by Sarah Hilary
May was okay. She was.
I heard them downstairs, Ashleigh and Christie, moving slowly so as not to disturb him.
Could I trust Christie? No, I couldn’t trust any of them. He’d made me into a monster, their bogeyman, his precious little girl. No wonder Ashleigh hated me.
The wire wouldn’t come out of the sketchpad, not easily, but I was working at it. I thought if I warmed the metal with my fingers and my breath, I could make it come.
It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all I had.
I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. No point with May gone.
I’d kept the peace for her sake, but I was on my own now.
Me and him, that was what it’d come down to.
It was always going to come down to that.
Me, and him.
21
Noah woke to a dark room. His temples throbbed but the migraine had retreated, leaving a soft wash of endorphins in its wake. He lay blinking at the pillow, light-headed with relief.
‘You’re awake?’ Dan was at the side of the bed.
‘Mmm.’ He moved on to his back, nursing the blissed-out feeling. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly seven.’ Dan found his hand and held it. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Better.’
Dan’s thumb traced his knuckles. ‘Sure?’
‘Yes. Come here.’ He pulled Dan down into a kiss, making it hard enough to persuade the pair of them that he was fine. ‘Where’s Sol?’
‘He went out when I got back, said you needed to sleep it off. He’d been keeping an eye on you. He’s a good brother.’
Noah didn’t argue. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, waiting to see if the pain would catch up with him before he attempted to stand. Sometimes the migraines hung around for days, but this one was gone. He let out the breath he’d been holding and smiled at Dan. ‘I’m fine. Really. I couldn’t fake it if I wasn’t.’
Dan said simply, ‘I know.’ Then, ‘Convince me again?’
Noah leaned the pair of them into the wall for a long minute, convincing Dan with his hands and his mouth, before saying, ‘I need to eat.’
‘I noticed.’
‘Come on.’ Noah made a fist of their hands, moving in the direction of the kitchen.
When he passed the sitting room, he stopped, remembering the raised voices. Someone in the flat with Sol … A mate, his brother had said, but he hadn’t sounded friendly. Calling Sol a little fucker, threatening him …
The room was empty, just the shape of Sol’s head in the sofa cushions. No mess, or nothing that wasn’t explained by his brother’s relaxed attitude as a house guest. ‘Where’d Sol go, did he say?’
Dan shook his head. ‘Just that he wouldn’t be late.’
They went through to the kitchen. Dan opened the fridge, started taking out eggs, ham.
‘Was he on his own when you got home? No one here with him?’
‘Just you,’ Dan smiled across his shoulder, ‘passed out on the bed.’
Sol had got rid of whoever it was before Dan came home. Noah wished he could remember exactly what he’d heard. If Sol was in trouble, and if he’d brought that trouble back here …
Noah wanted to know.
Dan was breaking eggs in a bowl, making omelettes. ‘You want cheese in this?’
‘Yes please.’ He dug out his phone. ‘I should call in, let them know I’m okay.’ He walked into the hall, where the signal was stronger. He dialled Sol’s number first, getting voicemail. ‘Hey, it’s me. Thanks for earlier. Let me know you’re okay.’ He hung up, and dialled Marnie’s number.
She answered on the second ring. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great. Slept it off. Any news?’
‘Nothing that can’t wait until the morning. Get some rest. Fran will have the PM results for us tomorrow. I’ll call you if there’s anything to report. Otherwise I’ll see you first thing.’ She rang off.
Noah pocketed the phone and returned to the kitchen. ‘That smells good.’ His body was craving a hit of fat. He poured orange juice for himself and a beer for Dan, setting two places at the table.
‘I heard the news.’ Dan was finishing the first omelette under the grill. ‘About the body at Battersea. Is that your case?’
‘Yes.’
‘No wonder you had a migraine.’ Dan’s blue eyes were a shade darker than usual and there was a thread of worry in his voice, but he didn’t ask any more questions. ‘Sit down, I’ve got this.’
Noah’s phone purred in his pocket.
A text from Sol: Cool, and a smiley face.
Sol code for Leave me alone.
Noah returned the phone to his pocket, and concentrated on the food.
A basket of petunias hung over the door to number 14, a shiny car in the driveway. Wheelie bins stood sentry up the street, as they had in Taybridge Road. But this was the other side of London, a different house. Marnie hadn’t lived here since she was eighteen. Thirties, detached, big kitchen at the back and a downstairs bathroom where her dad would get clean after washing the car, a brown Vauxhall, his pride and joy. The car in the driveway was an Audi now, but the basket of petunias was the same, red and purple, turning to black under the street lights.
Marnie rested her wrists on the steering wheel, looking through the windscreen at the house her parents had left to her. Everything had been left to her. They’d insisted that Stephen was a permanent fixture in the family – they’d fostered him for six years – yet he wasn’t mentioned in their wills. A silent, skinny eight-year-old, the first years of his life a living hell – that was as much as she knew when they began fostering him. No details were given, and she hadn’t wanted any. He’d kept her parents occupied, deflecting their attention from her. She was glad, busy with her new life, her career. She’d got away. A teenage runaway, Welland had called her, seeing some likeness to May Beswick, but Marnie had never been mute in this house. She’d been a scourge, making the whole place rock around her. A wild child, running on anger. The memory made her cringe against the steering wheel.
Do you hate him? Stephen Keele. Even after five years?
May had never fought back at home. Loz was the angry one. Like Marnie. Like Stephen, except he’d buried his anger too deep for Children’s Services to see. He’d lived quietly in this house, spying on her when he was twelve and she was twice his age, watching her undress in the guest bedroom, reading her skin’s secrets, the tattoos she’d kept hidden from everyone. She’d been good at keeping secrets. The drinking when she was fourteen, the affair when she was sixteen …
Some houses soaked up secrets.
Was it like that at Taybridge Road? May and Loz and Sean and Katrina all living under the same roof but knowing so little about each other’s lives, each other’s pain?
The steering wheel pressed into her chest as she leaned to look up at the bedroom, her room until she’d moved out. Empty for three years, then Stephen’s for the next six, before he took a knife to her parents one morning when Marnie was miles away, at work, being a detective.
Have you forgiven him? Loz hadn’t waited for an answer.
Above the hanging basket, the bedroom window was curtained, quiet.
What was it like for Stephen living in her room? Why didn’t he paint the walls, put her belongings into the attic, move the furniture around? Because he knew he wouldn’t be staying? Or because he liked the room full of her things? He’d said he’d killed them for her. His latest assault, a new bid for her attention, or something more?
What had he found, or thought he’d found, in her room? What clues did she leave to make him think she was unhappy here? Dust in her hairbrush, like the one in May’s room? Untouched books? A room that hadn’t been lived in, not properly. A room she’d run from again and again, unable to stand the feel of its walls around her.
He’s such a little boy, Marn, and he’s had such a hell of a life. We’d like to make it up to him.
What had they done to deserv
e what he did? What had they done to deserve her anger, her restlessness, her running away?
She sat back in the car, shutting her eyes.
It was late. She should be home with Ed, not parked here looking at a house she’d not visited in five years, arranging the tenancy from a distance because she wasn’t ready to sell, still hoping for evidence she’d missed, clues to why he’d done it. She closed her hand around the house keys. The leather fob was soft, polished by skin, by her father’s fingers. The keys bit their teeth into her palm. It was her house. She could serve notice on the tenants and go inside, search for the clues she’d missed. The clues they’d all missed. If Stephen was a strange boy, no one had noticed it. Not her parents, or their neighbours. He hadn’t run from this house even once. He’d helped her dad to wash his Vauxhall, played on the swing in the garden, gone to school every day. His social worker couldn’t explain it, and nor could the prison psychiatrist. Her parents had never said a word against him to anyone. Mrs Poole, the neighbour, had seen Marnie storming out and sneaking home, but she never saw Stephen put a foot wrong. Not until that morning when the screams brought her out of her house and into the street.
None of the neighbours had noticed anything amiss on Taybridge Road before May went missing. ‘A happy family,’ they’d all agreed. But it wasn’t true.
Was it true for anyone, anywhere?
Marnie started the engine, checking the car’s mirrors before pulling away from the kerb.
A CCTV camera had been bracketed to the wall of number 8. Home security. It hadn’t been there five years ago. The murders had made people nervous, given this nice neighbourhood a bad reputation. She wondered what reputation Taybridge Road would get when the news broke that May had been murdered, whether the penthouses at Battersea would ever be sold, and to whom. Who would want to live in a place where a body had been found?
She drove back up the road, respecting the speed limit, past the detached houses with their yellow-lit windows and locked doors.
Was May’s killer in a house like this?
He was out there somewhere. She’d delayed going home in the hope of news, some glimmer of the trail that had felt warm in the early hours but was increasingly chilly.
This man knew how to hide. You didn’t display a body the way he’d displayed May unless you had a good hiding place and a fully functioning survival instinct.
Clean crime scenes filled her with dread. Clean killers were the hardest to catch. It was possible that May wasn’t his first. It looked certain that she wouldn’t be his last.
Marnie turned left, past streets and streets of houses with the same face, home to Ed.
Ed was lying on the sofa in an old T-shirt and the bottom half of a pair of pyjamas. Headphones on, laptop open, watching an episode of Seinfeld. Odd socks on his feet, bed-head brown hair, his fringe in his eyes. Marnie sat on the arm of the sofa and leaned down to kiss him.
‘Have you eaten?’ He pulled the headphones off.
She could smell bacon. ‘Have you?’
‘I had breakfast.’
‘Breakfast was hours ago.’
‘I ate it for supper.’ Ed stretched, putting the laptop aside. ‘I had a craving. I’ll make you some.’
‘In a bit, maybe.’ She kissed him again, keeping her hands in his hair. He tasted of brown sauce, the same colour as his eyes. ‘You have some bad habits, Belloc.’
‘Mmm.’ He smiled against her mouth. ‘You’re the best of them.’
She moved her hands to his hips, liking the narrow feel of him, the way they fitted together. After a while, they went into the tiny kitchen at the back of the flat.
‘I heard the news about Battersea,’ Ed said. ‘Is it that poor girl?’
‘May Beswick, yes. We’ll be confirming it in the morning.’
‘Murder?’ Ed cracked an egg over the pan.
‘Yes.’
He shook his head, saying nothing more.
Marnie found a bottle of Guinness in the fridge and shared it between two glasses. ‘Very clean,’ she said. ‘Very nasty, but very clean.’ She knew Ed would understand what that meant.
‘How are her parents coping?’ he asked.
‘Not well. Her sister Loz is very angry. I’m worried there’s no one taking care of her.’
‘Family Liaison?’
‘Not a good match. Loz is tough. It’s going to be hard to help her. She needs someone who won’t deal in platitudes. She’s thirteen, but in some ways she’s much older than May was.’ Marnie watched Ed turn the bacon in the pan. ‘May was pregnant. Just a few weeks.’
He looked across at her. ‘The killer?’
‘We don’t know. That would be the obvious conclusion, but the way he left her … It didn’t look like a sex crime. Not to me, or to Noah.’
Ed served the food on to a plate and sat with her while she ate. Marnie hadn’t known how hungry she was. When she’d finished, they returned to the sofa with what was left of the Guinness.
‘Loz asked me about Stephen,’ she told Ed. ‘She’d googled me, wanted to know if I was taking part in the Forgiveness Project.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That I didn’t believe in it when I signed up. She can’t imagine ever forgiving the person who killed her sister. I said I understood but that anger can be exhausting. Stupid of me. It’s too soon for her to be hearing stuff like that. She should be angry.’
Ed put his hand on her waist, his fingers finding the bare skin at her hip. It reminded her of what else Loz had said. ‘May wrote on herself with Sharpie pens. She was covered in writing. We think the girl from the traffic accident was the same. They knew each other. We can’t find the other girl, but we think she might be on the Garrett estate.’
‘That’s a hard place to search,’ Ed said.
‘Yes … I used to write on myself, before I saved up the money for the tattoos.’ She’d never told anyone this before. ‘I know what it’s like to keep those sorts of secrets. And the ritual, the urge. It helped me to cope, strengthened my resolve to escape. It was like a first draft of my rebellion. Not that it was ever much of a rebellion.’ She was exhausted. Emptying herself of words, letting Ed take custody of these new confidences. ‘May wrote “whore” in her hands, in the palms of her hands. And other insults, all over her body. She was very unhappy. But why would she write that word? If the killer got her pregnant, it wasn’t likely to have been consensual.’
‘What words did you write?’ Ed asked her.
‘Oh, nothing like that. Pretentious nonsense, like the tattoos.’
Ed stroked his thumb over the words inked across her hip: Places of exile.
‘Seventeen teenage girls are reported as missing in London right now. Even if we narrow it down to the ones who went missing recently, that’s four lost girls. And this man. He’s not going to stop.’
‘Very nasty, and very clean.’
‘Exactly. He looks after them, to begin with. May wasn’t malnourished, no signs of restraint. She wasn’t living on the streets. If she was with the killer all that time, then he took good care of her. That’s why I don’t think he’ll stop.’
‘How did he find her if she wasn’t on the streets? Do you think she was snatched?’
‘I’m worried she might have found him rather than the other way around.’
‘Social networking?’
‘She didn’t use a computer or a phone. Not like other teenagers, anyway. We checked the laptops in the house – nothing. She liked sketching Battersea Power Station. Perhaps that’s where he saw her. If she was lonely, he might’ve been able to use that, flatter her, make her feel special …’ She was thinking of a party sixteen years ago, a stranger offering her a light, his mouth crooked around a cigarette, his eyes a hot band of blue. Adam Fletcher. Her first big mistake.
‘Loz suggested we look on the Garrett. Where we’re looking for the other girl.’
‘I know a couple of the families there.’ Ed scrubbed a hand at his scalp. ‘From
what they tell me, they’re living under siege.’ He worried about the families he was helping; not in his nature to switch off when he left work. Time to change the subject.
Marnie reached for the Guinness. ‘Stephen’s being moved to an adult prison.’
‘When?’
‘In a few months. He’ll be twenty, and things have been tricky at Sommerville lately. They must have moved his name up the list.’
‘Which prison, do you know?’
Marnie told him. ‘Can you think of one with a worse reputation? I can’t.’
Self-harm, suicide, violence. Stephen’s new home ticked every box, and unlike Sommerville, it was in Greater London. No excuse not to visit, if she intended keeping the promises she’d made to the Forgiveness Project.
Ed was silent, his hand still on her hip, fingers smoothing her skin.
‘I said I’d go and see him before he’s moved. Paul Bruton thinks I might give him a pep talk, help him to focus on his rehabilitation.’
‘Isn’t that Bruton’s job?’
Marnie held his hand to her hip. ‘Stephen knows about this. The tattoos.’ Ed’s fingers were on the words, Places of exile. ‘He told me that’s the reason he did it, the reason he killed them.’
‘What …?’
‘I should have told you sooner. He must have watched me at the house, years ago. Saw the tattoos but never mentioned them. Then the last time I visited, he said that’s why he killed them. “I did it for you.”’
‘What bullshit.’ Ed’s eyes were bright with anger. ‘That bastard.’
‘I know it’s bullshit. It’s okay.’ She smiled, holding his hand steady. ‘I know he’s lying. I even know why he’s lying. To mess with me. It’s what he does, all he has. At least … We talked about care packages. Someone’s sending him food, books. He claims he doesn’t know who it is. His parents, probably. But he’s not interested in playing games with them. It’s my attention he wants.’
‘He should’ve been moved to an adult prison years ago.’
‘I don’t want him moved.’
‘What?’ Ed stared at her.
‘Part of me wants it, of course. Part of me’s glad he’s finally going to be punished properly. But it’s a part of me I’m not proud of. Just as I’m not proud of the way I behaved when I was May’s age and going off the rails, chasing trouble, putting my parents through hell. That girl cheered when she heard the news of Stephen’s move, but I don’t like her very much. I’m trying not to be her any longer.’ She waited, but Ed didn’t speak, staying close, hearing her out. ‘Do I want my parents’ murderer to be punished? Yes. But do I want him in a place where he’s likely to learn worse ways to hurt other people? No. And that’s if he survives. There’s a good chance he won’t, and if he dies before I’ve come to terms with what he did, I’m not ready to cope with that. I want him alive and safe, and growing up. I’m managing to do that, and I want the same for him. I want him to regret what he did. Even if he can’t explain it, I want him to be sorry.’
