by Sarah Hilary
‘Unless it’s the blunt end of his baseball bat . . .’
Marnie’s phone rang. She took the call. ‘DI Rome.’
‘Are you at the station?’ It was Harry Kennedy. ‘I’m parking up. With Zoe.’
He sounded grim. ‘You’ll want to hear this.’
It was the second time Harry and Zoe had come into the station together. Noah wondered whether Marnie was remembering the first time, when Harry was carrying the shoebox from Lancaster Road. Zoe wore the same parka and biker boots but she’d removed the red mittens, or forgotten them. She looked cold and unhappy.
Harry shook down the collar of his coat. His hands were empty but he was bringing bad news, just like last time. Noah saw it in his face. Concern for Marnie, and something more—
Harry liked her. More than a little. Did she know?
Noah couldn’t read anything other than professional courtesy in Marnie’s manner as she led the four of them to an empty interview room.
Once they were seated, Harry said, ‘I asked Zoe to look at the descriptions of Tobias Midori’s mates. She knows the Crasmere Boys, or most of them. But that’s not why we’re here.’ He stopped, nodding at Zoe.
‘Huell Bevan.’ She rubbed the end of her nose. ‘You have a warrant out for him.’
‘You know him?’ Marnie asked.
Zoe nodded, her look of unhappiness deepening. ‘He thought . . . I was his girlfriend.’ She blushed then straightened, squaring her shoulders. ‘I met him over at the sports centre near Jonas House, when I was first working with Ollie and the others. Huell was giving first aid training. We got chatting and he seemed to care about the kids so when he suggested a drink after work, I said okay.’ She drew a breath. ‘Big mistake. Big, big mistake.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two years ago? August bank holiday weekend.’
‘Go on,’ Marnie prompted.
‘The next day he’s texting me, but I hadn’t given him my number. Ten minutes into the drinking session it was obvious he wasn’t interested in the kids. Only in me. And he knew things.’ Her face stiffened, defensively. ‘Personal things. Including as it turned out my phone number, which I’d made a point of not giving him. The next day he texted about twenty times. I didn’t reply to begin with, didn’t want to give him confirmation of my number. I thought he’d get bored, or he’d assume the number wasn’t mine. But he didn’t stop.’
Her mouth was tight, as if her teeth hurt. ‘The texts got more and more . . . personal. Obsessive. In the end I texted back and told him to stop. I said I’d report him to the police if he didn’t.’
‘But he did stop,’ Marnie deduced.
‘One last abusive text, calling me a heartless bitch. Then that was it.’ She worked the clench from her hands with her thumbs. ‘If it hadn’t stopped there, I would have gone to the police. I was serious about that. Now I wish I’d reported it anyway because you have a warrant out for him, and for Ollie.’ Her face changed, painfully. ‘Whatever he’s dragged him into, it’s not Ollie’s fault. Huell can be convincing. And Ollie’s just a kid. He doesn’t look it and he doesn’t act it, but that’s what he is. A kid.’
‘Convincing how?’ Noah asked.
‘Plausible. Interested in you, lots of eye contact, lots of concern. Mirroring – I suppose they taught him that in training. It looks real, though. I’m good at spotting fakes, and I didn’t spot him. Not until he was buying a second drink and touching my hand.’ She grimaced at the memory.
‘What did he know about you?’ Marnie asked. ‘Personal things, you said. You’ll understand we need all the information we can get our hands on right now.’
Harry moved a fraction, enough for Noah to guess that Zoe had confided in him on their way over here. Whatever she’d told him, Harry hadn’t liked it.
‘He knew I’d been attacked.’ Zoe put her hands on the table, rigid in the chair. ‘Four years ago. A gang on one of the estates decided they’d had enough of me interfering in their recruitment process. I was out of the picture for a while, but I got better.’ Her voice resisted questions, but she didn’t stop speaking. ‘It happened not long after I started with Ground Up. It was— Bad. They used knives. I was in hospital for four months. I thought about giving up the job; I was scared for a long time after it happened, really scared. But I like my job and the kids need people like me. That’s not ego, it’s maths. Not enough people want to do this work, and it matters. So, I went back.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marnie said.
‘That’s not—’ Zoe moved her hands. ‘It’s all right, I’m all right. I talk about it to parents and kids who’ve been victims of knife crime. I’ve not kept it secret. But what I don’t talk about is the scars.’ She stopped, but only for a second. ‘I have scars. They’re ugly. Huell knew where, and he knew how many. Details I’d not shared with anyone but my surgeon, and my mirror.’ She’d pulled the cuffs of her jumper over her hands. Under it, she was wearing a white T-shirt.
Layers, Noah had thought, for the cold. He remembered her grimness when she’d talked about the knife Ollie had shown her. She’d known what knives could do, had the scars to prove it.
‘Huell wanted to talk about my courage.’ She looked nauseated. ‘His texts were full of that. How brave I was, how I’d survived. Then they got more personal, more specific.’
‘How did he get that information?’ Harry asked.
‘He’s a paramedic, in Camden. I was in hospital there, he must’ve accessed my records.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried to remember details of our conversation, wish I’d kept the texts, but I’ve had a new phone for over a year.’
‘And you’ve not seen him since that drink two years ago?’ Marnie said.
‘Once or twice. At the sports centre, from a distance. I thought he was a creep. I wished he didn’t have access to the kids the way he does, but I didn’t think it was worse than that. If he tried any nonsense with Ollie I thought he’d find out the fast way what kind of kids he was dealing with.’
She rubbed at her nose. ‘That sounds bad, but I’m sick of people who stand on the sidelines cheering me on, or make a big deal of my survival. I got on with my life, that’s all. I was lucky to have a job to go back to, and I was sick of sympathy. And of good advice from friends and family about walking away. Moving on.’ She shoved her curls behind her ears. ‘If we all walk away from stuff like that who’s left to do the real work?’
Huell had been right about one thing. She had courage, in spades. Noah had gone through training with a constable who was knifed in his first week on the job. He’d left the police to work in an office designing websites. Zoe had taken the hard path, and she’d played it down. She could’ve used the attack as a short cut during their conversation about the kids at Jonas House, but she hadn’t. She’d stuck up for them, but not blindly. Doing her job even when she found it difficult, and with good humour too. Drinking the bad station-blend coffee, sharing a joke with him. All the time those scars underneath. No clue in the way she moved, just grimness when she talked about Ollie’s knife. Attacked by a gang, but she was back out there. Fighting for kids like Ollie, whom everyone else considered long lost.
‘When was the last time you saw Huell at the sports centre?’ Marnie asked.
‘Months ago. I can’t remember seeing him recently.’
‘But you definitely saw him with Ollie. When was that?’
‘The first time? Two years ago, when he was friendly with everyone. But I’ve seen him with Ollie since. The last time must’ve been October half-term. School holidays are always tricky, the kids get bored. The sports centre liked Huell because he distracted them.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe I should’ve told them about the texts, but I didn’t think he’d be weird with the kids. If he’d been hanging around girls, I’d have said something. But it was just Ollie, and I knew he could take care of himself. Huell hadn’t tried anything physical that night. He was . . . puppyish. Even his texts, until that last one.’ She tipped her head, remem
bering. ‘He was sick of seeing what violence did, that’s what he said. Sick of patching people up after accidents and assaults. I thought he was a bit primitive to be honest. Old-fashioned. The texts were his idea of a compliment, all about how I’d shown the gang they couldn’t hurt me, not really. It was only the last text that was nasty. And the fact that he knew about my scars.’ She sat up straight. ‘So, yes. It was frustrating to see Ollie getting close to him, but there wasn’t anything for Huell to obsess over with Ollie, and if he’d tried to get personal? I knew Ollie would sort it out.’
She thought Ollie was a normal teenage boy. Angry, headed off the rails maybe, but not damaged. Not a victim. She didn’t know about Carole’s cage. Or that she and Ollie shared a secret of the kind which Huell had obsessed over two years ago. A secret of survival.
‘Is there anything else you can tell us?’ Marnie said. ‘Anything that might help us find Huell.’
‘Only that he’d wanted to be a paramedic since he was a kid, but he’d had to retake the exam after he failed it the first time.’ She frowned in concentration. ‘He talked a lot about his training that night we went for a drink. I suppose it was his way of leading up to my attack.’
‘Where did he study, did he say?’
Zoe shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘He didn’t mention any addresses?’
‘Only mine. He knew I grew up in Hillingdon. I suppose he got that from my medical records.’
‘He went to a lot of trouble,’ Marnie said, ‘to find out details about your personal life. But he dropped the obsession after a single warning?’
‘I didn’t believe it either,’ Zoe said. ‘I was expecting more texts, or worse. An escalation. But he stopped and I thought he must’ve realised he couldn’t get what he wanted from me and moved on. If you’d been there that night we went for a drink . . .’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘He was just this . . . weird little man with wonky teeth. Like a kid, really. Old-fashioned, not frightening. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, not until now.’
‘What did he want from you, do you think?’
‘Attention?’ She shook her head. ‘Gratitude, maybe.’
‘Gratitude?’
‘That he cared so much. That he’d gone to the trouble to praise me for being a survivor.’ She moved her hands, pressing their palms together. ‘He wanted me to know that someone out there understood what I’d been through and wasn’t just ignoring it. Too often victims are ignored, or forgotten. It’s worse if there’s a conviction because then we’re supposed to believe it’s been put right. Punishment’s been meted out, justice has been served, but it’s never equal to the crime.’ She bit her lips together. ‘I think he believes . . . That kind of justice, the kind handed down by the courts, is impersonal. Clean, somehow. We call it civilised but it’s not enough, not for what they did. It’s not personal enough. So . . . I was meant to be impressed by how much he cared about my injuries, about the injustice of the sentence they received. He kept asking whether they’d been punished properly. The men who attacked me. Whether I thought they’d been punished properly.’ She looked at Marnie. ‘You think he killed Kyle Stratton? That he’s some sort of vigilante?’
‘Do you think that’s possible?’ Noah asked. ‘From what you saw of him?’
‘Oh God . . . He was obsessed with justice. If he found someone else to impress? Someone he thought was a survivor?’ She put her hands in her hair. ‘What I don’t understand is why he got Ollie involved in this crusade, if that’s what it is.’
‘Perhaps he wanted a sidekick. Or a lookout. You said Ollie was after a place to fit in. And Huell is plausible. He might’ve persuaded Ollie that this was a job worth doing. Vigilantism.’
‘Ollie isn’t a social justice warrior,’ Zoe said angrily. ‘Those lists he made weren’t— They were a game. He’s just a kid cut off from his dad.’
Ollie was much more, but Noah didn’t enlighten her. ‘Perhaps Huell took advantage of that. Played the father figure, flattered Ollie’s need to be useful, to fit in.’
‘He’s delusional.’ She pushed her hair from her forehead. ‘Why didn’t I report the texts? If I’d done that two years ago . . .’
‘You’d have done it,’ Harry said, ‘if you’d been seriously concerned. You have a good radar for trouble.’ He looked at Marnie. ‘It sounds to me like Bevan hadn’t hit his stride back then. It’s taken two years for him to reach this stage.’
‘I should’ve told the police about him,’ Zoe said with bitterness. ‘Then I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering whether my bravery has put Ollie in danger.’
She didn’t know about Finn. All her self-reproach and worry was centred on Ollie. But Huell had kidnapped a ten-year-old boy, to wage war—
On Stephen Keele? On Aidan Duffy? On Marnie Rome.
‘If he found someone else to impress? Someone he thought was a survivor?’
Their killer had found Marnie.
A knock on the door made Zoe turn her head, tears shining in her eyes.
‘CCTV came through, boss.’ Debbie Tanner, her eyes catching on Harry before finding Marnie and Noah. ‘We’ve got the Astra.’
51
‘We’re going.’ Brady. ‘Get up.’
Finn hadn’t seen him in days, that’s how it felt. Days and days. He’d forgotten how to be scared of Brady. Ollie was scary. The bath, being buried down here in the cold, was scary, the plughole chewing his eyelashes when he blinked. But Brady was just a voice, not even that, a noise. Finn ignored it. Concentrated on staying where Ollie had said Dad could see him. He didn’t care about the cold as long as Dad knew where to find him. He tucked his taped hands between his knees and shut his eyes. Dad was coming. As long as he stayed right here . . . Dad was coming to get him.
‘Get up. We’re going.’
They’d go to the funfair, to the pier. Dad would win him another cat and Finn wouldn’t ever leave it behind no matter how old he got. He’d keep that cat forever. The two of them would fish from the end of the pier with the stinky bait sold out of buckets. The beach would rub between his toes and he’d wake to a bed full of sand and Dad’s white grin—
Booming in his head like a bomb going off, made his teeth shake.
‘Get up!’ Brady, kicking the side of the bath.
Hands reached in and got him by the armpits, lifting him up, setting him down.
Ollie, saying, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll bring him,’ the press of his fingers warning Finn to keep quiet.
Brady swung away. Gone.
The bathroom blazed black even though Finn knew the tiles were white because he’d washed them enough times. Everything in here was white, except Ollie’s eyes. Purple. He’d squatted down, his hands in Finn’s armpits, holding him upright. He was staring into Finn’s face, saying something, saying, ‘You need to do as he says. He’s pissed off, he’s scared—’
That couldn’t be true. Finn was hearing it wrong. Brady wasn’t scared. It was Finn who was meant to be scared. He tried straightening his legs, locking his knees so they’d keep him upright, but nothing was working. Tar inside his head, a mouse in his mouth, dead fly buzzing in his ear. Ollie had a stone. He was going to tie it round Finn’s neck and throw him in the river. He hiccupped and his whole body shook like when someone’s walking on your bed. No, not your bed, that wasn’t it. Walking on your grave. Like that. A full body shiver.
Ollie pressed the stone to Finn’s lips. ‘Quick . . .’
Wet and grey and tasting good. Water. It was a cup of water. Finn sucked at it greedily, until Ollie said, ‘You’ll be sick,’ and took it away.
Finn whined like Regan’s dog, swaying forward for another drink. Ollie pushed him back, straightening until he was standing, so tall it hurt Finn’s neck to look up at him. Miles and miles away, all the long way up there by the ceiling.
‘You’ve got to do as he says. Go along with it, all of it. Okay?’
With what? With Brady? ‘No . . .’
‘Listen to me. He’s got u
s, right? He’s got you and me and a mallet, he’s got a fucking mallet. That’s worse than a baseball bat and a bat’ll kill you.’
‘No.’ Finn’s teeth were chattering. ‘F-fucking Brady, fucking no—’
‘His name’s not Brady, it’s Bevan. He’s a nutter, and he’ll kill you unless you do as you’re told. D’you understand, cos I didn’t. Not until it was too late.’
‘I’ve got to wait here, you said. For Dad . . .’
‘Change of plan,’ Ollie told him. ‘We’re taking you to your dad. Come on. You want to see him, yeah? You want to see your dad. That’s where we’re going.’
‘C-can’t walk.’
‘Yeah you can.’
But Finn couldn’t. His hands were tied and he kept falling to the side whenever Ollie let go of him. So Ollie sat on the side of the bath while he unwound the tape from Finn’s wrists and it took ages and all the while Finn was shaking from cold and wanting to puke but he was afraid to puke on Ollie’s trainers which looked new and expensive and nicked and he couldn’t stop shaking, he couldn’t, not until Ollie gave him his hoodie.
Finn felt stupid with it flapping round his knees, but it was warm.
The hoodie was warm and it smelt of Ollie which was yellow cigarettes and Finn liked that even though he didn’t and then Ollie was putting something hard into his hand and saying it was going to be okay and Finn thought good, it’s going to be okay—
Right up until it wasn’t.
52
Marnie buried her hands in the pockets of her coat, shivering. All the way up the street, ice shone like scar tissue from houses where every window was an empty grey eye.
The stolen Astra was parked outside a house with a yellow door, but it was the house opposite which had their attention, and that of the Armed Response Unit. Ferguson had summoned the ARU in spite of everything Marnie had said at the station; this was incendiary enough without firearms in the mix. They’d put the CCTV images into chronological order and in the last one, captured less than two hours ago, Bevan’s face was immobilised by fear.
