Reporting Party Initial Statement
At approximately 00.32 on the morning of the 3rd April 2009 I was requested to attend the scene of an apparent suicide. I arrived at the residence at approximately 01.13 and was met there by Detective Constable Thomas McKenna, Detective Sergeant Alex King, and Chief Inspector Harry Blake. I was briefed by Chief Inspector Blake who provided the following information: The subject was a teenage girl, Emily Phillips, who lived with her mother, Jane Phillips. Ms Phillips was away for the weekend with her partner. Present at the scene when the responding officers King and McKenna had arrived had been Emily’s boyfriend, Luke Griffiths. DS King found Mr Griffiths on the stairs, holding the deceased body of his girlfriend. She checked for a pulse but there was none. There was a ligature attached to the subject’s neck, in the form of a belt. DS King described Luke Griffiths as ‘distressed and incoherent’, but managed to glean that he had found her hanging from the top of the staircase. He claimed to have taken a chair from the kitchen and used it to stand on in order to release her body. He then called 999. Dispatchers logged the call at 23.41. Paramedics were at the scene at 00.04 and determined the subject’s death at 00.07.
Death Scene Investigation
An assessment of the scene took place at around 01.25.
Alex scanned the next two paragraphs of the report, which included a long and detailed description of the hallway of the Phillips’s house. She took another bite of her sandwich before focusing her attention on the description of Emily.
The subject was on the floor at the foot of the staircase. She was wearing a black dress and no shoes. There was purple colouring to her lips and her skin had reddened above the place of strangulation. Clear ligature marks were seen around the subject’s neck. The belt from which the subject was said to have been found hanging had been placed on the stairs by Luke Griffiths after removal from the girl’s neck.
Alex scanned ahead, knowing what was coming. So much had flooded back to her upon reading the report. Though she had not worked directly on the case after that night, it had received so much press coverage and garnered so much talk at the station that it was impossible to not have known what had been going on.
During post-mortem, marks found to the front of the subject’s neck are consistent with the belt found at the scene of death, identical in width and pattern. The placement of the markings at the back of the neck indicates that the subject suffered asphyxia caused by the pressure of the belt around the neck. However—
Alex looked up from the report. It was here that everything came back. This was why no one had believed the death was suicide: it had been impossible. According to the pathologist and to the report, the buckle of the belt used to strangle Emily would have had to have come into contact with her neck, if she had in fact committed suicide in this way. But it didn’t. There was a clear ligature line straight around her throat, devoid of any markings that would have been left by the metal of the buckle.
Emily hadn’t killed herself. Someone else had held that belt around her throat and had tightened it until the last breath of life had escaped her.
There was another detail that made her suicide increasingly unlikely and, according to the pathologist, impossible:
Fibres found beneath the subject’s fingernails match that of the belt, suggesting a struggle to free herself of the noose.
The only fingerprints found at the scene were Emily’s, her mother’s and Luke’s. Luke had been arrested, but the evidence was circumstantial. Of course his fingerprints were to be found at the house: Luke was her boyfriend. He had been to the house countless times, having sometimes stayed there overnight. It hadn’t been sufficient evidence with which to charge Luke, but it had been enough for everybody to assume him guilty of Emily’s death.
Alex sat back on the sofa and closed her eyes. She wanted to help Chloe, but she had no idea where she was going to start.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
During the previous few months, things had got even worse. His mother seemed to loathe him more than ever – so much more now he was the only child still around on which to offload her anger.
He had seen the way she looked at him. There was so much hatred in her face sometimes and yet she managed to look through him as though he wasn’t there at all.
When he was younger, it had confused the boy. Later, he came to understand her anger, if only in part. Her bitterness had been explained to him in ways his teenage mind would never have fathomed alone. His sister had tried to comprehend their mother’s behaviour, despite all the ways their parents had so unfairly treated her.
There were times he found himself almost feeling sorry for his mother.
And then there were all the other times.
That day, he got home earlier than expected. He hadn’t been to college that afternoon, though he would tell his mother that his classes finished early. He had been somewhere she wouldn’t approve of, with someone she didn’t like. He told his mother anything he thought she might want to hear. He had found that life was safer that way.
He came in through the side door that led into the kitchen. On the table, his mother’s laptop was opened. She wasn’t there. He glanced at the screen and saw a part-written email. Saw who it was addressed to. Curiosity told him to take a closer look, and he would have managed to overrule the urge if he hadn’t seen the name at the start of the message.
He wasn’t really sure what to make of what he read.
‘What are you doing?’
He hadn’t heard his mother come back down the hallway and into the kitchen. She stood at the doorway, hands fixed to her hips; her face frozen in a look that was part indignation, part panic.
The boy felt a shift in control, one so subtle yet so empowering. What he’d read was incriminating. They both knew it.
‘I could ask you the same.’
It was only in the past few months his confidence had started to develop. Despite his mother’s growing anger, he felt stronger than he ever had. He had been shown a different way of doing things and he wanted to emulate it. He hated this life. He wasn’t allowed to question; he wasn’t allowed to disagree. There were so many rules, and none of them seemed fair or even logical. He hated his every move being watched; his parents seemed able to do as they pleased; his father, at least. If he stayed there, they would suffocate him. He wanted out.
‘I thought you weren’t supposed to contact her now?’
‘Get away from my things.’