Trick of the Dark

by Val McDermid

  'She had allowed others to have sway over her in the past, when she walked in the ways of sin. But after she accepted Jesus as her saviour, she was wholly a woman of God. Her faith was her rock. So she wouldn't have fallen for something that ran against her beliefs.'

  Charlie nodded, pretending she was satisfied. 'Well, Mr Calder, I'm sorry to have wasted your time. It looks to me as if it's very unlikely that your wife was a victim of the man we're interested in.'

  He bowed his head. 'Thank God for that. Against all the odds, I still pray that one day she will walk through that door, ready to be forgiven.'

  Charlie stood up. 'I do so hope you're right,' she said, wishing with all her heart that Jenna had really run off with Rinks van Leer. Or anybody, really. Unfortunately, she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. But she was done with Howard Calder. Wherever the answers to her questions lay, it wasn't in this shrivelled excuse for a home.

  14

  Whatever had happened in Roker twenty years before was buried deep, that much was certain. But having come all this way, Charlie couldn't resist taking a look at the place where Jenna Calder had held her secret trysts with her Dutchman. The Riverdale flats were only a mile from the Calder house, but they were down on the seafront. It felt as if they inhabited another world.

  From a distance, Charlie could see a brown brick building with faintly art deco lines. Big windows looked out at the heavy swell of the sea. Not a bad place to see out your final years, she thought. But as she drew closer, she realised the place was less charming than it first appeared. A six-foot hoarding extended round the perimeter, and the ground-floor windows and entrance were boarded up. Charlie parked opposite, noticing a sign plastered across the hoarding: Riverdale. Soon to be a new development of luxury seaview apartments. And above that, an artist's impression of a generic modern block of flats, all glass and steel. If she'd come a few weeks later, this would have been a building site, all trace of the old Riverdale block gone for ever.

  Charlie crossed the road and walked round the perimeter of the hoarding. At the back of the site, away from the road, a pair of gates were held together by a padlock and chain. Charlie shook the padlock, but it was properly fastened. There was some give in the gates; if she'd been the skinny type, like Lisa or Jay herself, she'd have maybe managed to squeeze through. But Charlie had too much padding for that sort of adventure. She walked on and to her surprise, as she rounded the corner, she saw that someone had forced the panels of the hoarding apart. They'd been propped against each other, but there was a clearly trodden mud slick that pointed the way to the breach.

  Out of curiosity, Charlie separated the boards and stepped inside. A few yards of churned-up grass separated the hoarding from the flats. The back entrance was covered with a sheet of corrugated iron, but it was juddering in the wind. When she got closer, she could see that the nails fastening it to the frame had been pulled out around one corner and halfway up the side. It was possible to get inside by crouching down and pulling the iron sheet back.

  Charlie took out her keys. Maria had given her a tiny but powerful torch at Christmas. Charlie hadn't seen the point but she'd fixed it to her keyring to humour Maria. She turned it on, surprised at how much light it delivered. She found herself in a hallway that smelled of damp, cigarettes and urine. A small scurry off ahead brought rats to mind, which made her think twice about going any further. 'Get a grip,' she told herself sternly. 'They're more afraid of you than you are of them.'

  There were doors to either side of the hallway; 1D and 1E. She moved forward cautiously, noticing that the door of 1E was ajar. She pushed it open and shone her torch inside. A pile of crumpled beer cans, some strong cider bottles. Cigarette butts and pizza boxes. It looked more like teenagers than anything more sinister.

  Round the corner, and there were the stairs. Solid, made of some kind of composite stone. Charlie climbed past the first floor and on up. As she approached the second floor, the stairwell grew appreciably lighter. She realised that only the windows on the first two floors were boarded up; on the second and third floors, light was still penetrating the building. Now she could see all the doors to the flats were open, the area round the locks bearing witness to blows from some kind of heavy hammer. Someone had clearly gone through the place checking if there was anything worth nicking.

  The lock on 4C had given way to violence just like the others. Not quite sure why she was bothering with this, Charlie stepped inside the narrow hallway and continued to what had probably been the living room. It had spectacular views of the promenade and the beach, waves pounding now in a white foam. There was no furniture, but the carpet still held ancient indentations, a presumption of chairs, tables and sideboard. There was a gaping hole in the chimney breast where the fireplace had been and pale squares on the walls where pictures had hung. Charlie looked round the ghost of a room and tried to imagine what it had looked like.

  It struck her that there was something odd about the proportions of the room. On one side of the chimney breast was a deep alcove lined with shelves. For books or ornaments, presumably. But there was no symmetry. The other side was flush with the chimney breast itself. At the bottom of the shelving, there was a small metal grid in the floor, where presumably the underfloor heating had vented. But there was no corresponding vent on the other side. It was peculiar, particularly for a period of architecture so obsessed with proportion and balance. Intrigued, Charlie walked out of the room and into the next-door room, to see if a previous occupant had made some alterations, perhaps to create a bedroom cupboard or extra space in a bathroom. But the room backing on to the living room was perfectly plain, completely lacking in recesses or cupboards.

  Charlie went back and looked at the wall again. It was odd, no doubt about it. You wouldn't notice it once the room was furnished because it was the logical place for the TV. And there were indeed indentations on the carpet to indicate that's what had been there. But now the room was empty, it was definitely strange. She walked out of the flat and crossed the hall to 4D, which ought to be the mirror image of 4C.

  And it was. Except that both sides of the chimney breast were occupied with shelves. This was definitely an anomaly.

  Back in 4C, Charlie started tapping on the mystery wall. It didn't sound as solid as the other walls, but equally, it didn't sound completely hollow either. Somewhere in between, she thought. She stared at the wall for a long time, considering. The block was about to be demolished. It wasn't like she'd be damaging anything of value. On the other hand, why on earth was she even considering breaking down a false wall in a derelict flat?

  Even as she chewed this over, she was walking back out of the room. The bedroom had been empty. The bathroom likewise. Not even a towel rail she could wrestle off the wall. The kitchen had been stripped of appliances, but in an attempt to remove a granite worktop, somebody had screwed up. Weakened by the sink cut-out, a half-metre chunk of granite had broken off. It was a dozen centimetres wide at the narrow end, about thirty-five at the other. A perfect Stone Age club. Charlie lifted it up and hefted it in her hand. Yes, she could take a decent swing with that.

  There was something liberating about the thought of physical violence after the frustrations of the past couple of weeks. Charlie took up a two-fisted stance like a baseball hitter, side on to the false wall. Bending her knees, she raised the club and swung at the wall. With her full weight behind it, the granite hit with a soft crunch, splitting the floral wallpaper and making a sharp-edged depression. A second swing, more splitting paper and a bigger dent. Doggedly, Charlie kept swinging. By the fifth blow, it was clear that the wall was simply plasterboard covered in several layers of wallpaper. After eight or nine whacks with the granite, she broke through. The air that drifted out towards her had a stale, sweetish odour, but it wasn't unpleasant. Through the small hole she'd created at shoulder height there was nothing to be seen, so Charlie grasped the edge of the plasterboard and pulled with all her strength. A chunk came away in her hands, reve
aling a couple of shelves, one at chest height, the other at waist height. They appeared to be empty.

  'Why would you do that?' Charlie said aloud. 'Why seal up a perfectly good set of bookshelves?' She gripped the bottom rim of the plasterboard, hands wide apart, and put her back into it. With a loud rip of wallpaper, most of the lower part of the false wall came loose, making Charlie stagger backwards at the sudden release. Steadying herself, she recovered her footing, looking at the gap she'd revealed.

  And then she understood why.

  15

  The only mummies Charlie had ever seen had been in the Manchester Museum. And they'd been in glass cases. But this macabre relic wasn't some sanitised museum exhibit. Its connection to modern life was all too vivid - the faded tatters of contemporary clothing, the carry-on-sized suitcase rammed against the far wall. Charlie tried to concentrate on those superficialities rather than the all too human remains themselves. But the body demanded her attention.

  The skin was dark brown, pulled tight over the bones. The soft tissue had desiccated, giving the head the appearance of a bizarre work of Brit Art-a skull covered in paper-thin leather, the teeth a gleaming grin, the eye sockets dark empty horrors, the hair still hanging lank and coarse. The limbs resembled beef jerky, muscles contracted and contorted into a parody of the foetal position.

  At first, she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Then she remembered the description of what Jenna Calder had been wearing on the day she disappeared. The rotted remains of denim jeans hung around her hips. The pink polyester blouse was almost intact, though discoloured where it had been pressed against the flesh. A brown raincoat was bundled under the mummy, its belt buckle clearly visible. The body might look like something that had been there for centuries, but Charlie was in no doubt that this was Jay Stewart's mother. 'Oh my God,' she said, taking an involuntary step backwards and letting go of the plasterboard she'd been clinging to. Without taking her eyes off her gruesome discovery, she reached into her pocket for her phone.

  'I don't think so.'

  The voice came from behind her. Recognising it, Charlie spun round, disbelief on her face, wanting her eyes to prove her ears wrong. 'Lisa?'

  'Hand over the phone, Charlie.' Lisa came in from the hallway.

  Charlie couldn't take in what she was seeing. Lisa Kent, in black jeans and black leather jacket, holding something in her right hand that pointed towards Charlie. 'What are you talking about?' she said, uncomprehending.

  'Just hand over the phone.' Lisa gestured with her left hand. 'Come on, Charlie, this is not a game.' She held up her right hand. 'This is pepper. It's very painful as well as disabling. I don't want to use it yet, but I will if I have to. Now, give me the phone.'

  Bewildered and baffled, clueless as to what she was dealing with, Charlie chose to cooperate. 'I don't understand,' she said, stretching out to put the phone in Lisa's hand. She noticed that Lisa was wearing tight-fitting latex gloves. 'Are you feeling OK, Lisa? What's going on here?'

  Lisa tucked the phone in a jacket pocket. 'I'm feeling absolutely fine, Charlie. You were right about those deaths, you know. They were murders.' She spoke conversationally, as if they were chatting in her living room. 'Step backwards, please. I'm not comfortable with you this close to me. And not for the pitiful reasons you'd wish for,' she added, a cruel edge to her words.

  Charlie took a step backwards, caught unawares by the sensation of the world tilting beneath her feet. 'I don't understand, ' she repeated. 'What's all this got to do with you? Why are you here?'

  'You're ridiculously easy to follow,' Lisa said, the chatty tone back in place again. 'Do you ever look in your rear-view mirror? I knew you'd turn up at Howard Calder's eventually, and I just stayed on your tail. I hoped you wouldn't find anything to pursue. But I came prepared to deal with it if you did.'

  'But why? What has any of this got to do with you?'

  'You really don't get it, do you? All those bodies, those people who stood between Jay and happiness - it wasn't Jay who killed them. I told you: she hasn't got it in her to kill. She needed me to do that for her.' There was no hint of madness in Lisa's sweet smile, which was all the more unnerving.

  'Jay got you to kill for her?' Charlie couldn't make sense of this at all.

  'No, no. I did it willingly. I did it because it was the only way I could show her how much I love her.' There was something almost radiant about Lisa now. 'She needs to be looked after. But the love between us is so strong, so combustible that she's afraid of us being together. I have to keep proving how much she needs me.'

  'You said you hardly knew her. That your paths had crossed at Oxford, but that was all.' The one thing Charlie could cling to in the shifting kaleidoscope around her was her professional skill. Keep her talking, she told herself. If Lisa was talking, she wasn't acting.

  Lisa gave a rueful smile and a half-shrug. 'I lied. We were lovers. I was her first. And she was mine. It was so strong, so amazing. Completely transforming.'

  A chill ran through Charlie. How in God's name could she have missed this madness? She resisted the urge to shudder. 'I've read the interviews, Lisa. She doesn't mention you. Her first girlfriend was called Louise.'

  Lisa's eyelids fluttered in a series of blinks. 'That's right. I was Louise then. But Jay transformed me. And now I'm Lisa. We don't talk about that transformation, you see. Here's the thing, Charlie. Some things are too powerful to share with the world,' she said quickly. 'To know something like the electricity there was between Jay and me is to transcend normal reality. It's impossible to explain to people who have only a mundane experience of the world.'

  'People like me, you mean?'

  Lisa laughed merrily. 'Exactly, Charlie. Now you're beginning to understand how I couldn't have a relationship with you.'

  'As opposed to Nadia,' Charlie said tartly. 'I tell you, Lisa, I am so over you.' As she said it, Charlie knew it was nothing less than the truth. Being threatened and held hostage had a way of putting relationships in a whole new perspective.

  Lisa looked momentarily cross. 'That's really of no account to me, Charlie. And I told you already, Nadia was about sex. The satisfaction of a physical urge. There was in no sense a relationship between us. How could there be?'

  'I suppose not. But I don't entirely understand how you went from being Jay's lover to being her avenging angel. Presumably she dumped you?' Careful, Charlie, she told herself. Don't make her too angry. Just enough to unsettle her.

  'We separated because we couldn't handle the extreme forces between us. My life since then has been about waiting for her to be ready. And taking care of her so she can have the best possible life until that time arrives.'

  'And that means killing people who stand in her way?'

  Again that brilliant smile. 'Why not? It's not like they were on the same plane as Jay and me.'

  'Does she know about this?' Charlie tried to sound conversational too, to hide her intention to understand the pathology of what she was confronted with.

  Lisa nodded. 'Naturally. It's important that she understands I'm still as committed to her as I ever was. We remain the keeper of each other's secrets.'

  'Each other's secrets?' The echo question. Always a powerful tool. Even with those who had crossed the line.

  'She knows I kill for her when it's necessary. And I always knew about this.' Lisa waved vaguely at the alcove and its contents.

  'You knew she'd killed her mother?'

  Lisa reared back, an expression of outrage on her face. 'Killed her mother? Don't be ridiculous. It was Howard who killed her mother. He'd found out about Rinks van Leer and he followed Jenna here that last morning. He was determined she should die rather than violate his mad Christian principles. By the time Jay arrived to talk to her mother, Jenna was dead. He'd whacked her on the back of the head with his cricket bat. Which he then left lying on the floor beside her.' Lisa rolled her eyes. 'Well, duh. So Jay arrives on the scene in time to see him legging it up the prom. She's scared he's com
e to put a stop to her escape plans so she runs up to the flat here. And she sees her life falling apart before her eyes. Mother dead, stepfather about to be arrested for murder. What's going to happen to her? The sky's going to fall on her head. The police, the church, the media. She's not going to be sitting her A-levels and going to Oxford in the middle of all that, is she? The lesser of two evils is a runaway mother, right? Am I right?' She paused, waiting for a response.

  'Absolutely,' Charlie said. This wasn't the time to try and pick holes in what felt like the authentic version. 'So she hid the body?'

  'Exactly.' Lisa sounded as if she were congratulating a particularly slow pupil. 'There were still leftover building materials all over the place. Jay had spent enough of her life in a makeshift existence to know the basics of construction. She took out the bottom shelves and walled up Jenna's body with her suitcase.' Lisa peered round Charlie. 'I don't think she expected to turn her into a mummy, though.' She frowned. 'When she told me about it, it sounded as if she'd sealed Jenna in some airtight environment. But those heating vents, and the chimney - they must have dried out the corpse and carried away any smells up into the roof space.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Old people smell anyway, don't they? You wouldn't think twice about a bit of stink in an old person's flat.'

  'She told you about it?'

  Lisa nodded eagerly. 'That's how special our relationship is. She's never told anyone else, but one night when we were in bed together, she told me. I had to find a way to repay that trust. So when Jess Edwards threatened her, I did what had to be done.' Again, that smile, so normal it was recalibrating Charlie's measure of crazy. 'The same with that Swedish programmer. I can't even remember his name now.' She shook her head, frowning. 'How odd.' She shrugged. 'Anyway, that was a real help to Jay because I got my hands on all his work too. She told me I'd proved my point, that I didn't have to do this any more. But when I saw her that afternoon last summer in Oxford at Schollie's and she told me about running into Magda and how that had made her feel, I could see she wasn't going to be happy unless she had her sweet little bride to play with for a while. And I can't stand to see her unhappy.'