by Emmy Ellis
But right now, seeing himself as he used to be, wearing clothes he hasn’t worn in so long, has him wanting to cry.
He crumples into a ball on the floor, lying on his side, hugging his legs, knees touching his chin, turning his back to the mirror so he can’t see his old self. He’d come so far, only for it to be snatched away from him. His life isn’t going to be the same anymore, not until he can get rid of that woman.
It’ll take planning, but that’s okay. He’d planned for his mother’s departure, and that had turned out all right, hadn’t it?
Eyes closed, he runs through what he has to do, thinking that even if it takes months, so long as he achieves his objective, things will be fine. Then he won’t have to be this side of him, in the brown trousers and the white shirt. In the taupe tie he wants to strangle someone with.
The Past
He waits in the driver’s seat of the taxi—a vehicle he uses to cruise. Sometimes people flag him down, thinking he’s a real taxi driver, and he even gives them a ride and pockets the fare. He’s done this before—this, this…kind of thing—after his mother had told him one particular story about Mrs Roberts and what she’d been before she’d become Mrs Roberts.
It had stuck in his mind, mainly because his father had used Mrs Roberts’ services, ruining the trust his mother had in him. Ruining their lives. Leaving them when his mother became ‘too unbearable to live with’.
He hates his father for that.
He’d gone out after he’d been told about the ‘shenanigans’, as his mother had put it, into the night, choosing someone who’d resembled Mrs Roberts and taking her home to his mother.
She’d kicked seven bells of shit out of the lookalike, and he’d finished her off for good. Then he’d dragged her into the basement and practised on her what he wanted to do to his mother at some point in the future.
Now, while he waits for an appropriate person to appear, he drums his fingers on the steering wheel, memories crowding in until he can’t draw a proper breath. He’s suffocating in the misery of what has gone before, drowning even, desperate to be normal but knowing he never will be. Not until his mother and the real Mrs Roberts are dealt with.
Ah, The Right One strolls by, her dark hair long, her legs slim, a short skirt leaving nothing to the imagination. He pretends to be his father for a few seconds, waiting in the car just like he did, picking up Mrs Roberts, who wasn’t Mrs Roberts until a few years later. Miss Irene Nicholls, she was. How had his father felt, eyeing her up, knowing what he wanted to do with her? To her?
Rage builds and swamps his body, but finally he can breathe again, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his lungs burning as much as his cheeks.
He starts the taxi and kerb-crawls, pausing right beside her.
Unwinding the window, he stares out at her standing there on the pavement, leaning down to speak to him with her blue eyeshadow and pale-pink lips screaming she’s a dirty girl, her fake, black leather jacket a strange brown colour on one shoulder where the amber streetlight splashes its glow.
He jerks his head, hoping she gets the hint, then he drives away, turning left and waiting in a lane that has no lighting, no houses, no nothing. Gaze fixed on the rearview mirror, he waits.
She appears, sauntering along, and he stares out of the open window until she’s there.
“Need a taxi?” he asks.
She grins, as though he’s said something extremely funny—as though it’s some kind of code for ‘I need a fuck’.
He doesn’t, and he won’t touch her like that, but she isn’t to know, is she.
She waltzes around the bonnet and opens the passenger-side door, and he tells her to get in the back. Doing as she’s told, she shuts the door then slides in behind him.
“Lie down,” he says.
She giggles. “This is a different way of going about things. Men usually drive away from here to a safer place—unless you’re planning to do me in the lane.”
“No, I’m not. And your type can’t be seen in my car.”
“Ah. Get in trouble at work, will you?”
“Something like that.”
He pulls away from the kerb and travels here and there for a few minutes, just to get the taxi seen in several different locations around the time she got in. He’s not stupid, he knows what to do, and then he’s on his way home, to the place where he grew up, the whole house belonging to him, left to him in his mother’s will.
She at least had the decency to do that.
The streetlamp closest to his home isn’t lit—‘someone’ climbed up the pole and broke the bulb, but he doesn’t want to think about who that was now, otherwise it means admitting to the truth: that it was him and he’d planned this. Again.
He doesn’t like that side of himself, this side of himself, the man he becomes when anger takes control, when what he’s endured staggers back into his head and screws everything up.
He guides her up the path and into the house—the neighbours’ lights are off either side, all the way up and down the street.
Locking the door, he waits for her to take her shoes off.
She doesn’t.
He’s not sure what to do. His mother had always insisted guests removed their footwear.
But his mother isn’t here anymore…
“Cor,” she says, gawping around, bringing him back to the present. “It’s not often I get to work in a house. If you pay me two hundred, I’ll stay the night.”
She’ll be staying anyway, and no money will exchange hands.
She moves to mount the stairs, but he shakes his head.
“My bedroom is downstairs,” he says, leading the way, the clip-clopping of her heels behind him, each beat drumming it into his head that his mother will be turning in her grave—if she had one—because the shoes might dent the wooden flooring.
He descends into his ‘bedroom’—a lie—leaving the light off. Once she’s down there with him, he runs back up to secure the door, then he joins her, knowing exactly where he is by instinct. He flicks a wall switch, and the room floods with brightness. She blinks, adjusting her sight he imagines, and looks around, her eyes widening at what she’s spotted.
And then she screams.
* * *
A woman whimpers in the corner, naked, her mouth gagged, wrists and ankles tied. She’s his pet, a replica of a young Mrs Roberts, and he keeps her drugged during the day and feeds her as little as possible, enough to keep her alive, but he bets her stomach growls most of the time, screaming out for food, and he bets she growls, too, when she’s lucid.
She’s not at the moment. Her head rests on her shoulder, and she snores. He probably gave her a bit too much medicine earlier. He keeps her so he can watch her suffer like his mother wanted Mrs Roberts to suffer. He sits and watches her sometimes, just stares and stares until his eyes go glassy and out of focus, pleased she’s unhappy, bearing the sins of a woman she doesn’t even know because his mind won’t allow anything different. His mother wouldn’t allow it if she were alive either. He knows he’s been conditioned, fed tales of woe and anguish, and it had burrowed into his head as he’d grown up, and now it’s here to stay. If he makes the scraggy cow in the corner wish for death, to be sorry—really sorry—it’ll make everything all right again.
He sets about doing what has to be done.
His mother stands in the other corner, watching him work, as does another lookalike Mrs Roberts, his first attempt at ridding the world of dirty girls. The pair of them don’t appear quite as they had in life, but he doesn’t mind. Their flaws only show him how he’s grown since he’d first practised on them.
With this new dirty girl, his pet, he has a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. She won’t have wonky eyes or limp fingers like the other two, and he’ll tan her skin properly, using a better method. He’ll do it the old-fashioned way this time.
He works for ages. That skin of hers is on a tarp in the middle of the floor, and he’s using a fleshing knife to scra
pe away all the fat. Once that’s done, along with shaving off her hair, he’ll wash her then hang her up to dry on a rack for a few days.
She looks like a human rug minus the fluff, displayed like that.
* * *
A week passes, and it’s time to boil her brain until it breaks down into soup. He blends it, creating a paste, and that’s enough to rub all over her skin to tan it. He doesn’t like the smell and gags, pausing to take deep breaths and force himself not to concentrate on the stench.
Next comes the stretching then the smoking. He drapes her over a tepee-like structure out in the garden in the dark, early hours of the morning, lighting a fire.
And then she’s ready.
The wooden mannequin has a moveable head, arms, and legs, and is a similar size to her. He dresses it with her skin. This is his favourite part, where he sews her back together over the body beneath and recreates her, only this time she can’t speak, can’t move—unless he makes her.
The pet in the corner cries quietly, and it interrupts his calm state. He stops what he’s doing and stalks over there, stabbing her a few times with his sewing needle until pinpricks sprout up all over her face. They bleed, and that blood dribbles. Red tears.
She shuts up.
He moves back to his new mannequin. Glass eyeballs and a wig complete the job, and she stares at him somewhat vacantly, as though she doesn’t understand why she’s there.
She’s there because she looks like Mrs Roberts, that’s all.
No other reason.
Chapter Eleven
Close to five o’clock, the shift almost over, Tracy sighed and addressed her team in the incident room. “This is proving to be a bit of a ball ache. No bloody leads from our end—mine and Damon’s, I mean. What about you guys?” She’d asked the question of them all but looked at Nada.
Nada sat straighter and swiped up a page of notes. “I rang Gilbert to ask if I could go to view Mrs Roberts’ body, but he was busy and said to go there tomorrow. The man who runs Shop on the Go isn’t in the frame. He had an accident in his van yesterday and is in hospital with a broken leg. Irene Roberts wasn’t on any social media sites. She kept herself to herself when she lived in her former place of residence, except for speaking to her next-door neighbour—a Michelle Armitage. According to Michelle, Irene tended to stay indoors and used to say things like, ‘They’re coming to get me, so I can’t go out.’ Sounds a bit weird to me, but the neighbour had no idea what she meant.”
Tracy’s interest piqued. “So this could mean that whoever ‘they’ are actually went to ‘get’ her at the care home and abducted her then killed her.” She frowned hard. “But why the hell would anyone want to ‘get’ her? She was an old woman, for God’s sake.” She thought back to what Mr Roberts had said. “This is interesting. Her son told me that for as long as he can remember, his mum had been anxious. Always looked on the dark side, thought if she went out something bad would happen. I took it as anxiety—a lot of people feel like this and think that sort of thing. But this? Sounds to me like she had a massive reason to behave the way she did.”
“That changes things a bit then, boss,” Nada said. “When Tim and Erica came back from interviewing the day staff, they got on with looking into Irene’s past—before she got married. Want to fill us in?” She glanced at Tim.
He nodded and read from his computer monitor. “She was formally Irene Nicholls. She’s got priors in that name but none as Roberts.”
Tracy’s spine stiffened. “Oh right. What kind of priors?”
“Soliciting.” Tim winced.
“You bloody what?”
“I know. She was a regular sex worker by all accounts. Got hauled in a few times for it.” Tim counted the lines of text on the screen by tapping the end of his pen on them. “Twenty-eight to be exact.”
“Bloody hell, she didn’t learn after the first few times of being nicked then, did she.” Tracy shook her head. “This alters things dramatically. Fuck, we could be looking at several hundred people—more even—who might have wanted to kill her. Punters, their wives… And how long ago was this?”
Erica wrapped a strand of hair around and around her finger. “In the sixties and seventies, boss. She got married in seventy-three, had her son two months later.”
“Oh heck, so he could belong to anyone,” Tracy said. “Frankie Roberts might not be her husband’s.”
Damon shook his head as though she’d said something out of turn.
“What? It’s true.” Tracy wagged her finger. “You know as well as I do there’s nowt queer as folk. Look at the last big case. One bloke getting three women pregnant. They all hid the secret so well—who’s to say this family doesn’t have similar stuffed up their sleeves?”
“Fair point.” Damon shrugged. “So do you think her son knows and is covering up?”
“No. Unless he’s a sodding good actor. He seemed as puzzled about it as we are. But you can bet someone made good on their promise—because from what Irene said to her neighbour, she knew someone was out to get her, just didn’t know when.” Tracy rubbed her temple. “Imagine that, living in fear all your life, then as time goes by, you tell yourself they’re not coming, then when you’re old, there they are, killing you.”
Everyone stared at her, mouths hanging.
“Sorry, thinking out loud. But that might have been what happened. We just have to work out who it was and why they were after her—why someone had a years’ long grudge. And it’d have to be a pretty fucking big grudge for it to last this amount of time, wouldn’t it?”
“Depends how deep the hurt goes, boss,” Alastair said.
“Oh, hello, you. Yes, trauma can fester.” I should know. Tracy smiled then turned to Lara. “Did you find anything of significance?”
Lara shook her head. “Afraid not. I looked into Mr Roberts again, just to double-check, and there’s nothing more than what we found earlier.”
Tracy pursed her lips in thought. “Nada, other than not being able to see Mrs Roberts’ body, did you get anything from Gilbert on the phone?”
“Nothing that he hasn’t already told you. He hasn’t got around to doing her PM yet,” she said.
Tracy sighed again. “Well, there’s nothing much we can do today now, so we may as well go home. Tomorrow we’ll start on the CCTV closest to Blooming Age—no time whatsoever to have got that done today—and we’ll have to contact all sex workers who got pulled in around that time and question them to see if they knew Irene.” She looked up at the ceiling, then at her team one by one. “A mammoth task, people. Get a good night’s sleep so you’re alert tomorrow. If you can get to sleep, that is. I’m thinking I’ll be awake mulling all this over. What a bloody mess.” She slapped her thighs. “See you tomorrow, you lot.”
She left the room and strode to Winter’s office. She needed to update the chief and let him know what the team had uncovered—and make him aware she might not be available in the next few days while they sought out this killer, who hopefully wouldn’t strike again if he’d only been after Irene.
She tapped on his door and went inside after he’d called, “Enter!”
“Ah, Tracy. Coffee?” He rose and went to his filing cabinet, grabbing the coffee carafe anyway.
“Of course. I tell you, the team love that stuff. Since I ordered that coffee and the machine to go with it and put it in the main office, they’ve been a lot happier. That vending machine stuff is utter crap.”
“You’re telling me.” He poured two cups. “So, what have you been up to today?”
“A murder, sir.”
He paused his pouring and raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t have time to let me know earlier or something?”
“No. Sorry, sir. It’s been one hell of a day.”
He passed her a cup then sat behind his desk. “Start from the beginning. Always the best way.” He chuckled.
“Well, what was a murder of an old lady has turned into something far more sinister.”
“What can b
e more sinister than murder?” He blew his drink then sipped.
“Wrong turn of phrase. She was reported missing from the local care home—we weren’t aware of that when we went out to see her body. She’d been dumped in a field. Her throat had been slit after death. Anyway, Nada found out about the missing old lady, and we went to the home.” She told him about the interviews with the staff at Blooming Age itself then the formal questioning in their homes later. Then she dropped the bombshell about Irene’s anxiety and her previous profession.
“I can see now why you didn’t have time to check in with me. Do you need more hands on deck?”
She told him what was on the work menu for tomorrow. “So if we’re overwhelmed, yes, but I think the team I’ve already got are adequate now Alastair is a permanent fixture.”
“That took some persuading to get him for you full time, I can tell you,” Winter said. “The higher-ups seem to think skeleton crews can manage perfectly well. I reminded them this is a serious crimes squad, nothing like the team Kane ran when he was here.”
Tracy’s hackles went up, and she drank some coffee to stop herself from saying something she shouldn’t.
“You know,” Winter said, “I worked the beat back in the seventies when I first started in the force. An old memory has just piped up. I’m sure there was a case back then of a prostitute being attacked by some woman who threatened her life. I’ll look into that right now, otherwise it’s going to niggle at me if I leave it until the morning. Of course, it could be someone else entirely…” He got up and walked to his filing cabinet, opened a drawer, then rummaged around for a while, bringing out a leather diary. The wide spine was cracked, and the corners had worn, showing the beige cardboard beneath. “These books”—he gestured to the drawer—“are my whole time as a police officer. Years of them in there. I kept records so I’d have something to look back on during retirement. Something to be proud of. I didn’t realise I’d read them before I left this job—too many times to count, hence me recalling this particular case involving a sex worker.”