by Gytha Lodge
‘Yes. So I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it down.’ She peered towards the road. ‘Was it Niall, then? Has he attacked his wife?’
‘Do you have reason to expect that?’ Lightman asked.
The neighbour – Pamela – fixed Lightman with a defensive look. ‘Well, it’s generally what happens, isn’t it?’
In the end, O’Malley stepped in. ‘Listen. You can see this is a serious crime. We need your help. If your husband heard anything, we need to know. It could make all the difference.’
At his long, imploring look Pamela finally relented. ‘All right.’ She opened the door properly behind her. ‘But after that, you leave him in peace, all right?’ And then she called, ‘Phil! Phil, the police need to see you. Sorry, love.’
O’Malley was a little disappointed by the quiet, slightly overweight man in blue tartan pyjamas who descended the stairs. He’d expected someone thuggish and intimidating.
Phil’s account was fairly disappointing, too. He’d been woken by a slammed door at some time after two. He thought it had come from Louise and Niall’s house, but wasn’t sure. He was pretty sure he’d stayed awake until five thirty, and hadn’t heard anything else.
‘You can bet he wasn’t really awake until five thirty,’ O’Malley said to Lightman in a low voice, as they left. ‘His window’s at the front. Surely, if he’d been awake, he’d have heard someone being murdered in the next-door garden.’
‘Unless they did it awfully quietly,’ Lightman replied with a trace of a smile, ‘out of consideration for the neighbours.’
‘It’s been wiped,’ McCullough said, her gloved finger hovering over the handle of the knife to show him the lack of blood over the patterned grip. It would have been a beautiful object without the brownish crust over the blade. A black grip patterned with elaborate silver detailing. A long, tapered blade curved to a hunting point.
There were three of them hunkered over the body of the young man. The pathologist had arrived, and Jonah had been satisfied to note that it was Dr Peter Shaw attending. Jonah had worked with him only once before, but his calm, measured approach had been a key part of achieving a murder conviction. He had turned out to be good on the witness stand, too. Less flappable than Jonah had expected of a fairly young man.
‘No prints, then,’ Jonah said, looking away from the perfectly crafted weapon. ‘But it’s pretty distinctive, isn’t it?’
‘It is. There’s a chance you could track down its owner,’ McCullough said, and then, to Shaw, ‘I’m interested in the smears. It looks like someone wiped the handle clean of prints and deposited it here.’
‘He wasn’t stabbed here,’ Jonah said.
It wasn’t a question. It had been clear to him from the lack of pooled blood below the body. He’d seen victims of knife crime before. The extraordinary spread of blood. The way it saturated everything. This looked to him like the end of a journey, one that must have involved a great deal of blood loss along the way.
‘No, he wasn’t.’ It was the pathologist who answered this time. He glanced towards the gate. ‘Has your team marked up the footprints yet?’
‘Yes, done,’ McCullough said, and they made their way carefully out onto the road.
The team had now put a cordon up round the pavement and verge, and McCullough led the two of them to the edge of the road.
‘Here,’ she said, gesturing to several pieces of plastic that had been skewered into the snowy grass. Alongside each, there was a depression in the snow, and in some places the snow was stained with what seemed to be blood. ‘They start at the kerb.’
Jonah turned to look at the road. ‘Are they definitely his?’
‘They seem to match his shoes,’ McCullough replied, ‘and I think it would be difficult for someone to carry him.’
‘We should look up what time it snowed last night,’ Jonah said, thoughtfully. ‘There’s no snowfall on top of them.’ And then he looked towards the edge of the kerb. ‘You think he arrived by car?’
‘It looks fairly likely,’ McCullough said. ‘I would say a taxi, except I think they’d have noticed if he was bleeding to death in the back.’
‘So someone else dropped him,’ Jonah said. ‘That person might have carried the knife in some kind of cloth before leaving it next to him?’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t pulled out of him in the garden,’ Shaw said. He frowned down at the footprints. ‘Interestingly, it doesn’t look like he was running or staggering.’
‘The prints are quite flat-footed and steady,’ McCullough agreed. ‘So if he was escaping an attacker’s vehicle, it doesn’t look like he fled in terror.’
‘So he might not have known how badly injured he was?’ Jonah asked.
‘He might not,’ Shaw said. ‘Though people can exhibit a strange sort of calm when suffering severe blood loss.’
Which was, Jonah decided, too depressing a line of thinking to pursue right now. ‘Let me know when I can ID the body,’ he said, and turned to take a little reconnaissance of Saints Close.
Hanson had boiled the kettle, rooted out a mug and teabag from the cupboards and poured the water before she looked in the fridge and found no milk. But, of course, Louise wouldn’t have brought it in. She wouldn’t have remembered the milk when she’d seen a body on her doorstep.
Hanson headed outside, treading carefully over the cables that led into the garden, and saw that the milk crate beside the step was empty.
She leaned into the sitting room to say, ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to find the milk. Did you put it somewhere …?’
‘Oh.’ There was a moment of pure blankness on Louise’s face, and then she said, ‘No, I was being stupid. There is no milk on Saturdays.’ She gave a laugh. ‘What an idiot.’
‘Well, good work on being an idiot,’ Hanson said, smiling. ‘You wouldn’t have found him so soon otherwise.’
Louise nodded at her, and then said, ‘I can have it black. That’s fine.’ Just as Hanson was turning away again, she asked, ‘How long will it be until you know who he is?’
‘I’m sure it won’t be long.’ Hanson tried to make it reassuring, instead of ominous.
‘Will you tell me, when you find out?’ Louise asked, her stare very fixed. ‘I really need to know.’
It didn’t take Jonah long to walk to the end of the close and back, and in an effort to keep moving he decided to go back up towards Belmont Road, too. Dawn was approaching rapidly, though the temperature was still well below zero. The sky towards Holly Hill was a warm orange that somehow slid into washed-out blue, and many of the houses had lights on, some showing anxious faces through the window. A whole street, summoned to watch by the flickering blue lights of the squad cars.
‘Has someone done her in?’
The voice rang out from a large white-washed house with red-tiled eaves and a protruding porch. A gravel drive led up to it in a sweep, bordered by clipped shrubs, many of them tied with twine.
It was a much older house than any of the others, probably by a good hundred years. Jonah wondered if the land the street was built on had once belonged to this house. It had the look of a small manor about it, with its tall windows and high roof.
The voice came from a figure standing in the porch. He was a man of somewhere between sixty and eighty. Corduroy trousers and a V-neck sweater over a checked shirt were finished off by sheepskin slippers.
Jonah gave him a flat look. ‘Sorry?’
‘I asked if someone had done her in.’ The slippers-wearer raised a slightly crooked finger to point towards the squad cars. ‘Wouldn’t be such a surprise, with that one.’ He nodded in what looked like satisfaction.
‘Why do you say that?’ Jonah kept his voice neutral. However distasteful comments like that were, they were often useful. Jonah’s was a world where every petty, mean-spirited remark was to be hoarded. To be treasured. To be written into his notebook and fed into the workings of the case in the hope that it might point them the right way.
‘Well, I’ve b
een half expecting it,’ the older man said. ‘The number of times I’ve seen her stagger out of a cab in the early hours, barely able to stand. The kind of woman who ends up a victim, don’t you think?’
Jonah nodded, almost but not quite as if he agreed. ‘Mrs Reakes is fine, luckily, but I’d be interested to know if you saw or heard anything unusual last night.’
‘Me? No.’ The man in the slippers shook his head. ‘Nothing unusual. The standard Friday-night drag race went on, but I don’t give them the time of day now.’
‘Drag race? You mean fast cars?’
‘Yes. The lovely lads who like to tear along Portswood Road and then down past the end of the close.’
‘So you heard them last night? What time would this have been?’
‘Oh, gone midnight,’ the gentleman said. And then he added, ‘If something’s happened, I’d say they were likely to have been involved.’
‘But you don’t know who any of them are?’
The gentleman shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I’m not in the habit of strolling out at that hour of the night.’
Jonah nodded, slowly. He might not be, but there were traffic cameras not far away. Louise Reakes had mentioned a loud engine, too, which made this account more interesting. ‘Just let us know if you think of anything else,’ he said. And then he made his way back to number eleven.
Shaw was done with his observations and was in the midst of discussing the removal of the body to the city mortuary. Lightman and O’Malley were hovering near the gate. Presumably they’d finished quizzing the nearest neighbours.
‘Am I cleared to look for ID?’ Jonah asked.
‘Yes,’ Shaw agreed. ‘Be my guest.’
McCullough pulled a pair of purple latex gloves from her pocket and handed them to Jonah. He slid them on and was immediately hit by their smell. A sex-and-death smell, McCullough had once said. Jonah had laughed, and then felt a little nauseated the next time he’d torn into a foil packet and recognised the scent.
O’Malley crouched next to Jonah as he manoeuvred a wallet out of the victim’s back pocket. He opened it carefully and slid out a credit card, touching it as little as possible.
‘A. Plaskitt,’ he said, and then continued to look through the cards until he found a gym membership. ‘Alex. Alex Plaskitt.’
McCullough held out a plastic bag for Jonah to slide the wallet into, and he shifted so he could reach into the man’s right-hand pocket, which looked like it might have a phone in it. It was much harder to pull out. The victim’s legs were drawn up so that the phone was wedged against his hip. But by pushing it up from the outside of the pocket, Jonah managed to lever it out.
An iPhone. Fairly new, he thought, and cased in a plastic protector with an elaborate dragon pattern over it that almost matched his T-shirt.
Jonah pushed the home button and it lit up, showing a series of messages from someone saved as ‘Sex Kitten Issa’.
Alex’s girlfriend, probably, Jonah thought, as he scanned them.
The last one was from half an hour ago and read:
Where the fuck are you?
2
Louise
Niall, there’s so much I need to tell you. A whole messy story that surrounds and encompasses the morning I woke up next to a stranger and panicked like I’ve never panicked before.
I know it might well be too late for any of this. I’m sitting here without you, and I’m not even sure I want you to come back. But after so many stupid secrets, I think it’s time to lay everything bare.
And I should probably say here that I’m sorry for my part in it. I really am sorry for what a mess this has turned out to be, and for the actions I took that led us here.
But apologising isn’t an explanation, as you’ve told me before. So here’s everything, and it starts a lot further back than you might think. With the night we met, which was obviously also the night I met April. Though, in fact, there were three of you I met that night, and all of you came to dominate my life in a way I could never have predicted.
As much as you might want to believe that you started our story, it’s abundantly clear to me that it was April Dumont who started it. Even you can’t deny the power she has. Everyone was watching her during the wedding, from the moment she stomped in late, with her dress that showed off her midriff (and the side of each breast too, just in case that wasn’t enough). They stared at her tattoos. At her high-heeled cowboy boots that were the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen.
I bet you winced at that, didn’t you? I bet if you were reading this in front of me, you’d roll your eyes and ask me if that kind of language was necessary.
Well, I’m afraid it is, my darling. This is a fuck kind of a story from start to finish, though I honestly will try to spare you whenever I can. I want you to keep reading, Niall. I really do.
So, back to that wedding, when I was still a meek, anxious, painfully shy person. I’ve often wondered what I would have turned out like if my darling mum had lived a little longer. If I’d spent my teenage years with her, instead of with my increasingly neurotic, messily grieving father. If I’d had someone to tell me how great I was. I might have been a confident, talkative young woman. I might have been sexy.
But there’s no point wondering about that, really. I wasn’t confident, or talkative, or sexy. I was shy and awkward and frightened of attention.
At least I was before April. Before my life was picked up and turned luminous by the cowboy-booted girl who made her noisy way up the aisle, ignoring all the other free seats, and came to sit next to me. Next to mousy little me.
It was me she rolled her eyes at over the truly awful poem the maid of honour read out. It was me she showed her service sheet to, with the word ‘cock’ circled in the name of some poor composer called ‘Peacock’. I was the one who started laughing, to the point where everyone around us turned to look, which made us partners in crime. And to my surprise, I found that I didn’t mind being looked at just then. Not when April was on my team.
‘Thank Christ that’s over,’ she said, once the service was done, and if I hadn’t already been in love with her, that strident Tennessee drawl would have clinched it. I didn’t quite keep up with everything she said to me for the rest of the night, which I’m sure you can imagine. The high tempo and volume of her speech. The sudden low-voiced asides. But it didn’t really matter.
She walked with me to the reception, telling me about her baby sister back home, and how I looked just like her. Dee, she said. Dolores, but always called Dee. It seemed to mean something to her, that resemblance.
I asked her, keenly curious, how she’d ended up in Southampton. She seemed just so exotic to me, and so out of place.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, but I used to work for big pharma, like the groom,’ she said, and grinned at me. ‘My first husband and I got jobs over here, and then got sick of the sight of each other. He went back home; I stayed. Though I got the hell out of that job.’
‘What do you do now?’
She gave me a sidelong look. ‘I do a little consulting for some of the pharma firms still. Freelance, you know. So I can tell them where to shove it when I want. But mostly I spend my second husband’s money. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.’
I couldn’t help laughing. And then, two seconds later, I half tripped on my heels and had to grab hold of someone’s garden fence to steady myself, which for some reason made me laugh even harder.
‘You OK?’ she asked, and looped her arm through mine. ‘It’s the weirdest thing. You’re so like Dee! Almost, if you just had the accent … you could be twins.’
‘I’ll work on it,’ I said.
As far as I can tell, she decided right then and there that we were going to be best friends forever.
She put her arm round me the moment we arrived at the reception, and glanced around until she saw someone with a tray of champagne. ‘Thank God,’ she said, and plucked two glasses from it.
I didn’t want to tell h
er that I wasn’t a drinker. It’s a difficult thing to admit to someone who clearly sees alcohol as a lubricant to their social interactions. Which is why I never told you, either, Niall. I’ve consciously hidden the fact that, until that wedding, I was essentially teetotal.
The strangest thing is that I don’t think you would have believed me if I’d told you. I’m pretty sure you’re struggling to believe it now. You can’t even begin to imagine a Louise who doesn’t get shit-faced and out of control.
The truth is, I was genuinely afraid of being drunk. Still more afraid of humiliating myself or losing my keys or phone or, I don’t know, some part of myself. My sense of control, maybe. I found the idea of not being in command of everything daunting.
But here was April, handing me a glass, and necking hers before I could even start. I wanted, so badly, for her to keep liking me. And so I drank. Quickly. I loved April’s approval as she put the empties back and grabbed two more. I loved, even more, the way she smiled at the waiter with a look that thanked him and hinted at a promise of something. And I decided that I was going to be like April, whatever it took.
I felt none of the dizziness I’d expected as the alcohol kicked in. I felt warmth instead. A sense of everything suddenly mattering less. It became easier to act like my new friend. To laugh and even, for the first time ever, to flirt.
April introduced me to all the groom’s side of the family. They actually seemed to like me, and that told me I was doing the right thing. I didn’t resist when April took me to the bar, or to the washrooms, to touch up my eyeshadow and restyle my hair. Little by little, she managed to erase the Louise I’d been, and replace her with someone shinier. Better.
And, in response, everyone suddenly seemed to want to talk to me. The DJ. That sultry Italian friend of April’s. The best man, who was definitely married. They actually wanted to flirt with me and be flirted with. At twenty-eight I finally felt desirable.
Somewhere along the line, I began to imagine that I really was a new person. A bubblier, sexier, better Louise. I started to feel like I was watching this better person interact, and the loss of control wasn’t terrifying, like I’d expected. It was liberating.
