‘I’m going with Alex, and Sam said you can stay at their house.’
Ellie chewed on her bottom lip and squinted as sunlight fell across her face.
‘What do you think?’ Logan asked.
‘Might be kind of cool,’ she said.
‘Right. No dads.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘We’re going over for dinner tonight and you’ll stay there so we need to get you packed this afternoon.’
‘Fine.’
Logan was relieved. Her continuing maturity still surprised him. He reached over and ruffled her hair with his hand to annoy her. She pushed him away and tried to look perturbed, not really succeeding.
When they got home, Ellie went straight to her room and started laying out most of her wardrobe on the bed while Logan got a suitcase from the cupboard in the hall. He put it on the floor in her room, stared at all the clothes and shook his head.
‘It won’t be that long,’ he told her.
‘Just being prepared.’
‘Right. I mean, you are planning on coming back here when I get home? You’re not leaving me.’
She stopped and looked at him — serious now.
‘Don’t say that.’
His heart contracted.
She returned to packing. They didn’t dwell on difficult emotions, preferring to confront them and deal with them in a straightforward way.
He realised she had grown a lot even over the last few months. Maybe in some weird way the death of his cat, Stella, a while back had helped. It was from natural causes. She was an old cat. And Chris Washington’s death too. It had shown Ellie that death is a way of life and that it touches everyone. She wasn’t special, at least not in that way. She hadn’t been singled out for any unique suffering.
‘What about Becky?’ Ellie asked, surveying the clothes on her bed and nodding her head as though she was satisfied with her work.
‘What do you mean?’
She turned to him.
‘You’ll miss her.’
‘Yes. But she’s got an important job and so she needs to be here to do that.’
‘Uh-huh.’
That seemed to be the end of it.
Logan went to his room and double checked his own carry-on bag. It didn’t look like he was taking much, not compared to Ellie, anyway, but it was all he needed. And he could always pick up extras over there.
Ellie shouted that she was going for a quick shower and he heard the bathroom door close then the sound of the shower going on. He went back to her room to check her packing and was surprised to see that she had put a lot of stuff back in her wardrobe and the suitcase was ordered and ready to go.
He bent down to shut it and saw a mobile phone he didn’t recognise. It was wedged down the side of the suitcase, only the top of it showing above the clothes. He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands. It was an old Nokia, which would have looked new maybe three years ago.
He sat on Ellie’s bed and switched the phone on. It took a moment to warm up and then the logo for the phone company came on the screen. Logan paid the bills for Ellie’s phone and this one was on a different network. He frowned, not sure what he was looking at.
Ellie came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later in her robe with her hair piled up in a towel. Logan was on her bed, leaning back against the wall. She stopped when she saw him.
He held the phone up.
‘What’s this?’
Her eyes flicked to the phone.
‘It’s a phone.’
He raised his eyebrows at her.
‘I can see that, Ellie. I mean, why do you have it when I already pay for one? I’ve never seen this one.’
‘Becky got it for me.’
Logan sat forward, frowning.
‘What?’
Ellie came over and sat beside him, took the phone from him and started pressing buttons. He waited to see what it was she was going to show him, but when she was done she put it against his ear.
He heard her mother’s voice. Heard Penny.
‘Hi, baby. This is your mum calling to say congratulations on your very first phone. Hope you like it. Love you.’
Ellie took the phone and switched it off.
Logan blinked away blurred vision.
‘Becky said they were getting rid of the evidence in my mum’s case after Christmas. At the police station. And was there anything I wanted. She showed me a list.’
‘She never said.’
‘Told me it was our secret. Anyway, I knew that message was on my old phone. I never deleted it.’
‘And Becky knows about the message?’
‘No. I didn’t tell her why I wanted it. It was just for me.’
Logan put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. She didn’t resist, leaning her head on his shoulder and toying with the phone in her hands.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She shrugged in his embrace.
‘You’ve got Becky now,’ she said.
Logan gently eased her away from him and faced her.
‘Your mum was special to both of us,’ he said. ‘Becky knows that. You could have told me.’
She looked down at the phone and back at him. She surprised him by saying okay, leaning in and kissing his cheek before getting up to plug in her hairdryer.
She was stronger than him, that was for sure. And he loved her all the more for it.
2
Armstrong had left Pitt Street after the interview with the two uniforms — telling Irvine that he wanted to catch up on his other work. He promised to be back before five to go and see Suzie Murray with her.
Irvine typed up statements for the officers and filled out internal reports. She hated the paperwork and it took her more than three hours to finish all of it. Sometimes she thought that modern policing was more about documenting what was done — rather than actually doing it.
She called Jim Murphy at four in the afternoon to chase up the post-mortem results and to see if anything of note had turned up from the lab analysis of whatever was found at the locus.
‘I think the drug squad instincts are right,’ Murphy told her.
‘How so?’
‘Well, blood analysis isn’t back yet but I’m betting that she died from an overdose. I spoke to the pathologist and his preliminary view is that she wasn’t killed by someone. There are no signs of violence and no water in her lungs.’
‘She was dead when she went in the water?’
‘Yes.’
‘CCTV show up yet?’
‘No.’
‘Call over there and see if they can put a rush on it, will you.’
‘I’ll do it now. Talk later.’
Five o’clock came and went with no sign of Armstrong. The clock crept towards six, then past it. She called her mother to ask her to pick Connor up from the childminder and endured a lecture about parental responsibility. After that, she called Armstrong’s mobile and left a message on his voicemail to call her when he could.
Then it was six-thirty.
Her phone rang and she picked it up without looking to see who it was.
‘It’s about time,’ she said.
‘What?’
It was Logan.
‘I thought it was someone else.’
‘You waiting for a call? We can speak later if you like.’
‘No. No, it’s fine. I’m a bit frustrated. Are you still planning on coming over later?’
‘I am. It’s just that, well, I wanted to ask you about something. About the phone you got for Ellie.’
She’d forgotten about that.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Ellie asked me not to.’
‘She’s a kid, Becky. Did you not think I should have known about it? I could have helped her. I mean, who knew how she was going to react to hearing Penny’s voice. She could have regressed.’
‘What about Penny’s voice? You’re not making any sense, Logan.’
He told her about the message on the phone.
‘I didn’t know. How did she react?’
‘She’s fine.’
He sounded terse, angry.
‘I said I didn’t know,’ she told him, aware that he was reacting this way because he was upset — probably unsure how he felt himself about hearing Penny’s voice again.