Johnson’s speaking, but his words are barely audible.
“You’re going to have to speak up,” she says, raising her voice. “I can’t really hear you.”
There’s the high-pitched whine of a motorbike in the background. “Sorry, I’m in a car park at the beach. I was just asking if everything is okay.” Hesitation in his voice. A random catch-up call isn’t exactly the norm.
“All good.” They exchange a few pleasantries before she takes a breath. “Look, this is a strange one, hence the call out of the blue. I wanted to pick your brains about the Creacher case. I’m out on the island now, another case, and I think I’ve got a possible link to the Creacher murders.” Elin shuffles closer to the barrier, making sure she’s out of earshot of the staff clearing one of the tables a few feet away.
A pause. “Give me a second to peel this wetsuit down, get in the car.” Huffing and puffing. She hears a door slam. “Right, I’m transferring you to speaker. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” Elin cuts straight to the chase. “Creacher, I know it was a long time ago, but I remember us talking, you mentioning there had been doubts, initially, about whether he was good for it.”
He pauses. “I’ll be honest, I did. Still do, for that matter. To me, at the beginning in particular, the evidence was flimsy at best.”
“Flimsy how?”
“There was DNA evidence on one of the victims’ T-shirts, a match with Creacher. But in my opinion, it was circumstantial, could have been transferred another way. It didn’t definitively put him at the scene. One of the experts for the defense also raised an interesting point about the lack of DNA on the victims, said that even if they hadn’t put up any defense, he’d have expected more than a single spot on a shirt.”
“What else did you have?”
“Eyewitness account: the boatman said he’d seen Creacher hanging around, watching the kids. There were photographs too.”
“Photographs?” She thinks about the photographs they found in the cave.
“Yes. There were teenagers in the images we found, but there was landscape, too, wildlife. He said he was simply a keen photographer.” Johnson gives a heavy sigh. “Creacher was odd, that’s for sure, someone you’d run a mile from if you bumped into him in a dark alley, but I felt there were assumptions made just because he was a bit of a loner.”
“An easy mark?”
“Something like that. Yes, Creacher struggled with eye contact, normal social stuff, and was a bit slow, but that didn’t make him a killer. You get a feeling sometimes, whether someone’s right for it, and I didn’t get it with him. A loner, yes, but a murderer? I didn’t see it. I kept suggesting we widen the net, particularly given the connection to the girl.”
“Girl?”
“Yes. I made an interesting connection almost as soon as we picked up the case. Another girl, who went missing a few months before the Creacher murders.”
Another girl. Elin thinks about the fifth photograph on the wall. Could that be her?
“Her name was Lois Wade. All very strange. Her class went to the island for one of the Outward Bound courses, but she was one of the few who didn’t. The week the kids were away, Lois was reported missing. The same night, a boy on the Outward Bound course reported he’d seen her on the island.”
“But you said she didn’t go.”
“That’s exactly the point. A group of them had snuck up to the rock on the island after the teachers had gone to sleep. They were drinking heavily, passed out. When the boy woke up, he was the only one still up there. Apparently he looked down, saw a body on the grass beneath the rock. Convinced it was Lois Wade, but by the time he climbed down, she’d gone. No sign. Not even a mark on the grass.”
“Weird.”
“Yes and no. The boy who saw her was the only one who did. Most people assumed it was the booze talking, possibly hallucinogens. Yet he was adamant, also admitted that they’d invited her to sneak onto the island that night, but he was alone in saying that; all the other kids gave the same story. Lois wasn’t there, was never meant to be.”
Elin absorbs his words, glancing out at the water. A breeze has picked up, the turquoise of the sea striped with vivid, unfamiliar color, bruising blue-blacks, tinny grays. “But surely it must have been easy to check whether she did go out to the island. She’d had to have taken a boat.”
“No CCTV back then, so there was no real way of knowing if she had. Friends and acquaintances denied arranging anything on her behalf. We spoke to a few of the companies operating out of the harbor to see if they’d brought her across, but no. A few days later, the parents admitted Lois was prone to running away. Then we had a sighting of her getting into a car on the mainland, and all resources went to that line of inquiry.”