Elle （Past）
ELLE
PAST
Tears pooled in my eyes as I stared at Bryony Sanders’s pretty face, her blue eyes sparkling as she gazed at the camera. She had been named as the young woman found dead in the burned-out car near Wimbledon Common.
“It’s her,” I told Jaz, my voice trembling. “The young woman I saw getting into the car last Saturday.”
Jaz came over and peered at my computer screen. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Positive.”
“I’m sorry, babe.” He sat down next to me on the sofa and pulled me to him. “She looks so young.”
“She was nineteen. I need to call the police.” I stretched my hand out and scrolled to the end of the news bulletin.
“There’s a number here for witnesses to call.
I told the responder that I thought the man who picked her up was local—what if she didn’t pass that on to the police?
” I gave a shiver. “I can’t believe he might have murdered her. He seemed so nice.”
“That’s probably why she trusted him,” Jaz said. “Shall I make you a cuppa while you phone them?”
“Yes, please.”
My hands were shaking as I dialed the number and told the responder about my call the previous Saturday. Within the hour, a DC from the MIT unit arrived at the flat to take a detailed statement from me.
“Can you start from about five minutes before you heard the shout in the street?” DC Gail Moss asked. “Where were you, what you were doing?”
I closed my eyes in order to concentrate better. “I was here, in this room, reading a book.”
“Was there anyone else in the house?”
“No, my boyfriend was out.”
“Carry on.”
“It was a lovely day so the window was open. I heard someone shout out and went to the window. I saw a young woman on the opposite pavement.”
“What time was it?”
“Around 4:00 PM.”
“Can you describe the woman you saw?”
I wanted to tell DC Moss that I’d already given the information to her colleagues when I’d called 101, the nonemergency police line.
But I soon realized how much I’d omitted, and how much more I could remember when asked the right questions.
I thought that the only thing I could remember about the car was that it was black, but when I was asked how many doors it had, I was able to say that it had had four, that there had been a silver rim around the windows and that it had no special markings.
I also remembered that the black tote bag the woman had been carrying had had a purple logo on the bottom left-hand corner.
“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful,” DC Moss said, stopping the recording. “Could you come down to the station and help create a likeness of the man you saw driving the car?”
“Sure. I think he might be local,” I said, repeating what I’d said to the responder.
“I saw him earlier that afternoon, on The Cut. I was coming out of the supermarket and I walked straight into him. I’d bought a jar of honey and it smashed on the pavement.
He offered to help me clean it up.” I paused. “He seemed nice.”
“Which supermarket was that?”
I gave her the details and she nodded. “We’ll look into it.”
I thought I had a clear idea of what the man looked like but the reality of creating a likeness was more difficult than I’d imagined.
Although the sketch artist was patient, I couldn’t convey the man’s features as accurately as I’d hoped.
But I presumed that once it was in the public domain, someone would recognize who he was.
The following day, Bryony’s mum, a widow from Boston, made an emotional appeal for help in catching her daughter’s killer.
I could barely watch as she explained that a year before, a few months before Bryony was due to leave for the UK, her husband—Bryony’s father—had died after a long illness and that Bryony had hesitated about moving to London because she hadn’t wanted to leave her mum alone.
Mrs. Sanders hadn’t wanted Bryony to give up her dream of studying at King’s, and had persuaded her to go.
“First my husband, now my daughter,” she wept. “I don’t want anyone else to suffer as I am suffering. If you recognize this man, please, please contact the police.”
I’d already looked at Bryony’s social media.
Under other circumstances, I’d never have looked at the Facebook account of someone who had died but I had a need to know as much as I could about the young woman whose path had so fleetingly crossed mine.
There was nothing extraordinary about Bryony; she was just a regular nineteen-year-old, enjoying her time at university in the UK, missing her friends and her mum back home.
But this evidence that she had barely started out on life somehow made it worse.
She’d had everything to live for, and it had been taken away from her in the most terrible and violent manner.
It affected me horribly; I couldn’t stop thinking about Bryony, about how, with her heartbroken mother living in the US, she had no one to fight for her on British soil.