‘You think I’m diseased, Marta? Worried I’ll give you the clap?’
She runs her fingers lightly across his chest and feels an answering shimmer of muscle contractions up and down his torso. Heat is coming off him in waves. She moves in close, reaches up on tiptoe, her fingers resting on his shoulder, her mouth close enough to his ear to kiss. ‘So-rry, darlink,’ she whispers, amping up the accent: ‘No glove, no love.’
She turns to leave, and he catches her by the wrist, not gently. His eyes burn with dull fury, and red-hot pain flares up her arm. Her heart skips a little; every instinct tells her to fight, but she relaxes her body, turns 180, and allows herself to be drawn into an embrace, arranging her features into an expression of wide-eyed inquisitiveness.
‘Be nice,’ she says. It’s a reminder that Sol will not take it well if he is rough with her.
The light in his eyes seems to flare, then it dies, and he flings her hand away. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘You win.’
‘No, lover,’ she says, patting him lightly on the cheek, ‘we both win.’
She moves to the mirror above the dressing table, arranges her hair, checks her lipstick, using big, bold movements, so he won’t see that her hands are shaking.
3
Afterwards they shower and she sees him out, then she returns to the room and showers again, taking her time, washing all trace of Rob off her skin. She dries carefully, then sits naked at the dressing table to fix her make-up. Her wrist is bruised, but otherwise she is unmarked.
There was never any serious danger: every treatment room in the place is rigged for surveillance. Right now, she’s looking into the lens of a tiny camera built into one of the screws on which the mirror hangs.
In the main office, there is a desk in front of the stockroom door; night or day, one or other of the Henry brothers will always be sitting behind the desk. If neither brother is in the office – well, you should not be, either. This means that nobody else has seen behind the magnolia white door; not the other girls – not even Rob – because Rob might be more important to the boys than she’d realized, but he is still a punter, and if he finds out what’s in there, he won’t like it.
Marta herself has been inside that small windowless room because Sol invited her. The other girls fantasize about a pharmacy of powders and herbs and pills stacked in boxes behind that door, but the Henrys are too careful for that. Nothing incriminating is kept close by; they have stashes all over town – she should know – she has run supplies to half of them. So that first time Sol invited her into the storeroom, she hadn’t expected to see goods stacked on shelves, but she hadn’t expected to see banks of screens, either. Monitors linked to DVD recorders, a column of USB drives for back-up.
She stared at the images on the screens: men in various stages of undress, fucking or being fellated by women or with their heads buried between women’s thighs. ‘You record everything?’
Sol stood behind her and nuzzled her neck. ‘Mmm …’ He slipped his hand under her blouse and cupped her breast.
‘Why are you showing me this?’
He tilted her chin with his left hand, and planted kisses along the sharp line of her jaw, rotating her nipple stud between his right thumb and forefinger. ‘Because I trust you.’
She eased away, turning her head to look up into his face. ‘Or because maybe this is the only place without your little spy cameras?’
He laughed. ‘That’s what I like about you, Marta. You’re smarter than the average.’
‘Sure, always thinking.’ She faced the screens again, pushing her buttocks into his erection. ‘Like now, I think you bring me here because you want to screw me and you don’t want your brother to know.’
He kneaded her breast, almost hypnotized by the girls and their punters silently humping and sucking and licking on twelve different screens. ‘Frank’s old school,’ he said, his voice hoarse now. ‘Doesn’t like mixing business and pleasure.’
‘So, if I fuck with you, Frank wouldn’t like it.’
‘What Frank doesn’t know can’t hurt him, can it?’
She reached around to fondle his buttock with her left hand while she assessed the room. A filing cabinet; a wall safe, unlocked; stacks of CDs – recordings of men fucking and women faking. Is it worth it? Is it worth fucking Sol for the chance of getting a good look around some other time? Sol worked his free hand down her body to her crotch and she knew she had to make up her mind, because once he got his fingers inside her panties, there would be no stopping him. Yes, she thought. I really want to know what’s in that safe.
This is how Marta knew Rob, standing behind her, was staring at her ass, she also knew that Sol was watching her from the monitor in the stockroom.
She looks into the small black camera lens, tricked out to look like a mirror mounting bolt, and gives a slight nod. Sol would not allow Rob to go too far. Because Rob might be a big man in the business, but Marta has her own value, and her stock rises with every new transaction: every drop-off or pick-up, every message she relays, every favoured client she entertains.
Smitten, she thinks. This so-strange word which means consumed with desire, but also struck down, defeated. Yes, Sol is smitten. She doesn’t need Rob to tell her, she knows it – she has been working on Sol for months.
4
‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’
A SIGN HANGING IN ALBERT EINSTEIN’S OFFICE AT PRINCETON
Nick Fennimore looked up from his work. A door had slammed further down the corridor, jarring him from his careful check of the numbers. It was 7 p.m.; probably security, doing the rounds. He dragged his fingers through his hair, stood up and stretched, feeling his back creak and hearing the click and crackle of joints realigning. The wind screaming off the North Sea rattled the traffic lights at the corner of St Andrew Street and Crooked Lane. He watched them change to green as he stretched out the rucks and tangles caused by twenty years of weekend rock climbing. Of course, spending the rest of his days hunched over microscopes and computer keyboards hadn’t helped.
He had been working a good four hours on the data Kate Simms had sent through. He hadn’t drawn any conclusions, yet, but he’d been reminded of one sad truth: there is nothing that an addict won’t do for a fix. Post-mortem reports catalogued repeated STD infections; fallopian tubes so blocked and inflamed with infection that the victims must have been in constant pain; papillomas; internal scars; old bruises overlaid with new; whip and ligature marks from S&M ‘games’; healed fractures. He felt sick with it.
The traffic lights changed for a second, and then a third time from green, through amber, to red, and he couldn’t bring himself to go back to his reading. Time for coffee.
Fennimore had a house in the Lakes, but during term time he rented a flat near Union Terrace Gardens, which he hardly ever used; he had smuggled a day-bed into his office, and often slept over. The placed was heaped with papers, books double- and triple-stacked on his shelves, and a dozen or more plastic storage boxes stuffed with case papers and journals, these crammed into corners, under his desk and behind the door.
The café had been closed for hours, but there was a small kitchen on the third floor, squeezed into a broom cupboard next to the south-east stairwell. There was no sign of Security, but he heard occasional booms as doors were opened or slammed shut. Access to the kitchen was restricted to staff, and entry controlled by a proximity card reader. He waited for the electronic lock to give the tripletone beep which confirmed his ID, then shouldered the door open. It was a surprise to find Josh Brown at the kitchen counter, brewing coffee.
Josh seemed as startled as he was. ‘Professor Fennimore.’
‘Josh.’ The student had left a stack of books and papers on the coffee table; a copy of Fennimore’s own book Crapshoots and Bad Stats among them. ‘Working late?’ he asked.
‘Case law,’ Josh said.
‘You could read up on that at home,’ Fennimore obse
rved mildly.
‘Too many distractions.’
Josh Brown had attended the first years’ 9 a.m. lecture that day, and clearly he stayed as late as he was allowed, so distractions of a romantic kind seemed unlikely. Fennimore’s own flat overlooked a quiet shopping street which was usually deserted by 7 p.m., but he avoided it until the necessity of sleep could not be ignored. Home – even a home away from home – was a place where thoughts you could suppress in the workplace all came crowding back. But Fennimore had lived long enough to amass a wealth of painful memories and regrets; Josh was just twenty-three.
He had been working on his thesis for five months, perfecting lab techniques he’d missed studying for his first degree. But he was a will o’ the wisp – both there and not there – everybody knew him, yet nobody knew him well. He was about five-ten, his hair was gel-spiked, like most of his peers, and, like them, he wore urban fashion – hoodies, T-shirts and loose-fitting denims – but it was as though it was all an effort to fit in; his clothes, his self-effacing quietness worn like camouflage.
The coffee machine wheezed and spat, and Fennimore realized that he was staring. ‘Your thesis is on the influence of advances in DNA technology on cold case clear-up, isn’t it?’ he asked, jerking his chin towards the books and papers.
‘This isn’t for my thesis – it’s just for interest.’
His brief, uninformative answers piqued Fennimore’s curiosity. ‘So …?’
‘I’m looking at the Sally Clark case.’
‘Sally Clark. Convicted of the murder of her two infants.’
‘Wrongly convicted. They died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – cot death.’
A lot of students would not have corrected him on that. Fennimore suppressed a smile. ‘Well … you know … a lot of people claim cot death …’
‘She was cleared – the prosecution messed up the stats.’ Josh had a hard-to-place accent, but emotion injected a hint of Essex in the vowel sounds.
‘You think?’
Josh stared at him. ‘The entire prosecuting argument was based on a spurious argument.’
Fennimore tugged his ear. ‘They based their case on the assumption that if it was extremely unlikely that one child in an affluent middle class family should die of SIDS, then two dying went way beyond coincidence – isn’t that reasonable?’
‘Reasonable.’ Josh snatched the coffee jug from the hotplate. ‘They didn’t even look at environmental factors – the house, the ambient temperatures, the … the fact that both babies had been vaccinated shortly before they died. They didn’t consider genetics, or gender, or—’
‘Or the possibility that Sally Clark was innocent,’ Fennimore interrupted.
Josh stopped. ‘You just said she was guilty.’
‘I said she was convicted. Of course, if they’d done a Bayesian analysis of the evidence, the case would never have come to court,’ Fennimore said. ‘Bayes would ask what is the likelihood that the deaths were caused by SIDS, compared with the likelihood that they were caused by murder. Statistically, it’s more likely that two children will die of SIDS in the same family, because of predisposing factors.’
Josh was quiet for a moment. ‘So all that was just a big wind-up?’ He seemed to be deciding if he should be offended.
‘A test maybe.’
‘How’m I doing?’
‘All right, so far.’
The student poured the steaming coffee into his cup and raised the jug. Fennimore picked a mug up from the drainer and Josh filled it up.
‘So, you’d always use Bayes where the evidence wasn’t clear cut?’ Josh asked.
‘Always,’ Fennimore said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I never studied Bayesian stats.’
‘Your first degree is in psychology and law, isn’t it?’
Josh nodded.
Fennimore sighed. ‘“Combined Honours: the dilution factor” – someone should write a paper on it. You would have done Bayesian stats if you hadn’t turned down the chance to stay in Nottingham to do your PhD in Forensic Psychology.’
‘How d’you know about that?’ The guardedness, the willingness to take offence were back in his eyes. ‘I didn’t tell anyone I’d had an offer from Nottingham.’
‘Alastair Varley telephoned.’ Varley was a forensic psychologist Fennimore had worked with many times over the years. ‘He said you’re a brilliant scholar. Dedicated, curious, driven almost. He said they offered you a bursary.’
Josh replaced the coffee jug, and Fennimore waited for him to explain, or at least to ask what Varley had said about him turning down a PhD opportunity with a bursary attached to it, but Josh sipped his coffee in silence.
Varley had said that Josh Brown was entirely opaque, and possibly self-destructive. Fennimore had taken the last comment as a dig at him, since Josh had ended up under his tutelage. But Varley had dropped the professional rivalry for a millisecond to make a serious point: ‘Josh got a double first,’ he said. ‘And nobody came to see him graduate. Nobody.’
Fennimore decided that pushing Brown would achieve nothing, so he returned to the original thesis. ‘The second child that died had a staphylococcus infection – did you know that?’
‘No,’ Josh said, fully engaged again, now that they were no longer talking about him.
‘No reason why you should – it wasn’t even disclosed to the defence. The prosecution quite perversely ignored the relevance of context, and context is always relevant.’
Josh’s eyes gleamed. ‘Can you recommend some texts? I want to read up on this.’
Fennimore thought about it. He did need someone to talk through the drugs case. And Josh Brown wasn’t afraid to argue with him. ‘Want a practical introduction to Bayesian analysis?’ he said.
Josh gave him a long, thoughtful look, and Fennimore thought, You might paint yourself into the background, Josh, but the camouflage will never really fool anyone – the wariness behind your eyes will always betray you. He had only ever seen that kind of wariness in cops and criminals.
5
StayC’s death attracted national media attention, and Greater Manchester Police forked out the cash to rent the Park Suite at the Ramada in Piccadilly Square. So what was to have been a simple statement drafted by the press office and read by DCI Simms to a few local newspaper journos became a full press conference for TV, radio and press, chaired by Assistant Chief Constable Gifford. The other members of the panel were Detective Superintendent Tanford, head of the Drugs Squad; Professor Phillip Underwood, director of South Manchester Substance Misuse Services; and Simms’s own immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Spry.
The suite had been partitioned off with room dividers – one panel left open for ease of access between the two sections. Simms glanced in as she passed the press briefing room. Her heart skipped a beat – it was crammed. She counted six TV cameras, their cables snaking from various sockets around the room. Every chair was occupied, and more people milled about at the back. Simms took a few calming breaths as she walked to the GMP section next door. Briefing notes had been set out on a desk just inside the room, and she was offered a copy by a smiling clerk.
‘Thanks,’ she said, raising a hand in polite refusal. ‘I know what’s in it – I wrote it.’
‘Take a copy.’
Simms turned to face Jim Allen, head of the press office. She had worked with Jim on a couple of community initiatives when she first came to Manchester. He reminded her of a Jack Russell terrier. Small, fast, keen and constantly aquiver, as if his muscles were wired to a high voltage. Jim had come to the GMP Press Office after fifteen years as a crime reporter for the Mirror newspaper. He could summarize any story in fifteen words, tell you the weak spots in your briefing notes, and he had a particular knack for the visual cues that journalists used to manipulate the opinions of their readership. He took the booklet from the clerk and thrust it into Simms’s hand.
‘Sharks are circling, Kate. You’ll look badly prepped if you w
alk in there empty-handed.’ The suggestion of poor preparation caused a few heads to turn.
Kate raised the briefing notes with a weak smile and, satisfied, they returned to their conversations. Spry and Gifford, both in uniform, stood to one side in earnest conversation. Spry was the taller of the two, grey-haired and distinguished-looking in his uniform. He spent weekends and holidays on his narrow boat on the Cheshire canals, and those who knew said he was looking to drift gently along the byways of policing into an easy retirement.
‘The big three are here,’ Jim said, meaning BBC, ITV and Channel Four News. ‘Plus Sky, a local cable network and Music Plus – it’s a Hungarian music station – apparently, StayC was very popular over there.’
On the other side of the partition, the buzz of conversation from the gathered press and media sounded like a hive of bees that had been poked with a sharp stick.
‘Want some help with make-up?’ Jim asked, looking for someone who might give her a few tips.
Simms had already dabbed concealer under her eyes to hide the shadows caused by two days of lost sleep.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Thanks.’
He eyed her doubtfully, but seemed to decide it wasn’t worth an argument. ‘Keep your head up,’ he said. ‘Minimize the panda look.’
‘Thanks for the advice, Sir Galahad,’ she said, but he wasn’t listening. One of the press officers had presented him with a note. ‘Who?’ he asked.
‘Weekly News,’ she said. ‘They say they want the human angle.’
‘No.’ He monitored the room constantly as he spoke. ‘No interviews. They want to ask questions, they can ask them now.’
Simms listened to Jim Allen with half an ear as she watched one of his staff guide a man in a light grey suit over to the two senior officers. The psychologist, she guessed. They greeted him, speaking in low, grave tones, and the three formed a loose circle. Gifford was a square, solid man, a former rugby player, with sandy hair and small eyes that darted from face to face as he spoke.
Everyone Lies Page 3
