by Sarah Hilary
She dragged at his hand, but he was strong. Stronger than he’d looked in the bed. His arms weren’t skinny at all, hard muscle under his skin. Her eyes rolled up in her head until she was seeing him standing over her.
Black eyes, cheekbones, the curve of his jaw just like May drew it. Aimee. How had anyone in this house believed he was a girl?
He bent lower, his hair scratching at her eyelid, at her eye.
She’d stopped struggling, too scared to breathe let alone fight.
He put his mouth close to her throat.
‘Better,’ he breathed. ‘That’s better.’
52
‘Eric James Mackay. Fifteen years old, missing from a care home in Derby since May 2012. We know he hung out in the subway in Stockwell, but Joel and his friends haven’t seen him there since September, a couple of months before May stopped going to the subway. We know she met Eric there. She drew him. Grace has identified the sketch.’ Marnie pinned May’s picture next to the photo of Eric Mackay. ‘None of us recognised him from her sketch, but Grace had the advantage of living with him. He’s changed more than we thought.’
They’d been imagining a shaven-headed thug, but Eric Mackay had metamorphosed into an angel-faced androgyne. A better disguise, perhaps, for a street kid. But surely more dangerous.
‘Why was he in care?’ Ron asked.
‘His mum was sick,’ Debbie said. ‘Munchausen by proxy. She kept him off school, fed him pills, wouldn’t let him out of the house. Children’s Services got him eventually, but it sounds like he was messed up, spent the first six months at the care home hiding in bed like that’s all he knew.’
‘He calls himself Aimee Finch now.’ Marnie touched May’s sketch. ‘According to Grace, he’s been with Christie and Harm for the last three months. He and May arrived at the same time.’
‘The porno pictures,’ Ron said. ‘Are those Mackay too?’
‘We don’t know. Perhaps. He and May met in the subway, but we don’t know where he was living at the time. It’s possible he’s part of the recruitment drive, just like Christie.’
‘Didn’t Joel call him a psycho?’ Ron said.
Noah nodded. ‘But when we pressed him for more information, he wasn’t very helpful. The extent of Eric’s psychosis seems to have been jumping from the subway roof on a couple of occasions, and dancing outside when it was raining. A teenager’s idea of psycho, in other words. Joel did say that Eric wasn’t scared of anything. Went with strangers for sex on more than one occasion.’
‘Men, or women?’
‘Both. He wasn’t picky, that was Joel’s phrase.’
‘And now he’s living in this nuthouse,’ Ron said, ‘dressed like a girl.’
‘Not just dressed as a girl,’ Marnie corrected. ‘Grace was convinced he was a girl. She says everyone in the flat was convinced of it, including May and Ashleigh.’
‘Are we sure of that?’ Noah was studying May’s sketch of Eric. ‘From this, it looks as if she might’ve known he was a boy.’
‘Grace could be wrong. But she’s adamant that Harm doesn’t know Aimee is Eric.’
‘Which means he’s not abusing them,’ Debbie said. ‘Or he’d have found that out by now.’
‘Grace says Harm never touched her. Or any of the others. From the way she described it, that’s the creepiest thing about him, the fact that he’s not interested in them in that way.’
‘She’s got a funny definition of creepy.’ Ron’s low opinion of Grace hadn’t improved since the girl had started talking. ‘Why’d she run off, if everything’s so cosy up there?’
‘It isn’t cosy, but it is safe. Locks on the doors, blackout blinds, strict rules about quiet. Three months ago, they were squatting in a house in Chiswick. Harm decided it wasn’t secure enough; that’s when he moved them into this flat.’ Marnie glanced at Colin. ‘Any luck locating it?’
‘We’ve narrowed the list, but getting information out of developers is like blood from a brick. Hundreds of new-builds across London, private housing, offices, flats. Lots of stalled projects.’
‘Why can’t she just give us the bloody address?’ Ron argued. ‘She’s talking now.’
‘She rarely went outside the building until the night she ran, when it was dark and she was panicking. She’s working with DC Waywell to help us pinpoint the location.’
‘What about this squat in Chiswick?’
‘We’re looking for it,’ Marnie said. ‘Grace doesn’t remember the exact address, but she’s given us bits and pieces. We want her to concentrate on helping us find the flat.’
‘Do we think Loz knew Eric, or Aimee?’ Noah was still examining the sketch pinned to the board. ‘She must’ve seen this in May’s sketchpad.’
‘She’d have told us.’ Marnie wanted to believe that. ‘If she knew anything she thought would lead us to May in those weeks when she was missing, or to her killer now – she’d have told us.’
‘Harm,’ Debbie said. ‘What do we know about him?’
Marnie nodded at Noah. ‘DS Jake?’
‘He’s roughly the same age as Jamie Ledger, so mid forties. Perhaps a superficial likeness, but Grace is adamant that Ledger isn’t the man she knows as Harm. We’ll have a photofit soon. She didn’t want to tell us anything, but luckily we had Ed Belloc on our team. From what Grace told Ed, Harm’s a loner with some serious survival skills. A control freak. Food, water, affection – all strictly rationed. Lots of rules for the girls to obey, and he dresses them the same, in school uniform. He’s obsessed with security. It’s why they moved from the squat. The flat’s easier to defend. His words.’
‘Sounds like an ex-army man to me,’ Ron said.
‘He’s made the building secure, rigged up heating and light, off grid. He’s handy, and he’s strong. Grace is scared of him, and she doesn’t scare easily. She’s also inclined to keep his secrets, so we can assume he did a psychological number on her. He doesn’t stay in the building the whole time. Grace says he comes and goes. The girls are given keys but the keys don’t work in the locks, so presumably that’s a trick to make them feel secure. If Harm’s going out of the building on a regular basis, it suggests he has a life somewhere else. Maybe even a job.’
‘Ledger had a job,’ Ron pointed out, ‘until recently.’
‘We’re still looking for Ledger,’ Marnie said. ‘But the priority is finding this flat. We’ll need a team on standby. Hostage negotiators, too. Grace is scared of Christie as well as Harm. She doesn’t think Eric’s a threat, but that’s because she’s still thinking of him as Aimee.’
‘How does he shave?’ Debbie asked. ‘He must be doing that every day to pass himself off as a girl. Surely someone noticed something wasn’t right.’
‘Grace says Aimee is left alone most of the time. Harm has her confined to bed, convinced she’s sick. Maybe Eric stays under the covers, doesn’t let the others see too much of him. That ties to how he grew up, with his mum’s mental health problems.’
‘What difference does it make whether he’s a boy or a girl in there? If Harm isn’t abusing them, or trying to abuse them, couldn’t he just as easily be Eric?’
‘Harm hates teenage boys,’ Marnie said. ‘It’s one of the things he lectured Grace and the others about. Drugs, promiscuity, diseases. So we can imagine how he reacted to the news of May’s pregnancy. He saved them from all that, from the perils and pitfalls of living on the streets. At the same time he’s dressing them in uniform, keeping them meek. DS Jake’s right, we’re dealing with an obsessive control freak, probably with a history of trauma.’
‘Grace didn’t know about the murders,’ Ron said. ‘May and Ashleigh. So what was she doing with May the night before she got killed?’
‘Grace left in a panic after a confrontation with Harm. She wasn’t keen to say exactly what happened, but reading between the lines, she made a pass at him in the hope of privileges of some kind. He reacted badly, and she ran. May went after her, wanting to help. May was always trying to help, Grace says. Sh
e took a change of clothes and the address Christie had given her for Emma’s flat. Supposedly a safe place to stay, although I’d question Christie’s motive. Grace tried to talk May into going with her, but May insisted on heading back to Harm and the others.’
‘Why? She’d got away. Why go back? If she hadn’t done that …’
‘Grace doesn’t know exactly, but she’s still talking about that place as “home”. She says May insisted on going back home, that she couldn’t leave Aimee alone there.’
‘She went back and it got her killed,’ Ron said. ‘How did Grace react to that?’
‘She was upset, but not entirely surprised. Especially when I told her May was pregnant. She’d already figured out something was very wrong in there. Harm didn’t lose his temper in the usual way. She says he went white hot – froze her out. She ran because she was scared of what would happen if she hung around.’ Marnie paused, until the room was quiet. ‘We know that two of the girls who went into that flat were killed. By Harm or Christie or Eric, we don’t know which.’
‘If Harm hates teenage boys,’ Debbie said, ‘then Eric’s in danger too.’
‘That’s what Grace says,’ Marnie agreed. ‘Either way, we need to find the flat before anyone else is hurt or killed.’
53
‘Sit still and shut up.’ He walked to the door and stood listening before coming back to the bed where he’d put her.
Loz hadn’t moved, other than to get the key into her fist. There was only one way out of the room. Through the door he’d just checked. No weapons in here, or none that she could see. The key was all she had.
He stood staring down at her, looking like all her favourite anime heroes rolled into one, with his spiky hair and heart-shaped face, in a loose white vest top, dark-blue pyjama bottoms hanging off his hips. ‘You’re Loz,’ he said. ‘May’s little sister.’
‘Shut up.’ She shook with hate. ‘You don’t say her name, you don’t get to do that. You—’
‘Be quiet. Do you want Christie up here?’ He put his hands on the frame at the foot of the bed. He had long fingers, neat nails. His knuckles were white. ‘Why are you saying she’s dead?’
‘Because she is. You killed her. You … freak.’
He stared her down, eyelashes like blades at the bridge of his nose. ‘You said your parents had to look at her, identify her.’ His voice was rigid, low in his throat. ‘Is that true?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s really dead?’ The bed frame creaked under his grip, the muscles in his arms standing out in slim lines. His eyelashes shone with tears. ‘When?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘Where?’ He bit each word out, but he was crying now.
‘Battersea Power Station.’
‘How?’
‘She was strangled.’
He doubled up as if she’d kicked him in the stomach. The bed scraped at the floor.
Loz looked at the distance to the door. She forced herself to stand up.
He was crying with his whole body, rocking on his heels, his head between his outstretched arms, face hidden. She could make it, if she was quick. Get past him, down the stairs to the kitchen. Christie had locked the door, but Loz had a key. She opened her fist and looked at it, to convince herself. She had a key. Look …
Its teeth were smooth, too smooth to make a decent weapon. Too smooth for the key to be recently cut. It was an old key, but the locks in here were all new. This key …
Wouldn’t open the new locks. She’d known there was something wrong with it ever since Christie had invited her to take it from the drawer. It was useless as a weapon, and it was useless as a way out. ‘You didn’t kill her,’ she said to the boy.
He sobbed, shaking his head. ‘We … we were …’
Loz put the key into her pocket, moving closer to the foot of the bed. ‘You were what?’
‘In love. I loved her. She was having our baby.’ He lifted his head, red-eyed, wet-faced. ‘The police … Who found her?’
‘A security guard at Battersea. The police haven’t given us the post-mortem report yet. But they told us she was pregnant.’ Loz looked at him. ‘Is that why she was killed?’
He moved his mouth, not speaking.
‘Who killed her?’ Loz demanded. ‘If it wasn’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Whoever it was, did they know she was pregnant?’
‘Everyone here knew.’ He wiped at his tears with the crook of his elbow. ‘She told them. I didn’t want her to tell them, but she came out with it in front of everyone. I was scared for her. For all of us. You can’t just say a thing like that, not here, not to him …’
‘You didn’t know she was dead, but you knew she’d gone.’ Loz tasted old blood in her mouth, from where she’d bitten her cheek. ‘Why didn’t you go after her? Why didn’t you look after her?’
‘I didn’t know. He said she’d gone back out there. On to the streets, or home. I thought she’d gone home to you. And even if she hadn’t, if she was in a hostel … I knew they’d give her a place if she told them she was pregnant. She was better off without me.’ His shoulders shook, anger cutting across his face suddenly. ‘I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him. She was better off out there.’
‘Who said she’d gone back out there?’
‘Harm. It was Harm.’
They looked at one another. Loz said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Eric.’
‘How come they think you’re Aimee?’
‘He thought it. When he took me home that first time. I didn’t know, just thought he wanted … sex. And I was desperate. I needed a place to stay.’ He flushed, looking feverish. ‘When he made me put that on,’ pointing to the girl’s school uniform on the wardrobe door, ‘I thought he was kinky. I thought he knew I was a boy, but he didn’t. Then I got too scared to tell him after he started with the lectures about staying safe, keeping clean. I thought if he found out, he’d go crazy.’
‘So he doesn’t know.’
‘No one does.’
‘But she was pregnant. How do they think that happened if they believe you’re a girl?’ Her stomach churned. ‘Do they think he did it?’
‘No. No. He doesn’t touch us, any of us. If he’d touched her, I’d have killed him. They thought she was sneaking out. She did go out, with Grace. But she always came back. For me. It’s my fault.’ His face kept breaking, blurring with tears. ‘I took her to the house because I fancied her.’
‘What house?’
‘The place before here. We lived there for a bit. May liked it, she liked the garden. It was a place we could be together and I wanted that, more than anything. But I knew there was something wrong with him and I never warned her, not properly, because I wanted her to stay and there wasn’t anywhere else I could be with her. It’s my fault she’s dead. If I hadn’t got her pregnant, if I’d warned her—’
‘Why does he want you all here, if he isn’t touching you? What’re you for?’
‘We make him feel like a man. He has to be a man. It’s how his dad treated him, growing up.’ He spoke too fast, like he’d been alone for so long he’d forgotten how to talk to people. Loz had to concentrate to keep up. ‘It screwed with his head, like my mum screwed with mine. Only for me, it was the opposite of be a man. I just had to stay in bed, being sick for her.’
She didn’t understand that, but she wasn’t interested in his mum. ‘Why does he need so many of you?’
‘Safety in numbers, he says. He’s obsessed with safety. It’s why he moved us up here. The house wasn’t safe. His job’s fitting alarms, listening to people go on about break-ins and robberies. He thinks he’s got it sorted, that he’s keeping us safe. That’s how it starts. He finds us, or she does, brings us back, takes care of us. To start with.’ He wiped at his face again. ‘It’s like he’s … searching for someone. Or he’s guilty about something. I don’t know, I can’t figure him out. Just that he’s not right. I didn’t think it was wo
rse than that. I didn’t know he was a killer.’ Sucking a breath. ‘I’d never have let her come here if I’d known that.’
‘What about Christie?’ Loz needed a chink in the armour of this place. She’d have taken a knife from the rack in the kitchen if Christie hadn’t watched her so well. ‘Where does she fit in?’
‘I suppose she was abused. She doesn’t know when to stop, thinks she’s in control but she’s not, not really. I knew girls like her in care. Usually they’d been abused.’
‘You were in care.’
‘All of us were. Grace, Ashleigh.’
‘May wasn’t.’
‘No.’ His face broke again. ‘I can’t believe she’s dead.’
‘Can’t you?’ Loz looked at him pityingly. Her head was ringing with dizziness. She’d not eaten in hours. ‘You’ve just told me what a psycho he is. And you’re up here because you’re scared of him. Why’s it so hard to believe he killed her? And not just her. Ashleigh’s dead, too.’
Eric stared at her. His eyes were weird, flat. Was he on drugs?
‘How did you find us?’ he said.
‘The subway, I told you. May had drawings of you. I knew where she went, but I didn’t know about you. Not properly. Not until now.’ Loz looked around the room. ‘What else about Christie?’
‘She’s been with Harm a couple of years. His watchdog. I suppose she’s in love with him.’
Loz wrinkled her nose. ‘Worst advert for love, ever.’
He nearly smiled.
‘I didn’t just mean her.’ Loz headed for the door.
‘Where’re you going?’
She took out her phone. ‘No signal in here. Otherwise I’d have called the police already.’
‘She let you keep your phone?’ His face twitched with panic. ‘She never does that.’
‘She gave me a key, too.’ Loz wanted to see if he knew about the keys. She couldn’t be sure he was telling her the truth. About May, or Christie, or any of it.
‘The keys don’t work.’ He dropped his hands to his sides. ‘Gracie told me that.’
