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I text her again: “Please leave me alone. I can’t see you or speak to you ever again.”
I requested to get on surveillance on Daniel Lorenzo. I wanted nothing to do with investigating Lyra. So there I was. Following Lorenzo. Sitting in a car waiting for him to do something or nothing. Knowing he knew exactly how our Operation was working so there was no chance that he would do anything crucial with us following him. The most dull job in the world. Mind numbing. Trying to shut off my mind from Lyra.
That evening with Simon. Trying to act normal. As if everything wasn’t falling apart. He seemed normal. He knew I had a sometimes difficult job that I couldn’t always talk about so often he just didn’t ask questions. I almost wished he would. Just confront me about everything. Make me tell him what was going on. Tell me how stupid I had been and tell me what to do now. Help me. But it wasn’t his place to help. It wasn’t anyone’s place. There was nobody I could confide in and I had never felt more alone.
My phone rang from an unknown number.
I picked it up.
“Jen, it’s me,” Lyra’s voice was unmistakeable but I could hear the stress cracking it. “Something really bad has happened. Please,” she cried. “I need your help.”
10
I had a million questions but I kept the conversation brief and only asked for the vital information. She sounded distraught and not like Lyra at all. What had she done? There was a moment I thought about doing the right thing. About calling the police. Or being the police. I am the bloody police. But I didn’t. I wanted to help her and protect her. Foolish as it might seem.
I told Simon I had to go in to work and he didn’t question it. I put on a tracksuit of Simon’s that was baggy on me and a baseball cap that I shoved my long hair up into and I drove to B and Q. I knew I could easily pass for a teenage boy at least on CCTV like this if not in person. I made it just before they closed at 8pm and I dashed to the gardening aisle picking up two spades. I grabbed 3 big bottles of bleach from the cleaning aisle which was all I could carry. The sharp bright metal of the spades glinted in the harsh shop lights.
I pulled up to the pub car park as Lyra had described desperately on the phone. The same place we had had our first date. It seemed so long ago. Winter was drawing in and darkness covered everything. I headed to the top end of the car park near the trees. There she was sitting on a bench, looking desolate. Her surveillance team were still busy watching her apartment, they had no idea she had ducked out of a secret door in the basement of the building to go and meet him. The body of the man she had just killed at her feet pathetically hidden by her coat thrown over him. Blood pooled around his body. I pulled back the coat and his face was unmistakably Daniel Lorenzo. The strong jaw. The dark hair beginning to grey. The big boss of organised crime with what looked like a knife wound to the heart by a professional assasin. He had a thousand enemies but his eyes looked surprised to have eventually been taken out by the one he trusted the most. The one who had been so loyal to him had finally ended him. The scared little girl after years of being under his control had fought back. Swiftly and efficiently. Where Lorenzo’s surveillance team were I had no idea, but it was obvious they weren’t there.
“What the fuck happened, Lyra?” I asked.
“I couldn’t live like that any more. Being with you, I knew I wanted more than the life he allowed me. Daniel and I had a meeting organised anyway. We usually meet here. I just needed to end things this time, that’s all,” she said contemplatively.
“You planned it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
There seemed to be no real remorse, but there was a distance in her eyes. There was a moment where I looked into her eyes which for once were dully glazed and I had decisions to make that would affect my own life irreversibly.
It was starting to rain and the blood began to dilute and wash away, the weather working to help us. I say us. I didn’t kill him, but I had made my choice. I was a partner in this crime now. Lyra needed my help. She needed someone to take control of the situation.
“Come on, we need to drag him into the trees,” I said.
With one of us under each of his arms and him in a sitting position, we dragged him backwards into the forest, following the route we had taken on our first date. The ground was wet leaves and mud underfoot; we had had a lot of rain. It helped his body skid along. We pulled him off track as far as we could. I wasn’t sure it was far enough so we went again. Exhausting work but we worked together. And there I was, DS Jen Towers, dragging a body through the woods with his murderess. I remembered every last thing I had learnt in the police and the one thing I knew damn well is that if there isn’t a body, there isn’t a crime. We needed to make sure that this body was never found. Lyra wanted to put him in the lake. But I’ve been to plenty of murders where bodies are found in lakes. I’ve also been to scenes where bodies in the woods aren’t buried deep enough. But the one thing I learnt from my father as a child when he buried our dog was that graves need to be six feet deep to be sure to avoid disturbance. I heard later that this wasn’t strictly true. That funeral homes and cemeteries buried people at a depth of between three and four feet. But they were in coffins and Daniel wasn’t. And now wasn’t the time to test out that theory. I decided on a five feet hole, to be safe.
I returned to the burial site we had chosen with the shovels and bleach from the car. We started to dig. The ground was wet and earthy and we chose a clearing area away from tree roots, which made it slightly easier than it could have been, but it took forever. Hours later, we were still digging. Stripped to T shirts, sweat and rain soaking our faces and arms, we continued to dig when we thought it was impossible. We took little rests and I could see Lyra close to breaking. She didn’t want to dig anymore. She didn’t want to be here anymore. I could s
ee that she had decided that killing him was her only way out if she didn’t want to live that life any more. But he had been her main constant for so many years. Their relationship, although abusive and controlling had been all that she knew. I saw her glance across at his body every now and again. Just to check it was real, that it really happened, that he was really gone. And he was. What I assumed to be a deep knife wound easily visible in the left side of his chest. She had meant it. She had really meant it. She was exhausted with the whole thing mentally and physically. I could see that this was how murderers end up digging shallow graves and then get caught. I refused to let that happen to us. I encouraged her to dig with me, and we dug some more, our persistence gradually paying off with progress.
It was 3am by the time I was finally happy with the hole we had dug. We were shattered but we couldn’t stop there. We stripped his body and poured bleach over all of him. I was no expert in forensics but I figured bleach would destroy everything it could. Then we rolled his body into the hole and it landed with a wet thud.
Filling the hole was more work and we ended up with loads of soil that wouldn’t fit. So we built a mound. Trying to make it look more like a little hill shape than a body shape. We compacted it best as we could and scraped up a load of wet leaves, little rocks and twigs to decorate it. By 6am it looked for all the world as if it had always been there. I hoped our night’s work would be enough to save us.
I looked across at her. Wet and muddy. Tired and bloody. Still beautiful. Unsure whether her whole relationship with me was just so that I would help her now. Help her escape her life. She’s a gifted actress but when she looked up at me I felt sure she was real. I wanted to trust in what we had. What I thought we had. With a deep breath, I realised just how much everything had changed and just how heavy the burden was that she had put upon my shoulders.
11
One Year Later
The investigation into the disappearance of Daniel Lorenzo ended up with our team despite it being our surveillance team that had managed to lose him from his own home. His colleagues were all interviewed. His enemies were all interviewed. Sarah Jones of course was interviewed. Her ties were directly with Daniel, and that is how she had remained undercover so successfully for so long, because the rest of his crew were unaware of her existence. Myself and Alice Jackson did Lyra’s interview. She was charming and glamorous and did a great confused act about where Lorenzo could possibly be. She was never really a suspect because the surveillance team on her confirmed that she hadn’t left her apartment all evening. Lyra had paid her neighbour who looked enough like her from a distance to wander around lit up in her windows a couple of times through the evening and then to turn the lights off and ‘go to bed’.
We didn’t find his body. We never got anywhere close. He had so many enemies with power and connections that literally the body could have been anywhere. There was no trace of him. His car had never left his house.
I visited the spot in the summer. Grass had grown over the mound and it looked as though it had always been there. I felt a sense of possibility and freedom looking at what his grave had become.
I didn’t think too much about how it happened. I knew she had planned it. That pub car park was their regular meeting and handover point. It was also her choice of first date location. I didn’t want to think too much about the pre-meditated murder aspect. That the woman I was in love with was a cold blooded killer.
But the Lyra I knew was not like that.
