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Shelly puts her hand on Paul’s back, rubs him between the shoulders. ‘It’s okay, it’ll be okay.’
‘It won’t be though, will it?’ counters Paul. He looks up at Jennie. ‘Where was she found?’
Jennie hesitates, her breath catching in her throat as she remembers Hannah’s eyeless skull looking up at her from the bottom of the muddy trench.
‘In the basement of the school building,’ says Martin, bluntly. ‘She’d been buried.’
Paul lets out a loud sob. ‘So someone killed her?’
‘That’s what the evidence suggests,’ says Jennie, recovering her composure. ‘We believe she was strangled, but we’ll know more after the post-mortem. In the meantime, I’ve opened an investigation into her death.’
‘That’s more than your lot did when she disappeared. They didn’t give a shit about her,’ says Paul, bitterness in his voice. ‘A couple of weeks poking around in my life and then they had the cheek to say she’d just run away. Bastards. If they’d have investigated properly maybe she’d be here now, maybe she’d be alive.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ says Jennie.
‘I just …’ Paul shakes his head. He flattens his palms and presses them hard into the top of his thighs. ‘Look, I want to help in any way that I can.’
Shelly puts her hand on his arm. ‘Paul, you know what the doctor said about not getting stressed.’ She looks at Jennie. ‘He has a bad heart.’
‘I’m fine, love,’ says Paul, putting his hand over Shelly’s and giving it a squeeze. ‘I need to help them find out who did this to my sweet angel.’
‘Thank you,’ says Jennie to them both. She’s trying to focus on the job but it’s so weird talking to this man who Hannah described as aggressive and violent. She realises she still feels cowed by him, but she can’t let old feelings distract her. She’s the one with the power now. ‘It would really help if we could go over a few details from the night Hannah disappeared.’
‘Of course, not a problem,’ replies Paul, keeping a tight hold on Shelly’s hand. ‘I was in construction back then, working nights building a new motorway slip road over on the M40. I’d left for work around five o’clock, as usual. Hannah was out when I’d woken up just after four, and still wasn’t back by the time I left, but that was pretty normal. She liked to study with her friends.’
‘Do you have the names of these friends?’ asks Martin, looking up from jotting notes onto his scratchpad.
Jennie stiffens, wondering if her name is about to come up.
Paul thinks for a moment. ‘Lottie and Elliott were the main ones, I think, but she mentioned a couple of others. Rob, I think, and Stephen – no, sorry, it was Simon. She’d had the same group of mates for years.’
Not me?
Relief and irritation mingle inside her. She’s glad Paul didn’t name her but it brings back the feelings she had when Hannah disappeared. No one spoke to her or asked her any questions – not Hannah’s dad, the teachers at school, or the police. It was as if she didn’t exist, had not been a part of Hannah’s life. It was heartbreaking at the time, but she can use it to her advantage now. There’s no record of her in the case file, nothing to show how close she was with Hannah. Nothing to prevent her leading this case. ‘Thank you. What else can you tell us about the night she disappeared?’
‘Well, you see, that night my machine broke down partway through the shift.’ Paul fidgets in his chair. ‘The engineer on-site couldn’t fix it right away as one of the belts or gizmos had snapped and needed replacing but there weren’t any spares to hand, so the supervisor sent me home.’
‘Do you remember the name of the supervisor?’ asks Jennie.
Paul runs his hand through his close-cropped greying hair. ‘No, sorry, it was a long time ago and it wasn’t the regular guy that night.’
‘Okay, go on,’ says Jennie, trying to get past how odd it feels to be talking with Hannah’s dad as if Hannah were someone she’d never met.
‘Anyway, so when I arrived back Hannah was home. I went into her room to say hello and that’s when I found her packing clothes into a rucksack. I was gobsmacked. I mean, why was she packing her stuff? She was meant to be studying hard for her exams and looking after me while I worked all hours, not buggering off to God-knows-where.’ Paul glances from Jennie to Martin, clearly looking for sympathy. He shakes his head. His tone switching from annoyed to full of regret. ‘I’m sorry to say I didn’t handle it well. I mean, I was tired and pissed off that I’d probably get my wages docked for the hours I couldn’t work even though it wasn’t my fault. So it didn’t take much to wind me up. I asked Hannah what the hell was going on and banned her from going out. But she didn’t listen. She just grabbed her bag and stormed out of the house.’
Jennie looks at the downcast man in front of her. She keeps her voice gentle as she probes further. ‘Were you worried about her storming out?’
‘Yes and no,’ says Paul. ‘You have to understand, Hannah was a very highly strung girl and she’d often explode at me and storm out, but she always came back a few hours later, or perhaps the next day after spending the night at a friend’s house, once she’d calmed down. But she always, always came home.’
‘But she didn’t come back that time?’ probes Martin.
Paul shakes his head, his voice cracking as he says, ‘That’s when I called your lot.’
Shelly squeezes his hand. Martin glances at Jennie.
‘Did you have any idea why she’d been packing the rucksack?’ asks Jennie.
‘No, not right then, but later I assumed it was to do with the modelling.’ Paul lets out a soft sigh. ‘I’d known she’d wanted to be a model but it just seemed so pie-in-the-sky for people like us. I told her to be realistic, even banned her from talking about models and modelling, but it didn’t do any good. I only found out she’d gone behind my back after I’d received a call from a modelling job in London asking why she hadn’t shown up. It totally floored me. She was already missing by then though, so …’
