The Blissfully Dead

by Louise Voss

  Lennon had humiliated Winkler at the end of the Child Catcher case, and Winkler deeply regretted that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to bash Patrick’s head in with a heavy object. He probably could have made an official complaint too, maybe even got Lennon suspended. But, at the time, Lennon was a hero and Winkler was pretty sure he was slipping one to the guv behind his banged-up wife’s back. It would have been, what was the word? Impolitic. Better to bide his time and wait for Lennon to slip up. When he did, Winkler would be there to provide a hard landing.

  Even better, maybe he would be the one to cause the slip.

  Winkler couldn’t see how the three murders – the teen girls and his old woman, Nancy Marr – could be related. OK, so there were the cuts, but he was convinced Daniel Hamlet had made a mistake there. It was a coincidence, that was all. Nancy’s case was dissimilar in every other way. Two victims were young and nubile while the other was well past her sell-by date. Unlike the other two, Nancy’s murder was in her home. They were in different areas of south London, the girls miles apart from Nancy. There was nothing at all to connect Nancy to the other two victims except that they’d all been female and had met with a nasty end. Winkler was grudgingly pleased that Lennon didn’t seem to think there was much of a connection between the murders either, but he didn’t trust him. He was likely to steal the case from under Winkler’s nose – or steal the credit if they did turn out to be connected.

  The best thing to do, Winkler decided, was to pretend to go along with Suzanne’s plea for cooperation while doing two things. First, solve the Marr case, or at least find a credible suspect, in order to stop Lennon muscling in. Second, use the ‘in’ the guv had given him to get involved in the more glamorous and exciting teen murders. Winkler had been a whisker away from cracking the Child Catcher case, had put in a lot of the important legwork, and received absolutely zero credit or thanks. That wasn’t going to happen this time.

  He started the car and headed over to Wimbledon, thinking how sweet it would be when he got one over on Lennon.

  Winkler stood outside the house where Nancy Marr had been murdered, wishing the building would give up its secrets, that a shaft of light would fall from the sky and reveal some devastating clue. He sighed as the sky remained grey and unhelpful. He was going to have to rely on his brains rather than miracles.

  Being honest with himself, he hadn’t put an enormous deal of effort into solving this murder. Nancy Marr had no good friends and only one close relative: a son in his late fifties who lived in Yorkshire, whose main concern appeared to be how quickly he’d be able to sell the house and pocket the money. There was a ‘For Sale’ sign outside now, but, as the scene of a brutal murder, this property hadn’t shifted, despite the property boom that was going on at the minute.

  His emotional indifference and unconcealed interest in his mother’s money had made the son, George Marr, the initial suspect. But he had a rock-solid alibi. He’d been in Majorca with his partner and a couple of friends and there was nothing that pointed towards George hiring a hitman to bump off his mum.

  Winkler’s next line of inquiry had focused on known burglars in the locality – he’d got the team to check out a dozen other known names, but none of them appeared guilty. They’d done the usual, going door to door, interviewing the neighbours, with no joy. No-one had heard the old woman scream. And there was no useful forensic evidence.

  So, with no relatives or friends to pressure the police and no great media interest in the case – after an initial cry of outrage and a leader article about ‘the sickness in our society’, the local paper had soon lost interest – Winkler had been able to put this investigation on the back-burner. It hurt, though, that his clearance rate, which was excellent, was affected. Winkler didn’t do failure. So he was pleased now that he had the motivation to reignite it. Somebody around here must have seen something. It was time to start knocking on doors again.

  Chapter 15

  Day 4 – Patrick

  Patrick and Gill regarded one another warily from opposite sofas. It was ten o’clock on Sunday evening, his and Bonnie’s first night back in their own house, and Bonnie had only just settled back in her bedroom. She’d grizzled and fussed for hours and they had taken it in turns to read to her and stroke her until eventually she passed out from sheer exhaustion, her bum in the air and her grubby knitted Peppa Pig under her armpit. Patrick couldn’t shift the uneasy feeling that maybe she remembered something bad had happened to her in that little room. He wished they had a third bedroom they could have redecorated so she could have had a fresh start in there, but they didn’t. The house was too small.

  Patrick guiltily upended the almost finished bottle of Merlot into his wine glass. He’d downed most of it in between his Bonnie-shifts, although he was technically still on duty. There was so much going on in his head, after finding Jessica’s body and all the subsequent interviews he’d done, that now all he wanted to do was to block it all out so he could focus on this new chapter in their lives. He just prayed that he wouldn’t be called back to the station; not tonight.

  Gill was sipping cautiously at half a glass – she’d never been a big drinker, but said that now she drank even less. He almost wished she would – perhaps it would make the atmosphere more relaxed, had they both been half-cut. But her counsellor strongly recommended against it, for obvious reasons.

  ‘So,’ Gill said shyly, staring intently into her glass. ‘This is awkward, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s like a weird sort of first date.’ He laughed mirthlessly and then, when he saw how crushed she looked, backtracked. ‘No, I mean, it’s not really, of course, it’s you and me, and how many dates have we been on? I just meant in terms of feeling . . . strange.’

  She nodded, but he could see he’d upset her. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Him having to tread on eggshells around her, terrified of saying the wrong thing, constantly worrying that she would lose it again? He forced himself to stand up and walk across the room to her. He sat down close to her and put his arm around her shoulders. It still felt weird. This is my wife, he had to keep reminding himself, glancing down at her wedding ring, trying to feel an echo of the happiness that had consumed him the day he’d slipped it onto her finger.

  ‘It’s great to be home,’ he whispered into her ear, gazing at the side of her face, unable to prevent himself noticing how much of a toll the last two years had taken on her appearance. Her skin had a permanent greyish tinge that never used to be there, and her dark brown hair, once so shiny and buoyant, was flat and dull.

  They needed a holiday, he thought. All three of them.

  He felt her shoulder relax a little under his hand and saw the side of her cheek curve up into a smile. ‘This is our new start, right?’

  She nodded again, but she didn’t seem overly enthusiastic either.

  ‘How do you feel about it, Gill?’ he ventured. ‘Are we OK?’ He realised he was asking himself that question as much as her.

  In reply, she turned to kiss him. It was the first time they had properly kissed for two years, and initially it was clumsy, teeth clashing, tongues out of synch. Patrick felt like he was fourteen again. That thought in turn led him to have an unwelcome flash of Jessica McMasters’ disfigured body spread-eagled on the dustsheet of the makeshift studio floor earlier that day, with the trappings of a real photo shoot around her, lights and reflectors, making a mockery of a studio portrait. Stupid girl, he thought. How could she have been taken in like that? He would make sure he brought Bonnie up to be far more street-smart.

  He banished the thoughts immediately and pulled Gill’s warm body closer to him. She responded, pressing her breasts into his side, and gradually the kiss became more comfortable and erotic. For the first time, Patrick felt that he had his wife back.

  ‘I’ve missed this so much,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  Gill put her hands on either side of hi
s face and kissed him again. ‘I’ve missed you too, Pat.’

  After a few minutes, Gill’s hand slid down his torso and inside his jeans. He groaned with pleasure. He was so turned on that he thought he would come then and there, as soon as Gill’s probing fingers touched his flesh.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he whispered, standing up with difficulty and holding out his hand to her.

  She smiled properly at him then and he was reminded again how beautiful she was. He had forgotten how her nose crinkled when she smiled; how her eyes magnetised him when she looked at him like this. He hadn’t looked at her properly for two years, had averted his gaze since that terrible day when he came home and found her sobbing – here on the stairs.

  He froze, plunged back in time for a moment, his ardour ebbing away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Gill whispered, but he shook his head, unable to answer. He led her up the narrow stairs, stepping over the step where she’d sat, shoving away the memories. As they reached the landing, Gill stumbled and ricocheted off Bonnie’s bedroom door. They both froze as they heard Bonnie stir and mumble in her toddler bed, but after a few moments all fell silent again and they tiptoed into their bedroom.

  Patrick was glad it was dark. It felt too weird being back in this intimate space together. Trying to bring himself back to the moment, he gently pushed Gill onto the bed on her back, and lay down on top of her, pressing himself into her as they kissed again. He relaxed again, lost in the moment, trying not to think about how long it had been since he’d had sex, fighting back the urge to crack a joke about having forgotten what to do.

  He worked Gill’s skirt and knickers down over her hips and, as she unbuttoned her shirt, breathing hard, he kissed her there, between her legs, the smell and taste of her and the way she gasped so familiar but so strange. He moved back up the bed, trailing kisses across her belly. She pushed him onto his back and straddled his thighs, unbuckling his belt and helping him pull his T-shirt over his head, tracing his tattoos with trembling fingers.

  ‘Oh God, Pat, you don’t know how much I thought about this when I was . . . away . . . I used to construct this fantasy about what you’d do to me in bed; it was all that would keep me going. I dreamed about you all the time. Shall I tell you what my fantasy was?’

  Her voice snapped him out of the zone. No. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to talk, to listen to the desperate, strained note in Gill’s voice, like she was only saying all this to please him. He shook his head, said, ‘Just kiss me,’ and she did, leaning forwards, bare breasts pressing against his chest. It felt good; she felt good; so why couldn’t he fully relax?

  Because when she ran her hands over his torso, he saw them shaking Bonnie.

  When she wrapped her fingers around him, he pictured those fingers encircling their daughter’s throat.

  He must have made a noise in his throat because Gill stopped kissing him and sat up, staring at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  He tried to smile, to say, ‘Nothing.’ He was still hard, his body so starved of this, so desperate for fulfilment that nothing, no images, no doubts, could stop him. He rolled Gill over onto her back and, with eyes closed, entered her, concentrating on the feeling, the pleasure. Pushing away the pictures in his head.

  ‘I love you,’ Gill said, and he was sure he said it in return. Because he did. He still did. And this had to get easier, didn’t it? They just needed time.

  Chapter 16

  Day 4 – Wendy

  Wendy sat at her desk in the half-deserted office, one of the strip lights flickering in a way that made her glad she wasn’t epileptic, and wondered what DI Lennon was doing right now. Snuggling up on the sofa with his wife, probably. Or reading his little girl a bedtime story. She knew all about Lennon’s wife and her heart went out to the poor cow. She hoped he was kind to her . . . Actually, she couldn’t imagine him being anything but. Despite the tattoos, the hair that needed cutting and that serious face, he was, well, he was lovely.

  Lovely and gorgeous. The kind of man who was sensitive and empathetic but strong enough to be protective and sexy.

  Jesus, listen to her! Sexy? She laughed, drawing a curious look from Martin two desks down, and reminded herself that it was a bad idea – a bloody terrible idea – to have a crush on her superior officer. Especially one who was married. Wendy’s dad left them after a younger woman he worked with tempted him away, moving to the other side of Wolverhampton, and Wendy would never, ever be a homewrecker. Never be like that scutter who made her mum bawl her eyes out for months. Not that she was the type that men left their wives for. She hadn’t even had a boyfriend for three years. Not for the first time, she cursed the fact that she had the body of a teenage gymnast – flat as a pancake, straight up and down, like an ironing board, and only five foot two. Twenty-five years old and she still got ID’d any time she tried to get into a club, and pretty much every time she bought drinks in a pub. It was deeply irritating. Unless she wore a ton of make-up – and often even then – she looked younger than her fourteen-year-old sister, Lucy.

  Her latest attempt to appear her age was to have all her dark hair chopped into the shortest of pixie cuts because most teenage girls had the obligatory long, artificially straightened curtain of hair, but it hadn’t made a lot of difference. Pat – as she’d heard Carmella call him, not that Wendy would dare to herself – hadn’t appeared to even notice that anything was different about her.

  Wendy really wanted to impress him, and the best way she could possibly do that, she thought, would be to find the bastard who had killed those two poor girls.

  She gazed again at the photo of Rose Sharp on the whiteboard across the office. Even if it wasn’t about gaining Pat’s admiration and respect, she’d do anything to get the scumbag murderer off the streets. This was her chance!

  Rose reminded Wendy of her little sister, Lucy, who still lived at home. Lucy actually thought OnTarget were a bunch of twats, preferring Jake Bugg and cooler indie music, spending her weekends hanging around the horse statue in the city centre with the alternative kids. Lucy thought that her older sister was ‘well sad’ for being into pop music, though she would happily join in with a game of Just Dance if none of her friends knew about it. Lucy would laugh her socks off if she saw what Wendy was doing now: signing up to the official OnT forum. She had chosen a picture of Shawn looking dreamy as her profile picture, with an animated GIF of the band on stage as her signature, and she decided on the username ShawnsCupcake.

  As well as signing up to the forums she had also set up a new Twitter account, and had joined Tumblr and StoryPad. She didn’t bother with Facebook because OnT fans didn’t congregate on there, mainly because Facebook was seen by teenagers as a place for mums and grans.

  Then she had spent an hour catching up with the latest OnT news and gossip, searching for the OnT hashtag on Twitter and seeing what the fans were talking about at the moment. Predictably, the deaths of MissTargetHeart and YOLOSWAG were hot topics, but so was Blake’s new tattoo and rumours that Zubin was seeing Trixie from Love Bomb. There was a disturbing amount of vitriol aimed at Trixie, which reminded Wendy of how much she’d hated any girl who was linked with Lee from Blue. For two years she had been convinced she was going to grow up to marry Lee, had longingly stroked the posters of him on her wall, sketched his face a thousand times, though his nose always came out wonky and his lips not quite kissable. She closed her eyes and remembered how that had felt – the rushing hormones, the deluded certainty that if the object of her rampant affections met her, he would see she was special. That she was The One. She recalled, too, the pain she’d experienced when Mandy Briggs told her she didn’t like Blue anymore and was switching her allegiance to McFly.

  She plugged her headphones into her PC and opened Spotify, streaming the latest OnT album. She stared at photos of the band, trying to convince herself that they were not just fanciable but godlike. It crossed her mind t
hat maybe she should pretend Shawn looked like DI Lennon, instantly chiding herself. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and entered the zone. She was an OnTarget fan now. She loved them more than she loved her parents, her dog, her friends. They were her Everything.

  It was time to join the fray.

  She soon noticed that there were half a dozen ‘super users’ on the forum, girls – she assumed they were female, anyway – whose threads got the most views and comments, and who responded to nearly every thread started by another user. It was ridiculously cliquey. These half-dozen fans dominated discussions and opinion, with a second, larger group of acolytes who agreed with their opinions and acted as cheerleaders. Anyone who dared voice a different opinion, who wrote anything deemed to be in any way negative or stupid or ‘sad’, was instantly shot down. Sometimes arguments broke out between new users and the forum elite, page after page of passionate back and forth, which went on until the new user surrendered or a moderator stepped in. It was an intimidating place.

  Wendy realised that her best bet was to ingratiate herself with these super users. If, as it seemed, they spent their entire waking lives on here, they would surely know Jess and Rose, if not in real life – or ‘meatspace’ as it was called – then online.

  The most fanatical user of all, the queen of this microcosmic world, called herself, quite simply, Jade. Her real name, or a reference to the gemstone? There was a line in one of OnT’s songs, Wendy remembered – something about a girl with jade-green eyes. This was the kind of fact she needed to know, so she looked it up. Yes, it was from ‘Green, Green Eyes’, their song about a jealous girlfriend.