Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid

by Belinda Bauer

  He turned angrily, but Jack didn’t even let him start. ‘I found the knife that killed my mum.’

  ‘You what?’ said Louis. ‘Where?’

  ‘In a house up on the estates.’

  ‘Whose house?’

  ‘A man called Adam While.’

  ‘Let’s see it.’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ said Jack. ‘I left it there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t there, so I left it next to his wife’s bed with a note. I thought she’d call the police, but she didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ cried Jack. ‘And now Adam While’s trying to kill me.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Last night. He set my house on fire.’

  ‘On fire? Is everything OK?’

  ‘It’s a mess, but it’s all right. Joy and Merry are fine.’

  Louis nodded. Then he said, ‘How do you know it’s the same knife?’

  ‘I just know,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t know how. But I know, all right?’

  Louis frowned. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You saying someone was in that house when you broke in?’

  ‘Yeah. His wife.’

  ‘Bloody Shawn!’ said Louis angrily. ‘I’ll have his guts. That’s aggravated burglary! That’s serious shi—!’ He caught himself and they both looked at the doorway where Baz was sitting on his trike, looking up at them with interest.

  ‘Shenanigans,’ finished Louis, and waggled his fingers at Baz. Baz giggled and waggled his back.

  ‘Ja’, I’m riding a bike!’

  ‘That’s … Baztastic,’ Jack told him.

  Baz laughed. ‘Watch me!’

  ‘I’m watching.’

  They both watched Baz rumble away until he was out of earshot.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about Shawn,’ said Jack. ‘What matters is, what do I do now?’

  ‘Well, you don’t go to the cops,’ said Louis sharply.

  Jack was silent.

  ‘You haven’t told them already, have you?’

  Jack chewed his lip. ‘No, but he’s dangerous, Louis. I could see it in his eyes. He hit me and chased me right through town and then followed me home like a nut and set fire to the house while Joy and Merry were in there. They could have died!’

  Louis frowned. He looked across the yard at Baz.

  Then he said, ‘Listen, mate. We can take care of this bastard. Just don’t go to the cops. You think you’re going in there about one thing, but they’ll get this Goldilocks shit out of you too, and then you’re fucked. And if you’re fucked, I’m fucked and all the boys are fucked too!’

  ‘What about his wife?’

  ‘His wife can take care of herself.’

  ‘No she can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s pregnant …’

  ‘Shit!’ said Louis. ‘She’s not your mum, Jack.’

  ‘I know that!’ said Jack angrily. ‘But still …’

  ‘Listen,’ Louis lowered his voice threateningly. ‘You do whatever you want. But if you drop me in this, we’re over, you understand?’

  ‘But I have to find out who killed her, Louis. I don’t know how. I only know that’s the only way it’s going to stop. All this thieving and lying and hiding. I just want it all to be over! You know what you said about Baz? You were right. I just want Joy and Merry to be happy and safe. I want them to have beds and a bath and to go to school – even if it means going to prison! And I just want to sleep without dreaming of her every fucking night.’

  ‘Awwww, shit!’ Louis punched the wall so hard that Jack flinched and Baz stopped dead and looked back towards the shed, squinting in the sunshine.

  Louis came closer to Jack now. Close enough to hit him if he wanted to.

  ‘This here is my fucking life,’ he said. ‘Don’t come here again.’

  Then he strode away across the yard. He plucked Baz off his tricycle as he passed, and carried the squirming toddler with him towards the two patient customers waiting in the timber shed.

  Jack watched his only friend disappear into the darkness.

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT REYNOLDS had a quiet night in.

  He opened a bottle of white Burgundy and made himself chicken gujons and wilted spinach, with tarte au citron for dessert.

  He laid a place and ate at the table – like a human being, his mother always said – and then watched University Challenge. This week was St Hilda’s College, Oxford, against Hull. It was a contest as uneven as it sounded. Reynolds scored more alone than Hull did as a team, and by the end of the show the northerners were sent packing like pregnant housemaids.

  Reynolds topped up his glass and opened his book. It was a wonderful book on Churchill. He’d not read a better one.

  He wondered what Elizabeth Rice was doing.

  Probably something quite lowbrow with Eric, he imagined. Paintball. Or the pub.

  He wondered which pub.

  He closed his book and went to bed early.

  DS Reynolds woke at four, thinking about Mr Passmore and his insurance claim. Poor chap. The trauma of a burglary and then the bloody company trying to disclaim! Reynolds’ finely tuned sense of justice was pricked.

  Later, on his way to the capture house, he called DCI Marvel and sought his advice.

  ‘Sounds like the company’s being difficult, sir. I just wondered if there was anything we could do to help him.’

  ‘Steady on with the we!’ Marvel grumped. ‘Insurance companies disclaim for good reason. Don’t get involved.’

  Don’t get involved. What a lovely sentiment for an officer of the law to hold, thought Reynolds.

  ‘But if it’s a Goldilocks case—’

  ‘Which it’s not,’ said Marvel.

  Reynolds frowned. If it wasn’t a Goldilocks case, then he’d made a horrible mistake. Two horrible mistakes, in fact. First in treating it like one, and second – much worse – in telling Mr Passmore that it was one. Two horrible mistakes, when he wasn’t used to making any mistakes at all. So he still thought it highly unlikely that he’d made one now.

  ‘I hate to labour the point, sir—’

  ‘Look,’ interrupted Marvel. ‘You said the local paper has been all over this story for a year, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘So a lot of the details would have been in the paper, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Reynolds again, although he wished Marvel would stop saying ‘right’ at the end of every sentence, which required him to answer by repeating the word like some dreadful cockney.

  ‘So anyone could have copied Goldilocks, right?’

  Reynolds baulked at another right, but finally had to say it anyway, because Marvel was right.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyone including Passmore,’ Marvel went on. ‘See, he knows food is taken, but not that Goldilocks steals healthy food. He doesn’t know Goldilocks targets detached houses, when he lives in a terrace. He knows Goldilocks sleeps in the beds, but didn’t know he sleeps in the kids’ beds – you see where I’m going?’

  Reynolds did.

  ‘But the clincher is what the kid with the thing on her lip said.’

  The little girl on the sofa with the sun-blistered lips.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Reynolds.

  ‘She said, “But that TV’s broken.” As if it was already broken.’

  Reynolds hardly remembered it. But it was a child getting mixed up. Not something on which to take a policing decision!

  ‘I wouldn’t even have noticed it,’ said Marvel. ‘Except that her father jumped all over her, like he was trying to cover up a slip.’

  Reynolds nodded slowly. He did remember that. Mr Passmore butting in, drowning out his daughter with angry rhetoric about the thieves. He hadn’t appreciated before the ambiguity of the child’s comment – or her father’s rush to respond in a way that made her words fit with his own version of events.

  ‘But the TV
was broken,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘I’m not saying it wasn’t,’ said Marvel. ‘I’m just saying it wasn’t broken by a burglar. My guess is that the new TV got broken and Passmore did all the rest to make it look like a Goldilocks burglary, expecting a windfall, but the loss adjustor smelled a rat. Now he’s shitting himself because he smashed up his own house and he’s not getting paid for any of it!’

  Marvel laughed heartily, then hung up.

  Reynolds pulled into the driveway of the capture house behind Rice’s battered little Toyota, and sat for a moment, worrying. He’d expected some bullshit from Marvel about hunches and instincts, but the DCI’s logic was annoyingly logical, and his memory sharp. What was worse, Marvel’s suspicions had first been raised by a question of semantics – something Reynolds considered his own personal territory.

  It was humiliating.

  Reynolds could hardly bear to countenance the possibility, but maybe he had made a mistake. He liked to do everything right. The thought of having done something wrong was disconcerting. And the thought of anyone else knowing he’d done something wrong was unbearable.

  He ran a worried hand through his hair and frowned. It felt thinner than usual. And he would know; he often checked.

  Rice had claimed his hair was falling out in the shower.

  Suddenly Reynolds needed to see a mirror.

  Right now.

  He threw open the door of the car.

  ‘Hello, Glen,’ said the woman who lived next door.

  ‘What?’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, her smile faltering.

  ‘Hello,’ he snapped, and slammed the door, rushed inside and ran upstairs. The bathroom mirror was on the windowsill where he’d propped it. He picked it up and realized that behind it was a camera he was supposed to not fuck with.

  Oops. No wonder they hadn’t seen Goldilocks come in until the cameras in the living room had picked him up.

  Too late to worry about that now! Reynolds tried to get a good angle to see the back of his head but it needed two mirrors.

  ‘Hi,’ called Rice from downstairs. ‘Is that you?’

  Stupid question. He didn’t bother answering.

  Rice had a mirror in her room.

  Reynolds went into Rice’s room and crossed to the mirror on the wardrobe. He turned and angled both mirrors, and frowned.

  His hair did look a little—

  Reynolds froze – staring into the glass.

  Behind him, in the bed, somebody stirred. And then was still again.

  Eric!

  Oh God, Rice had brought Eric back to the house with her! When they were supposed to be out, getting burgled! She’d known it would be empty and had brought her dome-headed boyfriend there and shagged him in her little single bed. At least, Reynolds hoped that’s where they’d shagged! And now Eric was asleep in the room they’d created for their imaginary son.

  Reynolds was stung.

  It was silly, but he was stung.

  He was Glen and she was Michelle, and now she’d brought another man into their fake house and it felt like she’d betrayed their fake marriage. He knew he had no right to feel slighted, but he did anyway.

  He stood for a moment, still holding the mirror, not knowing what he should do.

  Ignore him?

  Go downstairs and confront Rice?

  Or shake Eric awake right now and demand that he leave?

  But what if Eric punched him? Reynolds thought that was a distinct possibility – especially if he’d seen the photos of Glen and Michelle wrapped together in cosy green velvet …

  Maybe he should just creep out of the room and pretend it had never happened?

  Then his backbone stiffened.

  On this he knew he was right: Elizabeth Rice had overstepped the bounds of professional conduct one too many times. This was a place of work, and Reynolds knew he had both the professional right and the moral high ground to wake up the no-necked gym-bunny and kick him out of the capture house.

  In fact, it would give him enormous satisfaction to do just that.

  He strode to the bed, put a firm hand on the man’s shoulder and shook it hard.

  ‘Rise and shine,’ he said.

  The moment he touched him, Reynolds knew it wasn’t Eric. It wasn’t even a grown-up. The shoulder was too small, the body too easy to shake.

  And the head on the pillow too …

  … golden.

  THE INTERVIEW ROOM at Tiverton police station was tiny but it served many purposes. There was a table – small and Formica – up against one wall. Metal shelving ran down the opposite wall, and was stacked with copy paper and notebooks and toilet rolls, almost up to the high, narrow strip of window just under the ceiling. An old coffee machine and three mugs stood on the draining board of a grimy little sink. A broom and mop and bucket stood guard behind the door, while a photocopier hummed gently against the back wall.

  It was the Swiss Army Knife of rooms.

  ‘Let me just move these,’ said DC Parrott, shifting several boxes of Bic pens off the little table. Then he opened three wooden folding chairs with a hospitable flourish.

  ‘Is that all the chairs?’ said Marvel.

  ‘Lucky to have them!’ said Parrott defensively. ‘Mostly we only got one or two men on shift, and there’s no call to be sitting down!’

  Marvel let it go and sat down. The chair was little better than a stool. It was small and hard and uneven and tipped back and forth every time he moved, which made him feel like an elephant on a tightrope. Reynolds sat next to him, the boy opposite. There was a recorder on the table between them, but Marvel didn’t touch it.

  Marvel jerked a thumb at the coffee machine.

  ‘Fire that up, Rice.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Parrott had taken up a position at the door, but his folded hands almost touched the back of the boy’s head, and the mop leaned into his shoulder like a dreadlocked girlfriend.

  ‘Wait outside, Parrott. There’s no room in here.’

  Parrott looked disappointed, but said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and left.

  Marvel tipped awkwardly forward and put his elbows on the table. ‘We can’t formally interview you without a parent or guardian present,’ he started.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said the boy. ‘I want to talk.’

  ‘Until a parent or legal representative is present, I don’t want to hear it.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘But I’m going to say it anyway.’

  ‘But unless you’re properly represented and safeguarded and the interview is recorded, it’s not admissible as evidence.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ shrugged the boy, and gave the smallest of smiles.

  Marvel glared at him.

  The whole Goldilocks thing was most unsatisfactory. For a start, it was no fun to discover that they’d all been outwitted by a child. Fourteen going on twelve, skinny as hell, with dirty blond hair and a peach-fuzzy face. And it was pure luck that they’d caught him at all! He’d broken back into the capture house – although God knows how the fancy bloody cameras kept missing it – and fallen asleep there! He could have cleaned the place out and they’d have been none the wiser.

  The kid hadn’t even tried to escape when Reynolds had found him. The DS kept trying to make it sound like a great bit of policing on his part, but Marvel could tell that all he’d done was shake him awake, as if for school!

  And so the Goldilocks myth had become an embarrassing damp squib. He wasn’t some Raffles-type cat burglar; he was just a lazy little thief who’d finally overslept in the wrong bed.

  Marvel was sorry he’d ever got involved.

  ‘Can we ask him about the Passmore house, sir?’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Ask him anything you want,’ snorted Marvel. ‘None of it’s admissible.’

  Reynolds pursed his lips.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said Marvel.

  He didn’t expect an answer, but he got one.

  ‘Jack Bright.’

  �
�That your real name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what went wrong this morning, Jack?’ said Marvel. ‘Alarm clock not go off?’

  ‘Nothing went wrong,’ said the boy.

  ‘Ohhhh,’ said Reynolds sarcastically, ‘so you wanted me to catch you!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Reynolds. ‘Nobody wants to be caught.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Well, I did.’

  ‘If you wanted to be caught,’ said Marvel, ‘why not just hand yourself in?’

  ‘Because I want to make a deal. And if you think I’m Goldilocks, then I have some …’ The boy hesitated, searching for the word.

  ‘Leverage?’ said Marvel.

  ‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘Leverage.’

  ‘But you are Goldilocks,’ said Reynolds anxiously. ‘Aren’t you?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘Just tell me, did you burgle a house down on St Peter Street? Steal a camera and smash a big new Sony TV? Take pizzas from the freezer?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘I don’t eat pizza.’

  Marvel laughed at Reynolds. ‘He’s Goldilocks, all right!’

  Then he turned back to Jack Bright.

  ‘What kind of deal? What’s so important that you’re prepared to risk getting nicked for all those burglaries?’

  The boy suddenly went quiet. A shadow passed across his face, and Marvel was surprised to see his bottom lip tremble, as if he might cry. It was fleeting, but it looked real.

  Finally, he took a deep, shaky breath and said, ‘Murder.’

  The hairs on Marvel’s neck sprang to attention.

  Murder.

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Reynolds. ‘I caught you red-handed. You can’t wriggle off the hook now by trying to distract us with some stupid lie.’

  But Marvel only leaned back in his chair and re-appraised the boy.

  ‘Please,’ he said with an elaborate twirl of his hand. ‘Distract us.’

  So Jack Bright told them about the murder of his mother.

  To his amazement, they remembered it. Even Marvel, who had apparently been in London at the time. Jack was so used to being invisible that seeing the sombre nods and murmurs of recognition was a strangely encouraging experience.