‘I’m sure I’ve told you everything.’
‘Okay then. Enjoy the rest of your day.’
Mr James showed them to the front door, said goodbye again and closed it behind them. They walked to the car and Simone started the engine so she could sit in the glorious air conditioning. ‘What do you think?’ she said.
‘They’re lying about something. I think he found the body last night but waited until this morning to report it.’
‘He could have been getting up to something behind her back and he’s hiding something.’
They stared out of the window in silence. Simone said, ‘She’s hiding something too.’
‘You think she suspects him of playing around?’
‘I think she knows exactly what he gets up to in the evenings while he’s walking the dog.’
‘The area was always renowned for deviant activities, the car park especially,’ said West.
‘It still is. The clearing where the body was found is away from the guide tracks, do you think he knew about it or did he really stumble on it by accident?’
‘That’s the question.’
West noticed a missed call from the station on his mobile. He called back and when he got through to Jackson he put the call on loudspeaker so Simone could hear.
‘Just returning your call Sir,’ said West. ‘You’re on speaker, Simone is here too.’
‘We’ve got the identity of the victim; Victoria Redman, a local girl, nothing but a youngster; eighteen years old. She lived with her father about ten miles from where she was found. He’s been informed of the loss.’
‘Okay. Do we know any more about her abduction?’
‘He couldn’t give us much at all. He didn’t even realise she had been missing all weekend.’
‘Did she like to party?’
‘Quite the opposite, she didn’t have much of a social life. It’s her old man that likes a drink; he’d been on a bender all weekend and was too drunk to notice that he hadn’t seen her since Thursday evening. He rang the school when he’d sobered up and they told him they hadn’t seen her since Thursday either. Then he called us.’
‘Nice.’
Simone said, ‘We need to find out as much about her life as we can.’
‘He’s expecting you at some point today.’
‘Then I guess we’d better get round there before he hits the bottle,’ said West.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Jackson.
West got the address and hung up the phone.
Simone said, ‘I know where that is, it’s on the way to Newmarket. We’ll be there in about half an hour.’ She put the car in gear and gunned it to Redman’s place.
They sat in silence nursing their dark thoughts until Simone saw something she couldn’t help mentioning. She pointed out a couple of longhaired kids waiting at a bus stop. ‘Did you see that?’ she said. ‘That kid was wearing a Napalm Death T-Shirt.’
‘Didn’t notice.’
‘You used to have that shirt twenty years ago.’
‘They’re still popular;’ he said. ‘If any band’s going to piss your parents off, it’s Napalm Death. I haven’t listened to them for years have you?’
‘No, I guess my tastes have mellowed with age.’
‘They used to be your favourite band.’
‘Not just mine; you loved them too. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to anything that heavy. I’ve still got all my old CDs but Martin hates them,’ she said and when Martin’s name left her lips she instantly regretted bringing him into the conversation. She paused for a second and regretted that too. She said, ‘Do you remember when we all went to see them?’
‘Supporting White Zombie at the Marquee? That was years ago.’
‘Must have been what, around eighty-nine, ninety?’
‘It was nineteen-ninety; early nineteen-ninety.’
‘It was easily one of the best gigs we ever went to.’
‘Remember how much he hated it?’ said West meaning Martin but not using his name. It seemed unusual to hear West even acknowledge Martin’s existence.
‘He was never going to enjoy it; even to this day I don’t know why he bothered going.’
‘Really?’
‘Okay, it’s obvious why, but it’s even funnier knowing that he’d put himself through an evening like that just to stop us from going somewhere on our own.’
‘Laura had a good time.’
‘She could’ve had a good time at a funeral.’
The words Laura and funeral hung heavily in the air, Simone knew there had been enough talk of death and murder already and there was plenty more to come without the need to discuss the past, so she tried to keep momentum to the conversation as they drove into the sleepy Fenland village of Brior Fen and looked for Cromwell Road. ‘I couldn’t listen to that sort of music now anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s teenager’s music.’
‘Never. I’ll concede that tastes mellow with age but I think you’ve been with Mr Wet Wet Wet too long and you’ve forgotten what good music sounds like.’
‘Ha-de-ha.’
‘I’ll take AC/DC over Erasure any day,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t listen to Erasure.’
‘Yeah well, he always looked the type.’
Simone managed to smother a burst of laughter before it happened and chose to ignore his comment instead.
She indicated and turned into Cromwell Road, which was little more than a dusty dirt track edged on one side by a field of crops. The surrounding landscape was completely flat and the sun was high in the sky, the skyline shimmered in the dusty heat making the area appear more like Texas than rural England.
All the houses were well spaced and of decent size but they had become tired and run down over the years, as was usually the way with 1960’s council houses. Simone slowed the car and leant forward in her seat, looking at the houses as they passed. She pulled up on the side of the road and pointed. ‘Thirty-six is that one there.’
Bloodshot eyes and five-day growth answered the door and they identified themselves to Mr Redman who stood before them shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. When they entered they struggled not to show their distaste at the human stench inside the house as Redman led them into the living room, he was bare-chested and the metallic twang of his body odour made the room seem damp. Redman was aware of the squalid conditions and apologised for the mess as he pulled a stained vest over his skinny body. He opened the curtains and the sunlight that streamed in cut through the dust and smoke and made the filth more apparent by glinting off the glut of crushed beer cans, fallen bottles, glasses and empty metal takeaway containers that seemed to cover every flat surface. He opened the windows and began a futile attempt at tidying up but there was nowhere to move the rubbish and so he ended up shuffling it around for a while and then he tried to gather it together. He didn’t look at the police officers and they could do was watch the top of his thinning red scalp and the greasy ponytail that stuck to his pasty back until Simone said softly, ‘Mr Redman, do you mind if we sit down?’
When he looked up he had tears in his eyes and managed to grunt an affirmative from deep within his grief stricken throat. They sat on the sofa and watched as he adjusted his armchair away from the television. He smeared the tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand and it made his cheeks glisten in the sunlight.
West said, ‘We are sorry for your loss Mr Redman.’
Redman cleared his throat and replied, ‘Are you going to catch who did it?’
‘We’re going to do the best we can and I hope you understand that we need to ask you some questions.’
Redman stared at the floor with dreamy eyes and mumbled to himself. ‘The best you can.’
West spoke loudly. ‘Mr Redman?’
Redman jerked, switching his gaze. He looked at West with a completely slack face.
West was steely and serious. ‘I’m good at my job and I will do everything in my power to get who did it.’ He held hi
s stare until Redman looked at Simone and said, ‘She was a good girl. She looked after me.’
She said, ‘When was the last time you saw Victoria?’
He looked distant and guilty then said, ‘Thursday evening.’ West and Simone waited for him to elaborate. He cleared his throat. ‘She got home from school and made our tea. We had chops and mash, I’m useless in the kitchen; wouldn’t know where to start. We had tea and she did some schoolwork in her room. After that she went out some time after six.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘She does…did, some work for the church, they have some group on a Thursday evening and she helps set it up, gets the chairs out and makes the coffee and tea, stuff like that.’
‘What group was it?’
‘I don’t know; some churchy stuff, helping tramps find Jesus and crap like that.’
Simone said with a smile, ‘I take it she didn’t get her religious beliefs from you?’
‘She just started going to church on her own every Sunday. Out of the blue it was; she wanted me to go with her but I never did. The thought of it made me feel uncomfortable, I’ve never been to church in my life and I wasn’t about to start. I don’t know where she got it from but it was something she believed in and it made her happy. And that made me happy, it also made me feel that she was safe, it stopped her from falling in with the wrong crowd. She had friends but wasn’t interested in going out to parties and getting drunk like all the others. It’s a rare thing these days.’
‘And that was the last time you saw her?’
‘I went to the pub in the evening and didn’t get back ‘til late. I had the next day off work so I had quite a lot to drink and I slept in on Friday morning. I thought she’d gone to school. Didn’t think anything of it. Anyway I went to London that afternoon, got the train down there and stayed at a mate’s house, did some drinking and went to the football on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t get back ‘til Monday.’
‘Did you try to call her at all over the weekend?’
‘Don’t have a mobile. I can’t understand them.’
‘You could have used a pay phone,’ Simone said with an accusing tone she wished she could have disguised.
‘I could have but I didn’t, she’s eighteen years old she can look after herself better than I can. I couldn’t imagine anything like this would have happened. What do you want me to say? I took her for granted? Well yeah, maybe I did, but I loved her so much and I want to kill the fucker that hurt my baby.’
West understood the grief Redman was feeling and ignored the threat, he said, ‘Tell me about her friends.’
‘She had a friend called Beth something; I don’t know her last name. Go to the school, they’ll tell you more about her private life than I can. You know what teenagers are like; they keep themselves to themselves. They keep stuff from their parents anyway.’
‘Any boyfriends?’
‘Maybe, but she never said, never told me anyway. She spent time on her computer. She was into that, whatever it’s called, social networking, they all are aren’t they?’
‘We will have to take her computer Mr Redman because we may be able to see who she was chatting to and whether she was in regular contact with anyone.’
‘Take it. It’s in her room.’
‘Thank you. Can we take a look around while we’re up there?’
‘Go ahead.’
Victoria Redman’s bedroom made Simone sad as it reminded her of her own at that age and illustrated exactly how young eighteen years old actually was. As they stood in the teenager’s private space and looked at the posters on the walls and the teddy bear collection on the bed Redman’s defensive protests regarding his daughter’s ability to look after herself seemed tragically laughable. She may have been strong minded enough not to succumb to peer pressure or feel the necessity to hide her beliefs in an attempt to win a classroom popularity contest but she was still nothing more than an innocent young girl murdered viciously.
She had her whole life ahead of her and as if by way of providing evidence of how little time she had been alive the sum of her existence thus far was documented within the walls of her small room. If she knew her abductor and clues to his identity were to be found they would most likely to be found here.
The horrible image of Victoria Redman’s bloody corpse haunted Simone and seemingly West too as they stood in silence side by side in an unavoidable mark of respect for her private space. Simone had become accustomed to the foul smell in the rest of the house and was now acutely aware of the pleasant scent of perfume and clean clothes that hung faintly and yet distinctly in the air. In any other circumstance this sweet fragrance of youthful femininity would have been beautiful and pleasing but it only made Simone feel sorrowful and intrusive.
West said, ‘I’m going to unhook the computer. I want you to look around for anything that tells us more about her life. Imagine this was your room when you were eighteen. Where would you hide your secrets?’
West went to the computer desk in the corner of the room and set to work unplugging it while Simone went to the first and most obvious token of affection in the room. On the windowsill, above her bed lay a single dead rose. Positioned amongst small, framed pictures of happy school friends and assorted friendship gifts of bracelets and ornamental cats it seemed to take pride of place in the centre of the windowsill. She didn’t touch it; there was no need, she just looked at it carefully from different angles. It looked to be the type of rose people sold in pubs and bars by putting embarrassing pressure on dating couples especially on Valentine’s Day. Martin always waved the sellers away whenever they had been approached on a night out. To buy one would have seemed tacky but at the same time Simone thought it would have been a nice gesture. She always felt that gifts don’t need to be expensive or elaborate and an impulsive gift - no matter how tawdry, given with a cheesy smile and an affectionate glint in the eye could be more special than any other. Simone thought that if someone ever bought her a rose from a chancer in the pub, she would keep it too and if she had been given one by someone special when she was Victoria’s age, she also would have put it on display in her room.
She looked around the bed area and in the drawers of the bedside table but found nothing that any other teenage girl wouldn’t have. She checked under the bed and found nothing but dust. She hit the jackpot when looking amongst the books on the shelf above the head of the bed. There were religious books, some popular fiction, a couple of A-level textbooks and also a small collection of compact discs. Simone looked across the room and saw a tower of about thirty CDs near the stereo, by the TV and computer. It seemed strange that Victoria had kept these particular ones on a shelf, separate from the rest when there was plenty of room to keep them all together. Gifts maybe? There were five in all, four of them were popular current artists, but one of them in particular stood out by not being the usual thing a teenager would listen to – or anyone else for that matter. ‘Theodore Patterson Presents Movie Themes Played On The Hammond Organ. Reggie Style!’ She lifted it from the shelf already suspecting its secret.
Simone thought that there was always a chance that friends would ask to borrow popular music or books, or they may choose a CD to play or a book to thumb through while spending time in someone else’s bedroom. So if Victoria was to hide something personal then it made most sense to hide it within the sleeve of probably the shittiest most unknown and undesirable album in the history of unpopular music.
She opened the CD and slid the sleeve notes from the case. As she suspected, when she fanned the sleeve, a series of small photographs fell from their hiding place and onto the bed.
‘Found something,’ she said and looked across to West who was coiling cables. He put the one he was holding on the top of the computer case and joined her at the bed. She picked up the photographs with one hand and handed the CD sleeve to West. ‘Found them in this,’ she said. ‘It seemed out of place in a teenager’s bedroom, but then it’d be out of place anywhere.’
West cocked his head and read the cover of the CD. ‘Sounds all right to me.’
Simone immediately saw what the pictures were when they scattered across the bed; the flesh tones of the images were a dead giveaway. She thumbed through them: Victoria topless. Victoria naked. Victoria smiling, lying back on a bed with mild embarrassment in her eyes, vulnerable and naked but not unhappy, clearly not forced. Exposed but seemingly unthreatened. There was another person in similar poses, the two of them were together naked and grinning madly into a camera held at arm’s length. Victoria had a secret relationship but not with a boy, the images were of her and another girl, pretty and blonde with the same look of embarrassment in her eyes and she too was pouting and grinning and happy.
West said, ‘Redman mentioned a friend…’
‘Beth.’ Simone finished and pointed to the framed pictures on the windowsill. ‘The same girl is in those pictures.’
They went back into the lounge where Redman was sitting and staring into space. Simone showed him the framed pictures and asked if Beth was in any them. Redman pointed out the pretty blonde girl. It was definitely the same girl who was in the private photos. Simone had put them in her pocket; eventually Redman would have to clear his daughter’s room and pack away the memories and if the private pictures were irrelevant to the case then he didn’t need to see his daughter in a state of undress.
‘May I keep the pictures?’ she asked. ‘Just for the time being Mr Redman, you’ll get them back.’ Redman nodded and glanced at West who was holding Victoria’s computer. Simone saw a flash of hurt in his bloodshot eyes; they were taking her things, he had lost his daughter and now he was losing everything else piece-by-piece. ‘The computer too, I promise you will get everything back.’
He turned away from them. ‘Just get who did it.’
As Simone suspected there were flowers waiting for her when she got home. An extravagant bunch lay on the kitchen table, still wrapped in paper and guilt. At first she ignored them, loathing to go near them as if touching them would confirm acceptance of apology but common sense and the need for a peaceful evening persuaded her to cut the stems and put them into a jar of water. The repulsion she felt when she picked them from the table would have been less intense had it been a wasps nest.
Nothing but Meat: A dark, heart-stopping British crime thriller Page 4