The Scent of Death

Twenty-eight

Plot reminder: There is hope that the second of the missing girls, Sophie Reeece, may still be alive. Ben made an anonymous call on a roadside phone informing authorities of the location of Tracey Mullins' body. He faked the same north-eastern accent he used a few days earlier when informing the police of a white van in the Jackson Road area of Harborough where the girls were taken.
Shortly after her return home, a detective has shown up at Jennifer's door to take her in for questioning...

*

And so for the second time in the space of two weeks I found myself inside a police interrogation room. As at Woodbridge, my surroundings were claustrophobic in their dimensions, quite terrifying in their airlessness. The only differences were that rather than a dismal shade of beige, the walls of the Wynmouth Central interrogation rooms were painted an equally dismal shade of grey.  The back of the guarding officer's head which was visible through the panel in the door wasn't balding this time, meanwhile, but the thick black mane of a much younger man. Upon his periodic peeps through the door, the line was just the same as two weeks earlier however. Inspector Wilkins would be there as soon as possible. In the meantime, did I want another coffee? A bottle of water? Something to eat from the snack machine?

Wait. Oh yes, just like at Woodbridge, Wilkins was going to make me wait. Literally make me sweat.

Noon came and went; so much for Ben's deadline for that week's 'Good Dog!' feature. Had they picked him up too, I kept wondering? It was difficult to know what they had on me. Had on us. In my state of shock and confusion at DS Osgood's arrival at my front door, I'd left my phones - both of them - in the backpack I'd taken with me to Ticklowe Forest. Perhaps this was good - Wilkins would have access to nothing incriminating without a search warrant first - but even so, I wished I'd been able to contact Ben, find out where he was. What if he was there in one of the other interrogation rooms a little further down the corridor? Just a few metres away but at the same time half a world from me. Isolated and uncontactable.

Despite the two neat coffees I'd had the guarding officer bring me, the precocious start to the day and its tense early-hours drama had drained me. By one o'clock it was getting harder to resist the temptation of resting my head onto the table, drifting off for a while...

Suddenly, the door burst open with enough force to send a gust of air into my face, slammed straight back closed again with a thunderous bang.

"Wakey, wakey!'

And there he finally was before my just-woken eyes, that familiar sardonic smile on his face.

"So Miss Hulse, we meet again."

Despite the bluster of his entrance, the difference between the man who now took his seat across the table from me and that of two weeks earlier was marked. It wasn't just the unshaven jaw and unironed shirt, those minor details which he'd always previously seemed so attentive about. It was there in his face, that inner self-confidence somehow reduced. The wrinkles seemed more creviced, the folds beneath his eyes greyer and bulkier. Gone too was the overwhelming aroma of aftershave, replaced by a faint whiff of stale cigarettes as if  the turmoil of the previous few days had compelled him to take up a long abandoned habit once more.

"Last Thursday afternoon at four zero six pm," he began, "my colleagues at Harborough police station received an anonymous call warning them of a possible suspicious presence in the Jackson Road area of the town. Wouldn't happen to know anything about ths would you, Miss Hulse?"

I shook my head as convincingly as I could. "No, I wouldn't." Then, feigning a certain indignation: "Is this what this about? Some anonymous call?"

My words provoked a smile. "Did you ever have any doubt as to what this is about?" The smile, along with hardness of his gaze, lingered for a moment. "The caller was male," he continued. "Had a north-eastern accent - Newcastle or somewhere round there."