by Sarah Hilary
My lovely, lucky nurse. She’s punched in the numbers like it’s rollover week and I’m floating on a fresh flood of morphine that’s drip-dripping into my arm from the tangle of tubes. Like this, I can bear to think about Mickey’s drawings, his women. He told me their names, told me everything. I didn’t want to hear it, but I hadn’t the nerve to tell him to shut up, so I lay there too close to the ceiling with the whole of my head caving in to a migraine as he talked about them, Ruth and Lara. Reading me their letters, showing me their photos.
He’s pinned their pictures to the wall. All the time he’s talking, he’s running his thumb over their faces and the photos are making this sound like whispering, like squealing. I shut my eyes with the migraine setting fire to my face and pray for the pain to get worse, for the hammering in my head to drown out what he’s saying about Lara’s legs and Ruth’s eyes, how they’re going to look after he’s emptied them out, when there’s nothing left but raw red sockets and scraped white bone.
‘It’s what they want,’ he says. ‘It’s why they write to me.’
At first I think he’s making it up, that the letters are from his mum and he’s only pretending to read from the pages. But he makes me recite a couple out loud, ‘Like you’re Lara,’ and they’re real. Jesus, they’re so real. I can’t believe letters like that make it through the post room checks.
‘Do to me what you did to her.’ That’s the gist of the worst ones. I know who they mean by ‘her’ and I know about ‘what you did’, because Mickey talks about that too. Julie, the young mum he tortured. He won’t shut up about her. How she looked after he’d finished with her. How she looked while he was doing it. He even talks about how she looked before. ‘Like this.’ Showing me a blank sheet from his sketchpad. Like she was nothing before he got to work on her.
‘Do to me what you did to her.’
Sad, mad cows. How awful did your life have to be? Or was it just a safe suburban housewife’s fantasy? That’s what Daz Quayle reckons – neither of them really meant it, Lara and Ruth, they were just getting a cheap thrill out of being in touch with a violent con. I’m not so sure, Dazza. I’m not so sure anyone’s got that much faith in the prison system they’d mess with a man like Vokey just because he’s behind bars. Supposing he gets out, what then? What then, Dazza? An appeal, I meant. I wasn’t thinking about a riot where I’d end up in here and he’d be out there, wherever he’s gone. To Lara, maybe. I hope not to Julie. She’s suffered enough.
‘Like this.’ Showing me the blank page from his sketchpad. ‘Before I found her.’
Aidan got him the sketchpad. Not like the cheap ones they hand out in art classes. Mickey’s pad is made of thick sheets the colour of clotted cream. He tears a page from the pad and screws it in his fist. It sounds like someone stepping into new snow, the squeaky clean noise of it, like old shoes in new snow. A pulpy, sweet smell. Later, after the charcoals, it smells of ash. His sweat’s the same, you find out things like that when you share a cell. I’ve shared with plenty. Those who never wash, and those who wash so often they stink of metal from the sink.
‘Read it like you’re Lara,’ Mickey says, and I do.
I read, ‘I want you to see me the way you saw her. I won’t feel real until you do.’
He holds the letters to his lips, and sniffs. As if they’re perfume samples, or porn. He smells of ash and sugar. Aidan gets him sweets. Skittles, the sour ones. Mickey soaks off the colours to use as paints. Then he wads up what’s left in his mouth, slapping his teeth together as he chews. I’ll be lying four feet above him, trying to hold the migraine at bay, hearing him sucking and slapping, reading the words out loud. Worst thing I’ve ever had to listen to, worse even than the doctors who gather to pass judgement around my bed.
‘The smell of new paint turns me on.’ Mickey puts on this little girl’s voice when he reads from the letters. ‘I set fire to a spider’s web and watched it burn and I thought of you.’
I see the sweat on his head like wax, his left eye watering madly. I pray for an alarm to sound, for a fire or lockdown. I want its rattle in my skull, like metal beads in a bottle to get it clean.
‘The sky smashes my head in. I need to be less, I need you to make me less.’ His little girl’s voice, whining, wanting. ‘The skin behind my knees bruises when I pinch it.’
Did it turn him on? Of course it did, but not in the obvious way. He likes to play the parts, to be the women buttering him up with their letters, begging him to do his worst.
‘I need to be less. Make me less.’
He thinks he’s them.
Maybe he invented some of it. I can’t understand how it got through the post room: ‘I bruise too easily behind the knees and at the tops of my arms. I don’t feel real.’
Behind my eye, the migraine hammers, keeping time.
In here, there’s no real pain thanks to my lucky nurse. But I have an idea my hands are closing, making claws. My feet too. Like I’m marching, or trying to. Stiff legs, stiff arms, claws for hands. I want her to wash my hands, get me clean. I’m scared I won’t ever get clean again. Rats scrabbling around inside my head, emptying it out. Whole parts of me I can’t feel, not properly. I’m mute, unable to answer the questions the detectives keep asking. I was never mute in there. Mickey got angry if I refused to read the letters out loud.
‘Come and find me.’ Lara, the whine of her voice like the reeling of a fishing line.
Once, my silence made him bark. Dog noises, no words. Remembering that, I try to smile but it feels wrong, hanging off my face as if my mouth’s gone, and my eyes. As if the fire caught up with me in the end.
Where is he? That’s what everyone wants to know. Me too, if I’m honest. Where’s Mickey Vokey?
It’s weird being without him, this far away from the ceiling. I’m so used to him being in the bunk below mine, reading whatever the post’s brought, being Lara talking about bruises and spider’s webs, and the smell of new paint. I miss him and the missing him makes me want to shout for my nurse to come and punch in more numbers to take me away from here, change my life. Set me free.
5
‘It’s less than six weeks since we scraped that young woman off the Embankment.’ DCS Lorna Ferguson scrutinised her team. ‘And here we are again with another bloody mess on our hands.’
‘Welcome to London,’ Ron muttered, straightening when she caught his eye. ‘Ma’am.’
‘No, go on.’ She cocked her head, like a gun. ‘Let’s hear how property development works down here. Only up North when we want a bit of extra space we shove on a conservatory. We don’t dig graves in our cellars. That’s what you found in this house in Ealing, am I right? An open grave.’
Ron nodded. ‘That’s what it looks like.’
‘Hard to see what else it could be, that size and shape. Unless he’s putting in posh plumbing and I don’t see how he’d find the time with all his other extra-curricular activities. Assault, aggravated arson, prison mutiny.’ She ticked each item off on her fingers. Verbal bullet-pointing, they called it. Noah had the impression she’d like to be using real bullets. ‘Michael Vokey. Who’s got the profile on this charmer? DS Jake. Let’s start with how dangerous he is, and work our way from there. Before you roll your eyes, DS Carling, I know we’ve covered this ground already, but as we’re making less progress than a striking snail, I’m thinking we could use the recap.’
‘Vokey went into Cloverton as a Category B prisoner,’ Noah said. ‘But they were in the process of upgrading him. By all accounts he should have been Cat-A from the outset. Highly manipulative and aggressive. Clever enough to hide it a lot of the time.’
‘Until he buried a plastic tray in the back of someone’s head.’ Ferguson stood five foot five in her heels. Solidly built and expensively blonde, she made a point of taking no prisoners, Cat-A or otherwise. ‘That’s the kind of clue they couldn’t ignore. Go on. What else?’
‘He’s serving eight years for aggravated burglary. They’ve moved him around
under prisoner protection rules, citing reasons of safety and disruption.’ Noah referred to his notes. ‘Exerting a negative influence over other offenders.’
‘So they thought they’d bung him in an overcrowded prison where tensions were already running higher than the walls.’ Ferguson nodded. ‘That makes perfect sense.’
‘Is there any other kind of prison, right now?’ Ron wanted to know.
A ripple of weary assent moved around the room. Noah waited until it had died down. ‘On record, Vokey’s behaviour was exemplary. But the behaviour of those around him became increasingly difficult to manage. Three attempted suicides at his previous prison, one of which resulted in a death. All three had formed friendships with Vokey shortly before the incidents, except friendship is too strong a word. The prison governor described these men as being in Vokey’s thrall. They became agitated or excited in his presence, depressive the rest of the time. Stopped sleeping, smashed up their cells . . . The governor likened it to an outbreak of rabies.’
‘I’d say the governor got it right,’ Ron muttered.
‘This is up in Leeds?’ Ferguson asked. ‘Why was he shunted our way?’
‘There was a riot at Leeds two months ago,’ DC Debbie Tanner said. ‘Wasn’t there?’
Noah nodded. ‘It’s why he was transferred to Cloverton so quickly.’
‘Thereby making last week’s riot a sure-fire certainty.’ Ferguson thumbed a speck of mascara from her left eye. ‘Any reason to think he may’ve run back to Leeds?’
‘No contacts in the immediate area,’ Ron said, ‘although his sister’s not far off. West Yorkshire Police are on the lookout, like the rest of us.’
‘Oh good, because last time I counted they had seven detectives covering the whole of Leeds.’ Ferguson wasn’t exaggerating, the cuts had been savage. ‘That’s a sixth of what they had four years ago and no prizes for guessing the state of the response units. So now he’s on the loose, most likely on our patch, and of course he’s gone to ground, lower than a slug’s belly in the sand. No sightings in seven days. Forensics sifted through the slop in that corridor in record time, and came up with precisely nothing we didn’t already know. CCTV may as well be bunting for all the good it’s doing us.’ She flicked the speck of mascara away. ‘Tell me about this house with the hole in the cellar. Why wasn’t it uncovered at the time of his arrest?’
‘The house isn’t in his name,’ Debbie said. ‘His mum Marion paid off the mortgage years ago. When she died there was no paperwork linking the house to Vokey. It’s in probate.’
‘So she died without a will.’ Ferguson chewed this over. ‘But we’re not imagining it was her dug the grave in the cellar. In which case, what’s it for? Who’s it for?’
‘Julie Seton?’ Ron suggested. ‘Or his next victim. Classic escalation – if we hadn’t caught him when we did he’d have killed by now.’
‘DS Carling’s here all week,’ Ferguson said sourly. ‘If you’re looking for a laugh.’
‘I was just saying— We did catch him, after Julie.’
‘And then we let him go again. Or Cloverton did. Which means we don’t get to keep the medals or the warm feeling of having done our duty. Let’s say you’re right about the escalation. It means we’ve a killer out there looking for someone to bury in his cellar. Who’s got a bright idea in that direction?’ Her stare ran the room. ‘DS Jake, tell us about the photos.’
‘We took over five hundred from the house. The vast majority aren’t attributable to Vokey. He cut them out of magazines, newspapers, textbooks. All forty-eight faces from the Szondi Test, and he’d photocopied each one multiple times. The Polaroids we found under the flooring were of artwork, life studies mostly. We think we can attribute the art to Vokey.’
‘We’ll come back to the art, and the Szondi Test.’ Ferguson eyed the evidence board unkindly, holding her Met lanyard away from the scarlet silk of her blouse. ‘Discounting the photocopies and his dodgy ideas about home décor, what’re we left with that we should be worrying about?’
‘Eleven faces.’
Ferguson swivelled towards Noah. ‘Eleven out of five hundred?’
‘We’ve identified these two,’ he touched a hand to the images of a young mother and her daughter, ‘as his victims from the Edmonton estate. Julie and Natalie Seton. Vokey stole these family photos from their house on the night of the assault. Julie is the reason he was convicted, and sentenced. Aggravated burglary, eight years. But that leaves nine faces we’ve yet to identify.’
Everyone looked at the photocopies on the board, each face enlarged from its Polaroid original. The images of Julie and Natalie had been set to one side, a black band of shadow obscuring Julie’s eyes. She looked like a warning of what might befall any one of the others.
‘Seven of the nine are women,’ Debbie added. ‘Two might be men, it’s hard to tell. But we reckon all these photos were taken in the last four or five years.’
‘Don’t be fooled by the Polaroids,’ Ron put in. ‘They look retro, but they’re recent.’
‘Nine potential victims,’ Ferguson repeated. ‘Out of over five hundred photos. Not that it isn’t plenty to be getting on with, but are we absolutely certain this isn’t optimism on our part?’ Her gaze moved around the team until it landed on Colin. ‘DC Pitcher?’
‘We scanned every face,’ Colin said. ‘Put it all through our systems, plus a reverse image search to see which ones pre-existed online. Some needed extra digging, facial recognition software and so on. We got hits on every image except these. These nine don’t exist online, or in any police or misper database we can access from here.’ He blinked behind his spectacles. ‘That’s a lot of databases. Obviously we’ve checked passports, driving licences and the rest.’
‘I look forward to your overtime claim. But good, well done.’ Ferguson straightened up. ‘So, do we need to flag these nine people as being at risk? Is one or more of them destined for his cellar? Or are we chasing shadows when we’ve a dangerous prisoner to catch?’
No one answered right away. It was hard to look at the faces and declare them unimportant in the light of what was done to the inmates at Cloverton, most especially in the light of the empty grave. Noah saw it in his mind’s eye, a pit in the floor surrounded by a loose margin of earth and sand. A man-sized pit, or woman-sized. Deep enough for two bodies, if both were small. It was impossible to look at the nameless faces on the board and not think of that pit. Noah had copied the nine photos to his phone, committing the faces to memory, wanting to keep faith in some small way with each one, to give them hope.
‘We don’t know that they’re victims,’ Debbie was saying. ‘I mean they could be accomplices or one-night stands, or complete strangers.’
‘He didn’t dig that pit for fun,’ Ron said. ‘He took up a brick floor. It’s a professional job, must’ve taken him weeks.’
‘He didn’t just collect photos of their faces.’ Noah nodded at the board where they’d pinned the pictures of shoulders and shins, hands and feet. ‘I don’t think they’re strangers in any usual sense.’
‘But the vast majority of his collection are press cuttings and photocopies,’ Ferguson said briskly. ‘Unless I’ve missed something.’
Noah shook his head. ‘You know as much as we do, Ma’am.’
‘We’ve got someone on Julie Seton, yes? Since she’s the one put him away.’
Debbie nodded. ‘Round the clock surveillance.’
‘More dents in the budget. But we can’t be seen taking chances, not if DS Carling’s right and he’s been dreaming of his burial project all the short while he was inside. Not to mention the bedlam he left behind when he ran from prison. If we’re talking escalation, we should be focusing on that. I’ve seen rabid dogs do less damage.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘I don’t think Ms Seton knows what a narrow escape she had. She was lucky to hang onto her teeth, for starters.’
The photos from the corridor at Cloverton occupied the bottom half of the evidence board, a low ti
de of blood and soot. Vokey had improvised a black and red rainbow, working blind since the corridor was solid with smoke, smearing the carnage he’d left on the floor, picking up whole handfuls of it in lieu of a paint brush, wiping his hands and fingers onto the wall. As if the floor wasn’t enough for him – the mess he’d made of the men he’d mutilated – as if he needed the walls to bear witness to what he’d done. Carnage, from the Latin carnaticum, meaning flesh, meaning slaughter. He wasn’t an artist, not in the real sense; interested in destruction, not creation. And driven, compulsively violent. There was no coming back from what he’d done at Cloverton. Noah was reminded of a conversation with a good friend from university, Sam Amsler. Sam worked as a forensic psychologist, trying to rehabilitate offenders. Except when you tried to rehabilitate a psychopath, Sam said, you just made a better psychopath. Taught him or her new tricks, more sophisticated ways to pass below the radar of most people’s threat instinct. If art was the expression of a person’s soul then Michael Vokey’s was black and red and ruined beyond rescue.
‘D’you think his mum knew?’ Debbie asked. ‘About the sort of son she raised? Is that why she didn’t make a will, because she didn’t want to leave him the house, or anything else?’
‘He has a sister, hasn’t he?’ Ferguson said. ‘No, I’ve no idea how she died, but his mum probably thought she’d plenty of time to get her affairs in order before she dropped down dead. Well, don’t we all think that?’ She checked the gold watch at her wrist. ‘I can’t see how we’ll justify a full-scale search for these nine people, no matter how much it might eat at our collective conscience. We need all the bodies we have looking for Vokey. When’s DI Rome back with us?’
