by Sarah Hilary
That’s what I’d go for, with the wire – her eyes.
Stop her spying for him, seeing something she shouldn’t. He didn’t look, not properly, but she did. She knew something wasn’t right with me. I could hear it in her breathing. She saw me. She was stronger, too. Bigger, taller, her hands like fucking trowels, but I’d have her.
I’d fucking have her.
I used to live on the streets, in the tunnels.
May knew …
That was where she’d found us, living like rats when the rain came, pretending it wasn’t a pit, pretending we were streetwise, free spirits, sharing stories about the fuckers we’d escaped from. Dancing in the rain, I remembered that. Dancing in the fucking rain.
Ashleigh had a story about her stepdad. Some shit about him watching when she got undressed. We all had a story like that, and she was lying, I could tell. She wanted him to watch, that was my guess. All she had were her tits and arse. If no one was looking at those, no one was seeing her, and we all wanted to be seen. We thought it’d be impossible to be ignored when we were sitting right there under your feet every day. But you managed it somehow, managed to make us invisible. Ashleigh couldn’t stand being invisible. She’d be out there right now, showing her tits to someone, getting noticed. Good luck to her. We were all just trying to stay alive. If she needed to get groped to feel that way, then good luck to her. I hoped she was getting groped right now.
May needed looking after with the baby coming, so I got that, too. Why she had to go back home to her little sister, who’d be an auntie soon. I didn’t blame her for running. I’d have done the same if I wasn’t being watched so well. By her now, as well as him.
The wire stabbed my finger, scratching blood from under a nail.
I sucked it, tasting salt.
I was thirsty, all the time. It was the food, everything salted, dried, preserved. Maybe that was what he was doing, preserving me from the inside out like an Egyptian mummy. He’d pull my brains through my nose and put my kidneys into jars. I’d have skin like leather and huge hollow eyes. He’d love me like that.
Footsteps on the stairs.
My heart skittered.
I curled on my side with the wire under me, tucking my hands away.
Shallow breaths, shallow, don’t give the game away.
Cold air snaked into the room.
Was it him, or her?
I was sleeping, look. I was sleeping.
My mouth open on the pillow, breathing through my mouth.
Asleep. Don’t wake me.
His shadow over me, like a stone. Or hers, was it hers?
Silence packed like soil, green and black behind my eyes, flecked with white like spit. Shallow breaths through my mouth, damp on the pillow. I was sick, sleeping. Let me sleep.
I didn’t want to wake. I didn’t.
Eyes on my skin, on my throat, like fingers pressing, squeezing. I couldn’t breathe. It was only eyes. His or hers. Watching me sleep. But it felt like fingers, hands on my throat.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe.
Panic hitched air into my chest, making me jump. I turned it into a snore, frowning in my sleep, not waking. My whole body prickled with fright, every hair spiking into my skin. But I didn’t wake, didn’t open my eyes, didn’t move past that first kick of panic.
I was good at this, still good.
His good little girl. And hers.
The stone shifted over me, moving back from the bed, retreating to the door.
I felt the long pull of the shadow as it drained like water from the room, leaving me damp and twitching in the bed.
28
‘So our dead girls knew each other.’ Welland studied the whiteboard as if its content was a personal affront. ‘Any idea where they met?’
‘We’re looking for the subway in the sketch,’ Noah told him. ‘It’s our best lead.’
‘A drawing? Who’s to say she didn’t pull it out of thin air?’
‘She drew the power station, and other landmarks.’ How had she felt about the bland landscapes on her parents’ walls when she was producing sketches as rawly intimate as these? ‘We think the subway exists. We’re looking at places close to her house and school.’
‘That’s all we’ve got to go on?’
‘And the graffiti. Taggers are territorial. If we can identify the tags, we might be able to work out the location of the subway. Transport Police have a database, so we’re starting there.’
Welland eyed the tags in May’s sketch: Fearz; Rents. ‘That’ll give us where the girls met but not how they ended up dead within forty-eight hours of each other.’ He pulled on his upper lip. ‘Ashleigh’s parents haven’t got any ideas? Or the care home she ran from?’
‘Kent Police broke the news to the parents and the care home. They showed them May’s photo, but no one remembers seeing her with Ashleigh at any point before she ran. They must’ve met after she got to London. My guess is they met in the subway. What May was doing there, I don’t know. Sketching, maybe. I think that’s where the killer found them.’
‘What about the third girl, Traffic’s missing one?’
‘We’ve got a better e-fit, thanks to Ruth Eaton. The house-to-house team’s showing it around the Garrett. A lot of frightened people there after we found Ashleigh’s body this morning.’
From the whiteboard, Ashleigh blew a kiss, eyes flirting, shoulders cocked. Trying to attract attention. Not like May, or not like they’d imagined May. The sketchpad changed a lot of things.
Welland kneaded the skin under his eyes. ‘Where’s DI Rome?’
‘With Fran Lennox for the post-mortem results. One thing: Ashleigh wasn’t pregnant. Fran’s ruled out any recent sexual activity. No evidence of abuse or assault.’
‘So he just strangled and dumped her. What a gentleman.’ Welland peered at the sketches copied from May’s pad. ‘The Beswick girl was a dark horse. Taking an A level in pornography, was she?’
‘It’s not pornography,’ Noah said mildly. ‘It’s life studies.’
‘And now she’s dead. Whose life was she studying?’ Tapping his thumb to the most graphic of the images. ‘Our killer’s? What does the sister have to say? These were found in her room.’
‘Loz didn’t know about the drawings. She’s upset by them, but not in the same way as her parents. May was keeping secrets from her. It’s made her feel even more isolated.’
Back at the Beswicks’ house, Loz had told Noah she was being threatened with a therapist. ‘I don’t need shrinking,’ she’d said. ‘My world’s small enough already.’
Noah had said, ‘It might help. To talk. To realise you’re not alone with this thing.’
Loz had looked straight at him. ‘You do realise that sounds like bullshit?’
Welland was growling at the sketches. ‘Pity she didn’t draw more faces. I don’t fancy having to ID our killer from his private parts.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Keep me posted, Detective.’
‘Ashleigh Jewell was hypernatremic,’ Marnie told Noah forty minutes later. ‘Fran’s confirmed it. What’s more, her stomach contents was a match for May’s. Salted fish and lentils. They were in the same place eating the same meal just before they died.’
‘He had sex with May, but not with Ashleigh.’
‘Someone had sex with May,’ Marnie corrected. ‘We don’t know it was the killer.’
‘He puts May on the bed, brushes her hair, lays her out. Ashleigh he dumps with the trash.’
‘The bruises are a match in terms of size and pattern. Latex gloves again, traces of talc. No other DNA evidence. He may have dumped her, but he was careful not to leave any clues. As careful as he was with May.’ Marnie rubbed at her left wrist. ‘If it’s the same killer, he held both girls for weeks. Fed them, clothed them, at least in Ashleigh’s case. The underwear was from Marks and Spencer, like the school uniform, even though Ashleigh wasn’t attending school. He bought them clothes, then he killed them both within t
he space of forty-eight hours. Why? What happened to make him do that?’
‘Even if May’s pregnancy was the reason he killed her, that doesn’t explain Ashleigh. We were looking for May; her face was in the papers, on the news. Ashleigh’s wasn’t. If he’s worried about being caught, then dumping her in the vicinity of what’s already a crime scene looks desperate.’ Noah shook his head. ‘Or he wants us to know what he’s doing, wants our attention on him.’
Marnie didn’t dispute this. ‘Ashleigh’s parents are coming to identify the body. Once that’s done, we’ll release her photo and name. Until then, May is the only official victim.’
‘What will you tell the press this morning?’
‘To report it responsibly.’ She tidied her hair from her face. ‘We’re putting out an alert to the homeless charities, letting them know we’ll have more feet on the ground over the coming weeks. If he’s targeting runaway girls, we need to be watching the places of greatest risk. Any joy locating the subway in May’s sketches?’
‘Not yet, but Dan knows someone who’s cataloguing London’s street art. If we hit a dead end with the BTP’s Graffiti Unit, then I’m hoping he’ll recognise the tags.’
‘You said Dan might know other ways into Battersea Power Station? None of the developer’s people is giving us anything useful on that score.’
‘I’ll ask him. At least we have the lists of everyone with access to the site in the last twelve weeks. I put copies on your desk; anything jumping out at you?’
‘The media party seems to have been a free-for-all. Anyone with more than five hundred Twitter followers got the champagne treatment.’ Her eyes were stormy, the frown stitched deep at the bridge of her nose. Frustrated, like Noah. ‘I’m following up on a couple of things.’
‘Something we’ve not talked about since Taybridge Road …’ He stopped.
But Marnie kept step with him, not missing a beat: ‘Sean Beswick accused me of calling his daughter a whore.’
‘So it wasn’t just me. That was … weird. Using that word. May was sixteen. He might not like the idea of her having sex, but at that age? It’s hardly unusual.’
‘We looked at the parents when she first went missing. Nothing lit up.’ Marnie picked a thread from the sleeve of her jacket with the tips of her fingers. ‘Did we miss something? Control, or abuse? It would give us a reason for May leaving home. It would explain the sketches, and the lack of contact. Katrina wasn’t surprised to hear that May was pregnant.’
She drew an unhappy breath. ‘They don’t look at each other, or comfort each other. Have you seen either of them hug Loz, or just hold her hand? I haven’t. That could be grief, or it could be worse. And if May knew Ashleigh, then it’s possible Sean knew her too.’ She met Noah’s stare head-on. ‘A statistician would remind us of the probability that May knew her killer.’
They were quiet, thinking the same horrendous thought, and it was their job, Noah knew it was their job to think thoughts like this. Look at the facts coldly, even savagely. Take apart Taybridge Road a brick at a time, nothing at face value, no benefit of the doubt for anyone. It was their job to suspect Sean and Katrina, even Loz. Measure each human being in that house against the stone fact of May’s death. Laid out like a child with the same word written on her hands …
Whore. The word her father used when he was white with anger at the suggestion that his daughter was having consensual sex, almost as if he preferred to think she was raped …
No. That was unfair. He was angry because his daughter was dead, and appalled that she might have been raped before she died. If that was an act, then Sean Beswick was one of the best actors Noah had seen. Self-deluded, self-assured and—
‘Loz. Do we need to get her out of there?’
‘On what grounds? Because he used the word whore instead of another word? Because there’s so much pain in that house no one can get past it to comfort anyone else?’ Marnie shook her head. ‘We follow it up, because it’s giving us both a bad feeling. We go back through the statements from the house, look at it all again. Double-check Sean’s alibi for the day she went missing, and the day she died. But we remember they brought the sketchpad to us. We don’t stop looking for someone else, and that includes our missing girl.’
‘I don’t want it to be him,’ Noah began.
‘Neither do I. But let’s put it in the mix.’ She checked her watch. ‘I need to get to the press briefing. Keep in touch.’
29
Marnie recognised a handful of the journalists who turned up for the press briefing, but there was one face missing from the crowd. She’d expected Adam Fletcher to make an appearance. His name was on the Battersea media party list, and it wasn’t like Adam to miss the chance to spin a story from a tragedy, especially when he could boast of having been in what was now the crime scene.
Six weeks ago, Adam had been drinking champagne and eating expensive canapés in the flat where May’s body was found. The developers did their best to woo the press. In Adam’s case, they failed. He wrote about the price of the penthouses, inviting comparison between the development and its surrounding area, name-dropping the Garrett estate, quoting statistics on homelessness in south London. The paper ran a photo of a homeless boy, his face not unlike the one in May’s sketchpad, Battersea’s famous chimneys in the background. Marnie looked for Adam’s byline on the press stories about May’s murder, but so far he was keeping quiet. Digging for something better than dry facts, looking for an angle. Adam had always been great at working the angles.
Easy enough to find his address. Had he not lived so close to the station, she’d have left it to someone else to cross him off the list of people with access to the crime scene. As it was, she walked the short distance to a narrow block of flats, pressing the intercom and standing where the CCTV could show her face to whoever was watching. The door buzzed open and she found her way to his front door, knocking twice before he answered.
Bare feet, stained chinos, white T-shirt. ‘Detective Inspector.’ He leaned his long body into the door frame. ‘Is this an arrest?’
‘Should it be?’
‘I thought you were hunting a murderer, not paying house calls to old flames.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Without a warrant?’ Adam propped his elbow on the wall by his head. ‘Doubt it.’
‘I wanted a chat. About the party at Battersea, six weeks ago. Your name’s on a list. I’d like to check it off.’
‘You couldn’t have phoned?’ He hadn’t slept in days, judging by his eyes, more grey than blue. And he’d lost weight; his leanness had a hungry edge.
‘I tried.’ He hadn’t slept, but he’d washed. Smelt of shower gel, not cigarettes. Had he kicked his old habit? ‘You’ve changed your number.’
‘Dodging nuisance calls. You know how it is.’ A seasoning of hostility in his stare, as if he was remembering the circumstances of their last conversation – Marnie’s speech about moving on, leaving the past behind. ‘What d’you want to know about the party?’
‘Whether anything stood out, or anyone. Someone showing too much interest in the place, for instance. Or asking a lot of questions about security.’
Adam’s gaze narrowed. ‘You can’t figure out how he got her up there.’
‘It’s not immediately obvious. Anyone spring to mind?’
‘Maybe.’ He shifted his position in the doorway. She saw bruises on his bare feet. ‘Hard to say, off the top of my head.’
‘You’re not working on a story about May Beswick’s murder?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Adam shrugged. ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
Six months ago, he’d shouldered his way into her investigation with information, he’d said, to help her find the killer of two young boys. His fingers had been burned by that encounter, or his pride had. Now, he was giving her nothing. But anything out of the ordinary at the media party and he’d have spotted it – the next best thing to having had a detective at that party.
&nbs
p; ‘I’m trying to find a murderer,’ she said. ‘If you can help with that …’
‘A murderer, or a serial killer?’ Propping his head on his hand. Bruises on his fingers, too. ‘You found another body this morning. On the Garrett estate. Another dead girl.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Twitter. You take a good photo, Detective Inspector. You and DS Jake.’
‘Who beat you up?’ Marnie nodded at his feet and fingers.
‘Flatpack furniture.’ He didn’t even blink. ‘I was building a bookcase.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Without a warrant?’ Crooking his mouth at her, but it wasn’t a smile. He wanted her gone.
He’d lost his daughter, a coach crash when Tia was fourteen. Everything led from that – his restless curiosity and sense of injustice – as if his past was a corpse inadequately weighted below the water of his present life, always on the rise.
‘You’re getting domesticated,’ Marnie said. ‘That’s new.’
‘Everything’s new,’ Adam said. ‘Except you.’
Walking back to the station, it occurred to Marnie that Adam could find out who was sending care packages to Stephen Keele. It was possible he already knew. Six months ago, he’d told her he was trying to solve the puzzle of why Stephen had killed her parents. Without her permission, without asking whether she wanted his help. She’d made it clear how little she liked his interference, but perhaps she should make use of his talents. Adam was good at what he did. He might be able to find the answers that were eluding her. He was smart and resourceful. She’d discovered that when she was sixteen. Adam was one of the reasons she’d run away from home. He’d told her once she wasn’t a bad daughter, but she hadn’t believed him.
Her phone thwapped. ‘Noah. What have you got?’
‘A lead on the subway, I hope. Dan says he knows the tagger Rents. He’s based in Stockwell. I’m going to send him the sketch, see if he can give us a location for the subway. And Dan’s put me in touch with one of his urban explorer friends who might know other ways into Battersea.’
