Ragged Alice

by Gareth L. Powell

Holly reached for her drink and raised it in salute. “Iechyd da,” she said. But before she could take a sip, Sylvia clamped a restraining hand on her forearm.

  “I expect you’re wondering why it’s a different colour to my good eye, though, aren’t you?” Her fingers felt like steel wires.

  “Um, not really.”

  “It was my great-grandfather’s.” The girl leaned closer and lowered her voice. The light darkened behind her eyes. “It’s more than a hundred years old, and it’s seen a lot, this eye. It could tell you some tales.”

  Holly resisted the urge to pull away. “Is that right?”

  Sylvia shuddered. She stood transfixed, jaw clenched and grip firm on Holly’s forearm.

  “Secret things,” she breathed. “Things that happened in the woods.”

  A car went past outside. The clock chimed. A log spat and crackled in the grate. And then suddenly Sylvia blinked and jerked upright again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, smiling. “What were we talking about? You wanted ice, didn’t you?”

  * * *

  Amy Lao leant back in her chair and glanced out of the office window. She had spent the evening working on a puff piece for the local rag. Thirty years ago, a UFO flap had gripped Pontyrhudd. Fourteen children at the local primary school claimed to have seen a flying saucer in the field beside their school, and when the headmaster asked them to draw the craft, the pictures they produced all bore a striking similarity. Now, on the anniversary of the event, she was filling space in the paper by reprinting some of the photos and statements from the children—many of whom still lived in the town.

  It was fair to say her journalistic career hadn’t worked out the way she’d hoped it might. When she’d left university, she’d expected that by now she’d be working for the BBC. Instead, she was stuck here, in the arse-end of nowhere, writing up town council meetings and court reports to fill the gaps between the paid adverts that formed the local paper’s true content. She missed the bustle of her native Birmingham. She was a city girl at heart, and Pontyrhudd, while affording some stunning coastal sunsets, couldn’t really compete with the churning vitality of Britain’s second-largest city.

  In fact, she was about to pack up for the night and head home to her bedsit when her mobile rang.

  “Hello, Amy, it’s Neil. Neil Perkins.”

  Neil Perkins was one of the local constables. She’d interviewed him last month, when a load of Rees Thomas’s cows had got loose on the main road and caused a four-mile tailback before they could be persuaded back to their field.

  “What can I do for you, Neil?”

  “It’s more what I can do for you, Amy love. I’ve got a tip-off, see.”

  Amy pulled her spiral-topped notebook towards her and picked up a pen. Maybe the cows had escaped again. “This had better be good.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  She clicked the pen. “What is it?”

  “It seems we’ve got a double murder. Lisa Hughes got knocked down on the valley road last night, and now her boyfriend’s shown up in the chapel grounds with his belly cut open and bloody sticks in his eyes.”

  “Christ.”

  “I was the first to see the body. Proper horrible it was.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” She jotted the names of the victims on her pad. “So, what’s happening about it?”

  “There’s a new DCI down from London. She’s heading up the investigation.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Craig.”

  Amy smiled. “Is that her first name or her surname?”

  “I think she’s Dai Craig’s granddaughter.”

  “Dai Craig?”

  “Before your time, love. His daughter was murdered, and he brought the girl up. Until the kid fucked off to London, anyhow.”

  “And now she’s back?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Where’s she staying, Neil?”

  “Down the Royal.”

  “Cheers, pet.”

  “You’re welcome, like. Just make sure this time you spell my name right.”

  5.

  AFTER A RESTLESS NIGHT, Holly woke at seven the following morning. The sheets smelled wrong. The pillows were too soft. She had left her window open and could hear the waves rustling up the beach and the gulls keening on the wind. And, in that dazed state between sleep and realization, when the boundary between the two seemed porous and negotiable, she felt as if she’d never left Pontyrhudd—as if those fifteen years in London had been no more than lingering wisps of sea mist dispersed by the rising sun.

  Here she was. Thirty-two years old, still single, unforgiving, remote and difficult to get along with—more a product of her father and this town than she would ever have cared to admit.

  Somewhere along the way, she realised, she’d stopped thinking of herself as a person with a past. In her head, she’d been DCI Craig for five years now. She might find it hard to relate to her coworkers, but she was good at her job. It had come to define her. Everything else was just baggage she didn’t need.

  Of course, being cranky, reserved and often hungover hadn’t endeared her to her colleagues in the Met. She certainly wouldn’t have risen as high as she had if her record for solving cases hadn’t been exemplary. Social niceties were one thing, but results spoke for themselves. While the bosses may have been disappointed the day she left London, she was sure the rest of her team had thrown a party. They had thought she couldn’t see them smirking behind their computer monitors as she called out her good-byes.

  Reluctantly, she pulled aside the sheet and slid out of bed. An empty bottle lay on the carpet. She walked around the room in bare feet, opening drawers and cupboards to see what they contained. She flicked through the available TV channels and found a local news report on Lisa Hughes. It was just a shot of the white tent that covered the scene, followed by an old school photo of the deceased. No real information at all.

  Leaving the TV playing in the background, she went for a shower. In the bathroom, the hair products were stacked in sideways orange crates that had been nailed together to form a set of shelves. One shelf for shampoos, another for conditioners, a third for gels and waxes. The shower was one of those walk-in arrangements with slate tiles and an incomprehensibly complex nozzle. She rinsed herself off as best she could and picked some clothes from the wardrobe, eventually settling on a simple combination of blue jeans and black T-shirt.

  When Scott arrived at the hotel at eight, he found her sitting on the bench outside, wrapped in her RAF coat and sipping tea from a cup and saucer.

  For her, tea was the one truly pure and necessary thing on this miserable earth, and the favourite and most worthwhile of her vices.

  “Morning, guv.” He handed her a folded newspaper. “I see we made the local rag.”

  Holly dropped it onto the bench beside her without bothering to glance at the headline. “And a fat lot of good that’s going to do us.”

  Scott grimaced at her tone. “With respect, guv, there’s something here you ought to see.”

  “What?”

  He opened the paper and stepped back. Holly frowned at him and then down at the black-and-white photograph on page two.

  It was a portrait of her mother, aged twenty-one. She had shaggy, dyed-brown hair and thickly applied eyeliner and was wearing a cardigan over a long-sleeved black polo neck. She looked kind of like the emo girl in The Breakfast Club, before the disastrous makeover.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Scott’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “According to this, Daryl Allen’s injuries were identical to the ones found on your mother’s body.”

  Holly’s stomach clenched like a fist. She had only been a couple of weeks old at the time of her mother’s murder. “Is it true?” She’d heard grisly rumours from her classmates but assumed them to be exaggerations.

  “I’ve asked one of the uniforms to dig out the file.” Scott bit his lower lip. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

 
Holly became aware the cup and saucer were rattling in her hand. She put them down on the arm of the bench and rose to her feet.

  “I think I need a walk,” she said.

  Without waiting for an answer, she strode across the road. By the time Scott caught up with her, she was standing at the water’s edge, hands thrust deeply into the pockets of her airman’s coat, her hair straggling out behind her.

  “I was a baby,” she said. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon. “Nobody told me anything. I didn’t even know she’d been murdered until I went to school and heard the other kids talking.”

  She kicked a pebble into the surf.

  “After my dad died, my grandfather took me in. I always got the impression he didn’t approve of my mother. That maybe he thought my mother somehow deserved what she got.”

  “I’m sorry, guv.”

  Holly watched another wave roll up the beach.

  “He used to bring me down here all the time. I’d spend hours throwing stones into the sea and make a wish every time I did. But then he’d tap out his pipe and say it didn’t matter how many rocks I threw, the tide would always bring them back.”

  She eyed a tangle of driftwood and fishing line. “I joined the police because of her,” she said. “But I never looked into her death. I never found out the specifics. I mean, she was dead. I guess I didn’t think it was relevant.”

  “Seems it’s relevant now.”

  Holly clenched her fists inside the pockets of her coat. “No shit.”

  Her head hurt from last night’s whiskey. All she wanted was to fall in a heap on the tide-slicked shingle and let the world do what it would, without her input or involvement. And she would have done if there hadn’t been a stubborn professional streak that refused to let her give up so easily—a queasy stirring that drove her to remain standing and demanded she march back into that hotel, grab another cup of tea and set her team about the task of solving these crimes.

  “Do me a favour,” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t mention this to anyone.” She took a deep breath and let it out into the face of the offshore wind. “I mean it.” For the first time, she turned to look at him. “It was a long time ago. If they get a sniff of any of this, and realise that’s my ma, they’ll pull me off the case.”

  Scott pursed his lips. He put his hands in his pockets. “I can’t promise anything.”

  “What do you mean?” She’d guessed he was ambitious, but would he really throw her under the bus to further his own career? She hadn’t pegged him as disloyal, but they hardly knew each other, and she hadn’t taken the time to find out where his allegiances lay.

  The young man looked down at his shoes. “Listen,” he said. “I respect the chain of command and all that cachu. And you seem to know what you’re about, so I’m not going to say anything.” He glanced up. “But if I think you’re compromising this investigation, even for a second, I can’t promise not to report you.”

  His honesty felt like an overdue splash of cold water. Holly rocked back on her heels. “Fair enough,” she said.

  Scott inclined his head. “So long as we understand each other.”

  Holly thought about it. Then she peeled off her fingerless gloves. “My name’s Holly,” she said, holding out her right hand.

  Scott looked down at it. Then he smiled and took it in his. “Scott,” he said. “But I believe I already told you that.”

  “I believe you did.”

  They both smiled. Then Holly let go and returned her hand to her coat pocket, and they went back to being two people standing on a beach.

  “Shall we get back to work?” she asked.

  He looked up and down the line of surf and then gave her a relieved grin. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”

  Side by side, they walked back across the road. As they entered the incident room, they were confronted by one of the CID officers. His name was Ralph Potts. Three days’ worth of stubble peppered his double chin. Yellow nicotine stains discoloured the middle finger of his right hand.

  “Guv,” he said in a gruff Valleys accent, “thank Christ you’re here. We’ve got another body.”

  6.

  THE BUTCHER’S SHOP SAT on the high street, nestled between a tattoo parlour and a charity shop. It was one of those traditional shops that had been in the same family for at least three generations. The shop front and much of the inside were heavily tiled. The window would usually have featured trays of sausages, steaks, bacon rashers, chops and black puddings, but there was no meat on display this morning. The circling flies seemed puzzled by its absence. The dog on the stoop whined as Holly stepped over it.

  Inside, the place had the air of a slaughterhouse. The smell seemed to creep past the hand she held over her mouth and nose. It tugged at the back of her throat, insinuated itself into the lining of her nose. Behind the counter, blood had run into all the seams between the tiles, forming an obscene city map. The corpse lay at the centre.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name’s Mike Owen, guv.” Potts scratched his belly. “He’s the owner’s kid.”

  “Who’s the owner?”

  “Owen the meat.”

  “Of course it is. Any connection between this victim and the other two?”

  “Aside from the way he’s laid out, there’s none I can see.”

  Holly pursed her lips. Mike Owen had been killed in the same manner as Daryl Allen. His apron had been torn aside and his stomach slit. Kebab skewers had been driven so far into his eyes the points were touching the bone at the back of his skull.

  Had her mother really been killed like this? She clenched her jaw and squeezed her fists to stop herself shuddering at the thought. In the face of such atrocity, it was small wonder her father had collapsed in on himself. For the first time in years, she felt her resentment lessen a notch.

  “Who was first on the scene?” she asked.

  “Perkins again.”

  “Did he see anyone else?”

  “No.” Potts seemed almost to be enjoying himself. “He says he found him like this.”

  Holly waved a hand in front of her face, trying to waft aside the smell. It wasn’t unusual for a corpse to void its bowels, but young Mike seemed to have done so with a particular curry-fuelled enthusiasm that would have startled even the most seasoned undertaker. Beside her, Scott was struggling to conceal his disgust.

  “Ach-y-fi,” he said.

  On the other side of the body, Potts’s smoke-deadened sense of smell seemed to have rendered him immune to the stench. He grinned at their discomfort.

  Holly looked around the scene. The knife that had cut the boy’s stomach had been taken from a rack at the back of the shop and now lay beside the body; the skewers that had punctured his eyes had been taken from the counter, where other identical skewers waited to be threaded through layers of chicken, lamb and vegetables.

  “What do you think? Is this the same killer, or a copycat?” she asked.

  Scott rubbed a hand across his mouth.

  “It could be a copycat,” he said. “The murderer didn’t bring tools with him; he used what was at hand.”

  Holly tapped her chin. “But the killer must have known there would be knives here. Maybe they came here specifically to gather weapons.” She looked to Potts. “Check with the owner and see if there are any knives missing.”

  “Yes, guv.”

  She took one last look at the scene. The forensic team would pull what they could from the site, but their results could take hours or days to bear fruit. If the killer intended to keep racking up victims at this rate, she couldn’t afford to delay.

  “But why kill the boy?” Scott asked, following her as she made her way back towards the street. “It doesn’t make sense. I can kind of understand someone killing Daryl as revenge for running over the girl, but why the lad? He wasn’t involved.”

  Holly hesitated at the door. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s our job to find out.”

>   Outside, a small crowd had gathered to nose. Old women with eyes made of flint and coal, pub regulars with roll-ups dangling from faces hacked out of boiled ham, a gaggle of teenage girls flapping and squawking like seabirds with mobile phones. Constables Walsh and Perkins were doing their level best to hold them back.

  As Holly emerged from the butcher’s shop, everyone stopped jostling. They looked at her expectantly, and for an instant, she saw herself through their eyes: an obviously hungover big-city cop in scuffed Doc Martens and her granddad’s old overcoat, standing next to a smartly turned out local lad nearly a decade younger. She must look like his eccentric aunt. Her in her black T-shirt and jeans, him in a suit and tie. Did any of them recognise her? She’d been gone fifteen years, but there might be some here who remembered her as a girl and might connect the woman she was with the awkward, gangly adolescent she’d once been. She scanned their faces for the school friends who’d dragged her from the river on the day of her accident and was relieved to see they weren’t there. If they had been present, she wouldn’t have known what to say to them. She owed them her life, but a part of her also resented their intrusion. Had they not risked themselves to save her, she might never have had to shoulder the burden of her gift.

  She turned left towards the seafront and began walking. While she had been indoors, ominous clouds had rolled in to eclipse the sun, and the wind brought with it the smell of rain and damp vegetation.

  * * *

  An old woman waited on the hotel steps. She wore a man’s white tuxedo jacket over a lilac ball gown and was smoking a cigarette.

  “Are you the detective, love?”

  Holly paused. The old girl must have been ninety if she was a day. Her hands looked like sausage skins filled with walnuts. She leant her weight on a silver-topped cane and had slicked back her silver hair with fragrant pomade.

  “Can I help you?”

  The woman looked her up and down disapprovingly. “I doubt it, cariad. I rather thought I might help you.”

  “This is Mrs. Phillips,” Scott said. “She’s one of the hotel’s long-term residents.”

  Mrs. Phillips ignored him. She brushed the pale grey wool of Holly’s sleeve.