No Other Darkness: A Detective Inspector Marnie Rome Mystery

by Sarah Hilary

  ‘Paranoid hoarders.’ Marnie cut him short. ‘I know what preppers are.’ Her stare made him uneasy, too sharp. ‘Where are you going with this, detective?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Except that preppers like bunkers, or any secure hiding place. We thought maybe whoever took the boys believed they were keeping them safe.’

  ‘Safe,’ she repeated.

  Curtains twitched across the street; the neighbours starting to get curious at last?

  Noah was surprised no one had come out of any of the houses to ask what was going on. But this was middle-class almost-suburbia; they could take a lot of curtain twitching before they were crass enough to ask questions.

  ‘Let’s start with number 8,’ Marnie said. ‘Douglas Cole.’

  Noah shook his head. ‘No one’s home. I checked as soon as I got here. Tried his phone, too. No answer. I left a message for him to call the station. Do you think he’s avoiding us?’

  Marnie didn’t answer. She stood looking at number 14 before she said, ‘I need you in the bunker where we found the boys.’

  ‘What?’ He blinked. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think I might have missed something. Two pairs of eyes are better than one.’

  ‘Okay.’ He tried to ignore the creeping sensation in the back of his neck. ‘Now?’

  ‘Let’s suit up. We should have done it sooner.’

  She moved in the direction of her car, speaking across her shoulder. ‘Fran’s got familial DNA. The boys were brothers. They were killed by someone close. Their mum and dad, or an aunt or uncle.’

  Family killer …

  ‘You think we missed something,’ Noah said, ‘in the bunker?’

  ‘Not evidence, no. But the sense of the place, how it might have happened … If you’re right about safety, about the motive behind this? We should go and take another look.’

  Marnie watched the twitching curtains. ‘Before the GPR team gets here and we find out what’s in the other bunkers.’

  22

  Noah stood in the dark under the Doyles’ garden, waiting while Marnie switched on the police floodlights. She remembered her way around down here. He wondered how long it would take her to forget. It was the first time he’d been further than the forensic tent.

  ‘Did you ever play under the stairs as a kid?’ she asked.

  Noah shook his head, then nodded. ‘Sometimes …’ And in bathroom cupboards, spying on his mother’s obsessive cleaning routine, but he was keeping those memories to himself. This was bad enough without adding seasoning to the spice.

  ‘With your kid brother,’ Marnie said. ‘Sol, isn’t it?’

  Sol was short for Solomon. ‘Yes.’

  Had he and Sol ever played under the stairs? Not that Noah could remember. He remembered Sol setting up a camp bed in their parents’ room and sleeping there whenever Dad was away, fetching blankets and a damp flannel for his forehead, everything Mum needed to take care of her sick little boy. Noah couldn’t remember Sol ever being sick, not really. But he could remember days and days with Sol in that camp bed, playing at being feverish; his favourite game, and their mother’s too. It was a short cut to her affection and attention. Sol had always been good at short cuts.

  Marnie finished setting up the floodlights and stood side by side with Noah, facing the makeshift bed. ‘You saw the toys they took up top?’

  Noah nodded. ‘And the books …’

  What Does a Dinosaur Do All Day? The picture of a Tyrannosaurus rex with a thermometer between his teeth – that was when Noah had first thought of Sol’s sickbed games.

  ‘Whoever put them down here,’ Marnie said, ‘it wasn’t intended as a grave. Or not just that.’

  ‘Unless the books and toys were to keep them quiet …’

  ‘There are ropes and gags if it was just about keeping them quiet.’

  ‘Distracted, then. Or he wanted to win their trust.’

  ‘Or he already had it.’ Marnie picked a flake of rust from her gloved palm. ‘The toys didn’t look new. They looked like old favourites, well loved.’

  The felt eyes had been rubbed flat on the toy monkey, like the face of Sol’s favourite lion with its fuzzy mane, a rare present from their dad, who didn’t believe in spoiling his kids but who made an exception, sometimes, for Sol.

  Noah said, ‘Familial DNA … Are we sure a family member did this?’

  ‘Would I rather it was a stranger? I don’t know if that’s better or worse. It depends how they died. If they thought they were safe, if they climbed down here because they felt safe …’ She turned her eyes away from the bed. ‘Maybe that’s worse.’

  ‘Of course it’s worse,’ Noah said reflexively. ‘It’s betrayal, the worst kind of betrayal.’

  ‘They might not have known that. They might’ve died feeling safe. Loved … What’s the alternative? That they died in fear, terrified, crying for their mum and dad?’

  ‘It’s horrible.’ Noah buried his fists in his pockets. ‘However it happened, it’s horrible.’

  Marnie didn’t speak for a while. Then she said, ‘Let’s say you brought them down here. How did you do that, without their help?’

  It was what they did, how they solved crimes like this. Except that there hadn’t been any crimes like this, not for Noah. It was different, for Marnie.

  ‘They were little,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t put up much of a fight.’

  ‘But there are two of them. You can’t carry two at once, down that.’ Marnie jerked her head at the ladder. ‘I’m not even sure you could carry one if he didn’t want you to.’

  Noah looked up the ladder with its narrow vertical rungs. ‘I drugged them.’

  ‘Post-mortem said no drugs.’

  ‘No lethal drugs. This wasn’t anything stronger than Calpol in warm milk.’ He grimaced as he said it, hating himself.

  This was what they did, he and Marnie. Reconstructed crime scenes, acting out the roles of perpetrator and victim, whatever it took to get under the skin of a case. But it felt wrong down here in the dark where the boys had died.

  ‘You didn’t mean them to die,’ Marnie said. ‘Let’s go with that theory. You were hiding them. You thought you were keeping them safe.’

  ‘Safe from what?’ Noah demanded. ‘Daylight and fresh air?’

  ‘Maybe …’ She crouched by the bed. ‘Maybe you were scared of whatever was up there.’

  ‘Daylight and fresh air,’ Noah repeated. He didn’t understand how she could do it. Treat this like any other crime scene. She’d been doing this job a lot longer than him; maybe she’d seen worse things than the dead boys. His mind blanked at what that might be.

  ‘So what’s up there? What are you so scared of?’

  Marnie stayed crouched, not speaking. He counted to thirteen before she said, ‘Their DNA was on the ladder, and on the inside of the manhole cover. They climbed up and tried to get out. So I guess you’re right. They weren’t safe.’

  She straightened and he saw her face. Blue shadows under her eyes. With the light bleaching her skin, she looked about sixteen. ‘They tried to get out.’

  ‘Anyone would try to get out. Even if it started as a game, as something safe … Sooner or later, you’d want to get out. You can’t breathe down here.’

  Not properly, he meant. Not in a way that let you believe you might survive. The air was a sucker-punch to the lungs. If you were shut down here, with no way out … You couldn’t breathe the stale air without knowing you were dying. Even if you were only five years old, you’d know. Of course their boys had tried to get out.

  Marnie looked at him and her face changed, its lines coming back into focus. ‘All right, enough. Let’s go back up.’

  ‘No. I’m okay. Let’s finish what we started.’

  It was important to get this straight in their heads. Noah didn’t want to come back at a later stage in the investigation because they’d failed to get it right first time.

  He stepped back, careful to keep within the perimeter of Forensics’ fing
ertip search. ‘You brought them down here. Drugged, or trusting you. Maybe you bribed them, said it was an adventure. The older boy would want to keep his nerve, show his kid brother he wasn’t afraid. And the little one would follow his lead, probably.’

  ‘Only probably?’

  ‘Not all kids look up to their big brothers.’

  ‘All right, but let’s say this one did.’

  She was remembering the shape they made, curled together, the older boy sheltering the younger with his body. It was impossible to forget a thing like that. Noah hadn’t envied Fran the task of separating the bodies. ‘Not all the food was eaten.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ Marnie agreed.

  ‘So you brought plenty of food. And you organised it.’ He nodded to the far corner of the bunker. ‘Over there, that was the kitchen. Bucket was there,’ he nodded again, ‘bathroom. And the bed’s here. Kids wouldn’t do that for themselves. Not most kids, anyway.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘You were down here with them, keeping house …’ He stopped.

  Marnie waited a minute. ‘Why did I leave?’

  ‘To empty the bucket. And to get more food, because there was too much to carry that first time, with the boys in tow. Two boys, some weeks … Lots of bodily waste in the bucket, especially if you’re feeding them sweetcorn, canned peaches.’

  ‘But then I stopped coming back.’

  ‘Then you stopped.’

  ‘Why?’ Her gaze was steady, burning like one of the lamps.

  ‘You … had no choice. Maybe you got caught. If this wasn’t the first time you’d done something like this.’

  ‘So I’m arrested. But I don’t confess to putting two boys down here even when it could save their lives?’

  Noah drew a breath. ‘All right. Then … you’d already killed them.’

  She shook her head. ‘No evidence that they were smothered, or harmed in any way. They were alive when I left them.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Noah agreed. ‘But they died because you didn’t come back.’

  Dead air curled like hands at his shoulders, heavy.

  Marnie looked at the whorls of damp on the walls. ‘Yes, they did. So why did I bring them down here in the first place? No evidence of abuse, Fran said. Why did I feed them and keep them warm and clean, and then just stop? Leave them to die?’

  Noah looked around, trying to see something other than a pit, a grave. ‘Maybe you were hiding them, keeping them safe.’ He couldn’t see this as a place of safety. No matter how hard he tried. He just couldn’t. ‘But what … what were you hiding them from?’

  ‘Something worse than this. Something so bad it made this place feel safe by comparison.’

  Noah shook his head. ‘I don’t buy it. If you’re that scared, you go to the police.’

  ‘Not always, or you and I would be out of a job.’ Marnie crouched by the bed again. ‘Sometimes the police are scary.’ She touched a hand to the shadow left by the mattress. ‘We take kids away sometimes. And sometimes … we give them to the wrong people.’

  The wrong people.

  Family killer.

  Noah wanted to be up in the fresh air, not down here in the rotten dark. He was starting to feel sick, black puffs of panic in his head. ‘Can we go back up?’

  Marnie was still searching the space with her stare; the whites of her eyes were the only clean things in the bunker. ‘No one reported them missing. No one. Not the schools they went to, not their extended family, or their friends. How does that happen?’

  ‘I … don’t know.’ He couldn’t stay down here. He could barely form a sentence, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. ‘Ian Merrick said … travellers. They don’t always send their kids to school, and they close ranks.’

  ‘True,’ Marnie said. ‘Just be careful how you word that for the press …’

  She straightened, turning to look at him before taking two short strides to his side.

  ‘All right.’ She put a firm hand under his elbow and lowered him to the floor of the bunker, pushing his head on to his knees. ‘Noah? Just … breathe.’

  He didn’t think he could, but she held him there with her hand on the back of his neck until the blood began to beat in his temples and the dizziness cleared a little, enough for his chest to register a complaint against the angle she was holding him to. ‘I need to …’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But slowly. Take it slowly.’

  ‘I’m okay. Just … not great with enclosed spaces.’

  She moved her mouth, painfully. ‘My fault, and I’m sorry.’ She eyed the distance to the ladder. ‘Think you can get back up? I could call the PCSO.’

  ‘No. I’ll be okay.’

  She stepped away, giving him space to climb to his feet. He was glad she didn’t offer a hand, embarrassed enough by his show of weakness.

  She waited at the side of the ladder. ‘After you …’

  He climbed the ladder easily with the incentive of daylight at the top of it, unzipping the forensic tent and stepping out into the garden, sucking at the fresh air like a surfacing diver.

  Better …

  Marnie zippered the tent shut behind them, standing at his shoulder for a second, looking up at the house. ‘You might be right,’ she said, ‘about the travellers, and the preppers.’

  Noah was acutely aware of the bunker at their backs. Standing here with Fran, he’d pictured it as a place of shade, cold. Now, it was like standing six feet from a fire pit.

  ‘I know about preppers,’ Marnie said. ‘Stephen Keele’s birth parents dabbled in it. If you can dabble in post-apocalyptic paranoia. It’s more common than you might think, even in the UK.’

  Noah nodded dumbly.

  Marnie’s phone rang and she answered it. ‘DI Rome. Beth? Is everything all right?’

  She listened in silence before saying, ‘I’ll come over.’

  She pocketed the phone, asking Noah, ‘Are you all right to make a start with house-to-house? Julie Lowry at number 12, start there. I’ll get back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Clancy,’ Marnie said. ‘And yes.’

  23

  Lawton Down Prison, Durham

  If you were to ask me why we did it, I would tell you a lie. Not because I’m avoiding the truth. I’m a fan of the truth. I rub against it whenever I can, like a bear on a big old tree, satisfying an itch even at the cost of its fur.

  I would love a larger serving of the truth. If I could find it in here – a great redwood of truth – I’d ask to be strung up and hanged from it. Believe me when I tell you I hunt for the truth every day, and I do so knowing it’s likely to kill me.

  So why would I lie to you?

  I’d lie for the same reason Pavlov’s puppies salivated. Because it’s what I’ve been taught to do, quickly and often. Prison will do that to you.

  Some people need a reason to get up in the mornings. In here, it’s easy. They ring a bell. Actually, it’s a buzzer. (You see, the truth is important to me, even little truths.) I don’t lie when I can avoid it, but in here? I’d stand a better chance of getting an extra hour of sleep after the buzzer’s buzzed.

  Lying is part of prison culture, like a sharpened toothbrush, a melted carrier bag. It’s basic self-defence. Because here’s the thing about prison: it’s all corners. No hiding places.

  I’m going to find open spaces a challenge, Lyn says, when I’m out.

  It’s so close now, just a matter of days away. I can’t pretend any longer that they’re joking. It’s really happening. They’re going to let the pair of us out.

  Esther won’t talk about it.

  Lyn tells her the same thing, about challenges.

  Open spaces are a big problem, apparently. We’ve spent all this time getting used to six square feet, less if they’ve put us in with someone who likes to flex her muscle. You get in the habit of making yourself small. When they kick you out, it’s like being thrown from a plane, so much sky thrashing pas
t you and the ground rushing up.

  You don’t stand a chance.

  Of course Lyn doesn’t put it like that. Lyn calls free-falling to your certain death ‘a challenge’. She talks about ‘pastures new’ and ‘distant horizons’, and I swear sometimes I could hang her from that tree I was talking about.

  What do I think is waiting for us, out there?

  Let me try and tell you the truth.

  I think …

  Open space is like outer space. You need a suit, the kind astronauts wear, sealed to stop your blood from boiling and your spine from stretching. Some astronauts grow by five centimetres, because their spines get stretched in space. If Esther grew by even half that much, she wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without people staring.

  I bet it feels that way when you’re first let out.

  As if you’re growing, out of control.

  I don’t want pastures new, or distant horizons. The first chance I get, I’m going down, underground. Into tube stations, car parks, anywhere I can feel the ceiling pressing on me and the walls closing in. That and the smell. Dead air, dust and piss.

  I’m finding someplace nice and narrow and I’m reaching out my arms to touch the walls either side, my palms flat to the brickwork. Safe. If I get lucky, I can stay that way for hours, like waiting to be body-searched, for someone to tell me where I begin and end, to allocate the space I’m allowed. To tell me how much is too much, where to stop.

  And then, when I know where to stop, I’m going deeper underground.

  I think you probably know where I mean: the place where we left them.

  I’m going down in the bunker.

  And I’m taking Esther with me.

  24

  London

  Noah stood at the edge of the dodgy decking, at the back of number 12. The GPR team was testing the place where a trampoline had left indents in the lawn. To his right, over a high fence, the forensic tent breathed with the breeze, its polythene walls shrinking and expanding.

  Julie Lowry, the Doyles’ neighbour, came out on to the decking in yoga pants and a yellow vest, red FitFlops on her feet, worry eating at her face. ‘What’ve they found?’

  ‘They’re still setting up.’ Noah saw goose bumps on her arms. ‘Shall we wait in the house? I’ll make us a cup of tea.’