His and Hers

As I step out of his office, I see her again: my replacement. Although I suppose the truth is that I was only ever hers. It’s a terrible thing to admit, even to myself, but as I look at Cat Jones with her perfect hair and perfect children, standing there chatting and laughing with my team, I wish she was dead.

Him

Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harper

Tuesday 05:15

The sound of my phone buzzing wakes me from the kind of dream I don’t wish to be woken from. One in which I am not a fortysomething-year-old man, living in a house with a mortgage I can’t afford, a toddler I can’t keep up with, and a woman who is not my wife but nags me anyway. A better man would have got his shit together by now, instead of sleepwalking through a loaned-out life.

I squint at my phone in the darkness and see that it is Tuesday. It is also stupidly early, so I’m relieved the text doesn’t appear to have woken anyone else. Sleep deprivation tends to have terrible consequences in this house, though not for me – I’ve always been a bit of a night owl. I shouldn’t feel excitement about what I read on the screen, but I do. The truth is, since I left London, my job has been as dull as a nun’s underwear drawer.

I’m head of the Major Crime Team here, which sounds exciting, but I’m based in deepest, darkest Surrey now, which isn’t. Blackdown is a quintessential English village less than two hours from the capital, and petty crime and the occasional burglary tends to be as ‘major’ as it gets. The village is hidden from the outside world by a sentinel of trees. The ancient forest seems to have trapped Blackdown – and its inhabitants – in the past, as well as permanent shadow. But its chocolate-box beauty could never be denied. The old lanes and narrow streets are filled with an abundance of thatched cottages, white picket fences and an above-average number of elderly residents, who all appreciate a below-average crime rate. It’s the kind of place people come to die, and somewhere I never thought I’d find myself living.

I stare at the message on my phone, practically drooling over the words as I drink them down:

Jane Doe discovered in Blackdown Woods overnight. MCT requested. Please call in.

Just the idea of a body being found here feels like it must be a mistake, but I already know it isn’t. Ten minutes later, I’m sufficiently dressed, caffeinated, and in the car.

My latest second-hand 4x4 looks like it could do with a wash, and I realise – a little too late – that I do too. I sniff my armpits and consider going back inside the house, but I don’t want to waste time or wake anyone. I hate the way they both look at me sometimes. They have the same eyes, filled with tears and disappointment a tad too often.

I’m slightly overenthusiastic perhaps to get to the crime scene before everyone else, but I can’t help it. Nothing this bad has happened here for years, and it makes me feel good, optimistic and energised. The thing about working for the police for as long as I have, is that you start to think like a criminal without being seen as one.

I turn on the engine, praying it will start, ignoring the glimpse of my own reflection in the rear-view mirror. My hair – which is now more grey than black – is sticking out in all directions. There are dark circles beneath my eyes, and I look older than I remember being. I try to console my ego; it’s the middle of the bloody night after all. Besides, I don’t care what I look like, and other people’s opinions matter even less to me than my own. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I drive with one hand on the steering wheel, while the other feels the stubble on my chin. Maybe I should have at least shaved. I glance down at my crumpled shirt. I’m sure we must own an ironing board, but I’ve no idea where it is or when I last used it. For the first time in a long time, I wonder what other people see when they see me. I used to be quite the catch. I used to be a lot of things.

It’s still dark when I pull into the National Trust car park, and I can see that – despite coming straight here – everyone else appears to have beaten me to it. There are two police cars and two vans, as well as unmarked vehicles. Forensics are already on the scene, as is Detective Sergeant Priya Patel. Her career choice hasn’t managed to grind her down yet; she’s still shiny and new. Too young to let the job make her feel old, too inexperienced to know what it will do to her eventually. What it does to us all. Her daily enthusiasm is exhausting, as is her perpetually cheerful disposition. My head hurts just from looking at her, so I tend to avoid doing so as often as it is possible when you work with someone every day.

Priya’s ponytail swings from side to side as she hurries towards my car. Her tortoiseshell glasses slip down her nose, and her big brown eyes are a bit too full of excitement. She doesn’t look as if she’s been dragged from her bed in the middle of the night. Her slim-fit suit can’t possibly be keeping her petite body warm, and her freshly polished brogues slide a little on the mud. I find it strangely satisfying to see them get dirty.

I sometimes wonder whether my colleague sleeps fully dressed, just in case she needs to leave the house in a hurry. She put in a special request to transfer here to work under me a couple of months ago, though God knows why. If there was ever a time in my life when I was as keen as Priya Patel, I can’t remember it.

As soon as I step outside the car, it starts to rain. An instant heavy downpour, saturating my clothes in seconds, and assaulting me from above. I look up and study the sky, which thinks it is night even though it is now morning. The moon and stars would still be visible, had they not been covered with a blanket of dark clouds. Torrential rain is not ideal for preserving outdoor evidence.

Priya interrupts my thoughts and I slam the car door without meaning to. She rushes over, trying to hold her umbrella over my head, and I shoo her away.

‘DCI Harper, I—’

‘I’ve told you before, please call me Jack. We’re not in the army,’ I say.

Her face experiences a freeze-frame. She looks like a chastised puppy, and I feel like the miserable old git I know I’ve become.

‘The Target Patrol Team called it in,’ she says.

‘Is anyone from the TPT still here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good, I want to see them before they leave.’

‘Of course. The body is this way. Early indications show that—’

‘I want to see it for myself,’ I interrupt.

‘Yes, boss.’

It’s as though my first name is simply a word she can’t pronounce.

We pass a steady stream of staff I vaguely recognise – people whose names I’ve forgotten either because I didn’t learn them in the first place, or I haven’t seen them for so long. It doesn’t matter. My small but perfectly formed Major Crime Team is based near here, but covers the whole county. We work with different people every day. Besides, this job isn’t about making friends, it’s about not making enemies. Priya has a lot to learn about that. The hushed quiet we walk in might be uncomfortable for her, but not for me. Silence is my favourite symphony; I can’t think clearly when life gets too loud.

She shines a torch on the ground a little way ahead of our footsteps – irritatingly efficient as always – as we crunch over a dark carpet of fallen leaves and broken twigs. Autumn has been and gone, a guest appearance this year before shying away to make room for an overconfident winter. The top button is missing from my coat, so it no longer does up all the way. I overcompensate for the gap with a Harry Potter-style scarf displaying my initials – a gift from an ex. I’ve never quite managed to part with it, a bit like the woman who gave it to me. It probably makes me look like a fool, but I don’t care. There are some things we only hold on to because of who gave them to us: names, beliefs, scarves. Besides, I like the way it feels around my neck: a cosy personalised noose.

My breath forms clouds of condensation, and I shove my hands deeper into my coat pockets trying to keep dry and warm. I’m pleased to see that someone thought to put up a tent around the body, and I step inside the white PVC door. My fingers find the shape of a child’s dummy in my pocket at the exact moment my eyes see the corpse. I grip on to the pacifier so hard that the plastic cuts into my palm. It causes a small burst of pain, the kind I sometimes need to feel. It isn’t as though I haven’t seen a dead person before, but this is different.

The woman is partially covered by leaves, and quite a distance from the main path. She would have been easy to miss in this dark corner of the woods, were it not for the bright lights the team have already set up around her.

‘Who found the body?’ I ask.

‘Anonymous tip-off,’ says Priya. ‘Someone called the station from a payphone down the lane.’

I am grateful for an answer that is as short as the person who gave it. Priya is prone to being a talker, and I am prone to impatience.

I take a step closer, and lean down towards the dead woman’s face. She’s in her mid-thirties, slim, pretty – if you like that kind of thing, which I suppose I do – and her general appearance suggests three things to me: money, vanity, and self-control. She has the kind of body that has been taken care of with years of gym visits, diets and costly creams. Her long, expertly bleached blonde hair looks as though she might have just brushed it before lying down in the mud. Strands of gold in the grime. No sign of a struggle. Her bright blue eyes are still wide open, as though shocked by the last thing that they saw, and from the colour and condition of her skin, she has not been here long.

The corpse is fully clothed. Everything this woman was wearing looks expensive: a woollen coat, a silky-looking blouse, and a black leather skirt. Her shoes appear to be the only thing missing – not ideal for a walk in the woods. It’s impossible not to notice her small, pretty feet, but it’s the blouse I find myself staring at. Like the lace bra underneath, I can see that it used to be white. Both are now stained red, and it’s clear from the frenzied pattern of flesh and torn fabric that the victim was stabbed multiple times in the chest.

I have a curious urge to touch her, but don’t.

That’s when I notice dead woman’s fingernails. They’ve been roughly cut to the quick, and that isn’t all. I loathe being seen wearing glasses, but my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, so I find the non-prescription pair I keep for emergencies and take a closer look.

Red varnish has been used to spell letters on the nails of her right hand:

T W O

I look at the left hand and it’s the same, but the letters spell a different word:

F A C E D

This wasn’t a crime of passion; this murder was planned.

I tune back into here and now, and realise that Priya hasn’t noticed yet, she’s been too busy reading me her notes and telling me her thoughts. I generally find she tends to talk unless specifically asked to stop. Her words trip over themselves, rushing out of her mouth and into my ears. I try to look interested, translating her hurried sentences as she says them.

‘… I’ve initiated all standard golden hour procedures. There’s no CCTV in this part of town, but we’re gathering footage from the high street. I’m guessing she didn’t walk here barefoot in the middle of winter, but without any ID or vehicle registration – the car park was completely empty – I can’t issue an ANPR…’

People rarely say what they mean under stress, and all I hear is her desperation to prove to me that she can handle this.

‘Have you seen a dead body before?’ I ask, interrupting.

She stands a little straighter and sticks out her chin like a disgruntled child.

‘Yes. In the morgue.’

‘Not the same,’ I mutter beneath my breath.

There are so many things I could teach her, things she doesn’t know she needs to learn.

‘I’ve been thinking about the message the killer wanted to send,’ Priya says, staring back down at her notepad, where I can see the beginnings of one of her many lists.

‘They wanted people to know that the victim was two-faced,’ I reply, and she looks confused. ‘Her fingernails. I think someone cut them and wrote a message.’

Priya frowns then bends down to get a closer look. She stares up at me in wonder, as though I’m Hercule Poirot. I guess reading is my superpower.

I avoid her gaze and return my attention to the face of the woman lying in the dirt. Then I instruct one of the forensics team to take pictures of her from every angle. She looks like the kind of person who enjoyed having her photo taken, wearing her vanity like a badge. The flash blinds me, and I’m reminded of another time and place; London a few years ago, reporters and cameras on a street corner, clamouring to get a shot of something they shouldn’t want to see. I bury the memory – I can’t stand the press – then I notice something else.

The dead woman’s mouth is ever so slightly open.

‘Shine your torch on her face.’

Priya does as I ask, and I get down on my knees again to take a closer look at the body. Lips that were once pink have turned blue, but I can see something red hiding in the dark space between them. I reach to touch it, without thinking, as though under a spell.

‘Sir?’

Priya interrupts my mistake before I make it. She is uncomfortably close to me, so much so that I can smell her perfume, along with her breath: a light whiff of recently drunk tea. I turn and see an old frown form on her young face. I would have thought this whole experience – finding a body in the woods for the first time – might have fazed her, unnerved her a little, but maybe I was wrong. I try to remember how old Priya is – I find it so hard to tell with women. If I had to guess I’d say late twenties or early thirties. Still hungry with ambition, confident of her own potential, unscarred by the disappointments that life has yet to hit her with.

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the pathologist to examine the body before we touch anything?’ she asks, already knowing the answer.

Priya sticks to the rules the way good liars stick to their stories. She says ‘pathologist’ like a kid who just learned a new word in school, one who wants people to hear them use it in a sentence.

‘Absolutely,’ I reply, and take a step back.

Unlike my colleague, I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies before, but this is not like any case I have previously worked on. I zone out again while Priya starts to speculate about the identity of the woman. It feels like this is the start of something big, and I wonder if I’m up to the task. No two murders are the same, but it’s been years since I handled a case even remotely like this, and a lot has changed since then. The job has changed, I’ve changed, and it isn’t just that.

This is different.

I’ve never worked on the murder of someone I know before.

And I knew this woman well.

I was with her last night.

Her

Tuesday 06:30

We all have secrets; some we won’t even tell ourselves.

I don’t know what woke me, or what time it is, or where I am when I first open my eyes. Everything is pitch-black. My fingers find the bedside lamp, which sheds some light on the matter, and I’m pleased to see the familiar sight of my own bedroom. It is always a relief to know that I made it home when I wake up feeling like this.

I am not one of those women that you read about in books, or see on TV dramas, who frequently drink too much and forget what they did the night before. I’m not an amateur alcoholic and I’m not a cliché. We’re all addicted to something: money, success, social media, sugar, sex… the list of possibilities is endless. My drug of choice just happens to be alcohol. It can take a while for my memories to catch up with me, and I might not always be happy or proud about what I’ve done, but I do always remember. Always.

That doesn’t mean I have to tell the whole world about it.

Sometimes I think I am the unreliable narrator of my own life.

Sometimes I think we all are.

The first thing I remember is that I lost my dream job, and the memory of my worst nightmare coming true seems to physically wound me. I switch off the light – I no longer wish to see things so clearly – then lie back down on the bed, burrowing beneath the covers. I wrap my arms around myself and close my eyes, as I recall walking out of The Thin Controller’s office, then leaving the newsroom mid-afternoon. I took a taxi home, feeling a little too unsteady on my feet to walk, then I phoned my mother to tell her what had happened. It was foolish, but I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.

My mother has become a bit forgetful and confused in recent years, and phone calls home only make me feel guilty for not visiting more often. I have my reasons for never wanting to go back where I came from, but they are better forgotten than shared. It’s easier to blame the miles for the distance that exists between some parents and their children, but when you bend the truth too far it tends to break. It sounded like Mum at first, on the other end of the line, but it wasn’t really her. After I poured my heart out, she was completely silent for a moment, then she asked whether egg and chips for tea would cheer me up after my bad day at school.

Mum doesn’t always remember that I’m thirty-six and live in London. She frequently forgets that I have a job, and that I used to have a husband and a child of my own. She didn’t even seem to know that it was my birthday. There was no card this year, or last, but it’s not her fault. Time is something my mother has forgotten how to tell. It moves differently for her now, often backwards instead of forwards. Dementia stole time from my mother, and stole my mother from me.

Reaching back inside my memories for a source of comfort was understandable given the circumstances, but I shouldn’t have stretched as far back as my childhood; it’s a bit too hit-and-miss.

When I got home, I closed all the curtains and opened a bottle of Malbec. Not because I was scared of being seen – I just like drinking in the dark. Sometimes even I don’t like to see the me that I become when nobody else is looking. After my second glass, I got changed into something less conspicuous – some old jeans and a black jumper – then I went to pay someone a visit.

When I returned a few hours later, I stripped out of my clothes in the hallway. They were covered in dirt, and I was filled with guilt. I remember opening another bottle and lighting the fire. I sat right in front of it, wrapped in a blanket, gulping down the wine. It took me forever to warm up after being out in the cold for so long. The logs hissed and whispered as though they had secrets of their own, and the firelight cast a series of ghostly shadows that danced around the room. I tried to get her out of my head, but even with my eyes squeezed shut, I could still see her face, smell her skin, hear her voice, crying.

I remember seeing the dirt beneath my fingernails, and scrubbing myself clean in the shower before I went to bed.

My phone buzzes again and I realise that must be what woke me. It’s early morning now, still as dark outside the flat as it is inside, and eerily quiet. Silence is a fear I’ve learned to feel, rather than hear. It creeps up on me, often lurking in the loudest corners of my mind. I listen but there is no sound of traffic, or birdsong, or life. No rumble of the boiler, or murmurs from the network of ancient pipes that try and fail to heat my home.

I stare at my mobile – the only light in the shadows – and see that it was a breaking-news text that woke me. The screen casts an unnatural glow. I read the headline about the body of a woman being found in the woods, and wonder whether I am still dreaming. The room seems a shade darker than it did before.

Then my phone starts to ring.

I answer it, and listen as The Thin Controller apologises for calling so early. He wonders whether I might be able to come in and present the programme.

‘What happened to Cat Jones?’ asks a voice that sounds a lot like my own.

‘We don’t know. But she hasn’t turned up for work, and nobody can get hold of her.’

The little pieces of me I got broken into yesterday start to creep and crawl back together. Sometimes I get lost in my own thoughts and fears. Trapped within a world of worry which, deep down, I know only exists inside my head. Anxiety often screams louder than logic, and when you spend too long imagining the worst you can make it come true.

The Thin Controller asks more questions when I fail to answer the first.

‘I’m weally sorry to wush you, Anna. But I do need to know now if possible…’

His speech impediment makes me hate him slightly less. I know exactly what I am going to say – I rehearsed this moment in my imagination.

‘Of course. I’d never let the team down.’

The tangible relief on the other end of the line is delicious.

‘You’re a lifesaver,’ he says, and for a moment I forget that the opposite is true.

It takes longer than usual to get myself ready; I’m still drunk, but it’s nothing some prescription eye drops and a cup of coffee can’t rectify. I drink it while it’s still too hot, so that it scalds my mouth; a little pain to ease the hurt. Then I pour myself some cold white wine from one of the bottles in the fridge – just a small glass, to soothe the burn. I head for the bathroom and ignore the bedroom door at the end of the corridor, the one I always keep closed. Sometimes our memories reframe themselves to reveal prettier pictures of our past, something a little less awful to look back at. Sometimes we need to paint over them, to pretend not to remember what is hidden underneath.

I shower and choose a red dress from my wardrobe, one with the tags still attached. I’m not a fan of shopping, so if I find something that suits me, I tend to buy it in every colour. Clothes don’t make the woman, but they can help disguise the cloth we are cut from. I don’t wear new things straightaway; I save them for when I need to feel good, rather than feel like myself. Now is a perfect time to wear something new and pretty to hide inside. When I’m satisfied with who I look like, I wrap her up in my favourite red coat – getting noticed isn’t always a bad thing.

I take a cab to work – keen to get my old self back to my old job as soon as possible – and pop a mint in my mouth before stepping into reception. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, but when I stare down at the newsroom it feels like coming home.

As I make my way towards the team, I can’t help noticing how they all turn to look up at me, like a group of meerkats. They exchange a series of anxious expressions, neatly carved into their tired-looking faces. I thought they would look happier to see me – not all presenters pull their weight the way I do to get a bulletin on-air – but I fix my unreturned smile, and grip the metal banister on the spiral staircase a little tighter than before. It feels like I might fall.

When I reach for the presenter’s chair, the editor stops me, putting her icy cold hand on top of mine. She shakes her head, then looks down at the floor, as though embarrassed. She’s the kind of woman who regularly prays for a fat bank account and thin body, but God always seems to muddle up her prayers. I stand in the middle of the seated team, feeling the heat of their stares on my flushed cheeks, trying to guess what they know that I don’t.

‘I’m so sorry!’ says a voice behind me. It seems ludicrous to describe it as brushed velvet, but that’s exactly how it sounds; a luxurious, feminine purr. It’s a voice I did not expect or want to hear. ‘The nanny cancelled at the last minute, my mother-inlaw agreed to step in but managed to crash her car on the way over – nothing too serious, just a bump really – and then, when I finally managed to settle the girls and leave the house, my train was delayed and I realised I’d forgotten my phone! I had no way of letting you know how late I was going to be. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but I’m here now.’