The Soprano, page 3
She stepped past him and moved inside, going straight to the bottle of cold water she always stashed in the fridge for when she had finished a run. As she drank deeply from the bottle she heard the door close gently, followed by shuffling footsteps on the laminate floor of the hallway.
“Well?” she asked as the PC entered the kitchen and leant against the worktop opposite her.
“It’s DI Hales, Ma’am. He’s been trying to get hold of you."
The young PC spoke nervously, at a pace far more recognisable from lying teenagers trying to make excuses for being out late or caught where they weren’t supposed to be, and Catherine had to fight the urge to tell him to fuck off and throw him out of the flat. She wasn’t due at work for another hour, but lately she had noticed that communications from the station were coming further and more frequently out of hours. Two weeks ago she had finished a late shift at midnight, having worked for more than nineteen hours straight, and had been called by the Desk Sergeant less than an hour after she’d left, asking for her to come back in. She didn’t want to resent her job or the people she worked with, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to fight the urge to tell them to stick it. Nevertheless, she removed her phone from the upper-arm holster she wore when running and found four missed calls from DI Hales. She desperately wanted a shower after her run, but she got the distinct impression that junior wasn’t going to leave until she had called him back.
Waiting impatiently for him to answer, Catherine assumed Hales was calling to tell her that she needed to be in early, work late, or both. CID had been short-staffed well before the pandemic and the three serving officers who had succumbed to the virus had not been replaced, so longer hours and less recovery time had become more or less standard practice. And being unmarried and childless, Catherine often found herself forced to take leave around other people, who got priority for school holidays and Christmas - something she had planned to speak with her union rep about, but had not had the chance to before his taking early retirement the previous summer.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that please?”
Holding the phone tightly against her ear, Catherine slumped down into the nearest chair as the voice on the other end melted into a high-pitched wail that rose in her ears, absorbing everything around her. Words failed to register as anything other than noise as DI Hales’ last sentence reverberated between her ears, echoing through her mind.
“I think we’ve found your sister.”
Catherine’s head spun and she could feel heat rising from her stomach and sitting at the bottom of her throat, daring her to be sick. It couldn’t be? Could it? After all this time. She didn’t want it to be her. Sarah had been missing for almost 17 years, so she knew that it was pretty unlikely she would ever see her again, but the absence of a body or definitive proof had always allowed her a shallow sort of comfort - a vague hope that she was still alive somewhere. Happy.
“Cat? Are you still there?” the voice at the other end pleaded.
She snapped awake and shot up out of the seat again, taking the young PC by surprise.
“I’m here. What do I need to do?”
The morgue suite at University Hospital was a place that Catherine knew well, having frequented it more than her family home in the past two years. As cliches went, it was pretty typical; down in the basement where no patient would stumble upon it by accident, at the end of a long, sterile corridor with no natural light and sterile overheads that flickered sporadically. Small storage cupboards lined the corridor, and the smell of chemical preservatives hung heavily in the air. The heavy door that squeaked so loudly that it could be heard in the offices two floors above. Not that she noticed any of these things anymore. Nor did she notice the wear-marks of trolley tyres dragging across the cheap blue linoleum floor, the dents and cracks in the walls from where careless porters had crashed into them, or the creaks and moans of the antiquated air conditioning system which spluttered and wheezed as it battled to pump fresh air into the area.
The morgue itself - the technical area in which medical examinations took place - was bleak and sterile. Catherine’s first experience of visiting had always stuck with her. Not just because of the person laid out on the table, a striking young woman with vivid red hair and a large single bruise to the side of her head and blood filling her orbital sockets, but also because it reminded her of the dental surgery she had attended as a child. Every surface cold and smooth - unfeeling in a way that doctors’ surgeries were not. She doubted that it had been refurbished - or even had the walls and ceiling whitewashed - in a considerable length of time, or that any of the equipment had been purchased since the turn of the millennium and the anticlimactic absence of the much-vaunted Y2K bug. And the more often she visited and the more horrific the injuries she was presented with, the more comfortable she came to feel in the bleak environment. The pervasive smell of bleach and embalming fluid, not quite masked by the thick scent of pine disinfectant had begun to trigger an almost Pavlovian response, causing her to tie up her long, mousy-brown hair and remove the scant amount of jewellery she wore to her handbag, for fear of losing it in a cadaver.
But today’s visit was a less routine affair. A usual visit would have seen her fighting with cantankerous pensioners over one of the limited parking spaces on that side of the hospital site, and a brisk walk from the “unofficial smoking area” (where patients and staff alike gathered at the rear of the building to smoke and defiantly stub out their cigarettes on the no-smoking sign mounted next to the door) to the single-storey stairwell that was the only pedestrian access to the morgue. Today had been entirely different. The young PC - who she had discovered during the relatively short drive from her flat in the bay to the hospital was called Carl Bramble - had escorted her directly into the morgue suite and asked her to wait by a pair of small plastic chairs until they were called in. He pulled his mask away from his face repeatedly, like a rudimentary fan, which annoyed Catherine more than it reasonably should have. She ignored his instruction and tapped on the small glass pane in the door that led into the morgue. A small woman, squat and rotund, appeared at the window and, upon seeing Catherine, smiled and operated the mechanical door lock with a buzz. Even though the pandemic had been going for well-over a year by this point, Catherine had never become accustomed to seeing everyone wearing masks, but this was a face she had never seen without one, and the woman’s presence was immediately comforting.
Catherine pushed the door open and followed the woman inside as PC Bramble looked on, realising just in time that he was meant to follow her inside, just getting his hand onto the door moments before it closed and locked him out.
Catherine took just two or three steps towards the table before she stuttered and halted abruptly. There was no mistaking it. Sarah’s green dress - the one she had reportedly been wearing on the night she disappeared - had been cut from her body and laid out on a small, stainless-steel bench next to the slab. Catherine had never been one for dresses, heels and make-up - that had always been Sarah’s domain - but she remembered being jealous when she had first seen Sarah wearing it, coordinated with matching earrings and a long-chain necklace which draped a small emerald pendant across the top of her cleavage. There was no doubt in Catherine’s mind - it was definitely Sarah’s.
Breath became hard to come by, as though someone had wrapped a belt around her chest and was pulling it from behind, squeezing the air from her lungs. Her eyes watered, blurring her vision, and she found herself reaching out for something to steady herself on. She felt PC Bramble grab her, holding her up with an unexpectedly firm arm around her shoulders. Her head felt light and airy, as though she were about float off into the ether, but her feet felt like lead and anchored her to the dull linoleum. She thought for a moment that she was going to be sick - she could feel the bile rising rapidly in her throat. She tried to centre herself, sucking in as much air as she could muster, but in the time it took for her head to stop spinning she found herself sitting outside in one of the plastic chairs, sitting with her head over her lap and nursing a small paper cup of water.
It didn’t take long for the world around Catherine to slip back into focus.
“What?” she asked.
“Are you alright? You don’t normally freak out like that…”
Catherine raised her head and sat up, leaning against the posture-breaking back of the moulded seat. She sipped at the water, hoping it would rouse her a little and bring her out of the fog that enveloped her.
“It’s my sister.”
“How can you be sure?” the young PC asked, a quizzical look on his face.
“The dress,” she began. “It’s hers - it was one of her favourites. It wasn’t with her things when we…” She trailed off, remembering the afternoon in June when she’d accompanied her father to Sarah’s house to pack up her things and bring them home. Her father, consumed not only with anguish and confusion over the disappearance of his eldest daughter but also at the lack of progress by the police in finding any trace of her, had spent most of the afternoon crying as Catherine and Sarah’s housemate, Rhiannon, had packed the last remnants of her life into a handful of boxes and a large suitcase. It had taken him years to get over her disappearance. The cracks in her parents’ marriage were already starting to grow by the time Sarah disappeared, but the additional strain had become too much for them to bear, and her mother had walked away and eventually started a new life and family in France. Catherine had built him back up to a level little more than functional for a while, and it dawned on her that she was going to have to break him all over again.
Once she’d convinced PC Bramble that she could walk unaided, Catherine ventured back into the morgue, steeling herself to see what was under the sheet on the slab.
Who, she admonished herself. Who, not what.
Bramble held open the door and ushered her inside, watching for signs that she might falter again. None came. Having wavered once, Catherine was determined not to embarrass herself again. Standing beside the table, alongside the body’s chest, she nodded and watched as the pale blue sheet was gently pulled down. Her eyes burned as she tried desperately to hold back a tsunami of tears, the culmination of almost two decades of uncertainty, but she was determined to maintain some form of professional dignity in front of her peers. She felt her voice breaking as she confirmed that the body, unmistakably, belonged to Sarah Green.
CHAPTER FOUR
“THE BODY OF a young woman found on a construction site in the centre of Cardiff yesterday was confirmed as that of missing student Sarah Green, who disappeared in 2004 after a night out with friends. The family have been informed, and a spokesperson for South Wales Police has confirmed that the investigation into her disappearance has been reopened, asking for anyone with information to come forward. In other news, Cardiff City manager-”
Catherine clicked off the radio and wiped away the tears that had quickly filled her eyes. Despite having attended the morgue and formally identified the body as being Sarah’s, hearing it announced on the radio made it somehow more real than it had been in the past few hours. Try as she had, she couldn’t shake the vision of Sarah’s body which, according to the mortician, had been pretty-well preserved by the layers of plastic sheeting it had been wrapped in. It was Sarah – she was absolutely certain of that, but she struggled to equate what she had seen in the morgue with the vibrant 19-year-old she had dreamt of finding for almost two decades. Her experiences of death had not prepared her, and her mind had numbed itself to the point of not remembering any part of the drive from the hospital back to her flat.
When she checked her phone she found a voicemail from Hales telling her to take a few days off, but an afternoon of pointlessly pottering around her flat was enough to convince her that she needed to be busy, and that her sister’s killer had evaded detection for long enough. She had to go back to work.
Her throat felt thick and her jaw heavy, and a warmth had overtaken her which made her dizzy. She felt her heart pulsing loudly in her temples, and her vision blurred as she felt as though her head was preparing to lift off from her neck and float away. She wasn’t generally prone to attacks of anxiety, but it took a handful of long, deep breaths to achieve even a modicum of composure, steeling herself to get out of the car and head inside. She knew that, as soon as she walked through the door and entered the station, colleagues she barely knew would offer hollow words of condolence before clamming up and struggling to return her look, not knowing what to say, while the colleagues she would almost consider to be friendly would look away, not knowing what to say to her. Friendly, but not friends, she thought. She’d struggled to make any actual friends. This wouldn’t normally bother her - she was far more comfortable in her own company than with other people, but today was not a “normal” day, and she didn’t know what she wanted or even expected from anyone. In truth, part of her would have happily ditched the day, made the short trip back to the bay and holed up in her flat until everything around her stopped spinning. But the other part - the part that had searched for Sarah for almost two decades, that had redesigned her entire future and shaped her career - wanted to march inside and demand that she be assigned to the case. Despite being young and relatively inexperienced (at 31 she was three years younger than the next-youngest detective in CID and considerably below the average age of the people in the department), she had successfully solved and closed all four of the murder cases she had led on previously within just a few days, and whispers of a promotion or transfer to a high-profile task force had followed her around for over a year. She had been flattered to be held in such high regard by her superiors, but she was reluctant to encourage such talk for fear of being moved away from Cardiff, making it far less likely for her to find Sarah. Her DI had even gone so far as to ask her during a review what her long-term ambitions were, but her reticence was taken as indifference, and talk of promotions had cooled in recent months.
It was only when large drops of water fell from her hair and splashed onto the black surface of the table in front of her that Catherine realised that she was soaking wet. Although it was a short walk from where she had parked, she hadn’t noticed that it had been raining heavily.
She’d expected to go to her desk or be summoned immediately to Hales’ office, but as soon as she’d arrived Catherine had been escorted to one of the two small interview rooms on the ground floor, whose dated wooden panels, floral-patterned carpets and cigarette smoke-stained ceilings wouldn’t have looked out of place in a retro seventies police drama. It felt strange, sitting across from the side she usually occupied. She wondered how many hours she’d spent sitting on the other side. Dozens? Hundreds?
At least nobody’s going to be interrogating me…
DI Hales entered quietly and set two large, steaming mugs down in front of Catherine. The mug nearest her was chipped and faded from its original white, the remnants of a printed slogan now barely visible. She didn’t recall ever having seen that one before, and assumed it had come from the stash of communal ones in the cupboard under the sink of what passed as the CID “kitchen”. She picked it up and took a sip before setting it back down in front of her.
“Thanks."
“How are you holding up?” he asked. He attempted a half-smile, but Catherine couldn’t return it. His demeanour was soft and kind - a far-cry from the fractious facade he often wore while chewing out a teammate when an investigation ran out of steam or a case was thrown out before getting to court. His victim voice, she decided. “Sorry - stupid question,” he followed as he sat in the seat opposite her.
“I- I don’t know. Not really, you know?” she said, honestly. She had no idea what to say or how she was feeling. Words were spilling from her mouth without her knowing what or why. If anything, she was distracted by the state his usually impeccable hair was in, having been compressed by a safety helmet all morning, as well as a small splash of mud on his tie that she assumed had been thrown up by one of the larger earth-moving machines on the site. He was a stickler for presentation, and had once scolded a new Detective Constable for wearing a hoodie over his shirt and tie, rather than a “proper” jacket.
“What do they think happened?” she continued, but Hales’ face gave nothing away.
“Cat, you know I-” He paused, struggling to maintain eye-contact with her. “You can’t be involved in this. You’re too close. The DCI has suggested that you might want to take some time off.”
“But Guv, I-”
“I’m sorry, Cat, but you know why you can’t.”
“She’s my sister! I need-” Catherine could feel her cheeks reddening as he stopped her again.
“Cat, please! My hands are tied - you wouldn’t allow it if you were me, either.”
She deflated quickly and slumped back in her seat. He was right. Of course he was. There was no way she would ever let a member of the victim’s family take part in an investigation. Too many conflicting feelings. Too many emotions to maintain objectivity. She knew this would happen, but would have loved to have been wrong.
Neither of them spoke. Her mind was suddenly blank and she couldn’t conjure an argument – even a poor one – to try to convince him to let her stay. Instead, she found herself focusing on the calm, almost caring tone in his voice. It wasn’t something that she heard often from him. Their usual interactions were more serious and focused - not friendly at all – yet here he was, sitting across from her, eyeing her sympathetically. She picked up the coffee and took another sip, instantly regretting it as she recognised it to be the cheap crap they gave outsiders, rather than the half-decent stuff everyone put five pounds a week into a kitty for. Breathing heavily, she let a few moments pass as she composed herself.
