She took it to the bed, unzipped it and flipped the lid open.
It had been a while since she had opened the suitcase, yet everything inside it was as familiar to her as her own reflection. She reached past files of papers to the photo album that lay beneath and sat on the side of the bed before opening it. It was an old album, with a green satin cover. Its edges were battered and its front cover tea-stained, but Chloe considered these imperfections evidence of love. Here was the proof that she had returned to this album, returned to its pages, time after time: sometimes with smiles; often with tears.
Here was the evidence that she had never forgotten him.
From the pages, their faces looked back, young and laughing. Ice cream smiles and limbs swinging from park monkey bars; staring back at her were all those early days: the days before they’d learned about the things that made them different. These were the days before everything had gone wrong and all the bad things became irreversible.
His life – his death – had been blighted by a question mark, and Chloe was the only person prepared to search for the answer. Those happier photos were the minority. In the others, she saw both their faces as she now remembered them, as she believed in her heart she would always remember them: distant, lost; always thinking of something else.
Always thinking of somewhere else.
And it shamed her now that it had been so long since she had held his face in her hands, as though that absence over time had meant she had forgotten him. She never had. For the past eight years he had followed her, ever present, continuous, like some unfinished sentence that had never come close to a full stop.
The sense of an ending frightened her, but the thought of never finding one was even more unbearable.
She slipped a finger beneath the page and turned to the next, offering sad smiles to the faces looking back at her. Everything she had done had been with the intention of this. It was time she got back to what she was meant to be doing.
It was time to tell DI King the truth.
Chapter Eight
The following day, the next of kin of the young woman Alex feared she’d identified on the missing persons database attended the station after an early morning visit from uniformed officers. Alex sat in one of the station’s interview rooms opposite a woman she suspected might not be as old as she looked. The woman was frail, using a stick to balance herself when she walked, and when she’d taken the seat opposite Alex it seemed to have taken all her effort, visibly exhausting her. Alex went to fetch her a cup of tea, subtly using the offer as an excuse to leave the room and give the woman a few minutes alone to get her breath back.
When Alex returned, April Evans told her that she hadn’t seen or heard from her granddaughter, Lola, in over two weeks. She had reported her missing just a week earlier, and Alex questioned the woman’s delay.
‘She’s a bit of a free spirit,’ April explained, wheezing the words from her chest. ‘Always has been. She pops in, she pops out again – I can’t keep tabs on her.’
‘Can you describe Lola for me, please, Mrs Evans?’
The woman rummaged in her handbag and retrieved a mobile phone. She tapped the screen a few times, evidently not adept at how the thing worked. Once she’d found what she was looking for, she leaned over to show Alex the screen. It was a different photograph to the one that Alex had seen on the database the previous evening, but at the sight of Lola’s face, her heart sank once again.
‘Where was the last time you saw Lola?’
‘At the house. Friday before last. She popped in for some of her things, she said. Stayed long enough to manage a quick cup of tea with me. Look, I know not seeing her for a week seems a long time, but it’s nothing unusual for her. She’s twenty years old, she’s got her own life. She doesn’t want to be seen living with her nan. She stays with friends, with her boyfriend. I used to try to get her to check in every now and then, but she wasn’t having any of it. I tried her mobile during the past week when I started to get a bit concerned and every time it went straight to answerphone. That’s not like her. That phone is always on. That’s what made me contact the police.’
Alex listened to the woman’s words, unable to escape the underlying detachment that came with them. April Evans had reported Lola missing, but it had taken a whole week before she did so. She spoke of her granddaughter in the way a casual acquaintance might. What had their relationship been like in recent months? She was about to have to tell the woman that they’d found a body in the river – that now she’d seen another photograph of Lola she believed there was more than a possibility the dead girl was her granddaughter – and ask if she would make a formal identification.
‘A body was found yesterday morning,’ Alex told her, ‘in the River Taff at Bute Park. There were no belongings on the body, so we’ve not yet been able to make a formal identification.’
The woman glanced down at the darkened screen of the mobile phone she still held. Her granddaughter’s photograph had now disappeared, blanked away by the fading of the screen. She was silent before looking back up at Alex.
‘Have you seen her? Does it look like her?’
‘I’m going to have to ask if you’d come with me to identify your granddaughter. I know this is very difficult for you—’
‘It’s fine,’ she said quickly. ‘Can we go now?’
Alex was stalled by the woman’s reaction, her eagerness to view a corpse that might prove to have once been her granddaughter. There was no panic, there were no tears; she seemed calm somehow, as though she had expected the worst.
‘I’ll take you. I have to warn you though that the body was in the water for a while.’
April Evans nodded, acknowledging Alex’s words as a warning. ‘It’s fine,’ she said again. ‘Where shall I wait?’
April Evans stood at the side of the table, looking over the body of her granddaughter as though observing the remains of a stranger. Alex still found it unsettling to look at Lola Evans, yet the young woman’s grandmother had shown little emotion, reacting to everything with silence and nods. She stared absently at the bloated grey flesh of the girl, quietly absorbing the realities of Lola’s final moments.
Looking away, April moved a hand to her mouth; the first signs of a reaction.
‘Is this Lola, Mrs Evans?’
April nodded. She moved her hand from her mouth. ‘Yes, it’s Lola.’