“Yeah, I …” Heather hauled her bag up onto her lap, ready to delve into it for the photograph, when something else on the desk caught her eye. It was a series of clear plastic evidence bags, each containing what appeared to be a cheery birthday card. On the far end one contained something else entirely: a smooth gray rock about the size of the palm of her hand. It was polished and shiny, with a rough heart shape scratched into the surface. Heather stopped, her own heart doing something like a somersault. “What is that?”
Parker saw where she was looking, and grimaced. “Sorry. Like I said, everything is a mess here at the moment.” He stood up and moved around to the front of the desk. Heather, guessing he was about to put the evidence bags away, glared intently at the rock.
“Evidence collected from the school Fiona Graham worked at. Works at.” He sighed, going to put the tray out of sight. “The forensics is faster down here, so we’re doing what we can to fast track everything.”
“The rock, it’s— ”
“This? One of the presents from her schoolchildren.”
She wanted to snatch it up, to feel the weight of it. It was probably nothing. Hearts drawn on objects was hardly rare, but she couldn’t help thinking of the empty flowerpot in her mother’s garden. The crude renderings appearing on a murdered woman’s belongings. The note left in her bathroom. Hadn’t someone on the Internet claimed that the Red Wolf ate the hearts of his victims? A chill ran down her spine. Part of her wanted to point this out to Parker, to leap on something that smelt like a clue, but at the same time she couldn’t help seeing herself through his eyes: a recently bereaved woman, raving about her mother’s terracotta plant pots. She’d sound like a crazy person. And if he thought she was crazy, he might not let her talk to Michael Reave again, and with that would vanish any chance of her getting some answers about her mother.
“Found anything? I mean,” Heather cleared her throat. “I mean, do you think the killer sent Fiona Graham a birthday card?”
Parker shrugged. “Violent criminals have certainly done weirder things. And naturally, we have to check everything. Which is why …”
He raised his eyebrows at her, and Heather remembered the bag on her lap.
“Oh yeah. Well.” She pulled the photo from the front pocket, glancing at it quickly before she handed it over. On the way to the station she had started to worry that her hunch was ridiculous, that she was seeing things in the photo that just weren’t there, but the stone heart on Parker’s desk had changed all that.
“Hmm. We have the photo of the photo you sent, but as you can imagine, it’s better to see it in the flesh.” He smudged his thumb across the surface. “It certainly feels like a real photograph.”
“You think I’d fake it?” Despite herself, Heather was slightly amused by the idea.
Parker glanced up. “You’d be surprised at the weird stuff people do, Miss Evans, especially around cases like this. Do you know where this was taken?” Parker was frowning at the photo now, looking troubled. She had half expected him to immediately dismiss it, but he was turning it around in his hands, looking for a date that wasn’t there.
“As best I can remember, a little summer fete somewhere outside of London.” Parker glanced up at her. “I know, but you can see how old I was. Having said that,” she tipped her head to one side slightly, trying to picture her infrequent childhood day trips. She couldn’t stop thinking about the roughly scratched shape of the heart. “We tended to go to Kent or Essex on days out. Southend maybe. Places like that.”
“Fiona Graham’s family were from Manchester. What would they be doing down here?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve heard that even Northerners like to leave their icy lands occasionally.”
That got a smile. “All right. And, this certainly looks like our girl to me.” Parker shuffled some papers on the desk and came up with an old school photo. It was a typical school portrait, still housed in its brown cardboard frame. In it, Fiona Graham looked a couple of years older than she had been at the fête, and she was grinning widely at the camera, wild corkscrews of ginger hair framing her face. She was wearing a school uniform—dark green cardigan, shirt with light green checks.
“I’ll pass this on to Fiona’s parents, and see if they can confirm it.” Parker put the photos down and took a sip of his coffee. “This is your mother in the photo? And you say that your father took it?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about that day; how her mother, normally so icy and distant, had suddenly broken down in tears, shaking and hiding her head in her hands. How her dad had herded them away from the happy picnic area, his own face oddly pale around the jowls.
“Any idea if your parents knew Fiona Graham’s parents?”
She shrugged and picked up her own coffee. It was vile, but it was a good distraction. “I’ve no clue.”
“Still, quite a coincidence, isn’t it? A connection to Reave, a connection to Fiona Graham …”
“You don’t even know yet that Fiona is a victim,” Heather pointed out quickly. “She might have just wandered off. People do that, sometimes—life gets a bit too much, or she’s in debt, or fallen out with her family.” She smiled. “I left home as soon as I could, didn’t think too closely about what I was doing. I’d just had enough of it all. Maybe she just had enough of it all, too.”
Parker was nodding, but
