by Sarah Hilary
‘He’s running a fever,’ Noah said. ‘The duty doctor wants a chest X-ray because he’s had lung infections in the past. And he’s stuffed full of medication so we need time for him to sober up.’
‘DS Tanner, DS Carling, I’d like you to go through the inventory from the shed.’ Marnie nodded at the board. ‘We have jumpers, T-shirts, a pair of trainers, and food which Anita should be able to identify as having been taken from her house. Let’s tick those off the list quickly. We have personal items, in particular a notebook with names of inmates Darren may have been blackmailing, but also batteries, a book of artwork and drawings of the cell Vokey shared with Ted Elms. And this.’
She extracted a sheet from her file and pinned it to the board. ‘Vokey’s work, we think.’
It was the sketch of a man’s face, so furious it looked as if his skin might split open. A black scar for his mouth, lips drawn back so hard you saw the outline of his teeth. Nostrils flared, eyes spitting rage, every individual eyelash quivering with it.
‘We think it’s Edward Elms.’ Marnie pinned a mugshot alongside the sketch.
In the mugshot, Elms was unsmiling but not unfriendly. A fair-haired, blue-eyed man in his fifties with a high forehead, his expression benign, nothing like the man in the sketch. Only the depth of his forehead and the bluntness of his chin gave it away. At some point between being convicted of benefit fraud and becoming Michael Vokey’s cellmate, something had happened to change Edward Elms, and not for the better.
‘That’s what shacking up with Vokey does to you.’ Ron shook his head. ‘Poor bastard.’
‘Where did Darren get his hands on the gun?’ Lorna Ferguson wanted to know. ‘I think I’m right in saying Aidan Duffy is everyone’s spiv of choice in Cloverton. Is his name in Darren’s book?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Marnie nodded. ‘We need to re-interview Aidan, and several others at the prison. If Darren assisted in this escape then it seems unlikely he was acting alone.’
‘He was home on the night of the riot, wasn’t he?’ Ron frowned at the board. ‘Then he gets called in to the prison. That’s how his story goes. He kits up and wades in, finding all the mess Vokey made. That’s before they know for certain Vokey’s escaped.’
‘The fire kept them busy for a long time,’ Debbie agreed. ‘And the smoke. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that Vokey was gone over an hour before anyone realised it.’
Ferguson made a sound of derision. ‘And yet somehow it’s our fault he’s out there.’
‘We need to work the timeline,’ Noah said. ‘When did the fire start? When did the CCTV stop working in relation to Darren’s presence on site?’
‘Before or after the eyeballs began piling up in the corridor?’ Ron snorted.
Marnie glanced his way. ‘It isn’t easy to feel sympathy for the men assaulted at Cloverton, I understand that. But this wasn’t a victimless crime. None of the men he mutilated deserved it. They had a right to safety and protection, and they didn’t get it.’
‘We need to focus on finding Vokey,’ Ferguson said. ‘Before more people get hurt.’
‘Innocent people,’ Ron put in.
‘Did you not hear what I just said?’ Marnie fixed him with her steadiest stare. ‘DS Carling? Did you not hear me?’
‘Sorry.’ Ron wiped sweat from his neck. ‘I did hear you. Sorry, boss.’
She nodded, returning to the evidence board. ‘These new letters found on the allotment. From Lara and Ruth, and from Michael back to them. We’ll be asking Darren why he had these, whether he took the letters from the prison or if Michael gave them to him for safekeeping. Colin, what’s happening with Lara?’
‘Joe Coen’s on his way over there. He knows about Darren and the Anderson shelter, but he also knows we haven’t located Vokey yet. Oh, and Alyson’s awake. Not fit for questions, but I stressed the need to interview her and Lara as soon as possible.’
‘Let’s do better than that.’ Ferguson dusted her hands brusquely. ‘DI Rome, let’s you and I head up there. Since DS Jake’s got the interview covered here, and given the content of these new letters we’ve found.’ She handed round photocopied pages from the Anderson shelter. ‘DC Tanner, perhaps you’d spare anyone else’s blushes by being the one to read Lara’s latest offering?’
The letter had been typed and printed over two pages.
‘“Come and find me, darling. You know where to look. I’m wearing the red dress you like, no knickers since you asked so nicely.”’ Debbie frowned, but otherwise kept her face and voice neutral. ‘I’m dreaming of it, darling, of pulling you into a bruising kiss, the dry heat of your skin, sucking wet heat of our mouths. We’ll fit together perfectly I know, your body and mine like water finding its place, flowing into an empty hollow.’ She turned the page. ‘The sting of brick’s what I want, cold and unyielding at my cheek. My body heat bleeding away until the blood begins its bumping, thumping me all over, your stare on me like the only steady thing in the world.’
Ron shuffled his feet on the floor. Colin was scarlet under his spectacles.
‘Shall I—?’ Debbie indicated the second page of the letter. ‘That’s probably enough, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, let’s hear it all.’ Ferguson folded her arms, pressing a smile from her lips.
‘I’m clinging to the wall, bricks kissing like teeth, your mouth on my neck keeping me upright, your hand sliding hotly, long fingers teasing like steel under my dress. Anything, darling. Anything you want. I want it too. My cheek pressed to the stubble of the wall, the whole of me moulded in place by the hard heat of your body. If you weren’t here to hold me the breeze would pick me off, turn me inside out, tatter me to shreds.’
Ferguson waited until Debbie put the pages down before she said, ‘I don’t know about you, DI Rome, but I can’t wait to meet Lara Chorley.’ She looked around the room. ‘Chins off the floor, lads. Take a leaf out of DS Jake’s book.’ She nodded at Noah. ‘He’s not moved by any of it.’
‘Not his cup of tea,’ Ron muttered.
‘Tea doesn’t enter into it, DS Carling. Pot Noodle’s the analogy you’re groping for. Porn’s just nasty dried ingredients until you add the hot water. Right.’ She clapped her hands. ‘We’ve a gun fired by a lad who’s getting sweaty with his solicitor and coming down from his Night Nurse high. He’s a fan of our escaped prisoner and everything points to him having given said prisoner a place to hide. Clothes, food, bodily waste. Let’s get the DNA fast-tracked because I want to charge that toerag by teatime tomorrow. He knows where Vokey’s gone and we need to get it out of him. Make sure you all get your beauty sleep tonight because it’s going to be a long shift tomorrow. DI Rome, I’ll see you in the car park in ten minutes.’ She left the room, her heels barking at the floor.
Debbie fed the photocopied letter into the folder on the desk, setting it aside. A phone rang and she moved to answer it. Colin picked up a notebook and started studying the inventory from the allotment. Marnie touched a hand to his elbow. ‘First thing tomorrow, can you take a proper look at the letters? Dates and chronology. Something’s not right. I need your help making sense of it.’
‘Will do, boss.’
‘Who can tell me about the gun?’ Marnie asked the others, keen to refocus their energies after Ferguson’s fun with Lara’s letter.
‘That would be me.’
She turned to find DS Harry Kennedy in the doorway. The sight of him made Noah tense at her side, a muscle playing in his cheek. Expecting news of Sol?
‘DC Pitcher sent me the serial number,’ Harry said, ‘after it threw a flag on the system. It’s a match for a firearm used in a couple of recent robberies. Gang-related, so it landed on my desk.’
‘Come in,’ she told him. ‘Meet the team. This is DS Kennedy from Trident.’
Harry exchanged nods with the rest of the room. He looked good, in a mid-grey suit over a white shirt, no tie. He moved as easily as she remembered, like a swimmer, showing no sign of the knife wound which had nearly kil
led him seven weeks ago. She wondered about his scars, remembering the hot pulse of his blood through her fingers as she’d fought to save him.
‘Any idea how the handgun ended up in Darren’s possession?’ she asked.
‘I wish I could tell you.’ Harry ran a hand over his dark head. ‘I wanted to show my face as I’ve been asked to coordinate from our side. Knowing how hard you’re all looking for Michael Vokey and now this gun’s turned up, I thought I’d pitch in, see if I could help.’
‘Thanks. Noah’s leading on the interview with Darren Quayle.’
Harry nodded at Noah, an apology in his blue eyes. ‘I’m not going to tread on any toes, I promise. I’ve questions for Quayle, but mine can wait.’
‘Easier if we compare notes.’ Noah scratched his cheek, his voice light and friendly. ‘Two sets of awkward questions might shake some answers out of him a bit faster. I’m happy for you to join the interview tomorrow, if DI Rome’s okay with that?’
‘Sounds good.’ Marnie smiled at Noah. ‘Keep me in the loop, but I should be back before you get started.’ She picked up the folder of letters and photos. ‘DS Kennedy, do you have a minute?’
‘Sure.’
Harry went with her down to the car park. Marnie pulled on her coat, freeing the messenger bag at her shoulder. In the stairwell, she said, ‘Sorry to be against the clock. How are you?’
‘I’m good.’ He moved loosely at her side, his shoulders sleek with muscle. ‘What’s up?’
‘You’re in touch with Noah’s brother, Sol Jake.’
He hesitated and she shook her head. ‘I’m not asking for details. I just need you to know how tough this is on Noah. He’s hanging in there, but it isn’t easy.’
‘Of course. I’ll be careful how I handle it.’
‘Thanks.’ Marnie checked her watch. Ten minutes, Ferguson had said. She stopped and faced Harry. ‘And you’re really better?’
‘Any more time off and I’d be on a malingering charge. They signed me back to work, clean bill of health, just battle scars.’ He smiled, seriously. ‘I’m a mess with my shirt off, but I’m good.’
‘I’m glad. It’s good to see you.’
‘You too.’ His blue stare searched her face. ‘You came to the hospital, I think? Everything’s a bit trippy from back then.’
‘I came to the hospital.’ Marnie nodded.
It was strange to stand so close to him with the memory of his blood heating the palms of her hands. She’d been afraid he was dying, bleeding out, no sign of the paramedics. By the time they arrived, she was thirteen floors away, too far to see the struggle to keep him alive. Just the itch of his blood between her fingers and the fear he was dead, that she’d left him to die. That urgency had stayed with her. It had happened so fast, no time to sort her feelings into order, and she hadn’t wanted to let it go, hadn’t wanted the moment to pass unnoticed or unremarked.
‘Good luck.’ Harry held out his hand.
She took it. ‘And you.’ His fingers were lean and cool. ‘I’ll see you when I get back.’
‘I’d like that.’
Her phone was fizzing at her hip: Lorna Ferguson, calling her to heel.
An escaped prisoner to find, an obsessed woman to interview. Letters and photos and sketches telling unpalatable truths about people who couldn’t defend themselves. People like Ted Elms, wired to machinery in the room next to Stephen’s where the ventilator moved his chest in a relentless parody of breathing.
‘Take care, Harry.’
‘You too. Travel safe.’
25
Noah pushed back his chair, rolling his shoulders to work the crick from his neck. He was paying the price for the dead air in the station, his day spent searching the room of photographs. It wouldn’t matter so much if he’d learnt anything worth knowing.
‘Come here,’ Dan said. ‘You look like someone threw you down a flight of stairs.’
‘Not this week.’ He dropped his head forward as Dan’s fingers found the first of the knots in his neck. ‘Okay, that’s— Right there.’
‘You’re a hot mess.’ The heel of Dan’s hand pressed the pain towards the point of Noah’s shoulder, slowly and with care. ‘We need to get you in the pool.’
‘Hmm. Or you could just do this twice a day until the end of time.’ Slow heat was spreading up his spine, promising to dissolve every last ounce of discomfort. ‘Damn, you’re good.’
‘I should be, the amount of time I spend around works of art.’ Dan put his weight into what he was doing, chasing the ache from Noah’s neck. ‘Form and beauty. I know exactly what I’m doing.’
‘Yes, there. God.’ Endorphins made Noah sigh. He pushed back into Dan’s touch, shutting his eyes, letting go of the day’s stress. It was getting harder and harder to do that since Sol’s arrest, like prising his fingers free from a high ledge. ‘Don’t stop.’
‘No chance of that while you’re wound this tight.’ Dan smoothed the last of the pain into submission, working it to the inner edge of Noah’s shoulder blade where it vanished in a warm pulse like a magic trick.
Noah twisted sideways in the chair. ‘We really,’ he pulled Dan’s hands to his mouth, kissing his palms, ‘need to get these insured.’
‘You should hold out for some better reasons to say that.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
After supper, Noah checked in with the custody sergeant at the station who told him Darren’s X-rays were clear and Quayle was sleeping, should be fit for interview in the morning. Noah texted Harry to let him know, resisting the temptation to ask for news of Sol. There was nothing, he knew. Harry had promised he’d be the first to hear if fresh charges were brought against his brother.
While Dan put in an hour’s work on the prisoner art, Noah studied the inventory from the allotment. By the time Dan joined him on the sofa, he was looking through Vokey’s artwork for the sixth time. He’d stapled the photocopied pages into a book the same size and shape as the original: a pocket-sized sketchbook, each image drawn at the right-hand edge so that flicking through the pages conjured a narrative of sorts, disjointed and disturbing.
‘Help me kick the tyres on this?’ He offered the book to Dan, who took it, passing a bottle of Becks in return.
Noah drank the beer, watching Dan flick through the pages, his expression wavering between admiration and repulsion. ‘Shit . . .’
‘Right?’
Dan turned another page, dipping his head at the sketch of a man’s feet suspended, kicking at empty air. ‘Whoever drew these, you have him in custody, right?’
‘We had him in custody.’
‘Shit,’ Dan said again. ‘Wait, this is Michael Vokey?’
He was studying the sketch of a kneeling figure, as intense and fiery as the Break Out painting that Noah had saved to his phone.
‘It’s Vokey, yes.’
Dan held the book more carefully, as if he’d been told it was a living thing. Noah shut his eyes for a second, wishing he hadn’t put the pages into Dan’s hands, wanting to take it back, rewind to the point where they were eating, smiling at one another across the table. He’d polluted their evening with this obsession. Not just Vokey’s. His own. He couldn’t stop looking, searching. He wasn’t even sure he’d be able to stop after they’d found the man.
Vokey’s obsession had a smell and a taste. It had colour and weight and depth, but when you stripped it right down it was a small thing and sour, fretted to nothing by Vokey’s attention. Did he even call it art? If he did then he must think art was what happened up against brick walls in filthy side streets. Art was what rats did, and dogs in heat. Dan was studying the drawing of the bare feet kicking at empty air. HMP Leeds, where Michael Vokey had goaded a young man into suicide. How? What did he say or do to push the other man to that point? There was a high-pitched buzzing in Noah’s skull at the thought of Vokey whispering long into the night, never letting up. Had he whispered to Ted, and to Darren? It added a new, sly dimension to the man they were hu
nting.
Dan turned the page to a sketch of Lara, her face and her hands filled with a sticky pain which Vokey might’ve called lust. He’d seen so much, and cared so little. Lara’s face was a pale moon, her eyes a brown stain. He’d drawn her lying on a bed with a large handprint at the inside of one splayed thigh. All that hunger and humiliation, captured in a dozen lines of charcoal. It made Noah wonder what Marnie was finding at the cottage in Cumbria. Not Vokey himself, or she’d have called it in. But Lara had sent the photos from which Vokey had drawn these images. Noah didn’t see how she could be happy, or well. Was she dangerous, or simply disturbed?
‘No wonder you’re not sleeping.’ Dan turned the pages, his fair hair falling into his eyes until he scooped it away with one hand, the other holding the facsimile sketchpad.
Vokey’s art had no shape. It was the opposite of shape, a series of craters, torturous. The welted paint at the foot of a cell door, a stained shower unit, cacti shaped like weapons. The sketchpad tricked you into staring, searching for clues. Dust clotting the wheels of a hospital gurney. A close-up of Ruth’s face. Lara kneeling. A thing like worms writhing in soil. The hollow spaces in a man’s skull as his face peeled away, the skin reluctant to leave, tongue taken by its root. A puppetry of light lifting from scalpels, leaving a halo of hair around the tattered margin of a scalp.
Noah wanted to shout. Not words, just noise. Life, protesting. The sound Julie would have made if she hadn’t been so afraid for her daughter sleeping upstairs. Vokey’s art wasn’t just ugly, it was brutal, entering his head like a slow shove of steel, hurting his eyes and their sockets, bruising the roof of his mouth. The whole of him ached and felt bloody.
The flicker of the pages was like insects whirring.
The bitten palm of a hand, open. Too small to be Ruth’s. Julie’s perhaps. Laid aside, away from the rest of her body. Coaxing meaning from the images was like trying to grab the form of a pot from a fast-moving wheel of wet clay. It was like untangling a snarl of razor wire.
Noah leaned into Dan’s side and listened, hearing his heartbeat under everything else, such a small sound. Flak-flak-flak as his brain puzzled over his pulse, trying to make sense of what it was hearing in the context of what it was seeing.