Serial Part 2: The Other Diana by Geraldine Ryan

Rowan had suffered – but her so-called friend Diana made it all too obvious she couldn’t care less…

July 1997

Rowan didn’t want to talk to her right now. Frankly, if she never spoke to Diana Hunter again it would be too soon. She was supposed to be her best friend. But what sort of best friend couldn’t be bothered to pay you a visit all those weeks you were in hospital, or pick up the phone to find out how you were once you were home?

She’d not even sent a get well card. Unless you counted the class one. Diana had squeezed her signature sideways into the only available space, somewhere between Aileen Wright and Chesney Brookes, with three scrawled kisses attached. It was obvious to Rowan it had been a last-minute thing that someone had reminded her about.

‘Rowan! Are you coming down? Diana’s waiting on the phone.’

There’d be no peace till she went downstairs and took that call. Rowan eased herself up from the bed and swivelled her feet round till they met the floor. No dizziness. So far, so good. She felt a bit stiff, though. And cold, even though the sun was blazing outside. She was tempted to wrap herself up in the big woolly jumper hanging on the peg behind the door.

But Mum would see and draw her own conclusions and she’d start nagging her with questions about how she was feeling. So she gritted her teeth and decided to go without, crossing her bare arms against her chest to ward off the chill that probably nobody else could feel as she headed downstairs.

Once there, Rowan took the receiver from her mum. She waited till she was sure her mother was out of sight and fully out of earshot before she spoke. It was important to sound languid, like she wasn’t bothered about getting this call one way or the other.

‘Di. Well, this is nice,’ she said. Then, unable to keep the spite out of her voice, she added, ‘I’m surprised you could spare the time.’

‘Don’t start,’ Diana snapped. ‘I’m talking to you now, all right?’

The trouble with Diana was that when it came to spite, she could always go one better. Rowan sometimes wondered if that was the reason she’d made

When it came to spite, Diana

could always go one better

friends with her all those years ago on their first morning at primary school. It was safer to be Diana’s friend than her enemy.

‘So, what have you been up to, then, while I’ve been lying on my sickbed?'

Diana wasn’t even going to bother asking how Rowan was, she was certain of that. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, then a dramatic sigh. She guessed Diana was scratching around for an excuse.

‘I’d have come to see you, you know,’ she said at last. ‘But the hospital said only two people round the bed at any one time. I couldn’t get past your mum and dad. They were always there.’

She had a point. Although...

‘But I’ve been home a fortnight now,’ Rowan reminded her.

‘Yeah, and I’ve been at school. Remember that place?’

Rowan had missed most of the last term because of this stupid illness of hers. Which meant she’d missed her GCSEs and was going to have to stay on an extra year while Diana swanned off to sixth-form college. It wasn’t fair!

‘I was here at the weekends,’ she said.

‘And I’ve got a Saturday job, remember?’ countered Diana.

Diana worked in a souvenir shop on the pier. It sold pricy tat to tourists – painted shells and tea towels with Brockhaven stamped on them.

‘I thought you’d have given that up so you’d have more time to swot for the exams.’

Diana sniggered. ‘You must be joking. I could pass them with my eyes closed.’

Rowan felt a surge of jealousy. Diana was naturally

bright. She, on the other hand, had worked her socks off to get good enough grades in her mock exams to secure her a place at sixth form college. She’d made herself ill, not eating properly with worry and staying up late to do revision. And all for what? So she could end up with glandular fever and be forced to take months off school.

‘Anyway, the way things are turning out, I don’t think I’m even going to bother with sixth form. Who needs more education?’

Rowan restrained herself from yelling down the phone. She couldn’t let Diana get even a whiff of how much her flippant remark had infuriated her. It was her secret, how envious she was of a girl whose journey through school had always been so effortless, and it made her feel like a bad person that she felt this way.

Besides, knowing Diana, if Rowan yelled at her she’d simply put down the phone. And Rowan needed her. As much as she sometimes hated Diana she was, after all, her oldest and closest friend.

‘What will you do, then?’ she said instead.

There was a pause. Then, ‘I can’t say over the phone. It’s a secret.’ Diana’s voice was mysterious. ‘I can come round tomorrow though. So I could let you in on it.’

‘We’re off on holiday tomorrow,’ Rowan said. ‘I won’t be back for a fortnight.’

Mum was calling her from the kitchen. Lunch was ready. Rowan called out that she’d be there in a minute. Then she resumed her conversation with Diana.

‘I can’t go on holiday for two weeks without knowing about this secret of yours.’

‘Well, you’re going to have to.’ Diana was teasing her.

‘I can’t go away for two weeks without knowing this secret of yours’

Rowan was desperate to know but held back from begging. She still had some pride. It was a bold move. But it worked.

‘I’ll just say this, and the rest will keep till after you get back.’ Diana had relented.

‘Thing is,’ she said, ‘I saw something.’

‘Saw what?’

‘Something somebody didn’t want me to see. That’s all I can say. I’ve said too much already.’

And with that she rang off. She didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time Rowan was ever to speak to Diana. And she would never set eyes on her again. ‘I saw something. Something somebody didn’t want me to see.’ Casey sat at her desk, trying to collect her scrambled thoughts. What on earth could those words have meant? Did they even have any significance? Rowan Moody certainly seemed to think so or she wouldn’t have decided to get in touch with her again.

Casey had written down what Rowan described as Diana’s last words. She’d been staring at them for the last 10 minutes, coldly and analytically. She wondered if Rowan had misremembered them. It was more than 20 years ago, after all. And besides, by her own admission, she hadn’t been well.

‘I can’t help wondering, Rowan,’ she’d asked her, ‘why it’s taken you so long to report this. I mean, why didn’t you say something when you were interviewed? After you got back from your holiday?’

‘I don’t think I was all there back then,’ had been her reply. She sounded apologetic.

‘Life was moving forward for everybody else, but for me it was standing still and I resented it too much to care about anything or anybody else outside myself. I was horrible to my parents too,’ she added.

On top of that, the holiday her parents had hoped would speed her recovery had had the opposite effect. The whole thing had been a disaster because of one thing and another and it had ended up setting her back months. When she’d got back home and was hit with the news that Diana had been murdered, her reaction hadn’t been normal. She’d resented Diana for dying.

‘I’m ashamed to say it now, all these years later,’ she said, ‘But I felt Diana had died on purpose. So she could make sure I’d never get better and would never have another friend. I think I just put her out of my mind.’

Casey admired Rowan’s honesty. Not many people would own up to such twisted thoughts. But the girl had been sick and lonely and, by the sound of it, mired in a deep, undiagnosed depression too.

‘Honestly, I hadn’t given her final words to me a second thought until you turned up in my classroom and told me you thought you recognised me.’

Continued overleaf

The first thing Casey did when she’d put the phone down was to make a request for the files relating to Diana’s case. It was an impulsive gesture but what did she have to lose? She still wasn’t fully convinced there was anything in it – but she reminded herself that the case remained unsolved.

Once Ian Dawlish, the original suspect, had been let out of custody, the net had been widened. But although several other people were interviewed and some reinterviewed, none of this led anywhere. It didn’t help that Diana had gone missing on the weekend of the Brockhaven Festival, when the town had more visitors over a weekend than it did for the rest of the year put together.

Before the end of the day an email popped into her inbox informing her that there were a dozen files on record regarding Diana’s case and that she shouldn’t discount the possibility of there being more at the coroner’s office.

If Casey was going to pursue this case, then she was going to have to ask for assistance. There was far too much for one person to investigate singlehanded, but the prospect of knocking on the Super’s door and asking if she could put a team together was a daunting one. Would the Commissioner even give permission for the case to be reinvestigated, given such flimsy evidence?

Perhaps the best thing would be simply to drop the whole idea. But how could she, now that Diana’s words to Rowan had been so firmly planted in her head? Casey glanced at her watch. It was time to go home. But before she did, she pinged a reply back to the Records Department: Yes, please, she’d have the files. All 12 of them. And for good measure she also sent an email enquiry to the coroner.

While she waited for them to arrive she was going to have to retrieve her own files from her memory store. Who knew what she might be able to drag up?

31 August 1997

There was a charged atmosphere in the room you could almost smell. Everyone was talking at once. On their phones, at each other, gesturing wildly, shaking their heads. Mary Goodwin, who was in charge of the tea, looked like she’d been crying.

Only Olly Spark seemed oblivious to the brouhaha. He sat squarely at his desk, his eyes fixed on his computer monitor, doing what he did best, which was shovelling this morning’s snack of choice into his mouth. Salted peanuts, she noticed. Olly would be retiring in two months. Basically, the world could be coming to an end and he wouldn’t move a muscle. In his head, he’d retired already.

‘What’s going on?’ Casey said. ‘Is this because of Diana?’

She’d caught the news as she’d been driving into work. It was the only news, beamed out on every channel. It was shocking, she had to admit, what had happened to Princess Diana. But it bothered her the way the media had pushed every other piece of news aside to concentrate solely on this tragedy. It was almost as if they were enjoying the drama.

Olly briefly peeled his eyes off his computer screen. ‘Washed up on Keeper’s Cove,’ he said. ‘Sarge is looking for you. He wants you down there as soon as. Somebody needs to keep the public away.’

It took a few moments for Olly’s words to compute. When they did, she felt like she’d been socked in the jaw.

‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘I thought...’ Olly was looking at his screen again.

‘They’ve arrested that lad, the simple one,’ he said, scarcely noticing he was being offensive. ‘He’s with his mum, waiting for his brief.’

‘Who? Ian Dawlish? But that’s ridiculous!’

Olly shrugged like it was none of his business and threw another handful of peanuts into his mouth. At this rate, his retirement would be a shortlived affair. From across the room she saw Barry Hardy almost touching heads with

Jeff Taylor. Oh, they’d be

It bothered her the way the media pushed every other bit of news aside

loving this, those two.

Rage propelled her in their direction. She was going to have to say something or she’d burst. She’d been assigned to work with D.I. Hardy and D.C. Taylor on the case of the missing girl, Diana Hunter, taking statements from Diana’s neighbours. Ian Dawlish lived with his mother, a few doors down from the Hunters. He was a couple of years older than Diana and they’d known each other all their lives.

According to Diana’s mother, Ian Dawlish had a bit of a thing for Diana. He would leave her little presents on the doorstep: an unusual pebble he’d found on the beach; a bunch of flowers – usually from someone else’s garden, that sort of thing. Only a couple of weeks before she’d gone missing he’d left her a coconut he’d won at the fair. He was harmless, so Diana’s mother said. But he could be a bit annoying and on occasions Diana had been sharp with him.

She’d reported all that back, as was her job, and thought that that would be the end of it. Particularly given what she’d passed on to CID about her own dealings with Ian. A couple of times she’d rescued him from the park, where he’d tried to get in with a gang of boys and girls by getting drunk with them and passing out. Of course, they’d all scarpered once whichever of them had been blessed with a conscience had made an anonymous phone call to the police to report where Ian could be found.

On one occasion she’d come across him down on the beach, trying to resuscitate a seagull who was in a bad way from a ring-pull someone had carelessly discarded. He’d been in tears, deeply distressed at the sight of the poor bird struggling.

She’d taken him home and handed him over to his mother, a little terrier of a woman, as she recalled, who clearly loved her son dearly. Well, she hoped the woman would give them hell once Hardy and Taylor were inside the interview room with her. A boy like that, who cried at the sight of a bird in pain, could never do harm to a human being.

‘You’re not seriously thinking of charging Ian,’ she said.

The two men locked eyes. She’d seen that look pass between them so many times. Whenever she’d dared question them, in fact. It was a firm friendship and she was the interloper.

‘This is one for CID, Casey,’ Taylor, the more junior and definitely the most irritating of the two, said. ‘Shouldn’t you been down at Keeper’s Cove?’ ‘Where’s the body?’

She addressed her question to his superior officer.

‘At the morgue,’ D.I. Hardy replied.

‘And they’re sure it’s murder and not just drowning?’

‘First results revealed a lot of damage to the side of her head,’ Hardy said. ‘And Forensics have taken water samples to look for diatoms.’

If he was trying to baffle her with science, then he’d failed. Diatoms were algae in the

Continued overleaf

water the drowned person had been found in. They could only enter the body's circulation through the lungs if the heart was still beating. If Forensics failed to find any in Diana Hunter’s body, it would suggest she’d been killed by another method before being thrown into the water. Perhaps by that blow to the head.

Taylor had been silent for too long. ‘Satisfied?’ he smirked.

‘No. She may have fallen into the water and died of a cardiac arrest,’ Casey said. ‘Shouldn’t you wait longer for Forensics to draw a proper conclusion? What other forensic evidence do you have that this had anything to do with that boy? Even Diana’s mother said he was harmless.’

‘First of all, that boy is an 18-year-old man,’ Hardy replied, drawing himself up to his full height of 6ft 4in. ‘Secondly, things have changed. His mum no longer holds that opinion.’ ‘I didn’t know that,’ Casey said. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know, Officer,’ Taylor said. ‘Which is why we’re in charge of what happens next and you’re not.’

Casey felt a strong desire to punch him. But she knew when she was being deliberately provoked. These two weren’t going to win this one. What was that saying? Get mad or get even. Well, as soon as her shift finished she’d get that application in for a transfer to CID. It had been sitting on her dressing table at home for far too long.

2018

How hard could detective work be? Rowan was in the staff room. Everyone else had left. There was just her and her laptop. She might not have access to police computer sites like they did in all those TV dramas. But she knew people. Everyone Diana had known in her short life, Rowan had known too, to a greater or lesser extent. She was bound to be in a better position than Detective Inspector Clunes to try and work out what it was Diana had on them.

That boy they’d arrested. She still felt sad when she thought of poor Ian Dawlish. The village idiot, Diana used to call him. She was cruel to him, but Rowan hadn’t been much better. She’d been there with the rest of the gang when Diana had led the way poking fun at him, looking on and deeply ashamed that she was doing nothing to stop her.

But, however much Diana goaded him, he still refused to fight back. Simply put, he didn’t get it. It didn’t matter what Diana said or what she did to him. He was just happy that she acknowledged him. If there had been as much as a glint of murder in his eye, then Rowan was certain she’d have spotted it.

There was someone else, though, back then. Not in the gang but always in the background to Diana’s life. Her stepbrother. Older than her by only a few months. Quiet, shy, handsome in his own way. Diana

Everyone Diana had known in her short life, Rowan had known too

had been most put out when he and his father had moved in after her mother had remarried.

What had happened to Carl Crane, she wondered? Was he still living hereabouts? How could she find him, if she wanted to? The answer was obvious. She flipped open her laptop, logged into Facebook and typed in his name. His image came up right away. The last time he’d posted anything had been in 2016.

Why was that, she wondered, as she skimmed down the rest of the page to see what his friends had written. And there it was. Her answer. She was going to have to give this information to Casey Clunes. Throughout their phone call earlier Rowan had had a strong suspicion that Casey was listening to her purely out of politeness. But this had to mean something, surely! And maybe when she read it she might decide to take Rowan’s words more seriously... CONTINUES NEXT WEEK