by Sarah Hilary
‘He knows we’re closing in,’ Marnie had told Ferguson. ‘We can talk him down. Let Toby Graves talk him down. Guns will only make him panic, and make it worse.’
‘And Ollie? These two have done enough damage. They’ve an arsenal of weapons, we know that much. We shouldn’t be surprised if one or both has his hands on a gun.’ Ferguson had reapplied her lipstick in the ARV, after strapping on the Met vest. ‘I learnt the hard way to be prepared.’
According to council records, the house which they were watching had been empty for months. The Specialist Firearms Officers stamped their feet, keen to get moving. The cold was making everyone edgy and over-alert, too many fingers twitching on semi-automatics. The guns were loaded with hollow-point rounds designed to do the least amount of collateral damage, but the least amount might still be too much.
‘Let me try and talk to Bevan,’ Marnie tried again. ‘Please. Before we storm in.’
Ferguson consulted her watch as if this was running to her schedule and not Bevan’s. ‘No one is storming anywhere.’
‘And the press?’ Noah asked.
At arm’s length, no more than that, after they’d caught the scent of blood from Twitter.
‘You learn to live with them,’ Ferguson said. ‘They can be useful, handled in the right way.’
‘Bevan doesn’t want a battle—’ Marnie began.
A sharp scuffle of boots on tarmac cut her short; firearms officers bristling to attention.
The house was open, its door wide. Coming out—
Finn Duffy in an oversized hoodie that hung to his knees. Eyes like his father’s but huge, drugged with terror. A hand on the nape of his neck, another on his shoulder—
Huell Bevan, his pale eyes pointing at them.
Then a new shadow in the doorway, filling it.
Shoulders like a squaddie, sniper’s eyes on the street. In a T-shirt and jeans. Not yet sixteen, but passing for twenty. Ollie Tomlinson.
The SFOs tightened responsively.
A slam of sound: ‘Get on the ground!’
Bevan raising a hand in surrender: ‘I’m coming out!’
Hiding behind Finn, using him as a shield.
Finn staggering, out of focus, bare feet stumbling on frozen tarmac. Marnie tried to catch his stare but it blinked on and off, broken.
‘I’ve got him!’ Bevan grinned with every one of his bad teeth. ‘He’s safe! I’ve got him,’ as if Finn was a prize, his prize. Eyes sweeping the street but not for guns, or danger. Looking for cameras, someone filming this. That grin – he wanted it. The attention, everyone’s attention fixed on him. His knuckles white at Finn’s shoulder, holding hard.
Finn’s face kept blanking then coming back then blanking again.
When it blanked, Marnie saw Stephen on the stairs, sitting on the stairs, wearing their blood like gloves.
‘Get on the ground!’
Ollie checked over his shoulder for Bevan but they weren’t moving in synch, not a team. Two kids, one big, one small. It wasn’t like that; there wasn’t any teamwork here. Just Ollie seeing Bevan’s knuckles on Finn’s shoulder. It was his hoodie – Finn was wearing Ollie’s hoodie.
‘Wait . . .’ Marnie tried.
Finn’s hands were hidden by long sleeves and he was—
Turning. Not quickly but steadily, the way a spiral spring must turn when it’s been fully wound.
They all heard it—
The soft sound of the knife going in.
Wet suck of it coming back out.
Then the scream and Finn skidding sideways as Bevan clutched at nothing, at cold air, at himself, hands turning red, body folding forwards.
Finn had a knife, hidden inside the sleeve of Ollie’s hoodie.
He’d stabbed Bevan with it.
‘Drop it, drop it! Get on the ground!’
Ollie was in the way. Going for Finn because Bevan was his friend, his partner? Wanting his knife back? Scared Finn would go for him next? In that split second, it could’ve been any or all of those things. But Marnie didn’t see fear, and she didn’t see teamwork. She saw—
Ollie getting between Finn and Bevan, and it was his knife. He’d given his knife to Finn. A ten-year-old doesn’t take a knife off someone built like a squaddie and moving like one, so fast—
One shot was all it took.
One SFO. One bullet, its hollow-point blooming like a flower in Ollie’s chest. He grabbed at Bevan as he fell, tearing him from Finn, the pair of them thumping the pavement.
Shouting. Warnings. Threats.
Bevan on the ground, holding himself, screaming.
Ollie on the ground, spreading red, silent.
Finn with his hands at his side, the right one drip-drip-dripping.
Two SFOs powered past him to Ollie and Bevan, making sure neither was getting back up.
‘DI Rome!’
Marnie walked away from Ferguson, towards Finn.
‘DI Rome!’
‘Finn.’ Catching his stare and holding it. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Rome. I made a promise to your dad.’
An SFO circled behind her, training his weapon on Aidan’s son.
Grey eyes blazed in the boy’s face, his right hand leaking blood from the blade.
She had to get him to drop it. The knife. It looked welded to his palm. He was scared, and he was on the brink of something bigger, worse. With the knife hot in his hand, stuck to his fingers by blood, feeling like the only solid thing he had. No wonder he held onto it so hard. What had it taken to bring him to this brink? What happened in that house to put a grown man’s eyes in a small boy’s face, ruined by terror and a strange reckless courage?
The street kept sliding away from Finn, she saw it in his eyes.
The street was sliding and Ollie was jumping under the SFO’s fist, feet kicking at the pavement. Bevan was face down, sobbing and swearing, a slop of noise.
‘Finn.’ Marnie held him steady with her stare, refusing to let him look at the chaos to either side of them. ‘I made a promise to your dad. I promised I’d find you and see you safe.’
His lips moved, and his eyes. Not hearing her, not quite. His fist clenched at his side—
The knife made him safe. He didn’t need anything else.
‘Please give me the knife.’
She held out her hand, empty.
She was close enough for him to stab her. He could put her on the ground, the way he’d put Bevan down. He had that power – she saw it bubbling on his lips. Spit, and power. One bubble building, bigger than the rest. Bevan’s blood on him, stinking, and the bubble of spit building and building until it burst in a small star-shaped spatter at the edge of his mouth.
All around them the street was solid with shut doors, blind windows.
No one to bear witness to what had unravelled in the house. No one to speak about why Aidan’s son went in as a child and came out like this, with blood on his breath and death in his eyes.
‘I made a promise,’ she said. ‘Help me to keep it.’
53
It was getting dark by the time Marnie was dismantling the evidence boards, unpinning photographs, smoothing their edges. When she reached the pictures of Carole, she stopped.
Noah saw her studying the dead woman’s face. ‘What is it?’
‘Does all of this feel too . . . easy to you? In conclusion, I mean. Not the case itself, but this.’ She touched a hand to the board, slim fingers splayed between the spaces.
‘It’s neat,’ Noah said. ‘DCS Ferguson’s happy.’
A press conference live from the street where the ice was black with blood.
‘Too neat, don’t you think?’ Marnie was worn out, they both were. But her voice was full of worry. She hadn’t let go of the case yet.
Noah moved to stand at her shoulder. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘If you were Huell Bevan.’ She kept her hand on the board. ‘Smart enough to pass under our radar for ten weeks. Arrogant enough to manipulate inmates, and to g
et a gang of kids to break into a house, and steal to order. Dangerous. You killed two people. You did it without leaving any DNA, at least until the bat was found in Ollie’s flat. You did all this and then you stopped. Why?’
She took her hand away. ‘And how was it so easy to catch you in the final instance? You walked out of that house into our arms.’
‘Perhaps . . . I’d finished what I’d set out to do.’
Huell was hooked up to a post-surgical drip in a Haringey hospital. They’d have to wait for his full statement, but he’d been quick to confess. At the scene and later, in the ambulance. He’d told firearms officers, paramedics, anyone who’d listen, that he was their vigilante.
‘You’re Huell, and you’d killed Kyle.’ A stitch of concentration marked Marnie’s face as if it was the only thing holding her together. ‘And Carole.’
‘Kyle was an accident. I didn’t want him dead. I didn’t want any of them dead. They were meant to live with the shame and guilt of what they’d done, and what was done to them.’
‘And Carole?’
‘Colin had a theory about the lock-up. Her clock and the other antiques . . .’ Noah looked at the empty squares on the board. ‘They were camouflage for the scrapbook.’
‘Go on,’ Marnie prompted.
‘The other attacks—’ He stepped closer to the board. ‘What if it was all smoke? To distract us from the victim that really mattered.’ He put his hand on Carole’s picture. ‘What if I was hiding her in the glut of attacks? The chronology— That threw us. If this’d started or ended with Carole we’d have known it was all about her. Right from the start she was different. She stood out.’
‘So why was Rawling the first victim?’ Marnie asked. ‘If you’re Huell and you’re after Carole, why attack the others? And why start with Stuart?’
‘I had to work up to attacking a woman. I didn’t make a move on Zoe when we went for that drink. She said I was old-fashioned. I’m not a monster; I don’t think of myself that way. I go after people who haven’t been punished properly. In my head, I’m Batman. Attacking a woman wasn’t easy but I had to start somewhere. I didn’t want to make a mess of Carole, not in that way. I wanted to take my time. I’ve never been impulsive.’
Marnie didn’t agree, or disagree.
‘Carole was different to the others,’ Noah repeated. ‘I left her face alone.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I don’t know. So that Ollie would recognise her?’
Neither of them spoke for a moment, thinking about Ollie.
‘Ferguson got it wrong,’ Noah said at length. ‘Armed Response when there was no evidence Bevan or Ollie had a firearm? She got it wrong.’
‘It was my case,’ Marnie said. ‘My call.’
‘You told her it was a bad call. You wanted hostage negotiation, but she had to go in all guns blazing for the cameras and her own ego. You were overruled.’
‘I’d lost control of the relationship,’ Marnie said quietly. ‘She didn’t trust me to get it right. If I’d kept her onside, Ollie would be alive.’
Noah might’ve guessed she wouldn’t let anyone else take the blame, even when it rested so squarely on Ferguson’s shoulders.
He sorted through the photos for Ollie’s face and Huell’s, putting them side by side. ‘The pair of us – Ollie’s big for his age, I’m skinny and short – we could pass for kids. What if I attacked Carole alone that first time, but then I wanted Ollie to get his revenge? I found out about the cage, the abuse. I needed an accomplice because it justified what I was doing and because all this,’ nodding at the dismantled evidence, ‘was easier with two people.’
Huell’s confession at the scene, repeated in the ambulance, had named Ollie as his accomplice. Noah wasn’t extrapolating far beyond that, but something nagged at him. From the crime scene outside the house. Something didn’t fit.
‘Why didn’t you kill Carole during that first attack?’ Marnie asked. ‘If this was about her.’
‘I nearly did. I thought I did. But she was alive. Then after Kyle died, the rules changed. Or . . . Ollie wanted to finish her. Maybe he had to work up his courage, like me.’
Marnie sat on the edge of Ron’s desk. ‘Let’s say this was about Carole from the start. How did you choose your other victims?’
‘That’s easy. I was the paramedic dealing with the fallout. I was there when Val Rawling came in with torn earlobes. I was in the eye of the storm, had my pick of victims to avenge. And I’d made friends with Ollie at the sports centre. He’d told me about Carole. I was looking for a survivor, someone who was owed justice, and I needed a fellow crusader. I was sick of seeing people hurt and not being able to do anything about it. Sick of being made to help people like Stuart Rawling, who didn’t deserve it . . .’ Noah was faltering.
It didn’t feel right. This version of Bevan was a caricature, exaggerated. It wasn’t the man he’d seen coming out of that house. The man Finn had stabbed.
‘Aidan Duffy wasn’t so easy,’ Marnie was saying. ‘He wouldn’t do what you wanted, even when you threatened his son.’
‘No, he wouldn’t . . .’
Typically, when he and Marnie worked together like this to get at the truth about a crime and its motive, Noah felt the pieces slotting together. But nothing fitted here, not neatly. As if he was solving a jigsaw by forcing its pieces into the wrong places.
‘Did you intend to hurt Finn?’ Marnie asked.
‘I didn’t care. He was a weapon in my war. I used him as I needed to.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Batman.’
‘Okay, but you saw that list of rules and consequences from the house where I kept him. Like the rules Carole used to train Ollie, except Finn was a lot older. He wouldn’t fit in a cage, so I had to handle him differently—’
Noah turned, shaking his head. ‘This isn’t . . . You’re right. It’s too neat. I’m not making any sense. Huell, I mean. Something’s missing. We’ve missed something.’
Marnie didn’t argue. She’d reached the same conclusion ahead of him.
It was why she was here dismantling the evidence board instead of celebrating with the rest of the team. Drinks on DCS Ferguson, basking in the press briefing’s afterglow. Never mind that Finn was in hospital suffering from dehydration and PTSD. Or that Ollie was dead. As far as Ferguson was concerned, it was a result. Case closed.
‘Say you were Huell.’ Marnie touched her neck. ‘Focused on Carole, and Finn. All the other assaults – even the accident of Kyle’s death – just smoke for us.’
‘That feels right. It’s the rest of it that doesn’t. Huell’s connection to Carole . . . I don’t buy it. It’s tenuous, at best. Feels fake.’
‘Something else doesn’t fit,’ Marnie said.
He heard the clench of pain in her voice. ‘What?’
‘When I spoke with Huell in the ambulance, he had no interest in me. It was a relief, if I’m honest. Except that we’re supposed to believe he ordered the break-in at Lancaster Road and blackmailed Aidan into attacking Stephen . . . When I showed him my badge, he didn’t know who I was. Not really. Not obsessively.’
‘You think there’s someone else,’ Noah said. ‘Someone we’ve missed.’
They looked at the almost-empty evidence board. It felt as if they’d scaled an ice-cap only to find, lurking under thick cloud, a hidden summit still ahead.
‘Go back to the role-play.’ Marnie straightened. ‘How did you know to go into hiding when you did? Before we had a warrant out, even before we knew your name. You’d disappeared.’
‘Perhaps I did see Sol at your place. He’s sure he kept out of sight, but he could be wrong.’
‘From what I saw of Sol, he knows how to stay hidden.’ She shook her head. ‘I think someone warned you. You knew exactly when to go into hiding. And when to come out, with your hands up.’
‘Well, I wanted to be arrested. If this was about attention, recognition . . . My face is going to be in the news for a long time.�
�
‘What if it’s the wrong face?’ Marnie searched the photos for the one from Carole’s scrapbook, of the child taken before Ollie. ‘This isn’t you. It isn’t Huell Bevan.’
‘No,’ Noah agreed. ‘It’s not.’
‘Colin dated the print. It was taken twenty-two years ago. That’s nearer your age than mine. Huell’s thirty-five, too old. This child?’ She touched her finger to the face. ‘Is twenty-six now.’
‘So . . . the photo was taken ten years before Ollie was caged by Carole. Whoever this is, they were fourteen when Ollie was taken. That’s old enough to have helped in the kidnap, if Carole was controlling them. Assuming they weren’t rescued the way Ollie was. But we couldn’t find any other missing kids that matched the timeline.’
‘Fran fast-tracked the autopsy,’ Marnie said. ‘Carole gave birth to a child. Not recently. Nothing in the police records, or from the trial. Perhaps she gave the child up for adoption. Or perhaps this,’ nodding at the board, ‘is her child.’
Noah fell silent, hypnotised by the lost look on the small face. Carole’s child. Not one she’d stolen. A child she gave birth to, fourteen years before she took Ollie. No obvious resemblance, unless it was the blankness worn like bruises on both faces. No records from the trial might mean anything. It might mean the child died, that the cage became a coffin.
‘One more thing.’ Marnie’s lips were colourless. ‘When I spoke with Finn in the ambulance, he said Ollie had been in the house with him for days.’
‘Not days,’ Noah said without thinking. ‘He was at Carole’s when he sent me down those steps—’ He stopped. ‘Oh, shit. It wasn’t Ollie?’ His head throbbed. ‘I got it wrong.’
Marnie shook her head. ‘I’m not saying that. It’s more likely Finn got it wrong. He’s dehydrated, traumatised. It’ll be days before he’s ready for a proper interview—’
‘No. It’s me. I got it wrong.’ Remorse made Noah’s teeth ache. ‘When I saw Ollie come out of that house, the way he moved? I knew it wasn’t the same kid. I’d expected to recognise him, but I didn’t. I didn’t.’ He turned away from the board, gripping the back of his neck. ‘Shit . . .’
