by Danuta Reah
‘They’ll already be up here,’ Ashley said. ‘They’ve been here for a while.’
McCarthy positioned the team outside the door of the flat. It was quiet now, but a few minutes before, they had heard a voice, the sound of something falling. One of the officers shook his head. No further sound. They’d just heard the one voice, and they knew, now, who that was.
Anne Hays had taken prints from the body removed from Suzanne’s house, a standard procedure in the absence of close friends or relatives to make an identification. The formality of linking them up to the prints they had on record for Ashley Reid had been slightly delayed by the urgency of the forensic work from Simon Walker’s flat. Only they hadn’t matched.
And now Reid was holed up in the flat – on his own, or with Joel Severini, or with Lee Bradley? They needed to know if there was anyone in there with him. McCarthy checked back on his radio. The first confirmation came through. Severini had been found coming out of a pub, apparently ignorant of the events of the night. He’d been arrested. That was for sorting later. Lee Bradley was, according to his mother, out with his mates. She didn’t know where, and she didn’t seem particularly interested. Someone, presumed to be Ashley Reid, was on the balcony of the flat. He’d seen the cars.
McCarthy cursed and considered the options. He didn’t really have any. He gave the signal to the team and spoke quietly into his radio. ‘We’re going in,’ he said.
Barraclough could see the figure clearly from her position by the car. A man standing on the balcony, outlined against the light. Corvin was swearing under his breath. Reid had seen them now. The figure moved backwards, back inside, she thought, then came back to the edge. She heard Corvin on his radio, ‘Careful, Steve, hold it, he’s on the balcony …’ and a lot of static and crackling.
‘What’s he doing?’ Corvin was squinting up, his neck at a painful angle.
‘I don’t know … Shit! He’s going to …’ They moved back as Ashley Reid came right to the parapet.
‘No, he’s just standing …’ Corvin kept moving backwards, away from the danger zone. Barraclough heard the radio crackle, heard voices as an incoherent gabble, and then they were behind the van still looking up at the figure watching them from that precipitous drop.
Quite early in her career, Barraclough had had to help in the aftermath of a jumper. A teacher who had been suffering from depression had jumped from one of the city’s tower blocks. She could remember two things that had lodged themselves in her mind. One was the sheer mortality of the human body, its capacity to be smashed to pulp; the other was her conviction that between the leap and the end, there was more than enough time for regret.
Suzanne struggled to free herself from his grip. Relief froze her as he moved away from the drop. She tried to speak, but her voice was gone.
He looked at her. ‘It was so good, you see. We all knew it was. It was going to be perfect. It was all going to be new.’ He touched her face, gently. ‘Why are you crying? I can’t stand crying.’ Suzanne shook her head. She couldn’t explain. He looked into her eyes, running his fingers across her mouth. ‘They’re outside the door.’
He moved before she could react. He was behind her, pulling her back against him, his arm across her chest. She could feel the cold edge of the knife hard against her neck. He seemed calm, matter of fact. She heard pounding on the door and saw the jamb start to bend and splinter. Then the door was open and they were in. She felt him pulling her back towards the balcony. The knife was digging in now. She closed her eyes. ‘Ashley …’ she said.
She could feel his mouth against her ear. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.’ His voice was barely a whisper. Then she looked. There seemed to be hundreds of them, in the room, in the doorway, spreading out, trying to flank Ashley. And in the doorway, Steve, looking at her, and just for a second his face seemed to shatter, then it became a calm, impassive mask. He looked beyond her. ‘Ashley! Listen! They’re all right. Lucy and Michael. They’re all right. Let Suzanne go.’
Ashley’s voice, speaking in her ear. Still gentle, quiet. ‘Fire and water, Suzanne. They’re safe now. They’re gone.’ For a moment, she felt the knowledge open up inside her, a pit she would fall down for ever, but Steve’s eyes held hers. He wouldn’t lie. Not about this. Not to her. They were at the doors now, and Ashley was inexorably drawing her out onto the balcony.
Then, suddenly, he let her go, and she staggered back against the railing, feeling it start to give. He had swung himself up onto the low parapet, his legs hanging over the drop. ‘Suzanne!’ Steve was shouting. ‘Get away from there! Now! Now!’
It was like slow motion, like moving through heavy water. She turned her head, and his eyes, Ashley’s eyes, Adam’s eyes, looked at her. No! But she didn’t know if she’d said it out loud or if it just stayed in her head. She reached her hand out to him as he looked from her to the emptiness beside him. Listen to me! He smiled slightly, and suddenly he was the Ashley she knew, Ashley saying, Don’t mind them. Ashley saying, I’d like to do art at college, Ashley kissing her with a terrifying desperation. He looked into her eyes. He reached out his hand to her. Listen to me, Suzanne, listen! Her hand reached towards his, and he looked into her eyes and smiled. Steve’s voice, frantic now, ‘Suzanne!’ And she snatched her hand back as Ashley’s closed like steel round the empty air.
McCarthy saw it in frozen time, like a stop-go animation, like a scene under a strobe light. Ashley Reid on the balcony rail, silhouetted against the night sky, Suzanne reaching her hand out, taking his hand, and he wasn’t going to get there in time, and then she was falling back against the broken rail and Ashley looked across to him and smiled, a wry, regretful smile. And he was gone and it seemed an eternity in the second it took McCarthy to reach Suzanne, to pull her back from the drop, to try to muffle her ears from the crash onto the concrete far, far below.
21
McCarthy brought Suzanne down from the flat, wanting to get her away from the shadows and the pictures that danced and flickered in the candlelight. She was shaking with reaction. Perhaps he should have waited for the paramedics, made sure that she was all right before they attempted the long stairway, but he needed to get away as well.
There was a concrete bench at the bottom of the stairwell. It seemed as good a place to wait as any. They’d find him if they needed him. He put his jacket round Suzanne’s shoulders, and then put his arm round her. He looked up at the sky. It was as cloudless as the day he had taken her up on the heather moors. The moon shone clear and cold, making the edges sharp and the shadows black across the courtyard.
‘Michael?’ she said. ‘And Lucy?’ She kept asking.
‘They’re at the hospital,’ he said. He couldn’t tell her any more.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She had said that over and over.
‘Just stop it, OK?’ His head was pounding. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. He was angry with her, for the way she had run herself – and him – blindly and recklessly into catastrophe. He was angry with her for the way she seemed half seduced by the one safe place that Ashley had tried to lead her to. He couldn’t handle the way she made her choices, every time, it seemed, for guilt, despair and destruction. He couldn’t spend his life in the burial ground, watching her mourn by her brother’s grave.
And yet, at the last minute, she had pulled back from the edge.
It was after midnight. Tina Barraclough ran her hands through her hair and tried to focus. She was tired. They were all tired. If she closed her eyes, she could see the figure tumbling through the air above her, floating as if in slow motion, plummeting so fast there was no time for thought or action. She shook her head to clear it. She was dreaming on her feet.
Steve McCarthy came through the door, pulling off his jacket and dumping it on the nearest desk. He’d been at the hospital. He looked terrible. Brooke said, ‘We need to know what happened in that last half-hour, what happened in that flat before you went in, Steve.’ He paused
and took his glasses off to wipe them. ‘How did she end up there? What sent her up there after Reid?’
Barraclough saw Corvin start to say something, look at McCarthy and think better of it. After a moment’s silence, McCarthy said, ‘Silly bitch went off on a wild-goose chase and nearly got herself killed.’ He shook his head at Brooke’s query. ‘I haven’t got all the details. They’re still patching her up. I’ll go back tomorrow and …’
Brooke shook his head. ‘Not you, Steve.’ McCarthy began to protest, shrugged his shoulders and leant back in his chair. He looked exhausted. Brooke allocated tasks for the next day and sent the team home. ‘Wait, Steve,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you. DC Barraclough, you wait here as well. My office, Steve.’
As the two men disappeared into the tiny room that Brooke had annexed as a temporary office, Barraclough edged round so that she could see through the glass panels of the door. Surely Brooke wasn’t going to give McCarthy a bollocking, not about Reid’s fall, not about Suzanne Milner. She could see the two men talking but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. McCarthy was leaning against the wall, his head bowed.
Brooke reached into the desk and took out a bottle of whisky and a glass. He pushed them across to McCarthy, who poured himself what was probably the largest measure Barraclough had ever seen and knocked it straight back. Brooke nodded at him, and McCarthy poured himself another one and drank it almost as quickly as the first. Brooke stayed where he was for a moment, then came over to the door.
‘… all right,’ he was saying as he opened it. ‘You’re going home, Steve.’ He looked across to the door where Barraclough was standing, discreetly away from her original line of sight. ‘DC Barraclough, drive the DI home, and then get off yourself. I want you in again first thing. You all right?’
Like a great bird, dropping out of the sky, dropping, dropping… ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
Lee Bradley had been picked up, running from the flats after Ashley Reid’s fall. A search of his room in his mother’s flat revealed a few of the now familiar pills. Faced with this evidence, Bradley told them that he had got them from Ashley Reid, had been, in fact, a regular customer. ‘I used to pick up on Saturday nights, but he wasn’t there on Saturday, or Sunday.’ The news of Reid’s ‘death’ in the fire had been in the local paper that day. It would have been a major topic of discussion at the Alpha Centre. He claimed he had been going back to the flat to look for Ashley, that he had been unable to accept the stories he had heard of his death in the fire, but the flat, with its apparently unguarded supply of drugs, and the possibility of money, must have been an irresistible lure. Only Suzanne had got there first. He had watched her push her way through the bars onto the stairs and had waited at the bottom, knowing that she would have to come back the same way. What he had been waiting for, he was unable, or unwilling, to specify. Trapped by the sudden influx of police officers, he had been making his way to the footpaths through the flats where he hoped to escape unnoticed, when Ashley’s fall had panicked him into flight.
The flat itself had supplied evidence that filled in some of the gaps. Ashley Reid had obviously used it as a hiding place after his disappearance, but it showed signs of a longer occupancy. This was where Emma had gone. The flat was minimally furnished – a bed, a table, a Primus stove, a kettle. There were other things – a bag of clothes that Dennis Allan identified as Emma’s; and carrier bags with expensive dresses, tops, lingerie, most of which looked as though they had never been worn; more of the pills that had, presumably, come from Simon Walker; a small bag of brown powder that proved to be heroin, some syringes and needles; and nearly three thousand pounds in cash. They found the tape that had disappeared from Suzanne’s study the night of the fire, and they’d also found the missing pages from Sophie’s diary, tucked carefully away in a drawer in the one remaining kitchen cupboard.
Sophie had traced her brothers. She must have had some recollections of them from her early childhood, and her mother’s letter directed her to her uncle in Sheffield. The family had moved, so Sophie had hired a detective to find them. He had traced Ashley, and Ashley had taken her first to Simon, then to Emma. The diary was full of her delight in being reunited with her brothers, and in finding her half-sister as well. The plans that Ashley had told Suzanne of in the abandoned flat were shared by all of them.
She felt guilty that she was the only one who had emerged from their childhood apparently unscathed. She made excuses for her twin. It’s hard for Ash. He’s had a terrible time. He’ll come round. She agreed to his insistence on secrecy. And she seemed to accept what Ashley told her without query at this stage. But a darker note began to creep in. The strange withdrawnness of Simon confused her. He hardly talks. Except to Lucy. Lucy seems to like him. Sophie was worried about concealing things from her parents, about the taste for destruction that seemed to shroud both Ashley and Emma. Ash gets so angry sometimes. And Em is angry too. She found a photograph – she showed me – of her mum. Her mum was pregnant, and that was long before Em was born. Em said she didn’t care, but I could see she was really upset.
It was easy to see, between the lines of Sophie’s words, the way in which she, loved and stable, was gradually being pushed out of the circle that had existed those first months, pushed out by the two who shared the knowledge of instability and disturbance. Sophie began to realize about the drugs, began to realize that her twin perhaps had another agenda, began to realize that she was out of her depth.
I don’t like it here any more. I don’t know what to do. I’m going to go home. The last entry.
There were still some gaps that they couldn’t fill in. Ashley had talked to Suzanne Milner about removing his father from Lucy’s life, about revenge. Had he planned to kill Joel Severini? Or had he planned something else? What had he meant when he said to her, I’ve fixed him?
They had arrested Joel Severini on his return to the house, late that Monday night. He’d spent the evening in the pub, he told them; he gave them names of people he’d seen, people he’d spent the evening with, a picture of courtesy and co-operation. Barraclough, interviewing him with Corvin the following morning, felt as though she had wandered into looking-glass land. This man behaved as though he’d been involved in a minor traffic incident. He seemed more concerned with covering his back than anything else. He hadn’t left the children, he was insisting. He’d left Suzanne Milner in charge of them. It wasn’t his fault if she was unreliable. ‘Suzanne’s been a bit strange recently,’ he said. Barraclough sent up a silent prayer of thanks that McCarthy wasn’t there.
He changed as Corvin began to ask about Emma, about Sophie, about Simon. Yes, he readily agreed, he’d left his wife with a young child, and pregnant. ‘I couldn’t support them,’ he’d said. ‘Carolyn was going to go and live with her brother.’ He’d never seen the children. No, he’d made no attempt to find out what had happened to them. ‘Carolyn wanted a clean break,’ he said. It had clearly never crossed his mind that Sophie Dutton, the woman he knew as his daughter’s childminder, might be one of the children he’d left. He’d had very little to do with her, he said. ‘That was Jane’s business.’ He became more wary, less talkative, as he began to see the direction that Corvin was taking him. ‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. ‘And she didn’t know me.’ Prove different, seemed to be his challenge. He shrugged off the meeting with his son that Ashley had talked about to Suzanne. ‘How would I have known?’ he said. ‘He should have told me who he was.’
He agreed that he had a relationship with Sandra Ford in the early eighties. ‘Well, not really,’ he said with a deprecating smile. ‘It was just an old-times’-sake thing.’ Corvin asked him about Emma, and he began to show signs of annoyance. ‘I’ve told you all of this. I hardly knew her.’ He seemed to realize that they had more, and shifted his stance slightly. ‘She tried to sell me pills. Told me her boyfriend put her onto me,’ He shrugged. He hadn’t told them before because nothing had come of it and the girl was dead. ‘Why cause trouble?�
� he said. Corvin, playing a hunch, mentioned Peter Greenhead, implying that they had some knowledge of a deal. Severini was unperturbed. Yes, he’d seen Pete. He’d been hoping they could do some business together. He may have mentioned about Emma and the pills – just a story, really.
When Corvin told him whose daughter Emma was and about the doubts surrounding her parentage, for the first time he seemed to show some genuine emotion. The colour left his face and he stumbled over his words. He demanded a break to talk to his solicitor. When the interview was resumed, he had recovered his equilibrium. He didn’t think that Emma was his daughter. Sandy had been a very manipulative woman and had probably been spinning her husband a line. There were many men who could have been Emma’s father.
‘We can do tests if we need to,’ Corvin said. Severini remained unmoved. It didn’t alter his story. Barraclough felt a weary cynicism. In the end, he would walk away from all of it, leaving other people to bear the brunt of the things he had done. Four people were dead. The Duttons had lost their daughter. Dennis Allan had lost his wife and child. And Catherine Walker, old and confused, had lost the grandson she had been so proud of. Barraclough could remember the woman’s face, looking up at her, uncertain; her smile. He did very well. And Joel Severini sat in front of them, occasionally conferring with his solicitor, occasionally smiling a slightly puzzled smile, as though he really couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
In the immediate aftermath, without a role to keep him focused and stable, McCarthy had spun out of control. Brooke had been understanding but firm. ‘Go home,’ he’d said. ‘You’re in no fit state …’ McCarthy hadn’t known if he was on the case or off it, if he’d ballsed it up spectacularly, or if he was just reacting to shock. He’d gone home and unplugged the phone. Sleep seemed too dangerous, so he spent the few remaining hours of the night in an armchair in his flat, the whisky bottle beside him, watching the sun rise over the roofs, reliving the scene again and again, sleep relieving him of the sharp knives of responsibility, to leave him trying to run through waist-deep water, jolting awake at the moment of realization that he wasn’t going to make it.
