Behind Closed Doors

by Elizabeth Haynes

  They were on a road that was no more than a track, and behind them was a structure that looked like some kind of farm shack or outbuilding—concrete walls, a single window, a bright light like the motion-sensor-activated security light that they had at home on the front of the garage. This one lit up the uneven ground, revealing a rusted pickup truck with no wheels, a kennel.

  Somewhere—though not in the kennel—a dog was barking, hadn’t stopped since the van doors had opened. It sounded like a big dog, the ro-ro-ro of its bark throaty and deep. Above that, the incessant carolling of the crickets and the buzz of the cicadas. She thought of those insects, the great ugly beasts like the one Nico had shown her, all around. Everywhere, out of sight but never out of earshot.

  “Where am I?” she said. “Where is this place?”

  “You come with me,” the younger one said. He pulled her by the elbow—not roughly, but then he didn’t need to. There was nowhere she could have gone.

  “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

  He laughed—a short, high laugh, oddly girlish. “I do nothing with you. In the morning, you meet your new friends.”

  LOU

  Thursday 31 October 2013, 15:49

  The traffic to Knapstone was bad, unusually. Ferries had once sailed from here to the continent, which meant that the town was accessed by a dual carriageway, straight from the motorway which led back to Briarstone. The ferry company had given up ten years ago, right about the time that a pretty fifteen-year-old named Scarlett Rainsford had disappeared while on a family holiday in Rhodes.

  It turned out that a lorry had jack-knifed across both lanes, leading to stationary traffic backed up nearly to the motorway. It was being cleared, apparently.

  Lou considered turning on the lights and speeding up the hard shoulder, but only for a moment. Being late for a briefing wasn’t technically an emergency, and the traffic was starting to creep forward, suggesting that somewhere up ahead the emergency services had managed to open at least one lane.

  Scarlett Rainsford.

  She’d always expected to hear that name again one day, but in all honesty she had never for one minute believed the girl was still alive. They had made mistakes with it, undoubtedly, which had been bad for the force at the time; and that was after the initial investigation by the Greek police had missed so many opportunities. The Eden police had come to it late, which was never good. Within forty-eight hours they’d had a team out in Rhodes, but by then they’d all been working on the assumption that Scarlett had been murdered. They were expecting to find a body, because that was what the Greeks were expecting too. By the time they’d established that there was no evidence to support this theory, crucial opportunities had been missed.

  Back in the U.K., even as a DC new to Major Crime, Lou had been able to smell disaster.

  Scarlett’s sister and her father had returned to the U.K. just a week after the holiday had been supposed to end. Her mother stayed out there on her own, but after another two weeks she too returned. The whole family had waited just three weeks for Scarlett. It didn’t seem very long. It was as if they, too, believed she was dead. Or maybe, Lou had suspected at the time, they even knew she was.

  Well, she thought, as she finally managed to get her car out of first gear, she’d been wrong about that.

  Knapstone police station had a tiny car park, for which it considered itself lucky. Even so, there were no spaces, and several cars were double-parked. Lou went back out again through the exit barrier, cursing. It was five to four. She hated being late. She drove around the streets nearby, looking for a space that wasn’t marked as Residents Only, and eventually found half a space, leaving the car with its front tires sticking out over a double yellow.

  She signed in at reception and was directed down the stairs to Special Branch, where she had to knock to be let in. A young woman in jeans eventually answered the door, and when Lou explained why she was here there was a bit of discussion with someone over her shoulder.

  “They’re upstairs, on the fifth floor. Our briefing room’s in use for another job.”

  Lou found the lift. She’d been to the fifth-floor briefing room before, because it was the one Major Crime were invariably allocated when something kicked off in Knapstone. That was good: familiar turf.

  But of course by the time she got there the briefing had started and she had to creep in. And there weren’t many people there either, so everyone turned to look at her and the paunchy man with thinning hair who was speaking at the head of the boardroom table—actually eight scuffed laminate tables pushed together, mismatched chairs around the perimeter—stopped what he was doing.

  “You are?” he said.

  “DCI Lou Smith,” she said.

  “Have a seat,” he said, without introducing himself. He didn’t need to. He could only be DCI Stephen Waterhouse, and she hated his guts already.

  All the seats around the table were taken, but two guys at the corner nearest to her shuffled their seats around to make room. She pulled a hard plastic chair from under the window and squeezed between them. As she did so, her mobile buzzed in her bag. She pulled it out, checked the message in case it was urgent—it wasn’t—then adjusted the volume to silent. Waterhouse hadn’t resumed his speech.

  It was stuffy in the room and Lou sensed an atmosphere. She looked around the table: six men, one woman—an older DC with short, graying hair. Nobody was smiling, and now they’d all had a good look at her they were avoiding meeting her eyes.

  “Right, for those of you that don’t know: DCI Smith was part of the original investigation into Scarlett Rainsford’s disappearance—when she was a DC. Mr. Buchanan wants her involved.”

  Lou chanced a smile but still none of them looked up. SB were not normally this grim. She’d been on nights out with them—not this lot, admittedly, but generally speaking they were a “work hard, play hard” bunch. People joined SB and didn’t leave. It was considered a good place to work.

  “So,” Waterhouse said, looking directly at her for the first time, “what can you tell us?”

  He had to be joking, right? She’d barely sat down, and he was wanting her to show her hand first, as if this was some sort of test? She glared at him.

  “As you pointed out, I was a DC in Major Crime back then. I interviewed the family.”

  “And?”

  Lou took a deep breath. She was going to have to put herself on the line, clearly, in order to get into the gang. “Didn’t feel right. I know that’s easy to say with hindsight. The family was odd—Scarlett’s sister was monosyllabic, hostile at first; the father was polite, helpful as far as it went. When the mother came back she was in a bad state emotionally.”

  “What happened with the Greeks?”

  “It was pretty chaotic. One minute they wanted our help, the next they didn’t. They told us some bits and left out other important things. They thought straight away that she had been killed and disposed of. Somehow the investigators who went out there got the impression they had evidence that she’d been killed, some forensics—but there was nothing like that. So for a couple of days we were looking for a body when we should have been checking the ports.”

  “To be honest, we all thought it was the dad.”

  Lou looked around in surprise. It was the woman who had spoken. Lou tried to work out who she was, but drew a complete blank. It bugged her—she was normally better at faces than this.

  “Go on,” Waterhouse said.

  “He was all sorts of weird, wasn’t he?” she said, looking at Lou for support.

  Lou nodded. Who the hell was she? She couldn’t remember—there had been loads of them on the case initially—several women—but none of them fitted. The dark hair, peppered with gray . . . slim figure. Lou stole a look at the woman’s ID badge, hanging around her neck on a non-standard issue lanyard. It was a Federation one, she realized. Was she a Federation rep?

  “He was helpful,” the woman continued, “without any of it actually being
useful—and then he was keen to go back to the U.K. with Juliette. She ‘couldn’t miss her schooling.’ One minute he was out rooting through the undergrowth, organizing search parties with all the tourists and ex-pat Brits who were showing an interest, then all of a sudden he’d booked a flight for him and his daughter and he was off. And then, what you said about the forensics, ma’am—there was a suggestion that they’d found blood in the room—the parents’ room, not the one the girls were in—but the Greek police didn’t secure the scene properly and the place was cleaned. We took a couple of our CSIs out there but we didn’t find anything.”

  She must have been one of the original lot who went out to Rhodes, Lou thought. She couldn’t remember there being a woman on the team.

  “So the father wasn’t arrested?” Waterhouse was back looking at Lou.

  “No. We had nothing to arrest him for,” Lou said. “When we interviewed him—”

  “We’ve all seen the transcripts,” Waterhouse interrupted.

  She glared at him. “I was going to say this: he came across as personable one minute, aggressive the next. He was getting up out of his seat, fiddling with his glasses. Then he would sit perfectly still, calm. You don’t get a sense of that from the transcripts.”

  The man sitting immediately to her right—young; fair hair with too much gel on it—straightened in his chair. As if he was expecting the meeting to descend into a physical brawl at any moment and he wanted to leap for the door.

  For a moment, Waterhouse stared her out. Then he looked away, his cheeks coloring as though he was hot or dangerously angry. “Anything else?”

  Much as it pained her to provide him with anything other than a single-finger salute, Lou didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of shutting her up. “Yes, actually. I believe there was a crime series going on at the time, with young women going missing from Rhodes and Corfu. From what I understand, Scarlett wasn’t included in the series because she didn’t fit the criteria. For a start she was so much younger—the others were all in their late teens, early twenties, all on holiday with groups of friends rather than parents. They were multiple nationalities, too; none of the other missing girls were British.”

  “How many?”

  “There were five, I think,” the other woman said. “Two went missing from Rhodes, three from Corfu. The Greek police were reluctant to get us involved with that, too.”

  Waterhouse considered this. He must have read about it in the file, Lou thought, and he probably knew more about it than any of them. As a DC at the time, Lou had only had access to a tiny part of the investigation. The senior officers at the time—all of whom were now retired—would have had the overview.

  “Right then, tasks. Caroline, I want you to direct the debrief interview. Josh, you’re liaising with SOCA or the NCA or whatever the fuck they’re calling themselves today, and the U.K. Border Agency. Once we’ve done that, we need to bid for a surveillance team on Maitland and another one on Lewis McDonnell—Andy and Tim, you’re on that, right?”

  Wait, Lou thought. “Hold on. You said Maitland and McDonnell?”

  Waterhouse breathed out heavily through his nose, laid his hand flat on the gray cardboard file on the desk in front of him. “Yes?”

  “I’m assuming you’re talking about Nigel Maitland. What’s he got to do with it?”

  Nigel Maitland—suspect in the murder of Polly Leuchars, the case that had pretty much consumed Lou’s every waking moment for the last year. Nothing they’d had had been able to touch him. She’d known SB were looking at him, but even though they’d tried to get some more intelligence, something useful, Major Crime had drawn a complete blank.

  Everyone was looking at her again, the way they had when she’d first walked in. Waterhouse clearly wasn’t going to share anything that hadn’t been prised out of him like a crumbling cork from a bottle. It was Caroline—the one with salt-and-pepper hair, whom Lou suddenly and conclusively recognized as Caro Sumner, then DC with the Metropolitan Police, who had been on attachment to the investigation and had, once, appeared in front of the press with a statement that had gone horribly wrong—who finally spoke and shared the crucial bit of information.

  “We think he’s the one who trafficked her.”

  SCARLETT

  Sunday 24 August 2003, 06:57

  She had slept. It hadn’t been for long, since when she opened her eyes she felt as shattered as when she’d closed them. She had dreamed that she was awake, running, fighting—exhausting dreams about hope and hopelessness, as though her brain was spending the downtime trying to work its way toward a solution, and finding none.

  The room she was in held a dirty mattress on which she was lying, and a bucket which she had used last night. She could smell the urine and her own body odor. Her hands were covered in dried blood, crusted around the edges of her fingernails. She rubbed it off her palms and felt her nose carefully, then her eyes. The ache blended seamlessly across her face, and the skin of her nose felt tight and hot. By squinting she could see the bridge of her nose: it was wider than normal, and even in the half-light the color of it looked wrong. It looked bruised.

  She pushed herself to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall, waiting for the pounding, dizzying feeling to subside. She felt as if she was going to be sick, saliva flooding her mouth, and she gulped it back. The door of the room, a rough splintered wood with a space of a couple of inches at the bottom, was closed.

  It was worth checking. She stood, gingerly, keeping her head low, her hands on her knees. The nausea swelled and subsided.

  It was locked. Even the bottom of the door didn’t move against the frame when she gave it a boot. The impact, as feeble as it was, jarred her head.

  “Hey!” she called. “HEY! Let me out, you stupid Greek fuckers!”

  Silence. Had they gone, left her behind?

  She crossed to the window. It was small, head-height, and the window was pushed open as wide as it would go on a lever. Beyond that, metal bars prevented it opening further. She stood on tiptoe to try to look out, but all she could see was scrubland—uneven ground, dusty-looking trees, and low hills in the distance. No buildings, no vehicles, no people. No sign of life.

  Then the hopelessness hit her like a wave and the tears welled up and spilled over her cheeks. She dabbed at them with her sleeve. Her face hurt, her head hurt.

  “Mum,” she sobbed. To her own surprise—“I want my mum . . .”

  The tears lasted a while—long enough for it to be properly daylight, and for the heat to start to penetrate into the room—and then her eyes were dry and sore. She sat on the mattress and waited for what would happen next.

  10:20

  The patch of sunlight had moved from the corner of her room around to the floor.

  Scarlett had screamed, given up screaming because nothing happened, no one came; the only result was that it made her head hurt. Eventually she had lain down on the mattress because there was nowhere else to sit.

  The dog started barking. It sounded further away, muffled, as though it was in another building some distance from where she was. Again, that throaty bark of a big jowly dog. She had even begun to picture it. Jaws big enough to crush a human skull.

  And then she heard voices, from a way off—as though they were approaching the house. A male voice, then a response from another man—a laugh.

  And a woman, a girl. High-pitched voice. She couldn’t understand what was said but heard the tone of it—she was pleading. Afraid.

  The door opened a few moments later and Scarlett got to her feet, thinking they were going to pull her out of the room, but instead two women were shoved into the room with her. The man at the door was not either of the men who had brought her here. The door shut as both women started yelling in a language she didn’t understand. The man outside the door shouted something and the tone of his voice—or perhaps they understood him—made them stop; both of them stepped back and away.

  The door opened again and he threw in
a polyethylene shrink-wrapped bundle. Bottled water. A pack of six 500ml bottles of water that landed on the floor and bounced once. Then the door closed again.

  The two women pounced on the bottles of water, fought over them. The polyethylene was ripped, the bottles tumbled out over the floor and before she could help herself Scarlett was there with them, grabbing at the bottles before they were gone or busted and spilled.

  Somehow despite all the pushing and shoving they managed to end up with two bottles each. Scarlett retreated to the mattress, clutching the bottles to her chest, watching the two newcomers. They were talking to each other in hushed, desperate whispers. Other than fighting over the water they had barely acknowledged her presence, and now they were sitting cross-legged on the floor facing each other as they drank.

  The dark-haired one was taller, lankier, her back a long curve; the wrists protruding from her long-sleeved T-shirt were bony, angular. The other one had bleached hair, dark at the roots, half-tied into a knot to one side of her head, long greasy strands of a fringe that she was growing out either deliberately or for want of a hairdresser falling across her eyes. Both of them looked grimy, in need of a good wash. But then she probably looked the same.

  “My name’s Scarlett,” she said at last. She felt tears starting again.

  The blonde one was talking, and carried on as if she hadn’t heard. The dark one turned her head and stared at Scarlett.

  “Do you speak English?” Scarlet whimpered. Her voice sounded off-key, thick, as if she was bunged up with a head cold.

  “A little,” the dark-haired one said. The blonde one still hadn’t so much as cast a glance in her direction. And then she raised a hand, the palm flat in Scarlett’s direction. She said something to her companion, the language foreign but the meaning clear from the sharp tone. An instruction: Don’t talk to her. Don’t trust her.

  “What’s your name?” Scarlett said, gulping back a sob.