Who Killed Ruby?

by Camilla Way

‘Call me tomorrow when you wake up,’ Stella says. ‘I’ll bring over some ginger and fennel powder.’ She shoots Alek one final look of disapproval, before closing the door behind them all.

  Viv lies back on the sofa. ‘God, I’m sorry, Alek. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me tonight. I must be coming down with the flu.’

  He nods thoughtfully and disappears off to the kitchen, returning with a glass of water. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Drink this.’

  Cleo wakes to the sound of her phone bleeping and she blinks in confusion. What time is it? She glances at her clock: 12.30 a.m. She stares down at herself. Why is she wearing all her clothes? Then realization hits her and she snatches up her phone in panic and reads the text on her screen. At the end of ur street. Can u meet me outside ur house? it says. Hurriedly she types OK before stuffing the phone in her back pocket and creeping from her room. Glancing at her mother’s bedroom door as she passes she sees that it’s slightly ajar, and scarcely breathing in case she wakes her she tiptoes down the stairs. The house is dark and silent as she grabs her coat from where it hangs on the end of the bannister. Then, very slowly, she reaches for the front door’s handle and turns it. She waits for a few seconds to check that there’s no sound from upstairs, then lets herself out.

  On the pavement she shivers as she glances from left to right. The street’s completely empty. She looks down at her phone in confusion but there’s no further text from Daniel. ‘Where is he?’ she murmurs. But just then she sees a figure approaching from the far end of the street. She wraps her arms around herself for warmth as she squints at his approach. It looks, she realizes, like a grown man, not a fourteen-year-old boy, and, standing alone in the dark she experiences a small ripple of doubt. A minute later, however, when the figure passes beneath a street lamp twenty yards or so away, her face clears with recognition and she smiles in relief. ‘Oh! It’s you!’ she says as he draws near. ‘What are you doing here?’ When he doesn’t reply she falters in confusion, ‘Why are you … have you come to see Mum?’

  He smiles then, and it is only as he walks the last few feet towards her that she sees in his face something that makes her freeze. The person who is approaching her is entirely different from the man she’d met; the eyes that look back at her utterly devoid of warmth. As he reaches her, she understands somewhere deep inside herself that it was only a mask he wore before and she just has time to cry out once for her mother before a folded wedge of fabric is forced over her nose and mouth, and as soon as she breathes in its sharp chemical smell she falls backwards into darkness.

  Viv opens her eyes. She’s not sure what woke her. For a minute or two she lies there, drifting in and out of sleep, dimly aware of her headache, her parched mouth. It’s only when she turns over, groping around for her duvet, that she realizes something’s wrong. Fully awake now, she sits up. There is no duvet. She is lying on the living room sofa, still wearing her clothes from yesterday. What is she doing here? Looking around herself in confusion she sees the glow of the buttons on her Sky box, moonlight trickling in through a gap in the curtains.

  She squints at her watch. Almost 3 a.m. Her mind’s groggy, her headache sharpening into stabbing knives of pain, her throat so dry she can barely swallow. Slowly the evening comes back to her. The dinner party. She remembers standing outside by the wheelie bin, feeling very ill. She rubs her head and tries to recall what happened after that. Through the fog in her brain she remembers her mother, Ted and Samar putting on their coats and going home. Then … what? Alek handing her a glass of water … but beyond that everything’s blank. She shivers and stumbles to her feet, turning on the lights as she goes into the kitchen where she sees the table, covered in plates. Running the cold tap, she drinks directly from its stream, then splashes some more water on her face. What happened to Alek? Did he simply let himself out when she fell asleep? Embarrassment mingles with her confusion.

  Exhausted, she fills a glass with water and goes upstairs to bed. On the landing she pauses outside Cleo’s bedroom and, seeing that her door is slightly ajar, tiptoes over and glances in. Moonlight streams through the open curtains falling in two bars across Cleo’s bed. Cleo’s empty bed. She feels a bolt of shock, walking further into the room, looking around in confusion. Her daughter isn’t there. She switches on the light, then calls her name. ‘Cleo? Where are you?’ but there’s no reply. It takes less than a minute to search the house, running stupidly from room to room, panic building until she can scarcely breathe. ‘Cleo!’ she cries, ‘Cleo, where are you?’ But there’s no answer.

  12

  A police car’s engine growls outside Vivienne’s house, blue lights flashing silently. Another, unmarked, vehicle waits further down the street, two officers standing next to it conferring quietly. Neighbours peer from bedroom windows, awoken by the commotion. A Detective Sergeant Ian Marshall and Detective Constable Giovanna Spilleti sit at her kitchen table, regarding Vivienne seriously.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me again from the beginning,’ says DS Marshall.

  She wants to scream with frustration. ‘I’ve been through this with your colleagues already. This is Jack Delaney’s doing. I know it is. I reported last month that he’d made contact, but I was pretty much dismissed. And now he’s got my daughter! Why aren’t you out looking for her? You have to find her, she’s only thirteen!’

  Her voice is shrill and desperate, but Marshall merely nods calmly. ‘Please rest assured that we are doing everything we possibly can to find her.’

  Viv stares back at him. DS Marshall is in his early forties, a thin, redheaded man, with tired eyes drooping at the corners, large freckles covering his pale skin. The woman sitting next to him, DC Spilleti, is in her late twenties, with the sort of Mediterranean looks that make one think of olive groves and dappled sunshine, though when she speaks her accent is more Lewisham than Tuscany.

  Above their heads another officer searches Cleo’s bedroom, though for what she has no idea, and they listen to his tread on the ceiling before Marshall speaks again. ‘As I said, we need to be absolutely sure of the events leading up to Cleo’s disappearance last night. If you could go through the details one more time.’

  Viv sighs and closes her eyes, gathering herself before she repeats her account. ‘We had some friends around for dinner …’

  Spilleti glances at her notepad. ‘That would be your mother Stella Swift, Dr Aleksander Petri, Ted Johnson and Samar Basra?’ she says.

  ‘Yes. My neighbour Neil joined us for an hour or so. My daughter ate with us then went upstairs to bed around ten.’

  ‘And how did she seem?’ asks Marshall.

  She shakes her head helplessly. ‘Normal. Like I’ve said. She just seemed normal.’ She has already called every one of Cleo’s friends, dragging them from their beds only to be told they’d neither seen nor heard from Cleo since school on Friday. She has told the police that to disappear in the middle of the night is entirely out of character for her not-at-all-streetwise child. And yet they persist with the possibility that Cleo has gone of her own volition, making Viv feel trapped in a nightmare where she’s screaming into a vacuum, everyone around her apparently deaf to her panic. She wishes that her mother was here to take control, to make them see, but Stella, herself frantic with worry, has been told to stay at home in case Cleo should turn up there.

  At that moment a male officer comes in holding something in his hand. ‘Found this in the gutter, Sarge,’ he says to Marshall.

  Viv’s heart stiffens as she recognizes the pink and blue stripy case of Cleo’s mobile. ‘That’s my daughter’s phone! That’s Cleo’s!’ She rises and tries to take it from him, but the officer holds it back. DC Spilleti gets up and indicates that the officer should follow her from the room.

  The detective sergeant continues to stare at Viv expectantly. ‘And you didn’t see or hear Cleo after she went up to bed?’ he presses.

  ‘What?’ Dazedly she turns her attention back to him. ‘No. My neighbour Neil left shortly afterwards, m
y mother, Samar and Ted left about eleven, I think, and …’

  ‘And what about Dr Petri? Did he leave too?’

  ‘No. I … I fell asleep. I had started to feel unwell. I guess I crashed out, and he must have seen himself out.’

  Marshall considers this. ‘And what is your relationship to Dr Petri?’

  ‘We were … seeing each other. He was a customer at my café, but we had begun dating.’

  DS Marshall nods. ‘And it was a sexual relationship?’

  She holds his gaze. ‘What has that …’ she sighs. ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘OK, so tell me how you discovered that Cleo was missing. You said you woke up on the sofa?’

  ‘Yes, like I said, I’d been feeling ill. I guess I’d had too much to drink, although …’ she pauses, reflecting on the quantity of wine she’d consumed – it hadn’t been that much, she was sure – nowhere near as much as she has drunk on other occasions when she’d barely been affected at all. ‘But anyway,’ she continues. ‘When I woke up at about three a.m., Alek was gone. I went upstairs to bed and looked in on Cleo, but she wasn’t there. And then I phoned the police.’ Tears spring to her eyes and impatiently she swipes them away.

  Marshall waits until she’s composed herself. ‘We have officers interviewing your dinner guests at their homes now and we’ll also be talking to your neighbours to see if anyone in the street happened to see anything,’ he says. ‘We’ve also called Cleo’s father to tell him to be alert for her turning up at his place, and we’ll be keeping him abreast of the situation as it continues.’

  She looks at him imploringly. ‘You have to find Jack Delaney. You have to trace him. He’s behind this, I’m certain he’s taken her.’

  ‘And why do you think he’d want to do that?’

  She shakes her head helplessly. ‘Revenge? Punishment? I don’t know! Like I’ve told you, my evidence put him in prison. He’s always said that he’s innocent …’

  She breaks off as Spilleti appears at the door once more and beckons Marshall into the hall. He glances apologetically at Viv as he rises and leaves the room, closing the door behind him. For some minutes Viv sits alone, staring unseeingly into space. She checks her watch: 6.02 a.m. Cleo has been missing for between three to seven hours already.

  It had taken a long time for the police to arrive – almost forty-five agonizing minutes, due, she was told, to a double stabbing on Peckham High Street. While she’d waited, after calling Cleo’s friends and then Stella, she’d tried to contact Alek to see if he’d noticed anything strange when he’d left earlier. Unsurprisingly at three thirty in the morning it had gone straight to voicemail, so she’d left a brief, panicked message telling him the police were on their way. After that she’d paced restlessly until, wanting to keep herself occupied, she’d cleared up the kitchen, mechanically picking up every plate and bowl and glass and depositing them in the dishwasher. She’d moved as if in a dream, the work soothing her, barely noticing as she scraped Neil’s cheesecake from bowls, emptied wine and water glasses, even the Tupperware pot holding the remains of Shaun’s disgusting apple turnover, until the room had been entirely spotless.

  She goes to stand at the window. It’s starting to get light and as she peers out she sees some of her neighbours on their doorsteps staring over at her house and the police cars outside it, or else standing in groups, deep in conversation. The woman who lives opposite appears, holding her toddler on her hip; she makes eye contact with Viv and gives her a cautious, concerned smile before turning away.

  One thought, sickening but insistent, runs on a constant loop inside her head. When you went to sleep, Alek and Cleo were here in this house. When you woke up, both were gone. She thinks about the Albanian wine Alek had been so insistent that she drank; she thinks about how edgy and odd he’d been all evening, how she’d caught him staring so intently at Cleo, and then she thinks about how the last thing she remembers was him handing her a glass of water, how uncharacteristic it was of her to sleep so deeply without her sleeping pills. So deeply in fact that she didn’t even wake when Cleo left the house, despite the fact she was lying only feet away from the front door. A sickening possibility occurs to her like a cold hard punch and she runs into the hall.

  ‘DS Marshall!’ she calls, coming to a halt when she sees him. ‘I think Alek—’

  But before she can finish, he asks, ‘What can you tell me about your daughter’s friend Daniel?’

  She stares at him blankly. ‘Cleo doesn’t have a friend named Daniel.’

  ‘Cleo has been in regular contact with someone of that name, purporting to be a fourteen-year-old boy. He texted her at twelve thirty a.m. to ask her to meet him outside this house. Whoever Daniel is, it seems likely that Cleo is with him.’

  She shakes her head in confusion. ‘But I don’t understand … she doesn’t know any Daniels!’

  Marshall considers this, before saying, ‘From what we can tell, they have been talking via text and email for several weeks.’

  ‘What? But she would have told me! We don’t have secrets from each other—’ She’s interrupted by the appearance of Spilleti and it’s then that she remembers her fears about Alek. ‘Listen,’ she says desperately. ‘I think Aleksander Petri has something to do with Cleo’s disappearance.’

  The two officers exchange a glance. ‘And why do you think that?’

  ‘Because he was acting so strangely all evening. I think he drugged me. He kept getting me to drink this wine he’d brought over. He was behaving so oddly; jumpy, barely talking … ask Samar and Ted, they’ll tell you the same. And he’s a doctor, so he would know what drugs to use.’ The more she talks, the more certain she becomes. ‘Oh God!’ she says, frantic now. ‘You have to find him!’

  ‘But why would Aleksander want to kidnap your daughter?’ Spilleti asks.

  She thinks about his grubby flat, his obvious lack of money despite what must be a relatively decent wage. ‘I don’t know. Maybe … maybe Jack Delaney paid him.’ And as soon as she’s said this, she knows that it’s true, that it is exactly what has happened. And she feels shame and fear and misery like she’s never known before. Alek led Jack to Cleo, gave her to him like a gift, and she, her mother, had allowed it to happen. ‘You have to find Alek,’ she tells Marshall, her voice rising in desperation.

  He nods. ‘We have officers heading to his address. Do you have the wine glass you drank from last night?’

  Viv closes her eyes in despair. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I put everything in the dishwasher. Oh God, I didn’t think. I didn’t realize. I just wanted to keep busy.’

  When the officers have left her alone, though it’s a form of self-torture, Vivienne tries to call Alek’s phone over and over, but every attempt results in the same cold silence: no ringtone, no voicemail message, nothing. She closes her eyes in despair when she thinks how she’d left a message on his phone telling him that the police were on their way, unwittingly warning him they’d be knocking on his door soon enough. He’d be long gone by now. She thinks about how he’d come to her café, how easily she’d fallen for him, how effortlessly he’d sucked her in. He and Jack must have planned their deception from the beginning and she – desperate, foolish, gullible – had fallen for his lies.

  Seeing a movement outside on the street she goes to the window where she watches Marshall and Spilleti emerging from Neil’s house before pausing to confer quietly at his front gate, their expressions giving nothing away. She checks her watch: almost eight a.m., the winter sky turning gradually paler as it slowly shakes off the night. People have begun to emerge along the pavement, heading for buses and trains, and she watches as they stride obliviously towards her house before slowing, a look of astonishment and curiosity on their faces when they spot the police and their cars. They turn to peer through her window, looking guiltily away when they see her standing there. Finally, Viv moves to the sofa where she sits motionless, her daughter’s name pulsing through her like a heartbeat. Come back to me, come back to me, please, Cleo
, be safe.

  When DS Marshall returns ten minutes later she can tell that there’s been a development. She waits, her heart in her mouth, as he takes the seat next to hers. ‘Mr Basra and Mr Johnson have been questioned by our officers, and their stories concur with yours; that you were taken ill and Alek Petri was with you when they left.’

  ‘And Alek?’ she says urgently, searching his face.

  Marshall looks at her gravely, confirming her worst fears even before he speaks. ‘I’m afraid that we have, as yet, been unable to locate Dr Petri. He was not at his address when our officers called and after they forced entry it was clear that he’d left in something of a hurry. We’re trying to ascertain his whereabouts.’

  So she’d been right. The realization lodges in her throat, hard and bitter. She wonders how much of his life had been a lie. ‘What does the hospital say? Does he even work there?’ she asks quietly.

  To her surprise, Marshall nods. ‘King’s College has confirmed that Mr Petri is employed by them. He’s due to start a shift there this afternoon, in fact, so we’ll have officers waiting for him.’

  She nods mutely, already knowing it will be pointless.

  ‘Vivienne,’ Marshall says, ‘since your mother lives nearby, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to go and wait with her. We need to conduct a thorough search here, so it might be easier for you to …’

  ‘Why do you need to search this house?’ she asks dully.

  ‘It’s standard procedure. I really do think it would be best if you go to your mother’s. An officer can drive you round there.’

  ‘No. I need to stay here in case Cleo comes back.’

  ‘There will be police here at all times, and we’ll tell you as soon as we have news.’

  His tone is polite but authoritative and she thinks about her house being filled with strangers, searching through her and Cleo’s things. She’s hit with a sudden longing to see Stella and at last she nods and allows herself to be guided to one of the waiting police cars. She sits in the back, a cold emptiness filling her as the engine starts and they pull away.