by Louise Voss
‘I don’t like this,’ Patrick said, increasing his speed so he was just above the limit. ‘Mrs Hedges says Chloe’s gone shopping, but she’s not answering her phone either.’
‘Probably doesn’t want to be bothered by her mum.’
‘Maybe. But I’m going to phone the Bentall Centre in Kingston, ask them to put out an announcement over the tannoy, ask her to call home.’
‘I hope you don’t do that to Bonnie when she’s a teenager,’ Carmella said.
‘Huh. After this case, when Bonnie’s a teenager I’m never going to let her out of my sight. Did Mrs Downs say anything else about Jade?’
‘I was about to get to that. She said she was woken up, like I said, at about three by the sound of a car door slamming outside and loads of shrieking and laughing, so she looked out of the window and saw Jade coming through the front gate. She said she banged on the window to give Jade a hard time about waking up the whole street, and Jade was all excited. She called up to her to say she’d been to a party working as a waitress, that all of OnTarget were there, and Mervyn Hammond’s bodyguard had given her a lift home. Mrs Downs had assumed she was drunk, until Jade said she’d been working. Mrs Downs thought that was unusual – she’d never known Jade to have a job before. She also said she’d never seen Jade so happy and excited.’
‘Jade was at Hammond’s party.’ That was very interesting.
‘Yep. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘Call Gareth. Let’s find out everything we can about this bodyguard, assuming Gareth hasn’t gone off somewhere in a massive sulk. And I’m going to call Suzanne. I’m getting a bad feeling about Chloe and Jade. A very bad feeling.’
Chapter 51
Day 14 – Chloe
Shawn Barrett’s chauffeur, Pete, pulled off the road and drove down a small path, parking up outside huge iron gates in a tall, old-looking wall. He jumped out and deftly undid the padlock that held the chain together, opened the gates, drove in – then got out and re-locked the padlock.
‘We’ve got this place booked out, but they’re very security conscious,’ he commented as he got back behind the wheel. ‘It’s empty at the moment, but the developers were still really keen that nobody knew Shawn was coming.’
‘Oh,’ Chloe said, wondering why, in that case, there were no security guards to be seen. She wasn’t really sure what a ‘developer’ was either. Pete parked the car at the end of a long driveway, in front of an enormous house, all turrets and fancy stonework. Its front door was up a sweeping flight of stone steps, and Chloe looked longingly through the car window at it – even if it was closed, it was a place that would have a toilet! – as Pete walked round to open the door for her. That was more like a chauffeur should behave, she thought. He was carrying a black backpack that she hadn’t noticed before.
‘Could I nip in and use the loo before I meet Shawn?’ she asked shyly. Nerves were starting to get the better of her and she was desperate for a wee.
He looked at his watch. ‘Hmm. Sorry, love, time’s a bit tight. We need to get on, really. He’s a busy man. He just texted me to say he’s out there already and it’s cold!’
Chloe felt the disapproval in his voice. ‘Oh yes. Sorry. Sorry. I don’t want to take up much of his time.’ Again, she wondered why the symbolism meant so much to Shawn that he’d want to meet her in a freezing cold grotto in the middle of February, in the dark. And she hadn’t seen Pete reading any texts . . . She looked sideways at him.
‘One other thing,’ he said, as she climbed out of the front seat. He held out his hand, palm up. ‘You’re going to need to leave your phone in the car. Shawn’s got a strict rule about that, in case anyone tries to sneak a photo.’
‘Oh.’ Chloe’s prickles of unease increased. ‘I’ll turn it off, I promise.’
Pete shook his head. ‘Just leave it here, love, it’ll be fine. Look, I’ll put it in the glove compartment. It’ll be completely safe.’
She reluctantly handed it over, noticing that her heart rate had rocketed. Perhaps it was just excitement at being about to meet Shawn.
Was she about to meet Shawn?
Pete locked the phone into the car and hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder. That was bothering her too. Where had that come from and what was in it?
‘What’s in there?’ she asked.
He glared at her, not friendly anymore. ‘Stuff for Shawn. None of your business. Come on, then, we haven’t got all day.’
Chloe suddenly thought she was going to be sick. Her teeth chattering, she followed him as he walked away from the house, down a gravel path that curved away behind some tall forbidding trees in the house’s grounds. It was very cold, and getting dark. There was no sound anywhere apart from a distant rumble of traffic and then the sudden shrill bark of a fox.
Was it a fox? Her ears must be playing tricks on her, she thought. It sounded like a girl crying.
She forced herself to remember Shawn’s sweet messages on the forum. She was just being silly, going overboard on the ‘stranger-danger’ paranoia.
But something did not feel right. Always trust your instincts, Chloe, she heard her mother whisper.
Crunching along the gravel path in almost complete darkness behind Pete, Chloe dithered. For some reason she could not get the image out of her head of Rose Sharp, plump and freckled in the blown-up school photograph propped on the table at the vigil, nor of the wrapped-up poster in a tube that Jess had got her for her birthday. She imagined Jess’s fingers struggling with Sellotape as she put the garish gift wrap around it, the fingers that only days later were stilled forever, stripped of the cheap H&M gilt rings that were now probably in an evidence bag somewhere.
She stopped. Pete noticed, and turned.
‘Uh, sorry,’ she began, clutching her handbag closer to herself. ‘Bit of a nightmare, but I’m not feeling very well. I think I’m going to have to go home and meet Shawn another time. Can you apologise to him for me? You don’t have to give me a lift home or anything, just give me my phone back, and I’ll find my own way . . .’
The expression on his face was like nothing Chloe had ever seen before. He looked furious. ‘You can’t do that. Shawn’s gone to a lot of effort over this. He’s expecting you.’
Tears rushed into Chloe’s eyes. She hated making people cross and upset, and the thought of pissing off Shawn Barrett was unbearable. ‘I know, but’ – she never normally used her leukaemia as an excuse, apart from to get out of tidying her room, but it was all she could think of – ‘I’m sure he’d understand. He knows that I was really ill last year, he visited me in hospital, and I’m still not right . . .’
Pete put down the black backpack and walked up to her so that his face was mere inches away from hers. In the gloom, his eyes looked huge and black, demonic.
Oh shit, thought Chloe. The fox shriek came again, louder this time, and it spurred her into action. She turned to run, but his left arm had shot out and grabbed her biceps, squeezing it tight. She tried to shake it off, staring down at it in horror and pain, which made her not notice his right fist – until it connected with her collarbone in a sickening pistol-crack that sent agony flooding around her chest, up her neck and cascading down all her ribs.
She passed out.
When she awoke, the first thing she was aware of was being in a very cold and dark place, leaning against a wall that seemed to have been wallpapered with sharp stones that stuck into her back. The fox was still shrieking. It sounded so loud now that she thought it must be in there with her.
She opened her eyes to try to see it and threw up all over herself, causing the already sharp pain in her shoulder to intensify and amplify, so intense that she saw it as scarlet ribbons in her vision lighting up the darkness. She tried to lift a hand to wipe her mouth, but found she couldn’t – her arms were handcuffed together behind her body. She tried to move her legs, but they were bo
und together with what looked like rope.
Chloe groaned, in too much pain to properly cry out. She was a moron. Of course Pete wasn’t Shawn’s chauffeur. Of course it hadn’t really been Shawn Barrett messaging her . . . Oh God.
‘I’m going to die,’ she whispered.
Then, to her complete shock, the fox cry stopped and the fox spoke to her, a voice coming out of the darkness. ‘I thought you were already dead.’
She was hallucinating; she must be. This was some kind of horrific nightmare. But the stones sticking into her back and head and the pain in her chest told her that she couldn’t be.
She wailed, peering into the thick black air, trying to see the source of the voice. ‘Who are you? You’re a fox!’
The voice came back, more thickly. ‘I ain’t no fox, what are you on about? My name’s Jade, and he’s got me locked up in here too.’
‘Jade? Not Jade as in Jade and Kai?’
There was a faint snort. ‘Don’t talk to me about that twat.’
‘Oh my God, Jade, it’s me, Chloe Hedges. F-U-Cancer. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on? I came to meet Shawn.’
‘Oh, babe, so did I! I got a text at this party last night. Shawn was there and he said he’d seen me and thought I was gorgeous. Asked me to meet him at this place down on the Thames called Platt’s Eyot. Shawn, I mean the bloke pretending to be him, said he had a houseboat and was going to meet me there.’
How stupid and naïve, Chloe thought, then stopped herself. She had been just as stupid, hadn’t she? They had both allowed their desperation, the years of fantasy about meeting Shawn, to blind them to danger. Exactly the same thing must have happened to Rose and Jess.
Jade’s words tumbled out. ‘So I was, like, waiting there, on the edge of the car park, looking around coz there was no sign of him and the whole place was deserted coz it was pissing down with rain, and I got my phone out to Snapchat who I thought was Shawn and he came up behind me and grabbed me, stuck a knife in my back and told me if I cried out, I was dead.’
Chloe could hear Jade panting, seemingly drained by the memory and the torrent of words.
‘It’s only just struck me, but I’m sure I’ve seen him before,’ Chloe said. ‘There’s something familiar about him.’
Jade didn’t respond. What did it matter, anyway? He had them now, and all that mattered was whether he let them live. Or if they would die here.
‘You handcuffed too?’ Chloe asked.
‘Yeah, and my feet are tied to some weird sort of stone bench thing. I can’t move. My legs have gone dead. Everything’s numb.’ Jade started to cry again.
‘I think I know why we’re here. Why he chose us, and Rose and Jess.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The StoryPad thing. It has to be that. It’s the only thing that connects the four of us.’
‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit.’ Chloe could almost hear Jade’s brain whirring in the darkness. ‘That’s why he brought us here.’
‘What?’
‘I never told you, did I?’ Jade said. ‘The day . . . the day it happened.’ She began to cry. ‘I had no idea. If I’d known she . . .’ Jade’s voice broke apart and she dissolved into sobs.
‘We’ll die of hypothermia if he leaves us here all night,’ Chloe said when Jade was finally silent. Already her voice was coming out all funny with cold – her mouth wasn’t working properly.
‘Oh God, why did I do it?’ Her voice tailed off and the fox wail returned. Chloe wanted to know exactly what Jade had done, but for now it was far more important to attempt to get out of here.
‘Shhh, Jade, listen. I heard you crying back from where he parked his car. There’s a road not far away. If we both scream, someone might hear us.’
More sniffing. ‘I’ve already tried. Nobody came.’
‘Yeah, but there’s two of us now. We need to get out of here before he gets back. Let’s try it – after three: one, two, three . . .’
Chloe filled her lungs, although it was absolute agony on her busted collarbone, and the two of them lifted their heads and screamed as loudly as they could, the sound filling the small, freezing grotto, bouncing off the shells and – Chloe prayed – through the gaps in the boarded-up windows and the weird arched doorway, out over the trees to the road.
They screamed and screamed until their voices cracked and sputtered to nothing, like a gust of wind blowing a candle flame back to darkness.
When they stopped screaming, a man’s voice came out of the ringing silence – his voice. ‘Are we quite finished?’
Chloe’s heart somersaulted in her broken chest. Jade screamed again.
She heard someone moving towards her. He had been here, in the darkness, all along.
Chapter 52
Day 14 – Patrick
Patrick and Carmella had arranged to meet at her flat, which was close to Chloe’s address, and were now together in Patrick’s car. As usual, Carmella looked as fresh as a newly bathed baby; her red curls in individually spaced, smooth spirals; her skin dewy-clear. Patrick had no idea how she did it. His skin felt prickly and sticky; his lower back aching from sitting in the car; his tinnitus whistling feedback in his ears; and his throat sore from constantly puffing on his e-cig. I’m falling apart, he thought.
‘Have you managed to get through to Gareth about Hammond’s bodyguard?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. He wasn’t answering.’ She produced her phone. ‘You think he’s our man?’
‘I don’t know. Have we encountered him?’ Patrick felt the need to consult his Moleskine, but it was back at the office.
Carmella had her phone to her ear, waiting for Gareth to answer. ‘I think he was there when we went to Global Sounds Music, waiting in reception . . . Hello, Gareth? You all right? Listen, what’s Mervyn Hammond’s bodyguard called? . . . Kerry Mangan. What do you know about him?’
Patrick half-listened, while trying to puzzle everything out at the same time. Mervyn had insisted he’d been set up, that the ‘LUCKY’ knickers had been planted at his house. The DNA result wasn’t back yet, but that didn’t matter. If, God forbid, Chloe and Jade had been abducted, then obviously Mervyn, who had been in police company all day, couldn’t be responsible. There was a chance he was connected, was orchestrating everything, but after what Chloe’s mother had said, Lennon had discounted him pretty much entirely – though he was glad they were still holding him. Hammond had shifted from number one suspect to their most important witness.
Because if the underwear had been planted at Mervyn’s house, it must have been put there by somebody who’d been at the party. The same man who’d called the next morning and left the anonymous tip. They knew for certain that Mangan had been at the party, and had given Jade a lift home. Had he arranged to meet her again later?
Was he the killer?
Whoever it was, they now had a probable motive to explain why the killer had taken the girls’ clothes from the two crime scenes. He had been saving them to plant on some other poor sucker. That poor sucker being Mervyn.
Carmella ended the call. ‘Mangan was with Hammond when they visited the children’s home. And while Gareth was talking, I remembered something Roisin told me in Ireland. She said something about Mervyn’s bodyguard being there, giving her dirty looks while Mervyn was persuading her to keep quiet. I’m pretty sure he was there at the signing at Waterstones too. I have this memory of him looking over at me and Wendy when I was talking to her . . .’
‘We need to get a photo to Chelsea Fox,’ Patrick said.
Carmella nodded. ‘Gareth told me that Mangan is ex-army, but was discharged back in the nineties for reasons Winkler was unable to ascertain. Let me ring Gareth back, see if he can get a photo now.’
‘Get an address first. We’ll go to Mangan’s now, assuming we can get his address. Then tell Gareth to get round to Chelsea Fox’s, show her Mangan’
s photo.’
Adrenalin surged beneath Patrick’s skin. But running alongside the excitement, the conviction that they were close, so close, was a deep, horrible fear. Jess had been missing for twenty-four hours before her body was found, suggesting that the killer liked to play with his victims like a cat with a mouse.
Jade could already be dead. Possibly Chloe Hedges too – he’d instructed Rebecca to ring him the second she turned up, and there had been no call.
The alternative, Patrick thought with a shudder, was even worse. Both girls could be suffering torture, right now, begging not for their lives but to die. For the pain to end.
Chapter 53
Day 14 – Patrick
Halfway to Kerry Mangan’s place, the address of which Gareth had sent them within minutes of talking to Carmella, Patrick noticed the petrol light flashing in his car, reminding him that he’d been meaning to fill up for the past two days. The dashboard informed him he had five miles left till the tank was empty. He banged the steering wheel with his fist. For fuck’s sake. Normally, this would have drawn a quip from Carmella, but she was as tense as he was; her knee bouncing up and down; swearing at the traffic; leaning out of the window at one point and aiming a stream of insults in her thickest Irish accent at a portly man who was blocking the road with his white van. She didn’t look quite so fresh anymore.
‘Which one of us will have a heart attack first, do you think?’ Patrick asked, as they turned into the street in Surbiton where Mangan lived.
Carmella didn’t reply. She was too busy gawping at the scene halfway down the street.
‘Who the hell’s that?’ she asked, unbuckling her seat belt as Patrick did something he’d never done before: bumper parking the car, shoving a tiny Fiat a foot forward so he could squeeze into a space.
A mixed-race teenager was hammering on the front door of a Victorian terraced house, before stepping back and yelling up at the first-floor window. ‘Jade! I know you’re in there with him, bae! Come out, you fucking slag, I love you.’