Cut to the Bone

by Roz Watkins

  Mick rubbed his nose.

  ‘This is extremely serious,’ Craig said.

  ‘Some bloke arranged it over the phone a couple of weeks ago. The one who’s in charge of the abattoir.’

  ‘He must have given you a name.’

  Mick sniffed. ‘Gary Finchley.’

  Jai marched into my room, in full-on mission mode. ‘The tech people have found evidence that Gary Finchley was at the abattoir on Sunday night. We confronted his wife with it and she started crying and admitted he went out.’

  ‘He was at the abattoir the night Violet disappeared?’

  ‘Yes. He logged on to the computer. We think Gary was Violet’s biological father, don’t we? So she might have talked to him about the rape.’

  I nodded. ‘And they could have got into an argument. Bring him in. Have we found the bin liner? The one that Mick dumped? That should give us the forensic evidence we need, and then if it’s him, we’ll have the bugger.’

  Jai shook his head. ‘Not yet. But we’ve only just started looking. Do you know how big those woods are?’

  ‘But he told us where he dumped it!’

  ‘It’s been moved. Or he got it wrong. Or he lied.’ Jai walked over, perched on my windowsill, and jiggled his knee up and down.

  ‘Sit still, Jai,’ I said. ‘I can’t handle your jittering today.’

  ‘Sorry. Are you okay? It sounded horrible this morning.’

  ‘I am. Did Suki tell you she was there? She pretty much rescued me. She’s brave.’

  ‘What the hell …?’

  ‘She appeared when they had a knife at my throat.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘She wanted to talk to me. She wants me to tell you she does like your kids.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. You’re going to be even more on her side now, aren’t you?’

  I clenched my fists, feeling my fingernails press into my palms. Maybe if I stopped being so damn reasonable and turned into one of those cliched, psycho-bitch, ice-queen bosses then this would stop happening to me. ‘I’m on nobody’s side, Jai. I just want everyone to be happy. Suki’s nice. She’s very brave. And she says she likes your kids. End of.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jai said. ‘I’m sorry she’s been hassling you.’

  ‘She didn’t so much hassle me as rescue me, Jai.’

  He smiled. ‘Fair enough. I’ll give her that. She has guts.’

  ‘She does indeed. Anyway, we need to find this bag. We don’t know if this Mick bloke’s telling the truth. What his agenda might be. He’s not been Mr Honesty and Integrity so far.’ I grabbed a hole-punch that was sitting on my desk and punched a few random holes in a sheet of paper.

  ‘Now who’s being annoying?’ Jai said.

  I punched a few more holes, then shoved the hole-punch away. ‘It’s bad enough that she’s most likely dead, but if Gary Finchley fed her to pigs and chucked her hair in with the toxic waste … It’s awful. And imagine if he did that knowing she was his daughter.’

  ‘Horrific. Although if he’d been relying on TV tropes for pig-info, he’d have pulled her teeth out as well as shaving off her hair, so it could be worse.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Jai, all right.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s my way of dealing with it. Won’t this window go any wider?’ Jai stopped jiggling his knee and started fiddling with the window instead.

  ‘No. It’s buggered. Just leave it. So, if Gary Finchley killed her and put her hair and clothes in with the waste, are we saying he thought nobody would look at it? Or he had a deal with Mick to dispose of it and Mick botched it?’

  ‘Maybe the deal was to dispose of it,’ Jai said, ‘but when Mick looked inside, he freaked out. Maybe he hadn’t realised what he was getting into.’

  My phone buzzed. A message from Hannah: I’ve got something to show you. Will you be in Gritton later? x.

  What was she up to? But I was planning to go up to Gritton and could afford a half hour coffee. I texted back. OK. 6pm in Gritton tea room? x

  A smiley emoji pinged back.

  My internal phone rang. I snatched it up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’ve found a body.’

  26

  Bex – August 1999

  The trees were dark around the clearing, the evening humid, preparing for another storm. The fire blazed yellow and orange in the centre of their circle, making the air electric and dangerous. It was Bex’s last night in Gritton.

  The boys were there, doing boy things. Drinking beer, talking without saying anything, playing with the fire, eyeing up the girls. Gary’s hair was golden in the firelight, his eyes bright, his jeans singed where he’d let ash fall on them. He poked a stick into the fire and the flames shot towards his face. He didn’t move away.

  Bex took a swig of beer and allowed herself to admit it. There was something about Gary. Lucas was all square-jawed magazine looks, and Daniel was good-looking too, with his chiselled androgynous face, but she was weirded out by him after seeing the photo of herself in his room. No, it was Gary she was drawn to.

  It somehow felt like Bex had been in Gritton forever but also as if she’d only just arrived. She’d done okay bonding with her dad, especially when they were training the pigs, and she’d tried hard with Kirsty, but there was still a distance there. It was like Kirsty was a foreigner, an alien even. She wondered if it was because their mother had been foreign, but that made no sense because she was Bex’s mother too.

  Smoke drifted up from the fire. Anna was beside Bex. The boys were opposite and Kirsty slightly apart from everyone. They weighed each other up over the shifting flames.

  Bex had drunk too much. She was new to drink but she sure as hell liked it. Drink toned down her anxieties, made her feel detached from them. So what if she was all messed up inside? Maybe everyone was messed up and it wasn’t just her. Why did she worry so much about everything? Why did she feel guilty about things that had happened when she was only three? What did it matter if Daniel had been taking photos of her? She should be flattered.

  It was late. The empty bottles were piling up by the fire. The stories were getting more raucous. Bex was laughing too loudly at the boys’ jokes. She rarely felt attractive, but that night, all three men were looking at her as if she was a magnet that was drawing them in. She sensed Anna could see it too, but Bex couldn’t work out Anna’s reaction. Was she jealous or was it something else?

  Daniel shouted over the blaze of the fire. ‘Get us another beer would you, Anna?’

  Anna stood and walked to the pile of beers under the trees. She should have told him to get his own beer. Even Bex had realised you didn’t make them like you by being nice to them.

  Daniel put a hand on the ground and pushed himself up, skirted around the fire, and plonked himself next to Bex, where Anna had been. She saw Gary mouth, ‘Wanker,’ to Daniel through the smoke before turning to whisper to Lucas.

  Bex knew Daniel shouldn’t have stolen Anna’s place, but she was too drunk to care. ‘Come sit here, Anna.’ She patted the ground on the other side of her. Anna folded down and chucked the beer at Daniel, narrowly missing his head. His shoulder jerked back when he caught it.

  Bex took a sip of beer. She had to stare into the fire to stop it spinning away from her. Daniel was too close, letting his leg fall against hers.

  She could feel his arm creeping round the back of her, trying to draw her in, and suddenly it struck her as funny. ‘No, Daniel,’ she said, and pushed his arm away. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ She laughed in a stupid, hysterical way, knowing it was the drink making her like this but unable to stop.

  Daniel wrenched himself away from her and stood. ‘You’re a stuck-up little cow!’

  ‘No, Daniel, I didn’t mean …’ She reached towards him but she was still convulsed with laughter. Daniel turned his back and marched off towards the woods.

  Gary leaped up and took Daniel’s place. ‘Try this.’ He waved his hand in Bex’s direction.

  She reached for the firefly spar
k of orange light.

  She’d only smoked a couple of times. She’d hated the taste of it in her throat. But she took the joint, tried to hold it in a cool way, stuck it between her lips and sucked in. Didn’t cough. Felt the spinny unworldliness overcome her.

  Bex passed it on to Anna. A fizzy feeling rose up inside her and she didn’t care any more that she’d upset Daniel. She laughed at the craziness of everything and nothing. She rocked back onto the mossy ground and giggled like a five-year-old.

  ‘I like her when she’s stoned.’ Gary was speaking from miles away. She could feel his gaze. On her body, not her face. Her dress had ridden up her thighs. That was funny too. She laughed some more.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lucas lowered his voice but she could still hear him at the edges of her consciousness. ‘Wouldn’t kick her out of bed.’

  Bex knew that should bother her, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

  She let her head drop sideways, and caught sight of a figure in the dark woods. A girl. Pale, thin, wild-haired, dressed in white. Fear surged through her. The Pale Child. And she was looking right back at her.

  Bex scrambled into a sitting position. The world spun and she clutched the ground with curled fingers and tight toes, as if she might fall off. She pointed and said, ‘It’s the Pale Child.’ But when she looked again, the girl was gone.

  She collapsed back onto the soft earth.

  27

  Meg – Present day

  Wednesday

  ‘It’s quickest to go into the valley,’ I said. ‘Past the abattoir.’

  Fiona accelerated down the hill. The air was dense with the heat, shimmering over the rocky moors around Gritton, and smoke from the wildfire sat low above the trees. It was the kind of weather that could turn a body into a seething, seeping mass of maggots and flies within days.

  ‘What do they know?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘No detail,’ I said. ‘Just that they found a body in the woods and we should get there.’

  Fiona studied me from the corner of her eye. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I suppose I’d been hoping she was still alive, despite everything. While we didn’t have a body …’

  ‘I know. It’s awful. Poor girl.’

  I pictured Violet’s adoptive parents, who’d been warned all those years ago. Who knew Violet shouldn’t have come to Gritton but couldn’t stop her. And Bex, who also knew to keep away from Gritton, weeping silently for her lost daughter. ‘At least if we find her body, we should get some evidence. Everything points to Gary, and we’re bringing him in, but we’ve got nothing concrete on him yet. It’s all circumstantial.’

  ‘But if Violet’s his daughter …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How horrible.’ Fiona did a rapid shake of her head. ‘Oh, and I see they’re laying into us on Facebook again.’

  I gave a bitter laugh. ‘Laying into me, you mean.’

  ‘Mainly, to be fair. They’re going nuts that we haven’t arrested anyone from the Animal Vigilantes.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ I knew I shouldn’t care what these people thought but it made me feel wretched. ‘It’s wonderful to get an ongoing critique of the investigation from a bunch of gammons who know nothing about police work and wouldn’t recognise the CPS if it smacked them in the face.’

  The woods were behind Kirsty Nightingale’s pig farm in the valley. We drove past a huge barn behind a high fence topped with barbed wire. ‘It looks like a concentration camp from outside,’ Fiona said.

  ‘Having seen the cages she keeps them in, I reckon it feels like one from the inside too.’ I wasn’t in the mood to invent a bright side. ‘But then I would say that, because I sympathise with animal rights extremists.’

  The road bent away from the farm and passed into trees. Fiona slowed. ‘Round here somewhere?’

  A glimpse of white in the distance. We pulled closer. Police vehicles on a verge. Fiona slotted our car in behind them. ‘Am I blocking the road?’ she said anxiously.

  ‘No.’ I didn’t even look.

  An approach path had been marked out, and we followed it deep into the woods. It had been hacked between brambles and nettles. The foliage above us was so thick it absorbed all the brightness from the sky. Some woods were beautiful – dappled light on swaying branches, easy wide paths through bluebells. This wasn’t one of them. It was a tangle of ugly plants that either stung or spiked you.

  I tried to focus on the path ahead and not think about Violet. Her smooth skin in the light of a summer evening, her earnest face reporting that she’d seen the Pale Child. What would she look like now, after two days in this heat? I didn’t want to see.

  We reached a small clearing, and the blue tape of the cordon came into view. Just outside it, was Mary, the pathologist, talking to a uniformed cop. She looked up and saw us. ‘It’s quite interesting actually,’ she said.

  My heart always sank when Mary said a case was interesting. I looked beyond the tape into a clearing.

  I blinked a couple of times, not sure if I was seeing correctly.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Fiona whispered.

  A body was propped against a tree, slumped sideways. Where there should have been a face, instead there was a pig’s head.

  28

  Bex – August 1999

  Bex opened her eyes. It was morning and she was in her room at her dad’s house. The world spun catastrophically. She clamped her eyes shut again, but that was worse. She opened them and stared at the antique dressing table by the window. Don’t be sick, don’t be sick. Her breathing was fast. She swallowed. Oh God.

  She leaped out of bed and raced for the bathroom. Threw herself at the toilet and retched and retched until her stomach was bruised and her throat raw. Oh God. She collapsed onto the cool floor tiles.

  The sickness again. She clawed her way up and bashed her head into the porcelain of the toilet bowl. How could there still be stuff to throw up?

  She dragged herself to her feet and rinsed her mouth again and again. Raised her head and looked at herself in the mirror. Oh God.

  She stumbled over and locked the bathroom door. Sat on the side of the bath with her head between her knees. This was not good. Maybe if she brushed her teeth?

  The side of the bath was hard.

  And she was sore.

  He heart beat faster. What had happened the night before?

  She stood and walked to the toilet. Sat and reached her fingers tentatively to touch herself. She gulped back a sob. She was sore. Very sore.

  What the fuck had happened the night before? She couldn’t remember.

  She collapsed onto the floor again. Something had happened and she didn’t remember. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  She stood, but the room started spinning. She sank onto the toilet. Dropped her head forward and let herself cry.

  She spoke to herself. Okay, okay, so this has happened. Don’t panic. Her breath was coming in short bursts. Don’t panic.

  She didn’t want to use the word, even to herself. Raped? That was the sort of thing that happened to other people. How could it have happened to her? She was a virgin. She’d been a virgin. She wanted to scream. If she hadn’t felt so sick, she’d have been screaming. How the fuck could this have happened?

  She stood again. Leaned against the wall. The last thing she remembered. The flash of fear. Seeing the girl. The Pale Child. That was it.

  Then what? Did she pass out?

  It must have been one of the boys. Oh my God, one of her friends. A jolt of memory. The way Gary looked at her with narrowed eyes. Daniel calling her a stuck-up cow. Lucas winking and saying, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.

  But what about Kirsty and Anna? Why hadn’t they protected her?

  It must be a dream. She kept saying it to herself. This hasn’t happened.

  But she wasn’t waking up. She was still there, in the bathroom, wanting to puke, wanting to scream, wanting to die.

  Fuck, fuck fuck. She clutched her head and rocked to and fro.
/>   How was she supposed to deal with this? She wanted Aunt Janet. She wanted her mum. She didn’t remember her mum, but she wanted her anyway.

  She had to speak to Kirsty. She mustn’t have a bath or a shower. She looked at her fingernails. Maybe she’d scratched him. Evidence. She couldn’t let him get away with it. He wouldn’t get away with it.

  How could she not know who it was?

  She’d talk first to Kirsty. Kirsty always knew what to do.

  Bex pulled open the bathroom door and walked onto the landing. She looked out of the window at the yard below. A police car. Her pulse spiked. Did they know? Had Kirsty reported it already? Were they coming to talk to her?

  And then she heard Kirsty’s scream.

  29

  Meg – Present day

  Wednesday

  I stood at the front of the incident room trying to look composed. I was talking to the team, but half my mind was elsewhere, spinning fast and out of control. Images flooded my brain. That hideous pig mask, the body slumped sideways against a tree. A little girl asking us if we wanted tea, her voice polite and clear and unexpected. A feeling of utter dejection came over me. Why hadn’t I watched Frozen with her? Why couldn’t I have let humanity and kindness beat efficiency and professionalism?

  They were staring at me. I needed to speak, rather than stand at the front of the room sweating and looking distressed. ‘Gary Finchley was found dead in the woods at Gritton,’ I said. ‘We haven’t confirmed the cause of death, but it appears to be blunt trauma to the head. He had … a pig’s head mask on.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jai said. ‘Wait for the hysterical hordes to get hold of this one.’

  ‘They already have,’ Craig said. ‘It’s on social media about the pig’s head. Someone got a photo before we secured it.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘So we’ve got that to contend with as well.’

  ‘Two in one week,’ Jai muttered. ‘Did some bastard say it was quiet?’

  I smiled grimly. There was a veto against using the word ‘quiet’, its mere utterance being guaranteed to plunge the station into an explosion of activity, albeit generally affrays in Chesterfield and sheep on Snake Pass rather than serial murders.