‘The money was good.’
It wasn’t a lie: the money had been great. More than she had ever earned before. More than she could make as a police officer in a month.
Her flippancy wasn’t well received. Harry Blake pursed his lips. His cheeks reddened slightly. ‘That’s it. That’s your explanation?’
‘It was years ago, sir, before I joined the police. I didn’t break any laws. I needed money. I got a job.’
Blake’s left eyebrow rose at the word ‘job’. ‘We are in the middle of a major investigation, one that has gained a lot of public interest over the past couple of days. The last thing we need is…’ he gestured at the newspaper on his desk, as if unable to find the right words, ‘this.’
‘I’m sorry.’
The superintendent looked at her incredulously. ‘Sorry? That’s it?’
‘I don’t know what else I can say, sir. I can’t undo it, no matter how much I’d like to be able to.’
Blake rubbed his forehead and sighed. ‘Tell me what you’ve copied from the database.’
Chloe felt her stomach double over. Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that. How did he know?
‘Sir, I—’
‘DC Lane, please. Don’t waste my time.’
Dan Mason, she thought. He hadn’t seen her yesterday, but the day before that he had interrupted her as she’d tried to download the files. Clearly he had seen more than she realised. Had she even logged out after being interrupted by him? She’d been panicked; she couldn’t remember.
How much had Dan seen?
‘Have you accessed files relating to your brother?’
Chloe nodded.
‘Bloody hell, Lane. I told you to leave this alone. This,’ he said, pushing the newspaper across the desk towards her, as though she needed reminding of its front page, ‘is exactly the kind of publicity we could do without. And now this.’
His voice was shaking with anger. She didn’t blame him. He was bound by his duties as superintendent just as she had been bound by her own set of responsibilities at the time that video footage had been taken.
She wished she’d waited to access those files, but like so many other things in her life it was now too late to go back and change it.
‘I gave you an instruction to wait with regards to your brother’s case and you ignored it. You accessed files you had no right to. Have you taken copies?’
She shook her head.
Blake raised an eyebrow, trying to prompt an admission from her.
‘I haven’t, sir.’ The lie came so easily.
He sighed loudly. ‘I need everyone on this team to be focused and, at the moment, Lane, you are not. First the complaint made by Patrick Sibley, then the papers, now this. I’m going to have to suspend you from duties—’
‘Sir, no—’
‘Until our current case is completed. DC Lane, I’m sorry, I am, but you’ve not left me with much choice. Accessing closed case files like that is a disciplinary offence, you understand that, don’t you?’
‘Sir, I… yes. I understand that.’ She gripped the arms of her seat and forced back tears. No man had ever seen her cry; she wasn’t going to change that now.
Why now? She watched the superintendent’s focus shift uncomfortably from her before settling itself on the desk in front of him. Who had sent that clip to the station? Who had sent it to the papers – and why had they chosen to do so now? First the emails, then this. This was no coincidence. Someone seemed intent on revisiting her past, and wasn’t that what she herself had wanted all these years?
But not like this.
She stood from her chair. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said again, knowing her words would be met with derision. He looked away from her, down at his desk but somehow managing to avoid the front of the newspaper.
In the corridor, Chloe headed straight for the toilets, moving quickly to avoid colleagues. She flung the door to the ladies open and stood at one of the sinks, the palms of her hands pressed against the cold porcelain. Heat coursed through her, her heart racing and her head pounding. She couldn’t bring herself to look at her own reflection.
She had done it for Luke. All of it. And now she would be able to do nothing.
Chloe stayed in the toilets longer than was necessary, once again trying to avoid seeing anyone. She left at the wrong time; as she emerged from the ladies, a group of uniformed officers was heading along the corridor in her direction. Chloe hurried for the stairs, but wasn’t fast enough to miss the wolf-whistle thrown back in her direction. On any other day she would have turned back to see which one of them it was – would have confronted it head on – but that day she couldn’t bring herself to face him. She just wanted to be as far away from the place as possible.
Alex had wanted to stay at the station that morning to check through the list of support group member names Tim Cole had emailed across, but an early call from Helen Collier saw her heading to Cardiff to the University Hospital of Wales. She had asked DC Mason to look into the names Tim Cole had provided, and to check for them on the Niche database: a record of every person who had ever made contact with South Wales Police. Under normal circumstances, she would have taken DC Lane to the hospital with her. She sometimes wondered whether anything was going to be ‘normal’ again, or whether in fact normal had ever existed.
Now she found herself standing in the pathology lab, knowing it probably hadn’t.
Sarah Taylor’s naked body was laid out on an examination table. The condition of the examination meant that it was now impossible to see her as the smiling young woman whose face still adorned the board of the incident room. She was a drowning victim. A lost girl. Everything that had been a part of her – all the things that had made her the person her family and friends had loved – was gone, leaving a shell so grotesque that Alex’s attention was unable to stay fixed for more than seconds at a time.
‘She was alive when she went into the water,’ Helen confirmed.
Alex nodded. They had suspected so – feared so – and now she couldn’t help but linger over thoughts of Sarah’s final moments. Drowning wasn’t a peaceful death. It was torturous, violent; desperate. The torn skin on her legs and wrists showed a valiant struggle to free herself, presumably both in the water and before.
‘There’s rupturing to the muscles in the neck and shoulders, suggesting a struggle for air. The water was so cold that given any further time it might have induced cardiac arrest, but she was likely to have been dead within minutes of entering the water.’
Minutes. She made it sound like such a brief space of time; so inconsequential. When you were facing your own death, Alex imagined it was its very own lifetime.