Ahead of me, Sophie’s backpack bounces. Her hair glows in the sunlight and I feel a wave of sickness. Sandra must see the look on my face because she sighs, makes a tutting noise. I look down at the floor, my eyes scanning the pavement, the tap, tap, tap of our feet. Sandra’s wearing those hideous Birkenstock boots; I’ve got my little black ones on, Russell and Bromley, last year.
‘I know,’ she says, ‘the thought of it happening again… of it being one of our girls this time. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? I can’t abide violence.’
The shudder moves up my spine. Yellow flowers glisten behind my eyelids. The memory of the stairs in our old house, the way he pushed me, the pain in my ribs.
‘No,’ I tell her, ‘neither can I.’
DS Madeline Shaw
Wednesday 6th February
‘Madeline?’
The DCI is in front of her, his eyebrows raised. He’s impatient; the story has been picked up by the tabloids, and the calls are beginning to come in thick and fast. Some journalist has dug out an old picture of Clare from her Facebook page: her posing on a beach in Barbados. The inset is Rachel and Ian, him in an England football shirt, grinning at the camera. The grieving parents? the caption says. And so it begins, he thinks.
‘Have you got the pathology report in yet?’
‘Yep. Fast-tracked it,’ Madeline says, handing him the email that has just finished printing, ‘just in from Christina.’
He scans it, his eyes moving so fast that he could be skim-reading.
‘Cause of death identified as internal bleeding on the brain following a wound to the back of the head,’ Madeline says, ‘just what we thought at the time. Bruising to the shoulders, which makes sense if someone grabbed her. No signs of sexual assault. They’ve tested.’ It was the first thing they’d looked at; without it, one obvious motivation is gone.
The DCI sighs. ‘Well, at least that’s something. Though we’d have stood more of a chance of getting the perpetrator’s DNA if he’d fiddled with her. No obvious motivation, if you rule out rape.’ He runs a hand through his hair, wincing as the phone begins to ring again. This always happens when there is a crime of this nature – people coming forward with false leads, psychics, nutters wanting their five minutes of fame. The media make things worse; he wishes they didn’t need them so much.
‘We’re testing her clothing for DNA; should be in in a few days. The only thing I’m sure of at the moment is that this wasn’t an accident.’ Madeline stands up, looks over Rob’s shoulder and points to the pictures of the body, scanned in by Christina, the pathologist. ‘Look at this. Someone had a hold of her – my bet is they slammed her head against the floor, or hit her from behind and then flipped her round onto her front. It wasn’t done by an expert.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘not exactly methodical.’ The pair of them stare at the photos. There’s another bruise too, further down Clare’s arm, blossoming purple, edged with green.
‘Where does the name come from?’ Rob says suddenly, ‘Sorrow’s Meadow. Unusual.’
Madeline shakes her head. ‘No one knows really. Ruby Walker the newsagent always insists it’s to do with the river. The sorrow collects in one place and then the water flows it away, some rubbish like that.’
Rob grunts, stares back down at Clare’s bruises. ‘Right. And where are we with the door to doors? The neighbours?’
‘I’m about to get going now with Lorna.’
‘Make sure you speak to everyone,’ he tells her, ‘anyone who saw anything that night at all. Unusual cars, out-of-towners, anyone else out “walking”.’ He snorts derisively as he says this, still annoyed that he can’t get more out of Nathan Warren. ‘And Madeline,’ he says, ‘find out what people think of the parents.’
‘Their alibis checked out to a point, sir,’ she tells him. ‘We’ve CCTV of Ian leaving Liverpool Street Station on the early train, and arriving into Audley End a little later, but we don’t have anything placing him back home. In Rachel’s case, the estate agency confirmed her viewing in Little Chesterford, but again, no way of telling exactly what she did afterwards.’
‘So there’s a pocket of time?’ the DCI asks, frowning at her.
‘Well, technically,’ Madeline says, nodding. ‘The time during which they say they were waiting for Clare to come home, leading into the time when Ian was supposedly out looking for her.’ She shrugs. ‘We’ve no reason to suspect that that’s not true, though, have we?’
Rob is still staring at the photographs of Clare, his face unreadable. ‘Get a sense from the neighbours anyway,’ he says. ‘Find out what they – Rachel and Ian – are really like. Little town like this, people might talk.’
DS Lorna Campbell keeps up a steady stream of chatter as she and Madeline drive towards Ashdon, telling Madeline about how she’s just moved in with her boyfriend, how he worries about her working in the police.
‘He thinks I’ll get shot or something,’ she tells her, laughing nervously. She can only be in her late twenties, must be at least ten years younger than her superior. She’s got a slight overbite and the movement is awkward, unattractive.
‘You won’t get shot in Ashdon,’ Madeline says to Lorna, trying to reassure her, but then again none of them ever thought they’d find a dead body in Ashdon either, did they? They cannot be sure of anything at this stage. The DCI’s words ring in her head as they drive. So there’s a pocket of time, she thinks.
Jane
Wednesday 6th February
We’re having dinner all together tonight – I’ve just set the table when Jack walks in, shrugging off his jacket, earlier than expected. Our eyes lock for a second and I know he’s heard the news about the door to door enquiries, probably ten different versions from every patient he’s seen today. The doctor’s surgery is a great place for gossip; there’s nothing people love more than offloading their woes in a quiet little room. I’ve been a tiny bit tense all evening, waiting to see if they knock on our door. I’ve got long sleeves on, just in case, although I know that’s not what Madeline Shaw will be looking for. Domestics don’t seem to concern the constabulary these days. If they ever really did.
Finn wraps his arms around Jack’s leg, hangs there like a small monkey, his feet suspended just above our shiny dining-room floor. His socks don’t match: tiny elephants wave at red and blue stripes. Harry emerges as I’m plating up, blinking as though he’s just made his way from a dark cave, which judging by the state of his bedroom last time I popped my head in, he probably has.
‘How was your day, darling?’ I ask Jack, keeping my voice light with an edge of warning: yes, I’ve heard too, don’t bring anything up right now. We’re trying not to talk about Clare Edwards in front of Sophie and Finn. They know now, of course – the school told them all this morning, the kiddie version, one classroom at a time, but they don’t really understand. We all got a text message about it; the new way of communicating with parents, or so it seems. Your child’s well-being is of the utmost importance to us, it said. Well that’s good to know, I thought.
Sophie is mainly sad about the buttercup field, as she calls Sorrow’s Meadow – we used to go there a lot on Saturdays, especially when she was younger. She liked to test us all, hold the flowers underneath our chins, reveal our culinary appetites. I’ve