Come and Find Me (DI Marnie Rome Book 5)

by Sarah Hilary

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Ron rubbed at his eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘I looked back at the hospital records.’ Noah scrolled for the info on his phone, showing it to Ron. ‘When they took Ted in on the night of the riot, he was covered in blood, drenched in it. It was up his nose, in his mouth, under his fingernails. Blood, and vitreous fluid.’

  ‘Vitreous. That’s eyes—?’

  Noah nodded. ‘We told ourselves he was trying to help the injured inmates, or maybe the mess was transferred from Vokey when he attacked Ted. But what if it’s simpler than that? Like Darren says. What if it was Ted who blinded those men?’

  They both looked at the photo collage from the corridor at Cloverton, primal arcs of blood and soot wiped onto the walls like a caveman’s first bid at painting. Michael Vokey’s signature, they’d thought, because it was artwork. In the manner of artwork. But was it always only misdirection?

  ‘If this was Elms,’ Ron stepped away from Noah, ‘then we’re fucked. Because he’s not waking up, is he? Not any time soon.’ He banged his hand at the board, leaving it there, his fist on Ted’s face. ‘So in this new scenario Vokey did the world a favour, that’s what we’re saying. In some act of selfless heroism he stopped Elms running amok before he nicked off.’

  ‘Ted being guilty doesn’t exonerate Vokey. Not of what he did to Julie, or Charlie Lamb.’

  ‘Good, let’s get that much straight.’ Ron’s voice frayed. ‘All this does is make everything even more screwed up. We’re chasing our tails while Darren’s laughing it up in the cells. Meanwhile there’s a little girl out there who’s been kidnapped because some God-botherer can’t get her priorities straight, thinks we should be searching for her hero instead of keeping innocent kids safe. It’s insane.’

  ‘It isn’t easy.’ Noah wanted to believe Ruth wouldn’t hurt Natalie, but two days ago he hadn’t thought her capable of kidnap. ‘Let’s hope the boss is right and she’s in West Ealing.’

  ‘Yeah, and that being in a creepy nutter’s house with a grave in the cellar doesn’t send either one of them over the edge.’

  43

  In West Ealing, Marion Vokey’s house was sealed as a crime scene, but Ruth had found a way inside. CCTV and her patchy phone signal confirmed it. Toby and his team were setting up a mobile unit, traffic officers redirecting cars and cordoning off the street. Unlike Noah, Marnie hadn’t been here before, but she remembered his reaction to the room of faces. And Ron’s: Like a punch in the gut. Vokey’s shrine, his obsession writ large. A confession, of sorts, an admission of how little he understood people, what makes us human. He’d set Ruth on this path, primed her so thoroughly Marnie felt it in the street outside the house – the heartbeat of Ruth’s confusion, which had led to this latest havoc. When her phone pulsed, she connected the call. ‘DI Rome.’

  ‘You’re here, then.’ The signal was crystal clear. ‘It took you longer than I expected.’

  Marnie looked for a shadow at one of the windows. Toby joined her, listening to the call, ready to guide her through the negotiation. ‘May I speak with Natalie?’

  ‘She’s busy drawing.’ A sudden flicker of warmth in her voice. ‘Michael would approve.’

  ‘He told you about the house, how much it mattered to him.’ Marnie wanted the woman to talk, fearing silence above all else. She needed to hear Natalie in the background, proof that Julie’s daughter was safe. ‘Did he tell you where to find the key his mum hid at the back?’

  ‘You took his photos,’ Ruth accused. ‘And his drawings. I was supposed to deal with those.’

  ‘Deal with them how?’

  ‘Bury them, so he can start over. A fresh start, that’s what you’re meant to do when you get out of prison. He asked me to help. This was to be our fresh start, right here.’

  ‘He asked you to bury his drawings and photographs. Where?’

  ‘Here. In the house.’

  A flash of memory from the earlier interview: polished calluses on Ruth’s thumbs from manual labour. ‘You dug the pit in the cellar?’

  ‘It’s not trespass if you have the home owner’s permission.’ Ruth was trying for her old piety, but she was struggling. For the first time it sounded as if she was struggling. ‘He wanted my help. I’m all he has, the only one who isn’t hunting him. The only one helping.’

  ‘When did he ask you to do this?’

  ‘In his last letter, before the riot. Before he was forced to run.’

  ‘Michael wrote and asked you to come here, to dig a pit in his cellar and bury his artwork.’

  ‘Yes. It was symbolic, a fresh start, freeing—!’

  From the little she understood of the man, Marnie found it hard to believe Michael Vokey would have asked anyone to destroy his artwork. The care he’d taken to pin the Polaroids in place, each image trimmed to the same size, each pin driven into the wall so precisely. All so a stranger could undo it, destroy it? Michael hadn’t written that letter, so who had? And what else had they instructed Ruth to do?

  ‘Do you have his letter, asking you to come here?’

  ‘I destroyed it.’ Primly. ‘At his request.’

  Marnie glanced at Toby, who nodded at her to continue. ‘Was it handwritten, or typed?’

  A short silence, the sound of Ruth moving inside the house. ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘It matters because we’re aware of other letters Michael is supposed to have written, but which we believe to be forgeries.’

  Ruth laughed. ‘This is your strategy for negotiation, is it? Divide and conquer? You’re forgetting that I know Michael. I know his art, and his words.’

  She would never believe in the forgeries, not even if Marnie sat her down with a dozen experts who could explain in detail why the letters she’d received weren’t written by the man she imagined herself to be saving. ‘May I speak with Natalie?’

  ‘I told you, she’s busy. May I speak, with Michael?’

  ‘The last time we spoke, before the signal died, you were asking us to pray for him—’

  Her laughter slid into a sob. ‘I wasn’t asking you to pray. I was telling you that’s what he is. You’re treating him like the hunter, but he’s the prey.’

  A sudden darkness at the upstairs window made Marnie and Toby look in that direction.

  Ruth was standing in the bedroom which had belonged to Michael Vokey, her hand on the grimy pane, her face haggard from loss. ‘He’s the prey.’

  44

  My lovely nurse is washing me the way she did that first day, sponging away the blood, soaking each of my fingers in turn to clean the gore from under my nails. There’s a lot of gore in a human head.

  Of course Mickey never showed any interest in the allotment, only I did that. I knew where it was and which way it faced, the type of soil Dazza’s mum was growing her lilies in, the size of the plot, location of the shed. I knew about the fire pit and how the woods crowded in behind, miles of them. Hundreds of trees, thousands of dead leaves on top of soft black soil.

  Mickey thought he was shaping me, the way he shaped that boy in Leeds. Charlie Lamb, who hanged himself rather than live through another hour of Mickey’s moaning, his baiting, his night terrors. He imagined I was the same as Charlie, that he could twist me into any shape he pleased, but I was the one with the scissors. I’m the one who knows how stunted things grow.

  My nurse dries my hands one after the other, leaning over me with her crucifix hanging. She never looks into my eyes now, even though I know so much. I know how fragile the human head is, its points of entry and the way it feels inside, so soft and slippery, hot. Two thumbs, is all it takes. She’s being very careful with me, pressing the water from my hands with a towel, staying close. I smell her peachy shampoo, round and pink. The light’s in her hair, all tangled up in there, teasing out her colours. What was that line of Ruth’s—?

  ‘Your edges are in the clefs and empty eyes of notes. I have searched, and found you there.’

  You thought she was capable of writing those letter
s? You thought Mickey was? Oh, he had a talent, that’s true. He could draw, and he could punch. Empty you out, and fill you with his chaos. But he couldn’t write a letter to save his life. I wrote the letters, didn’t I tell you as much? He made me read their letters out loud and he made me write back to them, as him.

  ‘Get her to send me a photo of her tits.’ Lying in my bunk, dictating like a cut-price romantic novelist with braided hair and stained teeth. ‘Make her want to send me more photos.’

  And so I did. I wrote, ‘Dear Lara, I dreamt of you last night and it woke me. I went to the window to watch the moon, but it wasn’t there. Windows lie. Only pictures tell the truth. In my picture, you’re paler than the moon, and so much smoother. I dreamt your scent, like hot sand.’

  I wrote, ‘Dear Ruth, I dreamt of you last night and it helped me sleep. I have such trouble sleeping. Sometimes I lie awake all night, afraid of what will happen. There’s no peace here and I want to make my peace. There’s peace in you, I feel it. Like cool sand on a winter’s beach.’

  You think Mickey composed those letters? He couldn’t even hold a pen properly. It was what he wanted, I was doing what he wanted, at the beginning. And it kept the peace. You don’t know how important that is until you’ve tried to survive in a place like Cloverton. Later on, ‘Come and find me,’ that was different. That was for me. He knew their handwriting by then. I’m many things, but I am not a forger. Dazza typed the letters, asked friends to post them. He’d seen Mickey on bad days, dreaded seeing him like that as much as I did. He was all for my plan with the letters, happy to take everything home, keep it safe. He loved being part of it, got a buzz from breaking the rules. I hope he kept it all safely in a single place. I hope the police found it all – the batteries and sketchpad, forged letters and photographs – everything they needed to make a case against Mickey, and Dazza. Because they deserve that, they deserve one another.

  I suppose you could say I gave him a hiding place. Me, Edward Elms, I did that, and I deserve to suffer for it. The women he wanted, the ones he hurt, I was never enough. I was Julie, Lara, Ruth, all of them. I tried to be enough, but I wasn’t. Nothing was ever enough for him.

  He was scared, by the end of it. Most people in prison are scared, sooner or later. He had to run, of course he did. He wasn’t to know he was running in the wrong direction. He thought he’d make it back to his house, or to his sister’s house. As if the police didn’t know where to look, as if he had any secrets left. Mickey was all about pictures, but I brought him down with words. Letters to send the police in circles, and to burn down his hiding places. The police won’t ever see Ruth’s last letter, the one I destroyed while Mickey was sleeping, tore it into tiny bits and ate it. Easy, after the batteries. Ruth ought to have known better than to write a letter like that, but I expect she thought she’d disguised it all nicely. It’s not as if she wrote: ‘I dug a grave in your mum’s cellar just as you suggested.’ She thought she was burying his past, paving the way for a fresh start. She didn’t know she was digging him deeper into a pit of my making. I wanted to be sure the police knew what they were dealing with. You’d think his artwork would be enough, but the last time I looked no one was being sent to prison for putting up photos in his dead mum’s sitting room. I wonder if they figured it out, the detectives. DI Rome, maybe. Stephen’s sister, she looks like a sharp one.

  Mickey wasn’t hiding. He was hidden.

  He didn’t escape from here. He ran from me.

  You can twist people into any shape you want. All I did was trim the size of his neuroses, turn him towards the light, let him grow. He had Dazza to do his dirty work, his bidding. He thought he had me in the same way. ‘That’s mine. I’ll take that. And that.’ Like a toddler with fat fists. He was angry, that’s what everyone said, but they didn’t put two and two together. Anger comes from fear. Anyone who’s ever cornered a cat knows that. They saw the anger in Mickey, but they didn’t see the fear. None of them got close enough, except me. Sleeping three feet above a man, you get to learn his smell and Mickey reeked of fear.

  So yes, I took him, the blank page of him, and I reshaped it. He was hollow inside, like a tree that looks alive but isn’t, eaten away by rot. I hollowed him out and then I topped him up. It was just our little game, to start with. He filled Lara with lust, Ruth with the promise of his reform. And he filled me with batteries. He stole my bunk and my wall, forced those Triple As between my teeth, into my stomach. Do you think I should have taken it lying down? You don’t know much about prisons, if that’s what you think. Survival of the fittest. Ruth and Lara were empty, just like Mickey. Not Julie, though. It’s why she was never afraid of him, not in the same way. Ruth and Lara were houses of sticks and hay, wanting him to blow them away. But Julie was bricks, built to last. She deserved to see him punished. Dazza was empty, but he had his mum, nothing like a controlling parent to plug a gap. Vokey was Dazza’s bid for freedom. He thought he could swap his mum for Mickey, but he hadn’t counted on the reason Mickey can see who’s empty and who isn’t. He sees it in you because it lives in him, the same black ruin in his blood. It’s in DI Rome too, this emptiness, but she’s filled it with something hard and hot. Hate, or anger, or love. Not love like Lara and Mickey, and not love like Ruth and her church. Love like water boiling downhill, or smoothing out to sea. Vast and fast and nothing you can do about it but stand and stare. Mickey never knew love like that, never felt its ruin boiling in his blood. He couldn’t escape it, all the same. You can’t alter the way a person’s blood flows, but you can redirect it. You can build banks, dig trenches, set traps with logs and leaves. Write letters, pretend to be other people, whatever it takes to restore order, put him back in his place. He was out of control, like ivy, like bindweed, choking everything. He needed cutting back. Anyone asks, it was self-preservation.

  Kill or be killed. Fill, or be filled.

  He woke up to it too late, groping under the smoke for a weapon and finding me with my thumbs buried deep in Tommy Walton’s face because I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t. You can’t switch it off, a thing like that, not without a struggle. Except Mickey did. He got his hands on something, maybe just his hands, and he hit me until I stopped. Until I ended up in here, wired to the machines with nothing but their restive buzz-buzz-buzzing to tell me I’m not dead.

  45

  The sitting room, stripped of its Polaroid cladding, echoed with the sound of pencil rubbing at paper. Natalie lay on her stomach on the floor, drawing on the back of an envelope, her small face scrunched in concentration.

  ‘Hello, Natalie. I’m Detective Inspector Rome. I came to see your mum, do you remember?’

  No response. Forensic powder had put stains all over Natalie’s clothes. Marnie felt a throb of anger at Ruth for bringing the child here. The house reeked of white chemicals and black damp.

  ‘May I see your picture?’ She crouched, careful not to crowd the little girl.

  Natalie scratched with the pencil at the page. ‘Is my mum dead?’ It came out as a whisper, flat.

  ‘No.’ Pain cramped Marnie’s side at the thought of her fearing the worst, trying to make sense of why she’d been taken from her home and brought to this empty, echoing place. ‘No, she’s safe and she’s well. She’s waiting to give you a big hug.’

  Natalie pressed the pencil at the page until its lead snapped. Her small body stiffened, fingers fisted around the ruined pencil. She moved her mouth, but no words came.

  Marnie touched a hand very lightly to her head. ‘Your mum’s safe, and you’re safe. I’m going to take you to see her. Is that okay?’

  Natalie nodded, reaching to pull herself into Marnie’s arms, burying her face in Marnie’s shoulder. The weight and warmth of her was so sudden and solid, Marnie stayed crouched a moment longer before she pushed upright, holding Natalie in the curl of her arms, one hand on the back of the little girl’s head, cradling it. She grew heavier as Marnie carried her out of the house, the tension dropping away to leave her limbs slack, hea
d nodding towards sleep.

  Paramedics were waiting to check her over but Natalie clung to Marnie, whimpering a little as they tried to free her grip.

  ‘You’re needed in the house, Ma’am.’

  Marnie nodded. ‘Give me a minute?’

  Natalie’s skin was damp and sticky, smelling of raspberries and clean sweat. Marnie kept her arms cradled around the girl. The heat of Natalie’s cheek against hers was a mnemonic, flooding her mouth with the taste of metal links, green grass, her parents’ garden. The swing her father built for Stephen. He’d weighed less than Natalie, a skinny eight-year-old, not yet used to eating well.

  ‘Here.’ She handed the sleeping child to a paramedic, watching the woman settle Natalie under a blanket. ‘Be gentle with her.’

  ‘DI Rome?’ One of Toby’s team, reminding her that this wasn’t over.

  Marnie stood and faced the house. An ordinary terrace, just a little neglected, paint peeling from its window frames and door. Hollow inside, gutted of its furniture. She didn’t want to go back in there. She wanted to stay out here in the fresh air, or what passed for it. London’s traffic swelled around her like a sea, its rhythm familiar, comforting. She took shallow breaths to steady the panic in her chest, recalling all the times she’d gone into dangerous places, far worse than this, rushing in to save someone. But Natalie was out, safe. There was only Ruth waiting in the cellar by the side of the grave she’d dug, believing it to be what her hero wanted. She had nothing to give Ruth that would make this better. Her head flared gently with pain.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  She went with Toby’s man up the short path to the front door with its paint crazed by rain and sun. Dust lay trapped in a straight line along the uncarpeted hallway, tangled by dirt and leaves. The sound of their footsteps stayed on the surface of the hardwood floor, having nowhere to go. All the sound in the house was the same, trapped on the surface.

  The door that led under the stairs, down into the cellar, was varnished by fingerprints. She thought fleetingly of the cupboard at Harry’s mother’s house, packed full of gifts purchased and then forgotten. The door murmured on its hinges.