“I don’t know what this means,” Jenny said.
“Me neither,” I replied, though deep down, I realized, I knew exactly.
* * *
I’d copied the notes from my arm onto a Post-it before washing both them and the scent of Edith’s perfume off in the shower. Now, I sat staring blankly at my laptop background, a view across Rome from the roof of the Altare della Patria, my sister and me huddled together, giggling like schoolgirls from the corner of the frame.
We’d walked and walked and walked that weekend; we must have clambered up and down a thousand steps, to the Pincio, the Palatino, the top of the Colosseum. As with all the best holidays, we’d come home needing a holiday.
It had taken me two weeks to finish sorting through my photos. Changing my wallpaper was the last thing I’d done the night before I got hurt. It had seemed so important at the time.
Anyway. Petrol stations. A maximum of seven of them, according to Google, along or around the one realistic route from That Man’s house to the place where he’d killed Fairey and Keith. Which I was assuming he had, right there on the edge of that airfield, where...where what? Where he’d known they’d be? Or where he’d arranged to meet them?
Those two possibilities had, at first thought, very different connotations. If it were the former, then they’d obtained some intelligence about that place that related directly to him, and he’d known about it. Perhaps even been the one to give it to them.
But if he had given it to them, then it couldn’t have been about himself, could it? Because he’d driven there himself; he hadn’t been under arrest. And surely he wasn’t arrogant enough to set fire to two policemen in the very place he’d buried Sarah Abbott?
But if the intelligence was about something else—if he’d offered to show them, to lead them to a big score of some kind—then what? What could possibly have enticed John Fairey into a clandestine meeting that was more important than trapping a serial killer?
(Lowry. Dead.)
It simply didn’t make sense, and the more I tried to think it through, the more muddled it seemed to become, so I just copied and pasted the addresses of the petrol stations and printed them off, and then, as an afterthought, wrote Airfield—GPR? meaning ground penetrating radar, in green biro across the top of the page, just in case anyone thought it was worth bothering to scan there for a dump site. Which, given its failure to turn anything up at his house, I expected they probably wouldn’t.
Edith brought me a cup of coffee and a croissant with butter and jam, placed them gently on the table beside my computer and swept my hair to one side and kissed the back of my neck. I didn’t really like it, not right then, though I knew she wasn’t being anything other than nice to me. “Are you going to be okay if I go?” she whispered.
I nodded. The words were all in my head: I’ll be okay. Thank you for being kind. I have to leave in a minute anyway. Have a lovely day at work. I’ll talk to you soon. I couldn’t seem to say them, though. I didn’t want to be nice, or to make her feel good; I felt empty, numb, nothing. I just wanted to be alone.
She squeezed my shoulder, and I felt a surge of anxiety that held me rigid until she’d quietly let herself out. I sat and listened to the thunk of her car door, the starter motor, the first blip of the throttle, the low hum as she drove away. Then I closed the lid of the laptop, took a bite of croissant and a mouthful of coffee, let out the fart I’d been holding in since Edith had come downstairs, and had a little bit of a cry.
* * *
I found Jenny in her office, staring blankly at her computer monitor with much the same dazed expression I assumed was on my own face. She didn’t look up when I knocked and let myself in, closed the door behind me and sat in one of the chairs in front of her desk. She didn’t say anything, either—just sat with her hands in her lap, breathing steadily, her pulse slow in her temple, until after a minute or two she shifted in her seat, gave a dry sniff and swiveled the monitor around to face me.
She gave me a minute to take in what I was looking at before sliding the mouse across the desk and sitting back in her chair and winding her hands into her hair.
It was... Well. I guessed it was a photograph of Mal Lowry, although, as Jenny had warned me on the phone, I wouldn’t ever have recognized him.
The image Jenny had turned to me was a full-length shot from above, the body laid out on its back on a stainless steel mortuary table, a harshly lit greenish-gray horror of fine detail against the shiny bright white tiles on the floor.
Lowry’s face, like the rest of his body, was grotesquely bloated and devoid of extremities. His nose, eyes and lips were missing, perhaps once lividly but now just colorless ragged holes in his otherwise tightly skinned flesh. He had no fingers, and no toes on his left foot; I can’t speak for the right one, because his leg was gone at the knee. And between his thighs, there was nothing; or rather, there was a hole, bordered with loose flaps of black skin, that stretched upward almost to his waist, and I don’t know how deep.
I’d seen these things before, of course. People go into the water all the time; some of them come out after a couple of days, some after a couple of months. Some, inevitably, never come out, though it’s impossible to know how many. But Lowry’s was different. The cuts were different. The cuts were brutal.
One slashed across the tops of his thighs, exposing his left femur where the fish and the crabs had nibbled at the edges. The next ran diagonally across his chest, and, clicking through the series of close-up photos, I could see the sharp ends of sheared ribs, stripped of flesh. And the fourth had neatly sliced off the top of his head, maybe three inches above his eyebrows.
I remembered Edith’s eyebrows, and her gray roots, and felt, in spite of myself, a spark of relief that they were still there in my head, and indeed on hers. I allowed myself to enjoy it, just for a second, before I clicked back through to the third cut.
The third cut was different. The others were bold, wide, sweeping—strikes from something large and heavy and fast. A propeller, or two, or even three. But the third cut wasn’t. The third cut was narrow and precise, made by something smaller and scalpel-sharp.
A propeller to the neck would surely have knocked Lowry’s head clean off, but it was still there, attached at the spine if almost nowhere else. In the second photo of the set, it was tilted back to show the edges of the wound, and they were too clean, too clinical. I didn’t need to be a trained pathologist to know what that meant.
I returned the mouse to Jenny’s side of the desk, and rotated the monitor back to where she could see it. After a long moment of silence, she spoke.
“What do you see?” she said simply.
I was very clear on what I saw, and fairly certain about what it implied for my own safety, among others’. But I didn’t want to think too hard about that, lest it color my judgment, so I just stuck to what we had in front of us.
“This wasn’t any boat accident,” I said, and felt a second wave of relief when she nodded. “Someone cut his throat.”
She carried on nodding for a full minute, eyes narrowed in concentration, thumbnail wedged between her teeth. Then, when she was happy that she’d straightened out the wisdom in her head, she looked me dead in the eyes and gave me the full benefit of her many years of insight and expertise. “Fucking shitting cunting fuck,” she said.
I agreed, then went and made us a nice cup of coffee.
* * *
“I want you protected,” she said. “I’m not letting this happen to anyone it hasn’t already happened to, least of all you. If this is what he’s doing—if he’s taking out anyone who’s seen his face—then I want you chained to your desk where I can see you, and I want you escorted home every day, and I want surveillance on your house every night until we catch the fucker.”
“You can’t afford it,” I laughed.
“I don’t care. I’ll cancel the support staff
if I have to.”
“And then it’ll take ten times longer. Look, Jen, I know you’re worried, but I’m not going to be made a prisoner by that man. If you lock me up for weeks and months, then a) I’m going to go out of my mind, and b) you’ll run out of budget before you find him, then you’ll have to call off the secret service, and then I’ll be a sitting duck anyway, only a stir-crazy doolally one who can’t remember how to take care of herself. Seriously, don’t even think about it. I’d rather be out there tied to a post than stuck in here breathing Steve’s BO all day, and I’m sure Kevin would, too, although I noticed you didn’t say anything about protecting him.”
Jenny sighed and shook her head and gave a weary half laugh. “Ali,” she began, but I interrupted.
“And to be honest,” I said, “I think our priority should be to identify the witness, assuming he hasn’t already got to her. Me and Kevin are still walking around, and Mal died on the other side of the country, so is it safe to assume he’s not hanging around stalking us?”
“I don’t know. Look, Ali, I don’t want to sound like a dick, but this witness...” She bit her tongue and winced, not by accident, I thought, but I just sat upright and nodded, forcing her to press on. She sighed. “Ali, no one knows what you’re talking about. There’s no record of any witness. I’m not—”
“Me, neither, but I didn’t just make it up, so it can’t hurt to get a fresh appeal out for her to come forward, can it? I’ll check missing persons for anyone with the same name,” whatever it was—I had it written down but I couldn’t access the memory of it just then. I didn’t have my notebook with me, either, so I reached over and grabbed a pen and tore the blank sheet from the top of Jenny’s legal pad and wrote Witness missing on it. Then I thought I’d probably find a way to misinterpret that later, so I amended it to say Witness: missing persons. Check this. That should do it.
Jenny was watching me with an eyebrow raised, so I threw back the pen and nodded decisively and said, “Sorry.”
“You alright?”
“I’m good,” I lied. “What’s next?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, perhaps puzzled by what I had to admit sounded a little too indifferent to what we’d just been looking at. No, it wasn’t that. She was thinking. She’d forgotten what she was going to say. “I’ve forgotten what I was going to say,” she said. “What did we talk about last night?”
“Petrol stations,” I replied, surprising myself. Then I remembered I’d made that list. “I’ve got a list in my bag. You were going to get someone to look at traffic cameras.”
“Yes. Shit.” She snatched up her desk phone and stabbed at one of the buttons. “Hi, it’s Jenny,” she said. “Is the support team out of briefing yet?” She opened her top desk drawer and pulled out a packet of Maltesers, teased it open and popped two into her mouth before holding it out to me across the desk. I wasn’t really in the mood but I took a couple anyway. “Okay, you’ve got an analyst apparently. Or someone who knows how to use ViPER. Do you think you could get him to come and find me?” She seemed to like to suck the chocolate off her Maltesers. I just crunch mine like a normal person. “Thanks, hun.” Ooh, I hate it when people say hun. She dropped the handset back onto its cradle. It bounced off onto the desk. “Take some more, I don’t really like them.”
“Why have you got them, then?”
“Machine was out of Crunchies.”
“Fair play.”
“No Prawn Cocktail, either.”
“That’s shit.”
“I’ll make us another coffee in a minute.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
“I know.”
“Cheers.”
“I can’t remember what day it is.”
“Tuesday.”
“Oh.”
Sniff.
“Can you put a forensic suit on by yourself?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Just wondered.”
“Wh—”
There was a gentle knock at the door. We both looked at it. “That was quick,” she said, and, louder, “Come in.” The door remained firmly shut. I couldn’t see anyone through the window. “Fucksake,” she sighed. “Go let him in.”
I got up and went to the door. Turned the handle and pulled it open. Looked up into the face of a man who wasn’t there, and breathed in a lungful of Poison with a faint note of liquor.
There was a woman outside, of average height and average build, with an average face and average dark hair, and she smiled nervously and said, “Hi. I’m Annie Fisher. Did someone order an analyst?”
Chapter 11
Erica Shaw looked as happy as a pig in shit behind the wheel of That Man’s Transit, three hundred yards from a BP service station on the A11, head thrown back, mouth twisted open, apparently in full song. It was a startling—and startlingly clear—photograph.
“This changes things,” Jenny said quietly.
Annie Fisher, who hadn’t taken her hand off the picture since she’d printed it off and followed me into Jenny’s office and slapped it on her desk, stared silently at it with a haunted kind of focus that I found mildly unsettling, though having only met her an hour previously, I didn’t make anything of it. I just assumed she was proud of the efficiency of her work.
“Why does it change things?” Kevin asked, kicking the door closed behind him and setting down the mugs of tea and coffee hooked around his fingers and the pocketful of chocolate I’d sent him to fetch from the vending machine.
Jenny gave him a withering look and pointed at the photograph and said, “Look at it.”
He did. He shrugged.
“Kevin,” I said. “Really? Do you need me to explain this to you like we’re in an American TV show?”
Annie broke out of her trance then and looked between the three of us as we looked between one another. She was waiting for someone to laugh, I think, but no one did. “Um...” She took a deep breath. “I missed the last episode, too. Sorry.”
Jenny afforded her a smile, and Kevin’s shoulders dropped a little, though not entirely. “I wasn’t expecting to see evidence that Erica Shaw was working with Reed,” she said simply.
Those words didn’t sit easily with me. I’d seen Erica in That Man’s house, yes. And, ostensibly, we had evidence that she’d been in Mark Boon’s flat, too, though I didn’t believe that any more now than I had when I’d first read it. The most compelling proof, to me, was the terror in Erica’s eyes when she’d told me she wasn’t going back in a cage, a second before she’d tried to shoot me in the face. Which detail, admittedly, weakened my argument somewhat, if not my conviction. I opened my mouth to express all this, but Kevin got in first.
“Ali,” he said, “she shot someone right in front of us. She shot Reed in front of us, for Christ’s sak—”
I stopped him with an aggressively pointed finger. “Exactly,” I said. “Exactly that. She shot him. You know what that tells me? It tells me that whatever she might have done, she did it under his control. It was an escape, Kevin.” I’m not going back in a cage. “Her DNA was all over that cage. I don’t buy Erica as the Bonnie to That Man’s Clyde. I just don’t.”
“What about Mark Boon?” Jenny cut in. “Her DNA’s all over his place, too.”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t. It was in a couple of obvious places, but missing from a whole load of them. Nothing on the fridge, the door handles, the toilet... It’s rubbish.”
Jenny nodded. “I know what you’re saying, but we can’t just ignore the known fact that she wasn’t in a cage for the whole time she was missing. You saw her with your own eyes, and now, this.” She slid the photograph out from under Annie’s splayed fingers and spun it around to face me.
Annie snatched back the impulse to chase it across the desk and stood up straight with a crack from her spine.
I took a deep breath, and, a lot more calmly than I felt, said, “It’s called coercive control.”
Jenny and Kevin narrowed their eyes in unison, but said nothing. I could feel a volatile bundle of anxiety working its way up my back. I knew I was going to either shout or cry. Why couldn’t they see it? Why wouldn’t they see it?
Annie could clearly feel the tension. She reached out and took the mug closest to her. “Is this one mine?” she asked.
Kevin glanced at her tersely and nodded.
“Thanks,” she said, and sipped her coffee.
I wanted to punch Kevin, but instead I pulled my mug close and unwrapped a KitKat. Snapped off a finger. Bit off both ends. Dipped it like a straw and sucked a mouthful of hot coffee through it. Jenny watched me, bemused. “Try it,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t eat Nestlé products.”
“Try it with a Crunchie.”
“Penguins are best,” Kevin said, but I ignored him.
“Just a thought,” Annie said, “but Ali, you mentioned coercive control...”
I mirrored her earnest expression and nodded, suddenly hopeful that someone knew what I was getting at.
“Well...” she hesitated.
“Go on,” I said, and slid the whole melted KitKat finger into my mouth.
She smiled and nodded and said, “Well, obviously I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but is there a chance you’ve got it the wrong way around?”
I was fighting my gag reflex and trying to turn the finger in my mouth so I could bite it in half. I let Jenny ask her what she meant.
“I mean,” she continued, “what if Erica wasn’t working with him, but actually he was working with her?”
Jenny sat back in her chair and looked a question at Kevin. Kevin fired it straight at me as I tried to swallow some wafer. All I could do was shake my head.
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