I opened my mouth to interrupt, but nothing came out. I looked over at Annie, and saw the horror I was feeling reflected in her face. I was momentarily taken aback; the last time she’d expressed an opinion, she’d been as keen as anyone else for Erica to be guilty.
I looked at Dan: at his furrowed brow, at the straight, white teeth nibbling at his bottom lip.
I turned to Kevin, his fingers scratching the bald spot on the top of his head. Say something, I screamed silently. But neither of them did.
“I don’t necessarily believe any of this,” Jenny continued. “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe. But we have to consider the possibility that as far as Mal Lowry and John Fairey and Julian Keith and Eli Diaz and, for God’s sake, Richard Cockburn are concerned, Erica Shaw is the one we’re looking for. And God knows she has a motive for the latter. Someone. Anyone. Say something.”
I tried. There were words in my head, but they were jumbled and drowning in panic. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. I didn’t know all the answers, but I knew what I knew. I was there, for fuck’s sake. That Man had tried to kill me. I knew it.
Everyone was looking at me. Annie looked puzzled. Kevin’s eyes were full of sympathy, and maybe a touch of embarrassment. Dan just nodded, slowly. Oh Christ, how much had I said out loud?
“Ali.” Kevin leaned forward in his chair, rested on his knees so that he was looking up at me. “It was Erica who made a dent in my skull, and she was going to shoot you if Reed didn’t stop her. He was the one who saved your life, remember? And why would he kill Erica’s stepdad? She’s the one with the obvious motive for that, not him. Why are you so convinced she’s not the one coming after us?”
Jenny leaned forward and placed a hand on my knee. It felt cold, made me squirm. I could feel myself crumbling. Couldn’t be here. Had to get out.
“Ali,” she said, “I know what you’re going through. Believe me, I do. But everything we know about what happened to you is based on an assumption. You saw Erica drive away after she tried to shoot you, and then what? Where did she go after that? She had a twenty-minute head start, and everyone was looking for her in the direction you pointed them. How do we know that was where she went? How do we know she didn’t loop around through the woods and come right back for another go? We don’t know, because you don’t remember what happened inside that house.”
Well, that hit a nerve. I swatted her hand away, startling Annie and Kevin back in their seats as I snapped in Jenny’s face. “So this is my fucking fault now, is it?”
She flinched, but held her gentle tone. “That’s not what I just said, Al—”
“No,” I shouted, louder than I’d intended, but nowhere near as loud as I wanted. “No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to change my narrative. You don’t know. You don’t know, because you weren’t there, were you? You weren’t anywhere. Have you even been to the fucking crime scene?” Another flinch told me no. “You haven’t met Erica, have you? You haven’t met that man. Apart from Kevin, I’m the only one of us left alive who’s even seen his face, let alone talked to him, but you lot think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you? Well, let me tell you, you know exactly nothing about him. Nothing. You don’t know where he came from, you don’t know where he is or what he does, you don’t even know his fucking name, for Christ’s sake. You keep calling him a ghost, but now it’s like you don’t even know that about him. He had a cage under his garage, Jenny. A fucking cage. But sure, Annie knows a word that sounds scientific, and she found you a picture of Erica driving a van, so now obviously she’s some kind of criminal mast—Actually, fucking hell, Annie, who even are you?” Annie was pressed into the back of her chair, eyes wide, and she began to stutter as I jabbed a finger at her. “Seriously, where did you come from? You just waltz in here with your coercive fucking control smelling like a distillery, you do basically fuck all except swan around in the DCI’s car, but suddenly this whole case is upside down and back to front and Erica’s running around the country cutting the heads off coppers. What exactly is your motivation here, Annie? What do you know that the rest of us don’t?”
“Okay, that’s enough, Ali, thank you.” Jenny was on her feet, sweeping her chair back out of my reach. “I’ll listen to a reasoned argument, but I’m not prep—”
“Fuck you, Jenny,” I spat. I looked at Kevin’s bowed head, and the tears threatening to spill from Annie’s eyes. “And fuck you two, as well.” I stood too quickly and whirled to face the rest of the team: a sea of blurred faces, their names spinning around so fast in my dizzy head that I couldn’t read them. My face was flashing hot and sweating cold and my mouth filled with tangy bile. “I need some fresh air,” I said, and then everything went black.
Chapter 22
Annie Fisher had seen her share of dead bodies before the start of this week, not counting funeral home viewings of grotesquely embalmed grandparents. The first was an eighteen-year-old student who’d gone out to celebrate his exam results, belligerently insisted to his friends that he was entirely capable of walking the two miles home, and fallen into the estuary. He’d turned up on the beach the next morning, looking fresh and clean and almost serene, albeit pale and with sunken eyes. She’d found him tough to look at in spite of his relatively good-looking corpse, and very much harder still to touch. Indeed, her relationship with dead things had always been somewhat strained. Her cat, whose name was Stupid Cat, had fulfilled his own legend by strolling in front of a street sweeper. He, too, had been relatively unmangled, dying of a swift blow to the head that left the merest trace of blood around his grimacing mouth. And yet, despite having loved that cat and held and stroked and kissed and been licked all over her scrunched-up face by him for the best part of a decade, she couldn’t bring herself to touch his still-warm fur, or carry his limp form from the side of the road. She’d put on a pair of gardening gloves and scooped him up with a shovel, wincing at the dead weight of him as he rolled over, dead legs akimbo, dead fur rippling over his dead white belly, and dumped him straight into the hole she’d already dug between the hydrangeas. Poor Stupid Cat.
And it was the same with her hamster (whose name she could no longer remember) when she was a kid, and with the baby birds that had fallen from the nest in the park, and all of the mice that Stupid Cat had brought home to lovingly present as a token of his being an utter shit.
She knew that as a police officer, she had to suck it up. It was part of the job. It was what she’d signed up for. And her second experience had lulled her into a false sense of security. An eighty-two-year-old gardener who’d suffered a sudden and immediately fatal heart attack while pruning a privet hedge. He’d been fit, muscular and tanned, but equally he’d been an old man, and death is something of an occupational hazard for old men. Annie hadn’t been shocked, or even particularly sad, but even so, she was glad of the lunchtime drinks she’d knocked back when it came to looking for the poor bugger’s pulse.
The third time, she’d made sure to have a few swigs from the bottle in her locker before hustling out to the car. She’d needed them, too—a twelve-year-old girl, knocked down by a driver distracted by the hurry he was in. Her head had penetrated the windscreen and the top of the frame had broken her neck before flinging her ten feet into the air. By the time Annie and—what was his name again? Stuart? Stefan? Sim—no, Rob, that was it. Rob McLean. He always smelled like a Magic Marker and his wife was having it off with one of the desk sergeants. Annie didn’t blame her; he was the most boring individual she’d ever had to sit in a car with. All he talked about was football, and Annie didn’t know the first thing about football and couldn’t have been less enamored of it if it had conned her out of her life savings and left her with a dug-up driveway. Anyway, the little girl had landed in the road folded double, but had been moved to the pavement and covered with blankets by a crowd of local mums by the time she and PC McTedious had got there. Annie, not realizing the extent o
f the girl’s injuries, had leaned in to check for signs of life and to try to stabilize her neck, upon which her head had lolled unnaturally to one side and given her a close-up view of the back of her brain.
Annie didn’t stop drinking after that, and she couldn’t remember much about any of the others.
This, though: this was different. Photographs of severed arms were one thing, and they were nothing she hadn’t seen before. She’d seen plenty of crime scene photos, dozens of postmortem records. She had the same access to the internet as anyone else, and yes, she’d watched all of those videos. Some of them had even made her feel sick, and one, from some war zone or another, had kept her awake for a night. But nothing came close to the slideshow scrolling through her mind right now: the pin-sharp pictures, direct from her own memory, of decomposed feet and hands and thighs and torsos and heads. Oh God, the heads.
The hip flask of vodka had done nothing to dull those images. Annie had a distressing feeling that nothing would erase them; that that was it, she was doomed to carry them at the front of her mind from here on in. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.
She stopped at home for a change of clothes. The usual trick: a slow pass of the house, a few minutes’ surveillance, senses on high alert as she approached the door. Dread at whatever gift she was going to find inside today. Just like Stupid Cat, she realized, which made her laugh a little too loudly halfway up the drive.
There was nothing, though. No trinket on the table. No crockery drip-drying on the draining board. No footprints on the mat, no unfamiliar outdoor smell, no steam on the bathroom mirror. No sense of being watched, or of having been violated, at least not here. The house was empty, and had been since she’d left that morning.
Annie threw her shirt and trousers into the laundry basket in her bedroom and covered herself in a thick mist of deodorant. It did nothing for the smell that lingered in her nose, of earth and decay and violent death, or the image of empty eye sockets staring into her, or the sense that they could somehow see her more clearly than any living thing.
She stripped and ran for the shower, shivering under cold water for a long moment until the heater got with the game and turned it almost instantly blisteringly hot. The two extremes made her queasy, and before she could stop herself, she’d liberally thrown up all over the tiles in front of her, gasping for breath and clutching at her stomach as jets of water from the scaly shower head rinsed thick streams of vomit down the side of the bath to swirl around her feet. Living the dream, she thought. Living the dream.
* * *
At some point, Annie found herself dressed in a pair of old but comfortable jeans and a Sonic Youth T-shirt she didn’t remember acquiring and was certain she hadn’t bought, despite it fitting very nicely. She gave her hair a cursory brush and drew on some eyeliner, and that was enough. The words polish and turd sprang to mind, and she felt guilty for it; objectively, she realized she was probably being unfair to herself, but as it had been for the longest time, the reflection staring out of the mirror at her was, to Annie, a study in banality, the proverbial picture beside the dictionary entry for average.
This time, though, the thought startled her as it elbowed its way around her head, jostling for space with the severed limbs. She knew there was nothing actually wrong with her, and that even if there were—even if she looked like the back end of a broken-down bus, as her mother used to say—it would have no bearing on her worth as a human being. She knew that. She’d been told it a thousand times as an awkward, gangly teenager.
And yet. Those poor girls—the ones in those bags, cut into pieces and buried in that marsh—Annie would have bet her last pound that they’d all been perfectly beautiful. And if they were who they appeared to be, and it was James or Thomas or whatever the hell his name was who had violated them in that way, then what did that say about Annie? After all, she’d been alone with the man. She’d even shared a bed with him. But not only had he not tried to take advantage of her, he’d declined so intently to kill her that he’d gone as far as rescuing her from such a fate. So, maybe there was something wrong with her after all. Maybe she wasn’t pretty enough, or witty enough, or full-on Sex and the City enough.
So Annie, she figured, had a simple choice. She could choose to believe she was so undesirable that she couldn’t even get herself murdered by a serial killer, or she could continue to stubbornly deny, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that he was one.
She studied herself intently: her tired, faintly bloodshot hazel eyes, neither too close together nor too far apart. Her nose, a little dry and red but neither too big nor too small. Her dry lips, neither plump nor thin. The frown lines on her forehead, neither too many nor too deep. Her eyebrows, unsculpted but neat, and one above each eye like anyone else’s. Her dimples, which she guessed were cute but which hardly counted as a distinguishing feature. Just an ordinary face, framed by ordinary hair, tied in a bun with a plain, ordinary band.
Ordinary. Unremarkable. Average.
Overlooked.
Not worth killing.
Annie sighed, and hooked her phone out of her pocket in the laundry basket, and called for a taxi. It would be half an hour, the dispatcher said, and so she moped down the stairs and rinsed out a glass and poured herself two fingers of vodka, crushed ice from the freezer and a top-up of cranberry juice as a token effort at heading off the water infection she planned on giving herself.
She’d drunk two of those by the time she heard the car horn sound outside. She fetched her bag and dropped in her phone, squeezed her purse to make sure it was there and silently narrated herself locking the front door and zipping the keys into the inside pocket, to imprint on herself that she hadn’t forgotten. Then she walked to the old Mercedes at the curb in front of her house, and took hold of the door handle, and opened the door.
Chapter 23
“I feel like I’m going mad. Like...what if everyone else is sane and reasonable, and it’s me who’s completely batshit? I mean, I took a bit of a beating, didn’t I? Maybe it screwed me up more than I thought? Maybe I’m wired up all wrong? It’s either that or there’s some kind of conspiracy going on. Is that what it is? Kevin? Is that what I’m missing? Is it a conspiracy? Are we in one of those films where it turns out one of the good guys was the bad guy all along? Is that what’s happening? Is Jenny the bad guy?”
Kevin set my coffee down on the low table beside the couch I hadn’t yet struggled up from, in the family interview suite a floor above the incident room. The doctor had given me a cursory check over and prescribed lying down and chilling out for a while, so that was what I’d done. I didn’t know how long I’d slept—there were no windows, and I couldn’t reach my phone—but I felt somewhat refreshed, if no less frustrated.
“What you need to remember,” Kevin said softly, “is that we’re all in this together and we all want to do the right thing. Jenny’s not the bad guy, she’s just in way over her head. You knew that. Anyone who had any in-depth understanding of any aspect of this case either didn’t write anything down, or they’re dead, or...” He looked vaguely at the top of my head and gave me one of those poor-puppy expressions. “Until today, we didn’t even have any bodies. And that note from Abbott doesn’t change anything—it just means we’ve got a shitload more threads to tie together. But we’ll get there, yeah?”
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t. “I just...” I creaked up onto an elbow and reached for my coffee. Kevin pushed it closer and turned the handle toward me. I blew across the top and took a sip. “That’s not bad, for once,” I said.
Kevin smiled and looked at me expectantly.
I raised my eyebrows and acted quizzical.
“You were halfway through a sentence,” he said.
Shit. Was I? “I...”
“You can’t remember, can you?”
“It probably wasn’t important.”
“No.” He
slipped off the adjacent settee and knelt on the carpet beside me. “What I mean is, you can’t remember.”
I felt a flash of panic in my chest, but I was too zoned out to deal with it. “What do you mean?” I said, perhaps a little too defensively.
Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out what, in spite of the evident loss of my faculties, I recognized as my notebook. “You dropped this,” he said, and placed it gently on the seat in front of me.
Did I fuck drop it. He took it out of my pocket, is what he did, the slippery shit. “Really? Did I?”
He thought about it, and then shook his head. “No, but that’s not the point. Look at it.” He flipped the cover over to display the first page. I sipped my coffee and looked at it.
Your name is Ali Green, a note that, for the first couple of weeks of my recovery, had seen a lot of action.
Below that, my address.
The make and model of my car.
Lock the front door. Key ring!
“Ali. Mate.”
“I...”
“You keep blurting out random shit that’s in your head. You get halfway through a sentence and forget what you were going to say. You just told the entire team to go fuck themselves, and then threw up in Derek Burke’s lap and blacked out. Either you’re a raging wino or...for fuck’s sake, Ali, I’m worried about you!”
Worried. Was that what he was? He didn’t look worried. He looked angry. His voice was calm, but his hands were shaking and his face was red and he was trying to tell me I was mad. That was it, wasn’t it? This man was trying to convince me I was going insane. Why? What had I done wrong? Why was he doing this to me?
“Jesus Christ, that’s not what I’m doing at all and you know it! We’re meant to be mates, aren’t we? Look out for each other? How long have you known me?”
Dead Girls Page 15
