Die With Me (6 page)

Donovan returned after a moment and sat down, a glass with ice and lemon and a slimline tonic in her hand. ‘Thought I’d better go for something soft. Otherwise I’ll be under the table, given the little I’ve had to eat today.’ She poured the tonic into the glass and took a large gulp.

‘What’s bothering you?’

She smiled. ‘According to Kramer, Gemma had no private life. He said she wasn’t interested in boys. I got the impression he really believed what he was telling me, that he wasn’t spinning me a yarn.’

‘Your point is?’

‘I was just thinking back to what Mrs Brooke said. She’s absolutely positive about what she described. As I told you, she seemed pretty sharp for someone her age. I also checked her out with the vicar, as apparently she’s a regular at St Sebastian’s. He says she’s reliable.’

‘So, Gemma met the guy in secret. She wouldn’t be the first, particularly given how you describe Kramer.’

She nodded. ‘Maybe Gemma’s friend Rosie knows something. The man has to be somebody Gemma trusted. She kissed him, after all, and, from what I can tell about her, I don’t see her picking up just anybody in the street or in some internet chat room. This girl was a real romantic, I tell you.’

As she finished speaking, their food arrived. Tartaglia had just picked up his knife and fork when his phone rang. He answered it, listened for a moment, then snapped it shut.

‘Damn,’ he said, getting to his feet, staring down for a second at the untouched plate of lasagne, the smell unbearably good. ‘That was Dave. He’s found something on her computer. Says it’s really weird. We’d better go back to the office right away.’ He saw the look of desperation on Donovan’s face. ‘Look, you have yours. Then catch me up. Perhaps you can get them to put mine in a doggy bag.’

Twenty minutes later, Donovan rushed into the main open-plan office. At that hour, the long, low-ceilinged room, which housed the majority of the thirty-odd detectives who made up Clarke’s team, was uncharacteristically empty and quiet. Crammed with desks, phones and computers, it buzzed during the day with noise and activity and closely resembled a battery-hen shed. But with less pressing cases in hand, those not in Tartaglia’s immediate team had gone home for the night.

Tartaglia was perched on a desk at the front, next to the white board, chewing on a pen, reading some papers. He had taken off his jacket and tie, unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves as if he was settling in for the night. He looked troubled and Donovan wondered what exactly Wightman had discovered on Gemma’s laptop. Wightman stood beside him, methodically sorting a thick wedge of papers into several separate piles and stapling them together. Short, fresh-faced and thickset, Wightman was in his late twenties, although he looked barely eighteen and was the newest recruit to the team.

DCs Nick Minderedes and Karen Feeney came into the room immediately behind Donovan, having just got back from knocking on doors in Ealing.

‘Sit down, everybody,’ Tartaglia said, looking up. ‘We’ll be ready in a minute.’

Donovan deposited the bag containing Tartaglia’s takeaway on a filing cabinet behind him and pulled up a chair between Minderedes and Feeney. Feeney sneezed three times in succession, took a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose loudly. Her eyes were watering and she looked bedraggled, sitting there wrapped up in her limp mackintosh.

‘You OK?’ Donovan asked.

‘Just tired,’ Feeney said. ‘Nothing knackers you like tramping the streets for hours at this time of year. And one of my shoes has sprung a leak.’ Her voice was thick and nasal and it sounded to Donovan as though she was getting a cold. Feeney took a small mirror out of her bag and peered into it, dabbing her pale cheeks and wiping away the shadow of mascara from under her eyes. ‘Will you look at my hair,’ she said, turning her attention to her frizz of bright red curls. ‘Just takes a drop of rain to ruin a good blow-dry. Thank Christ I wasn’t planning on doing anything exciting later.’

‘That makes two of us,’ Donovan replied. ‘I had a hot date lined up with Jonathan Ross but I’m sure he’ll understand.’

‘Sorry you ladies lead such dull lives, but I really did have something on for tonight,’ Minderedes muttered gloomily. ‘And it’s the third bloody time I’ve had to cancel this chick because of work. She’s going to give up on me at this rate.’

Hunched in his overcoat, he took a stick of gum out of the pocket, peeled off the wrapper and put it into his mouth, chewing vigorously as if to compensate for what he was missing. Small and wiry, with thinning dark hair, his eyes were an unusual shade of green, almost yellow, and he had a permanently hungry, restless look, as if never satisfied with anything for long.

‘Anyone I know?’ Donovan asked, unravelling her scarf and unbuttoning her coat, feeling hot and a little sweaty from her brisk walk back to the office.

‘The new barmaid at the Bull’s Head. You know, the one with short dark hair. Polish, with big…’ He gestured, cupping his hands in front of his chest.

‘But she barely speaks English,’ Feeney said, raising her eyebrows.

He grinned, still chewing hard. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

Donovan shook her head wearily. Minderedes’s success with women was beyond her. He had the emotional maturity of a teenager, although he knew how to turn on the charm in a crude sort of way when it suited him. She prided herself on being one of the few single women in the office who had never succumbed. She wasn’t quite sure where Feeney stood in that respect.

As Wightman started to pass around a set of papers to each of the assembled group, DC Yvette Dickenson came into the room, carrying a mug of something hot.

Tartaglia looked round at Dickenson. ‘Anyone else coming?’

‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘They’re still out checking the names Mr Kramer gave us.’ She walked over to where Donovan, Feeney and Minderedes were sitting, pulled out a chair from a nearby desk and eased herself down onto it carefully. Yawning, she took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes and started to polish the thick lenses on the edge of her shirt. Nearly eight months pregnant, she seemed to be finding most things at work a strain, although she wasn’t due to go on maternity leave for another few weeks. Donovan wondered if she would last the course.

‘Right,’ Tartaglia said, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. ‘Let’s get started now. Dave’s found gold on Gemma Kramer’s computer. There’ll be a full briefing in the morning but I want your views straight away.’ He turned to Wightman.

Wightman cleared his throat. ‘The copies I’ve just given you are from Gemma Kramer’s email store. I’ve only had time for a quick look, as the laptop’s going off shortly to Newlands Park for full analysis. But I think I’ve picked up most, if not all, of the interesting stuff. As you’ll see, there are nearly fifty messages going back over the last three months between Gemma and a man called Tom.’

‘The last email in the sequence from Tom was sent the day before Gemma died,’ Tartaglia added. ‘Judging from what’s in it, he’s the man she was seen with at the church.’

As the group started to read through the sheets, the coughs, sniffs and rustling of paper turned to a hushed silence, leaving behind only the sound of underwater gurgling coming from Gemma’s laptop, which lay open on one of the desks with a screensaver of brightly coloured tropical fish swimming up and down a reef.

‘Turn the bloody sound off, will you?’ Tartaglia said, after several minutes, glancing up at Wightman. ‘Can’t hear myself think.’

Wightman reached over, fiddled with something on the keyboard and the screensaver disappeared, leaving behind a visual of one of the emails.

For a moment, Donovan gazed blankly at the screen, the words she had just been reading swilling like smoke in her mind. Hearing Gemma Kramer’s voice coming off the printed page, she felt sick. Gemma talked of her sense of isolation, how she was being bullied at school, how nobody seemed to understand her, how her mother and stepfather didn’t care about her. The language was childish, the tone pathetic and moving. By contrast, the responses from the man called Tom were chilling.

The wooing, the grooming, was subtle and progressive, with layer upon layer of delicate persuasion. Donovan looked back at one of the sheets in her hand, eyes focusing on some lines from one of Tom’s emails to Gemma that sounded as if they came from some rubbish pop song. Even if it was cringe-makingly awful, it was exactly the sort of thing calculated to appeal to a naïve young girl. Tom seemed to use anything to touch Gemma and worm his way deeper into her psyche. He orchestrated everything carefully, always in control. Like a piece of music, the emotional intensity of his emails rose and fell, sometimes powerful and dramatic, sometimes quiet, restrained and almost courtly, the concept of love and death and suicide running through them all as a leitmotif. They were two star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, with the cruel world set against them. He understood Gemma’s psychology perfectly and played her like a master.

Many teenagers had a fascination with death. But what had started out as an abstract idea on Gemma’s part, the wish to kill herself little more than a child’s cry from the heart, had been inexorably turned into a reality by Tom. It was evil in its purest form.

Although just the wrong side of thirty, Donovan could still recall the sense of alienation and despair of being a teenager, although in her case it had been nowhere as strongly felt as Gemma’s. She remembered a girl called Annette who had lived next door to her in Twickenham, where she had grown up. One day, without warning, Annette had gone into her bedroom, closed the door and hanged herself. The shockwaves reverberated around the immediate community but nobody seemed to have any explanation for why Annette had done it. One minute she appeared to be a perfectly normal, happy fourteen-year-old, with everything to look forward to; the next, she was gone. And Donovan, then aged twelve, couldn’t make sense of it either. But for months afterwards, the image of Annette haunted her, with her long, fair hair and heavy fringe, hanging dead in her room like some bizarre rag-doll.

Skimming through the last few pages of Gemma’s emails, Donovan came to the final one in the sequence, sent by Tom the day before Gemma died.

Darling Gemma

Everything is ready and love is impatient. I thought of phoning you at home, even knowing how risky it is and how I could blow everything. I wanted to reassure you, to tell you how much I want you. Just don’t worry. It will all be fine, you’ll see. Trust me. I’ll be waiting for you by the door of the church at four o’clock. Don’t be late and don’t forget to bring the ring – I have a beautiful one to give you in return. It was my mother’s. We will exchange them when we say our vows. Also, don’t forget the note for your mother – you have the wording I sent you. Just copy it out in your best handwriting but don’t leave it anywhere too obvious. We don’t want her finding it before we’re done.

Trust me, there is no other way, not if you want me. When we meet, I’m sure I can make your fears melt away. Until then, remember one thing. This isn’t a world worth living in. There can be no future for us here. Think what would happen to you (and me) if they found out. They would never allow us to be together. Just focus on that and I will take care of the rest. As Shakespeare wrote: ‘If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride’ and you will be the most beautiful bride. I hardly deserve you.

Die with me, my darling, and we will never be parted.

Your loving bridegroom,
Tomxx

As she read it, she shivered, imagining the high, dark gallery of the church, Gemma and the man called Tom, going through some sort of mock wedding ceremony, incense and candles burning. Poor Gemma. She hadn’t stood a chance.

Donovan didn’t know much about computers, but for Tom to have been so explicit in writing about his intentions, he must believe that he could never be traced. She had friends in the police who had worked on breaking paedophile rings and she knew that it was easily possible for someone to disappear into thin air if they knew what they were doing.

Feeney and Dickenson were still reading but Minderedes turned to Donovan, having finished.

‘I thought I’d seen everything,’ he whispered, shaking his head. ‘It makes me sick to read this shit. It’s unbelievable.’

She nodded in reply, just as Tartaglia got to his feet.

‘Hendon are checking out the email addresses that Tom used,’ he said. ‘Although I’m sure none of them will be traceable. I’m also bloody sure that the fucker’s name isn’t Tom.’

He walked over to the window, smacking the side of a filing cabinet hard with the palm of his hand as he passed, and stared out for a moment. Then he turned round, frowning, stuffing his hands in his pockets. In the overhead strip-light, his eyes were in deep shadow but he looked as though he wanted to hit someone, lay them out cold.

‘We’ve got to find out how he came across Gemma,’ he said quietly.

‘What about chat rooms?’ Feeney asked, looking up from her papers.

‘And suicide websites,’ Dickenson added, with a half-stifled yawn. ‘I saw a programme on telly recently about strangers meeting up on the internet to commit suicide together. Apart from the odd phone call, the people had never spoken or met before.’

‘I saw that programme too,’ Minderedes said.

The whole thing was sick, Donovan thought, remembering the programme, which had been on only a few weeks before. But there was fuck-all the police could do about it. The Suicide Act, which dated back over forty years, hadn’t envisaged the opportunities of the internet. For the moment, most of what the sites were doing and the information they were providing to assist would-be suicides was not illegal. Calls to strengthen the law and ban suicide sites had so far fallen on deaf ears, which she found extraordinary. Total strangers meeting to jump off a bridge holding hands, or dying together in a car filled with carbon monoxide was bad enough. But at least there was no compulsion or coercion involved. They were adults and could make up their own minds, although to Donovan, the idea of wanting company when you were going to kill yourself seemed bizarre. But children and teenagers, with over-fertile imaginations, were so vulnerable and easily influenced. They needed protecting from such concepts and material, let alone being exposed to somebody who might use it to do them harm.

‘I haven’t found any trace of her visiting any chat rooms, let alone suicide websites,’ Wightman said. ‘All the places she logged onto were educational or the usual kids’ games and stuff.’

Donovan flipped through the sheets to the beginning. ‘However Gemma and Tom met, I don’t think they were strangers at the time the emails started.’

‘How do you work that one out?’ Dickenson said, pushing her heavy-rimmed glasses up her nose and peering at Donovan bleary-eyed. ‘They could have just been chatting on the net. No matter what Dave says, I still fancy that theory until we hear back from Newlands Park.’

Donovan held up the copy of the first email in the sequence. ‘Here, take a look at Tom’s first email. He asks her how she is, if she’s feeling any better. He asks her if what he said, referring to sometime before, made sense. The tone is intimate, as if he’s talking to a lover or a close friend. He certainly doesn’t sound like a complete stranger to me.’

‘That’s right,’ Feeney said, scanning the sheets and nodding slowly. ‘She also says in one of the emails right at the beginning that she found his voice reassuring.’

‘And she asks him if she can call him again,’ Donovan replied. ‘According to her stepfather, Gemma didn’t have a mobile, so maybe she spoke to Tom from home.’

‘We’re checking the phone records now,’ Tartaglia said quietly, as if he was only half-listening. He turned away towards the window and stared out, his thoughts clearly somewhere else.