We might have done. “I don’t remember,” I said, and left it at that.
“No,” she nodded. “Well, that’s yet another thing that muddies the waters. They were out there, but as far as we know they came back. Just...nobody ever saw them again.”
I didn’t know what that meant, or why it only cemented the connection in my head, but it did. I studied the e-fit again. It was utterly generic. Just a nothing face. Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth. A chin. Some hair. “How,” I said, “can we not have a better picture than that? It could be anyone.”
Jenny nodded and put her coffee down on the table between us, a spark of triumph returning to her eyes—a question she could answer. She flipped open her laptop, tapped in her password, opened a folder and spun the machine around so we could both see it. “We’ve got a driving license,” she said, opening a scanned image of a photo card. “The two vehicles we recovered are registered to this guy. You know the name: Thomas Reed. Look familiar?”
I laughed. The man had a full beard and shoulder-length hair, his dark eyes all but hidden behind two great draped curtains of it. “Jesus Christ,” I said, cheaply.
“I know, right?” She clicked through to an image of a passport in the same name, with the same photo. “If I was religious I’d call it a miracle, because this Thomas Reed doesn’t exist. Or not anymore. He died of whooping cough in 1980. Unlike—” next image, a second driving license, same photo “—James Faulkner, who drowned at the age of three.” Click. Another passport. “James owns the house and the sixty acres around it.”
“What about bank accounts?”
“We haven’t found those yet. And neither of these characters is paying any kind of income tax. HMRC have nothing registered at the address. But also, he was holding keys to at least eight other properties.”
“So, what, he rents out properties? He’s a landlord, maybe?”
She shrugged. “Right now, there’s no money trail at all. No mortgage, no car payments, no credit cards... If we had him actually buying something, then maybe, but short of tracing the serial numbers on everything in that house, and then hoping he didn’t pay in cash...”
I gave her a look that I hoped said It might yet come to that.
“I know,” she said, and gulped down the rest of her coffee.
“What about DNA?”
“Oh, yeah, we’ve got fucking tons of the stuff. Just nothing to match it to. There’s no Breckland Butcher in the database, unfortunately.”
“No what?”
“That’s what the papers have been calling him.”
Ugh. “Well, they can piss off.”
“Yes, I told them that.”
“So.” I scanned the boards a second time. “Aside from Erica, how many of them can we place there?”
“One,” she said. “Kerry Farrow.”
My stomach flipped. “Kerry,” I repeated. I’d been there, looked That Man in the eye as he swore he’d never laid eyes on her, as he smugly pointed out the errors in our evidence, even as he correctly predicted that a body we’d found didn’t belong to her. “Where? In the...that cage?”
She nodded again and then cocked her head at the photos of the cage, I guessed as much to avoid my eye as anything else. “Yeah, and only in the cage,” she said. “Unlike Erica, who’d been all over the place. The cage, and every room in the house, including sleeping in the master bedroom.”
I heard a voice in my head then, although it was indistinct, genderless, and I couldn’t for the life of me place it. I’m not going back in a cage, it shrieked.
Jenny saw me shudder and said, “You okay?”
I wasn’t. Trying to think felt like staring into a black hole. I’d already forgotten the names she’d just given me, and the rest, whatever she said before the part about the DNA, was little more than a faint echo. “Kerry,” I said, for no reason other than to try to hold my focus. “Kerry was at the house.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, but I didn’t know what she meant, and had I done so, I probably wouldn’t have believed her anyway. I needed to press on.
“No trace of Samantha?”
“None. Nothing in the van, either. All we harvested from that was bleach.”
I thought back to the first time I’d met That Man. I’d been there, right in the back of that Transit. It had smelled of sweat and peroxide. There’d been a box—a large one, large enough to hide in, and filled with thick gray woolen blankets. “Was there anything in the back when you recovered it?” I wondered aloud.
“No, I think it was empty. Why?”
“If there’s a box of blankets in the inventory, they need swabbing.”
She made a note.
“Is there any connection between Samantha and Kerry,” I asked, “besides their job?”
“Not that we’ve established yet. But what we have got is footage that puts Reed, or whatever we’re calling him, close to where Kerry was last seen, and we’ve got her DNA in a dungeon under his property. That’s a done deal, Ali. Anything we find on Samantha is a bonus at this point.”
“A bonus?”
Jenny raised a defensive hand and said, “I know. I know what you’re about to say. But right now, we’ve got nothing on Samantha, and the only way we’re likely to get anything is if we find Reed and he talks to us, because no other fucker is.”
I tried to take stock, to dismiss the feeling that it all made less sense now than it had when I’d walked in. What had Jenny said about Erica? That her DNA was all over That Man’s house? It didn’t fit with what I thought I knew about her, but what was that, really? That she was an innocent victim, an abductee? I couldn’t know that, could I? She’d come out of that house shooting, but at what? At whom? “Jenny,” I said, almost afraid to ask the question that was playing on my mind. “You’re not entertaining the idea that Erica and that man could be collaborating, are you?”
Jenny looked at me like I’d completely lost the plot. “I don’t know what the hell I think,” she said. “But frankly, I hope they are on the run together, because we’ve got about as much chance of tracking him down on his own as we have of catching Jack the Ripper. The man’s a ghost. We don’t know who we’re looking for. He could be anywhere, or nowhere, and everyone who’s seen his face is either dead, missing or in this room.”
And I couldn’t remember it. “And Kevin,” I reminded her. “Kevin’s seen it.”
She dropped her eyes to the desk and heaved a deep sigh. “Yes, well, Kevin took a blow to the head too, didn’t he.”
“So what you’re saying,” I said, the dread tingle of hopelessness trickling through my veins, “is that we’re absolutely nowhere?”
Jenny, expressionless, sipped her coffee. “We’ve got four missing women we think are connected,” she said. “We’ve got one gunshot victim, two presumably dead detectives, a basement, a van, a shitload of keys and a man who doesn’t exist. So yeah, to all intents and purposes, we’ve got fuck all. We’re nowhere. Square one.”
I looked back to the board, to a photograph of a collection of door keys arranged in a neat square on a table, all but one or two attached to hand-numbered yellow tags. “Christ,” I thought aloud. “You said at least eight potential properties?”
Jenny nodded, sniffed, frowned. “I know,” she said. “Meaning at least eight potential cages, and no way of tracking them down.”
We shuddered in unison, and shared a moment’s silence. And then I was confused again, and feeling like I’d missed something. “Wait,” I said. “Did we lose the witness as well?”
She looked at me blankly for a second, and raised an eyebrow and shook her head and shrugged. “What witness?”
“The witness John interviewed. Who was with him on the night Kerry disappeared. It was the first thing he told us when we questioned him.”
A flash of panic passed across Jenny’s face, though she tried to hid
e it. She took a slow breath, and leaned forward across the desk, her brow furrowed deeply. “Ali,” she said. “What are you on about?”
I felt heat spread through me, shame and panic and frustration all tangled together as I tried to remember. “John,” I repeated. “He talked to a woman. Anna? Annie? A witness. An alibi, I guess. Didn’t you know?”
Jenny shook her head. “When was this?”
“I wasn’t with him,” I said. “It was after that first interview, though. Look it up. It’s in the file, right?”
“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. There’s no mention of any of it. What are you... Ali. Look at me.”
I met her eye. It was emerald green, bright with adrenaline. I felt sleepy all of a sudden, and my leg hurt.
“Ali,” she said. “What witness?”
Chapter 6
Annie was drunk, just like yesterday, but just like yesterday, she wasn’t going to let that stop her. There was daylight left, hours of it, but it wasn’t enough. Between them, the plodding train, the circuitous bus and the overstretched minicab company would ensure that darkness was waiting when she got home.
It had beaten her before, the sunset, two weeks ago, when she’d been late coming off shift. The village got dark too quickly—too many trees, not enough streetlamps. No noise pollution out there, away from the city. Just shadow, and sky. She’d pulled up a few houses from home, main beams illuminating the road, the fence line, the hidden places between the hedgerows, and there she’d sat for a quarter of an hour until she was certain nothing was waiting for her. Or at least nothing that walked upright. Afterward, she’d swung the car across the road and lit up the front of the house, aiming the lights through the windows, searching for silhouettes. By the time she’d made it inside and turned on all the house lights, her head had been throbbing from the tension in her shoulders. She hadn’t slept all night.
It wasn’t going to happen today; she was confident of that as she stumbled against her fossil of a Renault and dropped her keys on the ground. She laughed hoarsely to herself and tried to focus on them steadily enough to pick them up; took a deep drag on her cigarette before bending adeptly at the waist and scooping them up on the end of her finger. “See?” she said aloud, for the sake of the imagined company that comforted her when she was alone. “I’m not even actually drunk.”
She carefully turned the keys over in her palm and selected the one for the car door. It slipped to an oblique angle between her fingers and she couldn’t quite slide it into the lock. The more she twisted her wrist to compensate, the more it rotated until the shaft was resting on the back of her hand. “Oh, for the...” She sighed, and dropped them again.
The hairs went up on the back of her neck then. She didn’t remember a lot, not lately, but the memory of all those films was clear in her head: panicking women with big ’80s hair, fumbling their car keys to the ground as the killer bore down on them. Her pulse quickened in her throat, squeezing out her breaths. Her body chilled and prickled to high alert. Her mind raced. There was someone behind her.
Annie spun around with a bark that first made her jump, and then, as she encountered no one, embarrassed her. She caught her breath as the adrenaline sparked out of her, and then she shook her head and said, “For fuck’s sake, Annie,” and bent to scoop up the keys again.
She got one into the lock this time, but it was the wrong one, so she tried again, more successfully this time, albeit at the expense of a few more paint chips as she stabbed all around the door handle.
Finally the door was open, and she took another look over her shoulder before she tossed her bag inside and her cigarette to the ground and tumbled into the car.
Her eyes were heavy now, but she couldn’t worry about that. She slammed the door and found the ignition key and somehow rattled the car to life. “Fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.” Then she looked up at the rearview mirror, and everything was not fine.
It had been knocked askew, so that it afforded a view of the worn and bobbled headlining. She reached up instinctively to adjust it, and then froze. She’d seen this film, too, and so she knew without a doubt as the fear slithered up her spine that the last thing she’d see as she twisted the mirror into place was a pair of eyes staring at her from the backseat.
She closed her own eyes, all but oblivious to the spinning of her head. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t.”
* * *
Out of town, the traffic was light, but she didn’t want the traffic to be light because there was a police car behind her and nothing in front, no flow to keep up with, and the road was twisty with a fifty-mile-per-hour speed limit, which seemed generous considering the blindness of some of the bends, but she didn’t want to appear to be driving too slowly. And concentrating on her speed and constantly checking her mirror for signs of interest was tightening her grip on the wheel, making her turns sharp and sudden and her straights a series of imprecise corrections. Every time she tried to relax her grip and focus on the road far ahead instead of right under the nose of the car, her speed crept either up or down, depending on which was more wrong.
She’d turned the radio off to concentrate, and what felt like a sizable swerve had resulted from that, so now she was afraid to adjust the heater, which was inexplicably on, and so was simultaneously burning up on the inside and shivering under a cold sweat on the outside.
Annie was probably going to be sick.
Finally, having endured this torture for what seemed like hours but in reality, she knew, was only five and a half miles, she witnessed a ray of glorious sunshine slice through the clouds of her panic: the little Gulf station she drove past every day but at which she’d never had cause to stop, save for that one time the garage next door had put an old convertible BMW up for sale on their cracked concrete forecourt. What a heap that had turned out to be.
Annie mirrored, signaled and maneuvered all at the same time and without slowing, so that she crossed the corner of that forecourt at forty-nine miles an hour before standing on the brakes and bringing the Renault up at a neat twenty-degree angle, ten feet past the pumps. She didn’t look over, just swiveled her eyes as far as they could go to watch the patrol car cruise past, braking as it did so, which gave her a fright, although the driver wasn’t watching her. She held on to the door handle nonetheless, ready to spring out of the car and attempt to vanish into thin air if it turned around.
It didn’t.
* * *
Annie gave it a full minute before she stepped out of the car, met the eye of the station attendant peering curiously out at her from the window and strolled with what in her head was a kind of whimsical purpose into the store. She knew, though, as she stepped into the air-conditioned chill and felt her forehead light up with icy beads of sweat, that the attendant could see every one of her nerves jangling, and so, not trusting her voice any better than the rest of her, she didn’t try to speak. She just gave him a polite nod and a crooked smile and bought herself a Cornetto and a packet of crisps.
* * *
Some time later—she couldn’t say how long, but her foot ached from feathering the accelerator and her eyes from bobbing on the ends of their stalks—she made it home. Or at least, she made it to the side of the road in front of her house. Home was another matter. The closer she came, the farther she felt from the sanctity of that locked door. Like that famous shot in Jaws, where Chief Brody’s face zooms into tight focus as the background shrinks away, blurry and sickly and terrifying. A “trombone shot,” they call it. Or a “dolly zoom,” because that’s how it’s done—dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Calm the FUCK down, Annie.
Annie breathed, and gripped the wheel, and listened to the tick of the cooling engine, and tried to laugh at the thought of changing her name to Dolly Zoom. Maybe it could be her stripper name, she thought, if things got any worse a
t work.
Eventually, her heart and her breathing slowed to something like a workable rate, and she rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, and smoked it right down to the filter as she stared in turn at each of the windows of the house. And then she stared a little bit longer, until she was satisfied that it was just a house, her house, empty, familiar, safe.
Ha. Safe. Yeah, right.
Annie reached up and twisted the rearview mirror around to look at herself. She sighed at her smudged mascara, the worry lines etched black around tired, bloodshot eyes that had lost all of their sparkle, all of the intelligence that had set her apart from the pretty but vacuous girls at school, for better or worse. She thought, briefly, about digging some wipes out of her bag and cleaning the paint off her face then and there, but, deciding that while she was sober enough to notice, she was still too drunk to bother, she left it. Instead, she slapped the mirror roughly back into place, grabbed her bag, took a deep, steadying breath, and threw open the car door.
* * *
It was only twenty yards to the house. She had the key out ready, gripped tightly between her thumb and forefinger and angled so that, hopefully, it would slip smoothly into the lock without her dropping it. Deep down, out here in the crisp afternoon light, she knew no one was going to sneak up behind her. She just didn’t think she could take another shot of adrenaline—that pure, irrational it’s-behind-you fear that would inevitably accompany a floorward fumble of the keys. And so it was, the jagged little shaft click-clicking happily into the lock, the lock turning smoothly within the door, the door falling ajar, Annie swatting it open with the palm of her hand and stepping inside and throwing it shut behind her without the merest glance over her shoulder. Whatever was out there was staying out.
The relief, however, didn’t come.
The house was cold, downstairs at least; the hedges and the blossom-laden trees shaded the south-facing windows. Upstairs, where the slope of the roof cut through the bedroom ceiling, it would be sweltering, particularly in that spot below the skylight so beloved of next door’s cat. But the cat hadn’t been around in a while, and the heat hurt Annie’s head when the drink started to wear off, so she dropped her bag beside the sofa and just stood for a while in the cool gloom, rubbing the goose bumps on her arms and trying to figure out what felt different. For a minute, or maybe three or four, she managed to distract herself from the unease in her belly by cataloging the contents of the room: the lamps with their cracked-mirror finish, seemingly absorbing rather than reflecting the smoke-tinted magnolia of the walls; the television on its ill-fitting mahogany-look flat-pack unit, its screen partly obscured by the stack of unwatched films; the cabinet full of Wade Whimsies, fastidiously collected in childhood but now little more than a twee reminder of an alien past. The ashtray that seemed to fill and empty itself of its own accord. The sofa that wouldn’t stay plumped up between her leaving for work and staggering home. The faint, sweet aroma that was sometimes there and sometimes not, and impossible to place when it was. The ticking of the clock. The ticking. The ticking. The ticking of the clock...
Dead Girls Page 5
