by Sarah Hilary
‘Okay, Loz. That’s enough.’
‘I was just explaining to DI Rome why we wouldn’t go there. No nice girls on the Garrett.’ She looked directly at Marnie, her big eyes unblinking. ‘You’d only go there if you were into self-harming or some shit like that.’
‘That’s enough.’
‘Go to my room? Fine by me.’ She walked to the room, closing the door behind her with a click.
Her unhappiness stayed in the corridor after she’d gone, making the air parched and spiky, lodging its ache in Marnie’s chest.
Tim Welland was frowning at the incident room’s whiteboard, a mug of tea in his right paw. He acknowledged Marnie’s return with a nod at May’s photo. ‘How’re her parents holding up?’
‘Barely.’ Marnie removed her coat, going to her office.
Welland followed her. ‘I saw the CCTV footage. Is that Traffic’s girl from the crash?’
‘Joe Eaton thinks so, and he’s our only eyewitness at the moment. We should get the crash site footage soon. Nothing from Battersea worth watching.’ Her wrists ached from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. ‘I’d like to go back to the Garrett to look for this missing girl.’
‘You think she might be next?’ Welland sucked tea from his mug. ‘Or you think she’s part of it? She and May didn’t look too friendly from what I saw on the CCTV.’
‘No,’ Marnie agreed. ‘But she didn’t carry May up to that flat.’
‘She could’ve held the doors open for whoever did. Easier with two.’
‘I’m not ruling it out. I just don’t think it adds up, yet. The night of the crash she was in shock, half dressed. She could’ve been hit by Eaton’s car. She was lucky she wasn’t.’
‘Luckier than Logan Marsh. Or May Beswick.’ Welland walked to the window, looking down. ‘If she had a narrow escape, why not come to us? Why change her clothes and run?’ He turned to study Marnie, his heavy brow lowered. ‘Give me reasons. Beyond the fact that you know what it feels like to be a teenage runaway.’
‘She changed her clothes on the Garrett, so either she lives there or she has friends there. Neither of which disqualifies her from seeking police protection if she’s in trouble, but it makes it less likely, don’t you think? When was the last time anyone on that estate looked to us for help? Apart from Mrs Tarvin, and she’s not exactly our number one fan.’
‘That’s who she reminds me of … Kathy Bates in Misery.’ He lifted his mug in a toast. ‘Sorry, you were saying? Something about this being more than empathy on your part.’
‘Do we need to have a chat, sir? Only I’m picking up a vibe.’ She moved her hand, gesturing at the distance between them. ‘It’s a long time since I was a teenage runaway.’
‘Nineteen years. Not that long, in the scheme of things.’ He watched her across the lip of the mug, his left eye still shadowed by the cancer that had threatened his sight three years ago.
His illness had dragged Marnie out of the pit of her grief. The thought of losing him made her throat hot even now. She wanted to make him smile. ‘This isn’t empathy. I’ve no idea what was in May’s head when she left home, but I think she did leave. I don’t believe she was snatched. I’m not even sure she was with the killer until recently.’
‘So who got her pregnant? Nothing about a boyfriend in any of the statements twelve weeks ago.’ He set his empty mug on the desk. ‘I can’t think of many sixteen-year-olds with the wit to keep quiet about their sex life. Most of them are splashing relationship updates all over the internet.’
‘Not May, or not according to her family. Her sister said something interesting just now: none of May’s real friends was at school. Perhaps we’ve been speaking to the wrong people and she had a life we’ve not uncovered yet. Not online. A real life, somewhere she went twelve weeks ago. Somewhere she met Traffic’s girl.’
‘On the Garrett? That’s not an escape route, it’s a dead end. And she had a good life. Her parents were well-off, decent people. No evidence of abuse or neglect.’
‘No,’ Marnie agreed.
‘But you think she ran off. Because she got pregnant?’
‘The conception was more recent, so no. I think she left because she couldn’t live there, for whatever reason. I think she was terribly unhappy.’
‘So this was … teenage angst?’
‘At that age? Unhappiness can feel like the end of the world. And the Beswicks are … box-tickers. I’ve nothing against them. I feel sorry for them. But in twelve weeks, I haven’t seen either one of them hug their daughter. Not even in the last forty-eight hours.’
‘Laura Beswick is how old? Thirteen?’
‘Young enough to be hugged after her sister’s been killed.’
Welland digested this in silence. ‘How’s DS Jake?’
‘On the mend, I hope.’
‘You and I know what this looks like. The start of a spree, maybe a serial offender.’ He avoided saying serial killer, but he grimaced. ‘Your boy’s good, but he’s young. If you want someone with more years on him, or someone senior …’
‘I don’t, thanks. Noah saw what it was straight away. One look at the crime scene and he was working the case. He knows what we’re in for. I need his brain and I value his instincts.’
‘All right, Boy Wonder stays. Just make sure you’ve got what you need to keep on top of this. I’d prefer no more corpses in high-profile places, don’t want some tourist stumbling on a dead girl in the London Eye, or anywhere else for that matter.’
‘I’d like Traffic’s cooperation. Are they thinking of going after Joe Eaton?’
‘I’ll find out. Tell me what the CCTV chucks up, and when and how you want the press briefed.’ His face knuckled with distaste. ‘The Battersea developer’s bitching like a low-grade secretary with my hand up his skirt, so I’ll deal with that, too.’
He retrieved his empty mug from Marnie’s desk. ‘This? Runneth over.’
Ron was scowling at the whiteboard when Marnie rejoined the team. ‘Can you believe the bloody shambles over at Battersea? The millions they’ve sunk into those flats, and they can’t connect the ruddy cameras. Talk about getting your priorities straight.’
‘Do we have all the statements from the on-site security?’
‘For what they’re worth. The only one with his eyes open was the ex-squaddie, Ledger. I wouldn’t trust the rest of them to see shit if it was sitting on their top lip.’
‘What about the list of people with access to the site in the last twelve weeks?’
‘We’re still pulling it together. So far we’ve got contractors, developers, estate agents. The estate agents need to give us the lists of people who’ve been for viewings. You can imagine how they’re falling over themselves to do that. Then there’s a media party they threw on site six weeks ago. Press, photographers – anyone they hoped would spin a good story and help them shift a few flats. We’re waiting on the invite list.’
‘Let’s start ticking names off the list we do have. How’s house-to-house going?’
‘The usual, “strangers in white vans”. We’ve got white vans coming out of our arses round there. I’m heading back in a bit. We’re getting a picture of Traffic’s girl to show around, right?’ When Marnie nodded, he said, ‘How’d you get on with the parents?’
‘Sean Beswick’s convinced May never went near the Garrett, but Loz suggested it was worth following up. If Traffic’s girl is living there, I want her found. She’s our best lead to what happened to May in the hours before she was killed.’
‘You think May might’ve been on the Garrett? She’d be in Emma’s book, wouldn’t she? Not much gets past our Emma.’ Ron sounded proud of the pensioner.
‘We know May was obsessed with Battersea Power Station. She drew these.’ Marnie handed him the sketchpad she’d borrowed from Sean. ‘Make copies for the board. We need to concentrate on the site where she was found and the place where Traffic’s girl was last seen. So the power station, and the Garrett. And let’s take anot
her look at May’s movements in the last twelve weeks. I want a sense of where she was living. Was she on her own, or with friends? I don’t think she was on the streets. She was healthier than she looked in her last family photo. I want to know who was looking after her, and where.’
Like Welland, Ron said, ‘Her parents are decent people. We didn’t find anything to say otherwise, and we dug deep. Kids run off for all sorts of reasons. Look at Clancy Brand, six months ago. His parents had more money than most, spent it all on alarm systems. Bet their cameras were connected. Pair of security nuts. But he still scarpered.’
The Brands had been paranoid about danger, obsessed with what was lurking outside their front door. Hiding from living, and trying to force their teenage son to do the same. Clancy had ended up running away at the age of fourteen – headlong into danger, but preferable, he’d said, to being at home. Some parents bred fear in their kids just by trying too hard to keep them safe. Marnie didn’t believe the Beswicks fell into that category, but her conversation with Loz had forced her to rethink what she thought she knew about the family.
‘Leave the Garrett until the morning,’ she told Ron. ‘I want the team fresh and on their toes for the interviews with whoever’s been at the power station. OCU’s organising extra manpower, but I want you heading up the Garrett team. You know the territory.’
As if the estate was a war zone.
It was a war zone.
‘Enemy lines,’ Ron said, reading her mind. ‘I’ll draw up a battle plan.’
20
Aimee
May came home. I heard her voice. I was out of bed, half dressed, not caring about his rules or anything else except May.
She’d come back. She was here. I heard her.
I was on the stairs in his white nightie with the light making me see-through, nothing between me and his stare, when I stopped.
It couldn’t be May. How could it be? She wasn’t coming back. They mustn’t see me like that. He mustn’t see me. Tonight at supper …
He turned his back on all of us.
Washing at the sink, but his back was turned too long and he kept washing and washing, his shoulders working until I thought he must be crying. He didn’t say a word all through supper, didn’t tell me to eat up or to drink my water, didn’t look at any of us.
Something had happened. It happened days ago, after Gracie left, like she’d taken a bit of him with her when she ran, the bit making him work properly, keeping him from being just broken.
Everything must always, always be the same. But it wasn’t. It was different. He was different. It was all candle-and-scrubbed-face now. No hugs, no good girl.
Christie was trying to act normal, but her eyes were all over the place. ‘Ashleigh, you can take first turn in the bathroom.’
He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He smelt sharp, like firewood.
The candles put a deep, deep shadow up his back.
Christie licked her fingers and pinched at the flames until all the candles were out, just four grey threads of smoke twisting up from the table.
Much later, I thought I heard May’s voice. But I was wrong. I’d got her sketchpad in bed with me, hidden under the covers. The room stank of sickness. I stank. I needed to wash, and change the sheets, but I didn’t have the energy. It was easier to stay where he wanted me, curled in bed. Just like when I was little and Mum kept me home from school, saying I was sick. She was a worrier, my mum. That was why I thought I knew what I was up against with Harm, because I recognised the symptoms, the checking and double-checking, the routines. I thought he was like my mum and that he’d look after me the way she did, until she couldn’t any more.
Catastrophising, that’s what they call it. A social worker explained it to me, after they took mum to the hospital. It’s when you let negative thoughts get out of control and worry yourself to death over things you can’t do anything about. You put all these measures in place to try and keep safe but they don’t work because your brain just comes up with worse and worse stuff to worry about. They think there’s a paranoid gene now. If there is, maybe they’ll find a cure. But it’d be too late for Harm. It was too late for my mum, and he was worse than she ever was.
At least May wasn’t eating his freeze-dried crap any longer or listening to his lectures about the dangers out there. He was the danger. Just him. May was okay now. I made myself repeat that – she was okay. Hard to believe we were ever stupid enough to feel safe here. Except he was different, said we mattered, I mattered. You won’t understand what that means unless you’ve lived on the streets. It’s not just being hungry or cold or afraid of getting beaten up, or worse. It’s the way it empties you. I could stand to be hungry and cold, I could even stand to be raped, although it only happened once. What I couldn’t stand was not being me any more.
Homeless is just another way of saying empty.
That night Harm found me …
All right, so I thought he wanted sex. I went with him thinking that was what he wanted. I wasn’t stupid. Men didn’t pick homeless kids off the street without a reason, but I thought it was fair enough given what he was offering. A bed for the night, decent food, a place to get dry. It’d been raining for days and I was sick with a cold, coughing my guts up; I didn’t need to fake it at the beginning.
I undressed and showered, because I stank. It was good to get clean. Then I climbed into bed and waited for him. A clean bed, smooth sheets. As long as he didn’t hurt me, it’d be worth it. I wasn’t a child; I knew what I was doing, and I thought he couldn’t be that bad because the room was warm and the house felt safe. Just an ordinary house, but Christie kept it nice. I didn’t meet her or the others that first night. He took me to a room at the back and it didn’t have a lock so he couldn’t keep me there if he turned out to be a pervert. It felt okay. After I’d been in the bed for a bit, I rolled on to my stomach because I thought he might prefer finding me like that, but he never came. I fell asleep waiting for him. Next morning, I put on my old clothes and went downstairs. He was cooking pancakes for breakfast. The smell made my mouth water.
‘I left clean clothes out. Why don’t you get changed and I’ll wash those old things.’ He served the pancakes on to two plates. ‘After breakfast,’ he said, smiling at me.
The pancakes were amazing.
Afterwards, I went upstairs and changed into the clothes he’d left out: black school uniform skirt and a white shirt – and I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that. The skirt was long and he’d put tights out, proper thick tights, not kinky. The clothes were a better fit than my baggy jumper and jeans. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a flat-chested schoolgirl.
The uniform was embarrassing, but I got used to it. It didn’t mean what I’d thought it meant. Nothing did, with Harm. For weeks I was expecting him to touch me, especially because he was always sending me to bed. My cough cleared up after a few days in the warm, eating good food. But he didn’t want me to get well. He wanted to look after me. Just like my mum did, before she got too sick. I used to be good at faking it with her. It was harder with him.
Six of us in that house. It must’ve belonged to his parents, because I kept finding baby photos. A girl, and a boy who looked like him. Christie, Grace, Ashleigh, May and me – all in that house until he said it was getting too small, too hard to keep safe. He hated the garden even after May tried to bring it back to life. Too easy to break into, he said. That was when he found us the new place, with my own room, the split-level flat.
I hated being in bed there. Ashleigh bitched about it. I got her into trouble by saying she wanted me doing chores like the rest of them. That pissed him off. But I was going mad up there, like that crazy woman in the attic except I wasn’t a woman, I was his sick little girl.
Solitary confinement causes hallucinations. Did you know that? People go mad in prison. I was staring at the ceiling with its damp patch like a map, trying to imagine open sky, birds, trees, an outside world. May and the baby …
Sometimes I couldn’t breathe. It was like something was squatting on my chest. A child or a dwarf, heavy and hot. I could hear its blood beating and feel the weight of it pressing me down. Its breath was disgusting, like something greasy died in its mouth.
Whole days lying like that, and he was glad I was too sick to get up. He didn’t care if I was suffocating, if some fucking thing was on my chest, holding me there until I wanted to write all over myself, the way Grace did, and May. Except I’d write the truth. About what he was doing to us in that prison we were stupid enough to call home.
Real pain and imagined pain feel the same. They trigger the same part of the brain, the social worker told me. Towards the end, Mum didn’t know which threats were real and which weren’t. Both kinds felt exactly the same, her brain freezing, then flooding with adrenalin, making her run, making her jump. We’re the sum of our fears, the social worker said. That’s what I’d write. I’d get the wire out of May’s sketchpad and scratch words all over myself, Harm did this, and fuck him …
For making Grace run, and May run. For taking away my best friend, the only thing that made this place bearable. Just me now. Me and the thing squatting on my chest with its breath in my face so I couldn’t get up from that bed even if I wanted to, so it was less and less like faking and more and more like the real thing.
It was what he wanted.
Me in that bed. Face up or face down, it didn’t matter. Except I suppose in the end he’d lay me face up, with my hair brushed neat against the pillow. I didn’t think he’d bury me. I didn’t think he’d want to do that. He’d keep me there until I started to smell so bad, someone would call the council to take me out, a foul thing in a black bag, and no one would know what to do with me. No one would know who I was or where I’d come from. Not unless they dug really deep, all the way back to that subway, the tunnels where we sheltered from the rain, where I was sitting with soaking feet, coughing my lungs up. Until he came.