“Actually, I don’t,” I said.
Carla held the word in her mouth for several long seconds, studying my face, presumably for a sign that I was playing a trick. I held her stare, but I thought about what I was going to have for dinner instead of what my eyes were doing. One self-conscious twitch would have blown it. “You don’t?” she said finally.
I shook my head and swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “No, I don’t. Not personally. I’ll be honest with you—” or semihonest, anyway “—most of the people I work with disagree. They think she’s an accessory at the very least. But listen to me, Carla, very carefully. The man they think she’s colluding with—the man I believe held your daughter prisoner for three months in a cage, and murdered my friend Eli and put me in hospital—that man is not her friend, and he’s going to catch up with her before I do unless you help me. I’m not playing you here, Carla. This isn’t a trick. I’ve got plenty of questions for Erica, but my absolute priority is keeping her alive, and whatever you think, whether you think she really did kill three policemen, whether you think it was her who slashed your husband’s throat, I honestly couldn’t give less of a shit right now, because that man will cut the life right out of her without a second thought. And I don’t think it was Erica who did it. I think it was him, and that means he was right here outside this house two days ago. And we both know Erica was here too, Carla, so what I really need right now is for you to help me save her life.” I reached into my pocket and drew out Edith’s card and placed it on the table in front of her. “Call that number,” I said. “She’s a criminal lawyer, a good one, and a personal friend. She’ll represent you free of charge, and if you do everything she says, then all of this’ll go away, I promise you that, but the condition is that you do everything I say, right now. So tell me.”
Carla had curled in on herself, hugging her mug and drawing her knees up to her chest. I gave her a moment to process what I’d said, half worrying that I’d gone a bit too far as she gazed at the school portrait of Erica on the shelf way behind me and chewed her lip. Eventually, she sighed and drained her tea, and put down her empty mug, and said, “I don’t suppose you want to buy a load of old brass shit, do you?”
I waited her out. Listened to the tick of a clock that I couldn’t see. Thought about calling Edith when I got home. Stared into Carla’s eyes and willed her to tell me the fucking truth. And finally, she did.
* * *
A hundred miles an hour isn’t inherently troubling; speed in itself never killed anyone. When the roads are full of halfwits incapable of using their mirrors, however, and when your right hip is numb and you don’t know where your foot is, and you can all but hear the disapproving tuts of other road users as you elbow your way past them in the inside lane, it starts to feel stressful. When you’re only doing a hundred out of deference to some spurious notion that a hundred is Too Fast—a measure of bravado, an automatic ban—and the urgency is such that nothing short of warp speed is fast enough, it’s exponentially more so.
And I know there’s no logic to it. I wasn’t racing against time, not really. There was no countdown. No tangible evidence of any immediate danger. That Man was not, as far as I knew, advancing upon Erica’s bolt-hole at that very moment. If he knew where she was, then chances were he’d already been and done and gone again, and I was risking my life and others’ in a frantic chase to recover a two-day-dead body. And if he didn’t, and hadn’t, then Erica was probably sitting in her vest and knickers watching Pointless and eating a Rustlers Rib, and I might as well just stick to seventy. What I’m saying is, this scene contains no suspense.
And yet by the time I’d circled the city I was swimming in sweat and tears, and my throat was hoarse from yelling. The open roads out toward the Broads were no better; I had four near misses overtaking tractors and trucks and casual motorists seemingly with nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there. As the lanes narrowed coastward I took blind bends at lethal speed, missing oncoming vehicles by inches, my fingers white around a wheel I could all but feel bending in my terrified grip.
The car was earth-brown to its door handles and smelled of hot rubber and clutch smoke when I finally brought it to a stop in a shower of gravel and threw myself out, seat belt buckle cracking off the window as I discarded it, door bouncing back off its hinges and thumping me in my bad hip. I stumbled but didn’t fall, gritting my teeth against the bolt of pain that shot up my side and rattled my teeth. Now was not the time for this.
Behind me, a row of old prefab bungalows followed a narrow track along the clifftop. I couldn’t remember which of them I was looking for, but Carla had drawn me a diagram across two pages of my notebook, and I’d wedged my phone in to mark the page. That was all the phone was good for; I had nothing even resembling a signal. Emergency calls only, it said, which made my stomach flip.
I turned side-on to the searing sun and righted the map with the sea on the left and the track straight ahead, and surveyed the houses. Postwar scaled-down ranch-style affairs, each different but somehow the same: all porches and woodworm and dusty glass, muted yellow or blue or might-have-once-been-white. The first two had cars parked on their lawns. The third had an empty, depressed look, like no one had crossed its threshold in a decade. I didn’t like it. The silence seemed louder than the roar of breaking waves down below, and my body was racked with chills. I told myself the breeze was chilling my damp shirt, but it was a lie; there was no breeze. I was just afraid.
Carla’s map, though, was not frightening. It was drawn in pencil, with smooth, confident strokes and beautifully to scale. I could see the gap in the houses, the plot she’d boundary-marked with bold lines, a hundred yards from the car, and so, taking a few deep breaths and telling myself everything was fine, I started to walk.
The thought did cross my mind, at that point, that I might have been wrong, that Erica’s innocence was only a matter of faith, and that I was the only one who had any. There was every chance that she was watching me, just waiting for me to blunder within striking distance and expose my throat. But I didn’t believe that, not right then. And my legs certainly didn’t; the right was too preoccupied with trying to function as a leg, and the left was busy doing both of their work, and before I’d had time to consider their conspiracy of betrayal against my mounting trepidation, they’d carried me to the edge of the empty lot.
Erica’s father’s static caravan was, as her mother’s diagram predicted, broadside to the sea within feet of the cliff edge. There was no way to approach without being seen from one of the three wide windows along its flank. With an open cornfield at my back, I was as conspicuously exposed as if I’d been carrying a flag and an air horn. At first scan, though, there didn’t appear to be much of a threat. There were no vehicles on or close to the wide grassy plot, no faces in any of the windows that I could see, no sign of movement anywhere within my line of sight.
I scanned the borders of the neighboring plots. They were marked by scruffy rows of weed and shrub and a low single-wire fence. The bungalows on either side were as exposed as I was—no trees, no bushes, no piles of anything that might adequately conceal even a crouching, tightly bunched assailant. No tension in the still air. No hairs erect on the back of my neck. Nothing to stop my legs from pressing on.
It would have been neither a shock nor a surprise had I been pushed off the cliff as I limped around the perimeter of the caravan. I was more than aware of the irresponsibility of my actions as I checked again for the phone signal I knew I didn’t have and stood three feet from a lethal, rocky drop, staring at the map, and the mobile home, and the beautiful blue of the sea and the sky and the perfect golden sand on the beach, and the note in my pad that read Key in l/h pocket.
There was no one home; that much was obvious, even before I thumped on the door and all of the windows and called Erica’s name and peered into, under and all around the caravan. But someone had been, and recently. There were dishes i
n the sink and the bed was unmade, and that was all the probable cause I decided I needed, so I dug out Carla’s key, complete with its old, corroded RAC fob as retrieved from behind a drawer in her kitchen, and steadied my breathing, and rubbed some feeling into my right thigh, and let myself in.
Chapter 26
“That fucking bitch! Who the fuck does she think she is?”
Kevin moved his hands away from his tightly closed eyes, dragging them hard across his face and through his hair to the back of his neck, where he massaged himself with a groan as Jenny swept random items of stationery into her desk drawer, just so she could slam it shut. “I’m staying out of it,” he said.
“The fuck you are. You’re supposed to be her partner. What’s going on with her? And what the fuck does ‘Gone to find Erica’ mean?”
He shook his head and unscrewed his eyes. “I’ve barely worked with her. Lowry put us together about three days before she got hurt.”
“But you’re mates, right?”
Kevin blew out a sigh, and shrugged. A week ago, he’d have said yes. A week ago, he’d have taken a bullet for Ali Green, although the one opportunity he’d had to do just that, he’d spent rolling around on the floor with the top of his head split open. But now? “You know what she’s been through,” he said. “You can’t expect her to be...”
“Be what?” Jenny came around her desk and perched on the edge, ready to feed Kevin whatever prompt he needed to spill the beans. “Herself? A good copper? Anything other than a liability?”
“That’s not fair,” he snapped. “You don’t know her.” He bit his tongue, apprehensive of his tone, but pride swelled in him just the same.
Jenny nodded. “So tell me. You like her, right? Respect her?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s with all the frost? The pair of you haven’t made eye contact in days, so there’s clearly something not right. What did she do, turn you down?”
Kevin felt his heart speed up, and made an instinctive grab for his ring finger before he could stop himself. “What do you mean?” he spat, knowing it was a redundant question but happy to bat the ball back into Jenny’s court regardless.
She didn’t answer—just sat there, fiddling with her stapler and staring at him with a cocked eyebrow.
He folded. “There’s nothing like that,” he said. “I’m married, and she’s...” What, exactly? Not interested? Not his type? Not into men? He didn’t even know; he was just scrabbling for evidence of propriety, although Jenny hadn’t asked for any. He knew he was protesting too much, that he should have just gamely laughed and said, “Ha ha, yeah, that’s it,” appending an eye roll and a rapid change of subject.
Or should he? Maybe he’d actually played this perfectly, taking one for the team entirely by accident. It wouldn’t be the first time. He hung his head and closed his eyes again, blocking out Jenny’s stare and wondering whether he could make himself blush.
He couldn’t, but Jenny seemed to accept his answer, at least for now. “That’s tough,” she said. “Believe me, I know. I’ve had my fair share of unrequited crushes.” She gave a nervous laugh, trying to sound companionable, he guessed, but it came off as strained.
Kevin gave the floor a slow nod, confused thoughts trickling through his brain. “Can we not?” he said finally.
She rolled her eyes and changed tack. “So,” she said. “What do you think? Do you think she’s right? Do you think I am too objective?”
Oh God. What part of “I’m staying out of it” didn’t she understand? Kevin shrugged in spite of himself, and met her stare. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard for me to be objective, isn’t it? I’ve met Erica, once, when she cracked me over the head and threatened to shoot me, but whether or not that means I think she’s behind all of this is another matter.”
“And do you?”
That was the million-pound question, wasn’t it? “I don’t know,” he said. “Do I think she somehow drove Reed to kill those girls? No, probably not. I think the man’s exactly what Ali says he is. I think he probably... I’ve forgotten the word. Coerced?”
Jenny nodded and gestured for him to continue.
“I think he probably coerced her into helping him get rid of Fairey and Keith, but that doesn’t mean she killed them.”
“Doesn’t mean she didn’t, either.”
“No. I mean, maybe she’s got that...what’s it called? There’s a name for it, isn’t there? When kidnap victims start sympathizing with the—”
“St—”
“Well, anyway, you know what I mean. I’m not saying she’s innocent, but I’m not saying there isn’t any more to it than she’s guilty, either. And look, she’s five foot four and ten stone, she’s not exactly the Predator. Which, yeah, I know, doesn’t mean she’s not capable of cutting anyone’s throat, but... I don’t know, I’m just not really feeling it. And Ali’s definitely right about one thing.”
Jenny shifted uncomfortably on the desk, her jaw set hard, stapler discarded. “What’s that?” she muttered.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You’re the only one on the team who hasn’t stood in Erica’s shoes. We’ve all done the same courses, right? But Ali was there. I was there. I saw how scared that girl was. I stood in the cage, Jen. And today I stood in a swamp and watched those girls come out of the ground in bin bags. It’s...” He shook out a heavy sigh, felt a sudden tiredness wash over him. The bald spot on his crown was itching. He knew he was crossing a line, but somewhere, deep down and well hidden, it felt good to cross it. He hadn’t crossed a line in a very long time. He threw his hands in the air like he just didn’t care, and scattered the remains of his caution to the wind. “You just don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Silence descended. Jenny watched Kevin through narrowed eyes, her lip trembling just a little, her hands pale where the edge of the desk dug into her palms.
Kevin didn’t know what else to say. He thought about getting up and letting himself out; he figured he was about to be angrily dismissed, anyway. He’d left it too long, though, and the more he thought about what to do, the later and the worse it got until he just felt awkward and small and of a mind to begin systematically questioning all of his life choices, starting from this precise moment and working backward until somebody stopped him.
“Right,” she said, snapping both Kevin and herself out of the moment by springing from the desk and snatching her bag from the floor behind it and striding directly for the door.
Kevin watched her go, thinking about how many seconds he’d wait before following her out of the office, and how nonchalant a face he could pull off in her furious wake.
When she turned back to him, however, there was lightness in her features, and an unsettling hint of a smile on her lips. “Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s fucking do it.”
* * *
Jenny, as it turned out, much to Kevin’s dismay, liked Whitney Houston. A lot. Indeed, she knew all of the words to songs that he’d never even heard before, which made him feel somewhat left out as he watched the verge scroll past in silence. Mercifully, she at least had a pleasant voice.
It was faintly unsettling, though, given his uncertainty as to the mood she was in with him, that she seemed so manically cheerful as she aimed the BMW south, floored the accelerator and belted a power ballad almost directly into his right ear.
Twenty minutes later, she finally put a lid on it, turning the music off and the sat nav volume on as she left the dual carriageway and pointed the car out into the middle of the forest.
“So come on, Kevin.” She shifted in her chair, adjusting to the undulating rhythm of the road. “Talk to me. Tell me something about you. Who’ll be waiting at home when you get in?”
Kevin took a moment to process the abrupt change of pace, and the ringing in his ears. If she was trying to make peace, he thought,
she had a funny way of going about it. “Um...” And it seemed like a strange time to suddenly want to get to know him. If this were a cop movie, he thought, then this was the bit where the rookie partner opened up about her family, right before getting shot. Anyway, “Okay, yeah,” he said, awkwardly, “So, Gemma’s my wife. She’s a fighter controller at Marham.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Seven years. But we’ve been together since high school, pretty much.”
“Oh,” she cooed. “That’s really sweet. Any little ones?”
Kevin winced. If they’d been pushing their luck before, this was going to clinch it. “We’re getting there,” he said. “We’ve been trying for five years, and we just found out...well, it looks like we finally nailed it. And I haven’t told anyone at work yet, so keep it under your hat, alright?”
“I won’t tell a soul,” she said, through a sparkling grin that Kevin thought looked genuinely joyful. “Oh, Kevin, congratulations!”
He let himself smile then, more with pride than anything else. “It was a long five years,” he said. “We needed a lot of...help. You know. Anyway, what about you?”
“Oh, my husband’s a writer,” Jenny laughed. “Or he says he is, anyway. He’s basically a fucking layabout, but there we are. His name’s Kevin, too,” she said, and they laughed at the coincidence, which Kevin half took to mean she thought he was a fucking layabout as well. “Kids are grown up and gone, and he’s basically nocturnal and barely talks to me, anyway. Seriously, I could die tomorrow and it’d take him a week to notice. But at least I get a king-size bed to myself, which is lovely. It’s got a memory foam thing on it. Have you got one of those?”
“No.”
“Oh my God, it makes such a difference. I used to have terrible problems with my back, but not a sausage since I bought that. Really soft. Lovely.”
“That’s—”
The sat nav lady interrupted Jenny’s foreshadowing, instructing her to take a right in half a mile. And a minute later, Kevin was unclipping his seat belt and stepping out of the car and drawing back the bolt on the gate at the foot of That Man’s long, dark, winding driveway.
Dead Girls Page 17
