Come and Find Me (DI Marnie Rome Book 5)

by Sarah Hilary

  Anita lifted a hand to switch off the lights in the room. She hadn’t mentioned a solicitor, for her son or herself. It was as if she’d been expecting this, even preparing for it. The empty waiting room, the black dress. As if she were already in mourning.

  On the path outside the house, a white cat brought Marnie to a standstill. Half-feral, the cat’s eyes were pink as a rat’s, its spine arching as it hissed and spat.

  ‘He looks friendly,’ Noah said.

  ‘She’s scared.’ Marnie stayed still as the cat slunk past, disappearing up the side of the house.

  Noah brushed a spot of pollen from his cuff. ‘The way Darren caught himself when he mentioned his mum’s allotment? I think we need to take a good look there.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Marnie agreed. ‘With back-up, for preference.’

  In the event that Darren had done more than burn letters and photographs. In the event he’d taken food and money from his mother’s house on the night of the prison riot and brought it to the place where his hero was hiding, waiting for the right moment to make his next move.

  21

  My lucky nurse isn’t working today. They’ve given me an African who moves around my bed like a bin man, hauling at the dirty sheets, hauling at me. A bitter stink rises and I gag as I realise I’m smelling myself. I want to be clean, to be washed clean. My hands are sticky, disgusting. Why isn’t she here, sponging my feet and fingers? That’s what she does, it’s her job, and I need to be clean.

  The machine echoes at my side. I’m sunk in self-pity, remembering how it was when I was with the person who loved me most in the world, tucking me into bed when I was tiny, teaching me the difference between leaf mould and compost. Mum could be difficult. Well, mums are, aren’t they? You only have to think of all that fierceness – pride and pain and fear and sacrifice – from the moment they give birth until the day one of you dies. ‘Nothing but worry,’ she used to say about me, even when things were going right. There’s joy, of course, but resentment too. And grieving, so much grieving for each small stage we pass through, ‘No longer my baby, no longer my little man, all grown up now,’ and that’s not counting the times life shakes the order of it into pieces, turns it all inside out, the way it did with Mickey and his mum, the way it did with Mickey and me.

  All those long nights I spent staring at the ceiling, afraid he’d wake and it would start over. The awful noise of him, the wreck of our unspoken war.

  These nights are the worst, his scorched-earth smell, the hiss and flicker of the light under the door. The cell’s dark ruined by the glare and beam from the metal cabinets and toilet, the sink.

  Worse, the sudden whites of his eyes as he wakes.

  I stiffen as the sound of him starts up. Groaning, sobbing, shouting. He shouts even after they told him to stop. He doesn’t know how to stop, because he doesn’t know he’s doing it. When he’s like this, he can shriek all night.

  I used to think, ‘This is what it’s like to be a new mother.’

  The noise pushes at my spine and the lids of my eyes, at my armpits and groin. I jump under the impact, each flinch involuntary, pulled like a burr from beneath my skin. My eyes start to stream, my ears scrambling distress signals to my brain – Feed him! Feed him! Make him stop! – he has my whole body under siege.

  Just as suddenly he is quiet. Flopping down in the bunk, making wet movements with his mouth, wincing as if rawness is a wound that reaches all the way into his lungs. He’s yelled himself hoarse, and it hurts.

  Hush, I think. Hush. I’m limp with gratitude. Hush. Hush.

  It’s quiet now, we could hear a pin drop. We’re holding our breath, me and Mickey. His heartbeat’s so close it stumbles up into my chest and patters there. If I look down, I’ll see him smiling. Asleep and smiling, like green grass pushing through the parched grey of pavement.

  Silence is a golden field, a rippling sea of corn bending in a fresh breeze, soaking up the clean sun. I can breathe, I can breathe, I can breathe—

  I am the pin we hear dropping, the first leaf from the tree, turning over and over in fretful, ecstatic freefall.

  22

  Larchfield allotment wasn’t large, but it backed onto dense woodland lying in a long knot beyond the straight lines of soil and sheds, tight with trees that shut out light and sound. Perfect cover for anyone wanting to arrive unnoticed after dark.

  Marnie and Noah hung back for the armed response unit to complete its sweep. Anita’s shed was one of a collection of old Anderson shelters with corrugated iron roofs, wooden doors painted in contrasting shades of blue. The allotment, like the woodland behind it and the golf course beyond that, was privately owned. Full of pretty wooden boxes for growing herbs, benches fashioned from painted pallets, shallow fire pits decorated with attractive pebble sculptures. Noah had expected vegetable plots, maybe the odd poly tunnel, but this was gardening as a delightful hobby rather than a hard necessity. A sharp breeze stabbed the small of his back as he waited with Marnie for the ARU to confirm whether Michael Vokey was inside Anita Quayle’s Anderson shelter. Police dogs were in the woods with their handlers, the allotment sealed off for the search. At intervals, sound escaped from the tangle of trees, a throb of birdsong, the beat of boots. A group of bystanders had taken up posts across the street, watching the ARU close in on the shelters.

  Marnie said, ‘If he’s here then was it Lara who attacked Alyson?’

  Noah studied her profile. It was unlike her to speculate at this stage of an investigation, as they were poised for a discovery. Vokey was in the shed, or he wasn’t. Either way, it was significant.

  ‘We’ve been asking why they needed him,’ Marnie said. ‘Ruth and Lara. Darren. Why they needed a man like that in their lives. But why did he need them? What was he obsessed with?’

  Sunlight shone from the roofs of the houses, making the cars glitter. Noah could smell bitumen and the clean cotton of Marnie’s shirt. ‘Perhaps it’s as simple as this.’ He nodded in the direction of the shelter. ‘He was using them, looking for a way out.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She sounded unconvinced.

  The woods stood silent, no barking from the dogs. A breeze bent the tops of the trees as if folding them shut, sealing the wood with silence, keeping its secrets. The dogs would pick up Vokey’s scent if he was in there. The allotment reeked of creosote and compost, kelp and iron.

  ‘She asked me to take him away.’ Marnie shivered. ‘Anita. She didn’t want him in the house. She’s scared of him, of her own son.’

  ‘I can understand why she would be. The way he speaks about Vokey, the hero worship. That’s unhealthy.’ Noah turned up the collar of his coat. ‘That sitting room, its emptiness. The whole house felt wrong.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that at the back,’ Marnie said. ‘She took me to a room with roses and books. Her room.’ Her gaze travelled to the woods. ‘It was beautiful.’

  Noah was quiet, standing at her side, thinking of mothers and sons. His own mother, of course, but Marnie’s too. And Stephen Keele’s mother, whose neglect of her son had ultimately led to the murder of Marnie’s parents. ‘It’s going to be hard for her. Even if we don’t find—’

  He broke off as the ARU leader came towards them, lifting a hand to signal the search was over.

  ‘All clear. No one in any of the huts. But we need to widen the cordon.’

  ‘What did you find?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Food and clothing. Someone was living here all right, and recently.’ He glanced to where his team was at work then nodded at Marnie, lowering his voice. ‘And a firearm – nine-millimetre Baikal.’

  The handgun of choice for London’s gangs. Russian, designed for gas cartridges, rebored for bullets. Trident took hundreds of these guns off the streets every year, a drop in the ocean.

  ‘In Quayle’s shed?’ Marnie shielded her eyes to look at the Anderson shelter.

  ‘Concealed, but yes.’

  Converted handguns were found every week in the bedrooms of young men and women
, in the glove boxes of taxis, in handbags and sports holdalls. How often were they recovered from private allotments next to golf clubs where membership cost you a small salary?

  ‘When it’s secure,’ Marnie said, ‘we’d like to send in Forensics.’

  The officer nodded. ‘You’ve got it.’

  ‘How recently was he here?’ Noah asked. ‘Can you tell?’

  ‘The food stinks so I’d say days rather than hours. Fire pit’s been used as a toilet, but not recently. That’s going to be a fun job for someone.’

  ‘As soon as the hut’s secure,’ Marnie said tautly, ‘we need to be in there.’

  ‘We’re sweeping for other weapons, but yep. You’ll be the first to know.’ He headed back to the huts, sun lifting in a yellow haze from the shoulders of his flak jacket.

  The wind changed direction, pulling a red smell of rotting leaves from the allotment.

  Noah said, ‘If Vokey had a gun, why didn’t he take it with him?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s Darren’s gun.’ Marnie tied her hair back, away from her face. ‘His father was in the army, he died when Darren was nine. Anita implied an infatuation with danger, and father figures. Infatuation aside, if I were aiding and abetting a dangerous criminal I’d like to be armed.’

  ‘Or there’s another weapon, a worse one. And Vokey’s taken that.’

  ‘He didn’t need a weapon in Cloverton. Look what he did without one.’

  ‘He likes to get his hands dirty,’ Noah conceded. ‘God, what a mess.’

  ‘It’s worse than we thought.’ Marnie nodded. ‘But Darren will have to talk now. We can charge him, even if we don’t find Vokey’s DNA in here.’ She reached for her phone. ‘Let’s update the team that’s watching Julie. And we need eyes on Ruth and Lara, and Alyson.’

  She looked across the allotment to where the trees were bending their branches over the corrugated iron shelters. ‘DS Joe Coen needs to know that Michael Vokey might be armed and even more dangerous than we thought.’

  23

  My lucky nurse is back. She’s giving me a shot, but it’s not working. I want to scream at her to get it right. It’s not human what they’re putting me through. I’m like that kid in Leeds, slowly strangling, my face setting solid and black. I want it to be over. If this is my life then I want my quick, painless death. Dazza was always boasting about how he could lay his hands on a gun. If I’d been shot I wouldn’t be shackled to this bed with everything turning inside out, leaking, stalling, belching blood. She barely speaks to me now, my nurse. She’s sick of cleaning up after me. This morning she was interrupted halfway through washing my right hand and she left it, just left it and walked away. I’m a thing to her now, an endless inconvenience. I wish I’d been shot dead.

  Guns get smuggled into prisons, that can hardly come as a shock. But only idiots go down that route. Aidan Duffy wouldn’t touch it. He can get you all the fancy stuff you want, but guns aren’t fancy. They’re foul, and stupid. No one in his right mind would want anything to do with a weapon like that. Who wants to be found with a handgun? You can’t exactly flush it away when you’re finished. You’re stuck with it and good luck when they come for spot checks, like trying to hide a cactus up your arse, to borrow a phrase from Tommy Walton. No one in his right mind touches a gun inside. Some of the younger lads might talk about it, making believe they’re better off armed, afraid of what they call ‘lacking’ on the street, as if owning a gun makes you safe, as if no one ever shot himself by accident or regretted reaching for a trigger when a fist would’ve done the job.

  The boy in Leeds who hanged himself, he was done for carrying a gun. Had it for protection, he said, because he was scared of gangs. Well, who isn’t? He was afraid for his family, that’s the story his defence spun, his mum and brother, and it may even have been the truth – who knows? Given how seriously he took his rehabilitation, until Mickey got to work. The batteries were nothing, I got off lightly. That kid was scared and depressed and Mickey toyed with him, seeing how far he could push it. With Mickey, everything’s seeing how far he can push you, what new shapes he can make. He helped the kid knot the sheet into a rope but he was surprised all the same, when he woke to find his new puppet hanging by his neck a few feet away.

  ‘It was a game.’ That was the closest he came to a confession. ‘Yeah, we made a rope together but it was a game. I dared him to do it because I knew he wouldn’t. He was always talking about when he got out. I thought he was safe.’ He thought he could play, that’s what he meant, he thought he could play his game with the kid.

  When he first told me about the hanging, he drew picture after picture. The boy’s feet, his fists, the crooked angle of his head. Every picture ended up screwed into a ball, chucked at the bin. He’s like a child who accidentally creates art when he’s messing about, squashing paints in a folded sheet of paper to make butterflies. There’s no thought behind what he does. It’s not art, it’s mindless.

  ‘Look at Julie.’ Boasting of all the things he could have done, and would have done, if he’d had more time. ‘That was a good game.’

  He didn’t rape her, or break her. He wanted her attention, that’s all. Then when he got it he didn’t know what to do. Same story with me. He pushed me around because that’s what you do in places like Cloverton, mark your territory, lay out your battle lines. He likes to flex his muscle, but all he really wants to do is draw. That picture after the batteries— If he could’ve made me cry without touching me, he’d have loved that. Touching’s too much like hard work and it doesn’t come naturally to him, whatever Dazza wants to believe.

  ‘There’s no one like him. He’s out of your league, Elms. Out of everyone’s league.’

  I couldn’t persuade him otherwise. Couldn’t make him see that Mickey’s weak, and he’s lazy. He has no patience. You’d think being an artist would have taught him patience, but he’s all about instant gratification, like a little kid. ‘You have to have patience,’ I told Dazza.

  I tried to tell him a story from when I was ten years old and waited hours for this robin I wanted as a pet. It was lonely, just me and Mum in that cottage in the middle of nowhere. I’d seen Mrs Biggs bring down a robin one morning when the sun was long in the trees and the robin couldn’t stop singing, darting about, taking grubs from the beds where the soil was freshly turned. The cat put up her paw and brought him down. I shouted, ‘Hey!’ and she ran but the robin stayed on the ground, his little breast rising and falling in shock. I knelt at the edge of the flower bed and leaned close, ‘You’re okay now, it’s okay.’ His eye flashed black at me like a bead. Mrs Biggs was circling behind us, her tail switching at the grass. ‘You’re okay,’ I reached for the robin, wanting to scoop him into the palm of my hand where I could keep him safe. He stabbed at me with his beak and I dropped him. I didn’t mean to, but I did. In a flash, she had him. Jaw and claws. And that was that. But for a whole morning the following day I sat with a tea towel spread with breadcrumbs, its hem in my frozen fingers, keeping still as a statue waiting for another bird to land. I’d save this one, I thought, keep him safe from that old bitch, Mrs Biggs. The birds didn’t land, of course, they were far too clever and cautious for that. I crouched until cramp got the better of me. But I didn’t give up, not until it started to rain and the birds retreated to the trees.

  Mickey could never have done that. He doesn’t know the meaning of patience, can’t play the long game to save his life. If Dazza hadn’t pitched in when he did, Mickey would be in Cloverton right now. We both would. He’d be drawing, I’d be reading Ruth’s latest letter, looking at Lara’s latest selfie. This was down to Dazza and his stupid strutting, his need to be seen. Boasting about the gun he had, and the hiding places, how he knew all the ways in and out of Cloverton, back and front, making Mickey’s ears prick up.

  This is on you, Dazza. If you hadn’t walked in with your face shining like a choirboy on a bender, none of us would have ended up where we did.

  24

  ‘We’ve
arrested Darren Quayle. Assisting a prisoner, permitting an escape, harbouring an escapee. That’ll do for starters.’ DCS Ferguson folded her arms at the evidence board. ‘We’re looking into what further offences we can chuck at him in the light of what we found in his mum’s garden shed. DI Rome will bring us up to speed.’

  ‘Forensics bagged everything in the shed,’ Marnie told the team. ‘Including samples for DNA testing, so we should know fairly soon whether Vokey was hiding there. We have clothes, food and bodily waste. An inventory’s on the board.’ She paused, needing their full attention. ‘We found pictures of Lara and Ruth. And letters written to Vokey by both women. These are letters we’ve not seen before, so take a good look. And we found a handgun, wrapped in plastic, stashed in a watering can. No ammunition was found in the shed, or the house. The gun’s serial number is in the system. When we processed him here at the station, we found matching firearms residue on Darren Quayle.’

  ‘He has a story to account for that,’ Ron put in. ‘He’d been firing at squirrels in the woods after the bonfire party. He was pissed and things got a bit daft. His words. Duty solicitor’s frothing at the teeth about cross contamination, whether he was in a car used by firearms officers, if the prison has access to weapons which might accidentally have brushed up against his innocent little fingers as he was making sure all of Cloverton’s doors and windows were safely locked tight.’

  The usual objections, in other words. Darren had cleared it all in a single bound by admitting to firing the gun at the party. He was denying it was his gun, however. Not his party, not his bonfire, not his gun. Nothing Darren did was his idea. He joined in, but he didn’t ever initiate.

  ‘DS Jake’s leading on the interview.’ Marnie nodded at Noah. ‘First thing tomorrow morning, since Darren’s solicitor is pleading sickness on the part of his client.’

  ‘Is the little toerag sick?’ Ferguson demanded.