by Sarah Hilary
Nausea lodged its dry spike in her sternum.
Stephen shifted his shoulders, watching her. This was better; he’d tipped the scales back in his favour, put her on the defensive, made her afraid. ‘You didn’t know,’ he said, as if he was handing out a consolation prize. ‘They didn’t tell you.’
He was getting better at lying, more cunning, more cruel.
This place had taught him new tricks.
Well, all right. She had some tricks of her own.
‘She’s on your visitor list. Stella. Are you missing her care packages? You need all the chocolate bars and tinned tuna you can get in a place like this. For currency.’
‘Piss off.’
Better.
‘Tell me how you got the information to the kids who stole the shoebox.’
‘Tell me you didn’t know about their truth and fucking reconciliation campaign.’
‘You’re stalling, I get it. You’re not in a hurry to be back in your cell. Scary, isn’t it, prison? Not like that soft-play centre, Sommerville.’
‘They hated you.’ He sat back, enough for the tide of his shadow to retreat. ‘Your mum and dad. They hated you.’
The light struck the table, bruising Marnie’s eyes.
‘You put them through hell. Always running out, getting drunk, kicking off. They fostered me because you were such a disappointment they had to try again, see if they couldn’t get it right second time around.’ Snaking his dark lips. ‘They’d never have fostered me if it wasn’t for you. They’d be alive right now if you weren’t such a fuck-up as a daughter. And a detective.’
Pointing two fingers from his eyes to hers.
‘You had six years to see what was under your nose. I was in that house for six years. But maybe you saw, and you just didn’t give a shit. You’d got away and that’s all that mattered.’
She stayed silent, waiting for it to be over. For him to burn through the hate and come out the other side. But there was no other side with Stephen, she knew that. She’d come here knowing it.
‘Tell me how you got the information to the kids who broke into the house.’
‘To make your job easier?’ He laughed, a grown-up sound unlike any she’d heard from him before. ‘You’ve never known which questions to ask, have you? Never asked any about me, not until it was too late. Where I’d come from, what I’d been through to get there. Why they wanted me so badly.’ His eyes became hooded. ‘What went on in that house before I finished it.’
‘You’re trying to excuse what you did—?’
‘I don’t need an excuse.’ He put his hands in plain view. ‘I’m serving my time. You’re the one who needs an excuse. That’s why you keep coming back. Or maybe you just like prisons.’ Dipping his head at the shove of sound through the wall. ‘Because this is where you belong, because you know you fucked up. You left the three of us alone in that house. You couldn’t live there. What made you think I could? I had to look at that wall you painted every day, every night.’
She saw it in his eyes, the wall, the colour of a bloodstain.
‘I was sleeping with your ghost,’ Stephen said, ‘with everything you left behind. Shall I tell you how it felt, the morning I killed them?’
No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Stop talking now, just— Stop.
He leaned in, nailing his stare to her face. ‘It felt like your hand on the knife. Under mine. Your hand. Putting that knife into them, again and again and again—’
‘That’s enough.’ Somehow her voice came out quiet and low. ‘It’s enough.’
‘No wonder you can’t stay away.’ He straightened and sat back. ‘You should be locked up, just like me. But you are, aren’t you?’ He drilled a forefinger to his temple. ‘You’re locked up here.’
Her chest was packed with pain.
She had to get out, away.
‘Are you done?’ she asked.
‘I’ll never be done. We’ll never be done.’ His stare on her again, swarming with hate. ‘You’re a piss-poor excuse for a detective and you always will be, until you start asking better questions. Proper questions. The ones you never asked.’
He stood, lifting a hand for the CCTV lens in the corner of the room.
‘I’m going back to my cell now. You?’
Curling his mouth at her.
‘Can go back to yours.’
22
‘I’m a prisoner. I’m Finn Duffy. I’ve been kidnapped by a pervert and I’ve puked in his bath. He’s going to kill me. I can’t clean it up, I can’t do anything because I’m sick. I’m sick and stupid and I’m just a kid, not even eleven. I was going to see Dad, but that’s finished now. He’s got me, fucking Brady’s got me. I tried to poison him but he gave me the belt. If the house isn’t clean, no food. If I try to escape, the belt. If I make too much noise, duct tape. Brady’s joke, “Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.” I hate him. And I’m scared, I’m really scared.’
Finn stopped. He scratched out the last two sentences so hard the paper tore. Wrote—
‘Don’t get mad, get even. It’s down to me now, not Dad. But I’m sick. My puke’s in the bath and it stinks. I’ve made the whole house stink. I wish I’d puked on him.’
He squinted, trying to make sense of the words he’d written which were dancing like ants across the piece of torn wallpaper. No notebooks in the house, no books of any kind, but he’d moved the wardrobe a bit, upstairs. Picked at the edge of the wallpaper until he was able to tear away this piece before pushing the wardrobe back in place. He’d kept the pen he’d used to write the message for the bin man. A blue biro, blotchy, but it worked.
‘I’m Finn Duffy,’ he wrote, ‘he took me in Camden. I was with Ollie and the rest, we were hanging out up at Jonas House, not doing anything, just a couple of cans. Brady had a car. I couldn’t see its plates. Big boot, that’s where he stuffed me. Big car, think it was silver.’
Using his neatest handwriting, making it small to save space. Some of the words in his head he didn’t write down because it wasn’t meant to be his life story or something they could sell to a newspaper like that mate of Uncle Regan’s did. This was to help the police catch Brady. He’d written, ‘Wonky teeth. Adidas trainers. Smells of curry.’ When he screwed up his eyes to try and get a better picture, he just got red squirming across black. Like the funfair. Cartoon faces, googly eyes, zap of static from the blue cat Dad won.
‘House across the street has a yellow door,’ he wrote. ‘Curtains always closed. I’ve watched for hours and seen no one. No one comes up this street except the bin men and they hate me. Beanie Hat could’ve saved me, but he didn’t. It’s Raccoon City out there, he’ll leave my body to rot or take it someplace else. But I think he’ll leave it here. I still don’t know why.’
He stopped to cry for a bit. It was easy to cry because he felt so sick. After puking in the bath, he didn’t see how he could make it any worse.
‘He won’t tell me why. If he’s a perve, he hasn’t touched me. Not yet. He doesn’t even like me, tells me all the time that I stink. He doesn’t fancy me so why’s he keeping me here, I don’t get it. It’s like Uncle Regan and that dog. He hated it, called it a bitch. She was so scared, shaking all the time, this grin on her face, trying to please him. Creeping up close, whining for another kick. He’s a proper bastard, Dad said. He grew up with Regan and it wasn’t just dogs he kicked. I asked Dad why he had a dog when he hated it and it cost so much, he was always on about the money, like Brady buying cheap pasta, telling me how much I’m costing him, so why doesn’t he just let me go?’
He stopped to cry into the crease of his elbow, wiping snot from his nose.
‘Except Regan got a kick out of seeing the dog crawl so maybe it’s that. Maybe Brady needs someone crawling to him because his life’s shit. Dad says Regan was pushed about at school, at work. He says you pass it down the line, there’s always someone who’ll take it, Dad says, and if you don’t like it you pass it down and so I think I’m Brady’s
dog, that’s why I’m here. Regan drowned his dog, I think he drowned her. I know he put her into fights with other dogs, invited his mates to watch. Dad says there’s always someone happy to watch a fight like that, up West or in Camden under the market. He showed me a way in, we’re not supposed to know about. Dad knows all the secret places round there. If this was Camden, I’d know how to hide. Under the canal in that tunnel where the Crasmere Boys went, where Ollie wanted to hang out that time.’
He wasn’t writing. His hand was slack, blue stains on his fingers. Lying on the floor, talking at the tiles. He didn’t have any paper and there wasn’t any pen, leaking or otherwise. The stains on his fingers were from that tablet thing inside the bog; he’d clawed at it when he was puking that last time. Pebble-dashing the porcelain, Dad called it.
‘Ollie must’ve seen something,’ he wrote, fingers twitching out the words on the cold floor. ‘He was with us that day, he wanted me for the Crasmere Boys because of who Dad is. Should’ve gone with him, should’ve thrown a C-sign, whatever shit he wanted. Gang stuff. Dad says to step wide of that, it’ll suck the skin off you, stay wide . . .’
Blinking at the white chill under his cheek, gob at the edges of his mouth, tasting like blood.
‘Dirty house . . . no food. Escape . . . the belt.’
Reciting Brady’s rules, learnt by heart, ticking the list with his fingers, folding each one on the tiles, except they wouldn’t fold, too stiff, knuckles swollen like Dad’s.
‘Make a noise . . . duct tape.’
He could feel it tight and sticky on his face, dragging his lips back into his teeth, tongue trapped at the back of his mouth, impossible to swallow.
Tears burned in his nose. ‘Tell anyone . . . the river.’
A whale came up the river once. Dad showed him where. It took the wrong turning like those that died on the beach. Uncle Regan put his dog in the river, tied a rock to her lead and kicked her in. Finn had imagined it so many times he didn’t know whether the pictures in his head were real or not. The dog whining at Regan’s feet, still looking for ways to please him even after all the kickings. The rock from the beach, that strip of sand and gravel London calls a beach, and mud that sucks at everything, your shoes, your toes, your fingers if you reach for a pebble.
‘It sucks.’
And Dad laughing, his throat pointed at the sky. ‘That’s London for you . . .’
The splash when the dog landed. The hole it opened in the water, brown.
Then the hole sucking shut and the river running on like nothing happened.
Like there never was a rock, or a dog, or Finn to see her die.
23
The station’s heating had packed up, again. Everyone was shivering in their coats, huddled by the whiteboard, hands wrapped around hot coffees.
‘We’re looking for Ollie and anyone close enough to be called his friend,’ Marnie said. ‘We know he had a gang, and that it was close-knit. Zoe gave us a couple of names, but neither boy has seen Ollie recently. Stuart says his attackers were children, one large, one small. We know Ollie was popular with younger kids, ten-and eleven-year-olds.’ She stopped.
Noah wondered whether Ron and the others could see how worn out she was. Her eyes gave back the light from above the whiteboard as if she were translucent, her lips colourless. She’d disappeared for a couple of hours – seeing Welland? Or Ferguson.
‘We need to find whoever sent the clippings to Valerie Rawling,’ she said. ‘If our vigilantes want recognition for their work then let’s hope they’ve left a trail we can follow. DC Tanner’s leading on that. DS Jake and I will visit Ollie’s home and speak with Lisa, assuming she’s back from work.’
‘Why did Val send the clippings to Stuart?’ Ron slurped at his coffee. ‘Like she wanted him to know he was attacked because of what he did to her. Rubbing his nose in it.’
‘Or she was warning him,’ Debbie said. ‘We don’t know she’s glad he was attacked. She put up with him battering her for twenty years. It’s probably more complicated than it looks. Kids wouldn’t understand that.’
‘The vigilantes wanted Val to know the two things were connected,’ Noah said. ‘They sent the clippings to her, not him. In their heads, this’s about justice. They needed her to know they’d done what the courts couldn’t – punished him, properly.’
‘Where did Ollie get hold of the newspaper story about Rawling’s trial?’ Colin chafed his hands together. ‘That story’s seven years old. Ollie was only eight at the time.’
‘Let’s find out if Mazi Yeboah was sent clippings about Kyle,’ Marnie said. ‘And let’s not make any assumptions about Ollie. DS Jake, you spoke with Zoe Marshall?’
‘She liked Ollie, once upon a time. It wasn’t easy for her to betray his confidence, but she told me some interesting things.’ Noah looked at the mugshots on the board: Ollie as a toddler, and a teenager. ‘When he turned twelve, he started keeping lists in old diaries. He showed Zoe a couple, when she was first working with the kids on his estate. He kept the lists in date order, very neat for a kid who didn’t like school, but Zoe said not to read too much into his truancy; lots of kids can’t be in school for lots of reasons. Often it’s the bright ones or the quiet ones who find it hard to be in mainstream education.’
‘Which was Ollie?’ Ron wanted to know. ‘Bright, or quiet?’
‘Both, back then. He made lists of everything. The lists he showed Zoe were of things he loved, and things he hated. Food, clothes, music. People. He had a diary filled with lists of the people he hated. And what he’d like to do about it.’
Ron’s face sharpened. ‘Such as?’
‘Zoe says she’d have reported it if he was a danger to himself or others. She wondered about abuse in the family. A lot of the punishments he wrote down involved being locked up. In cupboards or car boots, or cages. She made a point of getting to know Ollie’s mum. His dad was out of the picture. What she saw of Lisa reassured her, but she worried that Ollie would find a gang, somewhere to belong. And she worried about the lists.’
‘I’ll bet she did,’ Ron said. ‘I don’t suppose he had Carole’s name written down?’
‘Zoe can’t remember details. It was three years ago. The only names she remembers were celebrities or schoolmates, anyone who’d run up against Ollie’s tendency to judge you on the basis of your taste in music. Once she’d ruled out abuse, she didn’t think any of it too troubling. But Ollie started hanging out with the wrong crowd, throwing up gang signs in the street, acting tough . . .’
‘That’s when the penny dropped.’ Ron drank more coffee. ‘Sounds a real charmer, even at twelve. Now wouldn’t it be great if Zoe recognised his handwriting on the envelope sent to Rawling’s wife? Better still, we get hold of his notebooks and match the writing from those.’
‘Did Zoe feel threatened by him?’ Debbie asked. ‘That’s usually a good indicator of how serious those sorts of problems are, or the direction they’re headed in.’
‘She didn’t feel threatened,’ Noah said. ‘But she’s a tough cookie. She’s sure the better part of it’s swagger, doesn’t believe Ollie’s capable of doing serious harm to anyone, except possibly himself if he keeps running with the wrong crowd.’
‘Does she know what Carole did to him?’ Ron asked. ‘And what was done to Carole?’
‘No. And I didn’t enlighten her.’
Ron’s phone rang. ‘DS Carling . . . Thanks, I’ll be down.’ He hung up, nodding at Marnie. ‘That’s our eyewitness from Page Street. Shall I show him Ollie’s mugshot?’
‘Play it by ear,’ Marnie said. ‘If he didn’t see faces then don’t show him faces. It would be too easy to jump to the wrong conclusion from Ollie’s stone-cold-killer impersonation.’
‘At least we’ve got a name.’ Ron reached for his jacket. ‘For DCS Ferguson. And it’s making the vigilante theory look solid.’ He grinned. ‘I might even start buying into it myself.’
Jonas House was iron-clad in cold, its breeze blocks finished
by a bad paint job with more wrinkles than a smoker’s skin. Eight months ago, Marnie and Noah had found a girl’s body on a high-rise estate in south London. This was north-east London, an experiment in low-rise living, but no less depressing. Jonas House was built as post-war housing for single people and couples, but most of the one-bedroomed boxes were crammed with families. Small surprise the kids wanted out, even if only to the narrow strips of grass segregating the eight blocks.
The estate’s low sprawl limited the prospect for dead space, but a knot of kids had found a spot where the grass had frozen with a ferocity that said this particular strip didn’t ever get the sun. Two of them were stabbing at the ice with broken selfie sticks, the others standing shoulder to shoulder, smoking e-cigarettes. None of them looked older than twelve. Three boys and a girl, dressed in the uniform of the school that Ollie hadn’t attended in eight weeks. Despite the cold, not one of them wore a coat. Their breath was the same colour as the grass.
‘Makes you wonder what their homes are like.’ Marnie shivered inside her scarf, wound high around her throat. ‘That they’d rather be out here on a day like this.’
‘Are you okay?’ Noah asked.
She glanced at him, and nodded. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘The light will be gone soon.’ He looked to their left where the eighth block stood derelict, its doors and windows boarded up. ‘I’m surprised they’ve not found a way inside there.’
‘Perhaps social cleansing has sapped their sense of enterprise.’
That was better; she sounded more like herself.
‘The regeneration generation.’ Noah followed her across a lethal stretch of ungritted tarmac, towards the block where the Tomlinsons had lived for the last ten years. ‘Lisa moved here when Ollie’s dad moved out. Bit of a comedown from Harrow.’
‘You have a gift for understatement.’
Inside, Jonas House was a degree colder. Smelling of chip fat and orange ammonia. The lift had been out of order long enough for someone to spray ‘I’m fucked’ on its doors. Each block was four storeys high. A long climb for a pensioner, or a family with a pushchair and the week’s shopping to bring home. Lisa and Ollie lived on the third floor at the far end, their door painted blue. Curtains drawn at the window, but that wasn’t unusual. All the windows they’d walked past were the same. Apart from anything else, it was a heat-saving measure.