The Silence (Dc Goodhew 4) (18 page)

It carried on with notes scribbled on a sheet of paper next to her keyboard.
Shanie was a bitch but she didn’t know better and I didn’t want her dead. Neither did Phil.
Then,
It was no biggie, would have been forgotten if she hadn’t died
, and
I wasn’t being a bitch but now she’s dead I look like such a cow. How do I come back from that?

There were empty drugs packets on the bed, the computer desk, and also one on the floor. Some were painkillers, but most were sleeping tablets, and two drinks bottles kept each other company in the waste-paper basket. One had contained Sambuca and the other a cheap brand of vodka.

Half a bottle of Southern Comfort lay on its side next to the bed and some had leaked on to the carpet.

Marks shook his head. ‘I’m not surprised she didn’t get to finish that bottle if she really had gone through the rest.’

Meg was sprawled on her back, her face tilted to one side, with a trail of vomit around her mouth and nose. It was still wet where it had pooled in the soft well of the suprasternal notch.

‘First thought?’ Marks asked.

‘Squalid . . . and depressing.’ Goodhew studied the room for a few seconds longer, noting the dirty laundry in the corner, the unopened packet of digestive biscuits on top of the portable TV, the red marks scribbled on the calendar.

They looked like assignment-due dates, extensions and final, final deadlines. ‘Based on first appearances, it seems genuine,’ he remarked finally.

‘Emily tells me that some kids at her school talk about suicide as if it’s a cool thing to do. She says they don’t really get it, because they think that they’re going to witness the aftermath, watch their friends crying for them, and so on. It’s so wasteful. They just don’t seem to grasp the permanence of it.’

‘Really?’ It wasn’t the first time that Goodhew had heard this theory, but he still found it too unlikely to fully accept. Without a shadow of doubt he himself had understood the frailty of death from the age of eleven when his grandfather had suddenly died. Un-learning a lesson like that seemed impossible.

‘We’ve already had contact with the family, and they acknowledged that she had intermittent emotional problems throughout her adolescence.’

‘If that’s the case, I’m sure that, between her former teachers and her GP, there’ll be reports to corroborate it.’

‘Subject to forensics and toxicology, I am satisfied. That goes for Shanie Faulkner, too.’

Goodhew nodded but he was far less convinced.

Marks picked up on his scepticism. ‘We’ve had confirmation from her doctor that Shanie not only sought advice about feeling unable to cope with the pressure of her studies but had also raised concerns about her making a trip to the UK by herself. Her doctor is willing to make a statement to that effect.’

Goodhew nodded again and continued to agree with Marks until slipping from the room looked like a viable possibility.

Once again, the house was quiet, but this time the retreating students had left more than shocked silence in their wake. There was fear here now.

There were people he knew, his grandmother one of them, who liked the idea that buildings retained memories, that an imprint of events could be left within the fabric of the walls.

He didn’t buy it. The whole concept belonged with the kind of new-age philosophies that he would believe as soon as he had proof. And not before.

Despite that, there was definitely more than just dust hanging in the air.

He already knew which room belonged to which student, but if he hadn’t, it would have been as easy to deduce as each of them having a photograph pinned on a tag and hanging from a hook on the centre of their door.

The girls’ rooms were particularly easy. Jamie-Lee’s erupted with energetic colours and quirky kitsch. Libby seemed determined to colour or disturb her environment as little as possible. Her room was neat, and everything from her clothes through to her notebooks and toiletries could have been picked for their low-key and almost inconsequential appearance.

No doubt too many assumptions based on a few incomplete facts had to be a bad thing, but on the other hand, who in the house but horticulture student Matt would have owned a bookshelf with titles ranging from
Science and the Garden
to
A Handbook for Horticultural Students
? The books were well used, the corners battered and the edges of the pages grubby as if they’d been hauled from classroom to allotment, and back.

By the same token, a single glance at Phil’s bookshelf said ‘science’ in a way that Jamie-Lee’s selection of gossip mags and chick lit never had. Phil’s personal flavour seemed to be physics. Goodhew selected a couple of volumes at random, both of them creaking open as if it were the first time. He slid them back into place.

Goodhew sat on one corner at the end of Phil’s bed. He wouldn’t have much time before Marks called him away. He needed to find something – anything – that might explain why Shanie’s door had been repeatedly opened during the hours after her death. With each room he entered he was moving further from Shanie’s room and still had no idea what he might be hoping to spot. He scanned Phil’s room carefully and, as with the other bedrooms, his gaze stopped at the laptop. Turning on a suspect computer was a whole other ballgame. As soon as it booted up, evidence was lost: with every file accessed, more details still would vanish, and details of any remaining information would be wide open then to accusations of tampering.

Still, it was tempting.

‘Gary, what exactly are you doing?’

He hurried through the doorway before calling down to his boss from the head of the stairs, ‘I’m just checking through the building, making sure nothing looks out of place.’

‘How much longer?’

‘I’m coming now.’ As Goodhew said it, he crossed the small square landing to the final door. He turned the handle, but of all the rooms in the house this was the only one currently locked.

‘Just the open rooms, Gary,’ Marks shouted up. ‘Off-limits if they’re locked right now, you know that.’

Goodhew sighed. Sometimes Marks could tune into his thoughts with uncanny accuracy. It took him about twenty seconds longer than the end of Marks’s latest instruction before the lock mechanism surrendered to his trusty skeleton key.

‘Gary?’

‘Yes, sir, I heard you.’

He pushed at Oslo’s door with the tips of his fingers. The window was small and square and covered by a pair of heavy brown curtains. There was a beige stripe running down the centre of each of them, and it was through this that the daylight glowed. At first Goodhew stayed very still and after a few seconds tuned into a soft humming just to his right. On the opposite wall, a large frame hung over the bed, the aluminium-coloured sides clear enough against the dark wall; picking out the subject of the photo it contained took a little longer. It looked like some kind of animal, maybe a dog.

Goodhew reached one gloved hand towards the light switch and turned the dimmer gradually until the picture took shape. One second later, he had racked it up to full power.

The photo-frame extended to approximately the width of the bed and was about two feet high. It consisted of five large photos, each very similar to the last. The subject was clear now: it was a fox. A dead fox. In the first image it lay with its body parallel to the gutter and its head resting on the kerbside. The camera seemed to have focused on a small patch of fur right between the eyes which still stared out dully.

Between photos two and five, those eyes had dulled further, shrinking away and disappearing into little black pits.

By the third photo it was obvious that the fox’s body had been disturbed; its head and brush had barely moved, but everything in between looked close to disintegration. The final shot kept the same angle on its face, but there was little else left besides crushed fragments of pelt.

Goodhew had taken several steps towards the photographs before he looked around the room and found himself staring at two similar shots, both 10 × 8s. One showed a dead badger being picked over by crows; the other a trail of feathers leading to the headless corpse of a pigeon.

The humming he had first noticed came from the pump inside a fish tank standing near the foot of Oslo’s bed. The entire tank was about eighteen inches long but Oslo had managed to deck it out in a style best described as ‘Halloween meets Vegas’. A layer of black marble stones carpeted the tank’s floor, with a wavy pattern of gold pebbles running like a footpath from end to end. Thanks to a tasteful selection of ornaments, the lucky fish were able to swim from golden Sphinx to crystal Eiffel Tower via a sunken pirate ship and a shrunken head. The head itself housed the pump, and every couple of seconds its mouth opened and closed, emitting a lively string of bubbles between its missing teeth.

Two mismatched goldfish stared out at him, probably wishing for the more dignified surroundings of the hook-a-duck stand at the fair.

In fairness to Oslo, the room was the most dust-free part of the entire house, and the fishes’ view of the outside world looked mark-and fingerprint-free. A small triangle of shiny paper jutted out from under one corner. It was its skewed position in relation to the tank that first caught his eye, but it was the familiar shade of blue that made him take a second look.

Boathouse Blue.

He remembered it from the catalogue of Heritage paint colours that he’d worked through while deciding on colours for his hallway and stairs. But more importantly he remembered it from just a few minutes earlier in Libby’s room.

He changed to latex gloves, and although they were thin, it still took him two or three attempts to grip the protruding corner and ease the photograph out.

And there it was, the inside of Libby’s bedroom. One of her books on accountancy lay open and facedown on the bed. Two pieces of paper had been balled and thrown in the direction of the waste-paper basket. The bin itself contained another textbook and more rejected work. He saw the little things, a half-drunk mug of coffee which had been stirred by a broken pencil. A small calculator, the kind banks give away, submerged in a glass of water. And the drawer was left open just enough to reveal a stash of Red Bull, chocolate and Pro Plus.

Goodhew understood.

He flicked the photo on to the palm of his other hand while he considered the implications, his gaze focused further afield than any point in the room until he was done. Then, with a start, he moved towards the bedroom door. ‘Sir!’ he shouted downstairs. ‘I think you need to see this right away.’

Gunvald Gjertsen, aka Oslo, had his arms folded across his chest and his body stretched out in the chair so that only his shoulders and the top of his thighs seemed to be making contact with it. No doubt a body-language expert would have a term for it, but Goodhew couldn’t imagine there would be anything more appropriate than ‘the uncooperative plank position’. Oslo was trying hard to pull off a facial expression that smothered the interview with a blanket answer of ‘
Whatever
’, but Marks and Goodhew had been with him for over an hour now and it was about time Gjertsen began to waver.

Goodhew simply started the round of questions all over again. ‘Tell me about the photos.’

‘I did that already.’

‘You didn’t tell me everything.’

‘They’re private. You broke into my bedroom. You shouldn’t have done that.’

‘There’s no point trying to play that card. The photo was in your room and I had every right to check the house.’

‘My room was locked and I rent it as my private area. Just because you have a right to be in the house, doesn’t mean you have the right to enter a room that is mine and mine alone.’ He swung his glare over to Marks. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

Marks had deliberately stayed in the back seat on this one, slipping out of the room a couple of times to make phone calls then quietly returning without interrupting Goodhew. ‘If Goodhew forced entry, or if the court were to decide that he should’ve waited for a search warrant, then any evidence he found in your room could be considered inadmissible. DC Goodhew is quite aware of this rule and, as I gave him specific instructions not to enter a room that was locked, I am confident that proper procedures would have been followed.’ Marks’s attention snapped on to Goodhew. ‘Detective?’

Goodhew concentrated his eye-contact on Gjertsen. ‘I walked straight into your room without any impediment. It seems to me that you’re more concerned with your reputation than with the fate of your housemates.’

‘You broke in.’

‘That’s enough.’ Goodhew had planned to demonstrate endless patience with Gjertsen – to plug away with facts and logical questions until Gjertsen accepted that telling the truth was the most pragmatic thing to go. Goodhew had now gone off the idea. ‘You’re hung up on the thought of your photographs appearing as a headline-grabbing piece of evidence, and I can’t work out whether you’re excited that it would give you some kind of phony kudos as a photographer, or that you’re scared that your disgusting behaviour will be laid out in front of everyone you know.’

Gjertsen’s expression said it all.

‘Right,’ Goodhew continued. ‘So you won’t be pleased if I ask your family, friends, course tutor and classmates whether they were aware of your habit of sneaking into other people’s bedrooms and arranging their personal items?’

‘I never damaged anything.’ The first admission so far.

‘Can’t you see how intrusive it is?’

‘
I
didn’t break in.’

‘No, you had a key.’

‘I didn’t.’

Goodhew paused to regroup. ‘Why do you like to photograph roadkill?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘That’s not true. You’re sufficiently proud of those pictures that you frame them and display them on your wall. You’re not keeping them secret – in fact, you have a Flickr account. They are on public display so it makes sense that you’ve thought through your arguments.’

‘I didn’t kill the animals, you know.’

‘Look, I’m not judging – I just want answers. We all have more things to do than sit here for the next forty-six and a half hours while we go backwards and forwards over the same questions.’