Tastes Like Fear (D.I. Marnie Rome 3)

by Sarah Hilary

She went back to Noah, who was standing and had mustered a smile. ‘I’ve got it from here. You need to be working the case. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll be back on my feet.’

  It was a long speech, and he looked less ghastly than he had in the car.

  Marnie nodded. ‘Take care. Call me when you can, but not before.’

  Noah climbed the stairs to the flat with his hands on the walls either side of him. Blind, because the left side of his head was a sliding mess of colour, everything red and green like Sol’s favourite TV show. The pain was twin hammers in his head, one for each temple. At least he hadn’t thrown up in the car. He reached the flat and felt with his fingers for the lock – a snagging sensation like teeth. Fitted the key. Pushed at the door. One foot in front of the other.

  Make it to the bed and lie down.

  Lie down.

  He closed the door, checking it was locked, waiting for the throb of nausea to subside. The migraine had repainted the hallway, set it at an angle hard to negotiate even with his hands holding on to the walls. Like crawling up a tunnel that got narrower the further he went.

  ‘… fuck with me, you little fucker!’ A stranger’s voice.

  Noah stood listening. Hard to hear past the thundering in his head and he needed – God – he needed to lie down. The stranger’s voice came again, too low to hear but raging, anger like a solid object pushing at the wall between him and the sitting room.

  ‘Sol?’ His voice came out frayed.

  Seven steps from the hall to the sitting room. He took five before his brother came out into the hall. ‘Shit. Shit. Come here, man.’

  Noah held him off with a look. ‘Who’s in there?’

  ‘No one. A mate.’ Sol shook his head. ‘You look dead, bro. What’s up?’

  ‘Migraine. Who is he?’

  ‘No one. I told you. Come on.’ Sol took his arm, steering him away from the sitting room, towards the bedroom. ‘Shit, man. Haven’t seen you like this in years.’

  ‘He was swearing at you.’ Noah lay on the bed, blocking the light with his arm while Sol drew the curtains. ‘Your mate. Called you a little fucker.’

  ‘Banter.’

  Noah kept the crook of his elbow across his eyes. The migraine was an iron spike through his left temple. ‘Get rid of him.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sol covered Noah with the side of the duvet he wasn’t lying on. ‘You gonna puke?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  Sol said something like, ‘Hang on.’ Noah couldn’t hear past the thundering in his skull. He badly wanted to pass out. It wasn’t nearly dark enough in the room. May Beswick …

  He should be looking for May Beswick. No, for her killer. That was what he should be doing. Not lying here praying to pass out. He was meant to be looking for a killer.

  ‘Bucket.’ Sol put a hand on Noah’s elbow, an awkward, brotherly pressure. ‘In case you puke.’

  It’d been years, but Sol hadn’t forgotten what to do when Noah was like this. Pure chance he was here to close curtains and fetch buckets, and who the hell was in the flat, calling him a fucker, threatening him? No good …

  Noah had to sleep. He had to be unconscious. It was the only cure he knew, when the pain got this bad. ‘Tramadol,’ he begged his brother. ‘Bathroom cabinet.’

  Sol said, ‘I’m on it.’

  19

  From the bedroom window in Taybridge Road, Marnie watched the vertical climb of the city, its high-rises topping out the trees in Battersea Park, dwarfing the sprawl of the Garrett estate.

  Engineered exclusion: the higher the city climbed, the fewer people had access to it. It wasn’t just the penthouses at the power station that cost millions. The cloud-kissing office space was reserved for the elite. For the view from the Shard you needed a pricey ticket and a security scan. More and more of London was being fenced off for fewer and fewer of its citizens, the private stamping ground of the super-rich, or corporations. Good news in this particular case; she was looking for someone who had access to the showroom flats at Battersea Power Station, and the list wouldn’t be long – she’d have it in her hands by the end of the day – but she mistrusted the illusion of control. She didn’t control the crime scene any more than she controlled the city. No one did. Unless it was the killer, with his rhetoric of terror. What had Noah called it? A normal reaction to social living. Marnie turned from the window to look at May’s bed.

  Clean sheets, a faint scent of fabric softener. Katrina had made the bed on the morning May went missing, before she discovered her daughter wasn’t coming home. She’d put clean underwear in the drawers of the dressing table where May’s hairbrush was gathering dust. Even before the discovery of May’s body, this room had looked odd to Marnie. Everything neat and untouched under a sticky topcoat of dust. Books, CDs, toys – nothing had been moved recently, picked up and put down, used. May had been gone less than twenty-four hours when Marnie first came here, but the room had looked unlived in. ‘She didn’t spend a lot of time in here,’ Sean had said. ‘Preferred the kitchen or the sitting room, sometimes Loz’s room.’ The posters on the walls belonged to a much younger girl. ‘She put those up years ago,’ he said. ‘Never took them down.’

  May hadn’t lived in this room for a long time, not in the way most teenagers lived. Messily, chaotically, joyfully, grumpily. Impossible to imagine her lying on the bed listening to music or chatting on the phone to her friends. No ghost of her was in the room, then or now. Where had she gone to do her living? To the place where she was killed? CCTV put her less than a mile from here on the night before she died. So close to safety, but she chose to stay away. Assuming she’d had a choice.

  ‘She hated it in here.’

  Marnie turned to see Loz standing in the doorway to her sister’s room. In the school uniform that swamped her, black hair brambly, eyes big with unshed tears.

  ‘I love my room, love to be sent to it. Go to your room, Laura! as if it’s not the best place in the house anyway. But May hated it. She liked the garden, digging, planting stuff. She’d come into my room sometimes. I liked it when she did that, but I could never get her to stay. She was always moving around. Like … a kite.’ Her voice caught.

  ‘Where’s your dad? Your mum went for a lie-down, I think.’

  ‘They both did.’ Loz put her eyes around the room. ‘I suppose this’s how it’ll stay now. That’s what parents of dead kids do, isn’t it? Keep their rooms exactly as they were. Except there’s no point with May’s. Not like she was ever here. Not really. Not in ages.’

  Marnie recognised the spikes Loz was putting out to keep the world at bay, each one as sharp and shiny as a needle. It was frightening how much of herself she saw in Loz’s anger, and her grief. She’d wanted to leave this task to Noah, believing him better equipped to communicate with Loz. She hadn’t wanted to be the one asking the questions or seeing at close quarters this girl’s pain. It was never easy being face to face with a grieving relative, but Marnie made the effort because it was important. This was different, not any less important just …

  Harder. Because Loz reminded her so much of the girl she’d been.

  ‘Who’s looking after you? Is there someone here apart from your mum and dad?’

  ‘Just them.’ Her face was small inside the storm cloud of hair. ‘Where’s Noah?’

  ‘He got sick. I took him home.’

  ‘Sick from seeing May?’

  ‘No, he had a migraine. He gets them sometimes.’

  ‘Mum felt sick after the mortuary. I told her it was probably adrenalin.’ Loz put her thumb between her teeth. ‘Do you think she knew who did it?’

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘May. Most people are killed by someone they know.’ Those fierce eyes, demanding the facts more plainly than Marnie had served them to her parents. ‘D’you think May knew her killer?’

  ‘What happened with Alice Gordon? You fell out.’

  ‘She was a liar. She said May was coming back, that everything would be all right
. We’d be a family again, as if that was ever true to begin with. She wasn’t even a good liar. Did you have to put up with that when your parents were killed?’

  The sudden switch of focus made Marnie blink.

  ‘They were murdered,’ Loz said. ‘I read about it online. Your stepbrother did it when he was fourteen. Stabbed them to death. May wasn’t stabbed, was she? She was strangled.’

  ‘Loz … It’s not appropriate for me to be talking to you about this. Not without an adult present.’

  ‘You’re an adult.’

  ‘I’m a detective.’

  ‘Same difference. It would only be a problem if you were trying to get evidence out of me, which you’re not. I’m just talking. I’m always talking. I open my mouth and stuff falls out. Until I put my foot in there and stop it, that’s what Dad says.’

  Her dad had a point.

  ‘Are you part of the Forgiveness Project?’ Loz said next. ‘It’s a prison project to help victims come to terms with what’s happened, by forgiving the people who hurt them. Will we have to forgive whoever killed May? Because I won’t. Even if Mum and Dad join in, I’m not forgiving them, ever. May wouldn’t want me to.’ Her stare shone with tears. ‘Did you have to forgive Stephen Keele? I googled you after you came here that first time. Actually I googled Noah, but I couldn’t find anything so I googled you and I found loads. From five years ago. He’s nineteen now.’ She bit her lips together until they turned white. ‘Have you forgiven him? Did they make you do that? I mean, did you have to, because you work for the police? Or as therapy? I bet you had a lot of therapy. You’ll be telling us about that next, I suppose. Bereavement counselling, coming to terms with our loss. Or will you wait until we’ve buried her? If they bury her. Probably it’ll be a cremation.’ She wiped at her eyes, looking angrily at her wet hand. ‘We’ll have to wait anyway, won’t we? For you to finish the post-mortem, and even then you’ll keep her body for evidence. For when you find the killer, which could take ages. You could have her for months and months. Mum and Dad don’t get that she belongs to you now, to the police. And then to the courts. She’s evidence. She’s yours.’ She gulped a breath, rubbing her hands on the front of her jumper. ‘It’s not your fault. No one’s saying that. But it’s someone’s fault. The killer’s, for starters. I won’t ever forgive whoever did it. Just so you know, if you start any of that forgiveness shit around me? I won’t join in, not even to please Mum and Dad. I can’t do much to help. I can’t do anything. But I can hate whoever did it.’ She had started to shake. ‘I can do that.’

  Marnie had stayed silent while the girl burned through her questions. Now she said, ‘That’s allowed. You’re allowed to hate whoever did this.’

  ‘Do you hate him? Stephen Keele. Even after five years?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re right, they wanted me to take part in the Forgiveness Project. I signed on because it was expected of me. But I didn’t believe in it, not then.’

  ‘It’s stupid. Weak.’

  ‘It can feel that way. But it can wear you down, always being angry.’

  ‘I’d rather be worn down than accepting.’ Loz shoved her hair back from her face. ‘I hate people who do that, who carry on. As if none of this,’ pushing her hands at her dead sister’s room, ‘ever existed. I won’t do that. Ever.’

  She turned her black stare on Marnie again. ‘Everyone says I’m the strong one. May was the dreamer, always tuning out or joining in. No questions, no trouble to anyone. Well I hope she was trouble to him. The killer. I hope she fought back. Even though she never did when she was alive. Not like me, the awkward one. The troublemaker. Well, fine. Fine. I wish I could make trouble for whoever did this. Strangled her and whatever else he did. When will you know what he did? When’s the post-mortem finished?’

  ‘Soon.’ Marnie felt battered by the girl’s unhappiness, her need for answers. Her throat ached with not answering. And with empathy.

  ‘Will you tell me?’ Loz demanded. ‘They won’t. Or I’ll get some safe version. But I want to know. I need to know what happened to her. Will you tell me? Promise me you’ll tell me.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I’m sorry. I won’t make a promise I can’t keep.’

  ‘They told you everything. You didn’t have to imagine worse than what actually happened.’

  ‘I was twenty-eight.’ And there was no worse than what happened.

  ‘You were looking for something.’ Loz bit her lip at her sister’s room. ‘What?’

  ‘The Sharpie pens.’ An answer, of sorts.

  Loz’s stare jerked to Marnie. ‘The pens.’ Scuffing her toes at the floor. ‘You saw, then.’

  ‘I saw the writing. Did you? Before. When May was living here.’

  ‘She showed me. She wanted me to write something once.’

  Marnie thought of the words she’d read on May’s body. Ugly, insulting words. A solitary act, she’d thought. Facing a mirror or locked in the bathroom. She hadn’t imagined an accomplice when May wrote those warnings on her body. ‘What did you write?’

  ‘I didn’t write anything. I wasn’t going to put stuff like that on my sister. It was all lies, and shit. It was shit. I hated it.’ Blinking back tears. ‘I hated what she wrote.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. But she asked you to write something?’

  Loz gave a reluctant nod, not wanting to betray her sister’s secrets. ‘She called it a game.’

  ‘How long had she been playing it?’

  ‘I don’t know. A long time.’

  ‘Did she play it with anyone else?’

  Loz hesitated again. ‘Sometimes. I don’t know for sure, she never said, but I think so.’

  ‘School friends?’

  ‘No.’ Loz flashed a look of scorn. ‘That place throws a fit if you don’t have the right hair extensions. She didn’t have any real friends there.’

  ‘Where were her real friends?’

  ‘Loz …’ Sean Beswick stood at the other end of the corridor, his face haggard, staring at his daughter. ‘What are you doing?’

  Loz slid her eyes at Marnie with a tiny shrug. ‘Asking questions, being difficult, you know me. But you needn’t worry. DI Rome’s far too professional to talk to me without an appropriate adult present.’ She pushed away from the wall. ‘I’ll make tea. That’d be helpful, wouldn’t it?’

  Her dad watched her go down the stairs. Marnie read fear in his face, as if he was scared of the questions Loz had been asking. Or scared of her grief.

  Why was it so hard for the Beswicks to hug their younger daughter? Were they afraid of losing her too? The troublemaker. How many awkward questions had Loz asked her parents before Marnie arrived? No answers to some of those questions, not yet, maybe not ever. How exactly May had died, what had happened to her in the twelve weeks after she went missing. Why she was killed, and by whom. Marnie wanted the answers as badly as Loz did.

  Sean said, ‘Sorry. I had to stay with Kat. She’s in a bad way.’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  ‘You had questions. Do you need both of us? Kat could really use some sleep.’

  ‘I wanted to ask about May’s friends, anyone she might’ve been in touch with during the three months she was missing.’

  ‘You spoke with her friends.’ Sean rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. ‘Didn’t you? We gave you all the names we knew, weeks ago.’

  ‘We spoke with her friends at school, but was there anyone else, someone we might’ve missed? A boyfriend, perhaps.’

  Sean had seen his daughter in the morgue, her clipped nails, clean hair. Hadn’t he wondered where she’d been, to be so well looked after? No, of course he hadn’t. He’d seen his daughter dead, strangled. There was no ‘well looked after’ in that. Marnie couldn’t stop thinking like a detective, but nor could she expect a grieving parent to think like one.

  ‘A boyfriend? No. I’m sure there wasn’t.’ A tension in his face, like a barrier to her question. ‘If she’d been seeing anyone, even someo
ne we hated her seeing, we’d have told you. We’d have given you that name first, probably.’ He dropped his hand to his side. ‘Why? Do you think she knew whoever killed her?’

  ‘She was missing for twelve weeks. We need to establish whether she was with the same person all that time, or somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere safe, until recently.’

  ‘She was safe here.’ He punched the wall. ‘We had her safe. Until he took her.’

  Marnie waited a moment out of respect for his pain. ‘May was an artist. You showed us her sketchbooks. Some of her pictures …’

  ‘Battersea Power Station.’ He nodded. ‘She was obsessed with the place, did an art project recording its history, the way it’s changing. When you told us where she was found, I thought we should’ve looked there sooner. She was always hanging around the place.’

  ‘We searched the area twelve weeks ago,’ Marnie reminded him. ‘The house-to-house team was very thorough. Did May ever visit anyone on the Garrett estate? A girl, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’ Another emphatic answer. ‘None of her friends lived over there. Some of the kids at the school for sure, but none of her friends. We told the girls to steer clear of the place. Why are you asking? Did she … Do you know who did this? Have you found someone …?’

  ‘Not yet, but we have a recent CCTV sighting of May and another girl—’

  ‘Recent? You mean she was here, out on the streets? Why didn’t she come home?’

  ‘We don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What girl?’ He dropped his voice, hearing Loz on the stairs. ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Not yet. She has dyed red hair. Very red, and lots of it. She’s slim, about May’s height and age. Do you remember seeing May with a girl who answers that description?’

  Sean shook his head, eyes straining at her face. ‘She lives on the Garrett?’

  Loz was carrying two mugs of tea. She held one out for her father, the other for Marnie. ‘The Garrett’s full of losers. Druggies and cutters, all the worst kids in the school. The police came and gave us a talk because some boys brought knives into school and said they got them from the Garrett. You can get anything over there. Glue, booze, fireworks.’