‘Do you know them all?’ I ask.
‘Eight hundred students – I don’t think so.’ He forces a laugh.
‘What about Jodie?’
‘I’ve been her form tutor since last year. She missed a lot of school with her skating. I helped her to catch up.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘I collected the relevant notes from her teachers and emailed her homework and assignments.’
‘Was she popular?’ I ask.
‘I think so. Everybody knew her.’
‘Outgoing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Academic?’
‘Not really.’
He gazes past me at a window, high up on the stairwell. ‘Some students are naturally gifted, but Jodie had to work hard to keep up. Some of her teachers complained that she fell asleep in class, but most understood the hours she trained.’
‘Did you ever see her compete?’ I ask.
‘No, but I used to wonder if it was cruel.’
‘In what way?’
‘Making a child work that hard – up every morning at six; a special diet, gym sessions, weight work, dance classes, acrobatics. She didn’t have time for a childhood.’
‘You make it sound like child abuse.’
‘More like white slavery.’ He smiles wryly. ‘Some parents expect too much of their children and others expect too little. Both can be equally damaging.’
The metal lockers are lined along the walls around the base of the stairwells. A maintenance man in a grey uniform arrives with a set of bolt cutters that slice easily through the soft metal of a cheap padlock.
Lenny tosses me a pair of disposable gloves and puts on a similar pair, smoothing them over her fingers. The locker door squeaks on stiff hinges. The inner surface is plastered with photographs cut from magazines. There are no skaters this time. Instead Jodie has chosen boy bands, pop singers and film stars. I recognise Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran.
Lenny takes photographs of the undisturbed locker, which is divided by two metal shelves. School textbooks are stacked upright at the bottom, along with several ring-bound folders, which Jodie has decorated with stickers. The top shelf has brightly coloured storage containers, full of pens, highlighters, flash cards, hand cream, hair bands, cough drops, chapsticks, chewing gum, a small zippered make-up bag, a bundle of greetings cards . . .
Lenny is flicking through the ring-bound folders. I look at the cards. Some of them celebrate Jodie’s birthday, while others are valentines from secret and not-so-secret admirers. I look for names. Clues. One has a flower pressed between the pages, a blue forget-me-not. The inscription reads: ‘I am not too young. You are not too old. I am your Ruth and you are my Tommy. Never Let Me Go.’
‘What is it?’ asks Lenny, looking over my shoulder.
‘A valentine.’
‘Is that Jodie’s handwriting?’
I compare it to the notes in her subject folders. ‘She must have written it and run out of courage.’ I look at the quote again. ‘It’s from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘A doomed love affair.’
Ian Hendricks is sitting on the stairs, looking at his mobile. I ask him what texts Jodie was studying for her English classes.
‘We were reading dystopian stories.’
‘You’re her English teacher?’
‘Yes.’
Lenny continues searching. She unzips the make-up bag and quietly nudges me. I glance down and see a box of condoms. Open. She pulls back the flip-top and counts. Four of the twelve are missing.
‘Parents are the last to know,’ she whispers.
The condoms are put into a sealed evidence bag that she marks with a time, date and location.
A black rubberised torch is standing upright at the back of the locker, looking out of place. Weighing it in my hands, I unscrew the battery cap and shake out a single D-sized battery into my palm. There should be more. Holding up the torch, I peer inside and see a roll of paper. Not paper. Bank notes: hundreds, fifties and twenties.
Lenny takes the bundle from me. ‘It has to be five, maybe six thousand.’
‘Where would Jodie get that sort of money?’
The question echoes in the stairwell, unanswered, and we both realise that Jodie is not the girl that we imagined.
15
I’ve been standing outside the house in Hotham Road for twenty minutes, studying the way the sun throws shadows beneath the eaves and highlights the coloured glass in the lead-light panels above the windows. A wind-vane of Father Time on the pitched slate roof is pointed fixedly towards the west, regardless of the breeze.
No. 79 is an ordinary house in an ordinary street in north London, lined with plane trees and dotted with estate agents’ signs and posters for the local primary school’s autumn fete.
This is where Evie Cormac emerged from hiding six years ago. Back then, the house was being renovated and the garden was overgrown, the downpipes were streaked with rust and the window frames needed painting. Wisteria had grown wild during the summer, twisting and coiling up the exterior wall, creating a floral curtain that half covered the front door. The house is in order now, but the wisteria remains, littering the steps like mauve confetti left behind by a weekend wedding.
A woman emerges from the house. She has red hair and a pinched face and she’s holding a mobile phone to her ear.
‘Can I help you?’ she shouts, not leaving the front steps.
‘No. Thank you.’
‘Well, piss off!’
‘Pardon?’
‘We don’t like your sort around here.’
‘What sort is that?’
‘Whatever you are – a ghost-hunter, psychic, true-crime writer, or general sicko.’
‘I work with the police,’ I say, taking out my business card.
She edges closer, squinting as she reads.
‘A psychologist! You’re not the first.’ She’s still holding her mobile to her ear. She speaks to someone, ‘Yeah, he’s one them . . . I will . . . Bye, love.’
She lowers the phone and rattles off a list of answers to questions I haven’t asked. ‘You can’t come inside. The secret room doesn’t exist any more. There are no ghosts, no hauntings, no strange sounds, no dog kennels in the garden. And we don’t know what happened to Angel Face.’ Defiantly, without prompting, she says: ‘We bought this place after the murder, OK? I know we got a bargain, but we didn’t expect to be in the bloody guidebooks.’
‘I didn’t mean to trouble you,’ I say.
‘Well, don’t.’ She turns in her slippers and disappears inside the house, slamming the door so violently it shakes the windows.
‘Don’t mind Francine,’ says a voice from across the fence. ‘She’s never been very friendly.’ The jug-eared old man has a Scottish accent and is leaning on a rake in his garden. His baggy trousers make him look bow-legged. ‘I don’t know what she’s complaining about – she didn’t live here when it happened. That was a real circus.’
‘Circus?’
‘The police and the reporters and the TV vans. We could barely get into the place. And the smell.’
He holds out his hand and introduces himself as Murray Reid.