It was hard going, at first. Once you pass the pool you’ve got to get up that hill and then back down the slope on the other side, but after that the terrain becomes much flatter and it’s a dream run. Cool before the summer sun hits, quiet, picturesque and cyclist-free, a far cry from my London run along Regent’s Canal, dodging bikes and tourists all the way.
A few miles up the river, the valley widens out, the green hillside opposite, speckled with sheep, rolling gently away. I ran along flat, pebbled ground, barren save for patches of coarse grass and the ubiquitous gorse. I ran hard, head down, until a mile or so further up I reached a little cottage set back slightly from the river’s edge, backed by a stand of birch trees.
I slowed to a jog to catch my breath, making my way towards the building to look around. It was a lonely place, seemingly unoccupied but not abandoned. There were curtains, partly drawn, and the windows were clean. I peered inside to see a tiny living room, furnished with two green armchairs and a little table between them. I tried the door but it was locked, so I sat down on the front step in the shade and took a swig from my bottle of water. Stretching my legs out in front of me, flexing my ankles, I waited for my breathing and my heart rate to slow. On the base of the door frame I noticed someone had scratched a message – Mad Annie was here – with a little skull drawn alongside it.
There were crows arguing in the trees behind me, but apart from that and the occasional bleating of sheep, the valley was quiet, and perfectly unspoiled. I think of myself as a city girl through and through, but this place – weird as it is – gets under your skin.
DI Townsend called the briefing just after nine. There weren’t many of us there – a couple of uniforms who’d been helping out with house-to-house, the youngish detective constable, Callie, Hairy the science guy and me. Townsend had been in with the coroner for the post-mortem – he gave us the low-down, most of which was to be expected. Nel died due to injuries sustained in the fall. There was no water in her lungs – she didn’t drown, it was already over by the time she hit the water. She had no injuries that could not be explained by the fall – no scratches or bruises which seemed out of place or which might suggest that someone else had been involved. She also had a fair amount of alcohol in her blood – three or four glasses’ worth.
Callie gave us the low-down on the house-to-house – not that there was much to tell. We know that Nel was at the pub briefly on the Sunday evening, and that she left around seven. We know that she was at the Mill House until at least ten thirty, which was when Lena went to bed. No one reported seeing her after that. No one has reported seeing her in any altercations recently either, although it is widely agreed that she wasn’t much liked. The locals didn’t like her attitude, the sense of entitlement of an outsider coming to their town and purporting to tell their story. Where exactly did she get off?
Hairy has been going through Nel’s email account – she’d set up an account dedicated to her project and invited people to send in their stories. Mostly, she’d just received abuse. ‘Though I wouldn’t say it’s much worse than a lot of women get on the internet in the normal course of things,’ he said, giving me an apologetic shrug, as though he was responsible for every idiot misogynist in cyberspace. ‘We’ll follow up, of course, but …’
The rest of Hairy’s testimony was actually pretty interesting. It demonstrated that Jules Abbott was a liar, for starters: Nel’s phone was still AWOL, but her phone records showed that although she didn’t use her mobile much, she had made eleven calls to her sister’s phone over the past three months. Most of the calls lasted less than a minute, sometimes two or three; none of them was particularly long, but they weren’t hang-ups either.
He’d managed to establish the time of death, too. The camera down on the rocks – the one that wasn’t damaged – had picked something up. Nothing graphic, nothing telling, just a sudden blur of movement in the darkness, followed by a spray of water. Two thirty-one a.m., the camera told us, was the moment Nel went in.
But he saved the best for last. ‘We got a print off the case of the other camera, the damaged one,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t match anyone on file, but we could ask the locals to start coming in, to rule themselves out?’
Townsend nodded slowly.
‘I know that camera was vandalized before,’ Hairy continued with a shrug, ‘so it won’t necessarily give us anything conclusive, but …’
‘Even so. Let’s see what we find. I’ll leave that with you,’ Townsend said, looking at me. ‘I’ll have a word with Julia Abbott about those phone calls.’ He got to his feet, folding his arms across his chest, his chin down. ‘You should all be aware,’ he said, his voice low, apologetic almost, ‘I’ve had Division on the phone just this morning.’ He sighed deeply, and the rest of us exchanged glances. We knew what was coming. ‘Given the results of the PM and the lack of any physical evidence of any sort of altercation up on that cliff, we are under pressure not to waste resources’ – he put little air quotes around the words – ‘on a suicide or accidental death. So. I know there is still work to be done, but we need to work quickly and efficiently. We aren’t going to be given a great deal of time on this.’
It didn’t exactly come as a shock. I thought about the conversation I’d had with the DCI on the day I got the assignment – almost certainly a jumper. Jumping all round, from cliffs to conclusions. Hardly surprising, given the history of the place.
But still. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that there were two women in the water in the space of just a few months, and that they knew each other. They were connected, by place and by people. They were connected by Lena: best friend of one, daughter of the other. The last person to see her mother alive, and the first to insist that this – not just her mother’s death, but the mystery surrounding it – was what she wanted. Such an odd thing for a child to suggest.
I said as much to the DI on our way out of the station. He looked at me balefully. ‘God only knows what’s going through that girl’s head,’ he said. ‘She’ll be trying to make sense of it. She—’ He stopped. There was a woman walking towards us – shuffling more than walking, really – muttering to herself as she did. She was wearing a black coat, despite the heat, her grey hair was streaked with purple, and she had dark polish on her nails. She looked like an elderly goth.
‘Morning, Nickie,’ Townsend said.
The woman glanced up at him and then at me, eyes narrowing beneath beetling brows.
‘Hmph,’ she muttered, presumably by way of greeting. ‘Getting anywhere, are you?’
‘Getting anywhere with what, Nickie?’
‘Finding out who did it!’ she spluttered. ‘Finding out who pushed her.’
‘Who pushed her?’ I repeated. ‘You’re referring to Danielle Abbott? Do you have information which might be useful to us, Mrs … er …?’
She glowered at me and then turned back to Townsend. ‘Who’s this when she’s at home?’ she asked, jabbing a thumb in my direction.
‘This is Detective Sergeant Morgan,’ he said evenly. ‘Do you have something you’d like to tell us, Nickie? About the other night?’
She harrumphed again. ‘I didn’t see anything,’ she grumbled, ‘and even if I did, it’s not as if the likes of you would listen, is it?’
She continued her shuffle past us, down the sun-bright road, muttering as she went.
‘What was that about, do you think?’ I asked the DI. ‘Is she someone we ought to speak to officially?’
‘I wouldn’t take Nickie Sage too seriously,’ he replied with a shake of the head. ‘She’s not exactly reliable.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s says she’s a “psychic”, that she speaks to the dead. We’ve had some trouble with her before, fraud and so on. She also claims she’s descended from a woman who was killed here by witch hunters,’ he added drily. ‘She’s mad as a hatter.’
Jules