Page 48 of The Family Remains

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t happen to know where this big house was?’

‘No. Sorry. All she said was that she had made a new friend who lived in a huge house and the friend had offered them a room as a temporary measure.’

‘And what year was this?’

‘The same year she and my mother stopped talking, when I was fourteen. So it would have been 1988; the year she and her band were at their most famous.’

‘And the band, they split up in 1990?’

‘Yes. Around about then.’

I sigh and stretch my shoulders apart slightly. ‘So, the skeleton that our forensics team have assembled, it is roughly twenty-five years old. Which puts us at about 1995 on the timeline. And your other sister, Jenny, passed away in—?’

‘Nineteen ninety-six.’

I change position in my chair to relieve the ache in my back. ‘So. Philip. We found fibres attached to these bones. Shreds of a label from a bath towel. A very expensive brand. Which makes me think, if she wasn’t wealthy enough herself to afford a two-hundred-pound bath towel, that she must have been with someone who was. It makes me wonder about this big house and the new friend. Is there nothing else you can recall about this arrangement?’

‘No. None of us can remember anything about it. We were all asked about it at the time of the original investigation. But nobodyknew any more than that. We don’t even know if she and Justin ever actually took up the friend’s offer of a room.’ He shrugs, then he looks up at me, very suddenly, and I see that his eyes are wet with tears. ‘How did she die? My sister? It is my sister, isn’t it?’

I stare at Philip and nod. ‘We believe it is. Yes.’

I feel appalled with myself for allowing my need to find out why she died to distract me from my responsibility to break this news to her brother. I clear my throat and sit a little straighter.

‘There appears to have been a blow to the head,’ I say. ‘She then appears to have been left to decompose inside a cocoon made of fabric and towels, outdoors. The bones were taken out of the towels and transferred into a black bag, which was tied in a knot and dropped, we assume, into the Thames, at some point in the past few months to a year.’

‘You mean, the murderer came back for her?’

‘Yes, it looks that way.’

Philip’s head drops. When he raises it again, there are tears on his cheeks.

‘Why would someone want to kill her?’

‘It might have been an accident.’

Philip shakes his head. ‘No. It doesn’t sound like it, does it? Leaving her in a shroud. Then coming back for her twenty-five years later. Disposing of her. It doesn’t sound like an accident.’

‘No,’ I agree. ‘No. It doesn’t.’

I watch realisation dawn across his face.

‘Someone killed my sister,’ he says. ‘And they’re still out there. To this very day.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid it would appear that way.’

Philip looks at me. His eyes are wide. ‘You are going to findout who did it, aren’t you? You are going to catch them? And make them pay?’

I want to say yes, but I cannot, for I know that there is only so far a case like this can stretch, that the passage of time obfuscates and complicates, that history swallows evidence in its wake. But I know that I will do my very best and that my very best is all I have to give and so I say, ‘Philip, I give you my word, I will do everything I can.’