Come A Little Closer

by Rachel Abbott

  It’s almost the truth. I don’t want him to know that I’ve read his emails.

  ‘Did you tell them there’s an emergency at home?’ I ask, certain there isn’t. I can feel myself shaking. I want to scream – to let out the tension that is gripping me at the sound of his voice. Why is he doing this?

  ‘I told them your mother was dead.’

  The words make me gasp. For a moment neither of us speaks. I want to cut him off, but if I hang up he will just call back.

  ‘But the real reason I called was to ask what the hell you thought you were doing emptying the joint account. I went to pick up the new telly – the one I told you about in one of the emails you claim you can’t get – and they said my application for credit had been denied, so I checked the account. There’s nothing left. You took it all, didn’t you? Bitch.’

  He’s right. It was the last thing I did before I left. I was scared he would empty the account. I didn’t trust him. And let’s face it, I’m the only one who puts money into the account. Every penny of it. His benefit is paid into his own account, not the joint one. So I knew he wouldn’t starve.

  How did it become so ugly? Why didn’t I notice that his interest in me ratcheted up a few notches when he discovered that Pops had helped me to buy the house? Pops lived in the north, and when I told Ian that I planned to move away from London to be near him, he suggested that he should come with me. It seemed a good idea at the time – if only so that I wouldn’t be alone in a city where I knew no one.

  Right now, though, I can’t find any words.

  Ian breaks the silence. ‘So, the reason for this call is to give you notice. I’m going to start selling things to get my share of that money back. I’m starting with your jewellery box – all those ugly things of your mum’s that you so cherish. And when you get back, we’ll sort this out once and for all.’

  The line goes dead.

  I don’t think Joel is in any doubt that there has been a death in the family when he comes back into his office to find me, head down on folded arms, sobbing uncontrollably. Why hadn’t I thought about the jewellery? The clearing of the account had been a last-minute panic, and I hadn’t thought it through.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I mumble, wishing she was here to tell me what to do.

  A box of tissues is pushed towards me, and I can feel Joel’s discomfort. He doesn’t seem sure whether he should sit down and talk to me or leave me alone. I take a deep breath and raise my head.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘You’ve nothing to apologise for. What can I do to help?’

  I want to ask him not to allow any more calls to be put through to me, but that will make no sense at all if my mother has died. I know my tears are those of frustration and anger, but he doesn’t.

  He talks to me about whether I want to be taken back to Yangon and asks if they can organise a flight back to the UK for me. What am I supposed to say? I wipe my eyes and mutter something about the funeral not being for two weeks so I’m okay to stay and please don’t mention it to anybody.

  Joel is silent, and I sense that he’s embarrassed.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but the lady you were eating with – Thea, I believe she’s called – asked me if you were okay, and I told her that we understood you’d had some very sad news. I didn’t say more than that. I assumed she was a friend and it would be easier if you didn’t have to tell her yourself.’

  He looks mortified, and I realise he’s younger than me – probably in his late twenties – and has possibly never had to deal with anything like this before.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say, pushing myself up and out of the chair. ‘I’ll just go back to my cabin now.’

  ‘Can I get you anything – a drink of some description? A brandy, a cup of tea? Let me know if there’s anything at all we can do for you, won’t you?’

  I nod my thanks and he opens the door to let me through.

  I slowly climb the stairs to the top deck, where my cabin is situated, thinking of what I can do to stop Ian – to get him out of my life – but my attention is diverted because as I make my way along the corridor, I can see that my cabin door is standing ajar. I know I closed it.

  I walk quietly towards it, wondering who is inside. I don’t know why I feel scared – surely no one on this boat wants to hurt me? I reach the door and push it gently. It swings silently open. The room is empty. The bed has been turned down ready for the night and I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding. The maid must have forgotten to close the door properly.

  Ian is making me into a nervous wreck, and I lower myself onto the bed and drop my head, the sobs building again. I fall to the side and curl up, my arms tightly hugging my body.

  The sound of a tentative knock silences my sobs and I open my puffy eyes to stare as the door opens. It’s Thea.

  ‘I don’t mean to intrude, dear, but Joel said you’d had some bad news. Would you like me to go, or can I help?’

  I push myself upright, embarrassed that anyone should see me like this.

  ‘Thanks, but there’s nothing you can do. It was Ian – my boyfriend.’ I end the sentence on a weak laugh that holds not a trace of amusement. ‘He told Joel he was phoning to say my mother had died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear.’ She walks towards me and reaches out a hand, but I lean away. It isn’t her fault, but I’m not sure I can cope with kindness just now.

  ‘It would be tragic news if it were true.’ I don’t try to hide the bitterness in my voice, and I see the puzzled look on Thea’s face. ‘Thea, my mother has been dead for ten years, and now Joel is trying to rush me back to Manchester. If I go, my trip is ruined. If I stay, I’m going to get sympathy from every person on this boat, and I don’t deserve any of it. I deserve their ridicule for being so easily manipulated.’

  I rest my elbows on my thighs, dropping my head.

  ‘Please, Thea, say nothing to anyone. I’ve got to decide how to handle this, and right now I don’t have a clue.’

  11

  ‘Boss!’ Becky called across the incident room to where Tom was standing talking to Keith Sims. ‘Local officer has found a pair of shoes,’ she said as they both approached her desk. ‘He’s going to send me a picture he’s taken with his phone, but he’s not sure it’s going to be helpful.’

  ‘Why not?’ Tom asked, clearly hoping this was going to be the breakthrough they needed.

  ‘They were found under a shrub quite a distance from where Penny was found.’

  Penny was the name the team had adopted for their victim, which Becky thought was as good a name as any, and infinitely better than Jane Doe. Just then her mobile pinged and she opened the message.

  ‘Bloody hell, I can see what he means,’ she said.

  She turned the screen to face Tom and Keith. Penny’s clothes had appeared plain and old-fashioned for a woman of her age, but the shoes were something else.

  ‘Surely they can’t be hers,’ Becky said. ‘Penny was wearing baggy jeans and a long cardigan, and these are party shoes. She couldn’t have walked far in these.’

  They were, in fact, just the type of shoes that Becky would have chosen until her pregnancy forced her into something a lot more comfortable. Pale pink, with peep toes and a thick wedge heel, they looked like shoes a girl might wear for a night out on the town.

  ‘No accounting for taste. Can we see the size?’

  ‘Yes, he’s sent an image of the sole too. They look very new from the lack of wear and tear. Continental size forty-one.’

  ‘Bugger,’ Tom said, his shoulders slumping. They knew that Penny’s feet were a UK size 5, which he had been reliably informed was a continental 38.

  They stared silently at Becky’s screen for another moment.

  ‘If we are saying they belong to someone else, how likely is it that we find a body without shoes and then discover a relatively new pair of shoes abandoned in the snow in the same area?’ Tom asked.

  He didn�
��t look like he was expecting an answer, and it didn’t make any sense to Becky either.

  Before they had time to voice any alternative theories, a PC approached Tom with an envelope. ‘Tox results,’ he said, his eyes lighting up. They were praying these might give them something to work with, and they had been rushed through the system.

  But Tom didn’t have time to look at them. His phone rang. ‘Tom Douglas,’ he answered. ‘Yes indeed, ma’am. I’ll come right away.’

  He rolled his eyes so that only Becky could see, and she tried to hide her smile. Tom had been summoned from on high, which probably meant his boss had something to say about their current investigation.

  Tom’s frustration at the lack of progress on the case was echoed by Detective Superintendent Philippa Stanley in what he considered to be an unnecessarily long meeting. She was scathing about Tom’s attempts to solve the case and left him feeling disgruntled with himself for not having better answers to her criticisms.

  ‘With the increased threat of terrorism hanging over our heads here in Manchester and more than one gang-related murder on your files that remains unsolved, I’m not sure I understand your obsession with this particular case.’ Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Philippa continued: ‘And don’t tell me it’s your famous gut at work again. That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?’

  Tom looked at the woman with whom he had worked for several years and remembered how well she knew him. As a new detective – like Lynsey was now – Philippa had reported to Tom, but she had risen rapidly and determinedly through the ranks until the tables had turned, and she was now Tom’s superior officer. Only once, on their very first case together, had Tom seen a chink in her armour. Since then she had cultivated the air of a perfectly poised professional in her ubiquitous navy-blue suit and white blouse, with her hair in a dark bob that never seemed to get any longer or shorter.

  Despite her cold, aloof manner, Tom knew another side of her. But sadly she knew another side of him as well, and she had guessed right – he had been about to claim that he had a feeling about this case.

  ‘It’s an unusual case, Philippa. We don’t know who she is or precisely how she died, but if Amy Sanders and Jumbo Osoba are right about the exit bag and the fact that she had help, we need to find out if she was murdered. If so, who by? If it was assisted suicide, who helped her? The tox results came in just before I got your call. I haven’t had a chance to analyse them in detail, but I had a quick scan in the lift and read them a bit more thoroughly while I was waiting outside your door.’

  Tom didn’t mention that despite the fact she had summoned him, Philippa had kept him waiting for ten minutes.

  ‘The gas analysis shows no sign of helium, but obviously we can’t rule out nitrogen, although it’s impossible to prove. The blood and urine results were confusing. There were traces of sedatives, maybe enough to make her compliant while she was killed, but insufficient to render her unconscious and definitely not enough to kill her. We don’t know what we’re looking at here, Philippa, and if Jumbo and Amy—’

  Philippa held up her hand.

  ‘I know. They did a good job. I’m not saying stop investigating it, of course. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it should be your focus. Give it to DI Robinson and move on to some of the other cases.’

  The subtext to this was that Philippa thought gang-related murders were more important than the death of a young woman who as yet had not been identified, suggesting she wasn’t missed. It had been several days now, and appeals for information were yielding nothing.

  ‘Just before we give up on this altogether, I want to delve a bit more deeply into the drugs,’ Tom said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to share this with Becky or the team yet, but the hair analysis shows that during the ninety-day window they were able to test she’d taken a very strange concoction – PCP, psilocybin and MDPV. That’s a weird mix of hallucinogens, dissociatives and synthetics.’

  Even Philippa looked shocked. MDPV, commonly known as ‘bath salts’, could result in aggressive behaviour, while the other two were known to induce confusion, impair memory and cause no end of visual distortion. They needed to look at the results in far more detail before they could get close to drawing any conclusions.

  ‘Do you think she might have been trafficked? If she was being used in the sex trade, that might explain the mix of drugs.’

  ‘Dr Sanders said there were no signs of recent sexual activity – at least in the hours before she died – but it’s certainly something we should consider. There were traces of scopolamine too, but taken at the start of the ninety-day period, and it may well have been legit. Perhaps she’d been on a trip and it had been prescribed for motion sickness. Until we know who she is, it’s impossible to say.’

  By the end of the meeting Tom had managed to convince Philippa that he needed to continue to treat the case as one of his many priorities, but it was a hard-won battle, and as it was after six he decided to take the unusual step of going home before the rest of his team. They were avidly studying CCTV footage from the main roads leading to the Flash, but he had a feeling they were clutching at straws. He felt a momentary pang of guilt at leaving them to it, but an evening with Louisa would relax him, and hopefully he could return the next day with a clear mind.

  As he drove home through the dark winter streets he thought back to when he had first met Louisa. It seemed so long ago now, although it wasn’t really. She had been a friend and colleague of one of the victims of a particularly horrific crime, and in her role as an anaesthetist had been involved in the care of Tom’s ex-girlfriend, Leo. With the trauma of all that had happened during those weeks, he hadn’t made a move to get to know her better, and it had taken Becky to engineer a meeting between the two of them. Since then they had spent as much time together as their work schedules permitted.

  As he pulled into the drive, Tom was delighted to see that Louisa’s car was already there.

  ‘Hi,’ he shouted as he pushed open the front door. He knew she would be in the kitchen, probably poring over something work-related on her laptop. She was as much of a workaholic as he was.

  She turned her head as he walked through the door, her shoulder-length auburn hair shimmering in the spotlight above the table. ‘You’re home early,’ she said, giving him a beaming smile. ‘That’s nice.’

  Tom walked over and wrapped his arms around her from behind, bending down to kiss the back of her neck.

  ‘Get off,’ she said with a laugh. ‘You’ll make me lose my concentration.’

  ‘Would that be such a bad thing?’ he asked, not moving.

  ‘Have patience, man! We have the whole evening – and the night.’

  He was pleased to hear she would be staying, because she didn’t always and he wanted to change that. Louisa had now met his daughter, Lucy, several times, and from the start they had been comfortable in each other’s company. Lucy liked her, which was the main thing and a huge relief to Tom, and Louisa seemed to enjoy watching Tom’s affectionate relationship with his child, who was fast becoming an opinionated teenager.

  He let his arms drop and walked over to the central island to pour himself a glass of wine, leaving Louisa to turn back to her work.

  ‘Need a top-up?’ he asked, seeing she had a glass next to her on the table.

  ‘Not just now, thanks. Maybe later when we eat. I’m starving.’

  She was always starving, and he loved seeing her here in his home, eating, drinking, laughing. It was a life he could get used to.

  ‘Have you thought any more about what I said last week?’ Tom intentionally kept his tone light. He didn’t want her to feel any pressure, and with her back to him it gave her somewhere to hide.

  ‘Of course I have,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘It’s still no, Tom. But it doesn’t mean never.’

  Her brown eyes didn’t waver as they looked into his, and Tom returned her gaze.

  ‘Is it because I bought this place when I was with Leo?’ he
asked. He knew some people would find it difficult to move into a house that had been shared with a former lover, but it came as no surprise to him when Louisa laughed.

  ‘Of course not. That is truly unimportant to me. We both have pasts, and we’ve both loved other people. I would find it a bit sad if you hadn’t, to be honest. But I was badly burned, as you well know, and after that relationship I decided to give myself at least a year with any new man before making a forever commitment. In my mind, moving in with you would be that kind of commitment.’

  Tom smiled. ‘I’ll go with that,’ he said. ‘What is it you’re looking to prove during those twelve months? What is it that you don’t already know?’

  ‘I need – no, I demand – total honesty. My ex lied to me about everything, and I only discovered that when we split up. I don’t ever want to feel that stupid again, so I reckon that if I haven’t found any skeletons within a year, I might be safe. I just don’t want to go through all that pain again.’

  Louisa stood up and walked towards Tom, and this time it was her turn to wrap her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder. ‘I don’t see you as a cheat and a liar, Tom. But I have to be sure.’

  Tom felt torn in two. He had never lied to her, but he had intentionally misled her about one thing right at the start of their relationship. His reasons were identical to those she had given for not moving in with him. It was simply a matter of trust. Would it be safe to trust Louisa with the one secret he had, knowing the repercussions could be devastating for so many people? Or should he wait until she believed in him enough to stay?

  It wasn’t just his secret, though. It could end Tom’s career, even send him to prison. And Philippa Stanley, who knew exactly what Tom had done, could suffer a similar fate. Worse still, it could result in an evil bastard, who was currently rotting in jail, getting the revenge he so badly sought.

  12

  I only have a couple of days left on the boat, but my cabin no longer feels like a place of escape, and when I’m in there I can’t think straight. I am always conscious of my laptop. I feel as if it’s watching me, daring me to open it. I have to get away to somewhere I can’t see it.