serial By Geraldine ryan

have some paperwork to go through with my visitor.’

Sally Seddon leapt to her feet nimbly. She was very spry, Casey mused. Clearly, here was a woman who refused to allow age to get the better of her.

‘Of course, my dear,’ she said, extending her hand once more. ‘So lovely to meet you.’

‘I guess this was about Finlay having too much imagination,’ Rowan said as the two of them watched Sally Seddon’s retreat to the far corner of the room, where she pounced on some other poor unsuspecting staff member. ‘She wanted me to penalise him because she said he needed to learn to write for the exam before he reached Year 10.’

‘Seriously?’

‘But can a child have too much imagination?’ said Rowan. ‘We have to make sure our education system doesn’t make little robots of the next generation.’

‘So, did you mark him down?’ Casey wanted to know.

If she had, then Finlay hadn’t mentioned it. Rowan shook her head. On the contrary, she said, she’d given him full marks and a merit. She grinned mischievously. It made her look about 16. And it was then that Casey remembered where she’d met her before.

‘I think I know you,’ she said. ‘In fact I’m sure I’ve been inside your house.’

‘Oh?’ Rowan’s expression changed. She suddenly looked nervous and ill at ease.

‘It was years ago. I was still in uniform. You’d been ill. I think you were in bed.’

The years suddenly fell away. She was standing in the doorway. Rowan, shivering under her duvet, was almost hidden by her mother’s enveloping arms. What she could see of her face was a streak of tears and a mass of hair. Casey didn’t want to be there. But she was a woman. And women were good at this sort of thing, so the rest of the team insisted. Something to do with her ‘feminine touch’. They were all men, of course.

‘You must have been the police officer who came to interview me about Diana.’ Rowan’s voice trembled.

Diana Hunter had been 16 years old when her body had been washed up along a stretch of beach called Keeper’s Cove. The case had never left Casey. Not just because a young girl had died who would never live to realise her potential.

But because of the wrongful arrest that had speedily followed and the hurt that had caused the family.

There was another reason too, that made it impossible for anyone local to forget the day Diana Hunter’s body was washed ashore. Her death coincided with the death of someone whose celebrity status vastly overshadowed this much more local tragedy.

‘Diana was my best friend. We’d been classmates here at St Bede’s,’ Rowan said. ‘Though in the months leading up to her death we’d sort of fallen out.’

‘Of course, she was a pupil here,’ Casey said. ‘I should have remembered.’

‘The school doesn’t advertise it. As I’m sure you can imagine.’

The bell went for the end of break. Rowan drained her mug.

‘Heigh-ho,’ she said. ‘Back to the coalface.’

They both rose to her feet.

‘I’ll walk you to the exit,’ Rowan said.

Outside the staffroom the corridor teemed with children of all sizes heading towards their next class. Casey and Rowan dodged the throng and the mist of over-sweet perfume, Lynx and socks - and finally made it through the scrum to reception.

‘Well, thanks for today. I hope I haven’t upset you. Bringing Diana’s death back up after all this time.’

Rowan shook her head. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she said. Time had moved on.

Casey liked this young woman. She’d seen how she interacted with the children and how fond and respectful of her they all seemed. Besides, how could anyone dislike a teacher who maintained that too much imagination in a child was simply not possible?

She’d recognised the look that had passed between Rowan and Sally Seddon back in the staffroom, too. Once upon a time she’d been there herself, taking orders from those in a superior position for whom she’d held little respect. It was toxic and debilitating and she hated the idea of Rowan losing

‘You must have been the police officer who came to interview

me about Diana’

the enthusiasm for her subject, and the love for her pupils, that she clearly possessed.

It was tempting to say something – to offer some advice. Don’t stay where you’re not appreciated. Get out and find a school where the person who leads the team thinks the same way as you. Better still, go for the top job yourself.

But it was far better for Rowan to reach a decision about where she wanted her career to go herself. In exactly the same way Casey herself had done, all those years ago, when she’d grown tired of the limits her job as a PC had put upon her. S uperintendent Jess Morgan was a fair woman and Casey had a huge amount of respect for her – and she knew the feeling was mutual. Which was why Casey had been asked to take over as Strategic Lead on the Hate Crime Incident Committee when Jayne Mitchell had gone on maternity leave six months previously.

Now, however, it transpired that Jayne wasn’t coming back, having made the decision that she preferred motherhood to police work. So Casey’s temporary position had become permanent. As if she didn’t have enough to do, which was exactly what she’d told Jess in their meeting.

After the meeting, Casey had done what she always did when she needed either a shoulder to cry on or someone to vent her frustrations on. She sought out her best friend, Sergeant Gail Carter, and dragged her off to the canteen for a coffee.

‘That was where you made your big mistake, my friend,’ Gail said after she’d heard Casey’s tale of woe.

‘What do you mean?’

Gail gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Because if you hadn’t said you had too much to do, then she wouldn’t have been able to point out you’d just been out on a jolly all morning, talking to a bunch of kids at St Bede’s,’ she said. ‘Fair point,’ Casey conceded. ‘Don’t look so miserable. It’s not so bad. How many of those committee meetings are there in a year? Six at the most, surely?’

‘I guess. But you know me and committees. All that ‘point of order’ stuff. It’s just not for me.’

Gail gave her a sympathetic look and said, ‘Well, maybe she’ll change her mind. It has been known.’

Casey snorted. ‘No chance,’ she said. ‘She actually told me it’d take at least a murder to get me out of it.’

‘That sounds a bit heartless. Even for her,’ Gail said. ‘Anyway, enough of all that. You’ve still not told me everything about this morning.’

Casey quickly cheered up once she’d got into her stride. Gail chuckled when Casey related the Gemma incident and sympathised when she described Finlay’s initial disdain.

‘But the most interesting thing was that the teacher, Rowan Moody, knew Diana

Hunter,’ Casey said. ‘In fact, they were best friends.’

‘Diana who?’ Gail threw her a quizzical look.

‘Of course, you weren’t here then. It was back in 1997.

I was a police constable. The only woman bar two in the entire investigation team.’

‘What happened to her?’ ‘Diana Hunter went missing at the start of the school holidays,’ Casey explained.

She’d been roped in to do door-to-door enquiries alongside several other officers.

‘I lost count of how many doors I knocked on,’ Casey said. ‘And how many statements I took. But during those two weeks we were looking for her, we got nowhere. And then, on August 31st, a Sunday morning, Diana’s body was discovered. It looked like she’d drowned.’ Gail sat forward in her chair. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘August 31st 1997? You’re joking!’

Casey shook her head. ‘No, I’m not. Same day. Same name.’

‘It was weird how the town had reacted; it was almost like they’d got the two Dianas mixed up in their heads. Flowers began to appear at the cenotaph in the market square. Someone even started a condolence book.’

‘You said it only looked as if she’d drowned.’

‘Yes, until Forensics revealed she was already dead before she reached the water. Which rather suggested someone else had had a hand in it.’

‘Did they get anyone for it?’ Casey sighed. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very conveniently they arrested some 18-year-old kid with learning difficulties.’

‘But you don’t think he did it?’ ‘At the time I was sure he hadn’t. He was being bullied, in my opinion. I tried to argue his case with the rest of the team. But they’d already decided it was him. All lads together and me the only woman – you know what it was like back then.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Gail said. ‘Sounds like you’re saying they were responsible for the bullying.’

‘Some of it. Or at least they preferred to believe the mob rather than the evidence.’

Casey had been studying her hands. She looked up and met Gail’s eyes. ‘Anyway, they took me off the case. Sent me to guard the flowers at the cenotaph.’

And that’s when she’d decided to apply for the CID.

‘Is he still inside?’ Gail said. ‘Good heavens, no. The CPS threw the case out through lack of evidence. It’s still an open case. Though it’s been scaled down to zero since. And there it will remain till someone comes forward with some compelling evidence.’

‘Is that your phone ringing, Casey?’

Casey had been so wrapped up in her story that she hadn’t heard it. When she glanced

‘It was almost like they’d got the two

Dianas mixed up in their heads’

at the phone screen she recognised the number as being St Bede’s. Her stomach plummeted. An accident, she thought. Finlay. But thankfully it wasn’t. It was Rowan Moody.

‘Finlay gave me your number. I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. Her words were hesitant, her tone strained. ‘But I think I need to talk to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Casey.

There was a long pause before Rowan spoke again. ‘This morning,’ she said. ‘It was when you brought up Diana...’ There was another long pause. ‘Go on,’ Casey said, encouragingly.

‘I started thinking about her again,’ she went on. ‘That last time I spoke to her on the phone.’

Another pause. Casey wasn’t going to ruin things by filling it.

‘And I keep wondering. What she said to me just days before she went missing… Could it have had something to do with how she died?’