Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘Who are you ringing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nat, to let her know you’re okay, we’re on the way back.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’ve got to. She’ll be out of her mind.’

  ‘Don’t tell her I was on the bridge. Don’t you fucking dare.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean it, Robin.’ His voice was as steely as she’d ever heard it. ‘If you tell her, I’ll make sure your big boss finds out what you did.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Kilmartin – that’s him, isn’t it? Assistant Chief Constable? Twisting that guy back there’s arm – he wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Kev said. ‘That’s not fair – she saved you from a potential criminal record.’

  ‘Stay out of it. This is between me and her.’ He turned back to Robin. ‘I don’t care if they charge me with drink-driving, I don’t give a toss. But you? If Kilmartin finds out you pulled rank, you’re right in the shit.’

  In the mirror, Kev nodded infinitesimally: do it for now, sort it out later.

  Still she hesitated. ‘I can’t believe you,’ she said eventually. ‘You’re …’ She shook her head. ‘For now. I won’t say anything. But this is serious, Luke, regardless of things between us. You can’t do that then sweep it under the …’

  ‘I’ll do what I want – I don’t take orders from you. Keep your mouth shut and we’ll both be fine.’ He pointed at the phone in her hand. ‘Call her. Call her and tell her we’re on our way back. That’s it.’

  After she spoke to Natalie, whose tears of relief quickly turned into fury, there was silence in the car. Kev didn’t try to get Luke to talk or offer advice; instead he opened his window a couple of inches and let the breeze buffet in, white noise.

  They reached the turn-off for Luke’s house and passed it. He spun around again. ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Mum and Dad’s.’

  ‘What?’ Aghast. ‘No way – you can’t. I …’

  ‘Not the best idea to let your wife see you like this, is it?’ said Kev steadily, ‘if you want her to think you’re okay. Straighten yourself out a bit, get some sleep, have a shower. Talk to her when you feel better.’

  Luke seemed about to remonstrate then stopped. A couple of minutes later, though, as they turned into Dunnington Road, he said, ‘What are you going to tell them?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re going to need some explanation, aren’t they, for you turning up off your face before eight in the morning.’ With me.

  ‘So tell them Nat and I had a fight. Tell them I was drink-driving. But don’t tell them I was on the bridge. And don’t tell Natalie.’ He glared. ‘I mean it.’

  Her dad closed the kitchen door and ushered them both away from it. ‘What’s going on, Rob?’ he murmured.

  Movement overhead, her mother’s voice as she shepherded Luke out of the bathroom towards the bedroom they’d shared as children, and which she’d shared with Lennie much more recently than that.

  ‘He had a fight with Natalie,’ Robin said quietly. ‘A pretty bad one.’

  Her dad nodded.

  ‘You’re not surprised.’ She frowned.

  ‘They’ve been having problems again lately,’ he said. ‘Nat’s got a lot to deal with, hasn’t she, the baby and keeping them going financially and trying to gee Luke up as well.’

  ‘What do you mean, gee him up?’

  He looked stricken for a second, realizing he’d made a mistake.

  ‘Dad?’

  He sighed. ‘Well, he’s quite down about being out of work.’

  ‘But he’s not “out of work”. He left to take care of Jack.’

  With the face of a man who knew he’d be in trouble later, he admitted, ‘Actually, love, he didn’t. They let him go. He asked us not to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake – he knew when I was fired.’ And he’d jeered at every opportunity.

  ‘Well,’ her dad said, ‘for whatever reason, he wanted to keep it private. He puts on a brave face – especially round you – but it’s getting to him more than he lets on. Anyway, how did you get involved today? What actually happened?’

  ‘Natalie rang me.’ She glanced at Kev. ‘She said Luke had nailed half a bottle of Jack Daniels and driven off in a rage. She was scared he’d have an accident.’

  ‘Or get pulled over by the police,’ her dad guessed. ‘Hence why she rang you. The bloody idiot.’ He shook his head. ‘He didn’t, though?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ He turned to Kevin. ‘You went with her, young man?’

  ‘Rob rang me.’ He looked at her. ‘I was in the area so …’

  ‘That was good of you. Thank you. Why didn’t you call us, though, love?’

  ‘I thought I could handle it,’ Robin said.

  Kev drove her back, too, Robin shotgun, moll to his gangster. Her car was an Audi, it wasn’t small, but he seemed far too big for it. Even with the seat pushed back to its full extent, his thighs skimmed the bottom of the wheel and his hair brushed the roof. They didn’t talk but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, more an exhausted one.

  ‘That was pretty rough,’ he said suddenly. ‘On the bridge.’

  Robin remembered Luke’s face when he first turned round, before he shut her out. And afterwards the shock at how close he’d come, how thin the tissue between life and death had stretched. She knew that look; she’d seen it a hundred times at work.

  ‘I’ve got to tell them,’ she said. ‘Later today. I’ll work out how to say it without saying it – without him suspecting. Tell them how worried I am about him. Honestly, the fact that I’m saying it is probably enough for them to know it’s serious.’

  They’d stopped at a zebra crossing where a woman about her own age was shepherding a little boy on a scooter. Kev waited until they were both safely on the other side. ‘What is it between the pair of you?’ he asked. ‘Why so much aggro?’

  ‘It’s always been like it. Even when we were little kids – remember that time he “accidentally” slammed my hand in the door of Dad’s car and broke two of my fingers? Or when he threw my packed lunch in the river on that school trip to Stratford?’

  ‘Yeah. I think you had one of my sandwiches after. And my apple.’

  ‘He thinks I’m Dad’s favourite, I know he’s Mum’s. He thinks everything I do is some attempt to belittle him and make him look like a failure. He was cock-a-hoop when I was out at the Met and plastered all over the Evening Standard, it was like he’d won the EuroMillions.’

  ‘On the bridge,’ Kev said casually, eyes back on the road, ‘he said something about getting his just deserts. For ruining your life.’

  She thought about fudging but she was tired of the cover-ups and half-truths, the constant calculation of who knew what. And Kev had been brilliant this morning. Yes, she wanted to tell someone – she wanted to tell him. Like Corinna, Kev knew all the players, he would understand why it had cut so deeply.

  ‘Luke didn’t ruin my life,’ she said. ‘He wishes.’ She hesitated. ‘But what he was talking about … It was years ago now, I’ve never told anyone. I didn’t even know myself till I moved back up here.’

  ‘I’m good at keeping things under my hat, as you know.’ A wry up-flick of the eyebrows. Kev was totally straight, you could eat your dinner off the accounts book at his scrap-metal business, she wouldn’t have tangled with him even this much if you couldn’t, but his dad, Morris, who’d run the business before him, had had some interesting connections and he’d done time for fencing back in the day.

  ‘Me and Samir,’ she said, ‘Luke broke us up.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Remember? A few days before I went away to university?’

  ‘’Course I do. That whole thing – no one understood it at all. One minute you were off travelling together, joined at the hip, the next you were gone to London on your own, so fast your feet never touched
the ground, and he was about as much fun as open-heart surgery. He wouldn’t talk about it, expected us just to accept the new world order and move on, no explanation given. So what did he do, then, Luke?’

  ‘Told Samir he’d never be accepted in our family because he was Indian and that if he married me, it’d finish my relationship with my mum and dad, and they’d never accept our children. Samir decided – who’d blame him? – that he couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Fuckin’ hell. And it wasn’t true?’

  ‘My parents loved him. It was only Luke who didn’t.’

  The phone rang as they made the turn into Mary Street. ‘Speak of the Devil,’ said Kev, looking at the screen.

  ‘Yeah, and now he’s my guv’nor.’ She hit the button. ‘Morning.’

  ‘Hi. Can you talk?’ Samir sounded worried.

  ‘Yes, I’m in the car but Bluetooth so …’ She glanced at the clock: five past eight, still incriminatingly early. But she had to – it could only be work. ‘Kev’s with me.’

  ‘Kev?’ Audible surprise.

  ‘Hiya, Sam, mate.’ The boom of Kev’s voice filled the car. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Okay.’ For a moment, he sounded uncertain. ‘Look, can you keep this to yourself, Kev? I’ve had a call, Robin. We’ve got another case.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The evidence bag Rafferty handed her held a bloodied scrap of paper that on closer inspection revealed itself to be a debit- or credit-card slip. Almost translucent, it was disintegrating along the fold – Robin guessed it had been through the wash – and most of the writing was lost forever, either faded or blotted out by blood. At the bottom, however, was a visible signature line and underneath that, barely legible when held to the light, a printed name: Ms Lara Meikle.

  ‘There’s nothing else,’ Rafferty said. ‘No bag or phone, no wallet, but she’s wearing a denim skirt and that was in the tiny pocket-within-a-pocket bit on the right hip. It’s so fragile, I worried it’d fall apart when we took it out.’

  ‘Lara Meikle – have you looked her up? Is that who she is?’

  ‘Unless she’s got a twin with an identical tattoo. We did her prints, not in the system, but I put the name into Facebook. Born here in 1996, went to school here, works – worked – for an insurance company in town, and it’s definitely her in the photographs.’

  ‘Right.’

  Robin gave him the bag back, hoping he didn’t notice the tremor in her hand. Usually she could click between modes pretty much at will – Adrian, her ex in London, said her ability to compartmentalize was very masculine; it hadn’t been a compliment – but the events of the morning so far were proving hard to get a lid on. That moment on the bridge, the train thundering closer as Luke leaned forward – how long until that became a fixture in her nightmares?

  ‘Do you think he missed it?’ Rafferty said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The card slip.’ He lifted the bag into her eyeline. ‘Like the girl at Gisborne’s – there’s nothing left to identify her by otherwise but maybe this was so soft he didn’t feel it through the denim?’

  ‘Let’s keep an open mind,’ she said. ‘The two could be completely unrelated.’

  ‘There’s a lot of similarities, though, aren’t there? Both young women, both white, both stabbed and …’

  ‘How’s your hand, Dave?’

  He looked confused until he realized she was cutting him off: ‘Surprisingly sore.’ He showed her a cut across the heel now spidery with stitches. ‘Had to get a tetanus jab, too. I’m counting myself lucky, though – if I’d fallen down that hole, I’d be a goner. Keep having flashbacks about it.’

  Open mind or not, it was hard to avoid a sense of déjà vu as she followed him to the body. The inner cordon had been set up at the mouth of an alleyway between a chain-link fence that formed the perimeter of the light-engineering works to their left and the corrugated-iron rear wall of the garage next door. The alley itself was about five feet wide and overgrown with the same medley of waste-land favourites as Gisborne’s: nettles, elder and brambles, which here were covered in the buds of small white flowers, bizarrely out of place in their rural innocence. Some of the vegetation had been flattened by earlier feet but the brambles reached out to snag the legs of her protective suit over and over again as if vying for her attention. ‘Like Day of the bloody Triffids, isn’t it?’ Rafferty threw back over his shoulder.

  Placing her feet carefully around cigarette butts and crumpled cans, Robin saw several different sets of dog prints dried into the mud and plenty of dog shit – clearly, it was a popular spot among the local canine community – but as they got closer, she noticed a set of large paw prints pointing out of the alley that was first edged, then filled with blood.

  Olly Faulkner stood, nodded hello and stepped back against the chain-link fence to let her see.

  The first thing that struck her was the blood. So much blood. For the length of several feet, the alley was soaked in it: the ground, the corrugated wall, the clumps of nettles. Arterial bleeding – blood pumping out while her heart was still beating, her life spattering the weeds. Robin imagined the sound like heavy rain. Like the fat drops of Kieran Clark’s blood that had warmed the pavement outside his parents’ house.

  Lara Meikle, if that was her name, lay slantwise across the alley, on her side, her head resting on her arm as if she were only asleep. Asleep among the weeds and dog shit and rusting beer cans.

  On the inside of her wrist was a small tattoo of a cartoon crown with five balled spikes.

  Her skirt was undisturbed but the cotton of her peasant-style blouse had been torn away to expose her chest and neck. A pair of purple fingerprint bruises bloomed on her jaw. Gingerly, Robin took a step closer and crouched. From what she could tell, she’d been stabbed three times. Two of the wounds were at the base of her neck – had he specifically targeted the jugular or been lucky? Most likely, that was where the blood that covered the wall had come from. The third wound was in the chest, where the knife had pierced the fabric of her grey satin bra. Around her neck were smear marks – had she clutched at the wounds or tried to staunch them? She must have known it was hopeless – she’d have seen the blood spraying between her fingers and known she was dying. Robin remembered Olly on Sunday morning: The only comfort is that with this degree of blood loss, she would have lost consciousness quickly.

  She stood and stepped back, looking not at the injuries now but the woman herself.

  She’d been more of a dresser than their first girl: the denim skirt was black with a shimmer of gold in the weave and ended a couple of inches above the knee; where it wasn’t sodden, her peasant blouse was elephant grey. Her hair was dyed a rich Jessica Rabbit magenta and had probably reached the tips of her shoulder blades when she’d been standing; judging by her eyebrows, it was light brown naturally. Her make-up wasn’t excessive but against the drained pallor of her skin, it looked super-imposed: black eyeliner with cat’s-eye flicks, pale gold eyeshadow, some sort of glimmering stuff on her cheekbones. She’d been pretty but in a more conventional way than the woman at Gisborne’s; her nose was small and unremarkable, no one would ever have singled it out for comment.

  Born in 1996. She’d been twenty-three.

  Moving forward again, Robin indicated the bruises on her jaw. ‘Do you think these happened during the attack? He or she grabbed her – tried to hold her?’ Bruises could develop after death as blood seeped through ruptured tissue.

  ‘I’d say so, yes,’ Olly nodded.

  ‘Any idea yet when that might have been?’

  ‘Between midnight and three or four, I think.’

  Robin looked beyond him to Dave Rafferty. ‘How far are we from Bradford Street here?’

  ‘Less than half a mile. Ten-minute walk, max.’

  When she ducked back under the tape, Varan was talking to Manda Pryce, a stout woman in her mid-forties still wearing the tartan pyjama trousers and sheepskin slippers she’d had on an hour and twenty minutes earli
er, she said, when she’d taken the dog out. Leon, a Staffie, had a frame like a muscular coffee table and eyes that simultaneously begged for understanding and threatened murder. Manda Pryce had his chain wrapped around her wrist, presumably to stop him bolting off down the alleyway again. ‘He just legged it across the road,’ she said, showing the red weal across her palm. ‘Pulled the lead right out of my hand.’ Leon narrowed his eyes, Putin-style, and Robin thought they were lucky he hadn’t eaten the body. The fur on his paws was crisp with dried blood.

  The neighbours were out in force, lining the outer cordon and gathered in little knots along the opposite pavement. Those expected at work tore themselves away with regret. Manda was visibly enjoying her new status and had squeezed the upper arms of at least three people who’d approached to ‘offer their support’. ‘Thanks, love,’ she said to one now, nodding gravely. ‘It’ll take a while to get over, that will. Awful bloody shock.’

  ‘What’s your address, Mrs Pryce?’ Varan asked, pen poised over his notebook.

  Shifting her cigarettes and phone to the other hand, Manda Pryce pointed across the road to one of the three short blocks of flats surrounded by an area of surprisingly vital-looking grass. ‘Twenty-seven Drumall Court. That one, fifth floor.’

  ‘Does your flat face this way?’

  ‘Sitting room and kitchen, yeah.’

  ‘Did you see or hear anything last night? Raised voices?’

  The woman shook her head, actually disappointed. ‘I went to bed early. I had a headache so I took a couple of Nurofen and got in about ten. I listen to audiobooks to help me drift off so even if there was anything, I might not have heard it.’

  ‘And you weren’t woken by anything later on? Fighting? Shouting?’

  ‘Not more than usual.’

  Varan raised his eyebrows.

  ‘There’s a couple of rowdy families in our block, closing time, you know. But no, not last night, nothing. Bedroom’s on the other side, though, so again …’ She shrugged.