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

by Sarah Hilary

  ‘They took her to hospital?’ Noah asked.

  ‘And Abi Gull’s in the back of the custody van.’

  They stood aside for the fire crew going into the building.

  ‘Where’s the fire? Not in her flat?’ Noah was picturing net curtains ablaze, Emma down on the floor, trying to stay under the smoke as Abi and her friends put their boots into her.

  Ron shook his head. ‘Little buggers lit it on the floor below, must’ve known she’d come out for a nosy. They were waiting for her.’

  ‘They smoked her out.’

  ‘That’s exactly what they did.’ Ron looked sick with disgust. ‘You know what Abi said when I arrested her? “It was worth it.” At least now we get to lock her up.’

  ‘Were her friends involved? How many arrests did you make?’

  ‘Just the one, for now. I’m betting Natalie Filton was part of it, but she’d cleared off by the time we got here. Abi was having too much fun to stop until we made her.’

  ‘How badly is she hurt? Emma, I mean.’

  ‘The paramedics got here quickly, and she’s a tough old bird. I’m hoping she’ll be okay. I don’t want to miss the look on her face when we tell her Abi’s going down for this, at last.’

  Perhaps Emma would say the same thing Abi had said: It was worth it.

  The fire crew were coming back down the stairs. Noah asked, ‘How bad is it up there?’

  ‘It’s out,’ the crew manager said. ‘Arson again. Someone said you got them this time?’

  ‘In the custody van.’ Ron nodded. ‘How bad’s the damage?’

  ‘To the flats? Not bad. Mainly along the deck access. Like every other time. You’d think they’d get bored of it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not this one,’ Ron said. ‘But we’ve got her now. No way she’s walking away from this.’

  ‘Is it safe to go up?’ Noah wanted to see the damage for himself.

  The man nodded. ‘As long as you stay wide of the investigation crew.’

  Noah thanked him and left Ron at the main entrance.

  He climbed with the aftermath of the fire black on his tongue and his head stuffed with the image of Emma fighting her way through thick smoke to where the girls were lying in wait.

  On the sixth floor, there wasn’t much to see.

  A shallow slick of water from the hoses, pieces of burnt cloth and paper floating on its surface. Brown stains reaching up the walls. The estate was already absorbing the mess. Arson left a scar, but this one was hidden by all the others, just an extra layer to the Garrett’s natural camouflage.

  Noah kept going to the seventh floor, counting the time it would have taken Emma to reach the spot where the girls attacked her. Less than a minute, even allowing for the fact that she’d have moved more slowly than he did. No time at all.

  Emma’s flat, when he reached it, looked the same.

  He curled his hand and blocked the light to look through the wide window into the sitting room. Net curtains filtered the view to sepia, as if he was peering into an old postcard. He could see the notebooks on the low table where Emma kept her one-woman neighbourhood watch.

  From inside the flat, he could hear …

  Knocking?

  The fridge, or the boiler, perhaps. He listened to its irregular beat before trying the handle of the door, expecting to find it locked.

  The door was on the latch, but awkwardly, as if it’d been closed in a hurry. It almost clicked shut, but he sensed the delicate pressure of the latch and eased it open.

  Stepped into the hallway to the smell of burnt milk and smoke. ‘Hello?’

  The knocking was louder now. Not a fridge or a boiler, more like …

  Feet, or fists.

  Noah’s scalp tightened. He followed the sound to the bedroom at the back of the flat.

  ‘Hello? Police. I’m Detective Sergeant Jake.’

  The bed had a floral duvet cover, matching pillows. Curtains were drawn at the window, their thin cotton pulling flower-shaped shadows into the room.

  The knocking was coming from a cupboard built into the back wall. The cupboard doors were fastened with a length of yellow nylon washing line, wound around the handles and knotted off. A good knot, naval.

  Noah struggled with it.

  ‘Hang on. Police.’

  The knocking didn’t stop, but nor did it get louder or more urgent, not even when he repeated his rank and name in a bid to reassure whoever was shut inside.

  The bedroom smelt of talcum powder, a pink scratch at the back of his throat. He struggled with the nylon knot, thinking of Emma Tarvin’s big hands. His fingers were sweating with the effort.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m police, hold on …’

  He got it undone at last, dragged the line through the handles, threw it behind him to the floor …

  She fell out at his feet, sucking for breath.

  Yellow rope at her wrists and ankles, elastic bandage gagging her mouth.

  Skinny, half dressed, her bound hands holding on to his feet, pulling at him as she lifted her head and tried to focus on his face. He crouched to her level.

  Sharp bones, and a wild scream in her eyes.

  Red hair, white skin written on in black pen, blue bruises …

  Traffic’s girl.

  The girl they’d been looking for since the night of the crash, the one Kenickie wanted to arrest for the manslaughter of Logan Marsh.

  The girl whose name had come from Marnie’s foster-brother, Stephen.

  Grace Bradley.

  38

  Sommerville hadn’t changed. The same stew of light from fittings filled with dust and dead insects. Same acoustics, making Marnie’s footfall punchy. Same wait for Paul Bruton to authorise her access to the centre, even after she’d called ahead to say she needed to see Jodie Izard as a matter of urgency.

  Only one thing had changed. She might have come and gone without noticing if she hadn’t been made to wait for Jodie to be brought to the visitor room.

  At the end of the corridor, a glass door looked into the main body of the detention centre. Marnie had been through the door more than once. She had no intention of going through it today. She intended to take a statement from Jodie and get back to London as quickly as she could. Noah would be on the Garrett estate by now. She was expecting his report.

  As she waited for Bruton, she saw a man standing the other side of the fireproofed glass. Her height, perhaps a shade taller, in jeans and a grey sweatshirt. Broad-shouldered, his hair buzz-cut to a dark shadow on his scalp. Standing very still, watching her.

  It was only by the stillness that she recognised him.

  Stephen Keele.

  Marnie tensed in alarm, her skin pricking everywhere, the way it did when she caught sight of a stranger as she walked home alone late at night – a cold punch of fear through her veins.

  She knew him, but she didn’t.

  A grown man, a new stranger.

  Stephen Keele.

  Acid burned the back of her throat, blood beating in her ears. He was strong, she could see it in his shoulders. He could take her. His shadow reared up the wall.

  They stared at one another across the empty length of the corridor.

  He was nineteen years old. He’d been a boy the last time she saw him, still skinny, with black curls and a red mouth.

  She hardly recognised the man behind the glass.

  How had he changed so much in six months? She didn’t need to ask why he’d changed. He was being moved to an adult prison – working out, getting strong. Ten years ago, she’d been able to lift him on to a swing in her parents’ garden. Now he looked dangerous, immovable. It wasn’t just his new bulk and the buzz cut. It was the dip of his head, his warrior stance.

  The pulse of his hostility reached her from thirty feet away, and she had to struggle to control her fight-or-flight response, the skin at the back of her neck and knees flushing damply. Like a flush of shame, except she wasn’t the one who should be ashamed. She’d done nothing but
grieve the loss of her parents and ask questions, holding out for answers past the point when it became obvious he wouldn’t or couldn’t give her any. A lick of anger in the back of her throat, salty like tears …

  He’d lost his disguise. No – he’d stripped it away. The last signs marking him out as a child. His curls, his narrowness, the limpid way he’d used his stare to pull her back into that past where she’d made promises to her parents to take care of her new brother. A boy they’d rescued from a broken family, wanting to make him whole again. Six years they spent trying to love him. There wasn’t any trace of that boy in the man standing on the other side of the glass. Gone …

  He’s gone.

  Good.

  I can hate him now.

  The ferocity of it shook her. For a second she was in free fall, euphoric, her head light and empty. She was dimly aware of moving in his direction, towards the glass door.

  ‘DI Rome?’

  Time slowed. She felt it unravelling, each strand separate and static.

  She stopped, three feet from Stephen.

  He hadn’t moved from his side of the glass.

  Light stripped the blood from under his skin, rendering his face in black and white. She was close enough to see the details in his irises.

  ‘DI Rome?’ Paul Bruton was standing in the doorway to the visitor room.

  Marnie could see him without looking, without breaking eye contact with Stephen. Her hands hurt. She’d clenched them into fists.

  She stepped back. Relaxed her hands. Turned to face Bruton.

  ‘Jodie’s ready for you.’ Bruton was looking past her at the glass door, but he was too far away to see what Marnie had seen in Stephen’s eyes.

  Under the hostility, the freshly forged aggression, was a smile.

  Stephen was smiling.

  Glad to have her here, but more than that.

  Glad to have her hating him.

  And fearing him, at last.

  39

  Marnie wasn’t the only one afraid of Stephen Keele.

  Hunched over in her chair in the visitor room, Jodie Izard was chewing her cuticles in concentration. When the door opened, she flinched upright.

  Paul Bruton said, ‘This is Detective Inspector Rome. She needs to ask you some questions, Jodie. If you like, I can stay with you.’

  ‘You’re all right.’ She slid her stare past Bruton’s shoulder to Marnie. Her ash-blonde hair was chopped to shoulder length, its roots burned by too much peroxide. She wore a black nylon skater’s skirt over thick black leggings, Adidas trainers. A clingy white yoga top headlined the fake tan streaked across her shoulders and the visible portion of her chest. Her face was an oval, ghosted over with cheap make-up, a halo of lipgloss around her mouth, a partially healed piercing in one thin nostril. Her eyes were pretty. Sea green, scared.

  She waited until Bruton had left the room before saying, ‘You’re his sister.’ Her voice was low, with a Somerset burr. ‘You’re the one he …’ She put her tongue between her teeth and bit it.

  The one he … What? What had Stephen told this girl he’d done to Marnie?

  ‘I’m here to ask you about Grace Bradley.’ She made her smile encouraging but not gullible. Stephen had said Jodie was a good liar, and he would know. ‘What can you tell me about Grace?’

  ‘Knew her on the streets, didn’t I?’ She couldn’t stop staring. ‘In Gloucester, a year ago, bit longer maybe. It was cold, I remember that. Hard as a cat’s head, Grace. Broke all the rules, did whatever she liked, but she hated the cold. Got an offer, so she cleared off. I should’ve been so lucky.’ She rattled the information out, wanting to move on to other things. ‘He killed your mum and dad. Said he stabbed them—’

  ‘Where did Grace go? You said she got an offer. What kind of offer? Who made it?’

  ‘I suppose she thought it was safe. You get into all sorts of shit when you’re sleeping rough. Spat on, pissed on. People think you’re a piece of meat. Sex. That’s if you’re lucky.’ She leaned forward under the ceiling strip of light, her pretty eyes glinting, catlike. ‘He says it’s what you wanted. That you and him—’

  ‘Grace got an offer of sex, is that what you’re saying?’

  Marnie didn’t want to hear whatever lies Stephen had told this girl, and possibly the rest of Sommerville too. All the time she’d been coming here, those strange looks from the kids when she walked in and out. She’d thought they stared because she was a detective, their eyes itching at her skin. It fell into place now. Under the lip of the table, she clenched her hands, concentrating on the blunt pressure of her nails in her palms. ‘Who made an offer to Grace? And what was it?’

  ‘Not sex,’ Jodie said, tonguing her cheek. ‘We’re not all perverts.’

  Above them, the light snarled as if a wasp had flown into the fluorescent tube.

  ‘Then what? Where did Grace go?’

  ‘Somewhere safe.’ A shrug. ‘It’s what we all want, isn’t it? Somewhere safe.’

  ‘Where did Grace go that was safe?’

  ‘Off the streets. Someplace warm. It’s not like we can all go home.’ She said the word like an obscenity, still digging at Marnie’s face with her eyes. ‘Grace couldn’t. Her stepmum wanted to change her name, said Grace was old-fashioned and she should be Ray or some shit like that. Threw out all her stuff, clothes and toys. Wanted her in a bridesmaid’s dress, made her grow her hair so she’d look nice at her dad’s wedding, made Gracie call her Mum like that wasn’t weird, like it didn’t fuck with her head. Gracie said she wiped her out. That was her home and she wiped her out.’

  ‘Who made Grace an offer, and where did she go? Somewhere in Gloucester?’

  ‘Doubt it. Never saw her again.’ She touched the scabbed piercing in her nose. ‘Good luck to whoever took her, though. Probably bashed his head in and nicked his wallet. She’s fucking mental.’

  ‘Did you see who took her?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  For the first time, her stare slid away from Marnie. She was lying. Just as Stephen had said she would. Unless … Had he told her to lie? To keep Marnie here?

  ‘If you saw who took her, I need to know. Two girls are dead. Girls like Grace who couldn’t live at home, but who weren’t safe on the streets. Not lucky enough to get convicted for shoplifting and end up in here where it’s warm. They’re dead. If you have information to help us find whoever did that, then you need to give it to me right now. Forget whatever game you’re playing for Stephen Keele, or anyone else. Tell me.’

  The girl’s eyes had snapped to attention at the speech. She glanced towards the door as if she’d remembered where she was. Fear found its way back on to her face. ‘I wouldn’t disrespect you, yeah? You’re his sister.’ Not afraid of the police, or Marnie. Afraid of Stephen.

  ‘Tell me,’ Marnie repeated. ‘What you know about who took Grace.’

  ‘I didn’t get a proper look, but it could’ve been him. Yeah. The one off the telly, the one you’re looking for. It could’ve been him.’

  Marnie didn’t say Ledger’s name, waiting to see whether Jodie would. If she’d seen Ledger in the flesh, then his name would have registered when she heard it on the news. Even if she hadn’t known it a year ago, the name would have registered. Jodie said nothing, looking at Marnie with her pretty eyes, anxious to please because she wouldn’t disrespect Stephen Keele’s sister. If that was her motivation, then Marnie could use it.

  ‘Let’s talk about Stephen. He told you what to say to me, didn’t he? Gave you orders, instructions. And you didn’t want to upset him, so you went along with it.’

  ‘I never.’ The girl sucked her mouth small. ‘I saw Grace. Right? I knew her.’

  ‘But you didn’t see who took her. You didn’t see Jamie Ledger – or anyone – take her off the streets. Did you?’

  Jodie hesitated, weighing up her options, torn between two brands of fear.

  ‘If you lie to the police,’ Marnie told her, ‘that’s a criminal offence. It will add time to you
r sentence, and it will piss me off. You don’t want to do that. Why would you?’

  ‘You’re not in here.’ Through her teeth. ‘He is.’

  ‘Not for much longer. He’s being moved to an adult prison. You’ll have perjured yourself for no good reason. Did you see who took Grace Bradley?’

  Jodie shook her head. But she said, ‘You should’ve kept him out of here. You could’ve. Kept him out, given evidence—’

  ‘What evidence?’ Marnie demanded.

  ‘You could’ve told them why he did it.’

  ‘I could have told them?’ She was incredulous. ‘You think I know that?’

  As if all this time she’d had the answers she was seeking tucked up her sleeve like a magician’s trick. Exactly what lies had Stephen told this girl? The same ones he’d told Marnie?

  ‘He did it for you,’ Jodie said. ‘Because of what you had, the two of you.’

  The same lie, again.

  Marnie was sick of hearing it.

  Anger spiked through her, the way it used to when she was fifteen, a bright, hot spike.

  ‘Because of what we had? We had nothing.’

  Jodie shook her head. ‘You could’ve told them, but you didn’t. That’s why he’s pissed off with you.’ She sucked a breath. ‘That’s why he’s going to finish you.’

  40

  The street boomed bright and empty, steel-coloured, on the brink of rain. Christie stood blinking, unsteady on her feet. Outside was always a shock. In jeans and a coat, but she felt naked. Just for a second she wished it was two years ago. Back when she was invisible.

  Harm was at his window, watching her go. She felt his stare dimming as she reached the turning in the road. He’d forgiven her, he said, for Grace and Ashleigh.

  But, ‘Bring me a new girl,’ between his teeth.

  She crossed between parked cars, hiding her hands up her sleeves. Too far for him to be watching now, but she felt the tug of the thread connecting them as if she’d stitched it herself – pierced her skin with a needle, sewn the other end to the blades of his back or the lids of his eyes. Keeping watch on her even as she ducked into the tube station.