Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  It didn’t much matter now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tanner said. ‘But we can’t divulge any information about our enquiries at this point.’

  ‘Which teacher is it?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘As I said—’

  Thorne stepped forward and tried to pick up where he’d left off, before he’d been interrupted by the Wood-Wilson woman. ‘As of now, we just need to ask you a few questions about one of the other parents, that’s all. A woman we’ve been led to believe you were friendly with. I’m afraid we don’t have a name or a description.’

  ‘If it’s any help,’ Tanner said, ‘you probably won’t have seen her for a few days.’

  They all looked at one another.

  ‘Sarah.’ David nodded. ‘Well, I certainly haven’t seen her. I mean, she could be unwell, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve not seen her either.’ Heather looked at Thorne. ‘She hasn’t been at drop-off or pick-up, so maybe it’s Jamie that’s not well.’

  ‘Jamie’s the name of her son, right?’ Thorne said. ‘That’s what she told you?’

  Heather looked at him.

  ‘Sarah … if that’s the woman we’re all talking about … didn’t actually have a child at this school. We’re not sure why yet, but for some reason she was just pretending she did.’

  ‘I knew there was something strange about her.’ Caroline turned to Savita, who had yet to say anything at all. ‘I said that to you, didn’t I? Yes, there was definitely something … off about her.’

  Savita appeared a little uncomfortable to see that everyone was now looking at her. She said, ‘Why would she do that? Why would you want to pretend?’

  ‘I never ever saw Jamie.’ David nodded, as if he finally understood. ‘Not once. Did anyone else?’

  Heather and Savita shook their heads.

  ‘Well, of course you didn’t,’ Caroline said, as though she had worked everything out months before.

  ‘Do you know Sarah’s second name?’ Tanner asked. ‘Or have any idea where she lives?’

  There was more head-shaking. ‘Sorry, it just … never came up,’ Heather said. ‘You chat at the gates, you have a coffee in the morning, whatever. That’s it.’

  ‘What about a phone number?’

  Heather reached for her phone and began scrolling. ‘Yeah, I’ve got one …’

  ‘I didn’t know you were that close,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Well, we were friendly enough, so we swapped numbers. Here you go …’

  She handed the phone across. Thorne dialled, then shook his head. ‘Not in service.’

  Tanner did not look particularly surprised.

  ‘Oh,’ Heather said. ‘I only called her the other day.’

  Caroline nodded towards David and Savita. ‘I mean, we’ve got each other’s numbers, but that’s because we’re involved with various school committees. Our kids play together.’

  ‘Sarah never really wanted to join in,’ Savita said.

  ‘True,’ David said.

  ‘She always kept her distance. I mean, it’s pretty obvious why now, isn’t it?’

  ‘She had a boyfriend,’ Savita said suddenly. ‘They’d just moved in together, I think. I don’t know if that’s any help, but …’

  ‘Ah, yes of course, the wonderful boyfriend.’ Caroline nodded knowingly at Thorne and Tanner. ‘Very smitten, she was. Wouldn’t stop banging on about him.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Conrad … something.’ Caroline looked to her friends for help, but none of them appeared to know any more than she did. ‘We were all there when she met him in the coffee shop, as a matter of fact.’ She turned to Heather. ‘Remember? The bloke I thought was a friend of yours?’

  ‘Was he?’ Thorne asked Heather.

  ‘No.’ Heather sounded a little irritated at the suggestion. ‘I’d never seen him before.’ She glanced at Caroline. ‘I told you.’

  A look of horror spread across Caroline’s face as she stared at Thorne. ‘You don’t think he’s got anything to do with … this, do you?’

  ‘This being …?’

  ‘The murder. One of the teachers.’ Seeing that she wasn’t going to get an answer, Caroline turned to Savita and David. ‘I didn’t much like the look of him if I’m honest. And like I said, I always thought there was something very peculiar about her.’

  Thorne looked at Tanner, who was scribbling in her notebook. He mouthed, ‘Fuck’s sake …’

  When he turned back to the parents, Heather was saying something to Caroline about ‘serious emotional problems’ and David had begun talking to Savita. As though influenced by her surroundings, Tanner had raised her arm, and was waving a hand in an effort to get everyone’s attention again when her phone rang.

  She looked at Thorne. ‘I need to take this …’

  When Tanner had stepped out of the room, Thorne asked for everyone’s details. As soon as he’d finished taking down numbers and email addresses, he said, ‘We might ask a couple of you to come in to help us put an e-fit together. Whichever of you knew Sarah best, or has a good memory for faces. Same thing for this boyfriend of hers.’

  ‘I’m happy to do it,’ Caroline said.

  Thorne was not surprised that the woman had been the first to volunteer. Anything for a half-decent story at her next dinner party, he guessed. He said, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Actually, I might even have a photo of her somewhere.’ David took out his phone and began to stab and scroll. ‘I think I took a picture of everyone in the coffee shop.’

  ‘I remember that,’ Heather said.

  Thorne waited.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t find it …’

  ‘Well, if you do, we’d be grateful if you could send it to us.’ The door opened and Thorne looked up to see Tanner in the doorway. Her expression made it clear that she needed to talk to him urgently, that there was no time for a lengthy winding up. He moved quickly to join her, confident that the parents would stay put for a while, with plenty to talk about among themselves.

  When Thorne came out, Tanner closed the classroom door.

  ‘They managed to extract DNA from the skin Phil took from under Gemma Maxwell’s fingernails,’ she said. ‘And we’ve got a match.’

  Tanner looked rather more bewildered, shocked even, than Thorne would have expected, given such good news. ‘What?’

  ‘It matches the suspect in the Margate killing.’ Now she sounded bewildered. ‘The same suspect whose DNA was all over Philippa Goodwin’s flat. Your con-artist again.’

  Thorne stared at her.

  ‘Looks like he’s getting a taste for this kind of thing.’

  He said, ‘That’s … mental.’

  Tanner began to say something about what a ridiculous coincidence it would be if this woman they’d just been talking about wasn’t somehow connected to Gemma Maxwell’s murder. How she may well be involved in some way with whoever had killed Gemma and how, if that was the same person who’d killed Kevin Deane …

  Thorne’s hand was already busy at the back of his head, fingers moving through the fine hairs at the nape of his neck; the prickle that had begun to spread.

  Tanner didn’t need to say it.

  ‘Looks like we’ve found your mystery woman.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In the garage, she took a joint from the tin, carried it across to the deckchair and lit up. She had decided that it didn’t much matter if Conrad were to catch her. It wasn’t like she was on heroin or a secret alcoholic or anything, and hadn’t she been the one insisting that there should be no secrets?

  Besides which, she needed it.

  After they’d eaten, he had suddenly announced that he was tired and fancied an early night, which was certainly not something that had ever happened before. She couldn’t remember a single night when they hadn’t gone to bed at the same time, when they hadn’t made love. She had chosen not to say anything, deciding that things might have been tricky after their conversation earlier – that horribl
e business about what he’d seen in the paper – so instead she’d just smiled and watched Conrad trudge upstairs, thinking that he did look worn out suddenly.

  Thinking that a smoke might stop her wondering what he had been doing to exhaust himself quite so much.

  I’ve been calling you.

  I had my phone turned off.

  She drew hard on the joint and sucked in fast. It tasted harsher than she was used to and she had to stop coughing before she could take another hit. A different batch of weed, maybe and hadn’t she read somewhere that stuff got added sometimes?

  She sat back and waited for the lovely, slow shush of it.

  She needed to relax, she knew that, to think about how lucky she was and to enjoy it. More than anything she wanted to let herself sink and go back just a little, to those first few days together, when this new relationship had pushed everything out of her head and heart … God, even Jamie, if she was being honest with herself. She needed to remember what Conrad had smelled like that first time, the taste of him.

  What he did to her …

  She brought the joint to her lips again and closed her eyes.

  The memories gathered speed quickly, though, and began to blur, refusing to slow for more than few moments at anywhere like the recent past, taking her a long way further back than she would have liked, until finally they juddered to a halt in the usual place.

  That small garden.

  When Sarah was exactly ten years old and it was just the two of them …

  Those handlebars, poking up from their scrubby lawn. The rest of her bike underground, unreachable …

  She walks slowly across the garden and for a second or two she wonders if she’s actually woken up yet. It can’t be real, surely. How much work must that have been?

  All night, probably, for him to dig a hole deep enough, to arrange it exactly like this.

  So she can see it, but she can never have it.

  There’s a brief moment of hope, when she thinks that maybe her bike will be much easier to pull up than she thinks, that’s it all just a daft joke, but as soon as she makes the effort, she knows it will be impossible.

  ‘Some things you have to work for,’ her father says.

  She settles down in the dirt, still in her pyjamas, kneeling over the spot where she guesses the saddle must be. She wraps her hands around the handlebars, the black rubber grips with yellow streamers attached that she’d pointed out to her father in the shop.

  She pulls and pulls and pulls.

  ‘You don’t deserve it if you don’t try,’ her father says.

  The handlebars don’t budge, not even an inch, because there’s just too much weight, too much earth to move and her arms aren’t strong enough. Still, she stays there until it gets dark, pulling and crying, and there are blisters on her hands by the time her father says, ‘Enough,’ and she walks back into the house. Her father shakes his head and puts an arm around her shoulders, and says, ‘Look at the state of you …’

  He stands her in the bath and washes the mud off her, slowly.

  She knows how fierce her father is because her friends are all scared of him, she’s always known. His anger at … something; at her because she’s the cause of it, or because she’s simply the nearest thing. Angry enough to carry her new bike out into the garden and dig through the night. She knows, but even so, her own anger doesn’t last, it never does. All the hatred that has built until it’s like something drumming fast inside her starts to fade, then run away with the mud that streaks down her chest and legs until the bathwater is black with it.

  Because she can feel how fierce his love is, too.

  She can feel it in his hands on her, and she will carry on feeling it, the terrifying heat of it, as she spends days looking out at the garden through a curtain of rain and watches the handlebars of her bike begin to rust.

  His hands on her.

  The hands of men who would use her then push her away.

  Conrad’s hands …

  Sarah opened her eyes and stood up. She brushed the ash from her shirt and threw the butt into a bucket, let a minute or two pass until she was breathing normally again.

  Then she walked back into the house to wake him.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Dr Melita Perera handed the picture back across the table to Thorne. A printout of the photo taken in the Enfield coffee shop, which David Herbert had eventually managed to locate on his phone and sent across three days earlier.

  ‘She looks perfectly ordinary, of course,’ Perera said. ‘Well, what you can see of her. Because they almost always do.’

  Thorne looked at the photograph again. Heather Turnbull, Savita Kohli and Caroline Wood-Wilson. The woman with them – whom they and the police still knew only as ‘Sarah’ – sitting at the end of the table, her face half hidden by a carefully positioned menu.

  Coffee and cake.

  Just one of the mums.

  ‘I didn’t think it would tell you anything very much.’ Thorne folded the printout and put it back in his pocket. ‘I just thought you might be interested in seeing it, that was all.’ He had immediately sent the photo, such as it was, to Colin Hatter, with the presumption that it would be widely circulated around Margate, but for all he knew the DI from Kent had pinned it up above his desk and done bugger all else. He might just as well have done. As far as the Gemma Maxwell investigation went, the picture had been shown on BBC London and printed as part of a major follow-up story in the Standard, but, despite a number of reported sightings, it had thrown up no major leads.

  ‘What about the man you mentioned on the phone?’ Perera lifted her glass of sparkling water from the table and sat back. ‘No photos of him, I suppose?’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘An e-fit, but I don’t think it’ll do us a fat lot of good.’ Having seen him in the coffee shop, Heather Turnbull and the others had been able to provide a decent enough description of the man they’d known as Conrad and Thorne still thought of as Patrick Jennings. He was clearly someone who changed his appearance on a regular basis. Knowing what they did about the woman he was now involved with, there was every reason to believe that she had already done the same thing.

  Now, Thorne and Tanner were looking for two ghosts, and though DNA and prints were certainly a start, false names and a pair of iffy pictures had left them with nowhere to go.

  It was why he had called Melita Perera.

  She was the forensic psychiatrist brought in seven months before, during an investigation which had begun with a series of cat-killings, and Thorne had consulted with her several times once that case had … broadened out. Because it was close to her office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they had met in this same Holborn bar several times back then. Today, the place was crowded with lunchtime drinkers, and though Thorne had been disappointed to discover that the chalkboards and exposed pipes were still there, he was pleased to see that Melita Perera had not changed either.

  Willowy, in a dark business suit, long dark hair pinned up, the Sri Lankan heritage evident in her looks …

  ‘Easy, tiger.’ What Hendricks had said on the phone the night before, when Thorne had mentioned who he would be meeting, well aware it was a woman to whom Thorne had taken something of a shine seven months previously.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Thorne had said.

  Thinking wasn’t doing.

  ‘No, course not, it’s purely professional, obviously. Don’t know what I was thinking … and you weren’t like a dog with two dicks when you were talking about that photographer woman a few weeks back, either.’ Hendricks had clearly found the whole thing hilarious. ‘What’s the matter with you, mate? You got a job lot of Viagra you need to get through?’

  Not for the first time, Thorne had told himself that perhaps he confided in Phil Hendricks a little too much, but he couldn’t really deny his friend had a point. This twitching of certain … antennae was clearly a reaction of some sort to what was happening with Helen, to being – theoretically – on the market again. />
  But all the same …

  ‘Before I forget,’ Hendricks had been unable to resist, ‘you know that old tramp, the really smelly one who sits outside Kentish Town station every day? He is definitely giving you the eye.’

  ‘What would be interesting is to see the two of them together,’ Perera said now. ‘To see how they appear as a couple.’

  ‘Right.’ Thorne stared across the table at her.

  ‘It might tell us nothing, of course.’ She leaned forward. ‘But sometimes you can get a sense of a hierarchy at least. Even a picture might provide some indication of which of them is the dominant partner.’

  ‘There’s always one of them calling the shots, you mean?’

  ‘Usually,’ she said. ‘Even when it’s not a conventional couple, even if it’s two straight men killing together. One partner is almost always submissive to the other in some way. Actually, I shouldn’t even use that word because, strictly speaking, it isn’t a partnership.’ She sipped her water and looked at him. ‘You had a case like that once, I remember you telling me.’

  Thorne nodded. During the cat-killing inquiry, he had asked her about Stuart Nicklin; a serial offender who had once operated as one half of a murderous double act. There could be little doubt as to who had been the dominant force in that pairing and though Nicklin’s current whereabouts remained unknown, it was a force of which Thorne remained very much aware.

  ‘So you know what I’m talking about.’

  Thorne told her that he did.

  ‘OK, so if we’re looking specifically at couples who kill, let’s take Hindley and Brady … a long time ago, obviously.’

  Thorne nodded again. The best example. The worst.

  ‘Well, I was a kid,’ he said.