When She Was Good

by Robotham, Michael

  ‘Normally these screens would be getting live feeds from cameras in the corridors and on the outer fences,’ explains the technician. ‘They tried to destroy the recordings, but the footage was automatically uploaded to hard-drives that are off-site.’

  Justy presses a key and his laptop screen divides into six different CCTV feeds. One of them shows the parking area where two figures dressed in black make low, crouching runs towards the main doors of Langford Hall. In the background I hear the repetitive blaring of car alarms.

  ‘According to the neighbours, they were set off just after two o’clock,’ says Justy. ‘The night supervisor went to investigate.’

  The footage shows a middle-aged man emerge from the glass doors. He’s carrying a heavy torch, which he aims into the parking area and the surrounding gardens. As the light swings towards the camera, red dots appear on his shirtfront followed by a flash of silver as two snaking wires from a stun gun hit his chest. His body spasms and jerks as the electrical current surges through him.

  He’s still writhing on the ground when a black-clad man appears wearing a full-faced balaclava. He pulls a cloth bag over the manager’s head and binds his wrists with plastic ties, before picking up his legs and dragging him inside the foyer and behind the reception desk.

  A second man, wearing similar clothes, follows him through the glass doors and immediately steps on to a chair, aiming the nozzle of a spray can at the camera. I glimpse his eyes before grey paint covers the lens. One by one the CCTV cameras were disabled.

  ‘We still have the audio, but they don’t say much,’ says Justy. ‘From the foyer they went to the control room, where they unlocked the accommodation wing automatically.’

  Justy fast forwards through the footage. ‘This is eight minutes later.’

  We’re looking at the car park again. The same two dark-clad figures are leaving the main doors, jogging under a streetlight and turning down the driveway.

  ‘That’s it,’ says the technician.

  ‘Keep it running,’ I say.

  We watch and wait as the minutes tick by, staring at the static image of a near empty parking area.

  ‘There!’ I say, pointing at the screen. ‘It’s Evie.’

  A lone figure appears in a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a small rucksack. She’s dressed in her favourite jeans and her fake Doc Martens, which make her look like a biker chick. Ducking down between the cars, she peers over the bonnets, before crouching and running from one dark shadow to the next.

  ‘We have to put out a missing person’s report,’ says Lenny.

  ‘Maybe you should let her go.’

  She looks at me incredulously. ‘She’s a witness to a murder.’

  ‘If they think she’s dead they’ll leave her alone.’

  ‘You still haven’t explained who “they” are.’

  I wish I could. Evie’s ‘faceless men’; the creatures of her nightmares. The monsters beneath her bed.

  ‘There’s something I haven’t mentioned,’ I say.

  Lenny taps Justy on the shoulder and nods towards the door. He closes his laptop and leaves us alone.

  ‘I’m listening,’ says Lenny.

  ‘A week ago, I showed Evie some photographs of Eugene Green’s known victims – along with the children who he was suspected of having abducted. She reacted to one of them – a picture of Patrick Comber. Evie wouldn’t confirm it, but I’m sure she’d seen the boy before.’

  Two vertical worms of concentration form in the centre of Lenny’s forehead.

  ‘You’re talking about a paedophile ring.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Evie Cormac can identify the people involved?’

  ‘Their faces, not their names.’

  ‘All the more reason to find her … we can protect her.’

  ‘She’s safer on her own.’

  Lenny doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t know Evie like I do. She hasn’t read the files or seen what Evie can do. How she survived in a secret room while a man was tortured to death and for the weeks that followed.

  ‘She’s been here before,’ I say. ‘You won’t find her unless she wants to be found.’

  * * *

  Lenny is being summoned. I stay with Justy and ask him to search the CCTV footage for a man who visited Langford Hall last Thursday and referred to me by name. Pushing his small round spectacles higher up his nose, Justy makes humming sounds as he types in the search parameters. The screen images keep changing to various camera angles.

  ‘Could this be him?’ he asks.

  A man in a dark suit enters through the automatic doors and approaches the front desk. He’s wearing sunglasses with a metal frame and seems to purposely avoid the CCTV cameras.

  ‘Is there another angle?’

  Justy changes cameras and I glimpse one side of his face. He’s tall and broad-shouldered with short-cropped hair. It could be the man who posed as a detective and visited Eileen Whitmore.

  ‘Go back to the other camera,’ I say. This time I see him from behind. ‘Notice how he walks.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘His left arm doesn’t swing as freely as his right.’

  ‘A disability?’

  ‘He’s wearing a holster under his left arm.’

  ‘Is he a copper?’

  I don’t answer. ‘Can you pull up the audio?’

  The volume is adjusted. I hear the visitor ask about me and the receptionist mentions Evie’s first name. The man clicks his fingers, as though searching for her surname. ‘Yeah, that’s her,’ he says.

  Evie told me she recognised his voice. I shouldn’t have doubted her. Traumatic memories are snapshots preserved like fossils beneath layers of sediment and rock. I can remember every detail of the evening I came home from football practice and found my family dead. The sights, sounds, smells are still with me, playing on a continuous loop.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a booming voice coming from the foyer. Somebody is barking orders and demanding to see DS Parvel. Timothy Heller-Smith, the assistant chief constable, has arrived. He and Lenny have a mutual loathing for each other that stems from a mixture of competitive jealousy and misogyny.

  Emerging from the control room, I see Heller-Smith shouting at a junior officer for some indiscretion. He looks more like a politician than a senior police officer, dressed in a suit rather than a uniform, with his dyed black hair so heavily oiled and combed back across his scalp with such care that I can see every tooth-mark.

  Lenny appears from along the corridor, pushing back the hood of her overalls.

  ‘Since I’m up so fucking early, make my morning,’ says Heller-Smith.

  ‘One girl is dead – another missing,’ says Lenny. ‘I’m informing their next of kin.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘The missing girl may have been the intended target.’

  Heller-Smith frowns, clearly surprised by the news.

  Lenny glances past him and our eyes meet for a fraction of a second. She doesn’t want me dragged into this because Heller-Smith doesn’t like psychologists, or maybe it’s just me.

  Lenny explains the likely sequence of events.

  ‘You’re making this sound like a gangland hit,’ says Heller-Smith. ‘Why would a teenage girl be targeted?’

  ‘We’re still trying to establish the motive,’ says Lenny.

  ‘Are you sure of the victim’s identity?’ asks Heller-Smith. ‘Who identified her?’

  ‘Cyrus Haven knows both girls, sir. He’s a regular visitor to Langford Hall.’

  I clear my throat. Heller-Smith turns.

  ‘Look what Schrödinger’s cat dragged in,’ he says, looking pleased with the pun. I’m sure Heller-Smith doesn’t know the first thing about Schrödinger, but I won’t give him any more reason to dislike me.

  ‘This dead girl – you’re sure it’s Ruby Doyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would Evie Cormac run?’

  ‘S
he’s frightened.’

  ‘Maybe these men came here to bust her out.’

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  Heller-Smith sniffs at the air as though he’s caught a whiff of something unpleasant and turns to Lenny.

  ‘Look to see if she had a boyfriend on the outside. I want to know everything about this girl – who she’s called, who visits her, where she came from. And I want it on my desk by midday.’

  Lenny nods.

  The senior officer turns and strides out through the automatic doors, raising a phone to his ear. I catch the first few words of the conversation as he begins briefing someone.

  In the meantime, a dog-squad officer in blue overalls and heavy boots arrives in the foyer, escorted by a detective.

  ‘The dogs have picked up a scent, boss. She was on Moorbridge Lane about half a mile from here, but left the road at Stanton Gate. She’s on the canal towpath.’

  ‘Heading in which direction?’ asks Lenny.

  ‘South.’

  Lenny looks at the time. It’s been four hours. Evie could be ten miles away.

  ‘OK, I want cars at every bridge, fly-over and canal gate,’ she says, pulling off her overalls. Her civilian clothes are underneath. ‘And I want officers checking every bus and train station. Show her photograph to commuters and talk to staff. Someone else will be looking for Evie Cormac. We have to find her before they do.’

  She summons two detective sergeants to follow her as she strides to her car. As I try to keep up, I pass Heller-Smith outside the main doors. He’s on his phone, but the tone of his voice has changed. I only catch a few words: ‘… the wrong fucking girl,’ he mutters before he catches me looking and turns away.

  43

  Evie

  I’m standing on the walkway of a bridge, peering over the side. The canal is twenty feet below me, where mist hangs over the water like smoke trapped in a glass bottle. I’m cold but it’s better now that I’m moving.

  I’ve run away before from Langford Hall, but usually I head straight for the nearest station and catch the first train, regardless of the direction it’s travelling. Distance is the key. Putting miles between them and me. I didn’t count on the tracker dogs. That’s never happened before.

  The towpath is paved with asphalt and pitted in places, where tree roots have broken through, or puddles have frozen and thawed.

  I draw level with a canal lock, where enormous metal doors are holding back the water. Narrowboats are moored on either side, most of them closed up for the winter. I can hear trains passing, but the railway line is hidden behind the trees.

  I walk for another hour past fields and farmhouses. The sky is growing light and a jogger emerges from the mist. Long and lean, wearing brightly coloured Lycra shorts, he says Good morning as he passes. I see him again on his return leg and he says, ‘Lovely morning’, as though the day has improved between the greetings.

  The next jogger has a dog, a husky, who lopes alongside her with its tongue lolling from side to side. I think of Poppy and my heart aches. Two middle-aged men, walking rather than running, pass by, but I don’t make eye contact.

  The sun is fully up, warming my face as I reach an old stone bridge with an arch underneath, where a family of swans seem to be living. More people are using the towpath, Keiths and Kaths and Jacks and Jills – all of them unaware of what happened last night; how a girl died instead of me. My best friend.

  Factories have replaced the fields. Houses replace the factories. Some with small boats tethered to the bank, covered in tarpaulins that are dotted with duck-shit.

  I’m passing another narrowboat moored to the bank when a bare-chested man steps off. Cursing the cold, he dances from one bare foot to the other. He’s carrying a small white dog that he sets down on the grass.

  ‘Shit or get back on the boat,’ he says, but the dog ignores him and sniffs at the nearest tree. ‘Oh, come on. I’m freezing my bollocks off.’

  The man’s chest is covered in curly white hair, but his head is mostly bald, apart from white tufts above each ear.

  The dog finally squats on a patch of grass with a look of intense concentration, but nothing happens.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. You’re bunged up. That’s what happens when you eat a whole block of cheddar. You have to be the dumbest dog on the—’

  He notices me and stops, raising an arm across his chest to cover his nipples.

  ‘Pardon me, miss. I didn’t expect …’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  The dog bounds towards me, yapping and leaping around my knees. I try to pat her but she’s too hard to catch.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Gertrude.’

  ‘What breed?’

  ‘A shih-tzu – name says it all.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous.’

  ‘She’s constipated.’

  A kettle begins whistling from the belly of the boat, growing louder in the quiet of the morning.

  ‘Damn!’ he says.

  ‘I’ll watch Gertrude.’

  ‘Great. Won’t be a tick. I’m Marty, by the way.’

  He clambers on to the boat and disappears through a wooden hatch. I hear him talking to himself while he opens and closes cupboards. He re-emerges a few minutes later, carrying the kettle and two tin mugs with the tags of teabags hanging over the rims.

  ‘Fancy a cuppa?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He’s put on some clothes: a tatty sweater, khaki trousers and sheepskin boots that are stained with oil. He pulls an old tobacco tin from his pocket full of sugar and polishes a teaspoon on the front of his jumper and offers them to me.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ I motion to the boat. ‘Is this where you live?’

  ‘Home sweet home.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’

  ‘The Happy Divorcee. My wife got the house.’ He grins and shows me a gap in his teeth. Gertrude sniffs at my boots and nudges my hand.

  ‘What brings you out this early?’ Marty asks.

  ‘I stayed at a friend’s house last night.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Yeah. We had a fight.’

  ‘Is he worth fighting over?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re well rid of him.’

  It’s strange when I lie to someone and watch to see if they swallow it completely, or show any signs of doubt. Marty has one of those faces that is so open and easy to read, like I’m looking at pictures in a children’s book.

  I glance along the narrowboat where an old bicycle is chained to one of the side-railings and a small herb garden is growing vertically from a metal frame. Two solar panels are propped on the roof of the main cabin, tilted to face the sun.

  ‘I’m not completely self-sufficient,’ he explains, ‘but I like being off the grid because it stops them spying on me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The government.’

  He gazes up into the clear sky as though we might be under surveillance even now by satellites or drones.

  ‘Hey! You hungry?’ he asks.

  He doesn’t wait for an answer before disappearing below deck and comes back with a glass jar full of biscuits. ‘I made them myself,’ he says. ‘My mother’s recipe. Nothing she couldn’t make. Sponge cakes. Flans. Tarts. Biscuits. She could have cooked for royalty.’

  I take a biscuit, which is hard on the outside and soft in the centre, with dark chocolate bits that melt in my mouth. I don’t realise I’m hungry until I start eating. I pull off my boots and examine a blister on my left heel.

  ‘You should put a plaster on that,’ Marty says. ‘I can get you one.’

  It means another trip into the belly of the boat. He returns and peels the paper backing from the sticking plaster, before pressing it gently on my heel.

  ‘Where is home for you?’ he asks.

  ‘London.’

  ‘I know London pretty well. Where do you live?’

  I try to make up an address, but names
suddenly desert me and I say the first thing that jumps into my head.

  ‘Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘You live at Trafalgar Square!’

  ‘Near there.’

  ‘Maybe Buckingham Palace or Clarence House.’

  He’s teasing me, but not in a way that makes me angry.

  ‘You haven’t told me your name,’ he says.

  ‘Evie.’

  ‘Would you like to go on a cruise, Evie? I’m heading downstream, but there’s a winding hole up ahead where I can turn around.’

  ‘I really should be getting home,’ I say, glancing back the way I’ve come. It’s then that I notice a group of men in the distance. They’re too far away to see clearly, but two of them are holding dogs.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I say, leaping on to the boat. ‘Can we go that way?’

  ‘Certainly. You hold on to Gertrude while I cast off.’

  He’s taking too long to unhook the mooring lines.

  ‘Please hurry.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘The thing about narrowboats is that they don’t go anywhere quickly.’

  Marty unhooks the last of the ropes and jumps on board. He starts the engine in a puff of fumes and leans on the rudder, easing us into the centre of the canal. Gertrude runs to the bow, where she stands like a hood ornament, barking at the ducks.

  I glance back and see that we’re pulling further away from the men and the dogs. They have reached the edge of the canal where the narrowboat was moored. The dogs are jinking back and forth along the bank, noses to the ground, looking for my scent.

  Taking a seat in the wheelhouse, I listen to Marty talk about how he bought the narrowboat at an auction and spent five years fixing it up.

  ‘Sleeps four in two cabins. Four-ring gas cooker. Drop-down table. Microwave. Twelve-volt fridge. All the creature comforts except for a TV, but there’s nothing I want to watch.’

  As he talks, we motor past more houses, some of which look expensive, with gardens that slope down to the water. I begin to relax and lean back, lifting my face to the sun.

  ‘Something’s happening up ahead,’ says Marty.

  I look along the roof and see flashing blue lights on a road bridge above the canal. A police car has pulled up and two officers are peering over the edge of the bridge.