by Louise Voss
‘All right, Gareth,’ he said.
‘Boss.’ Batey swallowed again, blew air from his cheeks.
‘Feeling OK?’
Gareth nodded, but his eyes showed that he was feeling far from OK. There was a rich smell creeping out of the room – the coppery odour of blood and something else. Cheap perfume or aftershave that stung Patrick’s nostrils and made him want to sneeze.
‘The SOCOs here yet?’ Patrick asked.
‘On their way.’
‘Good. So tell me what we know so far.’ He knew that as the first senior officer on the scene this case would almost certainly be his. He took out his pocket-sized Moleskine notepad and looked at Gareth, daring him to smirk. But the younger cop was too nauseated, and too used to Patrick’s little quirks, to be amused.
‘The chambermaid entered the room this morning just after 10 a.m. and found her. She was very cool about it, apparently. No screaming. No panic. She made sure she didn’t touch anything, locked the door behind her and calmly went downstairs to tell them what she’d found.’
‘OK. Is she still around? I’ll want to talk to her.’
‘Yes. She’s downstairs in the manager’s office.’
‘Good.’ He nodded for Gareth to continue.
‘I already asked Ms Shillingham for details of who was staying in the room. But nobody was checked in. The room was supposed to be empty.’
Bang went the chance of this being an easy case, a nice stat to make the clear-up rate look better.
Gareth fell quiet, as if he had nothing more to say – not till Patrick had looked in the room, witnessed the scene. He was aware that he was stalling, delaying the moment when he would have to see the body, the source of that bloody smell. Recently he’d begun to wonder if he was losing the stomach for this job, if he should quit, do something different. But what else would he do? The only other job he’d wanted was to be a rock star, to go on tour supporting his heroes, The Cure. That was one dream that would never come true.
He motioned to Carmella. ‘Come on, then. Let’s take a look.’
Being careful not to touch anything, he entered the hotel room. Immediately, the chemical sting of perfume made him sneeze, and as he opened his watering eyes he saw her. The victim. He heard Carmella catch her breath behind him.
She was laid out on the bed, naked and spread-eagled in an X-shape, each limb pointing towards a corner of the bed. She had light brown hair; pale, freckly skin; downy hairs on her arms. A strip of pubic hair, shaved legs and armpits. Patrick felt his breathing deepen and the anger that fuelled him, that kept him doing this damn job, bubbled and simmered as he realised how young she was. Somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. A child, though doubtless she would have recoiled to hear herself described as one.
Her eyes were open, staring at a future that would never come. What had this girl’s dreams been? To travel the world or have a family? Be a doctor or pilot or footballer’s wife? However modest her ambitions, they were over. She would never go to university, get her first job, give birth, grow old. This was it. A life truncated. A full stop.
Patrick stepped closer, trying to ignore, for the moment, the injuries, the mortal wounds, his eyes refusing to focus on them. He wanted to see the victim, to get to know her for a moment. To make this personal.
The girl was fleshy, with large breasts and a soft stomach, wide thighs. He guessed she had a BMI of about 26 or 27. It was a body that hundreds of years ago would have been considered perfect, the ideal of womanhood, but not now, in the days when emaciation was the look most young women craved. He studied her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in a conventional way, anyway. Her nose was a little too large, her eyes too close together. It crossed his mind that this would make the media less interested, that her face wouldn’t sell many newspapers, which could be both positive and negative for the investigation. The last big case he’d worked, the so-called Child Catcher case, had been a media shit storm from the off. Unlike his colleague DI Winkler, Patrick wasn’t the kind of cop who craved attention. In fact, despite his youthful desire to be a singer in a band, he abhorred it.
He closed his eyes for a second and made this young woman a silent promise. He would do everything he could to find the person who had done this. The man – in this case, it surely had to be a man – who had ended her young life.
There were marks on her throat that made it evident she had been strangled. But that was far from the most striking thing. There were cuts, short and shallow, all over her body, including her breasts and inner thighs, tiny trickles of blood patterning her skin. One of her outstretched hands was twisted and bloody, as if it had been stamped on. Her lips were puffy and smeared with dried blood too, like they had been punched or, perhaps, bitten. As he stepped closer he noticed that her skin was shiny in patches around the welts, and also around her vagina. The smell of perfume coming off her was intense.
‘I think he sprayed her with perfume – in the cuts.’
Carmella stared as he pointed.
‘He cut her, then sprayed perfume into the open wounds.’ He kept his voice even. ‘He tortured her.’
Patrick noticed a patch of blood on the pillow beneath her head and stepped around the bed. The hair at the back of her scalp was matted with blood, where she had apparently been struck with a heavy object, or banged against a wall.
He caught Carmella’s eye. Her own shock was morphing now into something else. Determination. He nodded and they left the room, just as the scene of crime officers – the SOCOs – arrived. Patrick and Carmella headed back down the corridor, Gareth following. They would leave the SOCOs to do their job.
Thirty minutes later Patrick and Carmella sat in a conference room on the ground floor, the cleaner who had found the body sitting across from them. The room was dry and hot and smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac. Patrick was sweating, his white shirt sticking to him, but the cleaner, whose name was Mosope Adeyemi, was cool, leaning back in her chair like she was about to interview them for a job. She was an attractive woman, with large, bright eyes and long limbs that Patrick fleetingly imagined wrapped around him.
‘Where are you from?’ Carmella asked. Patrick had asked her to conduct this interview while he made notes.
‘I live in Teddington.’
Carmella smiled. ‘I meant originally.’
‘Abuja, Nigeria. I was a teacher over there, you know. Now I clean rooms, make beds.’
‘For how long?’
Mosope twisted her lips. ‘Hmmm, a year. Just over.’ She leaned forwards conspiratorially. ‘The people who come to this hotel, they are disgusting. Animals. And they never leave tips.’
‘Can you walk us through what happened this morning?’ Carmella said.
The woman sighed. ‘I’d already cleaned half the rooms on that floor, apart from the ones where the guests were still in their rooms, like lazy pigs.’
‘This was, what, just after ten?’
‘Ten fifteen. I checked the time after I found the girl, because I knew you’d ask.’
‘That’s very thoughtful of you. Why did you go into room 365 if it was unoccupied?’
‘Because I smelled the perfume.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘Terrible. Cheap. It was coming under the door, the smell. I was curious, so I went in, saw the girl on the bed and came straight out again. That’s it.’
‘Did you see anything strange in the room? Anything different?’
She tipped her head. ‘You mean apart from the dead white girl on the bed?’
Patrick liked this woman, wanted to engage with her. But he stayed silent, letting Carmella continue. ‘I mean . . . You clean these rooms every day. You know how they look. Apart from the body, did you notice anything unusual, anything that struck you?’
Mosope thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Apart from the smell, no.’
‘You didn’t move or remove anything
?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Did you see anyone in the vicinity of the room this morning?’
‘Just guests coming in and out of some of the other rooms.’ She paused. ‘There were no clothes on the floor of room 365. You noticed that? I guess he took them with him.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Like a souvenir.’
Chapter 3
Day 1 – Patrick
At the beginning of a murder case, Patrick’s first job was to consider the obvious. A woman beaten to death at home – look at the husband or boyfriend. A youth knifed in the street – check out gang affiliations. So here was a young girl murdered in a hotel room. Less straightforward, but the obvious first action was to check the list of guests and staff. Find out who was in the hotel at the time of the murder.
DS Gareth Batey was waiting in reception, chatting to one of the security guards, a black man with a belly like a department store Santa. As Patrick and Carmella entered the lobby, Gareth came over and said, ‘I’ve asked about CCTV. They have it down here, in the lobby, but nowhere else in the hotel. I’ve told them we’ll need the tapes.’
‘OK.’
‘That’s the security guard who was on duty till midnight last night. Derek Childs. After that, a colleague’ – he consulted his notes – ‘Stavros Demetriou took over. Mr Childs says he didn’t see anything suspicious last night. No-one lurking around, nothing. I don’t have a picture of the deceased, but as soon as we get one I’ll check if he or Mr Demetriou saw her.’
Patrick nodded for him to continue.
‘What else? I’ve spoken to the station. They’re checking reports of missing persons, seeing if we can get an ID on the girl.’
‘Good.’
Heidi Shillingham, the manager, was waiting behind the reception desk. He walked over to her, trying not to think about Carmella’s observation from earlier. Heidi had just put the phone down and was wringing her hands, her face creased with anxiety.
A smile flickered on her lips as he approached.
‘Detective.’
‘Mrs Shillingham . . .’
‘Miss. No-one’s managed to catch me yet.’
Well, don’t expect me to chase you, thought Patrick. ‘I need that list of guests. Also, a full list of staff – everybody who works here, whether they were on shift yesterday or not.’
‘Yes, no problem.’ She hesitated.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh . . . I’ve just been on the phone to head office. We – they were wondering how long it would be before the body is removed and we can have the room back?’ She squirmed. ‘The hotel is fully booked tonight.’
Patrick sympathised. Heidi was no doubt getting shit from someone higher up. But it irritated him too, like the hotel wanted to check somebody into the dead girl’s grave.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a day or two before we can let anyone access the room.’
‘Oh dear. What about the floor? We can’t afford to have the whole floor cordoned off . . .’
He shrugged. ‘Get me that list and hopefully we can get this resolved today. Then you can go back to business as usual.’
He walked past Derek, the security guard, and pushed out through the front doors into the bright but chilly morning. He took his e-cigarette out of his pocket and took a deep drag. The light flashed, indicating that it was out of charge, and he cursed it, wishing he could have a real cigarette. There was a newsagent over the road and the temptation to go and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights was dangerously strong. Go on, a devilish voice whispered. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
You could be murdered by a maniac tomorrow.
He resisted, checking his phone to distract himself. There was a text from Gill: I need to talk to you x. He sighed and put the phone back in his pocket. He would reply later, when he got a moment. He knew exactly what she would want to talk about. Them. Bonnie. Their situation. And at the heart of it were the red-hot questions: did he forgive her? Did they have a future? Or had any possible future died the night Gill had tried to kill their daughter?
The thing was, he would happily talk about it – if he knew the answers. If he knew what he wanted, if his heart and mind didn’t vacillate so much. And to make things worse, he knew he was under pressure, that there was a time limit. Gill, quite understandably, wanted to know where she stood. He was going to have to make a decision very soon. Make a decision and stick with it.
And every time he thought about that, he sought a new distraction, because he didn’t want to make that decision.
As soon as he got back inside, Gareth hurried over, phone in hand. Carmella was upstairs, talking to the SOCOs. It crossed Patrick’s mind that Gareth saw Carmella as a rival, that he wanted to win brownie points with his superior officer. He wanted to be the one to make the breakthroughs, deliver the news. Patrick looked Gareth up and down as he approached, thinking how different they were. At school, Gareth would have been one of the popular kids, the football team captain, head boy material, the kind of guy that Patrick avoided, hanging out with his Goth mates, going out with girls who only chose him because they knew their parents would disapprove. There was something of the Peter Perfects about Gareth Batey and Patrick didn’t know if he wanted to protect him or encourage him to stop being such a . . . swot and get himself an attitude.
‘Boss. I think we’ve got an ID,’ he said in his crisp Scottish accent. ‘A teenager whose mum reported her missing this morning.’
He held up his iPhone. On the screen was a picture of a frowning girl. A selfie, as they called it. He thought the frown was meant to be a pout but had gone wrong.
‘Once I got the name I looked her up. I couldn’t find her on Facebook, but she’s on Twitter and Tumblr. Calls herself MissTargetHeart.’
She had a soft face, dotted with freckles, and light brown hair. The photo looked like it had been taken in her bedroom, sitting on her bed with a teddy bear propped on the pillow behind her. She had drawn a crude target on her cheek in eyeliner, three concentric circles, with an arrow through. It was definitely her – the girl upstairs in room 365.
‘Her name’s Rose Sharp and she lives about ten minutes from here.’
Patrick looked at him.
Gareth’s cheeks coloured faintly. ‘Lived, I mean. Lived.’
Rose Sharp’s mum, Mrs Sally Sharp, lived in a terraced house in a backstreet of Teddington, the kind of place that a decade ago would have been considered moderately desirable but was now worth the kind of money that would make anyone north of the M25 gasp and shake their head. Close to a good school, low crime, a couple of organic delis nearby. A whole generation of Londoners had become property millionaires simply by buying at the right time. Patrick knew he could sell his house and move to Thailand and live like a prince. Sometimes, when confronted with this kind of task, he was tempted to pack up and go.
Patrick rang the bell, Carmella standing beside him. Gareth had wanted to come, but Patrick had instructed him to go back to the station and start checking the list that the hotel had finally produced. They were looking for known offenders, anyone with a record of violence or sexual offences. Even though they didn’t know yet if Rose had been raped, the fact that she was underage and had been found naked meant there was almost certainly a sexual element to the crime.
‘Call me the second you find anyone who looks like a good hit. Don’t go off on your own, OK? It won’t impress me,’ Patrick had told Gareth.
Sally Sharp opened the door almost instantly, and it was clear that she had been hoping to see her daughter standing there.
Sally looked over Patrick’s shoulder, peered around Carmella. Realisation entered her eyes then, and her face crumpled. But there was still hope – for a few more moments.
‘Mrs Sharp?’ Patrick said. ‘Rose Sharp’s mother?’
She nodded, inspecting Patrick’s badge as he introduced himself and Carm
ella. Her hands were trembling visibly as she held on to the front door.
‘Can we come in, please?’
She led them into the living room. It was an ordinary room: medium-sized TV, saggy sofa, a bookcase filled with DVDs and framed photographs. There they were – the pictures of Rose as she grew up, from a bald-headed baby with dribble on her chin to a teenager in a school blazer. There was a framed photo on the wall of Sally, Rose and a man Patrick assumed was Rose’s dad. Sally was blonde with green eyes, and in the family portrait she sparkled with life and happiness. Now, standing before them, she looked squashed, as if a giant boot had stamped on her.
‘Are you here on your own?’ Carmella asked.
Sally’s eyes followed the two detectives’ towards the portrait.
‘Yes.’ She sounded like she had no saliva in her mouth.
‘Is your husband at work?’
‘I expect he’s at work, yes. But he’s not my husband anymore. He left us a year ago, so it’s just me and Rose now.’ She had a string of beads round her neck that she fiddled with. ‘Have you found her?’
Patrick braced himself. ‘I think you should sit down, Mrs Sharp.’
And before he’d even managed to tell her that they’d found the body of someone who matched the description of their daughter, that they would need her to identify the body, that her life would never be as happy or bright or hopeful again, she started wailing.
Patrick went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, while Carmella attempted to comfort Mrs Sharp. He called the station to check that the body had been removed from the hotel and taken to the mortuary so they could organise the identification. Sally had instantly said that she needed to call her sister, and that she would need to tell Rose’s dad, Martin, which had prompted a fresh wail.
While Patrick was waiting for the kettle to boil, he slipped into the hall and looked up the stairs. Looking over his shoulder to check Sally Sharp wasn’t watching, he went up onto the landing. The first door he opened was the bathroom; the second was the master bedroom. That left Rose’s bedroom.