Because this, surely, was what it was. The brutal loss of two teenage girls nearly seventeen years ago, which had blighted both their young lives and remade each of them in different shapes… forever a little twisted as they grew older… was playing out again, here, now.
Was this where Lucas Henry finally confessed?
She had been stamping on that tiny seed of doubt for months now. Everything she sensed in Lucas fought with the notion that he might be guilty of bludgeoning a girl to death in a quarry and burying her remains… and then taking the other one elsewhere and despatching her, too. She could not see it in him. She could see conflict and repression, though. Plenty of that. And who knew what a young man, boiling with testosterone and sexual shame, could be capable of? Who knew what anyone could be capable of in the heat of the moment? One rash, fatal overreaction… she well knew that the most normal of people could suffer this. She had helped to convict several such hapless individuals of manslaughter over the years.
But two? A crime of passion or accident or confusion… that could happen once. Anyone could believe it. Not twice, though. You couldn’t haplessly kill two people and put it down to tragic bad luck.
She glanced up the empty hillside. Had she made the right choice? So many choices she’d made recently had led her into catastrophe. Oh god. Lucas was elbow deep in decayed leaf litter now and still going, Sid dangling once more around his neck; the little friendly helper who pointed the way to death.
Lucas stopped abruptly, exhaled slowly, and then lifted his face to hers. An unreadable expression was on it. He tugged something out of the hole beneath the fallen tree and it wound around his grimy fingers, dyed with woodland dirt but still just about discernible as originally pink with white elastic.
Kate felt her knees begin to give way and grabbed hold of a low branch close to her, drawing in a ragged breath.
‘This,’ croaked Lucas, his brow suddenly wrinkling, ‘is not how it looks.’
She recognised the bra. The little butterflies of lace along the top of the cups were caked in mud but she remembered it clearly. Mabel liked to stroll around her room in her underwear and Kate had always longed to have bras like her sister’s, with little matching bikini knickers, instead of the babyish vests and pants she still wore. When she’d suggested she might have the bras Mabel had outgrown, her big sister had hooted with laughter. ‘You’ve got nothing to put in them!’ she’d hooted. ‘Just a couple of pimples!’
Not long after, Kate had abruptly inherited all the bras and the knickers and the tops and the skirts and the shorts and the jeans and the dresses.
But she would never wear any of them.
Lucas went back to digging, the filthy bra hung on a stubby dead branch that stuck out of the log. ‘There’s more,’ he said and then dragged out another piece of elastic and cotton, like a blackbird hauling a long pink worm from the soil. Kate heard static and hiss and a rush of something rumbling like a train out of Waterloo, which might very well have been her soul departing her body.
Lucas turned around again, sweat, or maybe tears, marking a grimy track down one side of his handsome face. He held up the matching knickers, closed his eyes, and then said, ‘Kate, this is not what you’re thinking. Let me explain.’
And then she snapped. She was on him and throwing him onto his back before he could utter one more poisonous, sick, polluted word.
‘Lucas Henry!’ she yelled, flipping him over with a kick to his flank and an elbow to the side of his head. ‘I am arresting you for the murder of Zoe Taylor and Mabel Johanssen.’
‘Kate! STOP!’ he cried. ‘Listen to me first!’
‘You do not have to say anything,’ she choked, grief flattening her words and tears welling in her eyes.
‘Kate! There isn’t much time. They’re coming. You HAVE to listen to me!’ bawled Lucas, fighting back as she pulled the cuffs off the back belt loop of her jeans and swiped his wrists together.
‘But it may harm your defence,’ she sobbed. ‘If you do not…. you fucking bastard.’
‘I’m not… I’m not, Kate. You don’t understand,’ he said.
There was a crashing sound above them, and several dark figures came plunging through the trees. She had been deeply conflicted about thumbing that redial button, but she now knew it had been the right thing to do. She was hollowed out with shock and grief and simply did not have the strength to hold Lucas down and get the cuffs on him while he struggled to be free.
‘POLICE! STAY DOWN! RAISE YOUR HANDS!’ bellowed one of her colleagues, and Kate let go and staggered away from him, falling backwards into a thicket. Lucas did not stay down.
‘STAY DOWN!’ repeated the officer. ‘YOU ARE SURROUNDED. WE ARE ARMED AND WE WILL SHOOT IF NECESSARY!’
Lucas vaulted over the fallen log, leaving the underwear hanging on it, and scrambled away into the thick undergrowth. Kate sagged into the thicket and allowed the armed response team to chase past her in pursuit. She was vaguely aware of the black-clad figures streaming by while her eyes rested on those muddy bits of material, hanging limply on the log like the world’s saddest lingerie display. Was Mabel under there, too? Were her remains decomposing beneath the soil? Until this point in her life, Kate had always cherished a tiny flame of hope that Mabel might still be alive. No matter how
