by Sarah Hilary
Marnie shakes her head, then nods. ‘I will, soon.’
As soon as she’s figured out a way to separate Ed from his job title.
Victim Support – she grows a spine for each syllable.
Porcupines are always single, poor old ’pines they must not mingle …
There wasn’t much in her parents’ house that belonged to Stephen, but there was this.
A hardback diary bound in manila card, in which Stephen had recorded dates, the start and end of school terms. The date of their murders he had left blank, pristine on the page.
Marnie would have preferred to see the date slashed in black, or ripped from the book. Stephen had marked a date later in the same month, some school trip or other, and this led the prosecution to argue that the killings were unpremeditated, as if otherwise he might have written ‘On trial for double murder’ after the date in question.
Of course she’s not allowed to employ humour in that way, even if it makes her feel better, more human. She must get used to hushed voices when she enters a room, and the shift of eyes away from her. No one likes a victim in their midst. She can’t blame them. She’s going out of her way to avoid victims. Their loss gets in the way of solving whatever crime is responsible for it, like a hazardous spill holding back a fire crew.
‘It’s not a logo,’ she says to Kate Larbie. ‘But I don’t think it’s just doodling. He’s not the type. Everything he does is deliberate. You saw him in court. He doesn’t fidget, he doesn’t daydream. He’s focused. Everything he does is focused. So these,’ she reaches through her shield of spines to put a finger on the page, ‘mean something.’
Kate has covered the open pages of the diary with a square of magnifying glass.
Marnie’s finger leaves a mark, a print. The heat in her eyes paints it red, like the prints in her parents’ hallway where he sat waiting for the police to come.
Circles joined to smaller circles, the pattern repeated at intervals.
This is what Stephen Keele drew in his diary in the days leading up to the one when he killed Greg and Lisa Rome.
Circles joined to smaller circles, empty rings, like eyes on the page.
Marnie refuses to believe that the circles mean nothing. She refuses to repeat the healing mantra that says, ‘Some crimes are without meaning,’ even though she knows it’s true and she’s been told by everyone from Tim Welland to Lexie, her therapist, that this crime was like that: meaningless. She refuses to believe it.
So she puts out spines and she asks questions, of everyone.
Victims rarely ask questions. That’s for detectives to do. She’s proving a point, putting distance between her and the crime, another layer of protection like the new suit, but what alternative does she have? Should she stop asking why?
Why and why and why …
She doesn’t think she can. The questions are all she has and it’s not certain, yet, that there are no answers.
He’s only fourteen years old.
He can’t keep quiet for ever.
People at the secure unit, specialists, are trained in extracting questions from kids who’ve gone off the rails, even ones who’ve done it as spectacularly as Stephen.
She doesn’t know, yet, that he has spines that make hers look like freckles. That he’s as empty of answers as the circles he draws, again and again, in the hardback diary.
She doesn’t know that she will see those same circles again five years later, when she’s asking different questions but with the same intent.
To heal someone’s hurt. To take home answers so that someone can lie down in the dark and weep, until the world comes back upright.
27
Now
Marnie sat in the car outside the Doyles’ temporary home, resting her hands on the wheel and watching the street for Clancy Brand. She needed to see the boy in daylight, not hiding behind a curtain or standing in the shadows. She didn’t trust her memory not to make a monster out of a normal teenage boy.
Her phone buzzed. ‘Noah. What’ve you got?’
‘GPR are just finishing up. They’ve found six bunkers, none of them filled in.’ Noah sounded relieved. Did he?
‘Tell me.’
‘They’re all empty. Nothing with the right mass to be bodies, they seem fairly confident about that. There’s a problem, though, at number 8.’
Number 8 was where Douglas Cole lived.
‘What kind of problem?’
‘Mr Cole is home, finally. And he’s unhappy about the GPR team going into his garden. Very unhappy. He’s asking for you.’
Marnie held the phone to her ear, tenderly, because her skin felt thin and hypersensitive, all her nerve endings alert, on edge. ‘Have they gone in?’
They had the paperwork, nothing Cole could do about that.
‘Only just. It’s getting a bit noisy here. The press want an update. They’re asking for you.’
‘Who’s asking, in particular?’
‘Hang on. He gave me his card …’ She heard Noah searching his pockets and she shut her eyes, mouthing the name in synch with his next words: ‘Adam Fletcher.’
‘Tell Mr Cole I’m on my way. And do what you can to keep the press wide of number 8. I’ll deal with it when I get there.’
Through the car’s windscreen: a loping figure in a hooded jacket.
High shoulders, narrow build.
His hands stuffed into his pockets, his head down.
Clancy Brand.
28
‘Is she coming?’ Adam Fletcher rolled an unlit cigarette between the fingers of his right hand.
Noah hoped he wasn’t expecting a light. He was surprised the man wasn’t self-conscious about smoking so near to a crime scene. But Fletcher didn’t look like he cared much what other people thought of his bad habits. He was aggressively good-looking, at least a couple of inches taller than the slouch in his spine suggested, and healthier than anyone with a nicotine habit deserved to look. Clear skin and eyes, athletic build.
‘DI Rome?’ Fletcher prompted. ‘Is she coming?’ He nodded at the GPR team. ‘That needs a statement, surely.’ A drawl in his voice said he’d spent time abroad, in the US maybe.
‘It’s important you don’t get in the way, sir. I’m sure we’ll have an update soon.’
Fletcher accepted this with a nod. He snapped a disposable lighter at the cigarette, his eyes on Julie Lowry’s house, his free hand shoved into the pocket of his Levis. He wasn’t dressed like the others and he was standing away from the crowd, wearing old jeans and a dark jumper, knackered boat shoes on bare feet. If he hadn’t presented the press card, Noah wouldn’t have guessed he was a journalist. ‘Any chance of a scoop?’ he asked next.
Noah smiled at him. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think she’s got you well trained.’ Fletcher’s teeth were too white for a smoker’s. Maybe he had them bleached every six months. He shut an eye against the smoke lazing from his mouth, and thumbed a crumb of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Where’d you put the kids?’
‘I’m sorry?’
Fletcher jerked his head in the direction of the Doyles’ house. ‘Clancy,’ he drew out the name like a splinter from a thumb, ‘and the others … You moved them all out, right?’
Noah shook his head, sticking to the smile. ‘Sorry, I need to get on with my job.’ He paused. ‘You understand, because you’re just doing yours. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Fletcher gave him a dazzling smile. ‘All any of us can do.’
He was the second person in the same hour who’d wanted to know about Clancy. As if there was something remarkable about a teenage boy being fostered in a house with a secret burial chamber in its garden, as if the two things had to be connected.
Noah needed to speak with Marnie before she walked into this. Not just the press and Douglas Cole; the rubberneckers had started a cordon of their own. Misery merchants, Ron Carling called them. He’d have tried to break up the crowd if he was here. It was one of the reasons Marnie kept Ca
rling wide of crime scenes.
Noah wondered whether Ron had uncovered anything more about the website selling tinned food. The preppers could be a blind alley. Julie Lowry thought the travellers were a better avenue of investigation. Condoms in the garden … Noah couldn’t see the connection to their boys. No evidence of abuse, Fran had said. And no evidence that anyone had opened the bunker since the boys died down there, years before the travellers came, and went.
So why was Douglas Cole in such a state?
Noah moved away from Adam Fletcher, carrying the scent of the man’s cigarette in his clothes. It reminded him of Sol. When his phone played Dan’s tune, Noah knew he was calling about Sol; sensory premonition.
‘Where is he?’
Dan said, ‘He’s here. How did you know …?’
‘I smelt him.’ Noah carried the call away from the crowd.
‘You … Okay.’ Dan laughed, persuasively, like someone who expected the favour he was about to ask to meet with resistance. ‘So he’s here, at the flat. I said he could stay.’
‘Why?’
‘To be friendly … He’s your little brother.’
‘No, why does he need to stay?’
‘He hasn’t said. Just that he wants to crash for a couple of days.’
‘Does he have a bag?’
‘What? Probably, does it matter?’ He heard Dan drop his voice and walk through to the kitchen, where the floors were wood and threw echoes.
‘If he has a bag,’ Noah said, ‘that means he’s hiding out. It probably means he’s pissed off Mum and Dad. We’re his last resort.’
‘Because he couldn’t drop in on his big brother without an agenda? Look, he just wants a bed for the night. We can do that.’
‘Find out if he has a bag,’ Noah said, ‘but don’t open it. Don’t even touch it.’
Dan said, ‘Seriously? Only I was going to get pizza and Beck’s.’
‘I’m working. I’ll be late. Don’t let him smoke in the flat.’
He ended the call and pocketed the phone.
Where was Marnie?
29
Clancy’s go-bag was slung across one hunched shoulder. Inside the hoody, his face was pale, pixelated by teenage spots.
Marnie climbed from the car. ‘Can I have a word?’
The boy’s eyes slid about the street, over parked cars, along the houses, anywhere but her face, her questions. His shoulders were so high they nearly topped his head. Outsized hands and feet, like all adolescents, a width to his wrists that warned her to keep her distance. He was strong. Skinny, but strong; already his shoulders were filling out.
‘Can I have a word?’ she said again.
‘You can have two: piss off.’
Funny kid. Bit of a cliché, but funny. Even slightly reassuring; kids were rude to the police every day of the week. He was just a typical teenager. Except he wasn’t.
‘I have something of yours. Something I thought you might need.’
She watched for a reaction, but he just shoved his stare away from her, to the other end of the street. ‘I don’t need anything.’ Contempt in his voice, but sullen, the sort kids like this reserved for authority figures.
‘Not even your haloperidol?’
‘What?’ The word meant nothing to him. Why would it? He wasn’t a dispensing chemist, or a pharmaceutical technician.
‘Your pills,’ Marnie said.
He kicked a foot at the tarmac. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was wearing beaten-up Converse All Stars, their laces ripped out, caked with dirt the colour of the mud in the garden at Blackthorn Road.
Her neck was hurting her, standing this close to this kid. He stank of pheromones. He wouldn’t let her see his eyes. He was stronger than he looked, and hiding …
The hood, hands buried in his pockets, high shoulders either side of his head; she knew he was hiding something.
‘Clancy, when your dad found that bunker—’
His eyes thumped to her face. ‘He’s not my fucking dad.’
She nearly took a step back, curling her hands in her pockets.
‘Terry,’ she corrected. ‘When Terry found that bunker … did you know it was there?’
He didn’t give an answer, just stood with his black eyes branding her face before loping away, up the street. Heading to the house where Beth was waiting, where he shared a room with Carmen and Tommy Doyle.
Marnie really hoped she hadn’t given him a fresh reason to be angry at the people who were trying to help him.
30
‘How’s Beth?’ Noah asked as Marnie climbed from her car on Blackthorn Road.
‘Stressed.’ Her quick eyes scanned his face. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The rubberneckers have landed.’ He nodded back towards the house.
Marnie’s stare swung in that direction, her eyes snagging on something she didn’t like.
Noah turned and saw Adam Fletcher standing apart from the other reporters, still smoking. Debbie Tanner was nearby. ‘That’s Fletcher, the one who was asking for a statement. He thinks you have me well trained …’
‘Does he?’ She looked unimpressed. ‘Let’s go and see Mr Cole.’ She started in the direction of number 8. ‘How did you get on with the other neighbours?’
‘Julie thinks gypsies had something to do with it. And she doesn’t like Clancy much.’
‘Julie?’
‘Number 12. Immediate neighbour, single mum, lonely.’
Marnie shielded her eyes with her hand to look at him. ‘She flirted with you?’
‘Okay, that was … uncanny. How’d you know?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘What’s her problem with Clancy?’
‘He watches her from the window when she’s sunbathing. And not just her.’ Noah shrugged. ‘It sounded like she was watching just as much as he was. Maybe he does look at her when she’s sunbathing, but she was reading more into it, as if he was a bit too interested in the bunker, the boys.’
‘You didn’t believe her?’
‘He’s just a kid. The way she said it … she made him sound like a psycho.’
‘And kids can’t be psychos.’ Marnie stopped, twelve feet from Cole’s house.
‘I’m not saying that. But our boys died four, five years ago. Clancy would’ve been ten. And he wasn’t living here back then …’
‘Do we know that for sure? I don’t. I don’t know anything about him, only what the Doyles told us, and they don’t know much more than that.’ She moved so that he couldn’t see her face, only her profile. She was watching the press pack. ‘Beth found a stash of anti-psychotics in his room.’ She put her hand in her pocket, took out a foil strip of pills.
Noah didn’t touch it. He remembered his advice to Dan not to touch any bag that Sol might’ve brought to their flat. ‘Clancy’s on anti-psychotic meds?’
‘Beth doesn’t know. She says they’d have been told if he was on medication. That’s a basic requirement on the fostering service, to share information of that kind.’
‘What did Terry say?’
‘I haven’t asked him yet. He wasn’t at the house just now and Beth says she’s not told him about the pills, or about the women she’s seen Clancy hanging out with over on the estate. Two of them, much older than him. Odd, Beth said. Old clothes, grubby …’
Marnie hadn’t taken her eyes off the reporters. Debbie was chatting with Fletcher, her body language making Julie’s look demure.
‘Surely,’ Noah said, ‘they wouldn’t let anyone foster a kid who needed medication like that. For one thing, how could they be sure he’d take the pills? It makes no sense.’
‘Maybe we need to ask the foster service some awkward questions about Clancy Brand.’
He held out his hand for the foil strip. ‘Can I see?’
Marnie handed it across.
The name of the strip meant nothing. None of the pills had been popped from their plastic bubbles. ‘Eight pills. I wouldn’t call it a stash. More like
a souvenir.’
‘A souvenir of what?’
‘I don’t know. But eight pills isn’t a stash. It isn’t even a prescription. Unless he’s hiding more pills, in other places.’ He felt the weight of his phone in his pocket, and wondered how long it would be before Dan tried calling back. ‘He didn’t seem psychotic to me. I know I haven’t see much of him, but …’
‘Beth’s scared of him. She says he’s angry. I saw him at the safe house just now. He was coming back from the park. Something’s not right with him. I’ve seen a lot of angry kids, but Clancy? Something’s not right.’
Noah hadn’t heard this note in her voice before. Cautious, as if she was feeling her way. No, more than that, as if she was afraid. Of Clancy, or what he represented? Her past had long arms, he knew that much.
‘I’ll look into it,’ he promised. ‘Ron’s tracing the travellers. Maybe one of them will remember something.’
‘Fran should be finishing the extra tests. With luck, we’ll finally have names.’ Marnie unfolded her arms, shaking the tension from her shoulders. ‘Right, let’s get this over with.’
They turned in the direction of Cole’s house, stopping when one of the GPR team signalled from the pavement. Serious, a warning in his signal and one eye on the press.
Noah’s chest contracted.
Don’t let it be bodies. You said no more bodies.
‘You’ll want to see this.’ The man nodded towards Cole’s house.
Next door was where the Finchers lived with their little girl, Lizzie.
Protests crowded behind Noah’s teeth. He had to lock his jaw to stop them getting out. He couldn’t go back inside one of those bunkers, not right now. He couldn’t.
Marnie touched a hand to his wrist. ‘I’ve got this.’
Noah shook his head, but before he could speak, a noise travelled from the back garden at number 8, echoing through the hollow walls of the house as it came …
A wail, high-pitched and keening, like a child’s.
31
A weatherproofed shed stood at the foot of Douglas Cole’s garden, its door propped open.
Marnie and Noah crossed the lawn, accompanied by the GPR technician. As they reached the shed, Cole came out. A little man in his fifties, with a thick head of fair hair cut like a monk’s, dressed in a pinstriped suit. His round face was pink, small eyes watering, mouth wide with distress that turned to relief as he spotted Marnie. ‘DI Rome!’
