Then
It turns out Aoife and I are sharing a room. I sit on my bed and scratch under the edge of the cast on my arm while I watch her unpack. She’s tied her hair back now and I can see she has a black eye and a cracked lip. Her skin is almost translucent; veins, like blue roads on a map, make their way across her arms, neck and face. Her teeth are white, but one is chipped, giving her a jaunty look.
When she’s unpacked what little she brought with her, she flops onto the bed and crosses her legs, facing me.
‘What you in here for?’ Then she sees my plaster cast and rolls her eyes. ‘Nuff said.’ She looks at me, blue eyes serious. ‘No one’s signed it. Wait.’ She jumps up, all legs and arms, and grabs a pen from my desk. Aoife was here. Then she draws the top half of a face looking over a wall, his hands gripping the edges.
‘That’s better.’ She tosses the pen on the floor and flops back onto my bed, legs from the knees down dangling over the edge.
I stare at her, then my arm. Her words are a flurry of lines and they take up the entire length of my arm. Looking at it I feel an emotion I’m not sure of. I test the edges, poke the sides: pride?
Aoife sits back up. ‘Do you speak?’
I open my mouth, then shut it. I feel a burst of something like bubbles in my chest that push their way out into a laugh and once I start I find I can’t stop. There is nothing to laugh about, seeing as I’ve been wrenched from my home with barely ten minutes’ notice, but here I am, unable to breathe, clutching my chest so much I worry I’ll wee.
Tears stream from Aoife’s eyes as we roll on the bed, each releasing whatever it is that caused us to be here. When we come up for air our faces are close; I can feel her breath on my cheek.
‘Shit, isn’t it,’ she says. She smells of peppermint.
‘Do you miss your mum too?’ I ask.
She considers this for a moment. ‘You see this?’ She points to her cracked tooth. ‘Boyfriend number four. And this –’ she lifts her sleeve to reveal a small mark the size of a cigarette butt, ‘– her third.’
I don’t ask what number caused the black eye.
‘I miss what I imagine a mum to be,’ she says. ‘But mine? Not so much.’
I think about my mum, all round and smiley. How she packs me lunches for school and makes sure I have the salt and vinegar crisps. How she always asks how my day was, regardless of her own, so that even when I visited her in hospital in a daze – accompanied by an overzealous social worker – her first words were ‘How was school?’ as I tried not to notice the blood at the edges of her mouth or the eye that couldn’t open.
‘I miss mine,’ I hear myself say. ‘But she prefers my dad.’
Aoife nods.
We lie for a while, listening to the cries and the shouts from below and above, before Aoife rolls over to face me, both hand palms tucked together under one cheek. ‘School tomorrow,’ she says.
I stare at her. There’s the slightest edge of fear in her eyes and it makes my heart start to pound. She squeezes my arm and I squeeze hers back. It anchors me.
‘Together, yeah?’ she says.
I stare at her: freckles, red curls, big, searching eyes. ‘Yeah,’ I reply.
Thirteen
When Nell’s mobile rang it took seconds for it to drag her from a dream she instantly couldn’t remember.
‘We’ve got a body.’
Nell could barely focus on Bremer’s voice.
‘A body?’ She cradled the mobile under her chin and reached for the glass of water beside her bed.
‘Yes, and from the description, it sounds like Connor O’Brian.’
The man’s body lay face down on the floor, the back of his head caved in. Nell pulled on her blue plastic gloves as Paul nodded downwards.
‘The pathologist has had a look at the face and it’s definitely O’Brian.’
Nell didn’t need a pathologist to tell her that, but she nodded just the same. ‘Who’s the pathologist?’
‘Eve Graham.’
‘Twice in one week, lucky us.’ Nell refused to think about Kelly-Anne’s confession and the doubt that threw on Eve; what she needed to do was go through the scene, and do it methodically.
Nell knelt on the floor, noting the congealed blood matted into what was left of O’Brian’s skull. ‘Did Eve give us any idea of time of death or method used?’
‘She gave her usual “I’m not committing to anything until I’ve got him on the slab”, but she did say she thinks it was within the last eight hours and death was due to blunt trauma to the head.’
Nell looked over at him. Paul held up his hands.
‘They’ve got to call it, even if it is bloody obvious.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In the kitchen, or what passes for a kitchen anyway, checking out a couple of blood patches.’
Nell looked around the room. The flat was situated above a betting shop in Rose Hill, the one Carla had flagged up and which Nell and Paul had visited the evening before. Had he been dead then? Lying here in his own blood while they talked crap to the shop owner?
She noted the tidy bedside table, a tube of moisturiser, a half-read book. ‘Who owns it? The flat?’
‘No you don’t,’ Paul stopped her. ‘You know the drill. You call the killer’s gender from the same information as I have. Just what’s in this room.’
It was a game they played. One of the little things that made the harder parts of the job more bearable.
Nell looked at the rose-coloured wallpaper – a little ripped at the edges – the chest of drawers on which stood a mirror and a brush, a book placed at an angle on the bedside table, and it occurred to her it looked just like a stage set.
‘I’m calling a woman.’
‘That’s a bold statement, Jackson.’ Paul’s tone told her what he thought of her conclusion but she just shrugged.
‘The room is bare, but what’s here suggests a female occupant.’ She looked at the hairbrush that’d be ripe with DNA to prove her right. ‘And attacking from behind suggests the need for surprise – to give the killer a chance.’
Paul looked unconvinced. ‘Yeah, but a man could just as well have needed surprise. Not all men have these.’ He flexed his tattooed biceps, thick from hours in the gym each night.
‘But why would a man be up here with him?’ She pointed to the bed, sheets ruffled. ‘I think whoever did it was here with him, then something happened to make her kill him. Maybe he got violent, she felt threatened, got what was nearest to her and hit him with it.’
‘But what? There’s nothing obviously missing, so what did “she” kill him with?’
He had a point. There was no obvious murder weapon, unless Eve had bagged it already. But if she hadn’t, if there wasn’t a murder weapon used in the heat of the moment, that would only indicate one thing.
Nell looked to Paul. ‘You think someone brought the murder weapon here deliberately?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Which would mean it was premeditated.’
‘Yup. And hours after his kid is killed? Too much of a coincidence?’
‘Kelly-Anne?’
‘She hasn’t been at the station long. She had ample time before to sneak out and meet him. Maybe they argued. She accused him of killing their child, they fought, she killed him.’
‘But that sounds premeditated. If the murder weapon was brought to the scene, she would have had to consciously choose an appropriate item, carry it on her, then be calm enough to take it away again after she’d killed her partner.’ And from what Nell had seen of Kelly-Anne, this seemed unlikely.
A short cough from the doorway made Nell turn in surprise.
‘Sorry, Sergeant, did I scare you?’ Eve was dressed in an all-blue plastic suit, her white hair tucked neatly inside the hood, and she wore the barest hint of a smile as she walked over to O’Brian’s body.
‘I won’t shake hands.’ She stopped by the remains of his head. ‘Cross-contamination and all that.’ Her blue e
yes studied Nell for a moment before turning to look down at the body. ‘I see you’re familiar with the back of Mr O’Brian’s head? Or lack of it, I should say.’
‘Any idea of the murder weapon?’
‘Not yet, but then it will no doubt be pretty standard – a hammer, fire poker. Criminals these days lack originality.’
Nell doubted they ever had it, and certainly none she’d ever come across. ‘So, something metal you think?’
Eve crouched down by the body. ‘I didn’t say that, Sergeant.’
Paul opened his mouth but Nell gave him a quick shake of the head. Eve’s list of murder weapons suggested metal, but Nell wasn’t going to argue and she certainly didn’t need Paul leaping to her defence.
Eve lifted O’Brian’s T-shirt. ‘Have you seen this?’
Nell crouched down beside her, taking in O’Brian’s exposed flesh, the hair on his back just below two bloodied letters inscribed on his chest.
‘“A W”?’
Eve didn’t reply, instead she traced a finger around the edges of the wound. It seemed oddly intimate and Nell averted her eyes.
‘What would “A W” stand for?’ Nell looked up at Paul, who thought for a moment then shrugged.
‘Nothing I can think of.’
‘No, nor me.’ She looked to Eve. ‘Any ideas?’
Eve kept her eyes on O’Brian. ‘No. But someone wanted to leave you a message, that’s for sure.’
‘Well, I wish they could have been a bit clearer,’ Paul said. ‘What the hell is “A W” going to tell us?’
Eve smiled up at him. ‘Well, that’s for you to find out, isn’t it?’
‘Must be pretty important if the killer wrote it on O’Brian’s skin.’ A thought came to Nell. ‘Did they do it prior to death?’
‘I’d say post. I’d have expected more bleeding if it was prior.’
Well, that was something, she supposed, but Nell still couldn’t see Kelly-Anne doing something like that, even if he was already dead. It just clashed with her portrayal of the downtrodden girlfriend. Unless a portrayal was all it was.
‘Do you think, having seen Kelly-Anne and O’Brian together, even briefly,’ she added as Eve gave her a warning look, ‘that she would be capable of doing this?’
Eve let out a short laugh. ‘That girl wouldn’t tie her shoelaces if he didn’t tell her to.’ She pushed herself up to standing. Nell joined her, knees protesting.
‘The thing about girls like that is they’ve been brainwashed so much they can’t countenance any action without prior approval. O’Brian will have worn her down until every little thing she did required his permission. And not because she was some poor little victim – although of course she was – but because his love for her was the world. And however misguided that idea of love was, however wrong, she’d had no one else to tell her love could be any other way.’ Eve looked down at O’Brian. ‘Children without love goad their abuser into hitting them so they can at least feel a human touch.’ She looked to Nell. ‘It’s what we need. And we get it however we can.’
Nell looked at what was left of O’Brian’s head. That was some need for human contact, beating a man’s brains out.
She felt Paul behind her, unsettled, keen to get on.
‘You done with us?’ she asked Eve.
‘I’ll let you know when I’ve done the report.’
‘Thanks.’ She paused. ‘Odd it’s the father of the dead baby, don’t you think?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, they must be linked.’
‘Must they?’ Eve’s face was unreadable.
‘If they aren’t, that’s one hell of a coincidence.’
Eve smiled. ‘Coincidences do happen, Sergeant.’
Nell contemplated her for a moment. Yes, they did. But she’d never come across such a case, and she doubted this was going to be the one to break the mould.
Fourteen
Then
Our school uniforms are a mix and match of whatever the staff could find in the cupboard. Aoife is looking scornfully in the bedroom mirror while I pull my skirt down in a desperate attempt for it to be half decent.
‘I don’t know why you’re worried,’ she says over her shoulder, red hair tied up in a bun. She’s put on a bit of blusher and it lifts her whole face, making the blue of her eyes stand out even more. ‘Better a tart than a nun.’
She turns back to the mirror, turning over the waistband of her skirt until she seems satisfied, then grabs the hand-me-down school bag and rolls her eyes. ‘I mean, honestly, they might as well brand us with “Kids from the stinky care home” with all this lot.’
I feel the nerves that’d woken with me start to clamour for attention. I want to be going to my old school. I want to have new pens, rulers and rubbers.
Aoife throws a jacket at me. ‘What you thinking?’
‘Nothing.’ I don’t want to admit I’m frightened of going to school, but she must be able to see it because she pauses, then flings herself on the bed, tickling me until I think I’m going to wee.
‘Stop!’ I say, breathless. We are lying back on the bed and she grins over at me.
‘It’s going to be fine.’ She takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you.’
I feel tears in the corners of my eyes and when I blink a few run down the edges of my cheeks. ‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ she says and brushes them away.
School is awful and Aoife finds me at lunchtime hiding in the toilets.
‘Ah, what’s up?’ She’s leaning against the door and I’m so relieved to see her I almost cry. She looks at the sandwiches in my lap, their edges curling, and grimaces.
‘I wouldn’t even try eating them, you’ll probably choke.’ She grabs them off me and turns to put them in the bin just as the door slams open and three girls walk in.
They stand in a line, arms folded. ‘Another little reject,’ the tallest one in the middle says to Aoife. I cringe by the door, trying to think of a way round them, but they’re blocking our exit so I hover behind Aoife and try not to look as scared as I feel.
‘Don’t see why we’re lumbered with you just because your mums didn’t want you.’ She peers around Aoife. ‘What you hiding from? Are you scared?’ She says this in a leering tone and I freeze.
‘I had to throw away the pens you dropped,’ she continues. ‘Had to pick them up with my sweater.’ She turns to the other girls. ‘God knows what we would catch off them.’
They all laugh and I see Aoife roll both hands into fists, straightening her shoulders, lifting her chin a little higher. The girls see it too and stop laughing.
‘What you going to do? Fight us?’ The middle one grins at the others but I can tell they are unsure now. They shuffle either side of her; one takes a long piece of hair and twirls it round her index finger. I don’t take my eyes off her as Aoife speaks.
‘If I have to, yeah.’
The room stills, the only sounds from a leaking tap and a cistern refilling behind us. The middle girl steps forward. ‘Come on then.’
Aoife moves forward too, and it makes me think of two pawns opening a game of chess. Then before I can work out who hit who first, arms and legs come at me. My hair is pulled, my lip is split by the heel of a shoe, and as I grab my chest to stop the kicks all I can hear is the ear-splitting scream of Aoife as she fights them off me.
It’s over as quickly as it began. The girls leave, swearing they’ll get us properly the next time, and I lie curled in a ball on the floor.
‘Come on, sit up.’ Aoife has toilet roll in her hand and as I gingerly obey she gently dabs the edge of my mouth. When she’s done, she sits back on the floor and lets out a breath. I see her tights are ripped and her hair has come loose from its bun. Red curls hang around her face, as wild as if the wind had come in and blown them that way.
‘Come on, girl, let’s get the hell out of here.’ She stands and holds out a hand to me.
‘Leave school?’
&
nbsp; She rolls her eyes but not in an unkind way. ‘You want to stick around for more of this?’ She holds out the toilet roll stained with my blood.
I shake my head.
‘Thought not,’ she says, and grabs my arm.
We make our way to the sea and as soon as I smell the salt I feel my body relaxing. Wind whips around us, little grains of sand stabbing our faces like needles. Aoife swirls round and laughs, her hair streaming out behind her, face lifted towards the cloudy sky. Her eyes are shut but the expression on her face is still one of freedom.
The waves crash behind us, each one keener to reach the shore than the last, while gulls swoop and try to make themselves heard above the wind. We are alone on the pebbles, or so I think until I glance up towards the promenade and see a man standing, watching us.
He is as solid as the sea: black jacket, black hair around a face I can’t make out, and the way he watches us makes the hair on my arms stand up.
‘What?’ Aoife stops dancing and follows my stare. We stand for a moment, the three of us, watching, before he turns and walks back to the run-down café behind him. I read the battered sign – Alf’s Café – written in red, a large plastic ice-cream cone swaying underneath.
Aoife looks at me and grins. ‘Fancy a Mr Whippy?’
I look back at Alf’s Café, its windows dark, upturned chairs on tables outside.
She grabs my arm. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and get this Alf to give us two on the house.’
My stomach rumbles so I follow, skipping over pebbles as we scramble to the top.
The man is standing by the door as we reach the wall. He watches as we climb the steps, sand making us slip, and holds the door open for us.
‘Hello, girls.’ His voice is low and hard. ‘Come inside.’
Fifteen
Terry, owner of the betting shop below O’Brian’s dead body, was sitting ashen-faced in the corner of the room. His hair was curly and lank, his faded black jeans smeared with grime, and he wore a greying band T-shirt. The television remained blank, betting slips untouched by the morning crowd.
When I Lost You Page 7