Bleed For Me

by Michael Robotham

  ‘Yes.’

  She raises her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, but the morning sun isn’t that strong.

  ‘I’m Zoe Hegarty.’

  She looks older than nineteen, with her mother’s eyes and build.

  ‘Do you want to come inside?’

  Zoe glances up and down the street. Shakes her head. ‘I get a bit funny about being alone with men. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’

  She rolls her chair to face away from the sun, resting the wheels against the low brick wall. Fumbling for a cigarette, she lights it apologetically. ‘Can’t smoke around Mum. She doesn’t like it.’ Turning her head, she exhales slowly.

  ‘I heard about Liam’s hearing. They’re not going to release him.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘But he can try again?’

  ‘In a year.’

  Zoe nods. I wait for something more. Her hand shakes. She raises the filter to her lips.

  ‘Sienna didn’t kill Daddy.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘You can tell the police.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell them?’

  ‘I have. I don’t think they’re listening.’

  A car passes. She looks at it through a veil of tiredness.

  ‘Tell me about your father.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘It was tough being his daughter.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It was like living in some Arab country with curfews and dress regulations - home before ten, nothing above the knee.’ She holds up her fingers. ‘I wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish, or go to parties. And how’s this? I couldn’t wear anything red. He said only sluts wore red.’

  ‘What did your mother say?’

  Her shoulders rise an inch and then fall.

  ‘Mum made excuses for him. She said he was old-fashioned.’

  ‘You think he was wrong?’

  ‘Don’t you?’ She doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘He eavesdropped on my phone calls, opened my letters, read my diaries. I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys or have a boyfriend. He thought I’d get pregnant or take drugs or ruin my reputation.’

  She looks at her legs. ‘On the night Liam attacked me I wasn’t supposed to be at the cinema. I lied to Daddy and said I was studying at a friend’s house. After the attack, whenever he looked at me, it was like he wanted say, “I told you so.”’

  Her cigarette is almost finished. She stares at the glowing end, watching it burn through the last of the paper.

  ‘Did you know that Sienna had a boyfriend?’

  Zoe shrugs.

  ‘Did she ever mention him?’

  ‘No, but I guessed it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She seemed happier. She couldn’t tell me directly, because Daddy was always listening in to her phone calls and reading her emails.’

  ‘Was Sienna sexually active?’

  She hesitates, holding something back. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Why did you come here today?’

  ‘To tell you that Sienna didn’t do it.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Was your father ever violent?’

  ‘He had a temper.’

  ‘Did he ever touch you or Sienna?’

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Zoe pops them open again. ‘Would it help her?’

  Before I can respond, she adds, ‘The only reason I ask is that, in my experience, the truth doesn’t always help people.’

  ‘Your experience?’

  ‘Yes.’

  When did she become so cynical? I look again at the wheelchair and get my answer.

  Zoe takes a deep breath as if poised to push herself off a cliff.

  ‘It first happened when I was seven. Daddy was driving me home after I played netball. I was wearing my pleated skirt. He bought me an ice cream. He said it was dripping on my thighs and began wiping it off, pushing his hand between my legs. I kept trying to hold my skirt down. He asked me if I loved him. He said girls who loved their daddies did what they were told . . .’

  She can’t finish the statement, but the memory shudders through her shoulders.

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘Mummy didn’t believe me. She said I was making it up, but later I heard them arguing. She was screaming at him and throwing things. She broke the frame of their wedding photograph. It’s still on her dresser. You can see where she’s patched it up with tape.

  ‘Later that night, Daddy came to my room, put his hand over my mouth and nose so I couldn’t breathe. He held it there, looking into my eyes. “That’s how easy it is,” he said. “Remember that.”

  ‘From then on I knew I wouldn’t be believed, so I stopped saying anything and started trying to find ways of avoiding him. I got pretty good at it - making sure I was never alone in the house with him, or in the car. I stopped playing netball. I never asked to be picked up from a friend’s house or the cinema.’

  ‘Did you ever tell anyone else - a teacher, a school counsellor?’

  ‘I told my Auntie Meaghan. She and Mum had the biggest fight. Mum told her that I made up stories to get attention. Later she made me call Auntie Meaghan on the phone and apologise to her for telling lies.’

  I feel my breath catching. I don’t want to hear any more.

  ‘When I was thirteen, I said no to him. I had a knife in my hand. He stopped touching me after that.’

  ‘Where is your Auntie Meaghan now?’

  ‘She died of cancer last July.’

  Zoe lights another cigarette. She smokes quickly. Nervously.

  ‘Did your father ever touch Sienna?’

  She closes the lighter and looks at her hands.

  ‘When I came out of hospital after the attack, Daddy wouldn’t look at me. He pushed my wheelchair up to the car door and lifted me out, but turned his face away. They set up a room for me downstairs. They had to widen the doors and build ramps. They pushed me into the room and expected me to be all excited, but I just looked at Daddy.

  ‘Before, when I was upstairs, I shared a room with Sienna. We had bunk-beds. I was on the bottom and she was on top. We were safe there because there were always two of us. Sienna thought it was so exciting, having her own room, but I had to teach her to look after herself, how to stay out of his way.’

  ‘Did he ever touch you again?’

  ‘No. I was a wheelchair girl. A cripple. Not even he was that sick.’

  ‘What about Sienna?’

  ‘I think she was old enough by then. He might have tried, but I think she would have fought back.’

  The cigarette glows as she inhales. ‘I sometimes wonder why people like him have children. I think my mother wanted someone else to love - other than my father. He was always a bully, bossing her around, making her fetch and carry for him. A beer from the fridge. A sandwich. A newspaper. Whenever he shouted her name she dropped everything and ran to him like a dog wanting to please her master. And all she got in return was ridicule and scraps of affection, yet she kept coming back. Surely you must get sick of being treated like a dog?’

  The air has grown colder around us.

  Zoe crushes her cigarette against the brickwork. Raising her elbows, she rests her hands on the wheels of her chair, rocking back and forth.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have to make a statement - tell the police about your father.’

  Zoe shakes her head. ‘That’d just kill Mum.’

  ‘What about Sienna?’

  ‘She loved Daddy and she hated him, but she didn’t kill him.’

  My phone is ringing. It’s Ronnie Cray.

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘I’m lecturing today.’

  ‘This is more important.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but it doesn’t pay my rent.’

  The DCI sounds annoyed, but she doesn’t raise her voice. Her tone barely alters as she suggests that my Volvo m
ight find itself clamped in the university car park should I turn up at the campus.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.’

  ‘You could explain that to the clamping crew,’ she replies. ‘Those guys love a good story. They’re born listeners.’

  Why are detectives so droll?

  I consider my options.

  ‘Since we’re calling in favours here, I have a small issue you might be able to help me with.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Charlie had an altercation with a cab driver yesterday. Didn’t have the full fare. Got into a fight.’

  ‘Princess Charlie?’

  ‘That’s the one. She was interviewed at Bath Police Station. The driver wants to press charges.’

  Cray doesn’t need the rest spelled out. She’ll make a call.

  9

  The living and the dead are greeted by stainless steel: benches, basins, scalpels and scales, disinfected and polished to a dull gleam under the halogen lights.

  Located in the basement of the new coroner’s court, the mortuary at Flax Bourton smells like a hospital and looks like an office block. A ramp leads down from the road to an underground parking area where Home Office ‘meat wagons’ are parked in bays.

  Pushing through swing doors, Ronnie Cray walks like a sailor in search of a fight. A white coat leads the way along brightly lit corridors. The place seems deserted until a cleaning lady appears wearing elbow-length rubber gloves. I don’t want to contemplate what she’s been cleaning.

  Another door opens. Louis Preston has his hands deep inside a butterflied ribcage. Half a dozen students are gathered around him, dressed in matching surgical scrubs and cloth caps.

  ‘You see that?’ Preston asks, adjusting a lamp on a retractable metal arm above his head.

  Nobody answers. They’re staring at the disembowelled body with a mixture of awe and disgust.

  Preston points and raises his eyes to theirs. Still no response.

  ‘What are we looking for, sir?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Evidence of a heart attack or otherwise.’

  He waits.

  Silence.

  ‘I swear you’re all blind. Right there! Damaged heart tissue. You don’t always find the clot, but cardiac arrhythmia can still be the likeliest cause of death.’

  ‘He suffered a heart attack,’ says one of the students.

  ‘You think?’

  Preston’s sarcasm is lost on them.

  ‘Sew him up,’ he says, peeling off surgical gloves. He tosses them overhead like he’s shooting a basketball. Rattles the bin. Scores.

  ‘You had something to show me,’ says DCI Cray.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  The pathologist leads us to a glass-walled office with a desk and filing cabinets. Having collected a manila folder, he waves it above his head like a tour leader and we follow him down another corridor until he stops before a large steel door. Pulling down on the handle, he opens the door, breaking the airtight seal with a soft hiss. Lights are triggered automatically. I feel a breath of frigid air. Four cadavers are on trolleys beneath white sheets. Three walls of the room have metal drawers. Bodies lie within.

  Preston checks a nameplate and tugs a handle. Another hiss as the seal breaks. Ray Hegarty slides into view on metal runners. His joints are stiff with rigor mortis and his skin marbled by lividity.

  Preston pulls on latex gloves.

  ‘He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head. The bruising and depression on the skull match the heel of a hockey stick. The blow was delivered in a chopping motion.’ He puts his fists together and pretends to swing an axe.

  ‘Ray Hegarty fell forward. The killer stood over him, grasped his hair, raised his head and sliced left to right. The weapon was most likely a Stanley knife, extended about an inch, which was drawn across his neck, severing his carotid artery and jugular vein. He bled to death within twenty or thirty seconds.’

  I gaze at the wound, a slash of crimson that begins just below his left earlobe, cutting through muscle and cartilage.

  ‘They were left-handed,’ I say.

  ‘Most likely,’ says Preston. ‘Some people are ambidextrous.’

  ‘Sienna Hegarty is left-handed,’ adds Cray.

  ‘Could a teenager have done this?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s not so much a matter of strength as the sharpness of the blade,’ replies the pathologist.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ asks the DCI.

  ‘Hegarty had alcohol in his system.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A significant amount - it would have slowed his reaction time.’

  Preston opens the folder and withdraws a forensic report.

  ‘We pulled forty-two full or partial prints from the house. Most of them match with the family. We’re looking more closely at those that don’t match. We collected fibres from the rug and the wound, and there might be DNA from the hand-towel in the bathroom. There were old semen stains on the daughter’s bed sheets and also on her underwear. The DNA results won’t be back for another five days.’

  I can hear Ronnie’s teeth grinding.

  ‘Check them against the victim. Then run them through the national database. Tick off the boxes.’

  Preston slides Ray Hegarty’s body from view and opens a folder of crime-scene photographs. The first shows Hegarty lying face down, his right cheek resting in a pool of blood. The image is centred on a bloody heel print beside his right knee. The second image is a close-up of Hegarty’s shirt showing handprints between his shoulder blades. Another partial print was found on the right side of the doorframe.

  ‘The tread design on the heel matches the daughter’s jazz shoes. Size six.’

  ‘Sienna wasn’t wearing any shoes when I found her,’ I hear myself say.

  ‘We found them in the river,’ replies Cray.

  Taking the first photograph from Preston, I study the position of the body in relation to the heel print. There is a second bloody mark on the opposite side of the body. Not a shoeprint. A knee. ‘Somebody knelt.’

  ‘To cut his throat?’ asks Cray.

  ‘No, afterwards.’

  Ronnie Cray studies the photograph and hands it back to Preston.

  ‘So we’re looking for a Stanley knife.’

  Preston nods.

  The daughter is a cutter. She had a shoebox full of bandages but no blade, which means she hid it somewhere else or got rid of it.

  She’s already convinced that Sienna was responsible.

  ‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions,’ I hear myself saying. ‘Maybe it was self-defence.’

  ‘More like an ambush,’ says Cray. ‘She hid behind the door.’

  ‘Somebody hid behind the door.’

  ‘His blood was all over her.’

  ‘He was twice her size.’

  ‘Size had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘She’s fourteen.’

  ‘I know how old she is, Professor.’ A sharp tone. ‘I hope you’re not making excuses because she’s your daughter’s friend.’

  ‘And I hope you’re not predisposed against her because Ray Hegarty was your friend. He must have had enemies. You said so yourself.’

  Undisguised contempt enters her gaze. I’ve gone too far. Cray doesn’t like having her judgement questioned publicly.

  Through clenched teeth: ‘Do you think I want this? I can see what’s going to happen. I can hear the defence warming up. They’re going to trash Ray Hegarty’s reputation. One of the best and bravest officers I ever served with is going to be branded a nonce, a child molester. They’re going to destroy him.’

  ‘What if it’s true?’

  ‘Bullshit! There were no defence wounds. No signs of a struggle. No signs of rape.’

  ‘What about the semen on her sheets?’

  ‘She had a boyfriend.’

  There’s no point in arguing because Cray hasn’t put a foot wrong procedurally. Meanwhile, I’m doing exactly what I t
ell my students to avoid - I’m ignoring the obvious answer. There’s only one greater sin - embracing it.

  Cray hitches up her trousers and I follow her down the corridor, noticing the scribble of purplish veins on the back of her ankles, above her drooping socks.

  It’s cold in the underground car park. She pulls open the car door.

  ‘Was anything missing from the house?’ I ask.

  ‘A laptop.’

  ‘Somebody could have taken it.’

  ‘Or she could have left it at school.’

  We’re moving. Cray has a driver, a young policewoman, who glances nervously in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Where to, boss?’

  ‘Trinity Road.’

  10

  Freud said that our memories are a repository of traumatic past events, but often these are merely fantasies rather than actualities. They haven’t taken place in the real world, only in our minds, which are vast storehouses for things that never existed and events that never happened. Sometimes I wonder whether my memories are real. If I try to concentrate on them too carefully, they catch in my throat and I struggle for breath.

  The nightmares of my recent past involve a former soldier who was trained to unlock secrets by torturing people - a man who knew how to reach inside a mind and pry it apart as if opening the segments of a citrus fruit. This is the man who took my Charlie and wrapped her in a world of darkness.

  Sometimes late at night when a car door slams or I hear footsteps on the footpath, I push back the blankets and cross the floor, carefully opening a corner of the curtain. I don’t expect to see Gideon Tyler waiting for me, but I still sense he’s there. Watching. Waiting.

  I know why this memory has come back to me now. It’s being here at Trinity Road Police Station, a red-brick fortress surrounded by closing-down sales, blighted tower blocks and crack dens. This is the last place I saw Gideon, smiling at me with a bloody froth on his lips and his tongue rolling across his teeth, painting them red. He challenged me to torture him, begged me with an unearthly smile on his face. I hated this man more than words could describe. I wanted to hurt him, I wanted him dead, but I knew it wouldn’t save Charlie or my marriage.

  The incident room is on the third floor. Most people take the stairs because the lift moves slower than a French tractor. Ronnie Cray’s office has no photographs. No certificates. No trophies. Instead there are files stacked against every wall like she’s building a child’s cubby house. Perched on the windowsill is a stuffed parrot, as forgettable as a fairground prize, yet I wonder how she got it. Who in her life gave her such a gift?