“Oh, you’re bleeding. Are you okay?”
Her voice matched her features, which were delicate and pretty. Her accent was local but subtle and she had a kindness in her expression that instantly put you at your ease. “Can I help at all?”
Still he couldn’t speak. It seemed impossible and yet it was true. As if the cosmoswaslistening. This lovely, kind girl who was offering the hand of friendship had walked right into his shop, right into his life. Like he always imagined she would. He let her examine his wound, but as she did so, he never took his gaze off her, transfixed by her delicate nose, her long black hair and those piercing blue eyes.
118
Alastair and Gemma Lansley stood stock-still, barely able to breathe. Helen watched them closely. She could tell that, like Daniel Briers, they had found news of their daughter’s death hard to credit. But they had done the right thing and flown over from Windhoek to be confronted by the grim reality of Isobel’s murder. She lay on the mortuary slab in front of them, her body discreetly covered, but her pale, thin face unveiled. Her opaque eyes stared up at her parents, giving them none of the love they craved. She had been dead for over a year.
Helen was surprised to see that while Alastair’s eyes were already brimful of tears, Gemma’s eyes were dry, as if they hadn’t yet taken in what they were seeing. Usually it was the other way around, the husband desperately trying to be strong for his wife. But that wasnot the case here. Helen had already established in their preliminary chats that Alastair was very close to his daughter—his only daughter. When he and his wife had retired abroad, Alastair had hoped that Isobel would eventually join them—a life in the sun—but she had cleaved close to Southampton and her studies. Alastair had picked up a note of cynicism, even weariness in her recent tweets and texts that perhaps tokened a change in attitude to her surroundings, and this had raised his hopes of a reunion. But these had turned out to be somebody else’s fabrication—a revelation that was too big, too horrific for this elderly couple to process.
Having concluded the identification, Helen moved them into the relatives’ room.
“I know this is hard, but I need you to tell me as much as you can about Isobel. Her friends, her study schedule, her habits. We’re working on the assumption that Isobel’s attacker was not known to her, but rather someone who she came into contact with in daily life.”
“We could have told you that,” Gemma Lansley said curtly. “Isobel didn’t have any friends.”
“Gemma... ,” her husband murmured, a gentle note of warning in his voice.
“They need the facts, Alastair,” she shot back quickly, her voice wobbling for the first time. “There’s no point dressing things up.”
There was a pause and then Alastair looked straight at Helen.
“When Isobel... when she was a teenager, she was the victim of a sexual assault.”
“Go on.”
“She was walking home from school. Took a shortcut across the heath. The man... the man responsible was caught and imprisoned.”
“Eight years with time off for good behavior,” Gemma added bitterly.
“But it left a lasting impression on Isobel. She hated open spaces, hated to be outside. She hardly ever left her flat and didn’t really want to share. She had trust issues, I think the psychiatrist said. Hence she lived alone.”
“She had a limited social circle?” Helen asked.
“Limited was the word,” Gemma said. “She deliberately cut herself off from her family, her friends—”
“Please, Gemma, you’re not helping—”
“Cut herself off from anyone who might have cared for her.”
Gemma Lansley lapsed into silence now, overwhelmed by misery and grief.
“So she wouldn’t have let someone she didn’t know into the flat?”
“Have you been listening, Inspector?” Gemma replied acidly. “She wouldn’t let people shedidknow into the flat. She felt safe only when she was alone behind a closed door.”
Helen nodded, suddenly feeling huge sympathy for the spiky Gemma. Her bitterness was the result of her daughter closing the door on her. Had she too hoped for a reconciliation, a greater closeness later in life?
“She was security-conscious?” Helen offered gently.
“Of course. She didn’t go to great extremes—didn’t have the cash—but she had a very strong lock, a spyhole in case anyone rang the doorbell. And she’d always tell deliverymen to leave things on the doorstep. She hated the idea of coming into contact with strangers.”
“And yet she must have come into contact with them every day on her way to and from college?”
“She did, but it was on her terms. She always took the same route at the same times of day. She knew the faces along her route extremely well—not that she’d ever talk to them, of course.”
Helen tensed, sensing a breakthrough. “Do you remember her route?”
