(2012) Say You're Sorry

by Michael Robotham

  I wanted to tell her not to do it. Don’t risk it.

  I sat down on the bunk and huddled against the back wall. Every shadow held a withered body.

  I prayed. I don’t pray very well. We’re not a very religious family. My dad says nine out of ten religions fail in their first year.

  While I was praying, I was listening, trying to hear what was happening upstairs. I imagined the worst things. Holes being dug and bodies buried. Hideous screams. That’s what he always threatened to do: bury us deep where nobody would find us.

  I don’t know how long I waited. Dozing. Waking. Listening. I shouted at the ceiling.

  “Give her back, you bastard! Don’t you hurt her!”

  I stood on the bench and looked out the crack in the window. There was a moon somewhere and I could just make out the trees and hear the wind moving the leaves.

  I woke in the dark again, shivering violently. I sat up. Still alone. I reached across to her bunk. Felt her cold blankets. When I woke again it was almost light enough to see. I threw back the blankets and climbed the ladder, trying to balance, but I couldn’t reach the trapdoor.

  I stood on the bench. Looked through the crack. I could just make out a wire fence and the edge of another building with a broken window. Rubbish. Weeds. Silence. Nothing moving.

  All the next day I waited. Time meant nothing. I was hungry and cold, but I wouldn’t eat without Tash. I looked at the black eye on the ceiling. I begged him to give her back. I didn’t want to be alone. I needed Tash.

  Then I heard the sound of the hatch opening. Gaping darkly. He lowered her down to the ladder. Her legs didn’t seem strong enough to support her. I stood beneath in case she fell.

  Slowly she descended, flinching, pale. She had blood on the front of her dress. It had dried and darkened. She stumbled. I had to hold her up. Reaching the bunk, she curled into a ball and closed her eyes. Closed to me. Bleeding.

  I made her a cup of tea. Heated some baked beans. She didn’t eat. She didn’t drink. She had stopped living by then. All hope gone.

  11

  A sound has woken me: a creaking floorboard or a whispered voice outside the door. Maybe it wasn’t a sound at all. Dull-headed, I push back the duvet and I tiptoe across the floor, joints popping in my knees.

  Turning the latch, I glance along the hotel corridor. Empty. The darkness of the staircase is like an open void. I take a step and feel something wet under my feet. Melting snow, tracked in from outside. Someone has been standing here.

  Closing the door, I turn the double lock and go to the window, pulling aside the curtains. It’s still dark outside. Charlie is sleeping. She hardly makes a sound. When she was a baby I used to crouch over her cot, fearful that she wasn’t breathing at all.

  I won’t sleep now. I will lie awake and go back over the details of yesterday. I cannot forget the image of the frozen girl. The more I try to push it away, the harder it pushes back. That is the grim inevitability of unwanted thoughts. We cannot empty our heads. We cannot forget.

  I wake Charlie just after seven and we eat a quick breakfast before walking to the train station. Supplies for the journey—a take-away coffee, hot chocolate and the Daily Telegraph. Five minutes for the train.

  Tires scorch into the station car park and a police car screeches to a halt. DCI Drury is out the door and sprinting up the steps, leaping the ticket barrier like a gymnast on parallel bars. Grievous struggles to catch up, straddling the barrier and grimacing in pain.

  Drury storms along the platform. Breathless. Angry. He almost knocks Charlie over, before jabbing his finger into my chest.

  “How in Christ’s name did you know?”

  I don’t retreat, but I’m concerned for Charlie.

  “Are you OK?” I ask.

  She nods. I look at Drury. “Please apologize to my daughter.”

  He won’t be distracted. “Tell me how you knew. Leece matched the dental records. It’s Natasha McBain.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Did Shaw recognize her?”

  “No.”

  “How?”

  “The dog.”

  “You’re kidding me! You pulled a name out of your arse based on a dog.”

  “It was more than that.” I sound defensive.

  “Where has she been? Three years and not a word, then she turns up in the middle of a blizzard.”

  “I don’t know.”

  A train has appeared around a far bend, the carriages straightening, rails humming. For a moment the platform announcer interrupts. Drury waits, loosening his tie.

  “You should have told me. I don’t like being everybody’s prize fuck.”

  “I could have been wrong.”

  “The chief constable wants to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s his business.”

  “We’re supposed to catch this train.”

  “There’ll be others.”

  Chief Constable Thomas Fryer is a big man squeezed into a uniform that is one size too small for him. Pink-faced with jaundiced eyes, he has an office on the top floor of Thames Valley Police headquarters. It’s a blue-sky view and daily affirmation that he’s reached the top of his chosen profession.

  Removing his rimless glasses, he wipes them with a Kleenex.

  “DCI Drury wants to have you arrested.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “You’ve made him look foolish.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  Through the vertical blinds, I can see the outer office. Charlie is waiting for me, sitting on a plastic chair, texting on her iPhone. Drury is in the same room, pacing the floor, furious at being excluded from the meeting.

  Fryer puts on his glasses.

  “He’s a good detective. Hot-headed. Noisy. But he gets results.”

  The chief constable takes a seat. The silver buttons on his uniform rattle against the metal edge of his desk.

  “Are you a gambling man, Professor?”

  “No.”

  “But you understand odds?”

  “Yes.”

  “A true punter might wager a few quid on a long shot just to keep an interest in a race, but he doesn’t bet his house on an outsider without inside information, you understand what I’m saying?”

  The answer is no, but I don’t interrupt him.

  “A punter doesn’t risk his entire stake unless he gets a nod from someone close to the horse, the jockey or the trainer.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “You’re a long shot but I’ve heard some good things.”

  “Good things?”

  “Detective Superintendent Veronica Cray speaks very highly of you. And I’m led to believe she doesn’t say nice things about men as a rule.”

  The chief constable has risen from his chair again and walked to the window, admiring his view.

  “Hell of a mess, this…”

  I’m not sure if I’m supposed to answer.

  “We need to tread gently. Under normal circumstances, a teenage girl dying in a blizzard wouldn’t create too many issues, but this is very different. This is one of the Bingham Girls.”

  “Issues?”

  “I’ll get to that. First I need to ask for your assistance. I want you to hang around for a few more days. Help us understand what happened to Natasha McBain.”

  “I have a clinical practice in London.”

  “We can pay for your services.”

  “It’s not about money.”

  Fryer places both fists on his desk, propping his body forward.

  “The press are going to have a field day. That’s why we’re not making it public just yet. I’ve ordered a full media blackout. I don’t know how long it’s going to hold…”

  “What about the girl’s family?”

  “We’ll seek their co-operation.”

  The silence stretches out. Fryer brings it to a close.

  “I have questions, Professor. Do you think Natasha McBain ran
away from home and chose the wrong night to come back?”

  “No.”

  “I thought so. Where has she been?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Fryer nods and glances at the folder on his desk.

  “There are details that I wish to share with you, but first I need your assurance that you’ll keep this information confidential and that you’ll agree to help.”

  “I can’t, I’m sorry.”

  Fryer doesn’t seem to hear me. “I want you to review the original investigation. Look for any shortcomings. Assist in the new search…”

  “I can recommend a good profiler.”

  “I’m asking you. You see things that other people miss. In less than a day you uncovered more than two dozen detectives did in a week.”

  “I’ve retired.”

  “A man like you doesn’t retire. You answer the call.”

  He straightens and rocks back on his heels, holding the blunt end of a ballpoint pen against his clean-shaven chin.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance, you and I: Vincent Ruiz. I played rugby against Ruiz. It was a long while ago, of course. We both played in the front row. He once landed a punch flush on my jaw and I saw stars for a week. I deserved it. I punched him first.

  “If you need help on the review, call in Ruiz. We can employ him as a consultant, put you both on the payroll: a thousand pounds a day. I’m sure he’d appreciate the money…”

  The chief constable has done his research. He knows that Ruiz has struggled financially since he retired from the Metropolitan Police. He has an elderly mother in full-time care and shrinking savings.

  Fryer pauses. There’s something else. Resuming his seat, he opens the folder.

  “Elements of this case shock me, Professor. I’ve been a policeman for thirty years and not many things surprise me anymore.”

  He passes me a photograph of Natasha McBain, naked on a metal bench, her chest sewn together with rough cross-stitches.

  “We do some terrible things to people after they die; we cut them open, gut them, stitch them up, but that poor girl suffered more indignities in life than in death.”

  He adds a second photograph. “At a stretch, I can accept why some sadistic prick might rape a teenage girl. Maybe he’s anti-social, or impotent, or just plain too ugly to get laid. And I can almost understand why he might keep her locked up as a plaything and beat her around, getting excited by her fear. But this… this is beyond me.”

  He adds a final photograph—an extreme close-up of Natasha’s groin area with her vagina shown in all its anatomical detail. Then I recognize what I’m looking at… what I’m not seeing. Her prepuce and clitoris are missing.

  This is what Dr. Leece saw during the post-mortem. This is what left him speechless.

  “Dead people have rights too,” says Fryer. “I don’t care what you wish had happened in the past. It’s not my concern. I sometimes wish I worked less and was nicer to people and could open a homeless shelter for stray cats, but then I realize that I’m not that sort of person, which is why I don’t give a rat’s arse about you being tired or retired. It’s bogus, a bad excuse.”

  The chief constable stabs his index finger at the photographs.

  “You’re going to help us, Professor, because there’s a lot more at stake here than a few bruised reputations and a DCI with his nose out of joint. There were two Bingham Girls. The job is only half done.”

  12

  Drury hasn’t said a word since he emerged from the chief constable’s office. With his bloodless fists clenched and a manic gleam in his eyes, he strides towards the lift, slapping his palm against the button, trying to bruise the wall.

  His arguments are stilling ringing in my ears. Delivered at decibels, they had opened doors along the corridor and raised eyebrows. He demanded a bigger task force. More detectives. Greater resources. What he didn’t want was a “bloody shrink” spouting clichés and telling him the bleeding obvious.

  Charlie pretended not to listen. Turning up her iPod, she swung her legs beneath her chair and hummed to herself. Now we’re half-running down the corridor, trying to catch up to Drury who is holding open the lift doors like he’s Moses parting the Red Sea.

  The police car drops us at the hotel where I rebook a room. Charlie has fallen silent, picking at a hangnail, a performance of compressed sullenness. I try to kiss her cheek. She turns her face away.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “What about London?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “I can go by myself.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t like that.”

  Drury is waiting downstairs, the engine running.

  The lift doors slide closed. I stare at my reflection in the polished steel wondering how I finished up back here—involved in another investigation. Whatever skill I have, whatever ability to understand human behavior and motives, it has turned into a curse.

  People teem with their own information. It leaks from their pores, spouts from their mouths, reveals itself in every mannerism, tic and twitch. Whether they are shy, materialistic, body conscious, vain, fluent in cliché, brimming with aphorisms and tabloid axioms, they reveal themselves in thousands of different ways.

  And almost unconsciously I pick up these signals, reading their body language and registering the cues. I used to want to know why things happened. Why would a couple murder young women and bury them in their basement? Why does a teenage boy spray a schoolyard with bullets? Why would a schoolgirl give birth to a baby in a toilet block and dump the newborn in a rubbish bin? Not anymore. I don’t want to be able to see inside people’s heads. It’s like knowing too much. It’s like living too long or witnessing too many events; experiencing things to the point of fatigue.

  People are complicated, cruel, brave, damaged and prone to outrageous acts of brutality and kindness. I know the causes. I know the effects. I have been there and back again and bought the souvenirs. It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I’ve done my bit. Someone else should shoulder the burden.

  DS Casey opens the rear door for me. Drury is riding up front. We’re not going to the police station. Instead, we drive to Abingdon, the tires crunching on gritted tarmac and splashing through puddles of slush. Few cars. Fewer people.

  Twenty minutes pass. We pull up outside a red brick and tile bungalow with pebble dash on the facade. Drury stares through the windscreen and finally speaks.

  “Someone removed her clitoral hood and clitoris. That’s a religious thing, right? Some Muslim communities do it to young girls. Sew them up…”

  “It wasn’t religious.”

  “What sort of sick—”

  “It was punishment. Payback.”

  “Someone hated this girl?”

  “Or what she represented.”

  “She was eighteen—what did she represent?”

  “Women, youthfulness, beauty, sex…”

  “It’s a sex crime?”

  “Yes.”

  He blows air from his cheeks and shakes his head.

  “I’m not happy about this, Professor, but I don’t have a choice. Next time you have a theory or uncover something—you tell me first, understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want a full psychological profile. I want to know where Natasha has been and why she came back. Did she run away or was she abducted? Where was she held? Why was she mutilated?”

  “I’m a psychologist, not a psychic.”

  “And you’re not a detective—remember that.”

  The DCI steps out of the car and signals me to follow. He rings the doorbell. We wait. I can hear a TV playing. Footsteps. The door opens. A young man blinks at us. There are tattoos on his forearms and neck. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says, POKER—YOU KNOW SHE LIKES IT, and he’s holding something out of sight, behind the edge of the door.

  Drury flashes his badge. “Hello, Hayden, is your mother home?”

  “She’s getting ready for work.”

  “This w
on’t take long.”

  For a moment they stare at each other before Hayden turns his head and yells up the stairs.

  “Mum. Coppers.”

  A loud noise, something dropped. An exclamation. Then a tentative answer: “Won’t be a minute.”

  Hayden slips whatever he’s holding into the waistband of his jeans and covers it with his T-shirt. A burst of canned laughter escapes from a TV. He opens the door, inviting us in.

  A skinny white girl is sitting on the sofa looking drugged in the watery half-light. She’s sitting in an armchair, smoking, her arm bent and her head tilted sideways to let the smoke escape from her lips. Hayden’s girlfriend. She looks about twenty-seven but could be seventeen.

  Hayden tells her to go home. She blows a fringe from her eyes and ignores him.

  “I said piss off!”

  This time she grabs her coat and sneers at him, slamming the door on her way out.

  Hayden takes her seat in the armchair and picks up a TV magazine, turning the pages, not reading.

  The sitting room is cluttered and claustrophobic, smelling of old shoes and cigarettes. There are Christmas cards on the mantelpiece next to a sad-looking Christmas tree. Fake green branches are draped in strips of tinsel and weighed down by cheap ornaments. The crowning angel is too heavy, bending the uppermost branch like a catapult.

  Quiet footsteps on the stairs signal Alice McBain’s arrival. She’s wearing dark trousers, a green-hemmed blouse and a cardigan. A nametag with a supermarket logo is pinned to the pocket. Late-forties, maybe younger, she’s a small woman with short straight hair and the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee or some other figure beaten down by life without ever comprehending why.

  “We’re here to talk about Natasha,” Drury says.

  Alice raises a hand to her mouth. Uncertainty shimmers in her eyes; not fear or hope, but something that swings wildly between the two extremes. Missing children create a silence around themselves, a vacuum that is filled with every shade of hope and despair.

  Drury has taken a seat opposite Alice, their knees almost touching. She tries to speak, but can’t summon a sound. This is the moment when all that sadness and dreadful wondering come to a climax.