She smiled at me, her coal-dark eyes piercing. I couldn’t stop looking at her large white teeth exploding out from bright orange lips. Sitting next to her I felt flat and pasty, as if all the colour had been drained out of me. I wished I could disappear into my grey pants and shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt.
‘So are you going to become a celebrity cop now? You could probably write a book or something!’
I looked at her blankly. ‘No, no. I’m just going to keep doing what I’m paid to do, I guess.’
I disappointed Candy that day. I didn’t give her that fierce, feisty, girl-power cop thing she wanted. The article she wrote on me was vaguely condescending. She managed to flatter me, calling me a prodigal detective and Smithson police force’s best asset, while at the same time suggesting that this had all been a huge stinking pile of luck. Of course, deep down that was what I was worried about too.
Walking back into the station that afternoon, I felt apprehensive. I knew that I had done the right thing, a brave thing even, but I also knew that I had broken unspoken rules. I had gone rogue and it had worked, but in the process I had made everyone else look inferior and lazy. Jonesy beckoned me into his office. He was puppy-dog excited. No one else in the main room seemed to move. I stopped still too, and just stood in the middle of the open office for a second. The water cooler chose that moment to force a large bubble of air to the top of the tank, mirroring my choppy stomach. I felt completely exposed.
Once we were safely behind the glass, Jonesy said, ‘How’d you know, Woodstock?’
‘I told you, sir. I had a feeling.’
He whistled. ‘Well, it’s a good thing you did. This changes things for you, Woodstock. Won’t be easier, not at all—harder, I’d say—but you can tell them all to get fucked now. A fucking serial killer. I can’t believe it.’ He patted me on the back and swept a disparaging look through his glass wall as if the rest of the force were annoying toddlers who needed their nappies changed.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Okay, Woodstock, we’ll talk more tomorrow about what this means, but it’s good, I guarantee you that much.’
‘Sir, I need to tell you something,’ I said, riding a wave of nausea.
‘Yes, of course. Don’t tell me you have another feeling!’
‘No, sir. It’s just that I’m pregnant.’
Chapter Ten
Monday, 14 December, 8.37 am
Josie Pritchard watches Gemma Woodstock peer through the windows of the school library as the man with her takes a phone call. She hasn’t seen the Woodstock girl in years, except for that business with the Robbie boy in the papers a while back. It seems completely bizarre that she is a police officer—and a detective, no less! Josie narrows her eyes; Gemma looks much smaller and skinnier than Josie had thought she would. As a teenager she had the kind of figure that one expected would thicken. The charcoal suit she is wearing is doing her no favours though: badly tailored and set oddly across her shoulders. And those shoes! Josie’s eighty-year-old mother wouldn’t be caught dead in shoes like that. She hasn’t had a mother to guide her, Josie reprimands herself. Ned Woodstock renovated the Pritchards’ laundry a few years back and Josie had wondered how such a clueless man had managed to raise a teenage daughter. It’s really no surprise that Gemma looks like a bargain basement mannequin.
The tall, handsome man returns to Gemma’s side and they talk briefly before walking towards Nicholson’s office. Josie grabs the last of the Tupperware containers from her car and shuts the boot, then makes her way to the canteen. Huddles of parents are milling around the school today, clearly spooked by this Rosalind Ryan saga. Her own kids are off playing somewhere, curious but seemingly unaffected by the murder, which she loosely breezed over this morning while doling out Weet-Bix, juice and raisin toast.
Poor lost young girl, thinks Josie, clicking her tongue as she cuts across the quadrangle. Rachel, her eldest, was taught English by Rosalind Ryan last year but none of Josie’s other kids had been in her classes. Josie didn’t know Rosalind well but she had always found her mildly off-putting. Her suggestion, in the parent–teacher interview, that Rachel needed to ‘slow down’ in her essays and feel the words, didn’t inspire much confidence in Josie.
‘I’m not sure she’s all there,’ she said to Brian as they drove home afterwards.
‘Oh, she’s all there alright,’ Brian responded, laughing and shaking his head. ‘Damn, if I’d had an English teacher like that I might have actually read a book once in a while.’
‘Don’t be revolting,’ Josie snapped, turning away from her husband. Typically, he didn’t seem interested in discussing the shortfalls of their daughter’s teacher.
‘She’s always daydreaming,’ Rachel reported of Ms Ryan when Josie investigated further the next day. ‘But she’s pretty cool. And she’s so beautiful.’
Josie didn’t really know what to make of the young teacher, with her long princess hair and strange old-fashioned clothes, always looking at everyone with that haunted wide-eyed stare. Men seemed to have no sense when it came to her. Those idiotic year twelve boys were constantly embarrassing themselves, slobbering after her like mindless dogs. And there were the problems with Kai Bracks a while back. Even John Nicholson, the boring-as-watching-paint-dry principal, appeared love-struck; he was always staring at her and promoting her silly plays. Rachel ended up doing very well in her exams, though, so the woman could obviously teach. Still, this murder business seemed to suggest something sinister was going on in her life, and Josie can’t help feeling a strange sense of satisfaction. She knew something wasn’t right with that woman: she tends to have a radar for these things.
‘Morning!’ Josie pushes into the canteen’s back room and hangs her bag on a hook by the door. The room is stifling, the air thick and soupy from the heat of the oven.
‘Oh, isn’t it terrible about Ms Ryan!’ Amy Parsons trills into a hanky as she grabs at Lucy Holbert’s hand. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Poor woman.’
‘Such a shame,’ agrees Lucy, patting Amy’s hand. ‘Especially after that wonderful play.’
Josie settles her heavy form into the spare chair and opens one of the containers. Chewing on an apple bran muffin, she looks at the two women in front of her. ‘Did you both go to the play on Friday?’
Amy stares at her hands, twirling the remains of the tissue between her fingers. Lucy reaches down to rustle through her bag. Amy nods quickly.
‘Hmmmph.’ Josie swallows the last of the muffin and pushes her irritation away. ‘I had my sister over for dinner on Friday. I cooked paella, one of Jamie Oliver’s thirty-minute meals. Delicious.’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ replies Amy.
‘I suppose the play won’t go ahead now,’ says Josie. ‘Shame, I have tickets for this Friday.’ She doesn’t really, but she probably would have gone at some point and made Rachel come with her in exchange for a new top or some make-up.