by Nina Milton
Get going girl, said Gloria’s voice, far too loudly, in my head. Get that bread machine on, then get out in the fresh air.
The greenhouse lifted my spirits, little green shoots bobbing under the spray of my watering can. The hens were looking their cheerful selves again, and they’d hidden two bronze eggs in their straw. I cradled them in the palms of both hands, walking with care as I took them into the kitchen.
I was downing a big glass of water straight from the tap when the doorbell sang at me. I checked my watch, terrified that it was already time for my first client. But at ten to eight, it was probably nothing more exciting than parcel post. I wasn’t even looking properly as I opened the door.
“Sabbie,” said Rey, swinging round from scrutinizing the side path.
I held on to my lip muscles, forbidding them to light up into an embracing smile. “Detective Sergeant,” I said, and inclined my head like a geisha.
“I thought I’d catch you early …” His gaze swiveled from my grey, shadow-eyed face down my grubby, malodorous, and shapeless garments, each a total passion exterminator.
“You’d better come in.”
“You look a little bit … wasted.”
“I don’t stay in doing macramé every evening, you know.”
“Macra—” He shook his head, a grin struggling for supremacy. I led him into the kitchen.
“Actually, you could do me a massive favour, if you’re going back to the station, and give me a lift. I’ve left my car by the marina.”
“Right! So you do have sensible brain cells tucked under that mane of hair.”
“Just a few. Probably countable on one hand, but—”
“Sabbie, I’ve come to let you know the results.”
“The results?”
“The pathology results on the bones you found.”
I heard myself gasp. His words had swung me back to the moment when I’d levered up the bare boards.
“I’ve brought a copy of the report with me.” Rey rested his briefcase on the carpet and sat down on the sofa while he shuffled through the files it contained. “Certain things are beyond doubt. You discovered a man and woman. They were both fifty-plus at the time of death, and that’s estimated at between eighteen and thirty years ago. They were deliberately placed side by side under the floorboards in the cottage. So either this was a suicide pact with intervention from a third party, or it was murder.”
Rey silently skimmed through the pages of the report while I leaned against the sink, reeling from his words.
He glanced up. “Sorry. I’ll summarize first—the pathology report has given us this—two people died around the time of the Wetland Murders, and in a locality close to where the bodies were discovered; very close. Whether or not they died of natural causes, they didn’t put themselves under the floorboards.”
“What about the hair you found?”
“The problem with that is we won’t have any DNA stored on the original victims—too long back, I’m afraid. But it’s only too clear that it’s from several different sources.”
“Some of it will be Cliff’s. That will be conclusive, won’t it? And I bet you’ve got his DNA already.”
Rey gave a nod, stiff to the point of reluctance. “We’ve traced ownership of the cottage. At the time of the murders, a local businessman was renting out a few of these country properties. Apparently, the final tenants did a runner, and the owner died in his seventies only a year or so later. It’s my guess that the cottage hung around as part of an inheritance for a long time, until it was too run-down to bother with.”
“It’s that all right.”
Rey turned the pages, quick, flicking at them. “I’m just trying to find the relevant bits. Here we are. Cause of death difficult to establish conclusively. A single trauma in the male victim—an abrasion on the fifth left vertebro-costal rib, indicative of a knife stab …” he glanced up. “Straight between the ribs. Either someone knew what they were doing or just a lucky stab.”
The knife came out of him and into me. I would never forget those words.
“Intruder?” I asked.
“Or intruders.”
“Sorry?”
“There is nothing substantial to clarify who these people are, but the dates and location suggest this must have something to do with the Wetland Murders. If a child murderer lived in this house, the logical assumption is that these are further victims, killed, perhaps, because they’d discovered the truth.”
“But … wouldn’t someone need to have gone missing?”
“People go missing every day of the week. It’s only children we can actively investigate. Adults have a right to disappear.”
“Patsy disappeared.”
“Neither of these bodies is that of a fifteen-year-old, but we will continue to look.”
A tremor passed through me. “What, pull up all the floorboards?”
“Forensics will take that cottage apart brick by brick. And the garden.”
“Those bodies are not victims. I heard them talk. It was horrid. They were Kissie and Pinchie.”
Rey scratched at an eyebrow. “Oh, whatever, let’s run with it, you found them after all. I’m sorry to say that the obvious motive for killing two ruthless sadists might be that someone escaped their clutches and returned. Cliff admits he was in that house and got away. It’s looking possible that he has a very long history of murder.”
“Typical! So convenient to pin every dead body in sight on the same person.”
“We examine all alternatives—”
“Cliff didn’t kill the Wetland Murderers, Rey. He was just a puny kid.” A better theory flashed into my mind. If a parent of a missing child had gone searching … found that cottage of horrors. Who wouldn’t attack the people who tortured your child?
But then I thought about Arnie. I had assumed I’d tell Rey about Arnie but found I was clamping my jaw shut. He had been at the wetlands when the bodies were exhumed, but I was sure there was nothing more hidden behind that story. I’d caused Arnie enough grief. The thought of him being hauled in for questioning made my knees lose their strength. I snatched at the kitchen surface to hold myself up.
“You’re in shock,” said Rey. He got up. I felt, rather than saw, his approaching figure. My body tingled, as if he’d caught me in a ring of magnetism. His hands came down onto the corners of my shoulders, where the bones lift and round. I tried to control my breathing, which was rising to Watt’s steam engine levels. The gentle touch of his warm hands slid around me until I was leaning into him. I could smell the aftershave he’d sprayed on earlier that morning, even pick out the sandalwood and vetiver. I rested my forehead on his chest, as comfortable as my own pillow. The warmth of his face was right above me, and I knew he had brought his lips to within a millimeter of my hair. A butterfly kiss, a secret one that I was not supposed to know about. I lifted my arms and rested them on his back, subtly pulling him closer.
“Sabbie …” he said, his voice hushed and trembling.
Into the slow-motion encounter came a persistent bleeping. I hadn’t put Rey down as the jumpy sort, but his clavicles hit his ears and he bounced away from me.
“What the hell is that?”
I managed a grin. “My bread machine.” The magic moment was over, and I didn’t think we would regain it. “Fancy some breakfast?”
I was impressed with Rey, who clearly knew his way around a cafetieré. He made the coffee while I knocked the loaf out of the tin.
“Got the breadmaker from a boot sale.” I hoped I would remind him of that happy Sunday morning we’d spent, which now seemed a long time ago. He was standing so close, his presence was making the hairs on my skin stand erect. “It was still in the packaging,” I waffled on, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Don’t suppose they’d worked out why they should stop buying their sliced white from Sainsbur
y’s. Their loss is my gain—the bread tastes like angels’ wings.”
“What—feathers?”
I stuck my tongue out at him (just the prettier half inch), put the steaming loaf onto a rack to cool, and put a pan of water on to boil for the two eggs I’d collected earlier. I dashed upstairs to slip into something more clean. I took a few deep breaths and sat on the bed, trying to think. My whole body had fizzed when Rey held me. I’d managed to fool myself into believing we were in a mutual state of flirting. But now I knew it—I was falling for the guy. And probably, he would never fall for me back.
I gave the eggs three and half minutes then lifted them out of the rolling water and dropped them into eggcups. Neither of us spoke as we tucked into breakfast. Finally, Rey pushed away his empty plate. “A rocket’s been going round the station since you found that cottage.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Both investigations—the original one and this one now? We should have found those bodies ourselves.”
“You mean the police—”
“Never entered that cottage.”
“No one would ever have known there were bodies down there.”
“So how did you know?”
“I felt it, I guess.”
Rey didn’t reply. He swallowed the rest of his coffee and set the mug down with utmost caution. I took the silence as a go-ahead.
“Whether the bodies are victims or killers,” I said. “It is definite, isn’t it? Brokeltuft was the epicentre—”
Rey was pushing at the handle of his empty mug with one finger, turning it in a circle. I saw the picture of Bugs Bunny followed by the words What’s up Doc? over and over like a mini movie show. “We still have no idea how closely these two sets of crimes are linked. I’m not part of the investigation into what happened at Brokeltuft. We’ve had to draft in more officers and hand most of this over to forensics for now.” He was addressing the mug, as if it was the least threatening listener. “My team must stay clear about its brief: Josh Sutton and Aidan Rodderick.”
“The children buried in the moors back then were around the same age as Josh and Aidan.”
“Okay.” Rey glanced up, and I could see that the detective inside him could not resist picking at the puzzle. “We seem to have established that the original murderer started by enticing a teenager. No doubt she’s a handful, so next time they go for a younger boy. It does make sense—a sado-sexual motivation was verified by the autopsies on the four original victims.” My face contorted at his words, but he didn’t notice. “The boy escapes, and the girl’s giving them so much grief, they do away with her. She might not have been the only older victim. There is a time gap between Cliff and this girl being reported missing and the snatching of four smaller children.”
I thought about this. “Maybe they deserted the cottage for a time, in case Cliff reported his ordeal to the police?”
“Maybe.”
“So, you agree with me, then? The two bodies are murderers, not victims?”
“Your average murderer doesn’t usually go for decomposition under their sofa area. Which is why the garden has to be dug up next.”
I was thinking about Cliff. How he’d returned to his home and never even told his mother. He’d got into trouble because those brutes had shaved his head, but he still never told. “Little Josh—did he have his hair shorn? If he did, then it’s a true copycat crime.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information.”
“The public don’t know very much, do they? They don’t even know how Josh died.”
“We need to keep some facts quiet. It’s the way the investigation operates.”
I went rigid. “You’re just waiting to find the body of Aidan Rodderick, aren’t you? You’ve given up before you’ve started.”
Rey looked stymied by my outburst. “You should take a look inside our incident room. The guys are working into the night, every night.”
“But you’re not getting anywhere! You’re fixated on Cliff, and on where I get my information from.” We were leaning across the breakfast bar, almost touching. The air was charged. “Sometimes, the spirit world knows things. You think Cliff told me where the house was, but he’d forced everything out of his mind. He was just a kid. A lost kid.”
“Okay. I’ll give you that. Besides, why would Houghton want to lead to you to these bodies? The discovery reinforces his connection with the original murders and only makes him look guiltier.” He showed me big, creamy teeth. “Which is why we’ve got him banged up.”
My temper flew away from me. “Right. You’ve got him banged up. But no sight of Aidan. Does Cliff look to you the sort of man who would sit quietly in a cell while a child slowly dies somewhere?”
Rey’s eyes flashed. “Don’t you cross-examine me, Sabbie. These people have a substratum inside them. They hide all their evil in it and go walking around the world as if nothing is amiss. They fool most people. That’s why we go on evidence. Evidence is how we compile a watertight case and get justice for the victims, and the evidence against Houghton is damning. It would be nice to get a confession from him, but frankly, we don’t need it.”
“It’s just …” My voice had left me for a moment. “I can’t sit here and do nothing. The whole of the county—the whole of the country—must feel the same about Aidan at this moment, but I think I could help! I feel I ought to try.”
“Try to what?” said Rey, not bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice. “Find the missing child?”
“Yes,” I said in a tiny voice. “It’s why I went to Brokeltuft.”
Quite suddenly, Rey got up from his stool. For a moment, I thought he was going to walk around the breakfast bar and take me in his arms again, because he was swaying on his feet as if trying to resist some inner temptation. He glanced at me, almost shyly.
“Josh died from paracetamol poisoning.”
I gazed at him, afraid to speak. Telling me this secret felt more intimate than our almost-kiss.
“The modus operandi could not have been more different from the first set of murders. Josh still had all his hair. There wasn’t a single bruise on his body. The only similarity was the place of burial.”
My mind was racing. “So … was he alive all the time he was missing?”
“Pathology think so. They’re placing time of death days, perhaps hours, before he was dumped.”
“For Old Mab’s sake!” I focused on the grim line of his mouth. “Does that mean—”
“Yes. Aidan could still be alive. Unless …” He lifted his briefcase onto the breakfast bar and gazed at it, as if not wanting to continue.
“Unless what?” But I knew already, just as Rey did. Little Aidan’s body could already be hidden, undiscovered. No one could say for certain that the child was alive.
“The entire murder team would laugh until they’d wet their seats if they knew that I trust your judgment,” said Rey. “And I don’t know if I do. I only know that it was me who dragged you into this case. I didn’t have to come knocking on your door when we found Houghton on the wetlands. That was my call, and the team is not going to let me forget it. None of them know I’m here.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice full of breath. I remembered what Abbott has said—that Rey had deliberately chosen to use me, almost as bait, at the start of the case. I looked over at Rey, burning to confront him with this, but the words never left my lips.
From his case he brought out a small package, triple-bagged in heavy-duty polythene, with a red label sealing the final fold like a wax signet. He placed it on the kitchen worktop, carefully away from our crumbs and coffee stains. I stared at it. I could feel my chest rise and fall like a Southern belle in a Civil War movie.
“No one can know I’m leaving this with you,” said Rey. “Ever. Do you understand?”
“Wh-what d’you want me to do with it?” I
asked. The packet filled the room with significance.
“I don’t know,” said Rey. “Do whatever it is you keep telling me you’re so good at, for God’s sake. My mobile number is on the seal. Now. D’you want that lift to your car?”
NINETEEN
By half past eleven, I was back home and ready for my Reiki client. The therapy room vibrated with candles, incense, and soft music, and thoughts of Cliff Houghton and Aidan Rodderick were lodged as far back in my mind as I could get them. In reality, both were lost in dreadful places they could not escape.
For an hour, I passed my hands over my client, feeling the heat radiate from them. This energy doesn’t come from me any more than the messages and gifts I receive from journeys to the otherworlds come from me. I’m just the adapter. When my client rose from the bed, his eyes had found a focus they didn’t have when he arrived, and that pleased me more than I could let him know—it meant that I had transformed myself from someone helping the police with their murder enquiries into a complementary therapist. I filed his cheque, updated his notes, and got ready for the next client.
For lunch I picked a bunch of the baby salad leaves I was growing on my kitchen windowsill and piled them on top a slice of today’s loaf, grating a bit of cheddar over them. I spread mayonnaise thickly on a seond slice, rammed the two slices together, and bit down into the oozing mix. It hit the spot, immediately reviving my energy.
Upstairs, I showered and tugged my black dress over damp, bare skin. I brushed my hair until its kinks were temporarily dispersed. It felt heavy as stage curtaining when I moved my head.
Already, I was between worlds, held there, floating in the viscous ether, neither Sabbie nor spirit.
In my therapy room, I opened the file drawer. At the bottom was the furtive package Rey had left with me this morning. I weighed it in my hand: no more than a gram, but as heavy as pain; a white plastic figure with a scarlet sash around his middle and a wand as long as his arm, ready to discharge the blaster ray.
Josh’s Slamblaster.
Somehow, I was surprised to see it, as if I might have dreamed Rey’s presence in my house and his covert motive for arriving.
