‘You did know her then?’
‘No.’
‘A kid, you said…’
‘I saw her lyin’ there, didn’t I.’
‘And that was all?’
Eileen stood at the window, her breath warming circles on the glass. A heavy bass echoed faintly through the side wall, the same rhythm over and again. Traffic stuttered in and out of the city along the Hucknall Road.
‘I saw her a few nights back,’ Eileen said. ‘Corner of Addison Street. Skirt up to her arse and four-inch heels. She must’ve been freezing.’ Her back was still to Resnick, her voice clear in the small room. ‘This van had been up and down, two, maybe three times. Blue van, small. Post office van, that sort of size. Just the one bloke inside. He’d given me the once-over, going past real slow, the girl too. Finally he stops alongside her and leans out. I thought she was going to get in, but she didn’t. To and fro about it for ages they was before he drives off and she goes back to her stand. Fifteen, twenty minutes later he’s back, straight to her this time, no messing, and this time get in is what she does.’
Eileen turned to face him, hands behind her pressed against the wall.
‘A few nights back,’ Resnick said. ‘Is that three or four?’
‘Three.’
‘Monday, then?’
‘I suppose.’
‘The driver, you knew him?’
‘No.’ The hesitation was slight, slight enough that Resnick, going over the conversation later, couldn’t be certain it was his imagination.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Course.’
‘And the van?’
She shook her head.
‘The driver, though. You’d recognise him again?’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
Resnick set the mug down on the tray, tea barely touched. ‘Thanks, Eileen. Thanks for your time.’
She waited until he was at the door. ‘When the van came back the second time, I can’t be sure, but I think there were two of them, two blokes, the second one leaning forward from the back. Like I say, I can’t be sure.’
The temperature seemed to have dropped another five degrees when Resnick stepped out from the comparative warmth of the house on to the street and clouds hung low overhead, laden with snow.
The pathologist was a short, solid man with stubby fingers that seemed unsuited to his daily tasks. Despite the cold, they stood at one corner of the parking area to the building’s rear, Resnick and himself, allowing the pathologist to smoke.
‘Weather, eh, Charlie.’
Resnick grunted in reply.
‘All right for you, up off the Woodborough Road; where I am, down by the Trent, bloody river freezes over, soon as the bugger thaws you’re up to your ankles in floodwater and bailing out downstairs like the place has sprung a leak.’
‘The girl,’ Resnick nudged.
The pathologist grinned. ‘Hamlet, Charlie. Act one, scene two.’
‘Come again?’
‘Had you down as a bit of a scholar. On the quiet at least. “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.” That poor kid, stretched out in the snow, clothes stuck to her with blood, jumped to the same conclusions, you and me, I’ll wager. Cut. Stabbed. Sliced.’ He sucked noisily on the end of his cigar. ‘Not a bit of it. Not her blood. Different type altogether. No, she was strangled, Charlie. Throttled. Bare hands. Likely passed out within minutes, that’s one mercy. Bruising in plenty elsewhere, mind you, some consistent with being struck by a fist and some not. Something hard and narrow. Old-fashioned poker, something similar. And semen, Charlie, generous traces of, inside and out.’
For a moment, without his willing it, Resnick’s eyes shut fast.
‘Marks round her wrists,’ the pathologist continued, ‘as if at some point she’d been tied up. Tight enough to break the skin.’
‘Rope or metal?’
‘Metal.’
‘Like handcuffs?’
‘Very like.’
Unbidden, instinctive, the scene was beginning to play out in Resnick’s mind.
‘One person’s or more?’ he asked. ‘The semen.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
Resnick nodded. ‘Anything else?’
‘Fragments of material beneath her fingernails. Possibly skin. It’s being analysed now.’
‘How close can you pin down the time of death?’
‘Likely not as close as you’d like.’
‘Try me.’
‘Twenty-four hours, give or take.’
‘So if she was killed elsewhere and then dumped…’
‘Which everything else suggests.’
‘She’d likely been on the Forest since the early hours of yesterday morning, Wednesday.’
‘Where she was found, not unfeasible.’ The pathologist stubbed out the last smoulderings of the cigar on the sole of his shoe. ‘Noon tomorrow, Charlie, I’ll have more for you then.’
Resnick cupped both hands together and lifted them to his face, breathing out warm air.
Back upstairs in the CID room, Lynn Kellogg was talking to a Mrs Marston from a village just north of Melton Mowbray, arranging for her and her husband to be picked up and driven into the city, there to assist in the identification of the body of a fifteen-year-old girl who corresponded to the description of their missing daughter.
Her name was Clara. She’d run away twice before without getting further than Leicester services on the Ml. The usual things: clothes, boys, forever missing the last bus home, the silver stud she’d had put through her nose, the ring she wanted through her navel. Fifteen years and three months. Pills. Sex. Her father ran a smallholding, found it hard; four mornings a week her mum worked in a newsagent in Melton, cycling the seven or so miles so she could open up first thing. Weekends they helped out at the local nature reserve, her mum made scones, coffee and walnut cake, the best.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Resnick had said, ‘if it is her, don’t tell them any more than they need to know.’
Ashen faced, Ted Marston held his wife by the shoulders as she beat her fists against his chest, her screams of denial tearing the sterile air.
The morning papers were full of it. Schoolgirl sex. Prostitution. Murder. An ordinary family grieves. Photographs of Clara in her school uniform vied for space with close-ups of her parents, stolen with a telephoto lens. The police are seeking to trace the driver of a blue van, seen in the vicinity of Addison Street and Forest Road East.
The pathologist beat his deadline by close on an hour. DNA samples taken from the girl’s body confirmed that the semen came from two different men, one of whom was the source of the blood that had soaked her dress. Scrapings of skin found beneath her fingernails were from the second man. Filaments of a muddy green synthetic material, also taken from under her nails, seemed to have come from cheap, generic carpeting.
Two men, one young girl. A room without windows, a locked door. Do they take it in turns, one watching through a peephole while the other performs? A video camera? Polaroids? When she screams, as Resnick assumes she must, why are those screams not heard? And the handcuffs — is she cuffed to a bed or somehow to the floor?
