“Is this where you remind me you’re one of the good guys?”
He clamped his mouth shut and bowed his head, took a few deep breaths through his nose.
“I’m not mad, Kevin,” I said. Was I? “I wasn’t ready to come back, but I’m here, and I’m trying to get on and do my job, however hard you or anyone else tries to convince me I don’t know what I’m doing. Understand?”
He sighed, and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “You’re fine, then. That’s good. That’s all I wanted to know.” He stood and headed for the door, turned and looked at me. “You might want to know that forensics can’t recover any DNA from the bones in Fairey’s car. They’re going to have to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle and come up with a best guess. Oh, and we’ve got another potential tat match on one of the girls in the marsh. Anja Jankovic, one of Hertfordshire’s. The weird thing being that Kerry Farrow’s covered in the damn things, and we can’t seem to find a single one of them. So the plot thickens.” He turned and opened the door. Hesitated. Closed it again. Didn’t look at me, but spoke quietly. “I’m not going to tell Jenny about you,” he said. “But I am going to make sure you do something about it. I’m not trying to piss you off. I just want you to be alright.” Then he left, and I was, both literally and figuratively, on my own.
So. Hertfordshire.
For all I couldn’t remember, I did know that David Abbott had been a regional sales manager for a company selling, fuck, I don’t know, pots and pans or something, and if even I knew that, then Jenny sure as hell did, and she’d be jumping up and down at the obvious clue.
I guessed it was down to me, then.
I felt around under the settee for my bag, and retrieved my phone, and scrolled through my contacts until I recognized Edith’s picture. Dialed her number. Got her voicemail.
“Can you come over tonight?” I said. “There’s something I need your help with.”
Chapter 24
Annie jumped as the car horn blared behind her, and she turned to see the minicab idling at the curb on the opposite side of her driveway.
Heart in her mouth, she ducked down low enough to see a pair of legs in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes and forced an amiable laugh and said, “Shit, I’m so sorry—wrong car.” She closed the door gently—too gently, as it only clicked onto the first latch, so that she had to open it again and say, “Oh my God, I’m such an idiot,” and slam it shut.
Feeling like the world’s biggest fuckup, she took a shuddering breath and walked as steadily as she could to the waiting taxi, in which she was relieved to see a familiar face.
“What are you like?” he said. His name was Mo, and he lived two villages away. Four times out of five, whatever the time of the day or night she called for a cab, Mo was the one who’d turn up. He had a kind face, and what Annie thought of as a typical taxi-driving physique, in that he looked like a man who lived on whatever he could buy from a twenty-four-hour petrol station. As willing as he was to drive in silence if she wasn’t in the mood to talk, she knew that he’d been married for over forty years and had seven grandchildren, on whom he doted unconditionally. It warmed her heart, in spite of the painful envy.
“I’m losing the plot,” she sighed, buckling herself in.
Mo smiled knowingly. “Oh, Annie. The whole world has lost the plot, my darling. If anything, you’re slow to catch on! Where are we going tonight?”
“Anywhere you like,” she said. “Somewhere different. Somewhere I can sing songs and drink myself to death.”
She could tell from the long, sad pause he took to look at her that he wanted to reach out and help her. If she’d seen that expression on one stranger’s face, she’d seen it on a thousand. But she didn’t want Mo’s help. She didn’t want anyone’s, not anymore. She just wanted to drink.
This was one of those nights when Mo drove in silence.
* * *
Annie didn’t bother reading the sign above the door. In fact, she wasn’t even sure there was one, but it was of no consequence. It was a gloomy shithole two streets from the North Sea, with a sticky carpet and an overbearing smell of stale sweat and spilled beer, and as she walked in, a greasy, ponytailed mountain of a man she could have sworn was the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons was caterwauling a rendition of “I Will Always Love You” into the karaoke machine. And nobody was listening.
The place was bustling, mostly with tired-looking men intent on shouting over one another, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. She took her two double vodkas to a free corner table and sat, necking the first one as she scanned the room for faces she might recognize, either friendly or hostile. A couple might have rung a bell, but they didn’t set off any alarms. She could relax at least.
The singer, for want of a better word, had moved on through Jennifer Rush’s “Power of Love” and Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” by the time Annie returned a second time with two more drinks. And this time, someone noticed.
“Been stood up, have you?” He loomed over the table out of nowhere, a full pint of something dark and frothy in one hand and what looked like a vodka and tonic in the other.
Annie looked up from the man’s shiny brogues, past his ironed jeans and his more than adequately filled-out rugby shirt, to the receding hairline that framed his cocked eyebrows and overconfident grin. He wasn’t anything special—certainly not the type she’d pick out across a crowded room—but even as her conscious brain was recoiling, something locked somewhere deep inside it was shrugging and saying, Yeah, fine, whatever, he’ll do.
For the second time that day, she stuttered, trapped between two responses. Apparently not anymore. And Fuck off and jump in a fire.
“Cat got your tongue?” he said.
Annie felt the pressure building in her head, her pulse accelerating, fight-or-flight charging the muscles in her limbs. Two words replaced all of the others on the tip of her tongue: panic attack. A vision flashed through her mind, of her hands on the rim of the table, flipping it, glasses flying, her elbow connecting with the man’s sternum as she fled for the door.
“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling, oblivious. “Let me see if I can guess your name.”
“Is that one mine?” A woman’s voice. A hand on one of Annie’s drinks. A body on the bench seat beside her. A wave of perfume. A wet kiss on her cheek. An arm across her shoulders. “Sorry I’m late, babe, work was murder. You two know each other? Jason, was it?”
Jason shifted from one foot to the other, sloshing a few drops of ale onto the carpet. “Right,” he said, but he didn’t move. “Right. You two...”
“Oh God,” said the voice in Annie’s ear. “Were you trying to chat her up?” She laughed and took a sip of Annie’s vodka. “Awks.”
Jason looked over his shoulder, presumably to check that none of his mates were laughing at him. They were—three similarly douchey-looking rugger buggers, two of them with their polo shirts tucked into their jeans, sniggering and raising their glasses to him from the bar. “Fucksake,” he sighed, and put the vodka down on the table. “You might as well have that.”
“What have you put in it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
“Vodka and tonic, same as what your girlfriend ordered.”
“If you could take it away, that’d be great.”
He looked confused, and a little overoffended. “What, you think I’ve spiked it?”
“Don’t get upset,” she said, “and don’t be a dick. Just take the drink away, give it back to the barman and have a nice evening, yeah? Better luck next time, and all that.”
Jason huffed, and then he puffed, and then he shook his head and snatched up the drink and hissed, “Whatever. Fucking vagetarians.”
A laugh. “Uh-oh. I hope this karaoke’s got Cyndi Lauper, ’cos I can see your true colors shining through, mate.”
Jason exited, stage right. The arm withdrew from across Annie’s back, leaving goose bumps in its wake. The drink hit the table, slid, clinked against its twin. “Sorry,” the woman said. “Hope I didn’t overstep. I could see you about to go into panic mode.”
Annie unclenched her fists and her teeth, sucked in a lungful of air, blew it out slowly and deliberately as she felt her new companion shift over on the seat to give her space. She nodded and tried to force a smile, her eyes shut tight in an effort to keep the tears in. Finally, she gave in to the sting with a gasp and let them spring open, blinking her cheeks wet and her vision blurry. “God, you must think I’m pathetic,” she said, attempting a laugh as she looked around at her rescuer.
Whatever she’d been expecting from the hard-edged voice, the weight of the arm, the self-confident swagger, the presence beside her, she’d been wrong. To Annie, she looked like little more than a girl, ostensibly at least. Her arms were slender, her waist wasplike, her poise angular, but her face, framed by dark hair that looked too straight to be God-given, had a youthful softness to it, and she didn’t look entirely comfortable in her frame, as though she were unused to her own waifishness. She wouldn’t have placed her far beyond eighteen or nineteen, were it not for her eyes. Annie squinted into their dark depths and felt a spark of recognition, a reflection of the scars it had taken her more years to accumulate than she might otherwise credit this girl with having lived. Her smile, though, didn’t hurt at all.
“’Course not,” she said. “The world’s a dangerous place to be a girl. If we don’t look out for each other, no other fucker will.”
Annie laughed. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, as though she needed any excuse. She slid the second vodka back toward the stranger across the otherwise empty table. “You’re welcome to join me.”
The girl smiled again and picked up a bottle of Coke with a straw in it from the seat behind her. “Driving,” she said, and took a sip. “But knock yourself out.”
“That’s the plan.” Annie tipped her glass to clink it against the bottle, spilled a little over her fingers and licked it off. The girl watched her for a moment, just a beat longer than Annie was comfortable with. She felt heat spreading through her face as she tipped a little too much of her drink into her mouth and half choked.
“Well, you’re going the right way about it,” she laughed, a glimmer of mischief brightening her eyes.
“Listen.” Annie took another swig, emptying her glass. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but...”
The girl nodded. “You’re right,” she said, reaching for her bag. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mean that.” Annie slid her empty glass away and picked up the full one. “No, I just... I mean, I’m...” She clocked the girl’s raised eyebrow, and flushed with embarrassment. Took a deep breath. “I’m straight,” she said.
The girl laughed. “That’s not really any of my business,” she said. “I mean, so am I, so...high five, I guess.”
“Oh God.”
“I mean, I could probably put it to one side for that...the girl who plays Wonder Woman, what’s her name?”
“Lynda Carter?”
“Lynda Car—I’m twenty-one.”
“Right. Sorry.”
The girl laughed and slurped her Coke. “So,” she said. “What is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“Ha. I don’t know. Running away?”
“What are you running away from?”
“Life. You?”
“Man.”
Annie snorted. “I’ll drink to that, too. Last guy I liked turned out to be a psychopath.” And there it was. She’d said it out loud.
“Been there.” The girl held up her hand for a real high five, and Annie obliged.
“You, me and every woman in here, probably. You want another drink?”
* * *
An hour and three more doubles later, the question was the same, albeit a little more slurred, and the answer was, “Sure. Can you sing?”
“What?”
The girl jabbed a thumb at the middle-aged woman with the ’80s hair and the tasseled biker jacket who was at that moment murdering “Because the Night.” “Can you sing?”
Annie laughed. “Fuck no.”
“Can you sing better than her?”
“Definitely not.”
“Quality. You get the drinks, I’ll get the track list.”
So Annie stood at the bar, thinking about how much she liked this strange girl who’d appeared out of nowhere and shared so little about herself. She hadn’t even asked her name, and it seemed a bit late to do so now, so she figured she’d casually introduce herself when they said their good-nights. Or maybe she wouldn’t mention it at all, and would instead remember her as some sort of guardian angel, neither real nor imagined. Mythical, perhaps. Like a unicorn, or a...
Annie didn’t know what. Whatever it was, it was childishly fanciful—she was lucid enough to know that much. And this girl was definitely real, because Annie knew she wasn’t the only person in the bar who’d seen her. Moreover, there was something nigglingly familiar about her, though for the life of her she couldn’t think what it was. Something in her eyes, she thought, or her mouth, or the shape of her face, or something.
It would come to her later, in a brutal, horrifying flash, when she heard the ladies’ room door swing shut and the footsteps stop outside her stall, just as she was thinking about how much she hated pub toilets and how vulnerable she was, alone in a cold, damp afterthought of an outhouse with her knickers around her ankles.
But not now, because the girl was beckoning to her excitedly from the little stage at the end of the room, and Annie was putting down their drinks on top of the monitor, and then a microphone was in her hand and she didn’t have time to think about much else. And that was how Annie came to spend her last few gloriously carefree minutes as the Kenny Rogers to Erica Shaw’s Dolly Parton, singing “Islands in the Stream” in a dive bar two blocks from the docks, in front of precisely no one who gave a shit.
Episode 5
Chapter 25
I expected a fight, but Carla showed no emotion when she opened the front door of her house to find me on the doorstep, rehearsing my defensive speech. She had keys in her hand and one of those environmentally friendly shopping bags looped over her arm, but she didn’t so much as proclaim herself busy; she just stopped, looked me blankly up and down and stepped aside to let me in.
I stood in the kitchen doorway as she dumped the bag and keys, filled the kettle and fetched a pair of mugs from the cupboard. Then, perhaps sensing my awkwardness, she told me to “Go sit down, I’ll bring it through.”
I did as I was told, tiptoeing through the house like I shouldn’t have been there. Which I shouldn’t have, obviously. I’d skipped the office and come straight here, although I had at least called and left a message with Dan to tell Kevin to tell Jenny where I was, if and when she asked. I’d wanted to speak to Annie, too, but she wasn’t in; apparently she’d called at four in the morning to say she was sick. None of that surprised me, though I did feel a small twinge of guilt, partly for being of the mind to drag her into something that would probably get her into trouble, but mostly for having been a bitch to her the previous afternoon. If I’d driven her to a drinking binge, then I only had myself to blame for having to lone-wolf it this morning. But even so: bollocks.
When Carla eventually joined me, she sat on the edge of the settee, back straight, composed, and smiled. It was the first smile I’d seen from her, and the difference it made to her face was striking. She looked youthful, relaxed—far from the wound-up bundle of tension and snot that was the picture of her in my mind.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead,” although that strategy hasn’t always worked in my favor in the past.
“It’s fin
e,” she said. “I’d have been back in twenty minutes, anyway—I’m not doing a big shop today.”
I returned her smile, and nodded gently, and then felt self-conscious and stared into my coffee. “How are you feeling?” I asked her.
She huffed a little half laugh and said, “Well, the bruises still hurt, but I haven’t got any new ones.”
I looked at her sleeves, pulled down over her hands as they had been on Tuesday. I’d seen what they were hiding that night. She’d be sore for a time yet.
“It’s funny,” she said. “Usually when someone loses her husband, after the funeral it’s like a barrage of Hallmark moments, isn’t it? Anyone who’ll listen. Out come the photo albums. It’s all sunsets and wedding dresses and ‘Did I ever tell you about the time we...?’ and ‘Oh, look at him, he was always having so much fun!’” She sipped her tea and pointed at my lap, or rather, I quickly gathered, the seat beneath it. “Richard strangled me until I passed out, right there,” she said, and looked at the coffee table where I now rested my mug. “One time he pushed me over and I cut my head open on the corner of that table. I lost count of the number of times he raped me on this carpet. I can’t remember us ever...” She hesitated, smiled apologetically, waited for me to nod my approval before finishing her sentence. “I can’t remember the last time I had sex because I wanted to, when I wasn’t crying, or screaming, or trying to keep the weight off whatever part of me he’d just broken. Those are my wake stories—not the happy memories. I don’t think I even have any of those anymore, not yet. But I will, because that man isn’t here to make sure I don’t.” She smiled again, and this time there was a light in her eyes. “So I’m sorry if I don’t seem very helpful, but I’m glad Richard’s dead. Just...relieved, you know? And it doesn’t matter that you know that or how terrible it makes me sound, because we were both right here when it happened. All I care about, Ali, are my daughters. And I know you think Erica did it, and that she killed your friends and whoever else, but I’ll never, ev—”
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