He nodded and swallowed.
Kim had to wonder what could have caused a thirteen-year-old to take her own life. How bad could her life have been?
‘Just a child,’ Brendan Thorpe whispered.
A child’s problems were no less important or intense than the worries of an adult, she reasoned. It was all relative. A break-up with a boyfriend could mean the end of the world. Feelings of despair were not the sole property of adults.
The sound of tyres on gravel prompted her to turn towards the road. Two squad cars followed by an ambulance pulled to a stop behind Bryant’s Astra.
She recognised Inspector Plant, a pleasant, permanently tanned officer with white hair and beard that contrasted with his skin tone.
He came towards her as Bryant reappeared.
‘Apparent suicide,’ she advised, beginning the handover. Although first on the scene they would not take the case. CID had no remit in a suicide, except to agree that was the cause of death with the pathologist, which they would do following the post-mortem.
In the meantime there were parents to inform, witnesses to be questioned, statements to be taken – but that would not be done by either herself or her team.
‘Her name is Sadie Winters, thirteen-years-old,’ she advised Plant.
A quiet shake of the head demonstrated his regret.
‘Brendan Thorpe over there is the principal, who made the call to us, but she’d jumped by the time we got here.’
Inspector Plant nodded. ‘Thanks, guys, we’ll take it—’
His words were cut short by a female voice emanating towards them.
‘Is it her?’ cried the voice.
They all turned as a blonde girl dressed in the school uniform dodged the principal and barrelled towards them.
‘Let me through,’ she cried. ‘I have to see if it’s her.’
Kim lined herself up in front of the victim and tensed her body ready for the impact. This kid was hurtling towards her like a rugby player; stopping for no one.
‘Got ya,’ Kim said, planting her feet firmly and holding her so she couldn’t pass.
The girl, only an inch shorter than Kim, strained to look beyond, but Bryant and Plant had moved into position and blocked her view.
‘Please, let me past,’ she shouted right into Kim’s ear.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kim said, trying to hold her.
‘I just want to make sure,’ she cried.
‘Who are—’
‘Please, just let me past. My name is Saffron, and Sadie Winters is my sister.’
Four
‘Bloody hell, that was intense,’ Bryant said as they headed back towards the car.
Oh yeah, her ribs were still smarting from the girl barging her to get past. Luckily the school counsellor had appeared and with the help of the principal had managed to drag the girl towards the bell tower.
They reached the car and turned. Inspector Plant and his team were scattered among the melee of students and adults as well as guarding the body for the arrival of Keats.
Sadie Winters’s sister sat against the bell tower with her head down. The counsellor, a thin, wiry man with ginger hair and bushy beard sat beside her, while Principal Thorpe paced and talked to someone on his mobile phone.
And at the centre of it all was the body of a thirteen-year-old child.
Despite her limitations in the sympathy department Kim found herself wishing she’d at least had a chance to speak to the girl, understand what had been going through her head, reassure her that it wasn’t all as bad as she thought. Emotional connection with other people did not lie at the top of her skill set but she couldn’t have done any worse than this.
‘Jesus, Bryant, maybe if we’d just…’
‘Four minutes, guv,’ he said, reminding her of how long it had taken them to get there.
‘But she’s so bloody young,’ Kim said, opening the car door. She was sure that many teenagers had contemplated ending it all but that was a long way from actually doing it. How bad must things have been for her to actually jump to certain death?
She paused and turned, taking a good look at the building.
‘What’s up?’ Bryant asked.
‘Dunno,’ she answered honestly, as her gaze travelled up from the location of the body to the roof.
Her brain was already sorting through the cases on her desk and the explanation to both Woody and the CPS about the collapsed case of Mrs Worley. Her mind had left this place and was already heading back to the office. It was only her gut that remained.
And something didn’t feel right to her.
‘Troubled, I heard the counsellor say to Inspector Plant,’ Bryant prompted.
‘Jeez, weren’t we all at thirteen?’ she said.
At that age she had just lost Keith and Erica, the only two adults that had ever loved her.
‘Guv, you’ve got that Ghostbuster look on your face.’
‘That what?’ she asked as her eyes reached the top of the building.
‘The expression that says you’re looking for something that’s just not there.’
‘Hmm…’ she said, absently.
Her eyes travelled over the grand three-storey building, taking in the high windows, the rounded arcade at the centre, the flat roof with stone balustrade that linked the two arched roofs that topped the ivy-covered wings standing proud of the recessed centre.
‘Guv, time to go,’ Bryant prompted. ‘We’ve got plenty of our own cases back at the station.’
He was right, as usual. The major cases that landed on her desk did nothing to stem the flow of lesser cases. It wasn’t a card game where a murder cancelled out sexual assault, robbery and gang-related violence. They were still playing catch-up from the incidents that had mounted up during the recent murder of night workers on Tavistock Road.
And yet just because something looked like a duck and sounded like a duck. Didn’t mean it really was a duck.
She slammed the car door shut.
‘Guv…’ her colleague warned.
‘Yeah, in a minute, Bryant,’ she said, walking back towards the building.
Five
‘Is this the only way up to the roof?’ Kim asked, as they mounted stone steps from the third floor via a corridor that ran behind a row of bedrooms.
Brendan Thorpe shook his head. ‘There’s a fire escape in the West wing but that’s been closed off to the roof for more than a year now,’ he said, taking a set of keys from his pocket that hung lower than it would have done if his trouser belt had been working more effectively rather than sitting beneath the middle-aged paunch.
He tried the door first to find it locked.
‘Could Sadie have got a spare key from anywhere?’
Thorpe looked puzzled. ‘I don’t see how,’ he said, frowning.
‘Well, she got up here somehow,’ Kim observed, in case he’d forgotten there was a dead teenager on the ground. The girl’s purloining of the key was about to be the least of his problems.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector, you’ll have to bear with me, I’m still in a little bit of shock,’ he said, trying the wrong key.
‘I understand that, Mr Thorpe, but it would be useful to know how many roof keys are in existence.’
‘Of, course,’ he said, as they stepped outside.
‘There is one on my master set, the deputy principal has an identical set to mine. The janitor, the maintenance crew, each housemistress or master has a reduced set of keys, which includes a roof key.’
‘So, that makes?’ Kim prodded.
‘A total of fourteen roof keys,’ he answered.
Kim glanced at Bryant who took out his notebook.
She stepped outside onto the flat roof and looked around assessing the scale of the buildings joined together by walkways and ladders. From where she stood Kim could make out four clear wings, each the size of a couple of football pitches. Navigating the area from up here would be challenging enough, but downstairs, spread over three floors, she’d need a decent satnav to get her around the school.
She stepped over a roof light and around an air conditioning unit to head towards the area she thought was the side of the building.
Thorpe’s phone began to ring. ‘Please, excuse me,’ he said, edging back towards the stairwell.