by Jack Jordan
‘But the blood … your car …’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Naomi heard the door shut and listened to Peggy and Mitch bicker outside the glass. Panicked breaths shook from her lips. She tried to focus on anything but the blood soaking into the sleeves of her shirt and pooling at her elbows.
The brick could have hit her, Peggy had said. The question was, had it been meant to?
EIGHT
No matter how many mints he popped in his mouth, Marcus could still taste bile at the back of his throat. His stomach growled beneath his second shirt of the day. He had tried to eat a sandwich at lunchtime, only to rush to the toilet and spew it back up at the thought of the pink meat inside Cassie Jennings’ neck. Maybe he would become a vegetarian.
He sat hunched over his desk and read through the list of people in the town who were known to them for the wrong reasons, searching for a link to the murder. Another task Lisa had given him, almost as if she were punishing him for throwing up.
Marcus always forgot how many people harboured dark secrets until he read over their pasts.
The local butcher, whom he had seen just the day before, had spent eight years in prison for grievous bodily harm. He had beaten a burglar with a leg of lamb, grinding his head into the white-tiled floor until flesh was dangling from the animal’s bone. When the police arrived, they hadn’t known if it was lamb splattered up the white tiled walls, or whether the meat belonged to the man twitching on the floor, his scalp sliced open and hanging over his eyes.
‘Team meeting,’ Lisa barked. ‘Now.’
She passed through the office and kicked open the door to the incident room. She had come from a meeting with the superintendent. If she was in trouble, so were they. Marcus piled into the incident room with the rest of the team, who looked equally drained.
Amber O’Neill had applied make-up since the briefing that morning, but it had worn away until all that remained was gloops of mascara in the corners of her eyes. The youngest in the team, she looked as haggard as the rest of them. When she noticed Marcus eyeing her hands shaking on the tabletop, she placed them in her lap.
DS Blake Crouch’s tie hung a couple of inches below his collar. His eyes were red, with inflamed lines framing the contact lenses that he should have taken out hours ago. Some of the dark hairs on his head had turned grey, which seemed to make him more and more desperate to bag the next promotion. Marcus could almost smell the anxiety leaking through his pores.
‘This is horseshit,’ Lisa spat as she looked round at her team. ‘No witnesses. No statements, thanks to the kid being scared speechless. No CCTV. Nothing. The press is hounding every officer that steps in or out of the station and we have absolutely eff-all to tell them.’
Without the uniformed officers in the room, it became abundantly clear how understaffed they were for a murder investigation.
Lisa rubbed the bridge of her nose and sighed. ‘I refuse to be dragged into the superintendent’s office again tomorrow without a single lead. Tomorrow we hit this from every angle we have. I want you all in the office by eight o’clock and waiting in this room for my instructions.’
She looked at Blake. ‘Any luck with the CCTV from the off-licence?’
‘A dummy camera. Hasn’t worked in years.’
‘Anyone from the flats see or hear anything?’
‘Only a few of them were in. I’ll try again tomorrow.’
‘What about previous convictions?’ She turned to Marcus, who immediately sat up straighter. ‘Any red flags?’
‘Some possible suspects convicted of violence against women, but they were all domestic.’
‘Amber,’ she said, so quickly that she made the woman jump. Amber had seemed on edge before, but beneath Lisa’s glare, she looked ready to shatter. ‘Has Dr Ling been in touch with the DNA results from the post-mortem?’
‘The only DNA that was found at the scene belonged to the victim.’
‘Christ.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose, creasing the skin around her eyes. ‘What about the phones? What did the records show?’
Marcus was glad that the responsibility had been passed on to Amber. She rearranged the paperwork in front of her, shuffling through for the right document, the pages quivering in her hands. Lisa watched her impatiently with a clenched jaw.
‘The smartphone was for personal use. Communication with friends and family, sexting with an ex-boyfriend, group chats with her girlfriends, another group chat with colleagues. She had worked for the local newspaper as a reporter for two years—’
‘I know,’ Lisa cut in. ‘What about the second phone?’
Amber turned the page. Marcus wanted to lean over the desk and tell her to take a deep breath.
‘There was only one person she was in contact with using the second phone. There were no texts or voicemails, but lots of logged calls. They started around February this year and stopped the day she died. The number was unlisted.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Lisa said, biting down on her bottom lip. ‘Nothing? Nothing we can trace?’
Amber shook her head.
Lisa pointed at Blake. ‘You’ll be following me tomorrow. I can’t have my staff vomiting perfectly good coffee.’
Marcus’s cheeks burned. He clenched his fists beneath the table.
Blake sniggered under his breath.
‘You think this is funny?’ Lisa asked. Blake shrank an inch in his chair. ‘A woman is dead, and while we play catch-up, the person responsible is out there, potentially gutting another woman as we speak.’ She slammed her palm down on the table. All three of them flinched. ‘Laugh on your own time. Here, you take the job seriously. Understand?’
Blake nodded quickly before dropping his eyes.
‘The press is already trying to tie the murder to the Hayley Miller case. I don’t want any of you even thinking her name, let alone speaking it aloud, you hear? We’ve only just earned back the trust of the town after that shit show. I’m not having anything like that happen again under my command.’
‘What happened last time?’ Marcus asked, forgetting himself.
‘Nothing that relates to this case,’ she spat. ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about it.’
Amber cleared her throat. ‘Hayley Miller’s mother has been calling all day, asking for the superintendent. I tried to deflect her like you asked, but she keeps—’
‘Next time she calls, put her through to me. Now get out of my sight, all of you.’
Marcus stepped out of the incident room and finally breathed. It was only then that he realised he was trembling.
‘Are you all right?’ Amber asked, looking up at him with large, doe-like eyes. She rested a hand on his arm.
He nodded quickly and headed to the toilets. He bolted the cubicle door behind him and leaned against it with his eyes closed, breathing in the smell of piss.
Fuck her. Fuck all of them.
He took a leak, zipped up his fly and left the cubicle. He stopped at the sight of his reflection in the mirror.
He looked exhausted. The dark circles around his eyes resembled bruises from a fist. He bent over the sink and splashed his face with cold water, then glanced back up at his reflection. Bloodshot eyes stared back at him.
‘You can do this,’ he whispered. ‘Just get to a year, and you can move on.’
He wiped his face with a paper towel and headed back.
Lisa was in her office, her chair turned from the desk and her feet up on the windowsill, her phone pressed to her ear.
Marcus took his suit jacket from the back of his chair and slung his bag over his shoulder. Just as he was about to leave, he heard Amber and Blake in the kitchen, whispering harshly beneath their breath.
‘Tell me what to do,’ she was saying. ‘Please, just tell me what I should do.’
‘Why should I help you? What you did could have destroyed my marriage, my career. I don’t owe you anything.’
Blake strode out of the kitchen with Amber pu
lling at his arm. Tears shimmered on her cheeks.
‘Blake, please,’ she begged.
They both stopped at the sight of him.
‘Night,’ Marcus said.
Amber let go of Blake’s arm and wiped her cheeks, adjusted her shirt. ‘Night.’
‘Yeah, night,’ Blake echoed.
You couldn’t have shagged a younger woman you met in the pub could you, Blake? Marcus thought.
Marcus left the station, took a deep breath of the night air, and decided he would go to the pub before he went home, and drink until the memory of the day became easier to bear.
NINE
Peggy pulled the car to a stop outside the café.
‘Mitch used your spare key and took Max home. Let me drop you off, Naomi. You shouldn’t be walking alone at night.’
‘I need the fresh air,’ Naomi replied. She had had enough of the hot, recycled air of the accident and emergency ward.
The hospital was two towns away and severely understaffed. By the time they had been seen and were out of A&E, a road traffic accident had congested every road back to Balkerne Heights. The journey home had taken hours instead of minutes.
She could still hear the screams of the baby with a temperature high enough to scare a nurse into letting mother and infant jump the queue. The sound reminded her why she couldn’t be with Dane: she couldn’t be that mother holding her screaming baby, worrying if the little life she had created was going to survive the night. She wasn’t even sure that she had that amount of love to give. As she had sat in the ward, she had thought of her birth mother. She could have left Naomi in the hospital, in the warmth and safety of others, but instead she had chosen to leave her alone in the dark.
‘And how are you going to hold your cane with those hands?’
The glass had been picked out with tweezers; three cuts had needed stitches. Both hands were bound with bandages.
‘I’ll be fine.’
Peggy sighed. ‘Don’t come in until you’re better, all right?’
‘I can’t afford the time off, Peggy.’
‘It’s paid leave, love. We’re not going to punish you for getting hurt.’
‘Thank you.’
Exhaustion hung from her body. She had to fight to keep her head from lolling back onto the headrest. She could fall apart once she was home. Not before.
‘Sorry again about the window.’
‘Why are you sorry? You didn’t do it.’
Someone was aiming the brick at me.
Peggy left the engine running as she ran inside the café and came back with Naomi’s coat. Naomi climbed out of the car. She could hear Mitch locking up the front of the café, the keys jangling in his hand. He called over and asked if she was all right. She nodded in reply and slipped her arms inside the coat. She hugged Peggy tight and headed off down the street.
The top of the cane sat awkwardly in her grip and jabbed at her wounds. She heard Peggy’s car turn out of the road and disappear into the night. The thought of home kept her moving. Once the door was locked behind her, she would curl up in the chair by the fire with Max by her feet.
The town was eerily quiet. The shops would have their metal shutters drawn over the windows, the lights turned out, sandwich boards brought inside. The wind whistled through the empty streets and sent dead leaves flying past her ankles. It was only then that she remembered what her mother had said: don’t go out after dark.
She swept the stick in front of her, feeling for inconsistencies in the path, which came as vibrations up the cane. When the pain got too much, she switched it to her other hand.
A barge horn sounded out at sea and echoed through the empty streets. The clock on the face of the town hall chimed.
Whenever she walked alone, she thought of her mother, who had helped her memorise the town until she had her own map made up of sounds and steps inside her mind. She had taught Naomi as though it was all a game, counting each step from the house to the end of the street like a beat to a song, likening the cobbles down the lanes to the yellow brick road in the land of Oz, swinging Naomi’s hand to make her smile. There were five lamp posts from the post office to the bank, and four drain covers to the zebra crossing that would lead her across the road to the bakery. When she thought of the woman who had adopted her and gone out of her way to make her feel safe in the world, she wondered what life might have been like had her real mother not abandoned her in the night. She couldn’t imagine that woman spending her day off leading her around the town, walking a few paces behind when it was time for Naomi to try and make it alone with her cane.
Rain began to fall, slowly flattening her hair around her face. She hated the rain; it disguised so many sounds that she needed to hear. By the time she was halfway down the high street, she was soaked through, with rain dripping from her jaw and the hem of her coat.
The smell of marijuana stained the air. A loud burst of laughter echoed down the street. The teens were sitting at the bus stop, smoking and claiming the street for the night.
Naomi tapped her cane against the wall and waited for the end. She could slip down the next side road without being seen.
She turned down the side street, put her hand to the wall, and traced her fingers against bricks until she felt the cool paint of a doorway, then delicately followed the numbers screwed onto the door with her index finger: 15. If she had walked down Straight Lane, as she believed, she was heading the wrong way for home. If she took the next right, she could loop around until she was back on the main road again, out of sight of the teens at the bus stop, who would taunt her like they always did.
She turned right down a narrow footpath, with uneven concrete on the ground. The cane hit the brick walls on either side with every sweep, but she could barely hear its usual scrape along the ground over the pummelling of the rain. The alley smelt of urine and waste, wafting up into the air in a putrid flurry, disturbed by the downpour. The further she went, the louder the sounds grew in the narrow space: her breaths, the beat of her heart, the puddles splashing underfoot.
‘No! No, please!’
Naomi froze.
‘Hello?’
The rain fell around her and tapped incessantly on her coat. She took a tentative step forward.
‘Who’s there?’
She listened to the patter of the rain and her own quickening breaths.
A deafening scream ripped through the air.
Naomi jolted and dropped her cane. She held her breath to listen to the night. A dog barked from a distant garden. Wet leaves bunched around her shoes as she tried to find her footing.
Her legs were shaking. She couldn’t move.
‘Who’s there?’ she whispered.
She crouched down and felt around for the cane. It had clattered against the wet ground and bounced on impact. The collapsible canes were good for storage, but they were too light. The bandages on her hands soaked up the rainwater as she skirted over puddles. Rotting leaves stuck to her fingers. She found the cane lying in the groove between the brick wall and the ground.
She rose to her feet and tightened her grip; if she dropped the cane a second time, she might not find it again. She had moved and turned in search of it, and now she wasn’t sure which way she had come. She stood in the alley listening to the echo of her breaths, trying to remember each turn she had made, listening for breathing that wasn’t her own. She raised her hand in front of her, hoping to feel something, anything, that would tell her she had imagined it all.
It’s all in your head.
A warm hand enclosed hers. She snatched her hand back, stumbled into the wall and pressed her back against the bricks. She covered her mouth with her hand. The bandage tasted of rain and blood. It was her blood; it had to be. A stitch must have come loose. She dropped her hand and felt the bricks with her fingers.
‘Who’s there? Who are you?’
Drops of rain flew from her lips with each desperate breath.
‘Are … are you still there?’
She covered her mouth as soon as the sob came, and tasted the blood on the bandages, blood she knew couldn’t be hers. She turned back and forced one quivering leg in front of the other. Fear seized her muscles and squeezed her heart into a fleshy fist. The cane thrashed into the wall and cracked.
‘Help!’
Blood seeped through the bandage as she tightened her grip on the cane. Heavy footsteps followed behind her in wide strides.
‘Someone help me!’
She rushed through the night, raking the cane against the ground in violent thrashes until it hit something with a fleshy thud. She stopped abruptly and stumbled, teetering on tiptoes. Every bone in her body was trembling. She nudged the obstruction with the end of her cane and felt it rock lightly.
She couldn’t hear the footsteps any more, just the incessant rush of the rain and the anxious breaths blasting from her lips.
She prodded at the obstruction in the hope of finding a way around it, but it took up the lane. She crouched down and lowered her hand.
Material first. Soaked fabric stuck to something meaty. Her fingertips trailed across the wet mass until they grazed skin. She flinched and fell back on her heels, dropping her cane for her hands to take the brunt. Her palms pressed down onto the wet path and tugged at the stitches. A wet cry flew from her lips and echoed down the alley.
She rested back onto her knees and hovered a hand over the body again, begging herself to stop shaking, to take it all in. She had to know if the person was alive. She lowered her hands and felt hair, skin, an unmoving face, and followed it down towards the neck to feel for a pulse. Her fingers pressed against torn skin and slipped into a deep wound. Her fingernails scraped bone.
