“And you laughed at my armor plating,” he says, with a hint of pride.
Abu glances at the burning wreck.
“They will have friends. We cannot stay here.”
14
LONDON
Holly Knight stares at a spot on the wall, concentrating on a crack in the paintwork because it stops her thinking of Zac. The police took away her clothes for testing. She fought them at first and it took three female officers to undress her. Then she sat in her underwear, refusing to wear the prison overalls.
There was an argument outside her cell.
A man said, “I can’t interview her if she’s half-naked.”
“She won’t get dressed.”
“Get her some proper clothes.”
The voices went away and came back later. A WPC brought a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and Converse trainers.
“They’re not going to let you go unless you’ve been interviewed. You don’t have to answer the questions, but you have to listen to them.”
Holly could see her point.
Now in the interview room the questions are washing over her like background music in a shopping mall. Threats. Accusations. Abuse.
“When did you last see Zac Osborne?”
She doesn’t answer.
“What happened in the flat?”
Silence.
“Did you see his attacker? What did he look like? Are you deaf? Your boyfriend is dead. He was murdered. You won’t say a word. You’re not crying. You’re not upset. Maybe you don’t care.”
Holly doesn’t react. She only turns her head when someone new enters the room, fixing her eyes on them, committing them to memory. Past experience has impressed upon her the need for silence. She has learned to analyze the consequences of co-operating with the police and has come to the conclusion that the best way to get out of her present circumstances is to say nothing at all so her words can’t be twisted and used against her.
The detective quotes from her file. A history lesson. The foster homes, the past arrests, her alcohol and drug abuse. Her mind slips back over some of these events, but most have been forgotten or blocked out.
She has decided that she does not like DS Thompson, who is no longer polite or respectful. He has an undertaker’s face and dandruff on his shoulders.
In Holly’s experience, people tend to talk at her and not to her. They preach or they browbeat and they hear what they want to hear. But that’s not the reason she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t trust the truth. The truth can be a lethal thing.
Her mother used to work nights as a nurse. Her father, Reece, would go to the pub every evening, dressed in his best jacket, smelling of aftershave, whistling as he walked up the street. He left Holly in charge. Aged seven. Her brother Albie was five, epileptic, small for his age. One night Albie left the taps running when he filled the bath. It overflowed and flooded downstairs, coming through the ceiling in a torrent of plaster and dust.
When their father came home, Holly had tried to clean up but the wet plaster dust was like glue and she couldn’t hide the hole in the ceiling. Albie lay mute and fearful in his bed. His cat was under the covers with him.
“It was my fault,” she said. “I should have been paying attention.”
She watched her father’s large callused hand go up in the air and come down hard on the side of her face: harder than Zac had ever hit her. It knocked her across the room.
Albie lay transfixed, holding the cat against his chest.
The skin of Reece’s face was tight against the bone. He dragged Albie out of bed by the neck and took him to the bathroom.
“You want to be clean? I’ll show you clean.”
He pushed Albie’s head into the toilet bowl. Flushed. Did it again. Albie’s socked feet scrabbled on the tiles. He couldn’t breathe. Reece pulled his head from the bowl and bounced it off the cistern before flushing it again. He left Albie lying on the floor, toilet water dripping from his face.
That’s when it happened. Albie’s eyes began to flicker and roll back in his head. He was stuttering and his limbs were jerking like a fish pulled from the water. After a while he stopped moving. He had a blue ring around his mouth.
Holly thought time had stopped. It was like watching a DVD and someone had pressed pause, freezing the frame in a blurred snapshot. Reece tried to shake Albie awake. Gave him mouth to mouth. CPR. Called 999.
The ambulance took Albie to hospital but he was DOA. “What does that mean?” Holly asked, but nobody answered her.
Her mother came running down the corridor. Reece caught her. Held her. “He just collapsed, babe. He had one of his turns.”
He was stroking her hair, whispering, muffling her sobs. Then he looked at Holly and there was a moment of chilling certainty that registered in her mind.
“Ask Holly, she’ll tell you.”
Holly remained motionless. Reece rolled his jaw like he was chewing on something hard.
“He killed Albie,” she whispered. “He put his head down the toilet.”
Her father’s eyes narrowed like he was looking at her down the barrel of a gun.
“The little bitch is lying. It was an accident, babe, I promise you. I tried to save him. Gave him CPR, just like you taught me…”
“No, Mama, Albie overflowed the bath. Daddy got angry.”
“You shut your mouth!” he warned.
“It’s the truth.”
Her mother had pushed Reece away.
“She’s lying, babe, I’d never do anything to hurt Albie. He had one of his turns. Ask the doctors.”
“Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she flooded the bathroom. You know what she’s like—always blaming Albie for things.”
Holly’s eyes grew hot and bright. She rocked from foot to foot.
This time her mother knelt in front of her, holding on to her shoulders. “This is really important, sweetie, you have to tell me the truth.”
“I am telling the truth.”
There was no fight. No more harsh words. That night Holly and her mother stayed at a women’s refuge in Battersea. They shared a bed and Holly fell asleep listening to her mother’s sobs.
It took Reece three weeks to find them. He came to the door of the refuge in his blue suit. Sober. Freshly shaven. He carried a bunch of carnations for her mother that he’d bought at the train station. He also had a present for Holly—a cheap pink Barbie rip-off with straw-colored hair. Her mother and father drove off together—just to talk things over, Reece said. Holly knew he was lying.
Later that night, Reece parked in a quiet street and put his hands around her mother’s throat. They found her body next morning lying in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. Reece left a suicide note in his flat. He hung himself from a beam in his lockup garage.
A brother, a mother, a father, her entire family broken by the truth—she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Holly dreamed that night of Albie waving to her from Heaven, signaling her to come.
DS Thompson is shouting in her face. She can feel the flecks of spit land on her eyelids and lips. She wipes them away with her sleeve.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he says.
“There is no easy way,” she replies.
“What?”
“People say there’s an easy way, but there never is.”
DS Thompson slaps the folder closed and mutters something to a colleague about her being “retarded.” He leaves her alone for a few minutes. It might be longer.
Then he comes back into the room.
“Get up.”
She’s taken outside, along a corridor, down the stairs to a parking area. A police car is waiting. The doors open.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To identify a body.”
15
LONDON
Ruiz splashes water on his face and tries to wash the coppery taste from his mouth. Leaning over the gutter, he empties the rest of the plas
tic bottle over his head. The police released him at three in the morning. Instead of going home, he drove to Westminster Public Mortuary in Horseferry Road.
Now it’s just gone seven. The morning is bathed in a faint glow.
He’s listening to the radio. Stories about Iraq and Afghanistan. A US Senate hearing into Goldman Sachs. Accusations of reckless greed. Claims and counter-claims.
A swinging door opens and a pale figure emerges. Gerard Noonan is in his sixties with short-cropped blond hair and no discernible eyebrows. His skin is so pale he seems to glow in the shadows, hence his nickname, “The Albino.”
When Ruiz was heading the Serious Crime Squad he worked more than a dozen cases with Noonan, a veteran Home Office pathologist, who enjoyed far better relationships with the dead than the living. Unmarried. Childless. Noonan has always struck Ruiz as being borderline autistic because of his social ineptness. The only sentient creatures that he relates to are horses—the thoroughbred variety that run round in circles carrying brightly colored leprechauns.
Ruiz falls in step.
“Gerard.”
“Vincent.”
“All-nighter?”
“People don’t die to a timetable.”
“How thoughtless of them. Had breakfast?”
“Not hungry.”
“Coffee then?”
“Are you going to follow me all the way home?”
“Depends.”
The café is a family business run by Italians with an endless supply of “cousins” working the tables and a barista who seems to have four arms. There are paintings on the walls of fat little nymphs playing in a forest.
Noonan orders a coffee. Ruiz wants the full English with everything fried, including the bread.
“I do autopsies on guys like you.”
“We keep you in work.”
The pathologist pushes up his sleeves. Ruiz is amazed at how Noonan has almost no color on his arms. It’s like someone has drained his blood or replaced it with milk.
“You autopsied an ex-soldier.”
“Might have done.”
“I called it in.”
“How much you want to hear before you eat?”
“Just get to it.”
Noonan puts three sugars in his coffee. “Let’s just say he was one tough bastard.”
“Meaning?”
“There was a lot of penile and testicular damage. He had his genitals remodeled with a set of long-nose pliers.”
“He was tortured?”
“Went every round. I don’t know what information he had but I hope he begged to give it up. I hope that’s what happened.”
Ruiz can feel his testicles retract. He looks at the side of Noonan’s face. The pathologist is gazing out the window at pedestrians, huddled beneath umbrellas, spilling from Victoria Station.
“How did he die?”
“Suffocated. The bullet was insurance.”
“A professional hit?”
“Looks like it.”
“Gangland?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you do a tox screen?”
“Results will take a few days.”
Ruiz scratches his unshaven chin, feeling the dirt between the hair follicles. “The police are saying it was a drug-related hit. What do you think?”
Noonan shrugs.
“Did they find any drug paraphernalia in the flat?”
“No.”
“Any needle marks?”
“None.”
“The guy was a war hero.”
“I heard.”
Noonan swallows the last of his coffee. “I’m too old for this shit.”
“For what?”
“To understand what some people do.”
Holly Knight sits in the back of the police car, letting the reflections of city buildings wash over her pupils. She’s dirty and tired and her shoulder aches where she was slammed against the wall during the fight.
The police car pulls into a walled yard with iron gates and razor wire. Holly is escorted through a door and along a wide corridor with a polished floor. It smells like a hospital with something missing. Patients. Hope.
Thompson makes her walk quickly, hustling her along without touching her.
“Wait here,” he says, leaving her in a room with two small sofas, a coffee table, water cooler and box of tissues. A curtain screens one wall.
Alone, Holly thinks about Zac. He had saved her. They had saved each other. Normally she didn’t get close to people. It was safer that way. Never pat stray dogs or they’ll follow you home. Her mother told her that.
She and Zac met at a rehabilitation center, which is a fancy term for a psych ward. Holly was undergoing tests. Zac was being treated for post-traumatic stress. Zac didn’t treat her like the other men in her life. He didn’t care about her history. That was a year ago. Long enough to fall out of love. It hadn’t happened. Closing her eyes, she can picture his stretched angular face and the blur of big freckles on his shoulder blades.
DS Thompson joins her in the room. Without any fanfare or warning, he pulls open the curtain. Zac is laid out on a metal trolley covered with a white sheet from the neck down. Bruised. Pale. Changed. It’s amazing what a breath can do. Fill a chest. Fire a heart. Bring color to a face.
“Can you confirm the name of the deceased?”
Holly whispers, “Zac Osborne.”
The curtain is drawn closed. Holly sits on the sofa, feeling herself getting smaller and smaller like Alice in Wonderland. DS Thompson is talking to her. Something about Holly’s grief has melted the ice within him and his attitude has changed. Mellowed.
“Do you have somewhere to stay?” he asks. “We can’t let you go unless we know how to reach you.”
A voice answers him from the doorway. “She can stay with me.” Ruiz is holding a coffee for her. “I have a spare room.”
Thompson looks at him incredulously. “Two nights ago you offered her a bed and she robbed you.”
“That was two nights ago.”
Ruiz addresses Holly. “You can’t go back to your flat. And the police won’t let you go unless you give them an address.”
Thompson interrupts again. “Why are you doing this?”
“That’s my business.”
He sniffs hard, trying to get a handle on Ruiz, who is still focused on Holly.
“It’s up to you. Stay here or come home with me. I don’t bear grudges.”
Words. Promises. Everything is happening too quickly for her. She nods but doesn’t look at Ruiz. Then she follows him down the corridor, taking two steps to each one of his.
“You’re asking for trouble,” yells Thompson.
Ruiz doesn’t answer.
“I’ll need to talk to her again.”
“You know where to find me.”
The Merc edges out of a parking spot and joins a stream of traffic. Brake lights blink between passing cars. Ruiz glances at Holly. Her eyes are closed. Her hair is drawn back and she’s wearing a man’s coat because her own clothes are in the lab. She’s a pretty thing, preposterously young. It’s a shame about the piercings.
“You don’t like the police very much?”
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m not a copper anymore.”
Silence.
“DS Thompson wanted to have you sectioned. Do you know what that means? He thinks you’re a couple of channels short of basic cable.”
Again he gets no response.
“You don’t have to be frightened of me.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“I’m not going to cause you any trouble.”
“Don’t even try.”
She is five foot five, weighs 125 pounds wringing wet, but something in her voice tells Ruiz that Holly wouldn’t hesitate to fight.
“I’m not going to fuck you,” she says matter-of-factly.
Ruiz glances at her in amazement.
“Don’t give me that look,” she says. “You’re a man. You�
�re all the same, unless you’re gay, which you’re not. Maybe you’re too old.”
“Somebody should scrub out your potty mouth.”
She gets a look of alarm. “Don’t even try it!”
They drive in silence through a hinterland of council houses and industrial estates, staying south of the river through Clapham and Wandsworth. The big old Mercedes has a soft ride. It’s the sort of car Holly used to throw up in as a kid. She sits as far away from Ruiz as possible with one hand on the door handle, sneaking occasional glances at him, contemplating what sort of monster he would turn into. He doesn’t look much like a policeman, even a former one. He seems big and slow, yet she saw how quickly he could move.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks.
“It’s my good deed for the day.”
“You’re lying.”
“I want my stuff back—the hair-comb you stole.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Where?”
“I dropped it at the flat.”
Ruiz nods. “Did you see the guy who killed Zac?”
Holly nods.
“Would you recognize him again?”
“Yeah.”
“Describe him to me.”
She mumbles, “Mid-thirties, dark hair, your height, but thinner.”
“What color eyes?”
“It was dark.”
They drive in silence for another while, pausing at red lights. Ruiz glances at Holly. Only half her face is visible. Goose bumps on her arms.
“Why?”
“Huh?”
“Why did this guy hurt Zac?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Did you owe someone money?”
“No.”
“The police think it was a drug deal gone wrong.”
“They’re lying! Zac didn’t touch the stuff—not for a long while. He got clean. Went to meetings.”
“Was he dealing?”
“No fucking way.”
Holly brings her knees up to her chest, resting her chin on them. Looks even younger.
“Sooner or later you have to level with someone, Holly.”
The Wreckage: A Thriller Page 8
