Her Last Breath: The new crime thriller from the international bestseller (Sullivan and Mullins)

by Alison Belsham

‘Wait a bit,’ said Alex, wiping his nose with a tissue. ‘I just need some time.’

  ‘What was the fight about?’ said Liv, after a few moments’ silence.

  ‘Nothing. It was stupid. She thought I was cracking on to this girl. But I wasn’t. It was just the usual shit. I tried to tell Tash but she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Did you go after her?’

  ‘I went outside and smoked a spliff. Then I was looking for her . . .’ He fell silent.

  ‘You smoke too much, Alex. It’s poisonous shit.’

  Alex glared at her.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wandered about. I can’t remember.’

  ‘You didn’t see her?’

  Alex shrugged. He remembered smoking the joint. He remembered getting home later, trying to close the front door quietly so his mum wouldn’t hear him. Then the phone woke him up and it was morning.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  Other memories crowded in.

  ‘Defib!’

  The continuous, piercing tone of the monitor went on and on.

  Tash was dead.

  You need to get your story straight.

  12

  Monday, 14 August 2017

  Marni

  Hell! She was going to be late getting to the studio for her appointment. It didn’t matter that most of her clients turned up late, Marni still felt that she should be there on time. If she kept them hanging around, chances were that she’d lose the business to someone else. There were enough tattoo parlours in Brighton, after all. It was a crowded market that had suffered after the Tattoo Thief case, and now at last it was getting back on its feet.

  She gunned her ancient deux chevaux as the traffic started moving along Church Road, her thoughts going back to the events of the weekend. Why the hell would anyone want to attack Tash Brady in such a bizarre manner? She wondered if Alex was still at the hospital or whether he’d gone over to Liv’s for the night – and made a mental note to give him another call as soon as she wasn’t driving.

  Something – somebody – caught her eye on the pavement.

  Wait! What the fuck? Was that Thierry?

  It was lunchtime on a Monday and she’d just seen Thierry standing on the pavement outside the Blind Busker. Who was he talking to? She glanced up to her rear-view mirror. Yes, that was definitely him – she knew the shape of the back of his head as well as she knew her own face. What was he doing there? She thought he’d had an all-day appointment to finish off a back piece.

  It didn’t make sense. And who the hell was that girl he was with?

  Parking the car behind the shop, she made her way round to the front with a definite feeling of unease creeping through her. It brought back all the feelings of mistrust in her husband she’d fought to banish over the previous few months.

  Her client was waiting for her at the door and Marni silently thanked her stars that she’d finished off the final details of the design for her the previous evening. She quickly covered the massage bench with a fresh layer of cling film and prepared her tattoo machine with a polythene sleeve to protect it from blood spatter. Before starting to tattoo, she cleaned her client’s skin with disinfectant and then applied a black stencil of the tattoo design they’d agreed on.

  The girl, who’d come in for a wreath of peonies on her thigh, prattled endlessly about her mother, her boyfriend and her dog as Marni first outlined the flowers and then gradually started to build up the colour of the petals.

  ‘Really?’ said Marni, feigning interest in the chihuahua’s health problems. She was finding it hard to keep her mind on the job. Instead, she was fighting with her imagination over the reasons why Thierry might have been talking to another woman on the other side of town when he was meant to be tattooing.

  ‘Yeah, she’s really suffering, poor little thing.’

  Marni dipped the tip of her needle into the dark red ink and started shading another burst of writhing petals.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be better soon,’ said Marni, keeping her tone even.

  ‘Yeah.’

  What the hell had he been doing down there?

  Even the buzzing of her tattoo iron failed to soothe her.

  ‘Shit!’ said Marni, pulling the tattoo machine back from her client’s skin.

  No tattoo artist is perfect. Every tattoo artist has made a mistake at one time or another. Marni Mullins was no exception. But a mistake while tattooing was permanent.

  ‘What?’ said the girl. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Just . . .’

  The girl craned her neck to see the part of her leg Marni was working on.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she squealed.

  The mistake was obvious. A dark red line that overshot its limit onto the pale petal of a nearby flower.

  ‘I’ll sort it, don’t worry,’ said Marni, wondering exactly how she was going to fix it.

  ‘Too bloody right you will. I’m not paying hundreds of pounds for a tattoo that’s messed up.’

  Marni disguised her mistake as a dark twig, then let the girl go with a hefty discount on the session. Her mind had been wandering and she should have stopped earlier. Where the hell was Alex? And why wasn’t he answering his phone? And now it looked like Thierry was up to his old tricks. She’d had enough.

  Coffee did nothing but jangle her nerves even further.

  Who the hell would he have been talking to outside the Blind Busker? It wasn’t one of his regular pubs. In fact, it was well off the beaten track for Thierry – and not even home territory for Charlie or Noa, the two other tattooists that worked with him at Tatouage Gris. But on the other hand, why was she even asking herself the question? How many times had he been unfaithful to her while they were married? Plenty that she knew of, probably a whole lot more she didn’t.

  Screw him!

  Without thinking, she found herself heading towards Preston Street where Thierry had his studio. It only took her ten minutes to walk from her own place in Gardner Street, but by the time she’d reached the black-painted shopfront of Tatouage Gris, she was glistening with sweat and righteous indignation.

  She slammed the door on her way in, making Charlie and Noa look up sharply from the drawings they were working on.

  ‘Damn!’ said Thierry.

  He was tattooing a man’s back.

  I hope he’s made a bloody mistake!

  It was a thought she immediately regretted for the sake of his client – but that didn’t mean she was going to let him off the hook.

  She advanced towards him as he put down his tattoo iron.

  ‘Let’s take a break, Kenny,’ he hissed to his bewildered customer.

  ‘Thierry, a moment of your time,’ said Marni through gritted teeth.

  ‘Now? Look – I’m working.’

  Kenny glanced from one to the other, then scurried for the door, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.

  ‘And was that work this morning when I saw you chatting up a girl outside the Blind Busker?’

  Thierry stood up, instantly removing her advantage of talking down to him, but the expression on his face was one of puzzlement rather than guilt. Had she got it wrong? No, it was definitely him that she’d seen.

  ‘When exactly?’

  ‘Just before midday.’

  Thierry let out a grunt of contempt. ‘Pah! I haven’t been to the Blind Busker for months. What are you talking about?’

  ‘I saw you there. With another woman.’

  ‘It’s bullshit, Marni. You saw someone else, who looks like me perhaps.’ He glared at her. ‘Go home. You’re wasting my time.’

  Marni felt certain he was lying. She’d seen what she’d seen. And since getting back together with him, a part of her had been waiting for this to happen. It was practically inevitable
with the man. She wanted to cry – with anger, with frustration, with the whole bloody gamut of feelings that he always managed to stir up in her.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ she said. ‘You’ve lied to me so many times before.’

  Charlie and Noa pretended to carry on working. They weren’t going to be drawn into a domestic.

  ‘Outside,’ he said, heading for the shop’s front door. ‘I’m not doing this in here.’

  Once they were standing on the pavement, with his client Kenny eyeing them from across the road, he spoke again.

  ‘Honestly, babe, I’m not lying. I haven’t been near that shithole for months. You saw someone else.’ He stood with hands on his hips, head tilted back so he was looking down at her.

  ‘I know what you look like. You can’t keep bullshitting me, Thierry. It can’t work that way.’

  Thierry shrugged. His dismissal infuriated Marni all the more.

  ‘And you, Marni, you can’t keep doing this.’

  ‘What?’

  He put both hands on her shoulders. ‘You won’t forgive me for the past and it’s ruining our lives.’

  ‘But you don’t get it, do you? It’s you that drags me back to the past.’

  Thierry shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t erase what happened.’

  Marni looked away from him, down the street in the opposite direction. She didn’t want him to see that she was on the verge of tears. ‘I know you can’t.’

  He tried to hug her but then she remembered the sight of him outside the Blind Busker.

  ‘No, Thierry. We’ve got to find a better way. This is wearing me out. I want to trust you, but every time I’m nearly there, you go and do something to destroy my trust.’

  ‘Merde! I told you – I wasn’t there.’

  He turned to go back into the shop.

  ‘I don’t know if I can go on like this,’ she said, hating herself for saying it, even though it was true.

  Their relationship always followed the same pattern. She would distance herself from him because she couldn’t trust him. Which in turn would push him to find solace in other places.

  ‘I need to get back to work,’ said Thierry. He went back into the shop. ‘We’ll talk about it at home, okay?’

  It wasn’t okay, but she didn’t know what to do.

  Without another word, she turned and walked away down the pavement.

  At this moment, she didn’t believe she had a future with him – she needed to protect herself from any more pain.

  ‘Marni!’ It was Thierry, running up behind her. His voice sounded sharp and urgent.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I just heard on the radio – Tash died yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘What? How . . .?’

  ‘The police are hunting for the man who attacked her.’

  ‘Oh God, no.’ Marni’s legs felt weak. She put a hand out to steady herself on a shop window. ‘No, that can’t be right. She can’t be dead.’

  Thierry took her by the other arm.

  ‘Come back to the shop and sit down.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, Thierry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If Tash’s dead, where the hell is Alex?’

  13

  Monday, 14 August 2017

  Francis

  By Monday afternoon, Tash Brady’s dead naked body lay partially covered by a white rubber sheet, bathed in the harsh white light of the autopsy room. Forensic pathologist Rose Lewis was working on it as Francis and Rory came in. Francis drew a sharp breath and looked at Rory. His sergeant had a daughter of his own and an attack like this would be close to the bone.

  ‘All right?’ Francis said.

  ‘I’ll never get used to the smell in here.’ Rory said, with an exaggerated grimace. He clearly didn’t want to touch on how he was feeling about Tash Brady’s death.

  There was no music blasting out in the morgue this morning. It was as if Rose could sense the mood her colleagues would be in. She’d taken delivery of the body from the hospital over the weekend, and by the time Rory and Francis arrived she’d already made a start on the autopsy.

  Their greetings were short and muted. Rose got straight down to business.

  ‘The hospital sent me a copy of her notes with the body,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got a full record of her vital signs from when she was admitted up to the moment she died.’

  Little over twenty-four hours, thought Francis. What had gone wrong? She should still be alive.

  ‘Did you speak to the doctor who treated her, Tanika Parry?’ said Francis.

  ‘Briefly, this morning,’ said Rose. ‘She couldn’t tell me very much. The symptoms Tash exhibited just before she died suggested some sort of toxic shock – but we’ll need to wait for the blood and stomach content results to find out more. I’ve also sent samples of liver tissue for analysis – if there was something poisonous in her system, then it will show up there.’

  ‘What can you say so far about the wounds and about that tattoo on her back?’ said Rory.

  ‘It’s quite a piece of work,’ said Rose. ‘A full set of stigmata and a fresh tattoo. From the text across her shoulders – and its source – they’re quite obviously linked, so it’s probably fair to assume they were done by the same person.’

  ‘You don’t think she could have had the tattoo done at an earlier date?’ said Francis.

  Rose peeled back the rubber sheet and shook her head. The three of them studied the black scrawl across Tash’s shoulders. The black letters were raised like welts and crusted with scabs and pus.

  ‘Rory, get this photographed. If the attacker’s sending a message, then we need to work out what it is.’

  Rory grunted his affirmation.

  ‘It might be nothing,’ said Rose. ‘Just an expression of his anger. I can’t see any logic in any part of this attack. If he’d been trying to kill her, he could have been more efficient with the knife wound in her side.’

  ‘So he wasn’t trying to kill her? A warning perhaps?’ said Rory.

  ‘A seventeen-year-old girl? Is she really going to have the types of enemies that put out warnings like that?’ said Rose.

  ‘A message to her stepfather, maybe?’ said Francis. ‘Let’s get the team digging into Richard Brady’s business connections. He’s an accountant, right?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Rory.

  ‘On the straight and narrow?’

  ‘We’ll find out.’

  ‘The tattoo’s not healed and it’s partially scabbed over,’ said Rose. ‘There’s also evidence of an infection at the tattoo site. Possibly due to dirty equipment or exposure to dirt during the attack, or maybe an allergy to the ink he used. However, there’s also a chance that it could be due to a hospital-borne infection.’

  ‘A superbug?’ said Rory.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Rose. ‘Could be MRSA, but we’ll have to wait for test results.’

  ‘Tanika Parry mentioned some unexpected results in her bloodwork at the hospital,’ said Francis. ‘Would an infected wound account for those?’

  Rose wrinkled her nose. ‘Sounds odd – they would be alert to blood test results that suggested an infection.’

  She walked across to the work bench at the side of the room.

  ‘They were already treating her with antibiotics.’ She rifled through a pile of hospital notes. ‘But look here . . .’ Francis went over to her. ‘Her blood pressure kept falling for the duration of her time in hospital, and these figures indicate a severe acid-base imbalance, cardiac electrical instability and hepatic dysfunction.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Something out of the ordinary was happening inside her body. Possibly a toxic reaction – but, like I said, you’re going to have to wait for test results for any more details.’ Then sh
e looked up at Francis. ‘You might want your tattoo expert, Marni Mullins, to give you an opinion on this. She’ll probably know a bit more about allergic reactions, and she might be able to tell us when the tattoo was likely to have been done.’

  Rory coughed loudly, but Francis maintained his composure.

  ‘Not sure she’s the right person to help this time round. It’s looking like her son might be involved.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Rose’s eyes widened.

  ‘He was dating Tash Brady and we know they had a row just hours before she was attacked. What I need to know from you, as fast as possible, is this – did Tash Brady die directly as a result of the attack?’

  Rose gave him a sharp look. ‘It’s too early to say what the cause of death was.’

  Francis pursed his lips. ‘I need to know whether I’m dealing with a murder case here, Rose.’

  ‘You’ll know as soon as I do.’

  ‘Tell us about the wounds,’ said Rory.

  ‘The wound in her side measures four inches long, by about half an inch wide at its broadest point. It was made by a sharp blade, slightly serrated, and pierces her side to a depth of three and a half inches. Because of the angle of the thrust, the tip of the blade caught her liver.’

  The wound in Tash’s side gaped open where Rose had obviously cut the stitches during the autopsy. The skin on either side appeared waxy and blue, the cut flesh almost black.

  ‘Was it life threatening?’ said Rory.

  ‘No, not once they’d staunched the bleeding. Untreated . . . she could have bled out, though. The other four wounds were all very similar. They pass right through both hands and both feet, and all four are of an identical diameter. It’s safe to say they were made with the same tool.’

  ‘Tool?’ said Francis. He studied the wound on the hand nearest to him. It was perfectly round and looked more like a bullet entry wound. Rose, who was wearing gloves, raised the hand and twisted it around so he could see the other side. Instead of a larger gunshot exit wound, there was a similarly round hole on Tash’s palm.

  ‘I can’t tell you yet what the attacker used to make these. The flesh lining the passage through is chewed up. They’re absolutely brutal.’