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Nelson hates the word sacrifice. He makes a silent vow to include enough charges to keep Leo in prison for the rest of his life.
‘Leo put Emily’s body in one of the mine shafts,’ says Amber. ‘He said that he’d say he took me to the station early, while Mark was walking Odin and everyone else was sleeping. Then I would pretend to be Emily. It was quite easy. We had similar hair colour in those days. I sneaked into Mark’s van and used my curling tongs to make my hair more like hers.’
Bingo, thinks Nelson.
‘Then I put on Emily’s hoodie and waited in Leo’s car. Emily could be standoffish. No one thought it was odd that she didn’t say goodbye. Even Tom and he was meant to besoin love with her. I remember waving at him and he waved back, never noticed a thing.’
There is acid in her voice now.
‘Leo said that there should be a sighting of Emily in some other place, to put people off the scent. A red herring. So he took me to Ely. I walked around a bit, then I got the train– several trains– back to Durham.’
‘What happened to Emily’s body?’ asks Tanya.
Good work, thinks Nelson. With luck they’ll be able to charge Ballard with preventing the lawful burial of a body.
‘It stayed in the mine,’ says Amber.It, thinks Nelson. ‘Later on, Leo told me that he’d moved it to the café. They were building a wall and he thought it could be hidden there. He said that Emily could be in a place she loved. I expect Gaia gave him the keys to the café. She was always hanging around Leo.’
By his own admission, Leo was having an affair with Gaia at the time. Was he also having one with Amber? But when Tanya asks, Amber is surprisingly coy.
‘We never. . . you know. . . did it. But we were in love. Leo said I was special, but he didn’t want to spoil it by anything. . . carnal. We had to remain pure. So that was why, when I saw him kissing Emily– that was carnal, all right– it seemed such a betrayal.’
‘Carnal’, Nelson recalls, was one of Leo’s words. If you want to reduce it to the carnal level, he’d said, only that morning. Well, the carnal level was where many crimes happened. Leo wanted his students to remain ‘pure’, presumably so that he could seduce them one by one. Nelson thinks that Emily’s parents were right to blame her tutor for her death. One thing is for sure: it certainly wouldn’t have happened without him.
Nelson gets his own round of applause when he enters the incident room.
‘It was all Tanya,’ he says. ‘She and Bradley did all the legwork.’
Tanya, who hadn’t joined in with the ovation, looks mollified. ‘How did you guess about Amber?’ she asks. ‘Has some of Cathbad’s sixth sense rubbed off on you?’
Maybe it has, thinks Nelson. He remembers the feeling of being on a roller coaster, the sudden fall. If that’s what sixth sense feels like, it’s no wonder Cathbad has vertigo.
‘We kept thinking in doubles,’ he says. ‘Emily and Amber. Emily and Sophie. Freya and Gaia. Then I thought: maybe it was just one girl. One girl who left the camp alive that day. Cathbad must have seen something on the video that told him the girl in Ely wasn’t Emily. He said something about gait. Maybe he’d spotted something odd about her walk.’
‘Emily broke her ankle playing hockey,’ says Tanya. ‘Her mother told me. She stopped playing after it. That could have affected the way she walked.’
‘That could be it,’ says Clough. ‘I remember hearing a forensic podiatrist give evidence in court once. He said that a person’s gait is entirely individual to them.’
‘I thought about what Cathbad said the last time I saw him,’ says Nelson. ‘We were talking about Emily and he said, “I can see her now, walking towards me.” Cathbad must have remembered Emily’s particular way of walking. He went to Tony’s to see if it really was her on the CCTV footage.’
‘Cathbad always notices things like that,’ says Judy. ‘But if only he’d come to you rather than confronting Leo Ballard.’
‘I suppose Ballard had been his friend,’ says Nelson. ‘Cathbad probably wanted to give him the chance to explain. He might not even have suspected Ballard of Emily’s murder. He just knew that the girl in Ely wasn’t Emily.’
‘All those hints and clues,’ says Tanya. ‘“Look to the sister” and all that. It was as if Ballard wanted to be caught.’
‘Maybe he did,’ says Nelson. ‘Or maybe he was just showing off. He cared enough about his reputation to sue Emily’s parents. He must have felt secure to do that. Of course, he had an alibi for the day Emily supposedly disappeared, the Monday, because she’d actually been killed the night before.’
‘That explains why Emily’s DNA wasn’t in Ballard’s car,’ says Bradley, the motoring correspondent. ‘She was never in it.’
‘I’m sure we’ll find Amber’s there, though,’ says Nelson. ‘But we might not need it. We have a full confession. And we have Amber and Ballard in custody. Tom Westbourne too but we’ll have to let him go. We don’t have anything to charge him with.’
‘Do you think he knew?’ asks Clough. ‘What Amber did?’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Tanya. ‘Tom left Cambridge after Emily disappeared and only met up with Amber at law school. It was as if she’d reinvented herself. You should see their house. Everything perfect. Perfect couple. Perfect children.’
‘Not that perfect,’ says Nelson. ‘This was always there in the background. Nothing in the world is hidden for ever.’
Where didthatcome from?
