“Ah. I see.”
“She said she met him at the counselor’s. She’s been seeing a counselor, see. Claimed she met Niall in the waiting room, that he was there because his mum and dad died, like hers. We never saw hide nor hair of him. I said to Ray, ‘She’s at it again, she’s fibbing,’ and Ray said to me, ‘Let it go, it keeps her happy,’ but I didn’t like her lying,” said Hazel with a fanatic glare. “She lied all the time, came home with a plaster on her wrist, said it was a cut and it turned out to be a One Direction tattoo. Look at her saying she was going away on a college placement, look at that... she kept lying and lying and look where it got her!”
With an enormous, visible effort she controlled a fresh eruption of tears, holding her trembling lips together and pressing the tissues hard across her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she said:
“Ray’s got a theory. He wanted to tell the police, but they didn’t care, they were more interested in where he’d been when she was — but Ray’s got a friend called Ritchie who puts a bit of gardening his way, see, and Kelsey met Ritchie—”
The theory was rolled out with a huge amount of extraneous detail and repetition. Strike, who was well used to the rambling style of unpracticed witnesses, listened attentively and politely.
A photograph was produced out of a dresser drawer, which did double duty in proving to Strike that Ray had been with three friends on a stag weekend in Shoreham-by-Sea when Kelsey was killed, and also revealed young Ritchie’s injuries. Ritchie and Ray sat on the shingle beside a patch of sea holly, grinning, holding beers and squinting in the sunlight. Sweat glistened on Ray’s bald pate and illuminated young Ritchie’s swollen face, his stitches and bruising. His leg was in a surgical boot.
“—and, see, Ritchie came round here right after he’d had his smash and Ray thinks it put the idea in her head. He thinks she was planning to do something to her leg and then pretend she’d had a traffic accident.”
“Ritchie couldn’t be the boyfriend, could he?” asked Strike.
“Ritchie! He’s a bit simple. He’d have told us. Anyway, she barely knew him. It was all a fantasy. I think Ray’s right. She was planning to do something to her leg again and pretend she’d come off some boy’s bike.”
It would have been an excellent theory, thought Strike, if Kelsey had been lying in hospital, pretending to have suffered a motorbike accident and refusing to give more details under the pretense of protecting a fictitious boyfriend. He did Ray the credit of agreeing that this was exactly the kind of plan a sixteen-year-old might have come up with, mingling grandiosity and short-sightedness in dangerous measure. However, the point was moot. Whether or not Kelsey had once planned a fake motorbike crash, the evidence showed that she had abandoned the plan in preference for asking Strike for instructions on leg removal.
On the other hand, this was the first time that anyone had drawn any connection between Kelsey and a motorcyclist, and Strike was interested in Hazel’s absolute conviction that any boyfriend must be fictional.
“Well, there was hardly any boys on her childcare course,” said Hazel, “and where else was she going to meet him? Niall. She’d never had a boyfriend at school or anything. She went to the counselor and sometimes she went to the church up the road, they’ve a youth group, but there’s no Niall-with-a-motorbike there,” said Hazel. “The police checked, asked her friends if they knew anything. Darrell who runs the group, he was that upset. Ray saw him this morning on his way home. Says Darrell burst into tears when he saw him from across the road.”
Strike wanted to take notes, but knew it would change the atmosphere of confidence he was trying to nurture.
“Who’s Darrell?”
“He didn’t have anything to do with it. Youth worker at the church. He’s from Bradford,” said Hazel obscurely, “and Ray’s sure he’s gay.”
“Did she talk about her—” Strike hesitated, unsure what to call it. “Her problem with her leg at home?”
“Not to me,” said Hazel flatly. “I wouldn’t have it, I didn’t want to hear it, I hated it. She told me when she was fourteen and I told her exactly what I thought. Attention-seeking, that’s all it was.”
“There was old scarring on her leg. How did that—?”
“She did it right after Mum died. Like I didn’t have enough to worry about. She tied wire round it, tried to cut off the circulation.”
Her expression revealed a mixture, it seemed to Strike, of revulsion and anger.
“She was in the car when Mum and Malcolm died, in the back. I had to get a counselor and all that for her. He thought it was a cry for help or something, what she did to her leg. Grief. Survivors’ guilt, I can’t remember. She said not, though, said she’d wanted the leg gone for a while... I don’t know,” said Hazel, shaking her head vigorously.
“Did she talk to anyone else about it? Ray?”
“A bit, yeah. I mean, he knew what she was like. When we first got together, when he moved in, she told him some real whoppers — her dad being a spy, that was one of them, and that was why their car had crashed, and I don’t know what else. So he knew what she was like, but he didn’t get angry with her. He just used to change the subject, chat to her about school and that...”
She had turned an unattractive dark red.
“I’ll tell you what she wanted,” she burst out. “To be in a wheelchair — pushed around like a baby and to be pampered and the center of attention. That’s what it was all about. I found a diary, must have been a year or so ago. The things she’d written, what she liked to imagine, what she fantasized about. Ridiculous!”
“Such as?” asked Strike.
“Such as having her leg cut off and being in a wheelchair and being pushed to the edge of the stage and watching One Direction and having them come and make a big fuss of her afterwards because she was disabled,” said Hazel on a single breath. “Imagine that. It’s disgusting. There are people who are really disabled and they never wanted it. I’m a nurse. I know. I see them. Well,” she said, with a glance at Strike’s lower legs, “you don’t need telling.
“You didn’t, did you?” she asked suddenly, point blank. “You didn’t — you didn’t cut — do it — yourself?”
Was that why she had wanted to see him, Strike wondered. In some confused, subconscious manner, trying to find her moorings in the sea on which she was suddenly adrift, had she wanted to prove a point — even though her sister was gone and beyond understanding — that people didn’t do that, not in the real world where cushions stood neatly on points and disability came only by mischance, through crumbling walls or roadside explosives?
“No,” he said. “I was blown up.”
“There you are, you see!” she said, tears erupting again, savagely triumphant. “I could have told her that — I could have told her if she’d only... if she’d asked me... but what she claimed,” said Hazel, gulping, “was that her leg felt like it shouldn’t be there. Like it was wrong to have it and it needed to come off — like a tumor or something. I wouldn’t listen. It was all nonsense. Ray says he tried to talk sense into her. He told her she didn’t know what she was asking for, that she wouldn’t want to be in hospital like he was after he broke his back, laid up for months in plaster, skin sores and infections and all the rest of it. He didn’t get angry with her, though. He’d say to her, come and help me in the garden or something, distract her.
“The police told us she was talking to people online who were like her. We had no idea. I mean, she was sixteen, you can’t go looking on their laptops, can you? Not that I’d know what to look for.”