Rabbit Hole

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Alice—’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Bearing in mind everything you’ve told me, I can see why you might—’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  He sits forward. ‘Nobody’s disputing that you discovered the body, and because of that, you already know that we were able to recover a knife from the crime scene. Under one of the sinks, just like you said it was. The post-mortem confirmed that this was the murder weapon and forensic tests carried out on the knife since then have provided us with all the fingerprint and DNA evidence we could have asked for.’ He waits, to be sure I’m taking it all in. ‘That’s why I’m here. Because we have solid evidence pointing us towards an individual on this ward.’ Now, he actually smiles. ‘It’s not you though, Alice. OK? It’s not you.’

  Once the shock has worn off a little, he can obviously see the question on my face, and if he hesitates, it’s not for long. I’m probably looking a bit desperate and pathetic by this point, like a dog that doesn’t know why it’s spent the last week being kicked.

  So he does me the favour I’m asking, copper to copper. He tells me who he’s come to arrest for the murder of Debbie McClure.

  ‘No way.’

  He nods. ‘It’s their prints on that knife and their DNA. Goes without saying I’d like you to keep this information to yourself . . . for the next twenty minutes or so, at least.’

  ‘Why the hell would they want to kill Debbie?’

  ‘That I can’t tell you,’ he says. ‘Because I haven’t got the first idea. I intend to find out though, obviously.’

  I’m too stunned to say anything else. Sort of . . . looking down at myself while I’m trying to process what he’s told me. It’s not until I see him reaching round for the box of tissues on the shelf behind him that I even realise I’m crying.

  ‘Something else you were wrong about.’ He slides the box across the desk. ‘Debbie McClure wasn’t the one passing drugs to Kevin Connolly, and she wasn’t the one who killed him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They got prints off a few of the bottles that were found in his room. We brought someone in for questioning and arrested them for murder yesterday afternoon. Thought you should probably know.’

  I stare at him, struggling to think straight. To think at all.

  He stands up and pulls on his jacket. He comes round the table and stands over me, a little awkward. ‘Maybe you should give yourself five minutes before you go back out there.’

  I can’t do much other than nod and blub.

  The detective moves towards the door, then stops. He says, ‘You’ve got nothing to feel bad about, you know. You shouldn’t blame yourself. I mean, I say that, but you probably will. Because that’s what the likes of you and me do, isn’t it?’

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Obviously I was joking before and I don’t really think Marcus and his team ever whack up the dosages to make their lives a bit easier, but you certainly couldn’t blame them today. I mean, if ever there was a time that might have called for some creative medication . . .

  Everyone does seem strangely subdued, though, and you don’t usually get that with all the patients at the same time.

  All the patients and all the staff.

  Nothing’s been arranged, there were no announcements or whatever, but while the arrest is being made the rest of us find ourselves hanging about like statues in the TV room. For once, the telly’s just a big dusty box in the corner and nobody seems to care very much. Nobody seems to know what to do or say or why we’re here at all.

  It’s like everyone’s just . . . gathered. Cows in a field.

  I’m happy enough to sit there and enjoy the stillness and the quiet, and it’s lovely to be ignored even if it’s only for a few minutes. To vanish. True to form, none of it lasts very long and it’s obvious that most of the people I’d stupidly thought were quietly contemplating the morning’s events were actually gagging to sound off about them.

  As soon as the first one pipes up, the dam well and truly bursts.

  ‘You ask me, it was always on the cards.’

  ‘Yeah, course it was. There was always something very iffy about that one.’

  ‘Not just iffy. Dangerous . . .’

  ‘Dangerous, right. I always knew that.’

  ‘No, you did not,’ I say. ‘None of you knew anything.’ Heads turn and, just like that, I’m not invisible any more, but that’s all right because I no longer want to be.

  It’s what always happens, isn’t it? As soon as a killer is discovered, they come pouring out of the woodwork: the ordinary gobshites who waste no time in letting everyone know – especially the papers who are usually paying for it – that they always knew there was something ‘off’ about their neighbour or workmate or acquaintance. I’ve never been able to abide that sort of cobblers, especially when I was one of those whose job it was to catch the killers in the first place.

  To pick up the pieces afterwards.

  ‘If any of you really knew anything, why didn’t you tell the people who might have been able to do something about it?’ Suddenly, they’re all a bit less keen to share their opinions. ‘Don’t you think that might have been helpful? I mean, if you had, then maybe Debbie might still be alive. If you actually knew and you’ve kept quiet about it until now, then some people might say you’re partly to blame for her being killed.’

  Now there’s some nodding, a few grunts of agreement.

  It’s nice.

  ‘Yeah, that’s fair enough, I suppose.’

  ‘Sorry, Al. Yeah, sounds a bit stupid when you put it like that.’

  ‘Right. I mean, you’re the one who understands all this stuff, being a copper and everything . . .’

  There are more nods and a couple of them ask me what I think will happen now. I tell them that no two cases are ever the same, then talk them through the basic stages of the process, from arrest to prosecution. I talk and it’s the best I’ve felt in a while, because everyone in that room is hanging on every bloody word . . .

  It would be lovely if that was what had actually happened after I’d made my big speech about responsibility. It would have been the high point of a very strange day, but life isn’t like that, is it? Not on Fleet Ward, anyway.

  Instead, there’s some cat-calling and a stifled giggle. One of them asks me who the fuck I think I am and someone else tells me to piss off.

  They don’t even know about who killed Kevin yet – well, the patients certainly don’t – and I’m sure that when they do, when they find out how wrong I was, I’ll be in for some serious stick.

  I can live with that.

  I’ve grown used to being doubted and threatened and scared.

  Being laughed at feels like nothing any more.

  I’m aware of movement in the corridor outside and someone stands up to announce that the police are leaving. That’s the cue for the rest of us to jump to our feet and crowd into the doorway. Nobody says anything, but we crane our heads, elbow and jostle to get a better view.

  I briefly catch the detective’s eye as he and the uniforms guide their suspect, none too gently, towards the airlock.

  We stand and watch as Lauren is led away in handcuffs.

  PART THREE

  HEADS OR TAILS

  FIFTY-NINE

  Ilias just called to say Lucy’s going to meet us in the pub and he’ll be round to pick me up in ten minutes. I told him that was fine. The truth is, though, I’m actually in a bit of a state, because I don’t want to keep him waiting, but I’m not ready and I still can’t decide which top to wear.

  I stand in front of the mirror and hold the two tops I’m trying to choose between up against myself.

  Black or red, black or red, black or red?

  Why is this so difficult?

  I might just toss a coin, like I do a lot these days. I
use a heads-or-tails app on my phone and actually it’s been working out pretty well. Not just for stupid stuff like which outfit to put on, but for all the important decisions, too. I’m still not finding it very easy to trust my own judgement, but I reckon that’s understandable, all things considered.

  Just a question of time, really.

  I’ve been out of hospital a couple of months now and I’m doing all right. To start with, I was transferred to a halfway house type place for a couple of weeks which wasn’t brilliant, but then the council came up trumps and found this place. It was here or going back to Huddersfield and even though Mum and Dad said they’d be happy to have me home, I wasn’t sure they really meant it. Plus, you know . . . Huddersfield. This place is handy, because it’s just across the bridge from Brent Cross, on the top floor of a house that’s been converted into flats. I’ve got a decent-sized room and access to a small garden. I can’t say I’ve exactly bonded with the other tenants but that’s probably no bad thing. The bloke on the ground floor with one ear and a scary dog is definitely dealing crack. For some reason his cooker’s out in the hall, so sometimes I come back late and find him frying sausages just inside the front door. There’s a woman below me with a baby and I’m not sure which of them wails the loudest, and there’s some other bloke I’ve never seen, but I smell him on the stairs sometimes and I can hear him swearing in the middle of the night.

  I think it’s best if I keep myself to myself.

  That’s not to say I don’t have a social life, because I get out and about as much as I can. There’s no Wi-Fi here, so I walk over the bridge to the shopping centre every day. I sit in Costa for a couple of hours, have a coffee or a sandwich and get online. I try to keep in touch with people. Banksy seems to have gone AWOL, but I talk to Sophie and one or two others.

  And I see a fair bit of Ilias and Lucy. They both got out of hospital before me, but we talked on the phone, and as soon as my section was done and dusted and I was finally out of there myself, we started meeting up. If we go out, Lucy tends to pay for most of the meals and drinks, but I think that’s fair enough. Even though her parents live in a house that’s probably got a gift shop she still gets benefits, if you can believe that, so she can afford to put her hand in her pocket. Lucy’s still . . . Lucy, but I don’t think she’s back on the smack and she actually high-fived me the other day, so she’s way better than she was.

  Me and Ilias have actually become dead close. We talk all the time and he’s got some fantastic stories and even though he’s still not great with . . . boundaries, I’m not expecting him to whip his cock out at any moment. Like, he told me all about his older brother teaching him to drive and about this horrible car crash just after Ilias had passed his test. He told me how he walked away without a scratch, while his brother’s been in a wheelchair ever since. He told me that his brother was the good-looking one and the clever one and, as it turned out, the unlucky one. It was his brother who’d taught Ilias to play chess, too, and he’s actually really good.

  Well, he thrashes me every time we play, but I’m slowly getting better.

  Most of the time, when we’re together, we end up talking about what happened on the ward. Why wouldn’t we? I don’t think we’ll be sending Christmas cards or anything, but we gossip about what the others are doing and about all the stupid things that happened and we usually end up laughing.

  As to what did happen on the ward, it would be fair to say I wasn’t surprised that Lauren never got charged, or when she came marching back into the TV room on her first night back, every bit as chopsy as always. More so, after being held in a cell for a couple of days. I wasn’t surprised when Ilias started pointing and chanting you’re not singing any more and Lauren slapped him hard enough to knock him off his chair.

  If you want to know what I think, the detective’s heart had never really been in it. I’d seen it, that moment when I caught his eye as they were leaving with their prime suspect. Of course, he had to arrest Lauren because of the DNA and the prints on the knife. He had evidence. The only problem was the evidence he should have had but didn’t.

  Rusty as I was, even I’d worked that much out.

  Why hadn’t Lauren been covered in blood? I’d seen how much of it there was, I’d seen the stab wounds, so I knew, same as the detective knew, that by rights she’d have been covered in it. They’d taken everyone’s clothing away for forensic testing and they hadn’t found so much as a drop of Debbie’s blood on Lauren’s precious T-shirt.

  Now, it seems obvious why the detective wasn’t particularly worried. He was simply going through the motions by arresting Lauren, when he probably knew all along that he already had Debbie’s killer in custody, because it was the same person who’d murdered Kevin.

  Poor old Shaun’s still in hospital, and so is Donna and Tony got moved to the ward downstairs. Bob’s section got extended, although all anybody’s been able to find out is that he made ‘inappropriate advances’ to one of the nurses. I think it was probably Mia, but Lucy says she heard it was Marcus, so who knows? I’m not sure what happened to Tiny Tears or the Jigsaw Man and I don’t much care.

  We’re all doing OK, though, me and Ilias and Lucy. We talk and we share things and we look after each other. Last time we were out, Ilias raised his pint glass and we toasted.

  ‘To the three mental musketeers . . .’

  So, this place isn’t a palace and I’m not exactly minted and I’ve all but given up on ever working with the Met again, but I still think I’m doing pretty well. Most important, my head’s together for the first time in a long while. I’ve worked everything out. I know now that what’s important when you’re dealing with a bastard like PTSD is that you face it head on.

  Then, you can own it.

  If you don’t, you’re just playing some part you think makes other people comfortable, and that’s when you end up with a mask you can’t ever take off.

  Whatever that Alzheimer’s drug was must have done the trick, because the blackouts stopped happening pretty quickly and all those things I’d forgotten started to come back. Just flashes at first, but then longer and longer stretches until there weren’t any holes any more.

  Now, I can even remember the song that was going through my head just before walking into that toilet and finding Debbie’s body. I remember the blood, the shape of it pooling around her like wings and I remember turning and seeing the knife. I can recall every moment of it with perfect clarity. Too perfect, sometimes.

  I can remember exactly how I felt, too. The desperate need to do something, that instinct to preserve life kicking in, and then the panic and the horror when I realised that I couldn’t. The memory of those few desperate minutes in that toilet has returned, complete and terrible.

  Only now, of course, I know there was someone in there with me.

  SIXTY

  I open up the app, press the button and watch the virtual coin spin.

  There’s a nice, satisfying clink as it lands.

  I start to put the black top on . . .

  Back in the MDR that day, when the detective told me I’d been wrong about who had killed Kevin, I’d felt like a mistreated dog that had been given one final, hard kick for good measure. Sitting there and sobbing, I remembered being with Shaun in the TV room, the night he collapsed and stopped talking. His eyes shifting and fixing on the nurse who was sitting in the corner and me, like the smartarse I am, thinking I knew what he was trying to let me know.

  No, not just a nurse, you idiot. That nurse . . .

  I remembered the same terror on his face when he was writing me those messages, when I didn’t give him time to explain the very last one.

  There’s something i need to tell you.

  Now I know what that was and I can finally understand what I’d thought was his confusion about why Debbie had been killed. During the course of my so-called investigation into Debbie’s death, I’d asked myself a
few times if I was being stupid in never suspecting Shaun. Well, I was and I wasn’t. The fact is, though he was not unhappy that a woman he hated was dead, Shaun never had a motive for killing Debbie, because he knew she wasn’t the one who’d killed Kevin.

  He’d known who that was all along.

  Malaika.

  Now I can’t decide which colour lippy to go with, so I quickly reopen the heads-or-tails app and that decides for me.

  Electric Orchid, if you’re interested.

  As to why Malaika killed Debbie, the best guess is because Debbie found out about what she’d done and was threatening to expose her. Poor Debbie, who had been trying to do the right thing, but could not have known just what the person she was dealing with was capable of.

  The clearer everything becomes in my mind, the worse I feel every day about what happened to Debbie and guiltier about the things I believed she’d done. Not just Kevin’s murder, but the whole . . . sexual abuse thing. I did believe it, for a while at any rate, but now it seems obvious that it was all about convincing myself (and Banksy) that I was after the right suspect. Maybe I just resented Debbie being a bit . . . offhand when she examined me that first day. Or it could just be that I got what actually went on mixed up with what Lucy told me had happened to her.

  To be fair, I was mixing a lot of things up back then.

  I say best guess, by the way, because Malaika still hasn’t come clean about a great deal. I only know this because the detective told me a couple of weeks ago, but he didn’t tell me too much I hadn’t already worked out. The truth is, I put most of it together myself.

  I can still do that.

  So, here’s the thing. You have to walk through two doors to get into that toilet. Two doors. There’s a pointless little space when you step through the first door before you open another to go into the actual toilet, and those few seconds between the first and second door opening were crucial.