She didn’t want to sound unfeeling, but she realised how difficult talking about this case would be for Chloe. If the young woman wanted her help, she had to accept Alex as things stood now. She would look at it from the eyes of a detective and nothing closer. Allowing herself to become emotionally embroiled in the details of the story’s background wasn’t going to be productive for anyone – least of all for Chloe – and the last thing she wanted was to encourage any false hope.
In truth, Alex remembered exactly why the death hadn’t been believed to have been a suicide. The coroner reported that it would have been impossible for the girl to have positioned herself in such a way that her boyfriend claimed to have found her, and that was also an initial source of doubt: no one but the boyfriend had seen her ‘hanging’ at all. A post-mortem examination revealed that although she had been strangled by the belt, the markings to her throat suggested the belt had been tightened horizontally, and not from the angles that would have been evident had she been hanged from the staircase as claimed.
The boyfriend had claimed to have loosened the belt and lowered Emily’s body upon finding her. It was obvious why he had so quickly become prime suspect in her murder.
‘I know how it all looks,’ Chloe said, having talked Alex back through the initial events, ‘but I also know my brother. He’d never hurt anyone. He’s not a killer.’
Alex sipped her wine and tried not to linger on the look of desperation evident in Chloe’s expression. She noticed how she never spoke about her brother using the past tense. How had she been able to keep this to herself for so long?
‘Your brother’s name was Luke?’
‘Luke Griffiths.’
‘Your surname?’
‘I changed it about a year after Luke…’ Chloe drifted away from the end of the sentence. ‘My parents… we fell out. I wanted a clean start. It’s a long story.’
If Chloe wanted her help, Alex felt that at some point that long story was going to have to be told. She just wasn’t sure it was the right time. Glancing at the files in front of them, it seemed evident they already had enough to keep them going. And none of this could be looked into properly until they had completed their current commitments and found the man responsible for Lola Evans’s murder.
‘I know Luke,’ Chloe said, putting her drink on the table between them. ‘And I know you were there – you were with him.’
Alex had been a sergeant at the time and had responded when the initial call had come in. She and a colleague had been first on the scene.
‘Everyone was against him,’ Chloe continued. ‘Everyone thought he’d killed her. Only, everything was circumstantial. Where was the proof?’
Alex sat back in her chair and exhaled. ‘I’d have to refer back to the case file,’ she said, knowing that was a lot easier said than done. ‘I can’t guarantee that’ll be easy. Look, I’ve never been asked to do anything like this before. Cases aren’t usually reopened without some sort of new evidence having come to light, you know that. And you also know how much shit you could end up in if you go about taking matters into your own hands.’ The original case had been led by a senior investigating officer who’d retired a couple of years later. Returning to it now would mean seeking the permission of Superintendent Blake. Alex glanced at the files on the desk. ‘Please tell me this lot’s not from the station.’
Alex couldn’t remember much of the case that had followed. She hadn’t been directly involved – had been working on another case at the time – but she had known how it had ended. She was worried that this was all too personal to Chloe. Her attachments to the people involved were inevitably clouding her judgement.
She shook her head and Alex sighed with relief. Chloe tapped the pile of files in front of her, as though her own belief in her brother’s innocence was proof enough. ‘This is what I collected. Evidence.’ She eyed the look of scepticism etched on Alex’s face. ‘Look, I’ll show you.’
For the next hour, and over Alex’s second glass of wine, Chloe worked her way through the paperwork. She had documented everything she had gathered – newspaper clippings, photographs, handwritten transcripts of conversations between her and her brother – with a precision that bordered on obsession, but rather than convince Alex that the case was worth reopening, Chloe managed to dissuade her there was anything substantial that could be considered by a case review team.
‘This all relates to Emily,’ Alex pointed out. ‘What about Luke?’
Luke’s suicide had closed the case into Emily’s murder. In the days that had followed her death, police had closed in on Luke, looking for concrete evidence that would be sufficient grounds for an arrest. But that, as far as Chloe was concerned, was the pivotal flaw in the logic of the officers who had dealt with the case: they had never found any. They had read Luke’s death as an admission of guilt. Case closed.
‘Luke didn’t kill Emily,’ Chloe repeated.
Alex wondered if she was really convinced of this as fact, or whether her insistence just showed a desperation to keep the possibility a reality.
‘And he didn’t kill himself,’ she continued, reading the doubt in Alex’s expression. ‘I saw him that afternoon. He told me he was going to find out what had happened to Emily – that it was the last good thing he could do for her. I told the police what he’d said, but nobody would listen to me. I was little more than a kid myself – why would anyone take me seriously? And I didn’t do much to help myself. I was in my first year of uni, I was drinking too much.’
Chloe’s unspoken words left Alex with questions she didn’t feel comfortable asking. Was this an explanation as to why Chloe didn’t drink now? What had she done?
‘Luke was scared, but he was determined,’ Chloe said, shifting focus from herself. ‘The following morning, they found the car. Does that sound right to you?’
Alex held back her response. Over these past few months working closely alongside DC Lane she had found herself developing a respect for this hard-working and resilient young woman. That hadn’t changed, yet this seemed to alter everything. Alex couldn’t help but feel in some way manipulated, as though Chloe’s trying so keenly and so obviously to impress her had all been leading up to this: this moment when she would ask for her help.
A wash of disappointment swept over her and she shook it off hurriedly, annoyed at herself for her misplaced pride. ‘I’ll have to speak with the superintendent.’
Chloe looked panicked. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. What if he says no? They don’t know I’ve got any connection to either case. How’s that going to look?’
Alex wasn’t sure, but she knew that investigating a case without following the appropriate procedures would land them both in front of a disciplinary board, justifiably or not. The case into Lola Evans’s death was already proving a difficult one; Harry certainly wouldn’t appreciate one of his own making things even more complicated.
‘Why now?’ Alex asked. ‘How long ago was this? Eight years?’
Chloe took her mobile from her handbag and showed Alex the email she’d received that week:
Found him yet?
Then she searched for the other, the one received weeks earlier:
How’s the search going?