Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller)

by Clark-Platts, Alice

‘Please,’ Martin said again.

  ‘Emily had certain ideas about things. Many of the girls her age do. It’s to do with their culture. They have thoughts about the place of women in society, how they can work within it, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And … ?’

  ‘It’s frustrating for me. It was hard to keep going with her, you know? Sometimes, I felt as if I was banging my head against a brick door …’

  ‘Wall.’

  Stephanie looked at her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Carry on,’ Martin muttered.

  ‘I couldn’t seem to get through to her. A lot of the upset she was suffering was down to her own actions. She seemed masochistic in this way.’

  Martin sat up in her chair. ‘Forgive me, but what is your job if it’s not to help people who are harming themselves? By definition people don’t go to therapy if they’re A-okay and coping brilliantly with things, surely? Emily needed your help.’

  Stephanie shook her head. ‘I did my best, Detective Martin.’

  Jones glanced sideways at her boss. ‘What sort of things?’ she asked, turning back to Stephanie. ‘What was Emily doing that you disapproved of?’

  Stephanie sighed and flicked her plait off her shoulder. ‘Not disapproved of, so much. These girls. They think they have it in them to bargain, you know? With their bodies? They think it’s currency. I’ll sleep with you, and then you’ll be my boyfriend. They don’t understand …’

  ‘That it’s not like that?’ Jones asked.

  ‘Things aren’t so different, Ms Suleiman, surely, from when we were growing up?’ Martin interrupted. ‘It’s always been the same. Once you put out, you’re damaged goods.’

  Stephanie looked at Martin patiently. ‘That’s what I’m trying to say. You and I …’ she waved her hand between herself and Martin, ‘we know that. It’s how we were brought up. But these girls. They seem to have missed that lesson. Emily was convinced she could have it all. That she could parade herself like one of those … those bunnies.’

  ‘Playboy bunnies?’ Jones questioned.

  ‘Yes, like that. She could prance and dance, and it would lure them in.’

  ‘Them?’ Martin asked, leaning forwards.

  The counsellor looked sad. ‘Nick.’ She wrung her hands together, a panoply of worry. ‘She already had Daniel, I fear.’

  ‘What do you mean, she had Daniel? Tell me about that. How did Emily know him?’

  ‘Emily was self-destructing. Nothing would stop her. Daniel tried to help her in actual fact. He wrote to me, to ask if he could help.’

  ‘Wrote to you?’

  ‘Yes, by email.’

  ‘Did you discuss Emily with Daniel?’ Martin asked.

  Stephanie shook her head emphatically. ‘No, of course not. But I knew he was her friend. Perhaps her only true one. Daniel himself had issues. He was being given a hard time by the fellow students. They ostracized him, made him feel alone. He was a victim too. Daniel was very alone …’ her voice tailed off as she looked down at the table.

  ‘Who is Daniel Shepherd, Stephanie?’ Martin asked abruptly.

  Stephanie seemed confused. ‘Well, he’s, uh, he’s a student here in Durham.’

  Martin looked at her for a second. ‘How do you know that? Did Daniel’s emails come from a student account?’

  ‘No they didn’t. But, he said he was a student. At Nightingale College.’

  Martin looked down at her lap. ‘Do you have a copy of these emails, Ms Suleiman?’ she asked softly.

  Stephanie took a breath before nodding. ‘Yes, yes I do.’ Reaching into her bag, she passed some papers over the table to Martin, who bent her head to study them. She read rapidly: ‘I came to Durham on a cold October morning, on the first train out of London. My mother had come with me to King’s Cross station to see me off, and she carried on standing forlornly at the ticket barrier, long after the train had pulled out of the station …’

  ‘This is Daniel’s first email to you?’ she asked, looking up briefly.

  Stephanie shook her head. ‘No. The first was about how he wanted to help Emily. This was the second. All of them … well, they followed on from this. How he met Emily, how their friendship grew.’

  Martin nodded without looking up, her hands moving through the papers, drinking in the words like water.

  44

  The Epiphany Formal was always held in the Joyce refectory. So Emily had said. I had never been to one before, obviously, and, with my current status at Durham thus, was about as likely to go in the future as I was to walk on the moon. Emily had got me a ticket before she’d changed her mind about the whole thing. She had shoved it, crumpled up, into my pigeonhole; it had looked like a piece of junk mail which I had very nearly thrown away. When I smoothed it out, though, I saw a picture of a boy and a girl in one of those pseudo-vintage black and white photos that you find on the front of birthday cards in the humorous section in shops. The couple were dancing, the girl being thrown back in some kind of adventurous dance move. ‘Let’s screw again like we did last summer!’ the girl was saying to the boy, her lipsticked mouth open in a batshit crazy sort of laugh. The boy looked bored, his eyes on something in the middle distance. He wasn’t answering the girl but he had a thought bubble over his head. ‘I think she means the twist,’ he appeared to be thinking. The details for the dinner and dance followed on. I sighed and, for a moment, leaned my head against the wooden rows of cubby holes. This is what my life had come down to. I had actively got myself invited to something like this.

  I had the same thought as I stood outside Joyce on the night of the Formal, holding the ticket by my fingertips. If I could’ve held it at arm’s length without being considered odd, I would have done it. I was sweating from my walk up the hill despite the cold. This was the trouble with Durham. The weather was always freezing, but you arrived everywhere boiling hot from the exertion of hauling yourself up and down the blasted hills. I was wearing a dinner jacket with a black tie. My second time of doing so in six months. It was unheard of.

  I looked at the door into the college and swallowed. This was going to be hard for me. I had no one inside as an ally. I knew Emily was coming with Nick. After I’d spoken to him outside the library, Nick had emailed me to tell me he’d bumped into Emily in town and, with his usual romantic panache, had asked her to tag along with him. I couldn’t get over the use of the phrase tag along. The guy was a dick. Nevertheless, they would be there together, and with no Emily to rely on, I had no one to help me out, prop me up socially.

  I breathed out, hating myself for my timidity. I looked back down the hill to where I had come from and thought about jacking the whole thing in. I could go home now, take this monkey suit off and spend the evening reading Gravity’s Rainbow. I looked back again at the Joyce door, hearing the hum of voices behind it, the clink of glasses. The room would be filled by now with a hundred boys who looked superficially like me and a hundred girls with saucer eyes and moistened lips, clinging on to vessels of sparkly wine, giggling, swirling the liquid around in their glasses before dashing it into their mouths. How on earth could I go into this?

  Just then, the door opened, and there was Zack, my room-mate, standing silhouetted in the archway. He smiled at me.

  ‘Hello, old sport,’ he said in some kind of Gatsbyesque imitation.

  ‘What are you doing here, old chap?’ I returned, the irony splodging from my tongue on to the cold pavement.

  ‘Mate of mine here needed help with the sound system. This one’s on its last legs.’ Zack looked at me with something approaching a twinkle in his eye. ‘They ignore the geeks until something breaks and then they’re all over us, treating us like Steve fucking Jobs.’ He shrugged. ‘Said I’d help him out if he got me pissed for free.’ He let the door bang behind him as he came and stood next to me on my pavement-hell. ‘Saw you lurking outside from out the window. Here to snag that posh totty of yours, are you?’

  I smiled, inclined my head slightly.

&nbs
p; Zack nodded. ‘Well, stick with me, Danny boy. I’ll see you right. Cal’s got a bottle of Dalwhinnie behind the decks, and you can sit with us during dinner if you like.’

  My smile turned genuine, and I felt a rush of affection for this boy who zoomed in and out of our shared room with such energy and lust for the life he was living. I was suddenly and sharply jealous of him and his certainty about himself. He was nobody other than Zack the physics geek and sometime DJ. He knew it and he was happy with it. And, as it turned out, he was also pretty generous and friendly to wankers like me who only cared about posh totty. I slapped him on the back and we went into Joyce together. I needed a drink.

  I could see them. They wittered and twittered like birds. Hunching over their phones, vultures over a kill, picking over Emily’s bones, over and over. She looked terrified, clutching on to her gin and tonic with white knuckles. She gave a panicked sideways smile to Annabel, who stood next to her, glowering. She shifted on her feet, back and forth, a little lonely do-si-do. Nick was standing a way off, his thumbs in his pockets. He was surveying his kingdom, a half-grin on his chiselled, handsome face. How I hated him.

  I leaned on the DJ booth Zack and his mate had fabricated in the dining room. They were busy playing the decks inside it as I slunk into its shadows, watching. I saw Emily go up to Nick, her eyebrows drawn together, a glint of a tear in the corner of one eye. He seemed to laugh, made to touch her face with his hand. She shook her head away.

  You see? This is what I knew. I had given her what she wanted on a plate. And she would be sick with it. She would see that this wasn’t it at all. She had given Nick what he salivated over; she thought she was fishing – hooking him with the pretty azure feathers on her fly, dancing over the dappled water, sunlight in her hair. She thought she could reel in him, toss her head, open her legs and that would make him desire her enough to stay. I could see it.

  Two people, hundreds of people really, who thought they knew what they wanted, who thought they knew what they were. They wanted to feed their urges – of sex and drink and popularity. But deep down, the need was actually to destroy, to hurt and to maim – to become the sole survivor of those who were fit and strong and unconquerable. They didn’t have the brains to articulate this so they snickered over others’ mistakes, their need to annihilate sneaking up on them in bursts, expressing itself through their fingers on keyboards, rage erupting in intermittent surges, at one remove from whoever they were making their victim because they were just typing it and, anyway, it was just a laugh, wasn’t it? Some people just couldn’t take a joke.

  Emily had that desire to destroy in her too, I knew it. She wanted to be the strongest of them all, the queen to Nick’s king. I didn’t mind that. But she had deluded herself in her methods. She had no faith in her real abilities. She had convinced herself that it was her right to use her body to garner attention. Nobody was forcing her, she was an independent young woman. But it was obvious to me that her body was nothing but the equivalent of the new hashtag on Twitter, the latest download on YouTube, a hot gig in Newcastle. Once it had been looked at, digested and belched over, it had no value. It was as meaningless as the King James Bible at an atheists’ convention.

  I wandered into the middle of the dance floor on my way out of the door, and turned back to look at Emily, who was standing almost behind Nick now, shielding herself from the disgust of others. Emily was a victim even though she thought she was a warrior. She was a victim because she didn’t realize that her so-called right to show her body off, her hot buttery body – well, that right didn’t come from her. We had made her think that. So clever of us. We made her think it was her decision, but where had she got that idea from? The notion that it was an expression of strength to take your clothes off and spread your legs? We were malevolence personified. I almost laughed as I watched her cower in the traffic lights of the dance floor. She would come running to me now.

  I had made my way out of the dining room, into the JCR, a low-ceilinged room containing a couple of dozen stumpy chairs covered in a rough green material which matched the cabbage-patterned carpet. If Joyce was anything like Nightingale, on normal days people would wait here for the dining room doors to open, slumped in these chairs, occasionally reading the free newspapers left lying around but on the whole gossiping, picking their noses and generally loafing. Now, though, they were dressed up but pissed. Mascara streaks down their faces, untied bows dangling on to white shirts, dinner jackets discarded on the floor. A couple were practically copulating in one of the corners. I wanted to get out of there.

  ‘Mate …’

  It was Nick. He had followed me out. The fact that he called me his mate made me heave. I rolled round on my heels to face him.

  ‘All right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Worked like a charm. Everyone thinks it’s wicked.’ He sniggered through his nose, snorting a little. ‘She’s not that happy but …’ He shrugged. He couldn’t have cared less. He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. A drum beat pulsed through the dining room doors and then a wave of melody as the doors opened as someone came out. Nick swayed slightly on his feet; his eyes were a tad glazed. I had still said nothing.

  ‘Well …’ He faltered, confused. ‘Well done, anyway, mate. Nice one.’ He gave the loud laugh that makes an appearance in an embarrassed silence. He slapped me on the shoulder and bumbled past. Presumably to the gents, where he would fumble to get his dick out, prop himself up at the urinal with one raised arm, the other trying to control his piss, which would spill out over the floor, drops splashing on to his expensive suit trousers.

  I continued to stand in the same position, looking at the empty space where he had been standing. And then there she was in front of me. It had been her who had opened the dining room doors. Smoke seemed to rise from her. I could imagine snakes tumbling from her hair, frozen jade in her eyes turning me to stone.

  ‘It was Nick,’ I managed to say.

  Emily came up to me. Her breasts grazed my shirt. She raised her chin so that her lips were millimetres away from mine. ‘He told me you spoke to him, that you told him to put them online.’

  I could feel her breath on my mouth. She smelled of the quinine in tonic water. I wanted to push my hands into her hair, kiss her; feel her tongue on mine. I wanted her so much. I wanted to devour her.

  ‘It’s Easter now,’ she whispered. ‘Fuck off back to wherever it is you live.’ Her voice shook. ‘Fuck off. Do not contact me. Get this,’ she moved on to her tiptoes, her eye for my eye. ‘I want nothing to do with you ever again.’ She paused and then moved her mouth to my ear. ‘Stay away from me, understand?’ she hissed before pushing me to one side and banging through the common room doors towards the exit to the street.

  I collapsed on to one of the green chairs. I could hear … Billy Joel I think, singing in the dining room about being a backstreet guy. I laughed to myself, looking at my hands on my knees. Then I rubbed my hands across my face and realized that I was crying.

  45

  Wednesday 24 May, 10.07 p.m.

  Martin sat in the incident room with Jones opposite her. They sat in silence, thinking, as the night-time traffic noise drifted in through the half-open window. A pigeon landed unabashed on the windowsill, and Martin stared at it without seeing until it ruffled its feathers and flew off.

  ‘The fact is,’ Martin said, mid thought-stream, ‘Emily voluntarily offered herself up to Nick again, and those photos he spread around on the night of the Formal. I mean, that’s what she says on the tape, right?’ She took a swig from the bottle of water on her desk.

  Jones nodded.

  ‘But the emails from Daniel up until that point seem to imply that he was the one orchestrating things. That he persuaded Emily to pose for Nick in the hope that Nick would like her. And then Nick would run true to form, show the photos to everyone, and Daniel would be there to pick up the pieces.’ Martin paused. ‘Why did Daniel stop emailing Stephanie Suleiman after the Easter holidays? Sh
e had one last one from him about the fight at the Formal and him mooning over Emily down in Brighton and then nothing. And these emails in any case,’ she continued, ‘if he was emailing Stephanie Suleiman an account of his days like a modern-day equivalent of Anne fucking Frank,’ she wiped her bottom lip with her thumb, ‘then who else was he talking to?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘What about the Zack he talks about in them – his room-mate? Can we find him? Maybe Daniel’s using an alias or something in his emails? Maybe he wanted to hide his identity from Stephanie Suleiman. But if we find Zack, we can track him down at Nightingale.’

  ‘Will do ASAP,’ Jones chewed her lip. ‘With Emily, though, it’s not as simple as that, I don’t think,’ she said, tracing a finger around the lip of her Coke bottle.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s like with dogs …’

  Martin frowned at her.

  ‘Bear with me. I can’t remember the guy that did it, but it’s like training. Put a bowl of steak down next to a bowl of shit, beat the dog enough when he goes for the steak and praise him when he goes for the shit. Soon he’ll be eating shit of his own accord.’

  Martin stared at Jones.

  ‘Doesn’t mean the dog likes shit,’ Jones finished.

  ‘Pavlov.’

  ‘What’s that, boss?’

  ‘Pavlov was the guy with the dogs – whose experiment you’ve so eloquently described, Jones.’

  ‘Right. Well, you know what I mean. Emily got attention for sleeping with Nick. She did it voluntarily. Doesn’t mean she wanted pictures of it being tweeted all over the internet.’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  Jones waited. A car beeped in the street outside as the sound of grinding lorry brakes interrupted the silence. Martin was lost in thought.

  ‘Boss?’

  Ignoring her, Martin smacked her hand on the table. ‘But who the fuck is Daniel Shepherd?’

  ‘We’ve sent the thumb drive with the emails on it to Forensics. They may be able to trace the account. But, look here …’ Jones passed a sheaf of papers to Martin. ‘We finally got the psych report back on Rush.’