‘He threw you out, did he?’ Baz asked, with a nasty laugh. ‘Well, that’s hardly a surprise. Who in his right mind would want to shag you?’
‘We split up, like I said,’ Molly replied, ignoring the interruption. ‘And before you ask, I left him.’
‘But where are you going to live?’ her mother asked, with an anxious glance at Baz who was shovelling greasy fried eggs into his mouth.
A cold feeling crept down Molly’s back. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This is where I live.’
‘But – you – you can’t stay here,’ her mother stammered.
‘What do you mean? This is my home.’
‘No, you can’t stay here,’ her mother repeated.
‘We need your room,’ Baz explained, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘So you can bugger off back to that boyfriend of yours and beg him to take you back because you can’t stay here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I said. We need the room.’
‘What for? It’s my room! Mum?’
‘I’m sorry,’ her mother bleated, with a quick glance at her boyfriend. She sounded anything but apologetic. ‘Baz pays the bills, and he wants the room.’
Baz smiled.
‘So you keep saying, but –’
‘It’s for my boy. He’s coming home.’
‘You mean they’ve let him out? That’s a shame. They should have thrown away the key when they locked him up.’
‘Well, we won’t have to listen to your stupid bitch of a daughter any more,’ Baz snapped at her mother. He turned back to Molly. ‘There’s no room for you here, not now my boy’s coming home.’ He smiled again, too pleased to remain angry for long.
Reluctant to give Baz the satisfaction of feeling he had won the row, Molly struggled to conceal her dismay. Wretchedly she wondered whether her mother had put up any sort of a fight to keep her. Knowing how feeble her mother was, Molly suspected she had caved in as soon as Baz had made his demands.
‘Fine,’ Molly said, moving towards the door. ‘That’s just fine with me.’ She turned her back on Baz and spoke only to her mother. ‘I wouldn’t want to live with a pair of losers like you and him anyway. I hope you’re very happy living with a vicious sadist and an ex-con, mum. Just think, your precious boyfriend’s going to have an accomplice now. They can both beat you up.’
‘Baz pays the bills,’ her mother repeated lamely.
Baz stood up and his burly figure towered over her.
Fear lent Molly the courage to stand her ground. ‘Don’t you dare raise your hand against me!’ In spite of her attempt to remain calm, she was vexed to hear herself squealing in alarm. ‘You can terrorise my mother, but you don’t scare me.’
‘Get your things and go,’ Baz replied, sitting down abruptly, as though she was not worth the effort of an argument. ‘Just fuck off out of my house.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m going. I wouldn’t stay here if it was the last place on earth.’ Reaching the door, she added under her breath, ‘And it’s not your house.’ It might as well have been.
Racing upstairs to her room, she threw some things into her rucksack: a T-shirt, underwear, and some toiletries. She gazed helplessly around, wondering what else to take, but she did not want to hang around and let them see how upset she was. Despite strenuous efforts to control her emotions, she had to wipe tears from her eyes more than once. Grabbing her jacket, she ran downstairs and fled from the house without stopping to say goodbye. What was the point? They were throwing her out. No one else cared what was happening to her, so why should she? In any case, she did not want them to see she was upset. They did not care about her. She had to show them the feeling was mutual. In a way, it was.
She had never done anything wrong, yet her own mother had chosen a violent criminal over her. She did not need evil people like her mother and Baz in her life. She was better off without them. They could do what they liked. Nothing they did meant anything to her. She did not even want to live there any more. Out in the street, she realised that she had no idea where to go. Her few friends had all dropped her when she had taken up with her boyfriend, and she had no idea where her father was living so could not turn to him, even if she had wanted to. There was no one in the world who cared about her now that her mother had rejected her.
It began to rain as she hurried along the street, letting her tears flow unchecked. She did not bother to wipe her eyes. The rain fell more heavily so she took shelter at the bus stop while she considered her next move. She could not stay in the village and let the local people witness her humiliation. Some of them knew her, even if none of them were her friends. Standing at the bus stop she decided to catch a bus, any bus, and go somewhere else. The first bus that turned up was going to York. It was as good a place as any. Alone in the world, and homeless, it made no difference to her where she went, and besides, there would be jobs in the city, and accommodation. She could start again there. Fate had decided her destination for her. Her mother would never know what had happened to her only child. Molly smiled. She hoped the old bitch would be sorry.
Sitting back in her seat, she watched green fields speeding past the window. She was on her way to a new life.
16
Lying on dusty floorboards, trussed up in a stinking pool of his own piss, Mark had no idea where he was, or why he had been brought there. His head was thumping, and his memories were muddled and disjointed. He wondered whether he had been drugged, or had fallen sick. Perhaps he had suffered a mental breakdown. Whatever the reason for his plight, something was very wrong. He had a confused recollection of a man locked in a cell for many years counting off the days with scratch marks on a wall. It could have been a character in a book. He could not remember the circumstances in which the makeshift calendar was devised. At times he thought he was that character, marking off the days with black marks, only his hands were tied together so that could not be him. He wondered why he had been targeted for this torment.
His eyes flickered around the room, trying to make sense of the pitted floorboards and rough-textured white walls. After a while he realised the streaks of grime on the walls must have some significance. If he could only work out what those marks meant, he might break out of his prison. With flashes of lucidity, he knew the marks were just random dirt on the walls. It was pointless trying to make sense of his incarceration. Then the conviction returned and he began studying the marks closely, searching for a meaning. But as he stared at them, the marks moved around and he realised they were only there to lead him further from the truth. As his confusion cleared, he remembered that all of this had something to do with a woman he had been seeing. He could not remember who she was, or what she had looked like. In any case, however beautiful she was, no woman was worth this acute physical suffering.
He allowed his mind to wander in an effort to stop thinking about his situation, but every time he began to drift off, physical pain recalled him to his plight. His shoulders were not designed to remain immobile for long and had both frozen, sending daggers of pain along his neck and back as soon as he stirred. Even when he kept perfectly still they ached horribly. His head continued to pound like a ticking bomb. He imagined his skull exploding, splinters of bone and brain matter spraying around the dimly lit room. His back felt as though it had been brutally pummelled, and his left side was sore from lying on the bare floorboards. Trying to control the distress caused by his physical pain took up most of his conscious attention, but he decided that was preferable to thinking about his imprisonment.
There seemed little doubt that the man who had brought him here had no intention of releasing him alive. Apart from anything else, his captor had made no attempt to conceal his face from Mark. He was crying with pain and self-pity when the door opened and footsteps approached. He heard low breathing as his gag was removed, and then a voice shattered the silence that seemed to have lasted throughout al
l eternity.
‘He’s still alive then.’
‘Help me,’ Mark rasped, his throat as dry as desert grass. ‘Water. Please.’
Laughter rang around his head, but it was not his own. Someone else was laughing. The sound spun around in his mind like a whirlpool. From a long time ago, he remembered what it was to laugh. He tried to join in but all he could manage was a low bleating sound. His lips felt swollen from the pressure of the gag and his tongue was so raw he could scarcely move it.
For all his terror of his captor, he was grateful not to be alone.
‘Stay with me,’ he croaked. ‘Water.’
‘He wants us to stay here. He wants us to give him water,’ the man echoed the words in his curious singsong voice. ‘But he knows we can’t do that.’
‘Water,’ he pleaded, desperate to cling on to the shred of life slipping from his grasp. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t want to die. Well, that’s all right, because he’s not going to die. Not yet. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? We’re not going to let him off so lightly. He has to suffer a while longer before we let him go.’
‘Why?’ Mark asked. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The other man’s face creased into a grin but his eyes were implacable. ‘He knows why we’re doing this. He knows all about it. He knows he’s been brought here to suffer the most terrible pain imaginable, just like he made us suffer.’ His features twisted with loathing. ‘He’s not going to die yet. That would be letting him off too lightly.’
‘No, no, you can’t do this,’ Mark begged.
‘That’s enough,’ the man said as he replaced the filthy gag.
And Mark knew this must be the end. Shuddering, he closed his eyes. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’
All around him was silence. The words existed only in his mind. No one would ever hear his voice again. Somewhere beyond his reach he was dimly aware of movement. The man had grasped him under his arms and was dragging him across the floor, towards the door and freedom.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked, in his mind. ‘Are you taking me home?’
With a tremor he realised that he did not know where his home was. Did he even have a home? A brilliant light shone on his face but he did not blink. His eyes remained closed.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked again, in a silent cry. ‘Where are you taking me?’
Something was fiddling at his neck. He thought his gag was being removed but he could still feel it between his teeth. And then he began to choke.
‘Help me!’ He tried to cry out but he could not utter a sound.
Terror swept through his chest, clutching at his lungs until he could not breathe. Blood spurted behind his closed eyelids and a roar reverberated in his ears. Then the pumping blood grew still and the roaring in his ears fell silent as the light drifted away from him and hovered on the edge of his consciousness, forever out of reach.
17
‘Well done,’ Eileen said to the team who had gathered for a final debriefing meeting. ‘With Tommy’s confession, we’ve as good as wrapped this one up. We just need to press him for some more details, and we’re finished. So let’s get this done and dusted as soon as we can.’ She grinned. ‘After our last case, it’s reassuring to know we can still track down a killer this quickly. Brilliant work, everyone.’
With the case resolved to the satisfaction of the detective chief inspector and her superiors, there was nothing left to do apart from finalise the paperwork. For once that was straightforward because Tommy was co-operating fully. There was not even any real need to take statements from all the people sleeping and working at the Fishergate Centre and York New Start Centre, because Tommy’s confession was so lucid. He had explained his motive for killing Bingo, which was about as logical as might be expected from any murderer, because of course although his motive made sense, it was nonetheless insane. Put simply, his annoyance with Bingo had grown into a rage that had led to the fatal attack on his victim.
‘I still don’t understand why you killed him,’ Geraldine said, reiterating the point she and Ian had made several times during the course of their interviews with Tommy. ‘He’d already left the centre. Why did you go after him like that? You must have known you were risking your own liberty. You’ll go down on a murder charge.’
Tommy shrugged, seemingly careless of his predicament.
‘I told you, he was doing my head in,’ he replied.
‘But he’d left the centre,’ Ian repeated.
‘He would have been back as soon as the weather turned,’ Tommy told them. ‘I knew he’d be back. Once I decided to kill him, I couldn’t wait for him to come back to the centre, could I? Not if I was going to be in with a chance of getting away with it. Surely you can understand that?’
Geraldine thought there was something odd about his eagerness to persuade them of his guilt, but her colleagues seemed happy to accept his confession. She wondered if there was something wrong with her, she was so out of step with the rest of the team. Not only was Tommy adamant that he was responsible for Bingo’s death, but he had been able to describe the nature of the attack quite accurately. Admittedly, all the information he gave them was readily available in the public domain. In an ideal world, the means by which Bingo had been killed would have been kept under wraps. In reality, it was almost impossible to keep anything from the media. With the advent of the internet, information spread faster than wildfire in the outback. The media had not yet learned that a red tie had probably been used to strangle the victim. That was the only detail Tommy had been unable to supply, along with the whereabouts of the noose.
‘I chucked it,’ he said simply.
‘Chucked it?’
He nodded. ‘In one of the bins in town.’
The street bins had all been emptied since the night of Bingo’s murder. Even if they searched every bin in the town, they would have very little chance of finding the tie Tommy claimed to have used to kill Bingo. It would have been shredded along with tons more litter. The bins were not going to be subjected to scrupulous forensic examination, looking for any minute traces of the tie too small to be seen by the naked eye, because Tommy had confessed. Even without forensic evidence to back up his statement he would be convicted. In any case, he claimed not to remember the exact location where he had disposed of the noose, so finding any such evidence would be almost impossible.
Geraldine reread the interview notes for the twentieth time, searching for any clue that Tommy was lying.
‘I crept up on him while he was asleep,’ Tommy had told them. ‘I put the noose round his neck and twisted the ends together until he stopped moving. It didn’t take very long.’
‘Where did you get the noose from?’
Tommy barely hesitated. ‘It was already round his neck. He was wearing it.’
‘Can you describe it?’
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t look at it closely. It was some scrap of material, something like that.’
‘And where it is now?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. I threw it away.’
It was hopeless. She might as well give up and accept that they had found Bingo’s killer, unlikely as it seemed.
Geraldine’s latest visit to her sister in Kent had been postponed, due to the investigation. Now there was nothing to prevent her from seeing her family so she called Celia and arranged to go and see her the following day. Saturday dawned bright and crisp and Geraldine set out early intending to spend a whole day with her sister, but her journey was slow and she did not arrive until late morning.
‘Sorry,’ she said, when Celia opened the door, ‘the traffic was horrendous.’
‘Come on in, you’re here now, and we’ve got time for a cup of tea and a natter before lunch. Oh, there he goes,’ she added as they went into the kitchen where the ba
by had just begun to wail. ‘He was fast asleep a moment ago.’
‘I hope the doorbell didn’t disturb him.’
Celia laughed. ‘No, don’t worry. Once he’s asleep nothing wakes him up until he wants a feed. Here, do you want to hold him while I get his mush ready?’
‘Mush?’ Geraldine queried, watching her sister contentedly bustling around. ‘That sounds appetising.’
Celia laughed. ‘It’s what Chloe calls it. Milk and mush is what we feed the baby. Here,’ she added, thrusting a pot and a little plastic spoon at Geraldine, ‘you can feed him if you like.’
Geraldine laughed nervously. ‘I’m not used to feeding babies.’
‘I thought it would be part of your training?’
Geraldine did not reply that she was used to dealing with those whose lives had recently ended, not with those whose lives were just beginning. The baby was protesting loudly now, his tiny face puckered and resembling a gigantic pink raisin. Celia worked quickly and within minutes Geraldine was carefully spooning food into the gaping little mouth. The baby stopped crying immediately and sucked eagerly at the plastic spoon loaded with a dollop of beige purée.
‘What on earth is he eating?’ Geraldine asked. ‘Is it porridge?’
‘It’s chicken and potato,’ Celia replied and they both laughed.
As soon as Geraldine stopped feeding him, the baby began to yell.
‘It’s all right, little man,’ Geraldine reassured him. ‘There’s plenty more. He’s like a baby bird, isn’t he?’
‘If you say so.’
Absorbed in inserting food into the gap between her nephew’s tiny gums, Geraldine forgot about everything else and for a few moments her life ceased to exist. All that mattered was feeding the little boy in her arms.
‘He’s so tiny, isn’t he?’ she murmured.
‘He’s doubled his birth weight,’ Celia replied, a trifle sharply.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean he’s not growing exactly as he should. He looks really healthy and he’s certainly got a good appetite. But he’s still so small, isn’t he? Look at his tiny little fingers! He’s beautiful, Celia.’
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