Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  RISK OF HARM

  Lucie Whitehouse

  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thEstate.co.uk

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

  Dublin 4, Ireland

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2021

  Copyright © Lucie Whitehouse

  Lucie Whitehouse asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover design by Julian Humphries

  Cover image © Getty Images

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This story collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

  Source ISBN: 9780008269043

  Ebook Edition © June 2021 ISBN: 9780008269067

  Version: 2021-05-24

  Dedication

  For Suzy and Paul

  &

  Millie and Andrew,

  safe harbours in the storm

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Robin could feel bracelets of sweat round the suit’s elasticated cuffs. It was early but the air was already humid and her heart was thudding from the physical effort. Ahead, Rafferty, the scene manager, was hacking through the undergrowth as if they were up the Amazon rather than ten minutes from Birmingham city centre. She and Malia followed in silence, focused on staying upright and alive. Loose electrical cables, open lift shafts, fallen beams – if you were looking for an untimely death, this place was the jackpot.

  The old Gisborne works, relic of British industry, shuttered in the Nineties according to Google. Until then, they’d made bicycle parts and evidently on a major scale: the grey cube on the aerial map filled the entire depth of the block. This one workshop alone was the size of an ice rink, stretching away between graffitied iron pillars like a ruined Victorian greenhouse.

  The roof had been glass but it crunched underfoot now, glinting among the sea of rubbish that surrounded them in all directions: traffic cones, a rusted-out fire extinguisher, plastic bags. Nettles and elder sprouted from every crevice, and the air stank of petrochemicals and decay. It was a steampunk garden, so far post the apocalypse that even the zombies had moved on.

  ‘It’s a young woman, Rob,’ Samir had said on the phone. ‘I want you to take this one.’

  Rafferty tripped suddenly and fell forward with a shout. When they reached him, he was picking himself up but one of his gloves was torn and bloody. He looked shaken and they saw why: a foot away gaped a huge square-mouthed hole in the ground, its dank sides falling away towards the gleam of stagnant water twenty feet below. There was no warning at all – no tape, no sign. The fall would have killed him.

  He put a second glove over the top to contain the bleeding and they went on, chastened, through vandalized steel doors to a slightly smaller space. The glass roof was intact here but so moss-covered that light penetrated only in patches. A mangled Venetian blind reared from the junk like the ribcage of a futuristic beast.

  At the far end, SOCOs moved through the half-light, spectral in their white suits.

  Without them, Robin thought, she’d never have seen her. There was no clearing in the junk, no sign that this spot had been chosen with any care – except maybe that it was away from the doors and anyone who happened to traipse through. If no one had, she might have lain undiscovered for weeks. Months.

  One of the white suits stood and raised a hand: Olly Faulkner, the pathologist. As they neared him, Robin saw a length of dark carpet at his feet. The victim was on her side, her back to them, the only parts of her visible at first a pair of blood-soaked white cotton plimsolls protruding from one end of the carpet and her hair spilling from the other, thick and shiny chestnut brown, incongruously clean amid the squalor. Robin’s stomach turned over; she hoped it hadn’t registered on her face.

  The girl wasn’t wrapped or rolled in the carpet – nothing so effortful – just lying on one half, the other pulled roughly over her. Maybe that was why her killer had chosen this spot to dump her: the carpet had already been here, a happy bit of luck.

  Olly Faulkner was Robin’s favourite of the two pathologists they dealt with regularly. About fifty, with collar-length blond-grey hair swept straight back from his forehead and wide-set eyes over a broad-bridged nose, he was known in Homicide as Aslan, and not only for his looks. The people he saw were beyond appreciating it but he treated them as gently as if they’d turned up in A&E, talking to them as he worked. ‘It’s like he thinks they can still hear him,’ Robin had overheard a uniform snarking on one of her early cases with West Midlands. ‘I can still hear you,’ she’d said.

  ‘Robin, Malia. Good to see you.’

  ‘How are you, Olly?’

  ‘Not bad. Unlovely location, though, even by our usual standards, and this is a terrible thing.’

  Robin was trying not to inhale too deeply but the butcher’s-shop tang in the air was inescapable. The carpet, she realized, wasn’t dark, or hadn’t been – its nylon backing was pale. It was soaked, completely saturated. Jesus.

  When she looked up, Olly was watching her. ‘The only comfort,’ he said, ‘is that with this degree of blood loss, as you know, she would have lost consciousness quickly. Come to this side, you’ll see her better.’
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  She and Malia picked their way over to him. He motioned to one of the SOCOs to take the opposite corner and they lifted the carpet gingerly away.

  Robin knew it wasn’t Lennie – of course it wasn’t, she’d left her at the kitchen table, messing around on her laptop – but she was still holding her breath. When she saw the girl’s face, an involuntary sound escaped her.

  She was young – so young. Older than Len but only a little: eighteen, maybe, twenty or twenty-one at most. She was white – paper-white now – her forehead high and lineless, her nose Roman with a saddle of freckles. Her bloodless, chapped lips revealed front teeth that were gently ridged like Len’s had been when they first came through.

  Robin crouched, glad to hide her face. Not her baby but someone’s. She’d been borne and looked after, fed, clothed, and then, as if none of that mattered, killed and dumped here amongst the rubbish.

  Her clothes were as soaked as the carpet – the T-shirt could have been white or pale blue or green because every visible inch was sodden. The weight of the blood pulled it sideways but she could see that the material was slashed in several places, long gashes, a couple of which revealed the mouths of puckering wounds.

  ‘A knife?’ she said, eyes still down.

  ‘I should think so,’ said Olly. ‘Look.’

  The woman’s left hand rested on her thigh but her right arm was trapped under her body, hand palm-up on the filthy carpet. The fingers weren’t curled as Robin would have expected, but slack. Blood obscured what would have been obvious otherwise: the palm was bisected from the base of the index finger almost to the wrist by a cut that had severed the tendons. Another cut, parallel, had sliced the insides of her fingers between the first and second knuckle.

  ‘She grabbed it? Tried to stop it?’

  ‘It looks like it, yes.’

  ‘But only once?’

  He tipped his head to one side. ‘Maybe because she lost consciousness so quickly? It wasn’t tooth-and-claw – as far as I can see so far, there are no other defensive injuries. But her killer was strong, too. Look.’ With a gloved finger, he moved the fabric of her T-shirt aside. ‘The blade cut a groove in the bone here, probably elsewhere, too. It could have been a woman, if she was young and very strong, in a passion, but much more likely a man, I think.’

  Robin looked at her nails: cut short, unpolished and undamaged. They might get lucky, the blood trapped underneath might belong to the killer, but she wouldn’t hold out much hope.

  ‘Time frame?’

  ‘Hard to be precise at this stage, with the various temperature factors in here – the damp and the concrete floor would lower her temp but she was wrapped in the carpet so … For now, let’s say after midnight, before six.’

  ‘Was she killed here?’ asked Malia.

  Olly braced his hands on his thighs and stood, unfolding his body with the care of someone with long-time lower-back issues. ‘I’d say yes. There’s no sign of any inconsistent livor and though the carpet’s done a good job of soaking up the blood, there’s some on the leaves of this elder over here, and here, for starters. That’s more Rafferty’s territory than mine, though.’

  Robin turned to him. ‘What do we have on ID?’

  Rafferty shook his head. ‘Nothing. No bag, no purse, no phone, empty pockets. We’ve done a very preliminary search of the immediate area but it’ll take a while to do it thoroughly.’

  There was an understatement. ‘How about her prints?’ Response carried mobile readers.

  Another head-shake. ‘She’s not in the system.’

  ‘The guy who found her is an “urban explorer”,’ Rafferty told them, scorn barely concealed. ‘Came to nose about and take pretentious pictures of the decay. He got in the other side, Warwick Street, he said, there’s an open door. Ton of homeless back there, all together in one room.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Twenty-five, thirty, maybe? We’re keeping them there.’

  ‘Can we get through from here?’

  ‘Yeah. After this bit, it’s easier, actually – there’s a corridor with a roof on, much less plant-growth.’

  They followed him back the way they’d come, silent at first. Birds darted over their heads, their song mocking: this was their place; humans were finished here and nature was taking it back.

  Knifed to death, then dumped in this hell-scape. Robin felt a surge of outrage. What had she done – what could anyone ever do – to deserve that?

  But what was worse? That or being knifed and left to die on the pavement yards from your own front door?

  Because if you’d been killed in Birmingham last night, those had been your options. When Samir had called, she’d told him Webster was on. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but he’s already in Erdington.’

  ‘What’s in Erdington?’

  ‘The other new case. Kieran Clarke, aged sixteen. Stabbed and left to bleed out on the street thirty feet from where his parents were watching television.’ They’d both been quiet for a moment then he’d given a deep sigh. ‘Two in a night.’

  Back in February, barely four months ago, three teenagers had been stabbed to death in the city in twelve days. There’d been public outcry, quite rightly, but while it had been exceptional, it wasn’t that exceptional: so far this year, they’d been averaging a murder a week. Any lingering idea Robin may have had that she’d left the Met for a sleepy backwater had been well and truly shut down: last year, their rate per capita had been higher than London’s, the Sun had even run a piece about it, ‘The Wild West Midlands’. And things had gone downhill since, big time: homicides on their patch were up 70 per cent.

  Knives. Knives the great equalizer, democratic weapon of choice: you didn’t need money or underworld connections to buy a knife; you could get one at Tesco with your weekly shop or nick one from your mum. It was an arms race, out of control. Street gangs had knives, kids took knives to school to protect themselves, then more kids tooled up to protect themselves – more and more all the time. Last year, seven hundred children had had knife injuries, some of them still in primary school. In February, after the three deaths, the Commissioner had called the situation a national emergency and begged the government for more money. In some areas, desperate residents were starting to patrol their own neighbourhoods at night.

  ‘It’s bad,’ Samir told her when he’d asked her to apply for the job. ‘Really bad. We’ve lost more than two thousand officers since 2010 – officers, not support staff. We’re radically underfunded across the board and we’re losing control. There’s just not enough manpower to deal with a city this size.’

  ‘You’re really selling it to me,’ she’d said, dry.

  ‘It’s why I need you,’ he’d replied with no edge at all.

  Up ahead now, Rafferty had stopped. When they caught up, he took them through a single doorway into a small room, perhaps an office once, where a pair of foetid mattresses lay at right angles to one another, some soiled heavyweight material, maybe old curtains, piled where they met.

  ‘The urban explorer said he heard them in here,’ Rafferty said. ‘He shouted when he found her and heard running. He thinks they went through there then out the front on to Bradford Street.’

  ‘Men?’

  ‘He wasn’t sure. He didn’t see them.’

  ‘Great.’ Robin crouched to look at an area on the floor that had been used for fires. She held her hand over it but it hadn’t been used last night. The ashes were cold.

  If the workshops at the front were post-apocalyptic, the loading bay at the back was a vision of hell, a huddled mass of human misery in shades of black and grey and yellow. The scant natural light came from a ring of low windows just beneath the roof; it reached ten feet down and then petered out, as if losing heart. In the gloom below, human beings were arrayed on three levels: several in the loading bay itself; more on this raised ground level; and, like battery hens, in wooden storage bays against the wall.

  The air was rank, every flavour of bodily emission mixe
d with damp and mould, oil, the sickly-sweet smell of stale alcohol. Stepping forward, Robin stumbled on an empty can and sent it skittering across the concrete floor, shockingly loud. A colourless face emerged from a pile of cardboard and blankets, eyes wide, hair in patches. It lisped some unintelligible words – a woman, Robin realized – and subsided. In the far corner, a man muttered to himself, arms wrapped tight around his knees.

  ‘I’ve seen more reliable witnesses,’ Malia said, her dismay visible even through the gloom.

  ‘Also,’ Rafferty said, and Robin heard apology, ‘the CCTV.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘There’s not going to be a ton, sorry, at least not in the immediate vicinity. None of the cameras on this place are working.’

  ‘Vandalized?’

  ‘Hard to say, could be wear-and-tear. The place has been out of business for twenty years. From the look of it, a lot of them bit the dust then.’

  *

  By the time they made it back to the street, twenty or more members of the public were clustered at the cordon, voices low but excited at this interruption of violence into a Sunday morning. Several filmed on their phones as they stood by the Forensics van to take off their suits and filthy shoe covers. ‘Lovely day for a murder,’ Malia muttered.

  A couple kept filming as they walked to the car so Robin waited until they were round the corner before calling Varan at the station. She asked him to pull up the recent missing-from-homes and dictated the witness appeals for the social media accounts. ‘We need to find out who she is ASAP,’ she said, ‘and make sure her people are told decently. I can’t have them finding out on bloody Twitter.’

  She hung up and they waited for the lights in silence. On the pavement, a man swung a carrier bag like a metronome: tick tock. She imagined a time-bomb, the hand grenade about to fly through the family’s front door. They’d never truly recover.

  ‘You all right?’ Malia asked quietly.

  ‘Me? Fine.’ She looked across. ‘Why?’

  ‘First girl we’ve had since …’

  So she’d noticed. Or – a sudden thought – had Samir rung her, asked her to keep an eye on her? No, paranoid, of course not; he’d never undermine her like that in the eyes of a junior officer. She was asking because she was Malia – perceptive. Astute.