She looked back down to her heart of shells. It was beautiful: too beautiful to be associated with tragedy and death. Collecting up the shells, she slipped them into the side pocket of her handbag. Perhaps she would make a picture frame for her mother’s wedding. A heart-shaped picture frame to celebrate love rather than death.
23
Workman shivered.
‘Are you OK, ma’am?’
‘Just someone walking over my grave, DC Cara.’
Walking over the grave of a dead girl.
The street looked the same as she remembered it, exactly the same. The leaves on the small poplars planted at intervals along the pavement, as luscious summer emerald as the last time she’d been here, a mix of black, grey and navy family Range Rover Evoques, Volvos and BMW four-wheel drives and compact hatchbacks, nanny runarounds, parked at the kerb. No nets in any of the windows, not then or now, all plantation shutters or nothing at all, the owners of these smart, five-bedroom, redbrick terraced houses in south-west London, happy to let passers-by glimpse their enviably comfortable lifestyles.
She thought now, as she had thought back then, almost two years ago, when she had first visited this address with Marilyn, how horrifying it would have been for this neighbourhood to have such tragedy as a child murder lurching down these suburban streets, a thing as unimaginable as an alien descending from outer space.
Workman didn’t need to be here, Cara was capable of handling it alone, but she’d wanted to come back, unable to shake off the sense that, by being here in person, she’d be able to sniff out the Reynolds’ trail on the air like a bloodhound.
‘Let’s chat with the neighbours,’ she said to Cara. ‘See if any of them know where the Reynolds have disappeared to.’
Marilyn had tasked Cara with using his ‘Millennials’ knowledge of all things technology-related to track the Reynolds down via the Internet, and Cara had spent most of last night and today trying to locate them: scanning the electoral roll, mining 192.com, ferreting through all the online friendship and contacts databases he could think of – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram – searching credit-card databases, every search returning a blank. He had discovered that they had rented out their old family house in Battersea via an agency who dealt with them purely by email, and transferred the money to an ‘Internet only’ bank account that had been set up with their Battersea address. Beyond that, there was no trace. It was pitifully easy, these days, to get convincing fake identification documents via the Internet, allowing anyone who had the desire to reinvent themselves, to steal someone else’s identity or create a fictional new one. The Reynolds had clearly made a very conscious decision to disappear and had engineered that disappearance with enviable aplomb.
Workman and Cara had just visited the Reynolds’ old house. The woman renting it told them that the Reynolds hadn’t left a forwarding address, but that she kept a cardboard box in the cellar, adding any mail addressed to them to the burgeoning pile, throwing away circulars or company promotions.
She smiled and shrugged. ‘I should probably just throw it all away, but after what they’ve been through …’ She let the end of the sentence hang.
Workman took the box and its contents, telling the woman that she’d pass it on to the Reynolds when they tracked them down, after they’d opened and examined every item of post for clues – she didn’t vocalize that last bit.
‘I’ll take this side of the road, you take the opposite,’ she said to Cara. ‘Make sure that you show your warrant card, as soon as they open the door.’ Her inference clear: even here in the melting pot that was London, the sudden appearance of a mixed-race twenty-two-year-old male on their doorstep in the early evening, many parents still at work, their wives or nannies and children alone in the house, would induce suspicion and mistrust. ‘Try not to arouse too much curiosity,’ she added. ‘We want to chat to the Reynolds out of courtesy, nothing more.’
Cara nodded. He was a good kid and Workman liked him. The Surrey and Sussex forces needed more diversity and switched-on, clever kids like Cara would, as well being fantastic assets in their own right, hopefully encourage others to join. Race should no longer be an issue, but it was: black, Asian and mixed-race kids as rare as hen’s teeth outside the big south coast cities of Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton, and even in those cities, rarely interested in joining the police, the perceived enemy.
A well-preserved, dark-haired woman in her mid to late fifties, dressed in a navy wrap dress and beige wedge-heeled sandals, answered the sage-green door of the house to the right of the Reynolds’.
‘I was surprised when they just upped and left with no forwarding address,’ she said, leaning against the doorjamb. ‘I liked to think that we were friends, but I suppose when something like that happens, worlds shatter and nothing is the same. Perhaps it was naive of me to think they’d keep in touch.’
‘You haven’t heard anything at all? No emails, postcards, Christmas cards?’
The woman shook her head.
‘Something innocuous, that might have slipped your mind?’ Workman pressed.
‘We’re a friendly road, not best friends or anything, but friendly, and as far as I know, no one has heard from them. We haven’t talked about them for months, to be honest, but with this second little girl found murdered on the same beach people have started talking again, wondering—’ Breaking off, she raised an eyebrow and smiled. Workman let the silence grow. She was here to gain information, not to share it. ‘Wondering what happened to this second little girl.’ The woman finished. ‘It would be good
