A shadow passes across her face and she sinks into the chair furthest away from me. ‘What is it?’ she asks nervously. ‘What’s happened?’
‘On my run this morning, well,’ I stutter to a stop. Lucy is only 15. Am I really going to fill her head with the realities of a violent death?
‘Someone has died,’ Matt says gently, sitting down next to her and taking her hand – an intimacy I doubt she’d sanction from me. ‘Mum saw the body, but from a distance. Annie and Robert happened to be passing and they called the police. Mum’s fine.’
‘A body?’ Lucy asks, her voice quivering. ‘You said her, when I first came in. And that something has started. Whose body did you find, Mum?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I say quietly. ‘But Amber Walsh is missing.’
Email from DI Finnemore (SIO) to Det Supt Bishop
Subject: Saturday 4th May update
Sir,
As you’re travelling to Copenhagen tomorrow, I’m planning on running silver briefings on a daily basis, and keeping you updated via email until you’re back from the conference.
Body of a young female (IC1 or IC2 – unable to determine at scene) found at Chinnor Hill nature reserve at 8.10 a.m. by a local woman while out running – Ms Rachel Salter. Victim transferred to the morgue. Post-mortem will take place on Monday (by Dr Julian Hill – I will attend alongside DC Bzowski) but initial observations show significant head injuries, which is why it was given to us straight away. CSI still working scene. Expected to finish tomorrow. A second team in place at victim’s home.
Victim has been identified as Amber Walsh – initially via a bus pass found in her pocket. Amber was 14 years old and under the care of Oxfordshire Children’s Services (mother deceased; father unknown) alongside her half-sister Jessica Scott (father alive but not deemed a competent caregiver). Their assigned social worker Colleen Byrne did the formal identification. She also mentioned a possible lead. Seems tenuous to me, but I’ll get one of the team to follow it up – and update if anything comes of it.
Foster carers – Bill and Molly Wainwright – are being supported by the FLO (PC Anoushka Tahta). Both are in their sixties, and I understand medical treatment was required for Mrs Wainwright. Jessica has been moved to crisis foster care for forty-eight hours. She is understandably distressed and not currently talking – as in mute – but I’m hoping she’ll break her silence tomorrow – am liaising with the social worker about speaking with her then. Bill Wainwright told us that Amber went to the youth club in the church hall like normal (uniforms following that up) and texted at around 22.00 to say she was home. Wainwrights were already in bed and didn’t check. Turns out she wasn’t. They called 999 at 08.15 this morning when it was clear Amber’s bed hadn’t been slept in.
Closest CCTV coverage is in village of Chinnor – approx. 1.5 km from scene. Mainly shop cameras, plus the railway station car park. I have tasked DC Williams with securing all relevant footage. Will update further tomorrow. Victim’s phone recovered at scene. No fingerprint ID unfortunately. Security code not known by Wainwrights so hoping sister will be able to provide. Only other tech found so far is family PC at victim’s home but apparently Amber has never used it.
Amber was a pupil at Lord Frederick’s in Thame. Have spoken to her head teacher and asked if we can interview Amber’s friends at the school to save time/resources. She gave her consent but needs agreement from school governors. There was an allegation of bullying against Amber – a student called Lucy Rose – so possible lead there, but she’s the straight-A, well-behaved, middle-class type so I doubt it will come to anything.
Initial door-to-door inquiries carried out by uniformed officers among Chinnor residents suggest that Amber might have been involved in low-level drug dealing – nothing concrete at this stage, but this will be our primary line of inquiry for now.
Will update again after post-mortem on Monday. Safe travels.
Simon
AFTER
Monday 6th May
Rachel
By an unspoken consensus, we’ve hardly left the house since Saturday morning – just Matt escaping for an early morning bike ride on Sunday – and Lucy has hardly emerged from her room the whole time. But the Family Fun Day is a village tradition, every May Day weekend, and in all the time our family has lived here, we’ve never missed it. In a brief fit of optimism this morning, I said that the tragic death of a teenager shouldn’t keep us locked away forever. And when both girls responded with a flat no, I made it compulsory.
But now that we’re here, I wish I’d listened to them. Milla found a few of her friends soon after we arrived and skulked off, and Matt has disappeared to the bar, so it’s just Lucy and me, huddled together as though we need to protect each other from some unknown enemy. Everything looks the same as normal – the tombola and face painting, the steel band at one end and beat the goalie nets at the other – but there’s a charged atmosphere, as though the low buzz of gossip is creating a menacing new energy.
And I can’t help wondering how much of that gossip is aimed at us.
‘Mum,’ Lucy murmurs, pulling on my sleeve like she did as a child. ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Even though it’s warm today, she’s wearing a big baggy hoodie.
‘Just give it half an hour,’ I coax. ‘We can get some hotdogs, and the raffle draw is soon. I bought us a strip of tickets each, so we might win something.’
‘But everyone’s staring at me,’ she continues, looking down at the ground. ‘They know Amber’s dead. They probably think I killed her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I snap, masking my distress with hostility. I exhale, soften my voice. ‘I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I just mean that no one would ever think that. If anyone is looking in our direction, it’s because I found her body.’ The images fly back – shoulder, blood, matted hair – and I swallow down a rush of nausea. ‘Just ignore them,’ I add weakly.
A few minutes after I read the message from Charlotte on Saturday morning, Annie responded. There were lots of omfgs and sad-face emojis, but the main part of her message was a detailed explanation of what the two of us had been through at the nature reserve. She’d ended with the inevitable finale – could the body be this Amber girl? – which caused a frenzy of new messages, and they haven’t slowed down much since. I might not have left the house all weekend, but I still feel up to date with the police investigation. At least, how it’s rumoured to be progressing based on village gossip.
The victim has been confirmed as Amber Walsh. Apparently Molly Wainwright was so distraught, she had to be admitted to hospital after hearing the news. At first, the messages said that she’d suffered a heart attack, causing another wave of alarm, but a few hours later that was downgraded to a flare-up of her angina. The victim’s sister – Jess – was reputed to have shut down completely and had been moved to stay with a trained crisis foster carer in another village for a couple of nights. Someone even reckoned she’d been put on suicide watch.
The cause of Amber’s death was said to be blunt-force trauma to the head – although I don’t know whether that had come from anywhere official. It could just have easily been someone who watches a lot of crime programmes making assumptions based on Annie’s account of what she saw. Would they even do a post-mortem this quickly? Theories about who could have killed Amber were rife too, with suspects ranging from her biological father to a wandering serial killer. But when gossip about Amber dealing drugs filtered through, the belief that it must be someone gang-related became the mainstream view.
And I think it was that development which gave me the confidence to suggest attending the fun day. I can’t know for sure that people haven’t been gossiping about Milla’s late-night roaming, or Lucy’s connection with Amber, on WhatsApp groups I’m not part of. But a drug-dealing gangster is a much more likely killer than my daughter, and I’m sure it’s not just me who thinks that. As a social worker, I’m trained to help everyone irrespective of what they’ve done, but it also means I know the statistics. Stereotyping can be dangerous, so we always try to avoid it at work, but it’s true that its origins are based on fact.
‘What if someone asks you about finding her though?’ Lucy presses, bringing me back to the fair. ‘And what if the stress of the conversation makes me look guilty?’
I turn to look at her. It’s true that she looks miserable. As though all the world’s problems are her fault. I love how much empathy she has, but sometimes I wish she wasn’t so sensitive. Bronwen has a similar awareness of people’s feelings, but her personality is tougher, so it doesn’t upset her in the same way. I’d often tell Lucy to watch and learn, but of course that’s not possible anymore. I’m sure they’re keeping in touch on Snapchat, but a friendship limited to messaging is so much narrower in scope.
Perhaps I need to be a bit more understanding.
‘Listen, why don’t you go home. Dad and I will stay for one drink, show our faces, then bring Milla back with us in a bit. I know she’ll hate that, but with everything that’s happened this weekend, I don’t want her roaming the streets.’ I wonder if my words will frighten Lucy – the possibility of a killer on the loose – but she seems unmoved.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ she murmurs. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She slides her headphones over her ears and flips the hood of her jumper up. As she does so, her face flinches, as though she’s in pain, but then her expression clears. She bows her head and walks slowly towards the exit. I watch a few people’s stares linger on her for a moment longer than feels natural, then they look away.
‘She didn’t last long,’ Matt observes, handing me a can of Chiltern Lager and putting the unclaimed Coke in his pocket. I listen to the dull fizz as I pull back the ring, then take a long gulp.
‘Well, you know Lucy,’ I say. ‘She’s never been great in crowds.’
Matt nods, a grave expression on his face. ‘And all this stuff with Amber must be tough for her,’ he says. ‘Going from probably wishing her dead to her actually being so.’
‘I don’t think she wished for that,’ I say spikily, my shoulders tightening. ‘Expelled yes, but not dead.’ I will hunt those bitches down. I blink Milla’s image away.
‘You’re right,’ Matt says quickly. ‘Bad choice of words. Lucy is much too kind-natured to think along those lines.’ He takes a swig of lager. ‘Unlike me.’
I shoot him a warning look, but he doesn’t back down.
‘What? Are you saying you haven’t thought it too? That Amber not being around anymore is good news for us?’
‘I saw her dead body, Matt,’ I murmur, taking another gulp myself. ‘How could I ever associate that with good news?’
Matt looks instantly contrite. ‘Of course, sorry. I must sound like a heartless shit. I suppose because I never met her – she was always just Lucy’s bully – it’s easy to think of her death as an absence rather than a loss. Does that make sense? Am I redeeming myself at all?’
I don’t speak, but I reach for his hand as a sign that it does, and we both turn our attention to the fair, scanning the crowd. Matt’s grip tightens. ‘Oh shit,’ he mutters under his breath.
‘What is it?’
He gestures to the right side of the stage. ‘Milla looks like she’s about to lamp that girl.’
My eyes widen at the sight. Milla is clearly arguing with another girl and Matt’s right, her hands are clenched into fists, and her face is scowling. We half shuffle, half run, past the stalls in Milla’s direction.
