by Knight, Ali
‘How so?’
‘They read like a police investigation. It’s like you’re searching for something.’
Orin snorted. ‘You been paying attention, young gun? I’m searching for my daughter.’ His finger started tapping again, a slow insistent beat on the table. ‘I know more about missing people than most police officers in this country. I know how killers’ minds work better than most profilers. I have access to information that officers spend their careers trying to get. I’m not in the service, but I can access the service.’ He was sweating, a strange pallor on his cheeks. ‘I accept my methods are unconventional.’ He gave Darren a knowing look. ‘But so are yours.’
‘There’s very little on Olivia’s sister.’
‘I gave you what I have on her. She went off the rails on a teenage fast track to destruction, the mother didn’t have the guts to rein her in. One daughter killed herself, the other ended up killing other people. The sister’s not relevant.’
‘There you go again, it’s as if you’re eliminating lines of inquiry. Which means you’re searching, which means you think someone else was involved in those girls’ deaths.’
Orin was very still. ‘I’ve waited ten years for a breakthrough in this case. I’m prepared to follow any lead, consider any theory. I’ve been told I lack perspective many times—’
‘Perspective.’ Darren stood up and put his hands on the desk. He didn’t care if Orin could see the scrapes and bruises on them, he had to share the revelation he had experienced earlier that morning. ‘A girl kneeling on the carpet, about to be bludgeoned to death by a woman, is an image to make a normal person shudder, isn’t it?’ He was thinking back to the moment when he had towered over his dad with the Tabasco bottle in his hand in the kitchen. ‘But hear me out on this. Duvall is five foot four, but what if Molly wasn’t kneeling? What if she was standing, and someone who was six foot tall, or taller maybe, hit her? With the same hand, at the same angle? Molly’s body being revealed has brought with it a new wave of information, hasn’t it? Information that can help us solve it.’
Orin got up suddenly as if the idea was electrifying. He stood staring out of the window across the river. ‘One idea from left field doesn’t unpick this riddle.’
‘But it’s possible, isn’t it?’ Orin didn’t reply. ‘This Eric guy, Olivia’s boyfriend—’
Orin held up his hand. ‘Just a minute.’ He walked out of the room and came back in a few moments later, carrying a file. He sat down at his desk and opened the cover, licked his thumb and began to leaf through the pages. ‘Let’s get this straight. When Duvall took the girls Eric had been her ex for years, there’s a girlfriend here in Hastings confirming it. The police found he had a solid alibi too, he was in a penitentiary –’ his finger traced down a line of dates ‘– when Heather and Molly went missing.’ Orin turned a few more pages, looking for relevant details. ‘After he completed his sentence he went to live in Spain, this was corroborated by several people. But then information on him dries up – no one knew where he was. Seems he wasn’t missed by anyone – even his mum didn’t like him, said she didn’t care what he was doing.’ He shut the cover of the file and pushed it away. ‘I tried to trace Eric Cox in the years after the trial, but I never found him.’
‘What do you think that means?’
Orin pursed his lips. ‘That this case can turn a sane man mad.’ He paused. ‘Or make a man do a stupid thing at a hospital. Cut your hair, come and join my campaign and maybe I can protect you from what might be heading your way, get you the freedom you need to pursue …’ He paused, searching for the right word, ‘pet theories.’
‘Give me twenty-four hours.’ Darren got up off his chair and walked out of the room.
Orin waited a couple of moments and picked up his phone. ‘I need you to follow someone for me. Starting today.’
60
When Darren came home from Orin’s office his mum’s hospital bag was in the hall. He climbed the stairs to her bedroom and found her sitting on the bench seat in front of her mirror. She didn’t turn round when he came in the room. ‘Budge over,’ he said.
She shifted gingerly across and they stared at each other in the mirror. ‘I’m sorry I left you at the hospital,’ he got out. ‘I just had to go and … get some air.’ It sounded so lame, such an awful lie. She didn’t answer. ‘Are you sure you should be home? Are you well enough?’ he went on.
‘I’m stronger than I look.’
‘It must have been horrible being in there knowing she was near.’
‘I want to move on. Forget about it.’ She smiled briefly and pulled at her hair with the hand that she could still move freely. He was shocked to see a bunch of strands come away from her scalp.
‘Oh Mum.’
‘Just sit here with me.’ She had Dad’s electric razor on the dressing table in front of her and she picked it up now and turned it on. She ran a line through the right side of her hair and a leaf-fall of long strands cascaded to the carpet.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ But he knew it was the right thing really.
She winced, her body obviously still sore from her operation.
‘Let me help you.’
He shaved her head for her. She seemed to shrink in size in front of him as he went. He saw a slow tear roll down her cheek and he felt a terrible fondness for her that words could not express. When he was finished she turned her head this way and that in front of the mirror.
‘Feels cold,’ she said and sighed. ‘And exposing.’ He didn’t reply as they both absorbed her new look.
Darren walked over to the rail in the corner where her clothes hung. He was looking for a scarf.
‘I like the orange and red one,’ she said and he picked it up and brought it over. He stood behind her and folded it and tied it tight round her head and tucked it in. She looked surprised but also pleased. ‘Now where did you learn to do that?’
Darren smiled and sat down beside her again. ‘I guess I’ve got hidden talents.’ He looked at the razor and looked back at his mum. He picked it up and ran it up the side of his ear, a cascade of sun-lightened blond and matted hair falling to the carpet. His mum gave a little gasp, and tried to reach up with her hand to stop him.
‘No. It’s time.’
He did another stripe, quicker. The razor vibrated against his skull, lowered its tone behind his ears. He kept on until it was all gone and he was finished.
He didn’t know himself. His face was shockingly exposed, an outline of jaw and neck that was unfamiliar to him, cheekbones prominent. He was no longer a blond; a dark brown fuzz of fresh hair covered his scalp.
She smiled ruefully. ‘You’re a good-looking boy under all that.’
He took his mum’s fingers, placed them on the back of his neck and turned so she could see the tattoo.
‘It’s Carly’s initials,’ he said softly.
He felt the light touch of his mum’s fingers as they traced the inky lines. ‘I know you loved her, Darren. I don’t think I ever appreciated the pain you felt when she disappeared. I am still so lucky, you know? I have you, and I love you more than you can ever know.’
He turned back round and they gave each other a long hug. After a while she pulled away and looked at the floor, inches deep in discarded dreadlocks and her own hair. ‘It’ll be a struggle to get this lot out of the carpet.’
‘I’ll do it, Mum.’
‘You can use a hoover, can you?’
Five hours a day, sometimes, he wanted to say, but he actually said, ‘I can work it out.’
61
Great Yarmouth
Olly was gulping down his bowl of Frosties; breakfast TV was showing people fighting somewhere far away. The doorbell rang and Nan looked at him accusingly from the armchair. She rolled her eyes towards the door, indicating that she wasn’t going to move to answer it. This was no surprise; she only ever got out of the armchair to get tea or go to the toilet. Olly put his bowl on the carpet and slid from the sofa.
Beggs was at the door, a football under his arm, panting with excitement. Olly had to come to the harbour, Beggs had heard there was a right carry-on going on down there.
Olly yawned. Beggs wasn’t selling it to him.
‘There’s talk of dead bodies and that.’
Nan was suddenly behind Olly at the door, urging him into his shoes and racing up the stairs to shed her dressing gown. She was moving faster than Olly had seen her do in years. No one loved a scandal like Nan.
By the time they got to the harbour, the crowd was three people deep, back behind blue and white crime scene tape. Nan started to complain that she couldn’t see anything. ‘It’s not the bloody opera,’ someone muttered, and Olly peered between necks and backs to see three policemen keeping the crowd well back.
Nan was not so easily put off, and wriggled and barged her way to the front, Olly and Beggs following in her wake. A white tent had been erected over one of the boats; huge men in white boiler suits with white things over their shoes were moving about.
Beggs elbowed Olly in the ribs and pointed. A news van with something slowly turning on its roof had pulled up in the car park. ‘That’s Sky TV,’ Beggs said in awe. The crowd was murmuring that a dead body had been found in the red boat. Olly had seen enough cop shows on the telly to know that the police wore white suits and TV news came only if murder was suspected.
Nan turned. ‘Get to school, both of you.’ She left her hard-won position to push them away down the road. Now that they really might be exposed to dead bodies and violence, she wanted to protect them from it. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’ She watched them to make sure they were really on their way before hurrying back to the very thing she was keen to dismiss as nothing.
Olly and Beggs ran off down the road with the football, the unusual start to the day making them feel wild and transgressive. Beggs crossed the ball to Olly and he dribbled down the street and across an expanse of grass. He slowed to a stop, the ball coasting to a halt. The red boat was Gert Becker’s. Was he dead? A strange feeling came over him, like he knew the answer to something but couldn’t express it. He was thinking about the blonde woman he had seen – although, in the sharp light of this summer morning with so much activity and speculation, he wasn’t sure any more that she had even been real.
‘Oi, what you doing?’ Beggs was waiting for him to pass the ball.
Olly shook off the feeling. After all, what had he even really seen, what had the blonde ghost even done? He ran up and kicked the ball and, as he had done so many times in his life, ran in Beggs’s shadow to school.
62
‘Bwoy, look at your hair!’ Sonny slapped his thigh repeatedly, a grin exploding across his face. ‘Or lack of it.’ He frowned. ‘From Rasta to skinhead – me prefer you the other way.’ The smile was back as he turned to Corey. ‘But the bwoy is fresh-faced under all that, what you say?’
‘That is a sick style, cuz! He’s showing his tats too.’ Corey nodded appreciatively. ‘What’s that say?’ he said, peering round the back of Darren’s neck.
‘It’s just an abstract symbol.’
‘Now what does Chloe say about this, eh? I hear you and her are an item! The whole hospital know, eh?’ Sonny was grinning again. ‘Hi Helen, how do you like Darren’s new style?’
Darren turned. Helen was standing in the doorway, her face stony. ‘Chloe? You’re going out with Chloe?’
Darren cast around for a hole to crawl into, but knowing really that there wasn’t one he turned and stared at the CCTV monitors so that he didn’t have to meet Helen’s eye. His eyes had settled on the one showing the kitchens and he could see Chloe in her white peaked hat moving baking trays around and Berenice wiping a counter. ‘Um, I guess, well, we’ve only just started seeing each other—’
‘They went surfing at the weekend,’ Sonny put in, smiling.
‘Surfing?’ Helen said it with the surprise one might use for news of an outbreak of diphtheria in south London.
‘Well, I’ve got to get on,’ Darren said, and slid out of the door back to the safety of his cleaning trolley. He retreated up the corridor, planning to take refuge in the men’s toilets. It had been a mistake to alienate Helen, she was his best bet for finding out more information, particularly about Olivia’s befriender.
‘Darren, can I have a word?’
He froze. Her voice was crisp and accusatory. He turned. The yellow cleaning sign in his hand showed a man falling backwards. He erected it on the carpet outside the women’s toilets, knowing exactly how the poor stick figure felt. Helen was standing by the toilet door, holding it open like it was the mouth of hell itself.
Like a scolded child, he followed her in.
Helen decided to stand rather than lean, arms folded across her chest. Darren came in, his palm roaming over his scalp.
‘So, um, yeah, like, I was going to tell you … that the way I’m feeling, it’s kinda …’
She let him talk on, but she wasn’t listening. Something had struck her when she’d seen him in security. Without his hair he was a different person. He was no longer Darren, the mumbling, shambling cleaner to be more pitied than admired. Under that thatch of dried-out locks had always lurked someone handsome, tall and young. And she felt a fear clutch at her heart; a sudden nostalgia for all the years that she had lost, for all the decades she had travelled and would never get back. She had crossed a barrier only visible to those who could look back; she had become all those words she used to scorn: mature, experienced – middle-aged, old.
Darren had his hands clasped together, trying to emphasise some point, his eyes roaming the washroom because they didn’t want to alight on her face. She revelled for a moment in examining his teeth, his prominent cheekbones, the whites of his eyes. Such promise. Instead of feeling angry or used, she suddenly felt joy for the possibilities of all the years that were still to come. He had kick-started her on another road that she had never expected to travel, had helped her drag herself out of the shame and failure that was her divorce.
She held up her hand in a stop gesture. His monologue stumbled to a halt. She smiled. ‘I wish you all the best of luck, Darren. Really I do.’
There was a pause. ‘Huh?’
Helen shook her head and smiled. ‘Darren Smith, you maniac.’
63
Great Yarmouth
By the end of the day, there was chaos at the harbour. The body on the red boat had been confirmed as its owner, Gert Becker, a millionaire from Birmingham. The crowd had swelled to a hundred strong, people from towns and villages far away. There were more news vans and an ice cream van. There was wild talk of a video confession by the victim, admitting rape and murder. The mood had changed while Olly had been at school and now people were pointing fingers, shaking their heads, speculating aloud. Only a few hours ago Gert Becker had been a victim; now he was a pervert.
Olly didn’t hang around but headed for home. He knew now that this morning he had done the right thing in keeping quiet. The blonde woman was indeed just a ghost. He berated himself for even considering telling Nan about the woman, and how he had been sure she had been on Gert’s boat, or about how he had watched the now dead pervert-good-riddance set out to sea many times in his red boat. It would have only pulled a whole ton of trouble on top of Nan’s head, which in turn would have ended up on his.
64
Darren spent the boring, lonely hours on his shift thinking about John Sears and who or what he really was. When he was forced to leave Roehampton he could do worse than to keep an eye on what John did. When his shift finished he cycled to John’s flat above the charity shop in Clapham and checked the pub car park. John’s car was there. Darren waited on the corner, pretending he was on his phone. He looked anxiously around for the women he’d seen the last time, but the charity shop looked empty. At six on the dot the elderly lady he’d met the first time he’d gone in came out, locked up and walked away.
Commuters began to spill out of the nearby tube station entrance as the eve
ning wore on. He became itchy and scratchy with boredom. He texted Chloe but she didn’t answer.
As he was wondering how long he could tolerate just standing and waiting in a south London street, John’s door opened and he came out, wearing work boots covered in dust and a white all-in-one. Darren shrank back into a nearby doorway and watched John walk towards the car park. A moment later his car emerged and pulled away sharply in the direction of central London. Darren got on his bike and followed.
John drove aggressively, but Darren had no trouble keeping up with him; he was faster on his bike in the rush hour traffic than John was on four wheels.
They travelled towards the river, the cranes of the Nine Elms construction site looming high in the night sky. John took the road that ran by Battersea Park and turned right into the huge development at Battersea Power Station. Darren figured he must be going to work. He stopped and considered. The lights in the unfinished buildings were all on, and while the large machinery had stopped for the night to let the nearby residents have some peace, Darren could still see cars in a makeshift car park and plenty of activity.
He coasted into the development and stopped by a huge awning with a monster-sized photograph of two blond children in the arms of grinning Caucasian parents, a sunny London river view visible through the windows of their flat. A large ticker tape ran across the picture, claiming that all of the luxury apartments had been sold off-plan.
Darren took a look at the car park and building site beyond, but couldn’t see John’s car.
The development was a maze of access roads, temporary fencing and plastic sheeting that obscured the huge towers thrusting skywards. Darren cycled down an unpaved road that lacked pavements or street lighting, and looked cautiously round a corner. He saw John’s car turning left round another building and bobbled down the unpaved road, his bike wheels clattering.
