Sirens

by Joseph Knox

  ‘What do you know?’ she said.

  ‘Most of it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I leaned past her and opened the latch. I led her by the arm and closed the door behind us. By the time we got to the bottom of the path she was leaning against me to stay upright. When we got to Grip’s car, she put her hand to her mouth. Tried to pull away. I took her to the passenger side and put her in. I walked round the car, climbed inside and started it up.

  9

  I knew we had to go somewhere quiet and remote, and I drove towards, through, past the city limits. Sarah Jane fidgeted with her seat belt.

  We went by dozens of half-finished, half-forgotten building sites and I slowed down by one or two of them. When I did, she looked out her window, sometimes with a hand on the glass, wondering if it was where Grip had ended up. Wondering what would happen to her now.

  Once we’d left the city, once there were fewer street lights on the roads, I caught her looking at me. Car headlights swept past us as we went and I saw her eyes lit up in my periphery.

  I kept my face blank and kept on going. The Barnes Hospital was a survivor from the 1800s. An enormous gothic red-brick, it had a couple of wings and a turreted clock tower that hadn’t told the time since the late nineties, when millions of pounds were cut from the local health trust’s budget. The hospital was closed down and immediately listed as a place of historical and architectural interest. In spite of that, the real estate company who bought it let the building slide into ruin.

  Sarah Jane and I pulled off the motorway, into the drive. There was a red sign at the entrance which used the word ‘opportunity’ three times, urging interested parties to call an 0800 number. A chain-link fence had been put up around the hospital’s perimeter, but someone had removed the bollards blocking the driveway. I took us in closer. When the headlights lit up the huge, abandoned building, its stone steps and wrought-iron railings, I saw Sarah Jane’s hand drift to the passenger-side door handle.

  I stopped the car, killed the engine and waited.

  There were no lights in the grounds and, without the growl of the engine, all we could hear were the sounds of the motorway. After a minute or so I became aware of the sound of Sarah Jane’s breathing too.

  ‘They buried Isabelle today,’ she said, staring straight ahead, trying to sound conversational. Trying, too late, to put some common ground between us.

  ‘I know, I was there,’ I said. She didn’t say anything but turned in my direction. ‘Would you have gone if you could, Sarah?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘What kept you away, I wonder?’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Where is he? Where’s Grip?’

  ‘Grip’s here, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Then take me to him,’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. She was so cold I felt it through my sleeve.

  ‘I need to ask you some questions first. What happens next depends on how you do with them.’

  She took her hand away. ‘You know why I couldn’t go. She died because of us.’

  ‘Us?’

  She turned, stared straight ahead again. ‘Because of me.’

  ‘That’s not why you couldn’t go, though, is it?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘The question I keep asking myself is, how did David Rossiter know so much about Isabelle, even after she’d run away from home?’

  Sarah Jane straightened. When she spoke again there was something of the old hardness in her voice. ‘She was seventeen years old. I looked out for her.’

  ‘You got her killed a second ago, now you were looking out for her.’ She didn’t say anything. ‘Well, which is it?’

  She mumbled something.

  ‘Say again.’

  ‘I was looking out for her, and I’m not apologizing for it.’

  ‘I don’t want an apology. I want an explanation. You still haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘How did David Rossiter know so much about Isabelle’s life after she ran away from home?’

  ‘Because I told him,’ she said.

  Neither of us spoke for a minute. The car was warm.

  Beads of condensation massed together on the windows.

  ‘You reported back to him about Isabelle. About me.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘You took photos of us together. Gave them to him.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘You gave him her new number.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You told him where she was staying. When she was there.’

  ‘So?’ she said again, but this time it was barely audible.

  ‘So why do you think she ran away from home?’

  ‘Little rich girl problems.’

  ‘Try again.’

  ‘Big rich girl problems.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Oh, you know everything, Aidan. Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because your boyfriend was fucking her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t believe it myself at first, either.’ She didn’t say anything. ‘When we found her, she was naked. She’d recently had sex.’

  ‘What does that have to do with—’

  ‘Your boyfriend? There were self-harming cuts on her inner thighs. Tally marks. One for every time they’d been together. There was even a fresh cut there, for that last time.’

  ‘Zain was with me when Isabelle died.’

  ‘Who said anything about Zain?’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘I was talking about your other boyfriend. I assume there are just the two of them?’

  Sarah Jane opened the passenger-side door and took a step out. The interior light flicked on automatically, surprising her, and she froze for a second. I hadn’t realized that she’d been crying, and her make-up had run with it. A blast of cool air blew her hair about her face. Stark red on pale skin. Smudged eyeliner.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. She stepped out of the car and slammed the door. The interior light flicked off. I opened my door and it came on again. I left it ajar so I could see. Sarah Jane was walking, fast, back towards the motorway. I went after her, took her arm and dragged her back to the car.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said again, but there was less force in it this time. I didn’t say anything. I was tired of banging my head against the wall. I led her to the driver’s side and took the key from the ignition. We were in darkness again.

  The motorway around us.

  The sound of her breathing.

  Her freezing-cold fingers on my arm.

  We walked to the car boot and I fumbled with the key. She started to panic, to pull away from me, and I held her by the scruff of the neck. I pointed her at the car. Opened the boot. The light flicked on, lit us up with it.

  Sarah Jane screwed her eyes shut. ‘Please, don’t—’

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  She took a breath, looked, and then leaned on me to stay upright. Grip’s wide eyes stared back at us. They seemed bigger than usual, swelling right out of his skull. He had been forced inside too small a space and they’d broken his legs, bent both knees the wrong way, to do it. The rictus of pain on his face suggested he’d been alive when it happened. His wrists were bound in front of his body with cable ties.

  There were deep cuts in the skin where he’d tried to struggle free.

  His arms had been in front of his body so they had easy access. So he could see what was being done to him.

  There was a syringe in his left arm and the injection site had turned black.

  The left side of his body had darkened. The same nightmare shade of blue I’d seen on Isabelle. The same I’d seen at Sycamore Way.

  I watched Sarah Jane’s eyes filling with pity, as she traced the torture on her friend from head to toe. When she looked at his face she went limp against me and started to cr
y. He’d vomited heavily before he died. He’d been forced to drink a large quantity of paint. The sick down his chest, crusted inside and outside his mouth, was black and white.

  10

  I held Sarah Jane’s arm and walked her to the passenger side. I opened the door, lowered her in and walked round the car. When I got in she spoke in a steady voice.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He went after Cath.’

  She pulled the fur around her. ‘Is she …?’

  ‘I found the car at my flat. No sign of her.’ I thought of what Sheldon had said in Rubik’s: It’ll be like she never fucking lived.

  ‘Why at your flat?’

  ‘A warning, a guarantee he’d be found. Look,’ I said, leaning towards the dash. ‘You need to answer some questions.’

  ‘Don’t turn the light on. Ask me whatever, but don’t turn the light on.’ I knew there was a good chance that we’d never speak again outside this car and, for whatever reason, had wanted to see her. I sat back and we talked in the dark.

  ‘How long have you been sleeping with David Rossiter?’

  ‘A year, give or take. How did you know?’

  ‘He knew more than he should have, but that could have been from anywhere. It was the pictures of Isabelle and me, really. They were too suggestive to have been taken by someone who didn’t understand sex. Caught the moment too well to have been taken by a man.’

  ‘So I was too good?’

  ‘No, not quite. When I brought Isabelle back to Zain’s that night, you asked me to take her to the flat round the corner. You wrote down her address. I saw the same handwriting on the envelope Rossiter had the pictures in.’ She snorted. ‘Carver and Rossiter both drank the same brand of cognac as well. I wondered if that came from you.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sorry for getting you in trouble.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘David, Zain, the police.’ She shrugged. ‘You’re in trouble with everyone.’

  ‘I don’t work for the police any more.’

  She looked at me again but didn’t say anything.

  ‘How did you and Rossiter meet?’

  ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with—’

  ‘If I have to ask again I’ll put you in the boot with Grip and walk home.’

  I was afraid that I meant it.

  ‘How else would a girl like me meet a man like him?’ I felt a stab of jealousy. I tried to keep it out of my voice but didn’t quite manage.

  ‘Where was this?’

  Sarah Jane caught the tone and began responding faster, happy in the knowledge that at least each answer hurt me on some level.

  ‘The Cloud,’ she said.

  A bar on the twenty-third floor of Beetham Tower. A view of the city and cocktails at Prohibition-era prices. There’s a four-

  metre overhang with a glass floor so you can see all the way down. There are usually travelling businessmen. Occasionally there are young women keeping them company. For most people, The Cloud felt like going up in the world.

  For David Rossiter, it was twenty-two floors beneath him. I wanted to tell Sarah Jane it was beneath her too, but I’d heard the tone in my voice as well as she had. I didn’t want to start acting on it.

  ‘You were working.’

  ‘Whoring? I don’t think of it as work, really.’

  ‘He paid you, though?’

  ‘Nothing to trouble the expenses scandal.’

  ‘Yes or no.’

  She paused. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘I can even tell you his safe word, if you like?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Mine’s “harder” …’

  ‘Let’s start at The Cloud.’

  ‘I was only there for a drink. You get so tired of drinking in basements around here. Especially the dives Zain sells in. Sometimes a view can take your mind off things.

  ‘I’d have been wearing something nice. Black for the way I felt, or red for the way I wanted to. I used to go there when I was young. Made more in an hour than my mum did in a month.’

  ‘You’re still young,’ I said. ‘Rossiter approached you?’

  ‘With David it would’ve been more mutual than that – I fucking love money. I don’t remember exactly, though. I’m sure we’d have locked eyes and bought each other a drink.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘All the way to the top.’

  ‘His penthouse? He wasn’t afraid his wife might come home and find you?’

  ‘Says she’s never set foot in the place.’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘It’s true, I think. Crippling vertigo and more money than sense. She bought the highest flat in England to try and get over it.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘She was gonna stay in the Hilton for forty-five days straight. Go up a floor every night until she got to the top. She had a panic attack on the fifteenth and never went back.’

  ‘So David started using it for himself?’

  ‘He said things weren’t working at home. They were only married on paper, really.’ I thought of him putting his ring back on every time Sarah Jane left. She heard herself, and went on quietly. ‘I know they all say that.’

  ‘Isabelle didn’t suffer from vertigo, though.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you met her at the penthouse?’

  ‘She went there every so often, when she knew David was out. We started running into each other.’

  ‘Sounds awkward.’

  ‘A little, at first. He’d left for work one morning and I was waiting for the lift when she came up in it. She was cutting school. Had a boy with her. She looked scared to death.’

  ‘And she knew?’

  ‘More or less. She started to work out our routine. David likes …’ She paused, corrected herself. ‘David liked to leave the suite first. I’d go ten, twenty minutes later. More often than not I’d see her get out of the lift. You don’t pass many people on the forty-fifth floor of Beetham Tower.’

  ‘Did you tell Rossiter?’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Sarah—’

  ‘No. No, but I think he knew. Some days they only missed each other by minutes. I thought they must be passing each other in the lobby …’

  ‘How did you and Isabelle end up talking to each other?’

  ‘David and I spent a night together. Usually I felt at home there, but I couldn’t get comfortable. When he left in the morning I was right behind him.

  ‘The lift came up but Isabelle wasn’t in it. It wasn’t right. I wondered if that was why I’d felt weird. If there was something wrong. I waited a few minutes, but she never showed.

  ‘I had this horrible feeling that she’d been hiding in the penthouse all night. Watching us. Listening. I went back and knocked on the door. Sure enough, she opened it.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Said she’d just wanted to know for sure. No hard feelings. I bought her a drink. I felt sorry for her. Got the impression her parents didn’t pay that much attention. One always thought she was with the other.’

  ‘Is that how she was gone so long before they realized?’

  ‘They didn’t know?’ She paused. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Did she ever say anything to you about her father?’

  ‘Not really …’

  ‘Anything off? Anything at all?’

  ‘I’d have remembered.’

  ‘What about him? Did he say anything about her?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like anything.’

  ‘Those clichés about men paying whores just to listen aren’t really true, you know.’

  ‘Stop calling yourself that, I get it. How did you end up taking Isabelle to Zain’s?’

  ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t have. She started following me round.’

  ‘And you of all people couldn’t give her the cold shoulder? You’ve got two of them.’

  ‘Her sister had left. She had no one
else …’

  ‘She flattered you.’

  ‘I suppose. No one had thought of me like that before. She got in the same way you did. I saw her round the bars, putting it about for a few weeks, then one night she showed up at Zain’s.’

  ‘And he took to her?’

  ‘I told you, he has a habit of attracting strays.’

  ‘What were you and Zain arguing about the second night I went there?’

  ‘You, at first – like I said. Told him it was stupid to let you in.’

  ‘How did you know who I was?’

  ‘David told me a policeman might be snooping around. He only told you about Izzy so it wouldn’t look weird that he hadn’t reported her missing, but …’

  I waited.

  ‘… I don’t know, sometimes it seemed like he didn’t want her back.’

  If Rossiter had heard about an investigation that might locate his daughter, a daughter he hadn’t even reported missing, it might make sense to bring me in unofficially. Then he could impede any contact between us. Keep tabs on Isabelle and keep his secrets safe. If worst came to worst, he could use the pictures he’d got of us to keep me in line.

  ‘What about Zain? He knew who I was before I introduced myself.’

  ‘If he sees a face twice, he wants to know who it is. A few of us had seen you hanging round the bars.’

  ‘But who ID’d me?’

  She swallowed. ‘He pays someone on the police force. They ID’d you …’

  ‘From a picture or in person?’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Sarah, this is important.’

  ‘In person. Before you came to Fairview that first night.’

  ‘Someone hit me that night. I woke up on the street outside Rubik’s.’ In the darkness I saw Sarah Jane shift position to look at me. ‘Did you have anything to do with it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Zain just called him his friend. Said his friend was gonna wait for you in Rubik’s. ID you and call it in. I knew you were something to do with Isabelle. Something to do with David. I told Zain he should have you scared off.’ She stopped abruptly and started to cry. Not for me but for herself, or whoever she’d been before. ‘When I saw you at the door with a black eye, looking at me like that …’