Mary, Mary

EXTRACT 1

You could say it began with a phone call. After all, that’s the way most cases begin. And you’d wonder then, looking back, whether therewas anything about it that warned you, that reached out and grabbed you, that said, Hold on a minute, this is serious.

But at the time it was just another anxious mother. Worried, embarrassed. Not sure she should be phoning. Not sure if she was doing the right thing. Hear fear turning to anger.

„If she‘d said she wasn’t coming home, if she’d rung, if she’d let me know.“

He’d heard it all before. Regularly. He doodled on the margin of the newspaper. Ice-cream cones with pointed creamy peaks and pints of stout in old-fashioned glasses with the little bulge three-quarters of the way up the side. He wrote the time in the phone log. Twenty-one forty-eight. Twelve minutes to the end of his shift. Sunday, 6 August 1995. The middle of the bank holiday weekend. Still hot at this late hour. Too hot. Damp patches under his arms and an itch in his crotch. The hospitals would be filled with cases of sunstroke, and God knows how many fights there’d be in the couple of hours.

EXTRACT 2

„Why did you go to New Zealand?“ he asked.

„I thought you wanted to talk about Mary.“

„Well, the two are related, are they not?”

Oh dear, he thought.

„Look, Dr Mitchell, I know this is very difficult and painful for you .“

„Do you? How do you know ? Has this ever happened to you?”

He moved his chair slightly, the wooden legs grating on the stone flags.

„Dr Mitchell, I am a policeman. For the past twenty-five years I have been investigating the practice of violent crime. You are not, I’m sorry to say, the first mother whose only daughter has died in a horrible and brutal way.

And I’m equally sorry to say that you will not be the last. I am, I’m afraid, only trying to do my job. As efficiently and successfully as I can.“

He paused and leaned towards her. „Do I make myself clear?“

She nodded. „Clear as day, Inspector.“

„Good. Now. As I was saying. Why did you go to New Zealand?“

She stood up and walked away from the table. She sat down on the small wall that bounded the terrace.

„I had been planning to go there with my husband but he was killed in a car crash, a couple of months before we were due to leave. Anyway, after a bit of thought I decided that I might as well go by myself. I had a job waiting.“

„And when was that?“

„Twenty years or so ago.“

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