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

by Sarah Hilary

  ‘Great.’ Her face didn’t change. ‘A double murderer thinks I’m cool. What else did you want to tell me?’

  ‘You asked if I’d forgiven him,’ Marnie said. ‘Stephen Keele. I didn’t give you a proper answer.’

  Loz blinked in surprise. She’d been expecting platitudes, some variation of whatever she was afraid the psychiatrist was going to say. PTSD. Or some shit like that.

  ‘I haven’t,’ Marnie said. ‘I won’t.’ She chose her words with care, needing Loz to listen. ‘I think about it all the time. About what I’d like to happen to him, how I’d like him to pay for what he did. I thought no one else understood. I thought I couldn’t say it out loud in case people decided I was dangerous, or crazy, or obsessed. But lots of people understand. You do. And your parents.’

  ‘They don’t,’ Loz said bluntly. ‘They loved her, of course they did, but that just makes it worse. All I am is what’s left. And I’m not enough, I’ve never been enough.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m stupid. Look what I did, going in there. Look what I put them through. I’m stupid.’

  ‘You’re remarkable. You helped save us. Eric said so. That was you.’

  ‘Don’t tell them that.’ Her cheeks were pink. ‘Please.’

  Marnie understood. Loz had played the survivor for too long. She needed to be a kid again, to be allowed to stop pretending that she didn’t care and that nothing hurt when everything, everything hurt.

  ‘I won’t, but I need you to do another brave thing. Tell them how it feels. Your mum and dad. Tell them how angry you are, how much it hurts, how much you need them to look after you.’ She drew a breath, smiling at Loz. ‘Give them another chance. Let them make up for the stuff they’ve got wrong, because we all get stuff wrong, all the time. They’re hurting too. They’re sorry. Don’t shut them out.’

  ‘Is that what you did?’ Loz asked. Before answering her own question with the sagacity that made her so remarkable. ‘It’s what you wish you’d done, when you had the chance.’

  ‘It’s what I wish I’d done.’ Marnie nodded. ‘You have that chance, and the courage to take it. Do what I wasn’t brave enough to do. Tell them how much it hurts. Ask for their help.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’ She shook her head, blinking. ‘I’m the awkward one, remember? I don’t do asking for help. They’ll think I’ve lost it.’

  ‘Try.’ Marnie reached for the girl’s hands. ‘Please.’

  ‘All right.’ Loz stopped swinging her feet, sitting still at last, her hands in Marnie’s. ‘I’ll try. But,’ wrinkling her nose, ‘it’s your fault if they freak out.’

  ‘I can live with that.’

  They smiled at one another, then Loz freed a hand to scratch her cheek. ‘One thing I don’t get. He had a sister. That’s what you said, when we were all in that room. He had a sister who was lost.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How? What happened to her?’

  ‘We don’t know, just that she went missing when he was fifteen.’

  ‘They never found her?’ Loz searched Marnie’s face with her big eyes. ‘All that time … He never knew what’d happened to her?’

  ‘No one did.’

  ‘That’s horrible. At least we know.’ She shook her head, wise beyond her years. ‘At least we have that.’

  69

  A bed of dead rose bushes, black with thorns, marked out the front garden of the house in Chiswick. Rubbish had been dumped over the shallow wall between the street and the garden, empty bottles and beer cans, polystyrene boxes, a sodden pink blanket from a child’s bed. There was no one living in the house to stop the fly-tipping, just the ghost of a once-neat garden under the neglect. Over the front door, a rusted nail held the broken chain from a hanging basket, long gone.

  ‘Home sweet home.’ Tim Welland stood back for the forensic team. ‘This’ll sort out the rising house prices. I might even be able to afford a bedsit round here myself.’

  ‘Too many nosy neighbours.’ Noah nodded across the street. ‘You’d hate it.’ He handed Welland one of the coffees he’d bought, passing a second cup to Marnie.

  ‘So what are we looking for here, exactly?’ Welland sipped at the coffee, giving the clot of bystanders a filthy glance. ‘Apart from a starring role in someone’s YouTube video.’

  ‘This was where he first hid the girls,’ Marnie said. ‘It’s the house he grew up in. The one his sister ran from when she was seventeen.’

  ‘And Eric Mackay did the CPS out of a job, at least where Calum Marsh is concerned. Do we need more evidence than the blood and bodies in Brigantia Gardens?’

  But Welland followed Marnie and Noah into the house.

  Inside, it was cold and smelt of wax, like a church. Forensics had shrouded the windows in polythene, clouding the light as they moved from room to room. Stacks of boxes everywhere, an abandoned house clearance. Dust squares on the walls where photos had been taken down. Rugs rolled into corners to make space for sleeping bags. A clock ticking obstinately in the kitchen, where limescale had crusted the taps and the steel of the sink. The house had been empty less than six months, but it had the stale, settled chill of a derelict building.

  The girls had stayed here, brought back by Christie for Calum, living among the boxes and the memorabilia of his parents’ half-dismantled life. Not all the photos had been taken down. Some showed a boy and his dark-haired sister, her mouth unsmiling. Calum and Neve, holding hands.

  One wall was pinned with lists. Harm’s plans for the move to the tower block, the paper edges curling away from the wall like scales, or feathers.

  Welland read a couple of the lists. Said, ‘He can’t have set out to kill them, or he wouldn’t have left this handy confessional for us.’

  Upstairs, one of the rooms was different to the others. At the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Furnished like a guest room, but self-consciously, as if no guests had ever used it. The bed was made, its pale-red covers pulled smooth.

  That waxy candle smell. The carpet worn down by the side of the bed.

  Noah’s scalp prickled tightly.

  Neve’s room.

  A rag doll on the pillows, marking her place.

  He walked to the window, looking down at the garden, a half-dug plot of earth where weeds had trapped the litter blown from the street behind. A wet breath of mould on the glass. The window frame, burnt by the weather, listed to the left. If he set a marble on the floor, it would race from one end of the room to the other.

  The whole house crooked by their loss …

  All those long years of searching, grieving. Calum, fifteen years old, trapped with his parents’ fears and hope, the wildfire of their imagination setting story after story spinning in his troubled head so that for years he caught glimpses of his lost sister in the faces of street kids.

  Years and years of looking and hoping and fearing.

  ‘Exciting opportunity,’ Welland sniffed at Noah’s shoulder, ‘to acquire a fabulous family home in need of TLC.’

  A dog barked below them.

  ‘DS Jake?’ Marnie was headed back down the stairs.

  Noah followed her, through the kitchen, out into the garden.

  The cadaver dog, a golden retriever, stood at the side of the half-turned plot of earth like an arrow, her whole body pointing.

  ‘Another girl?’ Noah measured the ground with his eyes. ‘There’s space here for a dozen.’

  ‘Just one,’ Marnie said. ‘I think. There’s just one girl buried here.’

  He looked up, saw her shivering. ‘Who?’

  She turned towards the bedroom where Welland was watching them. ‘Neve.’

  A crow rattled from the roof.

  The dog didn’t move, her coat bristling along her spine.

  The disturbed earth was less than ten feet from the house.

  ‘Here?’ Noah said. ‘The whole time she was here? The rages, PTSD. You think her dad …?’

  ‘Calum.’ Marnie held Welland’s gaze across the neglected
garden. ‘I think it was Calum.’

  The dog barked again, before going still.

  Marnie and Noah moved back, out of the way of the forensic team.

  ‘May wanted a garden,’ Noah remembered. ‘She was digging here. She found something.’

  ‘Or she suspected something, after he stopped her digging. When we found her, you said she looked like the killer’s confession.’

  May, laid out like a child on that bed.

  Calum Marsh’s confession.

  To more than one murder?

  ‘Neve went missing when he was fifteen.’ Noah could taste the turned earth, rancid with litter. ‘He killed his sister when he was fifteen? Why?’

  ‘Any number of reasons,’ Marnie said. ‘Because he hated her. Because she wanted to leave him on his own in this house with their father’s rages.’ Her voice tightened. ‘Because he loved her.’

  The forensic team moved around the black pit of earth, erecting the tent. One of the team petted the dog’s coat. ‘Good girl. Good Missy.’

  ‘Smart, independent, ambitious.’ Marnie moved back from the perimeter, drawing her coat closer about her. ‘That’s how Calum described his sister to Gina. All the things he hated those girls being. Grown-up … Neve had been wanting to leave home for years. He’d talked her out of it more than once. What if that last talk ended badly? What if this,’ she nodded at the pit, ‘was their last talk.’

  ‘He came to the station when we were investigating May’s death.’ Marsh sitting, looking beaten, under the station’s posters. ‘Did he want to be caught?’

  ‘He was living with the secret of Neve’s death for a long time. That kind of secret, the weight of it? I think he buried it as best he could. Maybe he’d half forgotten he was a killer. If he was still searching for Neve … Unless that was a lie he told to the girls. We know he made a decent life with Gina and Logan. He was a good father, or as good as he could be. Then when his parents died …’

  Marnie looked up at the house. ‘He had to come back here. To the photos, the memories, her room like that, untouched. He filled this house with the girls he found. He wasn’t hurting them, not at the beginning. Grace said as much, and Eric too. He wanted us to see the writing on May, to understand the pain she was in. He left her in a place she loved. He was in pain too. That’s how Eric saw it. And Eric understood about secrets better than anyone else in that place.’

  She stopped, shaking her head. ‘Maybe. Maybe I’m wrong.’

  Missy had her ears back, still pointing at the black earth, the place where May had started digging until Calum made her stop. The forensic tent had flooded it with shadow.

  ‘Maybe we’re going to find more bodies,’ Marnie said, ‘more lost girls.’

  It could be days, or weeks, until this place gave up its secrets.

  Years until they had all the answers.

  Or it could be never.

  Noah stood at her side, shivering, as the team began to dig.

  Author’s Note

  Tastes Like Fear is a work of fiction, but I found the following to be particularly relevant and/or inspirational when I was writing and later editing the book:

  Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain by Nick Davies, Vintage, 1998

  Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear by Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman, Oxford University Press, 2008

  Loud in the House of Myself by Stacy Pershall, W. W. Norton, 2011

  Explore Everything by Bradley L. Garrett, Verso Books, 2013

  ‘“If I move, he’ll attack”: Mastering Rage in Prisoners’ by Jonathan Asser in The Observer, 9 March 2014

  ‘A Victim’s Tale’ by Spencer Ackerman in The Observer, 17 December 2014

  Acknowledgements

  This one’s for the brave people, especially the girls. For Deb the Punk, my friend when I was fifteen (where have all the punks gone?), and Jude. Everyone who’s ever felt out of place in her own skin, or out of step, or out of time. Who’s refused to fit in, or has raised her voice against the tyranny of sameness – who stood out and paid the price, but stood out even so. This is for you.

  Thank you, of course, to Vicki, Elizabeth and Jo at Headline.

  And to Jane, Stephanie, Claire, Mary and everyone at Gregory & Co.

  To the bloggers, reviewers, and most of all the readers – thank you.

  And to Terence Waywell, who won the Get in Character auction in support of the CLIC Sargent charity for children with cancer. I hope you approve of your role in the story.