The memory of the last time he’d done this flooded his brain, and he took a moment to steady himself. He focused on the strand of blue police tape hanging limply from one end of the crossbar, dirty and rumpled no doubt from the dozen or so intervening visits by crime scene techs and detectives; aside from the clear blue sky, it was the only tangible reminder that this place was different now.
He walked the gate aside and let it hang, took a long look at the fifty yards of driveway he could see before it curved away into the woods. He scanned the trees to either side, squinting between shadows and shafts of dusty sunlight. He listened to the wood pigeons cooing among the branches, and turned to follow the rustle of an adder as it melted into the shade of a log beside the track. He stepped aside as Jenny let off the brake and the car rolled between the gateposts. Then he took a breath, strolled around to the passenger side, settled back into the car, and said, “Okay. Let’s go take a look.”
Jenny didn’t seem nervous at all.
Chapter 27
The caravan had been occupied, and recently. The bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled and kicked aside, one pillow on the floor. Someone was a restless sleeper.
A mug containing half an inch of tea, curdled and skinned but not yet moldy, sat on the table in the lounge.
In the kitchenette, a plate, knife and fork were soaking in cold water in the sink. On the counter, a jumble of groceries—tea bags, bread, biscuits, sugar, a bag of apples—sat opened and toppled in the puddle of the carrier bag that had been peeled down around them in situ. In the fridge below, I found fresh milk, juice, butter, marmalade, bacon, eggs. All the major food groups plus grain, fruit and dairy, John Fairey would have said. John Fairey was an idiot.
I returned to the bag and gently moved aside pasta and a jar of sauce and a pack of croissants, feeling around in the bottom for a receipt. I found it. It was dated three days prior—Tuesday, about an hour after Richard Cockburn’s death.
I made a note to have the store’s CCTV examined, and tucked the receipt into my notebook. However stretched the viewing team was, it would be quicker than sending that mug away for DNA testing.
Mug.
I was thirsty.
* * *
I found a clean mug—there was a cupboard full of them—and made myself a cup of tea. I put it down beside what I presumed to be Erica’s and slid in behind the table.
The view from the picture window beside me was spectacular. I could all but look directly down the cliff face onto the wide golden beach; in the distance, I could see the face itself as it curved seaward. The beach was far from empty, but it had none of the flamboyant bustle I would have expected from a hot day in July. I was half tempted to go down there myself, under the auspices of looking for a sunbathing fugitive. But I knew she wouldn’t be there, so I sipped my tea and stared at the sea, and debated with myself whether it would be a massive waste of my time to just stay here and wait for Erica to show up. “Probably,” was my conclusion.
It was nice here, though. I wondered if Erica would mind if I had something to eat. I was sure Carla had raised her to be hospitable. A full English might be pushing it, but I was sure a couple of slices of toast would be alright.
There was a book on the table. I slid it across to me and read the cover. It carried a picture of a young woman on a country road, staring purposefully over her shoulder at an unseen threat. It was called You Can’t Hide. The Independent called it “a captivating thriller.” I took a mouthful of tea and picked it up to read the blurb on the back, revealing a postcard tucked underneath. A view of a sun-kissed beach crisscrossed with streams. A verdant ridge curling into the sea beneath a beautiful clear blue sky. A caption: Three Cliffs Bay.
I flipped it over. A message inscribed in the bottom left-hand corner. E: Not safe here. Take care of Annie.
The card was addressed to Annie Fisher. I was now covered in tea.
* * *
I bolted from the caravan as fast as my fucked-up stupid leg would carry me, checking my phone five times before I got back to the car as though any ten square yards of clifftop were any more likely than the next to give me a signal.
I strapped in, hit the starter and sprayed gravel over three or four parked cars as I gunned it, silently apologizing to everyone whose alarm was now going off, and to everyone whose relaxing day at the beach had just become a lot louder.
I punched the postcode from the envelope into the sat nav as I navigated the single-track lane back to the main road, far faster than I knew was sensible. I may have run over a rabbit, I’m not sure.
As soon as a bar of signal appeared on the Bluetooth display, I shouted at the car to dial Annie’s number, swerving around a tractor and narrowly missing an oncoming scooter as it rang. And rang. And rang.
I hung up and tried Kevin. Same result.
“Call Jenny,” I barked. Her voicemail cut in right away: “Hi, this is Jen Riley. I can’t get to the phone at the moment, but do leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I’m free.”
Bland, I thought. Just like you, Jen Riley. Bland! “Jen, it’s Ali. Call me as soon as you get this.”
I used my hazards and horn to bully a Volvo out of the way. A fucking pool car would have been nice. I voice-dialed the incident room and got through to Dan Hooper, who always seemed to have one, the bastard.
“Dan Hooper,” he said casually as I misjudged a turn and bounced two wheels over the grass verge.
“Dan, it’s Ali. Who spoke to Annie Fisher this morning?”
“Fucked if I know.”
“Okay, never mind that. I’m going to give you an address and I need local uniform there in a hurry. You ready?”
“Ali, what’s going on? Are you alright?”
“Just write this down.” I read him the address. “I need two cars to assist with a welfare check, but I need them quietly, and I need them a hundred meters either side of the house. Got it?”
“Two cars for a welfare check?”
“Please?”
“Okay, I’ve got it. Is Jen with you?”
My heart skipped. “No, why?”
“Oh, she stropped off somewhere with Kev this morning and we can’t get either of them on the phone.”
“They left together?”
“Yeah. You don’t think they’re—”
“No.” I hit the brakes for a stop sign. Checked both ways. There was a car coming. I went anyway, and was treated to a blast of horn and a wanker sign.
“Fuck off,” I spat.
“Oh, right.”
“Not you, Dan. Please, just sort this for me and I’ll ring you back as soon as I get there, okay?”
“Ali, are you on your ow—”
I cut him off, and floored it.
* * *
Apparently Dan did have it, because in the twenty-four minutes it took me to arrive at my destination, he’d managed to corral two patrol cars from somewhere and position them discreetly two hundred yards apart in Church Road. It wasn’t all good, though, because my leg had cramped up by then, I couldn’t brake properly and I knocked the mirror off one of them. There goes my pension.
I managed to stop the car with the handbrake, and extricate myself with a modicum of grace. I limped over to the squad car I’d just crashed into, wherein the two guys in uniform were staring at me in disdainful disbelief. “Sorry about that,” I said, dangling my warrant card in front of the open driver’s window with one hand and passing the severed mirror through with the other. “Hi, I’m Ali.”
The two men nodded silently. The one in the passenger seat frowned and tossed the mirror over his shoulder into the back of the car. He looked like a man who just couldn’t even.
“Okay,” I said. “So listen, there’s nothing to get hyped up about. I’m going to carry out a quick welfare check, and if everything’s okay I’ll come back and buy you
all an ice cream, but if you hear me shouting, or if anyone comes barreling out of that house, then just...be there, alright?”
The driver nodded. “Are you expecting anyone to do that?”
“Fucking hope not,” I said, and took out my phone. “What’s your number?”
He recited it, and I dialed it and hung up so I’d have it to hand. “Cool. What are your names?”
“Jim.”
“Col.”
“Great. Can you let the other guys know what’s going on?”
“Will do,” Col said.
I didn’t like this frosty air of monosyllabic disapproval. “Let’s not wrong-foot this,” I said. “I appreciate you getting here so fast, and I’m sorry about the car.” I smiled as best I could and gave them two thumbs-up and Jesus Christ I was overacting and why did this shit always need to be so bloody awkward?
I walked away, pausing to turn my engine off, which I’d forgotten to do. Apart from the hedge behind which Col and whatever the other one’s name was had concealed their car, there was no cover for me to approach the house, but by that point I didn’t care.
I strode the remaining seventy-five yards, focusing on the birdsong to tune out the blood rushing around my head as I scanned the front of Annie’s cottage.
Two windows at the bottom, two up top. Door to the left at the head of the driveway. Tatty Renault parked there. Three other cars parked in this stretch of the road, all empty. I nodded at the two women in the far patrol car, and stepped into Annie’s drive.
The house looked quiet, empty. The windows were all closed, the curtains half-drawn. I couldn’t see anything inside. Fifteen feet to the door. Nothing happening. I thought about trying to call her again, but I realized my hands were shaking. Come on, Ali, sort yourself out.
I reached the door, and listened. Heard nothing. Took a deep breath, steadied my fist and hammered three times.
Something shattered. A short, sharp crash from inside the house, between the second and third knocks.
I pounded on the door again. “Annie?”
My stomach flipped, my temples pounding now. I took a step back, ready to kick the door, but my right leg was jelly. Something at the corner of my eye, a glint behind the window.
I thumped on the wood again, and grabbed the handle and shook and twisted it and shouldered the door and it swung inward, sending me stumbling into a darkened living room, clipping a tall table by the door and scattering its contents on the floor.
Annie Fisher was on the sofa, eyes wide, mouth agape, hands raised, squealing, “No no no no no.”
On the coffee table in front of her, a gun.
Chapter 28
It was a house just like any other: a simple, tidy brick-and-flint box, maybe a hundred or so years old, with a quaint little pitched-roof porch and modern double-glazed windows.
Its incongruities, however, were glaring. For one, it was half a mile from the nearest road, and considerably more from the nearest neighbor, set as it was at the edge of a twenty-acre forest clearing.
It also had a detached garage block, wide enough for four cars, its footprint almost as large as the house itself. And along a rutted track, halfway between the house and the tree line, stood a tall barn, its weathered wooden doors ajar, pitch darkness within.
Jenny drew the BMW up to the head of the driveway, a wide gravel square swept and ridged from the tires of a regular stream of heavy vehicles over the past weeks. She swung the car around to face the garage and cut the engine.
Kevin shuddered in his seat, gazing sadly at the patch of gravel in front of the left-hand garage door where, on his last visit, he’d watched a young woman bleed to death, his own blood mingling with the torrential rain that poured down over his face and into his eyes.
“You okay?” Jenny nudged him with her elbow and unclipped her belt.
He nodded. “It looks different.” He wasn’t sure how. The sunshine, maybe.
“You okay to do this, or do you want to stay in the car?”
Yes. Kevin very much wanted to stay in the car, but then what was the point in him being here? “Nah, I’m cool,” he said, and unstrapped himself and stepped out of the car, a chill trickling through him in spite of the heat. He turned around on the spot, taking in the house, the barn, the empty field between and around them, the wall of pines that marked the boundary on all sides. Beyond, he could just make out the hill above the railway line, at the rim of the flint pit—the gateway to those five girls’ grim and lonely resting place.
Kevin reached into the car and took the bunch of keys and the evidence-bagged garage door clicker from the glove box. He pressed each button in turn until both doors clunked and hummed and rolled up and over into the roof. “You ready?”
“I was born ready.”
The garage was empty, save for a few cobwebbed garden tools and a ladder hung on the wall. At the far side, where there’d once been an array of rolling tool chests and a false-backed wooden cupboard, there was now only an open doorway onto a flight of stairs.
Kevin led, feeling around the corner for the light switch and illuminating their descent. He did the same at the bottom and a set of LED spots blinked into life, flooding the room into which Jenny now followed him, digging her nails into her palm and trying not to let her claustrophobia overwhelm her.
In the center of the room, all but filling it, was the cage. Twenty feet square, built from ten-gauge steel wire with a two-and-a-half-inch diamond mesh and one-and-a-quarter-inch channel frame. A door, five feet wide and seven feet tall, with a self-locking mechanism and, somewhere back at headquarters, a reinforced titanium padlock.
Jenny hovered in the doorway as Kevin strolled into the cage. There’d been a metal bedframe bolted to the floor the last time he’d been down here. It was gone now, along with the thick rubber matting and the little en suite in the corner that consisted of a toilet, sink and pull-around curtain. It reminded him now of the booze cage out back of the shop he’d worked in, the summer after school.
“You coming?”
Jenny shook her head, shivered quite noticeably. “No, I can see it,” she said.
He smiled reassuringly, and nodded. “You can’t get shut in,” he said.
She hesitated, took a few deep breaths. Walked shakily to the cage door. Examined the frame as though she might find anything noteworthy. Gave up and stepped through.
Kevin beckoned her to stand beside him in the center of the cage. “Single bed over here—” he pointed “—complete with shackles. Toilet in the corner. He gave her a kettle, a fridge, a microwave, although that was broken.”
“I’ve seen the pictures,” she said.
Of course. This wasn’t her first day on the job. “Pictures are pictures,” he said, and walked to the door. “Here’s what you don’t get from pictures.” He stepped outside, swung the door to. Jangled the keys at her, though he didn’t click it shut.
Jenny froze before she could react, her face rigid with horror.
“The door’s not locked,” he said. “You’re fine, nothing bad’s happening. You’re safe. You can walk out any time you like. Erica couldn’t. She was down here for three months.”
“Kevin, could you open the door, please.”
He stepped aside and swung it back. “What was that? Ten seconds? Imagine three months, and tell me you wouldn’t come out shooting.”
* * *
“Don’t ever pull a trick like that on me again.”
“You needed to see it.”
“Yes, fine, and you made your point. Thank you.”
Kevin unlocked the front door of the house and opened it onto a bare whitewashed lobby. A door to the right, beside the stairs. A door to the left that led into the kitchen. A third dead ahead: a storeroom, now empty. He showed Jenny through to the living room, where they stood for a moment, watching the dust swirl in the splint
ers of sunlight that poked in through gaps and cracks in the boards covering the windows. A thousand pinpoints of light, like disco balls.
There were no seats. What furniture there was had been shuffled to the far corner of the room, ornaments and lamps and books and electronic gizmos stacked around it on the floor.
At Jenny’s feet, one of two circular imprints in the cream-colored carpet, the pile lighter and thicker between them—the back feet of a settee. There were no front feet.
A wide rectangle had been cut from the carpet and underlay, revealing a trace of a stain on the concrete floor beneath.
Kevin crossed the room, fetched a low side table and placed it between the settee marks, two legs on carpet, two on concrete. “Have a seat,” he said.
Jenny looked from Kevin to the table and back again and sighed heavily, her patience clearly waning. “What did I just say?”
“It’s not a trick.”
She blew a loud breath out through her nose and sat, her feet apart so as not to rest them on the stain. “You don’t have to teach me empathy, you know,” she said. “I’m not a robot.”
“I know.” Kevin leaned against the windowsill and considered his boss, perched awkwardly on a coffee table on the spot where Eli Diaz had been slain on an unseasonably tropical May Day bank holiday. “It’s just...you’ve been jumping to a lot of conclusions lately, and they might look different with a bit of perspective. You know?” She looked up at him, one eyebrow cocked, but in a receptive way, he thought, not threatening. “Ali nearly died on that sofa,” he said, emboldened. “Eli did die, right at your feet. And out there, where you parked the car, that’s where Rachel Murray died. And Kerry Farrow, she was in that cage, just like Erica was, and we don’t know where she died or where she is now, but you know what? The common denominator isn’t Erica. It’s Tom Reed, or James Faulkner, or whatever else you want to call him. And I’ll bet good money the same goes for those five women up on that marsh, and the more we get caught up trying to pin things on that girl, the farther we get from holding him to account for what he did. It’s disrespectful to those women, it’s disrespectful to Ali and it’s disrespectful to the four officers we’ve lost to this case. So far.” He shuddered a little at that last bit, but he didn’t think Jenny had noticed. She was staring at Eli Diaz’s bloodstain and chewing her tongue. “I need a piss,” he said. “I’ll meet you back at the car.” Then he left the room before she could give him the bollocking he’d just asked for.
Dead Girls Page 18
