by Steve Mosby
‘A female in her twenties.’ Swann paused. ‘It looks like she’s been tied up and left to die.’
That pulled him up slightly. He hadn’t been expecting that.
‘Like the one in May?’
‘Yeah.’ And the one last year.
‘Give me the address.’
Swann did.
Currie resisted the urge to ask the usual questions. Swann had been his partner for over ten years now, and he’d already have the scene contained, everyone moving.
‘Give me half an hour.’
‘Sam - I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’ll see you soon.’
Currie hung up, then turned the cap around on the bottle of whiskey: click, click, click. The smell rose in the air and he took a long swig, allowing the liquor to burn into his tongue and the sides of his mouth, branding them with the silky taste before he finally swallowed. Immediately, his throat burned bright, followed by his chest.
‘Happy birthday, Neil.’
He left the bottle closed and almost full, resting out of sight behind the headstone. Someone might take it, of course - either a groundsman or a derelict - but that was all right. In fact, it was probably what Neil would have wanted.
Half an hour later, Detective Sam Currie was standing in the doorway of a hot bedroom to the south of the city centre, looking at the body of Alison Wilcox.
She had been found by her ex-boyfriend, Roger Ellis, earlier that morning. Ellis was back at the department now, awaiting further questions, and Currie imagined the man would probably be suffering from what he’d experienced. He’d attended two scenes like this himself in the last year and a half, and the sight of the bodies still shocked him. Police work had brought him into contact with a great deal of violent death, but in this case it wasn’t the assault that appalled him so much as the indignity and inhumanity of what had been done. And perhaps what hadn’t.
Alison Wilcox’s body looked thin and wasted, her skin slack and yellow. Her hands and feet were bound to the bedposts by thick coils of leather - and the hands in particular were dreadful: bent at the wrist and frozen into waxy claws. But if the case was like the others, they would find little actual violence had been done to her once the attacker had subdued his victim. The bindings had been all that was necessary to kill her.
Behind him, scene-of-crime officers were moving slowly through the house while, in front, the pathologist, Chris Dale, was squatting on his haunches beside the bed, tilting his head as he examined the body. A bluebottle landed on her thigh and Dale brushed it away. It settled a moment later on the side of her face, and began rotating slowly.
Standing beside him, James Swann popped a piece of chewing gum into his mouth and then offered Currie the packet.
He took one. ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
‘Looks the same as the others. You were right to call me.’
Swann didn’t reply for a second, then said: ‘Sad to think of her, isn’t it? Alone like that.’
Currie nodded. Other detectives might have frowned on such an emotional statement, even delivered in such a controlled way, but it was one of the reasons he and Swann had lasted so long as partners. And it was sad. Assuming they were dealing with the same killer, Alison Wilcox had been tied up and left here to die slowly of thirst.
There was some controversy within the medical field about what that was actually like. Some said the body produced pain-numbing chemicals after the first day or so, while others maintained it was a hellish way to die. What wasn’t in doubt were the physical consequences and processes. As Alison Wilcox’s body dehydrated, she would have lost the ability to sweat, and her body would have heated up intolerably. Her mouth, tongue and throat would have become agonisingly dry; her skin would have cracked like parchment. Any urine she managed to pass would have been increasingly concentrated, becoming so hot it burned her. At some point, as her brain cells dried, she would have grown feverish and confused. Eventually she would have fallen totally unconscious. It could have taken her anywhere between a few days and two weeks for her organs to shut down - blinking out like lights - and for her body finally to die.
And throughout that time, nobody came.
Because of the anniversary, Currie thought about Neil again. When he’d stood outside his son’s house on the day he found him, he’d noticed the building seemed darker and more potent than those around it. The sun beat down on the neighbours’ houses, while Neil’s was in shadow, and everything had been too still. As he’d opened the gate and walked through the litter-strewn garden, a part of him had already known what he was going to find inside.
Now, he wondered whether anyone had felt something similar as they walked down the street outside this house. How could they not? It seemed impossible. There was a pocket of sadness around the whole scene. Her death was nothing short of an accusation.
Swann’s mobile went then, breaking his thoughts, and his partner moved back down the landing to answer it, muscles bunching beneath his pale-blue shirt sleeves.
Dale, the pathologist, stood up.
‘It’s certainly consistent with what we’ve seen before,’ he said. ‘Difficult, in these circumstances, to determine the actual cause of death.’
‘Dehydration?’
‘Yes. It’s likely to be organ failure, but it’s possible her throat was so swollen that she was unable to breathe any longer.’
Currie chewed the gum slowly. His own mouth felt dry.
‘There are no obvious indications of sexual violence, and no apparent injuries, aside from the bruising to the wrists and ankles.’
She’d fought against them, of course.
Currie said. ‘And she was kept here?’
‘It looks that way. The state of the bedclothes would indicate that, although it’s impossible to know for sure right now.’
The state of the bedclothes. Currie’s gaze flicked across the soiled, crusted sheet beneath the body. He wondered if she’d been embarrassed at first, before she stopped caring: before embarrassment gave way to panic, maybe even madness.
‘Ideally we should get her back as soon as possible,’ Dale said. ‘I’ll be able to be more exact then.’
‘No. We need her in place for a while.’
It went against his instincts to leave her body in situ. Currie stared at her and imagined time passing, uncaring, around her. His thoughts produced a stop-motion video of Alison: fighting at first, and then spasming as muscles cramped; her head moving from one side to the other, like a dreamer in a nightmare. The days and nights brightening and darkening the room as she died by increments.
The video uncurled in Currie’s mind, and he felt sorrow for each lonely moment that nobody had come to find her or check she was okay. So he wanted to get her out of here - finally - but they were too late for that to make any difference anymore. The only thing they could do for her now was catch the man responsible.
‘We can’t afford to miss anything on scene.’
‘Of course.’ Dale nodded slowly, then puffed up his cheeks and blew out. ‘I’ve got a few calls to make. I’ll be back.’
‘Okay. Thanks, Chris.’
Currie moved aside so the pathologist could leave. A moment later Swann rejoined him, clicking his mobile shut then running his hand through his close-cropped hair.
‘We’ve got traces on the phone calls,’ he said. ‘The first one was made from the phone downstairs. The second, the one using Alison’s mobile, was sent from the street outside.’
Currie put that together.
‘He watched Ellis come in, then played him the recording again.’
‘Looks that way. They’re going through Wilcox’s phone accounts now to look at activity over the past couple of weeks.’
Currie was sure what they were going to find - that the killer had sent his usual holding messages to Wilcox’s family and friends - doing just enough to convince them she was alive and well. It was frightening how easy it was to assume someone else’s identity, he thought. How re
liant society had become on communication that was ultimately impersonal. Emails, texts, Facebook profiles. People never stopped anymore. Just flitted around each other’s lives obliviously, like butterflies.
Swann indicated his mobile.
‘That was Collins, by the way.’
‘Yeah? What did he want?’
‘The domestic last week. You remember it?’
Currie raised an eyebrow.
He remembered it, although ‘domestic’ made the assault sound somehow more palatable, as though it had just been some petty disagreement. In reality, the girl, Tori Edmonds, had been badly beaten by her boyfriend. Even so, as unpleasant as that was, it wasn’t the kind of disturbance that would normally have registered for very long. A couple of elements had lifted it out of the ordinary.
The first was the girl herself. Something about Tori Edmonds had struck Currie when they visited her in the hospital. She seemed … not innocent, exactly, but more open and vulnerable than he was used to. From the moment he’d seen her, he’d felt protective. Perhaps it was as simple as that. The reaction had made him even angrier with her errant boyfriend, a man called Eddie Berries. When faced with something valuable, Currie divided people into two groups. There were those who treasured it, and those who couldn’t bear it. Some people, for some reason, always felt an urge to bring others down to their level.
Tori Edmonds seemed like a good kid - intelligent, sharp and clean. The more they learned about her boyfriend, Edward Berries, the more he seemed a strange fit for her: a low-level dealer and addict by some accounts; a general waste of space by many others. No criminal record, but hardly a catch. They certainly seemed an incongruous couple. But then, Edmonds was also known to consort with Charlie Drake - Choc to his friends - and Drake was a far more dangerous proposition on every level. Apparently they’d met while organising club nights when Edmonds had been a teenager. These days, Choc was known to run a large portion of the city’s cannabis trade, practically single-handedly.
It was an ungodly mixture, and it meant that Berries needed to be found quickly, not least for his own protection. After what he’d done to the girl, of course, most police probably wouldn’t sleep too badly if someone got hold of him first. Many would even feel he deserved whatever was coming to him. Currie wavered on that one, but if his son’s death had taught him anything it was that you didn’t abandon people. No man left behind. Whatever you might think of him. Especially when someone like Drake was involved.
‘So where are we up to on that?’ he said.
‘There was a disturbance reported earlier this morning on Campdown Road: a guy was pulled out of a squat and bundled into the boot of a car. The description matches that of our friend Eddie.’
‘Small, ugly and worthless?’
‘That’s almost word for word. And the address looks right for his place on Campdown.’
Idiot doesn’t know when to lay low, Currie thought. But then, they were all like that, weren’t they? A self-destructive spiral wasn’t the most obvious place for someone to start acting clever.
Currie chewed the gum thoughtfully.
‘What about the bundlers?’
‘They were black.’
‘That’s a start. Car?’
‘Also black. Four wheels. You know the area. Nobody wants to talk.’
Currie grunted. There were certain people’s business in the city that you didn’t want to get involved in, and everyone knew it. Drake was somewhere near the top of that list.
‘Nothing doing for now,’ Swann said. ‘Not round there.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘We will. But we have bigger things to deal with now.’
Currie looked down at the dead girl again, her head turned slightly to one side. On one level, he didn’t like what his partner’s words implied. Priorities. The idea that Berries didn’t matter; that they could simply let him go in favour of someone more important. But at the same time, he knew Swann was right. Somewhere in the city, Alison Wilcox’s killer was moving on. Someone else would be lying there soon. Waiting. Forgotten.
Suddenly, Currie felt very weary.
Swann said, ‘Head back and talk to Roger Ellis?’
‘Yeah.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s do that.’
Chapter Three
Sunday 7th August
Tori had explained she suffered from manic depression the first week we were together.
We’d been out that evening at the travelling fairground that parked on the moor once a year, and we’d spent the evening breathing hot-dog fumes in the freezing air, sticking candyfloss to our faces and leaning into each other on the waltzers, traffic lights and fruit-machine noise whirling around us. Later, back at my flat, Tori had been sitting cross-legged on my bed, rolling a joint on a magazine balanced over her slim thighs. The whole time she told me about her illness, she stared intently at the construction, not looking up once.
She’d been sectioned twice before, but thankfully not for a few years. Nevertheless, it remained a condition she lived with every day, and if I was going to be involved with her, I had to know what it could mean. Even though she took both medication and great care - she said, with a wry smile at the joint - it could still affect her at any point in the future. When she was finished she looked up at me, and I didn’t see the faintest trace of self-pity. This is who I am.
Despite her expression, I think that deep down she worried how I would react: that I might not want to be with her anymore, and that this, in turn, might shake some foundation she’d fought hard to get level. It didn’t change anything for me, of course, and I told her so. But in her face, just for a moment, I saw someone who’d had her sense of identity and self-worth swept away, and then had to stand in the eye of that tornado while the pieces of everything she’d believed about herself whirled around in the air. She had gathered them back together and clung on tightly.
If anything, as patronising at it might have been, the challenges she’d faced, and the way she faced the world afterwards, made her even more important to me. I told her, ‘You’re the sanest girl I’ve ever been out with,’ and I meant it.
Two years later, as I drove to Staunton, I felt guilt and anger spreading through me. It wasn’t my job to check up on Tori, but she was still my friend, and maybe I could have done something to help if I’d only taken the time.
That’s what happens. People slip if you let them.
I arrived just after two.
The hospital was built on the side of a gently sloping hill: a series of pale, single-storey buildings spreading out and down, some connected, some not. There were tall hedges along the roadside, with a single entrance to the car park, manned by a guard. The gravel beyond was white and carefully levelled off, while the fields around the wards were neat and luscious: bright green in the sunshine, with the lollipop trees nodding gently in a calm breeze. The car park was half full, but when I got out of the car everything was incredibly quiet. The hospital and its grounds were designed to be as tranquil as possible.
I walked down the path to the main entrance, smelling cut grass in the fresh air. Once inside, the main corridor was quite busy, and I glanced into some of the other wards as I passed them, seeing nothing to differentiate them from those in a normal hospital. By contrast, when I reached Eight, I was faced with a set of blue double doors, magnetically sealed, with a touch-key pad on the wall beside them. That brought it home - the fact that my friend was confined here. It was for her own good, but it was still strange and sad to think we couldn’t walk out of here together if we wanted.
I buzzed the intercom and the door was opened a minute later by a young, unshaven man in casual clothes: jeans and jumper. The name tag attached to his belt told me his name was Robert Till, and that he was a care assistant.
I said, ‘Hi. I’m here to see Tori Edmonds.’
‘Right.’ He let me in. ‘Tori’s outside on the patio. It’s at the end. You need to sign in and then I’ll walk you down.’
‘Thanks.’
Ward Eight was basically a long, wide corridor with doors branching off it. There were bedrooms off to the left, some open, some closed. None appeared to have locks on, but there were white boxes painted on the floor around doorways, clearly indicating ‘exclusion zones’ for guests. The air smelled of a combination of cleaning products and unidentifiable school dinners.
‘I feel awkward asking,’ I said, ‘but what should I expect?’
‘Have you ever seen her during a manic episode?’
‘No.’
‘Well, she’s getting better. She’s sedated a little, but just talk to her the way you would anybody else. How do you know her?’
‘We went out together a couple of years back.’
‘Oh, okay. Are you the magician?’
‘Kind of. Journalist, really.’
‘She’s talked about you a lot. She’ll be pleased you came. Even if she doesn’t really show it.’
Towards the end of the corridor there were large rooms to either side. We went right, into an area filled with comfortable seats and tables with magazines fanned out on them. Groups of people were dotted around, and it was difficult at first glance to distinguish who might be a resident or a visitor. The atmosphere appeared quiet and relaxed, somewhere between a hospital ward and prison visiting hours, but much closer to the former. These people were patients, after all, and so the security was subtle and unobtrusive, designed to disappear unless you looked for it. Locks on the windows; assistants casually mingling. But aside from the patio doors in here, the keypad at the entrance appeared to be the only way in or out. As Robert led me across, I noticed the large security bars here as well.
Outside in the sun, light-brown paving stones ran the length of the hospital building, the walkway expanding into small squares at the external doors of every ward. There were semicircles of wooden seats at each, linked by tables, and cylindrical bins topped with sand for extinguishing cigarettes. People were sitting or standing all the way along, smoking, talking carefully, or just squinting against the sun and enjoying the fresh air.
Tori had her back to me, but her hair was tied up to reveal the star tattooed on the back of her neck and I recognised her immediately. She was sitting with a bunch of people. One was painfully thin, her skin almost yellow, and I presumed she was another patient. There was an older couple next to this girl, who I guessed were her parents.
