‘Souvenir?’ Chloe suggested, repeating the assumption that had been made by the pathologist at the scene.
‘Perhaps. That might suggest she wasn’t chosen at random. It would also suggest her murder was premeditated. We need to find out as much about Lola Evans as we can,’ Alex said, bringing the meeting to a close. ‘It appears she has a boyfriend, or someone her grandmother thinks she might have been involved with. He plays in a band that seems to be quite well known around Cardiff. Let’s find him, see what he knows. If there are any developments, I want to be made aware straight away, please.’
The team began to disperse. Chloe Lane lingered at one of the desks, waiting to grab Alex’s attention. ‘I was wondering if I could have a word?’
‘About this?’
She shook her head.
‘Now?’
‘No, no rush. Lunchtime?’
‘I’ll be in my office.’
Chloe smiled. ‘Thanks.’
She didn’t really know what she was thanking her for. Not yet.
Chapter Ten
Chloe stuck her head around the door of Alex’s office and eyed the sandwich sitting unopened on her desk.
‘That your lunch?’
Alex glanced at the cardboard packaging that housed the equally cardboard-looking sandwich. ‘It’s an attempt.’
Chloe gave a slight smile. ‘It doesn’t look that great.’
Alex placed her hands on the desk in front of her and turned in her swivel chair so that she was facing Chloe. ‘What did you want to see me about?’
Chloe hesitated between the truth and a lie. She glanced at the clock on Alex’s wall. ‘Any chance I can tell you over a better lunch?’
Twenty minutes later, the two women sat at a table in the corner of a quiet café in the town centre, waiting for their food to arrive. Chloe didn’t want to tell Alex the truth at the station, not with prying eyes and over-keen ears lurking in every corridor. For months she had longed to tell Alex the secret she’d been keeping, and for months there had always been something that had stood in her way. Now there was a pressing sense of urgency. The emails she’d received seemed to read as a warning.
‘This can’t be long,’ Alex told her, shooting a look at the woman who had taken their order. ‘I’m going to speak with some of the staff at the council this afternoon – find out exactly who had access to the park. Authorised access, that is. Obviously, whoever put Lola Evans in the river could quite plausibly have been there without any authority. I’m not sure many people would look twice at a van driving through the grounds there – it’s not that uncommon a sight.’
Alex was thinking out loud now, but she noticed Chloe seemed to be barely listening. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I need your help,’ Chloe confessed.
Alex was the only officer – the only person – she trusted with the words she was about to speak. Life had taught her that even those closest couldn’t be relied upon – that everyone had a second face and some chose to keep it well hidden – but Alex had proven to be exactly the type of person Chloe needed: someone honest, someone with integrity; someone with a sense of loyalty that dictated that once something had been started, she would see it through to its completion.
Alex studied Chloe questioningly, wearing that expression she seemed completely oblivious to: the expression that seemed to look right through someone and see things they’d not yet seen for themselves.
‘What’s the matter?’ Alex repeated.
Chloe realised, much to her embarrassment, that tears had spiked at the corners of her eyes. She swallowed and took a sip of her tea. ‘Does the name Emily Phillips mean anything to you?’
Alex put her coffee cup on the table and sat back in her seat. She recognised the name, but she couldn’t picture the face and couldn’t remember why it should mean something to her.
‘Eight years ago,’ Chloe said. ‘She was found hanging from her mother’s banisters.’
Alex’s face fell. Of course she remembered Emily Phillips. Alex had attended the scene of what had initially been reported to police as a suicide. A teenage girl, just sixteen at the time, had been found hanging from the staircase of her mother’s home, or so it had been claimed.
‘I remember her. Did you know her?’
‘It wasn’t a suicide, was it?’
Alex’s eyes narrowed. Where was all this leading, and why was Chloe so interested in this girl? Alex couldn’t remember all the details, but she carried the main bones of the case with her – as she did with every case in which she’d had involvement – as though a part of her own skeleton.
‘No,’ she said tentatively. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Please tell me what you know.’
Alex sat forward in her seat and leaned on the table, closing the distance between them. ‘I know the same as everyone else does – it was public knowledge. Emily hadn’t killed herself – she’d been strangled and the death had been staged to look as though she’d taken her own life. Pretty badly, by all accounts.’
There was other evidence that it hadn’t been staged at all, but until she knew where Chloe’s sudden interest stemmed from she wasn’t going to volunteer any further details on the matter. What would Chloe have been at the time? Eighteen… nineteen? She hadn’t been in the police then; she had no reason to be interested in this case.
As she spoke, Alex watched Chloe’s pretty face grow pale. Her eyes became glazed yet her focus more intense, not faltering from Alex’s.
‘You met him, didn’t you?’
‘Met who?’
‘The boy everyone thought had killed her.’
‘Her boyfriend? Yes, I met him.’
General opinion was that the boyfriend had killed her after a drunken argument, yet there was something about it that Alex had never quite believed. She had been one of only two people who had seen him on that staircase and she remembered him now as she had found him then, clutching his girlfriend’s body and sobbing into her hair; little boy sobs that had failed to subside even when Alex had managed, after what had felt considerable time, to coax his body from the dead girl’s arms.
The case had been closed shortly after, when the boy had killed himself less than a week later.
‘Chloe, what’s all this about? Why are you asking me about this now?’
‘Her boyfriend, Luke,’ she told Alex, the words falling free before she had time to think twice about letting them escape her. ‘He was my brother.’ Chloe pushed a hand to her face as though willing back a further onslaught of tears. What use were they to him now? He needed her to be strong, to do what she should have done years ago.
‘He didn’t kill Emily,’ she told Alex. ‘And he didn’t kill himself.’
Chapter Eleven
Sometimes Connor’s head felt too full of the things of which he knew he would never truly be free. He had tried to fight them off, tried to shut them down, but they kept surging, like recurring nightmares, to break him, always managing to somehow take him by surprise though he spent every day expectantly awaiting their arrival.
He watched his son clicking away at the computer in the corner of the living room.