Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
DAN
‘I have to say,’ – she takes a few sharp breaths – ‘I’m…
I’m sorry, but it’s my heart… jeez, it’s going like the clappers…
It’s not every day you get a call out of the blue from the British police, asking about your daughter who died over thirty years ago!
I was just about heading up the wooden hills as well…
Ned! Hang on, sorry, … Neddd!’ I hear the sound of heavy footsteps on stairs, the low grumbling of a male voice in the background.
‘It’s the British police on the phone, they’re calling from London… ’
‘British police? What the blazes do those bastards want?’ His Australian accent is notably more pronounced than hers.
‘Ned!’ she hisses. ‘I’m sorry, I apologise on my husband’s behalf. He’s fallen off the wagon again and is a bit upset with himself, a bit grumpy. My mother always said that I married beneath me.’ She laughs, though I sense there may be a ring of truth to it.
‘I can only apologise if I’m keeping you from your bed, Mrs Valentine. And I’m really sorry for any distress this may cause you. Did my colleagues give you the heads-up on why we contacted you?’
‘… They didn’t really say much… just that you wanted to speak to me about my daughter, about Samantha, something about a message on social media?
’ I hear the click at the back of her throat as she swallows, dryly, no doubt apprehensive about what could be coming next.
‘It’s been thirty years now. My Sammie will have been dead for thirty-one years this November.
Though sometimes it feels like it only happened yesterday.
’ Her voice sinks. ‘You never get over losing a child, trust me, never.’
‘I believe you, Mrs Valentine.’
‘Shona, please.’
‘Shona, do you remember a girl who was friends with your daughter back in prep school, a girl named Katy Russell?’
‘Katy! God, yeah! Of course,’ she says. ‘Jeez, I haven’t heard that name in a while.
I knew Katy well, back then anyway. Thick as thieves they were, her and my Sammie, BFFs as they say now.
They were always off out somewhere together, roller-skating in the park, swimming at the beach, riding their bikes…
all that kind of kids’ stuff, and if Katy wasn’t over at our house, then Sammie was hanging out at hers…
Yeah, they were close at one time, those two girls, like sisters.
Ahhhh,’ – she sighs as she reminisces – ‘I’ve not seen Katy in years.
I don’t know if she’d even recognise me now, from all that time ago – probably not.
Ned says he doesn’t recognise me anymore either.
’ She laughs again, though it has a melancholy tinge to it.
‘She’s married now, I think, Katy, got kiddies probably.
I never heard anything about her moving to the UK though?
’ She pauses. ‘Nothing’s happened to her, has it? What’s this got to do with our Sammie?’
‘It’s complicated, Shona,’ I say, which is an understatement. ‘We’re currently conducting a homicide investigation—’
‘What! No!’ She gasps.
‘Don’t worry!’ I quickly interject. ‘It’s not Katy, Katy’s alive and well, and, I believe, still living in Australia…
It was something that she mentioned, a comment she made on social media about a girl named Julie Edwards – someone both she and your daughter, Samantha, knew back in school, is that right? ’
There’s a moment’s pause.
‘Oh. Her.’ Her voice tightens. ‘What about Julie Edwards?’
‘So you knew her?’
‘Yeah. And I never liked her,’ she says bluntly.
‘She was that posh little Pommy girl who turned up mid-term during the last year of prep school and broke up their friendship. She set her sights on being Sammie’s new best friend and pushed Katy out – three’s a crowd and all of that.
It caused a real stink at the time,’ she says.
‘I remember there were a lot of tears, and I had to have a heart-to-heart with Katy’s mum, Christie, about it all.
Katy was so hurt. Even I was cross with Sammie; I thought it was cruel to just dump her friend like that, and I told her off for being disloyal – she’d known Katy since kindergarten.
But this Julie Edwards girl, she seemed to just come out of nowhere, and then… ’
‘You met this little girl, this Julie Edwards?’
‘Oh sure, yeah, a few times. And like I said, I didn’t like her much. Bit of a perfect princess, you know what I mean?’
I suppose I did. My own little ‘perfect princess’, my Pip, loves to dress up in a tutu that she wears with these glittery purple wellies. ‘Make a swish, Pop-Pop!’ she says, waving her little magic star wand about, and then granting it to me with a bash on the head. She thinks it’s hilarious.
‘Why didn’t you like her much?’
She pauses.
‘I didn’t like the hold she had over my daughter, or the fact that she’d pushed poor Katy out of the picture.
Sammie was always a big softie, a real sweetheart.
She hated the idea of upsetting anyone. But she would never hear a bad word spoken about that Julie Edwards girl.
We’d get into a fight if I ever brought up any misgivings I had.
She seemed to look up to her in a way she never had anyone else before, followed her like a shadow. ’
‘And what was this Julie like, do you remember?’
‘She always seemed like a perfectly sweet, polite little thing whenever I met her. And she was a real stunner too, all long, ice-cream-blonde hair, with these really big, dazzling green eyes – like an angel.’
Blonde hair. Green eyes. My heart jumps in my chest.
‘But there was just something about her…’
‘What was that, Shona?’
She lets out a breath.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Just something not quite right, wasn’t it, Ned?
’ I hear that low grumbling voice again in the background.
‘I don’t know, maybe it was just a mother’s intuition.
All I know is that within six months of meeting that girl, my Sammie, my beautiful baby girl, was dead. She was only eleven years old.’
Her words haunt the painful silence that follows.
‘It was Sammie’s older brother, Nicholas, who found her.
He came home from soccer practice one evening, and there she was at the bottom of our garden, hanging from the apple tree, near the swing Ned had made for her with a bit of rope and an old truck tyre.
Poor Nicholas…’ Her voice drops. ‘He never got over it, finding his little sister like that. He gets flashbacks to this day, and he’s in his fifties now. ’
‘It must’ve been dreadful, Shona.’
‘Do you know, that tree never once bore fruit again after it happened. Since the day we moved into this place, almost half a century ago now, that tree produced a ton of apples each year, without fail; great big, fat, juicy green apples, so many that we couldn’t even give them away in the end, could we, Ned?
But after that, after our Sammie died – nothing ever again. ’
‘Did you find out why it happened, Shona? How it happened?’
She blows air loudly through her lips.
‘Well, that’s just it.’ I hear the strain in her voice and feel guilty that I’m having to be the one who makes her recall such a devastating tragedy.
‘There was nothing, no signs, no depression, no previous self-harm, no mental health issues. We’ve spent a lifetime since wondering if we missed the red flags, but…
The shock was… well it was…’ She struggles to find the right words.
‘It was too much. It shattered our family, tore our lives apart, literally like a bomb had detonated in the middle of us.’ Her voice is hoarse with emotion.
‘We were never the same again. How could anyone be after that? Samantha was always such a perfectly normal, happy little girl, let me tell you. She was. I remember that year – the year she died – she was especially looking forward to Christmas because Ned and I had talked about getting her a pony, you know, a little old nag she could trot about on and take care of, and she was so stoked about it.’
‘My God, Shona, I’m so sorry.’ My paltry apology is scant compensation, I’m sure. ‘Did the police ever look into Samantha’s death? Was there a coroner’s report?’
‘Accidental death.’ She sniffs. ‘But they suspected suicide because of the way…’ She clears her throat.
‘… because of the way the rope had been tied, or something. They said she would’ve had to have done it deliberately, herself.
But with no note, and no previous concerns from us or from the school, they couldn’t say conclusively either way. ’
‘And what did you and Ned think?’
‘How could I, as a mother, bring myself to believe that my happy-go-lucky little ray of sunshine, my beautiful eleven-year-old daughter, had deliberately hung herself? I just couldn’t. Never. Still can’t. It had to have been an accident somehow. Just a terrible, dreadful, fluke accident…’
Why do I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming?
‘I’ve never really told anyone this before, only Ned and I have spoken about it over the years, but deep down inside me I’ve always suspected that she had something to do with it somehow – that little angelic, blonde-haired, butter-wouldn’t-melt Julie Edwards.
’ Her voice sounds brittle now, simmering with resentment.
‘I had no proof or evidence or anything of that sort, and Julie was away on a family vacation when Sammie died, but it was just here,’ – I hear the thudding sound her fist makes as it connects with her breastbone – ‘right here inside my chest, my intuition – a mother’s instinct.
I felt it so strongly, Detective Riley. Do you know what I mean? ’
She has no idea.
‘I just thought that if my Sammie… well, if she did kill herself, then somehow Julie Edwards had something to do with it, told her to do it maybe, oh, I don’t know…
maybe I’m just talking shit. Maybe I’m still in denial, all these years later.
Ned’s therapist says he still is, and that’s why he’s become a pisshead!
’ She whispers the last part down the phone, but there’s no malice in her voice.
She sounds fond of him still. I try not to think about what it would do to a family, a tragedy like that.
‘Do you think you’d recognise Julie Edwards if you saw a photo of her, Shona?’
‘Heck, yes! I can even see her face in my mind right now, as we speak.’
‘Even thirty-odd years later?’
‘Well, I mean, I can’t say for certain, but yes, I’d like to think so.’
‘Shona, I’m going to send you over a link, right now, to this phone, and I want you to stay on the line and click on the link. Can you do that for me?’
‘What the hell, send it. Ned… Ned, get your arse up over here and have a look at this…’
‘I want you to tell me if you recognise the person in the photograph I’m about to send you, and if you do, then tell me her name, OK?’
I pull up Erin’s mugshot on my phone, click send. After a few seconds’ delay, I hear the ping of it arrive at her phone, and hold my breath.
‘No. That’s not her,’ she says, instantly. ‘That’s not Julie Edwards… I’m pretty certain it’s not her, is it, Ned?’
I hear him grumbling in the background again.
Is he muzzled? ‘Nah… Ned doesn’t think so either.
This woman doesn’t look at all familiar to me.
I suppose… I suppose the eye colour is similar, the green eyes…
but Julie Edwards had this ice-white blonde hair, and the shape of her face, her nose… yeah… no… it’s not her.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure about that, Shona?’
She sucks in a breath. ‘Definitely.’