The Blissfully Dead

by Louise Voss

  ‘And she left with a boy around the same time as you did? I don’t suppose you’ve got her number, do you?’

  To Pat’s disappointment they both shook their heads again. Anyway, he thought, it was probably nothing. There must have been loads of kids who were around that night and hadn’t seen anything.

  ‘Can I give you my number? Just in case you think of anyone else, or if Foxy shows up.’

  Emily looked puzzled, as if something had just occurred to her. ‘Yeah, that’s weird actually.’ She pointed at the poster advertising the part-time jobs. ‘I thought she had an interview here today for one of them jobs. I’m sure that’s what she told me.’

  Hope flared again in Patrick’s chest, stronger this time. He scribbled his number on the back of a sandwich receipt he found in his pocket and handed it to Emily. ‘Please? I’m counting on you. I’ve got to find the scum who did this to Wen— my kid sister.’ He made his eyes go round and watery, and was rewarded by the two girls’ own eyes filling up. ‘You’ve been really kind. Thanks so much for your time.’

  Right, he thought, as he strode away, thanking the security guard on his way out. Next stop: Tenpin Bowling’s HR department.

  Chapter 39

  Day 12 – Winkler

  Winkler was parked outside a coffee shop on Goswell Road, with a view of the cul-de-sac on which Mervyn Hammond’s office was based. He had sent Gareth to check that Hammond’s Jag was there and to confirm there was only one way out of the little street. Winkler wasn’t going to risk getting stuck in traffic again – he had woken up in a cold sweat last night, remembering the moment he’d stalled and everyone had started beeping at him – much smarter to wait here. Unless Hammond had a car that could transform into a helicopter, or access to a secret network of subterranean tunnels, he would have to drive past this spot.

  Gareth opened the door and squeezed through the gap, being careful not to spill the coffee. Winkler took his cup and sniffed it.

  ‘It’s organic, right? Did you ask?’

  ‘Yes. Specially imported from Guatemala. Grown by peasants. Fair trade, organic and decaffeinated.’

  ‘Good.’ This area was full of hipsters. Usually, the hairy bastards made Winkler wish they’d bring back National Service, but he could just about forgive them if it meant he could get a decent cup of something that wasn’t going to poison his perfect body.

  ‘I don’t see the point of decaf coffee,’ Gareth said. ‘It’s like—’

  ‘A woman without a vagina?’ Winkler suggested.

  Gareth spat out his caramel macchiato and Winkler laughed. Over the last few days he’d found something he enjoyed even more than winding Lennon up: making outrageous statements that made politically correct DS Batey shudder and squirm.

  ‘You know the old joke about why a woman has legs?’ Winkler began. ‘So she can get—’

  ‘There he is,’ Gareth said, clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to suffer the punchline.

  Hammond’s silver Jag glided out of the side street and Winkler could almost hear the engine purr as it crossed the road and joined the slow-moving traffic, heading towards the crossroad.

  ‘Right. Here we go.’

  Hammond headed past the Barbican towards the Museum of London. Winkler stayed two cars back, and could see that, again, Hammond wasn’t driving. It was his bodyguard, Kerry Mangan. Winkler had run a background check on Mangan already – he was thirty-eight; born and bred in Tottenham; joined the army in 1992 when he was sixteen, serving in Bosnia. He was discharged from the army after five years, though Winkler hadn’t been able to find out the reason for this discharge. After leaving the army he’d worked as a nightclub bouncer for a few years before getting a job as a bodyguard – or personal security, to give the role its proper title. Mangan had left the security company that employed him five years ago to work for Mervyn Hammond’s PR agency. Since then he’d been like Mervyn’s shadow, and could be seen beside the PR man in most photographs of Hammond in the press, standing beside or just behind him.

  Winkler wondered why Hammond felt the need to have a bodyguard. Had he received threats? Was he paranoid because of the number of people he upset with the stories he fed to the press? Or was there a more shadowy reason? Whatever, Winkler bet that Mangan knew all of Hammond’s dirty little secrets.

  The Jag reached the river and turned right, driving west through town. Once they got to Hammersmith, Winkler realised they were heading towards his and Gareth’s patch, past Chiswick and out on the A316.

  By the time they reached Richmond it was growing dark and rush hour was beginning, the roads becoming more choked with traffic, Hammond’s Jag just visible ahead, though a bus had pushed in between it and Winkler’s Audi.

  ‘Where the fuck are they going?’ Winkler asked.

  A few minutes later Mangan took a right at a roundabout signposted Isleworth, almost catching Winkler off guard. He turned left and saw the Jag just up ahead, following it through a series of left and right turns until, suddenly, the Jag pulled up and drove between two pillars onto the forecourt of a large white building.

  Winkler pulled up in a parking space on the street and turned the car lights off.

  It was a shabby-looking street, comprising mostly terraces, apart from this building. The streetlamp outside was broken, so he couldn’t make out the lettering on the sign attached to the white building’s front wall. He cracked the window a little, letting in freezing air, and waited till he heard Hammond’s car doors shut. This was followed by men’s voices, and the faint thud of a front door closing.

  He got out of his car and examined the sign: ‘St Mary’s Children’s Home.’

  He lifted his head slowly to look up at the building, most of the windows illuminated, a dark figure drawing a pair of curtains as Winkler watched. Ice and heat – horror and anger – competed for supremacy in his veins. Only last week Winkler had watched a documentary about the systematic abuse of hundreds of kids in children’s homes in North Wales. And many of the girls forced into prostitution, raped and abused by gangs of men in Rochdale and Rotherham, two other big news stories, had been in the care system.

  Winkler thought back to his own childhood. There had been a children’s home near his primary school – Winkler’s mum was always telling him she’d send him to live there if he didn’t behave – and several of the kids from the home had been in Winkler’s class. One of the boys, a kid called Michael, had gone berserk one day, shitting his pants and wiping it on the walls, sticking a turd underneath a girl’s desk. Michael always had brown stuff caked on his fingers and the other kids, including Winkler, would tease him mercilessly, though Michael was a fighter, could handle himself. Winkler’s mum told him he should stay away from the boy. Thinking back now, it seemed highly likely that Michael must have been a victim of abuse.

  He stalked back to the car and jumped into his seat.

  ‘It’s a children’s home,’ he said.

  Gareth’s eyes widened. ‘What’s Hammond doing here?’

  Winkler picked up the coffee they’d bought back on Goswell Road. It was almost completely cold, but he needed something to take the bad taste out of his mouth.

  ‘These places are like honeypots for paedophiles and child abusers,’ he said.

  Gareth’s eyes grew even wider. ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m sure most of them are run by well-meaning do-gooders. But you watch the news, don’t you? Every other story in the papers over the last few years has been about some child abuse scandal, from Jimmy Savile to Rochdale. They’re nearly always centred on some place where kids are easy to get at: hospitals, youth clubs, care homes. Places like this.’

  ‘But the two victims – Rose and Jess – lived at home with their families,’ Gareth said, wincing. ‘They didn’t have any connection to the kind of places you just listed.’

  ‘It doesn�
��t matter,’ Winkler insisted. ‘Hammond is the only link between the murders of Rose, Jess and Nancy Marr. He has access to teenage girls through his work. He’s never married, never had any kids of his own. He drives around with some shifty bloke who got kicked out of the army for some reason we don’t know about. And now we see him visiting a children’s home miles away from where he lives and works, after dark. I bet he treats this place like a drive-through McDonald’s.’

  Gareth looked like he was going to be sick.

  ‘So what do you want to do now? Go in, see if we can catch him with his . . . with his pants down?’

  Winkler thought about it. ‘No, if we could sneak in through a window, surprise him . . . But that’s not going to happen. I bet you he’ll have an excuse for coming here. “Market research” or something,’ he said, waggling his forefingers in quote marks. ‘Wait here.’

  He got out of the car and jogged into the forecourt of St Mary’s, then took a couple of snaps of Hammond’s car on his phone, making sure the building was clearly visible in the background.

  Before getting back in the Audi and driving away, he looked up at the closed curtains and felt the bile rise in his throat as he imagined what might be going on behind them. He made a silent vow.

  Hammond was going to spend the rest of his life shivering in a cell, fearing for his arse and his life. But first Winkler needed some evidence.

  Either that or a confession.

  Chapter 40

  Day 13 – Patrick

  Patrick was back in his car, sitting in the station car park yet again while he called Tenpin’s head office. He didn’t want anyone overhearing and asking why he was ringing them when he ought to be concentrating on Rose and Jessica. He was also taking the opportunity to charge up his e-cigarette in the car’s phone charger – it had run out after only two puffs that morning, and he was dying for a nicotine fix.

  After a twenty-minute wait while the director of HR tracked down all the CVs received for the current job advertised at the Kingston Rotunda, Patrick had the address of a girl with the incongruously glamorous name Chelsea Fox. He was sure she was the one he needed to talk to. Not only had she not showed up to her interview the previous day, with no reason given, but the scan of her application form said under Additional Comments:

  I know Tenpin in the Rotunda really really well its my faverite place to hang out with my mates so I would totally love to work there and you wouldn’t even need to show me around there ☺

  Tutting at the misspelling and inappropriate font, he jotted down the address at the top of her meagre CV – it was indeed the Kennedy Estate – and rang the mobile number. Somewhat to his surprise, Chelsea answered on the first ring.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Chelsea Fox?’

  ‘Yeah. Who is it?’

  Patrick cleared his throat. ‘Ah, hello, Miss Fox. My name is . . .’ He looked around the car park for inspiration, his eyes lighting on Winkler’s flash car. ‘. . . Adrian Wilson, assistant director of HR at Tenpin Leisure Group. I’m just ringing to ask if there was some kind of mix-up regarding your interview yesterday, since we didn’t hear from you – we were expecting you in our Kingston office at 2.30 p.m.’

  There was a brief silence, then a feeble, artificial-sounding cough. ‘Oh yeah, I’m ever so sorry, I was ill, I’ve got the flu, and my phone had run out of credit, so I couldn’t let you know, I was going to email, but I felt too ill, I’ve been off school and everything . . .’

  Patrick decided not to point out that it was half-term.

  ‘Please don’t worry, Miss Fox. Are you still too unwell to come in for an interview, if we reschedule for tomorrow?’

  More fake coughing. ‘Yeah, sorry.’

  ‘Well, not to worry. We’ll be in touch if another suitable vacancy arises. I take it you’re at home tucked up in bed and keeping warm?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said feebly.

  Patrick wished her well – the flaky little mare – terminated the call and switched on the car engine. He very much doubted he’d find her tucked up in bed smelling of Vicks VapoRub, but hopefully she was at least telling the truth when she said she was currently at home.

  Twenty minutes later, he was suppressing a brief shudder as the familiar towers of the Kennedy Estate rose above him. He hadn’t set foot on it for over a year, since he and Carmella had tracked down two other wayward teenagers who had run away and hidden here.

  His professional life seemed full of recalcitrant teens, he reflected as he got out of the car. He made a vow to do everything in his power to keep Bonnie on the straight and narrow once she hit puberty – although with her start in life, who could blame her if she did go off the rails? He was dreading the point, surely not too many years away, when she would find out that her mother had tried to kill her when she was a baby. He and Gill would have to tell her first, to prevent her from stumbling across it online or being told by a ghoulish classmate.

  Then he wondered if he and Gill would even still be together in a few years’ time to have that conversation. It took several deep drags on his now-charged e-cig to help shift the thought as he headed for Block B.

  The estate was actually looking a lot better than it had last year. It had clearly been given, if not a makeover, a bit of much-needed TLC. There were new little shrubs dotted about the grounds, and the doors had all been painted a kind of dull green, the same shade that Patrick used to paint his Airfix models.

  ‘Olive Drab,’ he said out loud, putting the e-cig in his coat pocket.

  The lobby no longer stank of piss either, which was a pleasant surprise. He pressed the door buzzer of Chelsea Fox’s ground-floor flat and waited. Nobody came, but he thought he heard a movement inside, so he buzzed again.

  Eventually a bolt shot back and the door opened a tiny crack. Even though it was fairly obvious that Foxy’s name was a derivative of her surname, Patrick had still made a mental assumption that the girl would be sharp-faced and ginger-haired, so he couldn’t help but feel surprised when instead the face, from the small portion of it he could see, belonged to a very pretty black teenager.

  ‘Chelsea Fox?’ he asked doubtfully, holding out his ID badge.

  The eye widened in the gap.

  ‘Is your mum or dad in? My name is Patrick Lennon, I’m a police officer. Nothing to worry about at all, but I just need to ask you a few questions. May I come in?’

  ‘I live with my nan.’

  ‘Well, is she in, then?’

  ‘I can’t let you in. She’d kill me if she knew you were here!’

  Patrick moved slightly closer to the door. ‘Chelsea, please. I think you can help me. You haven’t done anything, so there’s nothing to worry about.’

  The eye filled with tears and the door shut in his face. He felt a small thrill of excitement, the knowledge that this almost certainly wasn’t a wild goose chase. She knew something.

  He buzzed again, and called through the door. ‘Chelsea. If you don’t let me in now, I’m going to have to stand out here till your nan gets back, and then she’ll definitely know I was here. Come on. I just need a few minutes of your time.’

  The door opened again, slightly wider but on a chain.

  ‘You don’t look like a cop.’

  He held his badge closer to the crack. ‘A few minutes,’ he repeated, and finally Chelsea let him in.

  They stood in the narrow hallway and Patrick took in the girl standing next to him. She had a sweet face, huge brown eyes under a wide forehead, although her cheeks were spotty and she had the puppy fat of a twelve-year-old. Anyone less like a ‘Foxy’ he couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can sit down?’ he asked, and she led him through to a small living room, claustrophobically warm. Two plump black cats sat curled up, one at each end of a much-clawed sofa, like two cushions. Cat hair covered every surface, making Pat want to sneeze, but apart
from that the room was immaculately tidy. There was a door off either side of the room – one open and one closed – and through the open one Patrick saw a familiar sight: the four chiselled youths from OnTarget staring at him from a poster on the wall. Could mean nothing at all, he thought. Most teens have at least one.

  ‘Just you and your nan, is it?’ He settled himself in a large flowery armchair next to the television, and Chelsea plonked herself reluctantly in between the two cats. She nodded miserably, her eyes flicking to a photograph on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. It was of a beaming couple in swimsuits holding hands on a beach. The woman was curvy and gorgeous, and Patrick found himself hoping that this was how Chelsea – ‘Foxy’ – would one day look, once she grew out of the acne and awkwardness. ‘Your mum and dad?’

  ‘They were killed two days after that photo was taken. Boating accident in Jamaica when they went home to visit my dad’s mum.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. How old were you?’

  ‘Four. Been living here ever since.’

  Poor kid, thought Patrick. What people go through. He took out his Moleskine. ‘I understand you didn’t turn up for a job interview you were supposed to have yesterday at the bowling alley in Kingston? Would you mind telling me why not?’

  Chelsea immediately looked away, her mouth twisting in shock. ‘Is that why you’re here?’ she said, stroking one of the cats so hard that it wriggled away and stalked off into her bedroom. ‘It’s only a poxy Saturday job! I was ill.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Patrick asked kindly. ‘Are you better now?’ He waited for the fake cough again, but Chelsea just stared at the carpet.

  ‘Chelsea?’

  ‘Women’s troubles,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘Shame. That would’ve been a nice job for you, wouldn’t it? I hear that you hang out at the Rotunda a lot anyway?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  They seemed to be playing a game of Question Tennis, he thought, batting them back and forth without many answers.