No Other Darkness: A Detective Inspector Marnie Rome Mystery

by Sarah Hilary

  Marnie and Noah crossed the lawn, accompanied by the GPR technician. As they reached the shed, Cole came out. A little man in his fifties, with a thick head of fair hair cut like a monk’s, dressed in a pinstriped suit. His round face was pink, small eyes watering, mouth wide with distress that turned to relief as he spotted Marnie. ‘DI Rome!’

  ‘Mr Cole. How are you?’

  He wrung her hand, shaking his head. Behind him, a second GPR technician emerged from the shed. He nodded at Marnie and Noah. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

  Marnie didn’t move straight away, letting Cole cling to her hand a moment longer before she said, ‘It’s all right, Mr Cole. Let me do my job.’

  ‘It’s not,’ he stammered, ‘what you think.’ His eyes were streaming. ‘It’s not.’

  ‘All right. Let me see.’ She drew her hand free. ‘DS Jake?’

  Noah moved to help the man.

  Cole turned away, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘I’ll wait here. I’ll be good.’

  He stood to attention, like a child.

  ‘In that case,’ Marnie nodded at Noah, ‘I could use you with me.’

  • • •

  At first glance, it was like every other garden shed Noah had ever seen. It smelt the same too, of creosote and oil. Pots stood along shelves, tools hung from nails around the walls: garden shears; trowels; a pair of iron rods with right-angled ends. An old-fashioned lawnmower was propped in one corner, its blades freshly oiled. The shed was neat and orderly, but not obsessively so. The only striking thing was the open hole in its floor.

  A manhole. Like the one in the Doyles’ garden. The shed had been built around it, its base a neat cement job, home-made like the shed, leaving access to the manhole cover.

  The GPR team had opened the hole.

  The smell coming up was squeaky and high-pitched, like the wail Cole had let out.

  It’d been opened using the two right-angled rods, Noah guessed, and easily. As if it was done on a regular basis.

  Unlike any of the other bunkers in Blackthorn Road.

  ‘Has anyone been down there?’ Marnie asked the GPR technicians.

  The two men shook their heads. ‘We shone a torch to take a look, but we stayed up here. We knew you’d want to be the first ones down.’

  Noah tried to read their expressions.

  Disgust, but not horror, or not full-blown.

  Not small-bodies-buried-alive horror.

  Marnie held out a hand for the torch and crouched to peer into the bunker.

  Noah did the same, squatting on his heels, sucking a breath at what he saw.

  Eyes.

  Blue and green and yellow.

  Dozens and dozens of eyes, staring back at him from the blackness.

  32

  Noah said, ‘What is that smell?’

  ‘Damp course.’ Marnie didn’t mind the smell so much. It could have been a lot worse.

  Inside Doug Cole’s bunker, the walls were scratched by shadow, holding off the day’s heat. Her body temperature dropped a notch as she stood at the foot of the ladder.

  No bodies, so no death stench. No damp, either. Under the chemical top note, the smell wasn’t black or green. It was clear and white, like standing water.

  The larger dolls wore silk dresses; the smaller ones were dressed in cotton. The baby dolls had been wrapped in shawls, lying in wicker cradles. One or two looked frighteningly real.

  Dozens and dozens of dolls. Teddy bears too, and wooden toys, but most of the bunker was filled with dolls.

  At her side, Noah exhaled thinly.

  Oh Doug … why did you have to play down here?

  But she knew why. It felt safe. Away from prying eyes. Private.

  ‘Did you know,’ Noah pointed his torch around the bunker, ‘about this?’

  ‘The dolls, yes. Not about the bunker. He’s a toy collector. Most of his house is like this.’

  The bigger dolls sat on chairs and hand-painted benches, and around a low table laid with a white cloth and set for tea with doll-sized cups and plates, wooden cakes and candles. In a nursery, it would’ve looked charming, if a little twee. Down here, it looked sad and creepy. Tim Welland would’ve called it a freak show. He’d thought Cole’s house was bad enough.

  Marnie waited to hear what verdict Noah would pass. He wasn’t speaking, still shining his torch around the walls of the bunker.

  Doug had papered the walls with roses. He’d laid a Turkish rug on the floor and hung pictures. Strung bunting across the ceiling, and fairy lights, which meant he’d wired the bunker for electricity. Marnie looked for the switch and flicked it.

  She and Noah stood under the spattering of light that put coloured crumbs on the tablecloth and in the laps of the seated dolls.

  ‘Okay,’ Noah said, ‘that’s … worse.’

  Marnie knew what he meant. Their boys hadn’t had a rug, or lights, or hand-painted furniture. Cole’s playroom was a sick satire on the bunker at number 14.

  ‘This took time. The wiring alone … He’s known about this place for a while.’ Noah looked at her. ‘Did you search the shed when you were looking for Lizzie Fincher?’

  ‘The shed’s new. It wasn’t here eighteen months ago.’

  ‘But the house is like this?’

  ‘It’s odd,’ she admitted. ‘He’s odd. But I think he’s harmless. I spent a lot of time with him eighteen months ago. And a lot of time with Lizzie Fincher and her parents. Doug was the least of my worries, back then.’

  Noah processed this in silence. ‘When d’you think he found the bunker?’

  ‘Not recently. You’re right. He’s been busy down here for a while.’

  The fairy lights painted the dolls’ faces like chickenpox.

  ‘He should have told someone,’ Noah said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Hard to say. It’s his property, and if it was empty …’

  ‘Do you think he knew about the other bunkers?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Marnie looked into the glassy stare of the largest doll. ‘I hope not. This is going to look bad enough without that.’

  Cole’s shadow fell roundly at their feet from the open manhole overhead.

  Marnie said, ‘We’re coming up, Mr Cole. Just give us a minute.’

  He moved away without speaking. Marnie could sense his misery from twelve feet.

  ‘Does it give you the creeps,’ she asked Noah, ‘being down here?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘At first, sure, but now? It doesn’t seem so bad.’ He took a last look around. ‘Either you’re right and he’s harmless, or I’m getting used to this stuff.’

  Marnie switched off the fairy lights. ‘Go up.’ She nodded at the ladder. ‘Make us some tea. I’ll be right behind you.’

  She wanted a moment alone in the dark and the quiet. Away from the rubberneckers and the reporters waiting on her reappearance. DC Tanner, who’d gravitated to Adam Fletcher as easily as a spider vein to a drunk’s nose. They made a handsome couple, Debbie with her curves, Adam with his arrogant height. It made Marnie want to stay down here. A bad instinct, unhelpful. She needed to get on. She’d seen what the GPR team leader had wanted her to see.

  Doug Cole’s playroom was a nuclear shelter, like all the others in the road. Cold War bunkers built under a field in north-east London by people afraid the atom bomb was coming. It must have been easy to imagine a disaster on that scale after the long years of the Second World War. Marnie’s grandmother had spent the war overseas, but she’d often talked about the anxious mood in the capital when she returned to London. Post-Blitz paranoia warring with the country’s determination to rebuild. How many people of her grandmother’s generation had resorted to measures like this, holes dug underground, the laying-in of precious food supplies? Hiding places.

  She climbed the ladder to where the last of the day’s light was waiting. Over Cole’s fence she could see the perfect lawn of the Finchers’ garden, spoilt by the GPR team’s exertions.

  Nigel and Car
ol Fincher had spent a lot of money on their garden furniture; it put most of Marnie’s indoor furniture to shame. On the other hand, polyrattan wasn’t a look she aspired to. The borders were attractive, colourful. Eighteen months ago, the garden had been greying lawn, dead. She wondered whether Terry Doyle was responsible for the new borders.

  She rolled the latex gloves from her hands and pushed them into her pocket as a heavy man in a navy suit came through the French doors on to the Finchers’ decking.

  ‘Hello,’ he said across the fence. ‘Carol said it was you.’

  Marnie smiled at him. ‘Mr Fincher, hello.’

  ‘Quick question,’ Fincher said. ‘Who’s paying for all this?’ He gestured at the hole dug in his garden, the open manhole cover. He didn’t look at Doug’s shed.

  ‘We’re investigating a crime. I’m sorry it’s spoilt your lawn.’

  A blonde girl in school uniform trailed into the garden.

  Marnie said, ‘Hello, Lizzie.’

  The girl looked at her, blankly. She was nearly seven now. She’d grown, but she had the same spacey look she’d had eighteen months ago, returning home with her hand in Doug Cole’s, bewildered by all the fuss and questions, her eyes moving between her parents, not quite looking at either one of them, letting them take turns hugging her, taking care to share her attention equally between the two. Defence mechanism; Marnie had recognised it at a glance. Lizzie hadn’t changed, just acquired an extra layer of that caution. Her stare went to the hole in the lawn, then retreated, void of curiosity. She’d learned not to ask questions, even when things looked weird. ‘Dad, can I go on the internet?’

  ‘What does Mum say?’

  ‘She said to ask you.’

  ‘Fine, but just until suppertime.’ Fincher waited until his daughter had gone back inside before he gave a sheepish smile. ‘Compromise: the secret weapon of parenting.’

  ‘How’s Carol?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘Working, she’ll be working.’ He nodded at the attic. ‘Home office. She works from home now. Lucky her.’

  Marnie detected a flavour of the old animosity in his tone, but it was neutered. This was a couple who’d raced to report each other to the police when their child disappeared. She had struggled to feel sorry for the Finchers eighteen months ago, and wondered if they were still using their only child as collateral. They’d stayed together. That was surprising.

  ‘We patched things up,’ Fincher said, ‘for Lizzie’s sake.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Marnie wondered how good it was for Lizzie.

  ‘You’re digging up the whole street.’

  ‘Only this side. The side where the bunkers were built.’

  Fincher came up to the fence and peered into his neighbour’s garden.

  ‘Doug must be hating this. He loves his privacy.’ Sarcasm, but complacent, as if it’d become an easy habit, despising his wife’s one-time friend.

  ‘Found anything compromising over there?’ His stare sharpened. ‘I’m not a nosy neighbour, but Doug? Would make anyone suspicious.’

  33

  Douglas Cole perched on the edge of his sofa clutching a teacup to his chest. Beside him on the buttoned green velvet sat a doll the size of a five-year-old child, dressed in a frilly white pinafore with a pink sash. Her glass eyes winked every time Doug shifted.

  ‘When did you first find out about the bunker, Mr Cole?’ Noah asked.

  Doug darted his eyes at Marnie, who said, ‘Answer DS Jake’s questions, please. That way this’ll be over sooner.’

  ‘Eight months ago, when I ordered the shed. They wanted to know about the conditions for laying a foundation. I dug a bit and that’s when I found it.’

  ‘You didn’t report it?’

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t think. I mean, it wasn’t very exciting. Just an empty bunker, nothing down there.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said emphatically.

  ‘You didn’t think it was strange, finding an empty bunker in your garden?’

  ‘Well, obviously someone had broken a rule or two.’ He drank a mouthful of tea. The movement made the doll rock beside him and he repositioned it matter-of-factly before he continued. ‘It was obviously post-war, from the concrete. I know a bit about these things. Disused London is one of my hobbies.’

  His other hobby winked her blue glass eyes at Noah.

  ‘So you didn’t tell anyone about it?’

  ‘No one.’ Doug set his cup down in its saucer, looking at Noah with open apology. ‘If I’d thought for a second there might be another bunker … I’d have gone directly to the police.’ He looked beseechingly at Marnie, who fielded his glance with a nod towards Noah.

  ‘So you thought your bunker was the only one? Was that common for post-war bunkers?’

  ‘It wasn’t unusual. I didn’t think my neighbours would want to know, if I’m honest. They find me enough of a trial as it is. Most of them won’t talk to me in the street, only Terry, and he’s friends with everyone. The rest give me a wide berth, but I’m used to that. Par for the course, you might say.’

  ‘Why do they find you a trial?’ Noah asked.

  Cole blushed to the tips of his ears. ‘I’m odd,’ he said simply, ‘I do know that. But my … oddities do no harm. If they did, then I would find a way to curb them.’ He looked sideways, at the doll. ‘I’m a collector, but I’m not a deviant, much as you might think the two things would be neater hand in hand. Children like the toys. That causes problems, of course.’

  He rubbed at the end of his nose. ‘I suppose it boils down to this: certain people see me as the Child Catcher, but really I’m the Toymaker.’ The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘I’m Benny Hill.’ He waited to see if Noah would acknowledge the reference, then added, ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Ian Fleming wrote the screenplay, you know.’

  ‘No one knew about the bunker except you. You didn’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘No one.’ His ears were still pink, like a scolded child’s. ‘I’m sorry if that was wrong of me, but I just wanted a little privacy. And the extra space, of course. My collection’s getting out of hand.’ He looked around, as Noah had done when they entered the room.

  Every spare surface was filled with toys and games, spinning tops and stuffed animals. A life-size baby giraffe stood in one corner. There were bears and elephants, dolls with cloth faces or stiff plastic joints, two sets of bongo drums and any number of dented trumpets. A guitar with its strings curling like a walrus’s whiskers was propped on top of a DJ’s turntable. Moths had eaten dimples into several rag dolls. And toy monkeys, dozens of them, all shapes and sizes. The one on top was holding a pair of cymbals between cloth paws, a red velvet cap set at a jaunty angle on its woolly head.

  ‘You didn’t talk to anyone else,’ Noah repeated, ‘about the bunker.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Was he telling the truth?

  ‘You didn’t think that one bunker in a field was odd? You say this is a hobby. Disused London. You didn’t think there might be more of them?’

  ‘I wondered, of course. But I didn’t like to ask questions.’ Doug spread his hands. ‘Everyone’s entitled to privacy, aren’t they? If they’re doing no harm, I mean.’

  ‘You didn’t want to find who built the bunkers? If it was my hobby, I’d want to know.’

  ‘I have other hobbies. And I don’t like to stir things up, asking questions, being a nosy neighbour. It’s not my style.’

  His suit was bespoke. Expensive, like his shoes. A dapper little man, well turned out.

  ‘I know how this looks, of course I do. But I’m harmless. I give you my word.’

  ‘Benny Hill,’ Noah said.

  Doug nodded, still blushing. ‘Benny Hill.’

  34

  ‘You don’t like him for this?’ Noah asked Marnie, as they left Cole’s house.

  ‘For the boys? No. Do you?’

  ‘No, but I’m not sure he was telling the truth the whole time. When he said he’d not talked with
anyone about the bunker … that sounded like a lie.’

  Marnie’s phone buzzed and she answered it. ‘DS Carling, what’ve you got?’ She switched the phone to conference, so that Noah could hear Carling’s reply.

  ‘House-to-house have a name.’ There was an edge of excitement in Ron’s voice. ‘A woman. One of the travellers living in the field before Merrick got them moved on.’

  ‘A woman,’ Marnie repeated.

  ‘Someone on the estate remembers her having photos of two small boys.’

  ‘You said you had a name.’

  ‘Connie. No surname.’

  ‘What about names for the boys?’

  ‘He only remembers photos. He’s an old chap, seemed a bit dozy. But they were brothers, he was sure of that. Little boys, about five and seven. He says Connie called them her angels.’

  ‘We’d better speak with him.’ Marnie checked her watch. ‘In the morning. Maybe he’ll remember more after a night’s sleep. Text the details, will you? Thanks.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do it now?’ Noah said. ‘We’re on the ground anyway.’

  She could see traces of his earlier claustrophobia, and knew he would keep going until she told him to stop. ‘We need some sleep. Let’s regroup first thing in the morning. We can start with Ron’s new witness.’

  She checked the text that Carling had sent. ‘Denis Walton, Flat 57 Arlington Court. Get some rest in the meantime.’

  ‘Not much chance of that. We’ve got Sol staying.’

  ‘Your brother? Have fun.’

  ‘Sol’s idea of fun?’ Noah shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t see me first thing in the morning if I did.’

  35

  ‘S’up, bro?’

  Sol was sprawled on Noah’s sofa. Designer jeans and acid-pink hoody, dazzlingly new trainers on his feet. World-beating, shit-eating grin on his face.

  ‘Where’s Dan?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Bathroom?’ Sol shrugged his shoulders. Casual but wired. Had he taken something?

  ‘You can help with supper, if you’re staying.’

  ‘Sure.’ The pink hoody was like being mugged by Valentine’s Day. Sol’s eyes were all over the room, shining like his smile. ‘Looking good, bro …’ He’d taken something.

  Noah looked like he felt: shit.