Twenty minutes later, he was suppressing a brief shudder as the familiar towers of the Kennedy Estate rose above him. He hadn’t set foot on it for over a year, since he and Carmella had tracked down two other wayward teenagers who had run away and hidden here.
His professional life seemed full of recalcitrant teens, he reflected as he got out of the car. He made a vow to do everything in his power to keep Bonnie on the straight and narrow once she hit puberty – although with her start in life, who could blame her if she did go off the rails? He was dreading the point, surely not too many years away, when she would find out that her mother had tried to kill her when she was a baby. He and Gill would have to tell her first, to prevent her from stumbling across it online or being told by a ghoulish classmate.
Then he wondered if he and Gill would even still be together in a few years’ time to have that conversation. It took several deep drags on his now-charged e-cig to help shift the thought as he headed for Block B.
The estate was actually looking a lot better than it had last year. It had clearly been given, if not a makeover, a bit of much-needed TLC. There were new little shrubs dotted about the grounds, and the doors had all been painted a kind of dull green, the same shade that Patrick used to paint his Airfix models.
‘Olive Drab,’ he said out loud, putting the e-cig in his coat pocket.
The lobby no longer stank of piss either, which was a pleasant surprise. He pressed the door buzzer of Chelsea Fox’s ground-floor flat and waited. Nobody came, but he thought he heard a movement inside, so he buzzed again.
Eventually a bolt shot back and the door opened a tiny crack. Even though it was fairly obvious that Foxy’s name was a derivative of her surname, Patrick had still made a mental assumption that the girl would be sharp-faced and ginger-haired, so he couldn’t help but feel surprised when instead the face, from the small portion of it he could see, belonged to a very pretty black teenager.
‘Chelsea Fox?’ he asked doubtfully, holding out his ID badge.
The eye widened in the gap.
‘Is your mum or dad in? My name is Patrick Lennon, I’m a police officer. Nothing to worry about at all, but I just need to ask you a few questions. May I come in?’
‘I live with my nan.’
‘Well, is she in, then?’
‘I can’t let you in. She’d kill me if she knew you were here!’
Patrick moved slightly closer to the door. ‘Chelsea, please. I think you can help me. You haven’t done anything, so there’s nothing to worry about.’
The eye filled with tears and the door shut in his face. He felt a small thrill of excitement, the knowledge that this almost certainly wasn’t a wild goose chase. She knew something.
He buzzed again, and called through the door. ‘Chelsea. If you don’t let me in now, I’m going to have to stand out here till your nan gets back, and then she’ll definitely know I was here. Come on. I just need a few minutes of your time.’
The door opened again, slightly wider but on a chain.
‘You don’t look like a cop.’
He held his badge closer to the crack. ‘A few minutes,’ he repeated, and finally Chelsea let him in.
They stood in the narrow hallway and Patrick took in the girl standing next to him. She had a sweet face, huge brown eyes under a wide forehead, although her cheeks were spotty and she had the puppy fat of a twelve-year-old. Anyone less like a ‘Foxy’ he couldn’t imagine.
‘Is there somewhere we can sit down?’ he asked, and she led him through to a small living room, claustrophobically warm. Two plump black cats sat curled up, one at each end of a much-clawed sofa, like two cushions. Cat hair covered every surface, making Pat want to sneeze, but apart from that the room was immaculately tidy. There was a door off either side of the room – one open and one closed – and through the open one Patrick saw a familiar sight: the four chiselled youths from OnTarget staring at him from a poster on the wall. Could mean nothing at all, he thought. Most teens have at least one.
‘Just you and your nan, is it?’ He settled himself in a large flowery armchair next to the television, and Chelsea plonked herself reluctantly in between the two cats. She nodded miserably, her eyes flicking to a photograph on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. It was of a beaming couple in swimsuits holding hands on a beach. The woman was curvy and gorgeous, and Patrick found himself hoping that this was how Chelsea – ‘Foxy’ – would one day look, once she grew out of the acne and awkwardness. ‘Your mum and dad?’
‘They were killed two days after that photo was taken. Boating accident in Jamaica when they went home to visit my dad’s mum.’
‘I’m so sorry. How old were you?’
‘Four. Been living here ever since.’
Poor kid, thought Patrick. What people go through. He took out his Moleskine. ‘I understand you didn’t turn up for a job interview you were supposed to have yesterday at the bowling alley in Kingston? Would you mind telling me why not?’
Chelsea immediately looked away, her mouth twisting in shock. ‘Is that why you’re here?’ she said, stroking one of the cats so hard that it wriggled away and stalked off into her bedroom. ‘It’s only a poxy Saturday job! I was ill.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Patrick asked kindly. ‘Are you better now?’ He waited for the fake cough again, but Chelsea just stared at the carpet.
‘Chelsea?’
‘Women’s troubles,’ she said stubbornly.
‘Shame. That would’ve been a nice job for you, wouldn’t it? I hear that you hang out at the Rotunda a lot anyway?’
‘How do you know?’
They seemed to be playing a game of Question Tennis, he thought, batting them back and forth without many answers.
‘I’ve been asking around, trying to find out who was there on Saturday night when Wendy was killed. She was a colleague of mine. You heard about it, right?’
Tears welled in Chelsea’s eyes again.
‘You were there that night, weren’t you, Chelsea?’ he prompted gently. ‘Some of your friends said you were. They said you left with a boy.’
Chelsea sank her head into her hands. She seemed to have lost the ability to speak.
‘Was that your boyfriend?’
‘I’m not allowed boyfriends,’ she whispered, pulling her sleeve down over her hand and wiping her eyes with it.
‘Really? But you’re sixteen, aren’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Almost seventeen. In April.’
‘That doesn’t seem too young to have a boyfriend.’
‘My nan says I am. She says I’m not allowed until I finish A levels in case it interferes with my schoolwork . . . What’s the time?’
Her eyes were fearfully darting towards the door.
Patrick pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. ‘Ten past two.’
‘Oh my days.’ She jumped up and ran over to the window. ‘She’ll be back at quarter to three! You can’t be here!’
‘Chelsea, that’s over half an hour away. Please don’t worry.’ Bloody hell, Patrick thought. She’s petrified of her. ‘Come on, sit down. Why are you so scared of your nan coming back?’
She started to cry in earnest this time. ‘I want to help, I do, but I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if she finds out about the car park, then she’ll kick me out like she did before and I’ll have to go into one of them homeless shelters and it’ll be even worse than living here with her, otherwise I’d have gone myself ages ago—’
Patrick straightened up, every hair on his body standing to attention. ‘The car park? Chelsea, what do you know about the car park? Tell me!’
The girl was almost hysterical. Patrick got up and found a plastic beaker upturned on the draining board in the kitchen. He filled it with water and took it in to her, with a clean tissue from his pocket.
Crouching down next to her, he handed her the water and the tissue.