Never Look Back

by Clare Donoghue

  Once Bobby was settled, Lockyer stood in front of him and offered his right hand. His brother lifted it to his face, focusing on the scar that ran from Lockyer’s thumb to his wrist. Five years ago when they had met, it had been the first thing Bobby noticed. The nurses at the home in Manchester told him that Bobby assigned different rituals and indicators to each of the regular nurses and doctors. Something small and seemingly insignificant; a smell or a wedding band or a certain footfall but for Lockyer, Bobby had decided on a scar. That was how he recognized him five years ago and, according to the research Lockyer had done into autism, it was how he always would. He watched Bobby trace the imperfection three times before dropping his hand and picking up the cards in front of him.

  ‘Cards,’ Bobby said.

  Lockyer sat down opposite his brother. ‘That’s right, cards. And I’m telling you, I’m not letting you win this time.’ He thought he saw just the flash of a smile and comprehension on his brother’s face, even though he knew in his heart it wasn’t possible. He picked up his own cards and rubbed his chest with the heel of his hand as the pain of reality subsided.

  7

  24th January – Friday

  Why hadn’t she answered? He needed to hear her voice. Exhaustion had become his constant companion but it seemed to prolong the thrill in a way he couldn’t have imagined.

  He used the steering wheel as leverage, arched his back and stretched his legs out into the footwell. His muscles felt tight, unyielding. He groaned, looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was 8 a.m. He pulled his coat around him and turned up the collar. It had dropped to minus three during the night but just being this close to her seemed to warm his blood. He was dying to tell her, for her to experience it through him. But she was ignoring him. He felt like her puppet: she pulled his strings and he danced to her manipulative tune. It had been months since she had deigned to speak to him. All he had to sustain him were overheard snippets of conversations she had with her neighbours. As he leaned forward to ease the ache in his spine he rubbed his hands together. The joints on his fingers were red and swollen, his knuckles covered in scratches.

  Surrey Road was quiet. The rustle of the ice-covered litter in the gutters and the wind whistling through the branches of the trees kept him company. Most of the Victorian terraces were split into flats. Hers was on the first floor: 10A. From his vantage point, sitting in his car, he could just see into her lounge, when the blinds were open. Her television was mounted on the wall next to the window. If she sat in just the right place he could see a perfect reflected image of her, curled up on a red sofa with a glass of wine and a book. But that hadn’t happened in a while. Now, when she came home, she put down her blinds immediately. He was left with mere glimpses: her shadow behind a veil of maroon silk.

  He pushed away his frustration, closed his eyes and imagined walking her home after one of her photo shoots, cooking for her and then sitting on her raggedy old sofa, just the two of them. Her long blonde hair would be pulled over one shoulder and she would be wearing her leggings, slippers and hooded jumper. She would probably rest her legs in his lap as she read. His trousers tightened around his crotch as his interest grew. He could almost feel her hands on him. The sound of a bicycle bell brought him back to the car and out of his fantasy. The warmth of her touch vanished.

  She had known the effect she had on him the moment they met, all those months ago. It had been obvious. He had seen it in her eyes as she licked her lips when she talked to him, blowing on her coffee, her perfect lips pursed, as if waiting for a kiss. She was different from the others. As the cyclist disappeared around the corner, lights began to come on in some of the flats. Their warm glow bathed the dark street in little pools of gold. Her lights had been on all night. He knew she was home because he had watched her walk up the street yesterday evening, unlock her front door (she had two Chubb locks now) and go inside. So why was she ignoring his calls? ‘Selfish . . . bitch,’ he whispered, his breath fogging the window. He opened it a bit further so he had an uninterrupted view.

  As his anger subsided, cooled by an icy breeze, he heard a shout. His heart raced. Had it come from her flat? It was impossible to tell. He waited, straining his ears for another sound. He looked around at the deserted street. Nothing about it had changed but something felt different. Something was wrong. Condensation dripped down the windscreen. All his tiredness was gone. His eyes were fixed on her front door. ‘Please,’ he said, touching his cold hands to his hot face. He looked at the clock. It was almost 8.30. If she had a photo shoot she would leave her flat at 9 a.m. It wasn’t fair; leaving him to sit here unacknowledged was cruel.

  He watched as No. 12 drew back their curtains and No. 8 pulled up his blinds. Almost every flat showed signs of life now, except hers. The bald guy from No. 9 left his house at 8.45 a.m. He was wrapped up in a coat and scarf but had shiny brogues on his feet. He wouldn’t make it to the station without slipping, that was for sure. As No. 9 slammed his front door half a dozen other doors seemed to open in sync.

  As he opened his car door, a thin film of ice in the jamb cracked and broke. He paced up and down the pavement, hugging himself until a slamming sound made him turn. There she was. His anxiety, his anger, his weariness, they all disappeared. She was wearing her blue jeans and a black jacket he didn’t recognize. She didn’t have a scarf on or even any gloves. The coat was too big for her slim frame. She had lost weight. He was so relieved by her sudden appearance that he didn’t move. He stood on the pavement not more than three houses away from her, staring. Without making a sound he stepped behind a white van parked at the side of the road and watched her lock her flat and walk to her car. It wouldn’t do to startle her. She held up a delicate hand and clicked her keys. He noticed that she was muttering under her breath and her hands seemed to be shaking. The indicators flashed on her silver Golf as she pulled open the door and climbed in.

  The sound of her engine starting dragged him from his stupor. He crossed the road. It was so hard not to look at her as he ran to his car. Once he was in he fumbled to get the key into the ignition. The engine faltered for a second before rumbling into life. He had parked facing Peckham Rye, as she had, so all he had to do was wait for her to pull away before following, a safe distance behind. It was a test of skill to follow her by car. She drove fast and rarely obeyed the traffic laws. Before they had even reached the lights at the edge of Peckham Rye she was four cars in front. He craned his neck to keep the back of the Golf in sight but he was having trouble keeping up with her as she swerved from one lane to another. His car groaned and wheezed as he pushed it harder and harder to keep pace. In Forest Hill she ran a red light, but the roadworks outside Catford Station forced her to slow down and he was able to weave in and out of the traffic until he was two cars behind her. He ignored the shouts of protest from angry commuters.

  As they entered Lewisham and hit yet more roadworks he let himself relax, just enough to think about where she was going. She hadn’t been lugging her camera equipment when she had left her flat earlier. Her friend Toni, the rotund Italian, lived in Honor Oak, so she wasn’t late for a coffee date. Two cars pulled off on a side street leaving just one car between them. The temporary traffic lights outside Lewisham Police Station changed and she accelerated and then swung her car, without indicating, across the road. She was blocking the traffic, causing chaos. Once her car was wedged into a space, the traffic began to move again. He was so busy watching her that he almost rear-ended the car in front. He dragged his eyes back to the road and kept going. He looked over his shoulder as he drove past. Sweat prickled in the hairs on the back of his neck. He needed to find somewhere to park. If he hadn’t been right outside the police station he would have just mounted the kerb and left his car to its own fate. The bright yellow and orange of the Shell garage sign caught his eye. He indicated and pulled into one of the parking bays. He jumped out of the car and ran but by the time he reached her car she had disappeared. He scanned the street but couldn’t see her
.

  The police station car park was on his left, teeming with people. Uniformed officers punctuated a meandering group of men and women as they drifted in and out of the station’s electric double doors. Then he saw her. She was sat on a long red-brick wall that ran down from the entrance. She had her hands tucked in between her knees, head down, her hair covering her face. She was rocking back and forth. He stared at her, willing her to look up, to face him. He wrapped his fingers around the bars of the fence, his knuckles white, but when she finally raised her head he loosened his grip on the cold metal. He saw her wipe away a tear from her cheek. He wanted to kill whoever was responsible for the agony he could see on her face.

  8

  24 January – Friday

  Lockyer sat back in his chair and stared at Debbie’s file, relaxing his eyes until the words blurred on the scattered pages. He had been stuck in his office, reading and re-reading the post-mortem report, since 7.30 this morning. He pushed the section containing the photographic record of the procedure further to the back of the file. There wasn’t one part of his brain that needed to see those images again. The first-hand experience had been enough.

  He let his head hang forward and closed his eyes. Despite speaking to Megan and seeing her for a takeaway last night, he still felt odd, shaky. The smallest, seemingly inconsequential details about Debbie’s case kept catching him off guard, liquefying his stomach, sending him running to the men’s room. It didn’t make sense. Her resemblance to his daughter was understandably unsettling but it hardly warranted this intense physical reaction. The only time he could remember feeling this emotionally drained and tense was when Megan was born. He had spent the first month of her life in a state of perpetual panic. The slightest thing had him convinced he was going to lose her. Even the memory made the muscles in his neck knot. But now, this case, this murdered teenager. Why couldn’t he focus? Why couldn’t he control his own body, for God’s sake? He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as bile pooled beneath his tongue.

  It was no good. The more he tried to push Megan out of his thoughts and concentrate on Debbie, the more his daughter’s face appeared in his mind. To top it off, there were no hits for the partial fingerprint or the DNA. That could change but he would have to be patient. And his calls to the organized crime unit hadn’t turned up anything on the drugs. No missing prescriptions or stolen drug batches to chase up. Doors were closing faster than they were opening.

  He picked up the transcripts of Jane’s interviews with Debbie’s family, work colleagues and friends. There was practically nothing to go on. Deborah Stevens had been an ordinary girl with a normal job, living with her mother and stepfather in a nondescript council house on a suburban street in Nunhead. They were separated from the darker, poorer streets of Peckham by Nunhead Cemetery and Dulwich proper – the posh part, by the Rye: a piece of parkland better described as a modest patch of grass. The family had been checked and ruled out, everyone but Debbie’s real father, who hadn’t been located, as yet. Wherever he was, he wasn’t voting and he wasn’t paying tax. Lockyer would have to call in some favours at MPS to see if they couldn’t track Mr Stevens down using the missing persons’ database. Mind you, if the CSA hadn’t found him for child support, Lockyer doubted the MPS would fare much better.

  Debbie had worked for Foster Advertising for six months but none of her colleagues knew her well. In fact few seemed to know what her actual job entailed. Her manager, William Hodgson, spoke highly of her. He said she had been a hard worker; always on time, thorough and cheerful. Lockyer sat forward and looked again at the section on Debbie’s aborted pregnancy. There was no mention in any of the interviews about a man, a boyfriend. Her mother was adamant there was no boyfriend. ‘Debbie wasn’t interested in boys,’ the transcript read. ‘She wanted to make something of herself.’ Jane had told him that the mother’s voice had been brimming with animosity. Not towards Debbie, of course, but towards the killer, the police, anyone she could blame for the death of her daughter. He shook his head and pushed himself away from his desk. He knew there would be no respite for the family. Debbie hadn’t died of natural causes or been killed in some tragic accident. She had been viciously taken from the world. It wasn’t something her family would get over.

  He dropped the interviews back onto the file and pushed it to the edge of his desk, shifting in his chair. His arse was asleep. This office wasn’t designed for him. He was six foot three and could barely get his legs under the curved plywood desk.

  He closed his eyes and pictured the crime scene, images forming behind his eyelids. East Dulwich Road deserted but for some temporary traffic lights, the red light reflected by the patches of ice on the road, the pool of blood, the abandoned Rye, the grass standing to attention in the frost. The alley, narrow and dark, littered with bottles, fag butts and syringes. Her blood, black against the cement. Debbie, lying among the debris.

  ‘I need a break,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. The artificial lights were a killer. Lewisham’s new Metropolitan station, home to the area murder squad and numerous other departments, was ultra-modern, lots of blue-tinted glass, red brick, aluminium and no atmosphere whatsoever. He stood up, pushed his hair off his forehead and walked out of the room. ‘Penny, I’m heading out for five minutes. When Jane arrives tell her I want her in the briefing room at eleven to run through today’s action list on the Stevens case. I want the Atherton and Pearson files too, and I want Chris in there, with the interview transcripts prepped.’

  He was desperate for some air; even the smoggy air of Lewisham High Street would do. Five minutes, some breathing space and a coffee from Bella’s. He was halfway across the car park when he saw Jane walking towards him.

  ‘We might have something, sir,’ she said, her breath clouding in front of her face as it mingled with the freezing January air.

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘The hospital and GP notes didn’t give us much, but I just got off the phone with records and they’ve confirmed that she wasn’t referred for the procedure by her GP. She went through a private clinic.’

  ‘What kind of clinic?’ he asked, turning away from the gates and heading towards his car.

  ‘They provide pregnancy and STD testing, treatment and counselling for young and underage women,’ Jane said, keeping pace beside him. ‘I’ve spoken to the manager, he’s expecting us.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘We’ll take your car; my keys are upstairs.’ He changed direction and headed towards Jane’s Volvo.

  As soon as they were out of the station car park, weaving in and out of the Friday mid-morning traffic, Lockyer noticed the silence. He turned and looked at Jane’s profile as she honked the horn and swerved to avoid two buses whose drivers had decided to stop for a chat. Was she paler than normal? As if he would know. God, he hoped she wasn’t about to go off sick.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked. She didn’t reply; her eyes were still focused on the road ahead, but he could have sworn he saw her flinch when he spoke. ‘Jane, did you hear me?’ he said, hoping his impatience wasn’t too obvious.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, without turning to look at him. Her voice was hard but her cheeks were now flushed with colour. ‘It’s nothing, just the case and . . . home, you know.’

  ‘Peter?’ he said, his irritation vanishing.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m fine, really,’ she said, turning to face him, displaying her most reassuring smile before returning her focus to the traffic surrounding them.

  He should have known it was Peter. Jane’s son was the only part of her personal life that ever encroached on her work, and even then the instances were few and far between. She rarely talked about her home life. Lockyer had been to her little flat in Blackheath once, maybe twice, but that was it. As far as he knew, Jane’s mother took care of Peter when Jane was at work. He went to school during the day but had extra help because of his autism, although Lockyer didn’t know what the ‘extra help’ really entailed. He had never asked. F
ew people in the office knew what Jane’s life was really like when she clocked off. What Lockyer did know about her past, he had gleaned from snippets of conversation over the years: her one-time boyfriend had buggered off when she was eight months pregnant. Jane had once told him that she felt like a stranger in her son’s life because of his condition. Of course, that would have been the perfect opportunity for Lockyer to empathize, to let her talk about Peter, to tell her about Bobby, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t seem to find the words then, or now.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Jane said, swinging the car into a narrow lane running between two terraces.

  ‘It’s down here?’ he asked, looking around at the high walls enclosing the back gardens of the houses.

  At the end of the lane there was a newly tarmacked car park with a dozen spaces marked out by fresh white paint. The clinic sat at the back, a single-storey red-brick building with a gabled roof. Four gold letters hung over the door: LYWC. Underneath them was a smaller sign that read, ‘Lewisham Young Women’s Centre’.

  ‘This is the place,’ she said, pulling into one of the spaces.

  ‘Not too busy for a Friday morning, is it?’ he said, looking around him at the empty car park. He opened his door, got out and straightened his jacket.