"Oh, I'm fine." A small, brittle laugh. "Well, actually, no, I'm not. I'm devastated. But I think we're all still in shock, really. It hasn't sunk in yet. You never imagine something like this happening, do you?"
"No," I said gently. "I know how you must be feeling. Can I do anything to help?"
"I was wondering…do you think I could come in and talk to you sometime? Only if it's no trouble. There's something I need to ask you." A car went by in the background; she was outside somewhere, on a mobile or a pay phone.
"Of course. This afternoon?"
"No," she said hastily. "No-not today. You see, they'll be back any minute, they've only gone to…to view the…" Her voice trailed off. "Could I come tomorrow? Sometime in the afternoon?"
"Whenever you like," I said. "Let me give you my mobile number, OK?
Then you can reach me any time you need to. Just give me a ring tomorrow, and we'll meet up."
She took it down, murmuring the numbers under her breath. "I have to go," she said hurriedly. "Thank you, Detective Ryan. Thank you so much," and, before I could say good-bye, she was gone.
I checked the interview room: Mark was writing, and Cassie had managed to make him laugh. I flipped my fingernails against the glass. Mark's head snapped up, and Cassie threw me a tiny smile and a fractional shake of her head: apparently they were managing to get by without me. This, as you might expect, was fine with me. Sophie would be waiting for the blood sample we'd promised her; I left Cassie a "Back in 5" Post-it on the door of the interview room, and went down to the basement.
Evidence storage procedures in the early 1980s, especially for cold cases, were not sophisticated. Peter and Jamie's box was on a high shelf and I had never taken it down before, but I knew, from the lumpy shifting when I had pulled out the main file from the top, that there were other things in there, and those had to be whatever evidence Kiernan and McCabe and their team had collected. The case had four other boxes, but they were labeled, in neat black lettering as careful as a child's: 2) Questionaires, 3) Questionaires, 4) Statements, 5) Leads. Either Kiernan or McCabe couldn't spell. I tugged the main box off the shelf, dust-motes fountaining through the bare lightbulb's glare, and dumped it on the floor.
It was half full of plastic evidence bags, furred with thick layers of dust that gave the objects inside a shadowy, sepia-toned look, like mysterious artifacts found by chance in a centuries-sealed chamber. I pulled them out gently, one by one, blew on them and laid them in a row on the flagstones.
There was very little, for a major case. A child's watch, a glass tumbler, a dull-orange Donkey Kong game, all coated in what looked like fingerprint powder. Various scraps of trace evidence, mainly dried leaves and chips of bark. A pair of white gym socks stippled with dark brown, with neat square holes where swatches had been razored out for testing. A grubby white T-shirt; faded denim shorts, the hems starting to fray. Last of all the runners, with their childish scuff marks and their stiff, black, buckled lining. They were the padded kind, but the blood had soaked almost all the way through: the outsides had tiny dark stains spreading from the stitching holes, splashes around the top, faint brownish patches where it lay just beneath the surface.
I had been bracing myself quite hard for this, actually. I think I'd had some vague idea that seeing the evidence would trigger a dramatic flash flood of memories; I hadn't exactly expected to end up in a fetal position on the basement floor, but there was a reason I'd picked a moment when no one was likely to come looking for me. In the event, though, I realized with a definite sense of anticlimax that none of this stuff looked even remotely familiar-except, of all things, Peter's Donkey Kong game, which was presumably only there for fingerprint comparison and which ignited a brief and fairly useless flare of memory (me and Peter sitting on sunlit carpet working a button each, concentrated and elbowing, Jamie leaning over our shoulders and yelping excited instructions) so intense I could practically hear the game's brisk, bossy chirrups and beeps. The clothes, though I knew they were mine, rang no bells whatsoever. It seemed inconceivable that I had actually got up one morning and put them on. All I could see was the pathos of them-how small the T-shirt was, the Biro Mickey Mouse on the toe of one runner. Twelve had seemed terrifyingly grown up, at the time.
