by David Mark
“She must have been terrified,” says McAvoy, softly.
“Don’t start that,” says Pharaoh between mouthfuls. “You go soft on me, I’ll kick your teeth in.”
“Sorry, guv. Just, I thought we were after somebody who was doing this for kicks. She just wanted her secrets to stay hidden.”
Pharaoh shrugs. “She got her kicks a different way. Killed to cover it up.”
“You think he knows?”
“Her husband? No. If he does, he turned a blind eye.”
McAvoy looks again at the website. Paula Tressider, pictured in hundreds of pounds’ worth of designer gear, wearing a forced smile for the camera, shaking hands with the prime minister at a Conservative fund-raiser a year before.
“When she saw their tattoos in the magazine . . .”
“Yeah.”
The phone buzzes. They each take a breath, before McAvoy reads the text aloud.
“‘Think it’s time we finished our game. You’re on.’”
His smile contains no mirth. Just a relief that his own message, carefully constructed with Suzie’s help, has been received and accepted.
Roisin gives Suzie a cuddle as they head out of the door. She does not know what is happening, but her new friend seems trembly and scared.
“He’ll take care of you,” she says, gesturing at her husband.
“I know.”
McAvoy bends down and gives Lilah a tickle. Bumps fists with Fin, who is sitting in front of the TV, eating pasta and pesto with sliced-up hot dogs.
“They called,” whispers Roisin in his ear as he stands.
He turns to her. Looks quizzical.
“Noye,” she says. “The new campsite. Anlaby. He wants you there.”
McAvoy’s face contorts. He wonders if any more burdens will be laid upon his broad shoulders tonight.
“I’m a policeman.”
She makes sure he is looking straight at her as she replies, “You’re a man.”
He does not speak again. Just quietly closes the door as he leaves. Does not turn up his collar or lower his head as he walks through the pounding rain. Opens the car door and climbs inside. Starts the engine and finds something soothing on a classical station.
Watches the lights come on.
Checks his radio and gives a nod.
Suzie leads the way, her tiny Fiat at the head of this three-car convoy. She squints through the rain and the gathering gloom, wincing at the distorted headlights of the cars in front and behind, aware that the only reason she is not shaking her legs is because she does not want to stall the car.
On the passenger seat, the phone Pharaoh gave her bleeps. She reads the message. It has been forwarded from her own phone.
Need to Taste Your Skin. Don’t be Late.
She closes her eyes for as long as she dares while driving. Instinctively looks across to the passenger seat. Wonders if she can really feel Simon’s presence or just wants to.
The journey takes more than an hour in the slow-moving traffic. Twice she fears she has lost McAvoy and Pharaoh, but whenever she prepares to park up and wait for them, her phone flashes to tell her they can see her. That she is not alone.
It is easier when she hits the motorway. She sticks at a steady seventy in the inside lane. Tries to find comfort in the sound of the wet tires on the road. Concentrates on her breathing. Half wishes she had let Roisin petition her husband into being allowed to come, too.
She has been to this hotel before. It sits off the motorway, three miles from Goole. She sat in the car park for two hours while Simon entertained a man he’d met on the website. She had done some drawing and eaten a McChicken sandwich. Simon had enjoyed his afternoon. Said the man was grateful and kind.
Suzie parks. She wants to look at the other cars in the dark, wet car park. Wants to see if her murderer is already there. Does not let herself. Climbs out of the vehicle and, straight-backed, face upturned, walks through the puddles and into the hotel.
“Can I help you?”
The man at reception is younger than she is. He looks bored, and his shirt is too big for his skinny frame.
“I have a room booked.”
She gives her name. Tries to keep calm as he fiddles with the machine and then finally hands her a key. He looks her over, as if appraising livestock. Even has the temerity to nod.
“Second floor,” he says.
She takes the stairs. Cannot bear the thought that the lift may be mirrored. Does not want to see herself.
Balling her fists, clenching her jaw, she finds the room. Slides the pass card into the lock and pushes open the door. Switches on the light and looks round the dark, characterless room, her heart thudding painfully against her broken ribs.
Another message on her phone, this time from McAvoy.
Be strong. I’m here.
She undresses. Peels off her borrowed shirt and leggings. Tries to rub the creases out of her imperfect skin. Takes the length of cord from her handbag and wedges the door open with a flip-flop.
Slowly, as if every moment pains her, and each breath is a countdown, she moves to the bed. Lies facedown and naked. Feels the cool blankets against her warm skin. Grips the phone tight. Texts her killer.
I’m ready.
Time slows. Suzie does not know how long she has been here. Her mind drifts. She could not say with any certainty that she has not fallen asleep in the time she has been lying here, in this beige room, with its white sheets and thin mattress.
Just knows that this was how Simon died. And that by lying here, like this, she is helping to catch a killer.
There is no prelude to the attack. She hears nothing. No creak of floorboard or clever threat.
One moment she is lying facedown on the hotel bed. The next there is a pressure upon her back, and the cord she has draped so invitingly across her buttocks is tight around her neck.
She gasps. Fights. Thrashes like an animal. But the weight upon her shoulders is too great. The hands too rough. It is the same weight that pinned her to the grass two nights ago and was the last thing her friend felt as he died. It hurts.
Her mouth opens. The tendons in her neck feel, for a moment, to be snapping like a fistful of twigs.
And then it is gone. She is facedown on the bed. Her face is on the pillow. The tears upon her cheeks are soaking into the mattress. Warm, tender hands are upon her.
She turns. Manages to wriggle onto her back. Whips her head this way and that. Looks at the devastation of the room. The smashed TV. The spilled kettle and cups. The door that hangs from only one hinge.
“Suzie.”
Shirt torn, bleeding from the nose, McAvoy is standing in the doorway. He gives her a bone-weary smile.
“You okay?”
“Did you get her?”
“Are you okay, Suzie?”
She nods. Breathes, deep and slow. “Please . . .”
“We’ve got them both, Suzie. It’s a mess . . .”
JULY, IT WAS. Evening. A Sunday. Halfway through some costume drama on BBC One. A bottle of wine already drained and gravy-streaked dinner plates daringly abandoned on the coffee table.
That was when Paula Tressider took the call that made her a killer.
Four and a half rings, then a weary hello: warm plastic receiver against fleshy cheek.
TV on pause and a shared look of exasperation . . .
Five whole seconds of silence, then a male voice. She didn’t recognize it at first. Had not heard it say very much the only time they met. Just a few grunts and a thank-you.
Clipped West Yorkshire tones . . .
“You might not remember me. I remember you. Huddersfield, it was. Some enchanted evening. Does your sweetheart know how you spend your evenings?”
Thirty seconds more.
No words, save his breathing.
“I think you have the wrong number . . .”
The laugh. The snuffling, nasal sniggering.
“No, I’ve got you. Was a surprise, like. Didn’t think somebody in your position would be in the phone book. Then again, I didn’t think somebody in your position would do the things I saw you do . . .”
Cold fear in a churning belly.
White roses blossoming on red flesh.
“I’m sorry, would there be a better time for you to ring to discuss this more fully? Perhaps if you left me your number, I could contact you at a more convenient time . . . ?”
No laughter this time. Just ice in his voice.
“I’ll call you. I’ll call again, and again, and then I’ll call somebody else. I’ll tell. I’m sorry to be doing this. I really am.”
A moment’s consideration. Eyes closed, hiding from it all. Memories folding inward over everything else, like petals at dusk.
“Tomorrow. Call me tomorrow.”
A wordless nod.
Click.
A week without food. Of hands trembling and broken sleep. Needing a piss every thirty bloody seconds. Throwing up the wine that brought such feeble relief. Snapping at every gentle inquiry. Swearing at every question over health and happiness . . .
He called back, of course. The other man.
Midday, it was. Friday. Sweetheart at the shops.
Alone in the house. Glass knocking against the receiver; clutched in shaking hands.
“You ready to talk now?”
A nod. Then a deeper, more assertive reply.
“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.”
His smile.
“No? That’s fine, then. I’d probably get plenty of money from the papers. I’m only calling you out of courtesy.”
“That’s what you want, is it? Money? What makes you think I’d pay? Or that I could?”
Scorn, then. A note of uncertainty? A diversion from the script . . .
“You’ve got more than me. Everybody’s got more than me.”
Resisting feebly. Trying to talk him round.
“How do you know it’s a secret? People who know me already know what I like . . .”
“Bollocks. I remember. You told me a dozen bloody times what a risk you were taking. You were slumming it. Roughing it. Playing away, too close to home. You don’t want this coming out. I read the papers. I know what they’re saying about your future. You’re a big deal. And I saw you on top of that pretty little girl with the blossoms, loving every minute of it. Even me, when you let me join in . . .”
Tears. A coughing fit that became puke.
“How much do you want . . . ?”
Click.
Life became timeless. Hours became a shapeless, colorless mass.
Days, nights, all spreading out from that one moment, in the early hours, when her mind was made up.
Broken by tiredness, racked by fear.
Acquiescing to will.
Weighing payment with risk.
Nodding in the dark. Eyes fixed on the ceiling. Tears on cheeks.
Paula Tressider acknowledged what must be done. Decided they all had to die.
• • •
HERE, NOW, in the interview room at Courtland Road Police Station, with the rain thundering down outside and their breaths forming into ragged strips on the cold, damp air, Paula Tressider sobs.
McAvoy prompts gently. Nudges along her confession. Tries to pretend they already know what she is giving up so freely . . .
“I said I would pay,” she says, her voice muffled as she drops her face into her fleshy palms. “Told him to come.”
McAvoy leans forward. “You need to say his name for the tape.”
“Connor,” she says, choking on the word. “Connor Brannick.”
It means nothing to him. He tries not to show it. Feels the breeze as Pharaoh leaves the room, name scrawled on her palm in ballpoint.
Paula is too caught up to notice the sudden absence. Just keeps talking. Sniffing. Wiping away tears with the heel of her hand.
“He came on his motorbike. End of summer. Hot day, I remember that. I could barely keep my hands still. It was real then. Him on the front drive, in his helmet and leathers, asking me if he could put the bike in the garage so the sap from the trees didn’t drip on the paintwork . . .”
“Go on.”
“He was different from how he’d been on the phone. Embarrassed, even. When he took his helmet off, he looked like he was about to cry. Was talking and talking. Said the house was lovely—that his wife would like it. He seemed sorry to be asking me for money. Tried to justify himself by telling me he was struggling. Said he would never do this if he could just get work.”
“Go on, Mrs. Tressider.”
“He was talking so fast. Just gabbling on. He was as nervous as I was. I told him to come through to the back garden, be a bit more discreet. He followed. Saw the pond. Started saying how he could fit lights in it. Saying what a good electrician he was. Would look lovely lit from underneath. I was hardly listening. Managed to tell him the money was in the gazebo. I went to get it.”
“And then what, Paula?”
“I came back with the hammer.”
Pharaoh reenters the room. Slides a warm piece of paper in front of McAvoy.
PARTNER OF MISSING MAN SAYS SHE HAS NOT GIVEN UP HOPE
The common-law wife of a Morley electrician missing for almost eight months has made a renewed appeal for him to come home.
43-year-old Connor Brannick vanished last September. He told his partner, 39-year-old Gwen Simmons, that he was going to price up a new job of work, but never returned home.
Ms. Simmons, the mother of his four-year-old son, Andrew, waited several days before contacting police, as she said it was not unlike him to go away for several days at a time for work.
But as time went on she began to worry, and calls to his mobile phone went unanswered.
Today she told the Huddersfield Examiner that after he vanished, she discovered that he had been hiding major financial problems.
She said, “I just wish he’d spoken to me about it. I know everybody’s saying that he’s done himself in, or just run off and left me to it, but I have to cling to the hope that he’s okay and will come home.
“Our son keeps asking where Daddy is. I need him here. It was never about the money. I wish he’d told me how deep a mess we were in. I don’t know what to do next or where to turn. I just want him home.”
Mr. Brannick’s motorcycle, which he was riding when he left the family home, is also missing. Anybody with information should call West Yorkshire Police . . .
McAvoy looks up. “His body?”
Paula raises her head long enough to glare at him, then the flicker of defiance is gone. She looks away. “In the pond.”
“You smashed his skull in?”
Paula nods.
“For the tape, please?”
“Yes.”
For a moment there is silence in the room. Then McAvoy says the name that has brought them here. “Simon Appleyard.”
Paula turns to the gray-suited solicitor who sits to her left, and who has done nothing but polish his glasses on his tie since she told him to shut up and let her speak.
“The magazine.”
McAvoy nods. “The Journal. The advert.”
“They were both there. Him and her. The boy Stephen found for us and the girl he brought. Their tattoos, mocking me, like she did that night. The night she made me take the mask off . . .”
McAvoy licks his teeth. “Mrs. Tressider, do you really believe that either Simon Appleyard or Suzie would ever have tried to blackmail you? Do you think that even if you became the prime minister’s wife, they would have any notion of who you were, or try and use that to their advantage? Not everybody is like
that.”
For the first time, Paula meets his gaze. “Don’t tell me about people. I know what people are. I know what’s under the skin. It’s not pretty. It’s base and it’s desperate, and it takes what it wants . . .”
It is Trish Pharaoh who stops her short, slamming her palm down on the desk.
“Did you kill Simon Appleyard?”
She holds Pharaoh’s gaze. “Yes.”
“And you are responsible for the attack on Georgie-Lee Suthers? On the boy at the swingers party? Repeated attacks on Suzie Devlin?”
“Yes.”
Pharaoh breathes out. Looks the burly, disheveled politician’s wife up and down. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
AS HE WALKS across the car park in the teeming rain, tired to his bones, aching to his soul, McAvoy considers desire. Wonders at the nature of lust. Pictures Simon Appleyard, naked and holding his own noose, waiting for the stranger who would kill him where he lay. Considers Suzie: still visiting darkened rest stops and opening herself for strangers, even as the bruises burned on her skin.
Thinks of Paula Tressider.
They’d always gone farther afield, she’d told them in her interview. She and Stephen. Had crossed the country to find playmates. She thought Huddersfield was too close to home. Only eighty miles away. Too risky. But she’d been excited. Liberated. Daring. Had thrown herself into the evening and had fun with the young couple with the tattoos. And then the magazine had arrived. The one she’d been so proud of. The photo shoot of her beautiful home. The picture of her and Peter. Her fingers locked around her husband’s. Every inch the politician’s wife. And there, mocking her, in the adverts at the back: skin she had tasted and which had touched her own. She didn’t know when she’d decided to commit murder. Just knew that she had to make sure they could never talk. Knew only that the boy was into being dominated and liked certain websites. Knew, more than anything, he liked to please. Liked words. Liked peacocks. Could be found, and could be persuaded, to contribute to his own death.
