by Jack Jordan
‘You can’t keep running away from your problems. I can’t leave knowing you’re going to hurt yourself again.’
‘I won’t.’
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, he took her by the arms and turned her towards him.
‘How do I know that? How can I believe you? Look how we met, for Christ’s sake.’
The doorbell rang again. Max barked and rushed between them, his tail knocking against their legs.
‘Ignore it.’
‘They’ll know I’m in. I wouldn’t leave the house without Max.’
She walked towards the kitchen and unlocked the back door.
‘Please, Dane.’
Dane walked through the doorway and their arms brushed, a brief reminder of what they had done. She thought of him on top of her and the way his weight had pressed her down into the bed. He hadn’t even left yet and she already missed him. She had to fight the urge to claw him back.
He went to speak, words forming and dying in his mouth.
She shut the door and locked it. The doorbell rang for the third time.
‘I’m coming!’
She rushed towards the front of the house and opened the door.
‘You didn’t forget, did you?’ Rachel asked as she walked inside. ‘I was about to use my key.’
‘No, Mum, I didn’t forget. I was in the bathroom.’
The gasp cut Naomi’s response in two.
‘What happened?’
The bandage from her right hand was still unravelled on the bedroom floor.
‘Naomi?’ Rachel pulled her into a hug. ‘You’re so special to me, I can’t bear it.’ Her voice crackled in Naomi’s ear.
‘I’m okay, Mum.’
‘Did you have an accident at work? Christ, are you still able to go in? I can give you more money if you need it. I still have some equity in the house.’
‘Mum, you’ve done enough for me. You’ve kept this roof over my head. Just sit down and I’ll tell you.’
Her mother reluctantly pulled away. They sat on the sofa and Naomi took a deep breath.
‘Last night—’
The doorbell rang again.
‘That’ll be your sister. I’ll get it.’
Naomi sighed inwardly and closed her eyes.
How do I tell them? How could they possibly believe me?
‘Hi, Mum,’ Grace said. ‘Naomi.’
‘Hey.’
‘Sit down. Something’s happened to your sister and she was just about to tell me.’
‘Hang on,’ Grace said, and shut the door.
‘Sit down Grace, please.’
‘Christ, Mum, give me a minute to take off my coat.’
Rachel sat beside Naomi again and stroked the tender skin on her wrist with her nails, the way Naomi liked.
Grace sat down heavily on the armchair with a sigh.
‘Right then, what’s happened?’
Naomi paused, unable to decide where to start.
Grace was strong. Naomi knew her sister could handle the truth, but their mother?
Someone threw a brick at me through the window of the café and I had to go to hospital, and then on my way home I stumbled across a dead body with the killer still at the scene before spending two hours in the police station, followed by another trip to the hospital, and wound up in bed with my ex-husband because I have no impulse control and no self-respect, and every time I try to kill myself I fail.
‘I … I fell over in the garden, landed on some bark in the flower bed.’
‘That’s it?’ Grace asked.
‘I told you it was a bad idea you living alone after Dane left,’ Rachel said. ‘It was an accident waiting to happen.’
‘I didn’t fall because I’m blind; I fell because I wasn’t paying attention.’
‘What if you had hit your head? Who would have known?’
‘Don’t get carried away, Mum,’ Grace said. ‘She’s fine. People get injuries all the time. Craig tripped over one of the kids last week and nearly lost an eye on one of the kitchen corners. It happens.’
‘I’m not overreacting, Grace. I’m worried about my daughter.’
‘Mum, I’m fine. Honestly.’
‘See? She’s fine.’
‘She’s saying that because she doesn’t want me to worry.’
‘Mum, she’s nearly forty years old, she can look after herself.’
‘It doesn’t matter how old either of you are, I will always worry about you.’
‘Look,’ Naomi said. ‘I know you care, and it’s lovely of you, but I’m fine. I’ve had one minor accident in thirty-six years; I don’t think that’s too bad.’
‘All right,’ Rachel said. ‘But for Christ’s sake tell me these things when they happen.’
‘I will.’
‘Thanks for calling to apologise about missing the party, by the way.’
‘Grace, don’t spoil it. She didn’t mean to miss it, did you, darling?’
‘I’m sorry, Grace. I’ll make it up to the twins. I still have their presents …’
‘It isn’t about the bloody presents. It’s about you showing up and being their auntie.’
‘She said she’s sorry.’
The room fell silent. After a while, Naomi heard the sniffle of tears.
‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ Rachel asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said between breaths. ‘It’s the murder. It’s bringing it all back up again. I have to be so strong at home, but all I want to do is cry.’
‘Let it out, darling, you can with us.’
Naomi sat silently on the sofa as Rachel comforted her sister, rummaging in her handbag for a tissue. The two of them had been close as children, but Grace’s secret had forced them so far apart that neither of them knew how to cross the gulf that had opened up between them.
Something had happened between Grace and Hayley the night before she disappeared. Grace never told Naomi what it was. All she had said was that she and Hayley weren’t friends any more, and the next day, when Hayley was reported missing, she had begged Naomi not to say anything about their falling-out. But something had changed. Grace walked out of a room when Naomi entered, and only spoke to her when she had to, with a new chill to her voice. Even after all these years, the secret still sat between them, pushing them apart.
Whatever Grace had done, it had changed their family for ever.
FIFTEEN
Naomi stood at the platform edge, behind the bumps on the tiles, and waited for the train.
She wouldn’t see it coming. She would hear it rattling along the tracks in the distance until it was so close she could smell it. That was when she would jump, when the driver had no time to slow down.
It was late. The air was crisp and cold in her lungs. A vixen was yelping further along the tracks.
With the platform empty, she let the tears fall. It would hurt, but only for a few seconds. Once she jumped, she wouldn’t be alone in the darkness any more; she wouldn’t be overlooked by men like she was another woman’s shadow, or turned down at job interviews; she wouldn’t have to live at home with her mum for the rest of her life as everyone else around her evolved, loved, reproduced, succeeded – lived. At twenty-one years old, she should feel invincible, but instead she was lost in an existence that refused to move forward. All she had ever wanted was a normal life.
The suicide note was in her coat pocket. She would slip out of her coat and leave it on the platform just before she jumped. Her mother deserved to know why, that it was nothing to do with her. She was the only person who had truly ever wanted Naomi, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t substitute for a tender first kiss, or the loneliness latched around her heart, the desperate yearning to be touched, or her hunger for a life that left her to starve.
The train was coming.
Muscles twitched in her legs. She forced her feet into the ground. The tears on her cheeks had chilled with the night air; she instinctively went to wipe them away, but stopped herself. T
he slightest sign of distress could ruin everything. So many opportunities had been taken from her; she wouldn’t let this one slip away.
She thought of her birth mother leaving her at the bus stop never to return; she heard the voices of every interviewer as they told her why they weren’t hiring her, always skirting around her blindness. She thought of her virginal, untouched body, and of all the kisses she imagined pressing lightly against her lips, over the skin on her neck and breasts, down across her stomach towards the nerve endings between her legs. She would die with an unloved body ripped to shreds.
The rhythm of the train’s wheels resonated in her ears.
‘Stand back from the platform edge. The next train at Platform Three does not stop here.’
She slipped out of her coat. Two small steps and she was at the platform edge.
Don’t give in to the fear, she told herself. It will only hurt for a second, and then you will be free.
The train was close. It was so loud that she could barely hear her own thoughts.
‘I’m sorry, Mum!’ she shouted over the sound of the engine hurtling towards her. She raised her foot to step off the edge.
The train whooshed past, clattering against the tracks again and again as each carriage zoomed by, its speed sucking the air from her lungs and cooling the tears on her cheeks.
‘Don’t,’ he said with his hand still in hers, the hand that had pulled her back just as she had begun to lean into the fall.
The train was gone, rattling away into the distance until it was nothing but a low, fading grumble.
‘Tell me your name,’ he said.
‘Naomi,’ she whispered.
‘I’m Dane,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
Hayley Miller was just eighteen when she disappeared from Balkerne Heights. Marcus had devoured over fifty pages of her past, scanned every inch of the crime-scene photos, images of her blood splattered on the grass at the top of the cliff, dried to a crisp in the morning sun. There was enough of it to assume they were looking for a body, not a missing girl waiting to be found.
The amount of blood meant it had come from a main artery, such as the carotid in her neck. Just like the deaths of Cassie Jennings and Amber O’Neill. He couldn’t make assumptions, but the similarity between the findings and the recent attacks couldn’t be ignored.
He glanced up from the file and looked around the office that he would never see in the same light again. It looked smaller with the night pressing against the windows, and empty offices glaring back at him from behind the glass partitions. He wondered if it was the detectives in those very offices who had decided to bury the secrets back in 1997, or whether the decision had come from higher up.
When Lisa had been reluctant to discuss the case, Marcus thought she was trying to keep the team from feeding into the town’s paranoia, to keep control of the investigation before the locals snatched it from her grasp and turned it into something untameable. He’d had no idea she was protecting the force from being dragged into the limelight, after the public became aware of police corruption within the case.
As Hayley had left her house for the last time, she’d told her mother she was meeting a boy for a date. Another boy? her mother had asked, before her daughter slammed the door in her face. Hayley had earned a reputation for being promiscuous, something that would taint her disappearance. The town blamed her for opening her legs. They blamed her mother for failing to raise her right and reel her in when she misbehaved. Marcus noticed that the neighbours who gave character statements never blamed the boys who had climbed on top of her, or the parents who raised them.
Now Marcus had a name. The boy Hayley had planned to meet the night she disappeared was Dane Hannah. Naomi’s ex-husband.
But he couldn’t bring himself to read the transcript of his interrogation yet, not when another name stared at him from the stark white paper.
Blake Crouch.
Back in 1997, Blake’s father, Superintendent Nathan Crouch, had been running the police force in Balkerne Heights for over seventeen years. When his son’s name was listed as a person of interest in the disappearance of Hayley Miller, evidence supposedly went missing. What evidence, the file didn’t state. Superintendent Crouch himself dismissed the accusation as a groundless attempt to undermine the police force during their search for the truth of the girl’s disappearance.
But with Lisa’s eagerness to bury the case, Marcus didn’t know what, or who, to believe. If the current case was connected to the disappearance of Hayley Miller, would Lisa follow it through to discover the truth? Or would she bury it further to protect Blake, her job, and her future in the force, even if it meant failing the town she had been employed to protect? With Superintendent Matthew Cunningham also named in the file as a detective on the case, Marcus knew that if Lisa wanted it buried, the Superintendent did too.
Marcus couldn’t trust Blake; he had known that the second his eyes changed after Marcus asked what had happened between him and Amber the night of her murder.
‘She made another fuck-up on the system,’ Blake said. ‘Wanted me to hack into the server to correct it. Last time I helped her out I got cautioned for it. I wasn’t going to do it again.’
‘And that would destroy your marriage?’
‘What’s my marriage got to do with you?’ he’d spat, as he squared up to Marcus in the small kitchen. ‘You like snooping around, listening to other people’s private conversations?’
Marcus walked away knowing that if he was going to find out the truth about Hayley Miller and how the case linked to the recent killings, he would have to work alone.
The clock chimed as it hit eight o’clock. He closed his copy of the case file and slipped it into his bag. He was heading home, but he wasn’t finished yet. He had some more reading to do.
SEVENTEEN
Dane sat in the interrogation room with his eyes closed and tried to calm his racing heart. The room was small with windowless walls. The only way in or out was through the single door, and he was the furthest from it.
‘Here,’ his solicitor said.
Dane opened his eyes and saw a tissue in the man’s hand.
‘For the sweat,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
He took it and dabbed at the sweat on his forehead and above his lip.
The lawyer, a grey-haired man with leathery skin and yellow teeth, had told him to keep quiet about his secret. They wouldn’t find out unless they found Hayley’s body. Better to keep his cards to himself until they needed to be dealt, he said.
The door opened and two men walked in, both dressed in black suits and white shirts, ties tightened around their collars like nooses around their necks. The door clicked shut and the two men sat on the opposite side of the desk.
‘Dane, my name is Detective Inspector Carl Roster, and this is my colleague Detective Sergeant Matthew Cunningham. You understand why you’re here?’
Dane glanced at his solicitor, who nodded.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
DI Roster turned on the tape recorder and reeled off information about the date and time. He asked Dane to confirm he had been read his rights. Dane said yes. The word scratched in his throat.
‘You’re not under arrest,’ DI Roster said. ‘You’re here voluntarily and can leave at any time.’
Dane looked at the windowless walls and the closed door. It didn’t seem that way.
‘But it would be in your best interest to clear your name so we can find the person who is involved in hurting Hayley. Do you understand?’
Dane wanted to run towards the door, but he couldn’t trust his legs to carry him.
‘Dane?’ his solicitor prompted. He looked Dane dead in the eye, as though he could see every terrified thought. He was telling him to stick to the script.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re here because of your relationship with Hayley Miller. I understand you were intimate friends in college. You just graduated, right?’
/> Dane nodded, and realised it could be in response to either question. Every word the detective spoke felt like a hurdle he had to jump to make it into the clear.
‘Yes, I just graduated.’
‘Twenty is a bit late to finish college, isn’t it?’ DS Cunningham asked.
‘I didn’t decide to study nursing until after I’d finished sixth form.’
DS Cunningham smirked down at his paperwork.
‘There’s nothing wrong with a man being a nurse,’ Dane said, clenching his hands into fists between his legs.
‘You’ll see a lot, being a nurse,’ DI Roster said. ‘You’re not squeamish?’
‘I wouldn’t make a very good nurse if I were.’
‘So you’re okay with the sight of blood? It doesn’t frighten you?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a very admirable vocation. Let’s put your knowledge to the test.’
‘Test?’ Dane asked, and glanced at his solicitor, who looked equally confused.
‘For fun,’ DI Roster replied, leaning back in his chair. ‘You’re a young guy; you like fun, don’t you?’
Dane nodded.
‘Good. Let’s get started.’ He picked up a notepad, read something on the page. ‘What’s the largest bone in the human foot?’
Dane looked at his solicitor again. They mirrored each other’s frowns.
‘The calcaneus. The heel bone.’
‘Correct,’ DI Roster said. ‘Impressive. How many pints of blood are there in the human body?’
‘Eight, on average. I don’t understand why—’
‘We’re having fun, aren’t we?’ DI Roster asked. His lips were turned up in a smile, but his eyes were serious. He looked down at his notepad. ‘How much does the human heart weigh?’
Dane had to think. He stared down at his clenched fist, the same size as his heart. He wanted to get out of the room. If he played along, he might get out faster.
‘Ten ounces, I think.’
‘Close. Eleven. Where are the carotid arteries located?’
He pointed to both sides of his neck, just as his solicitor gestured for him not to. DI Roster smirked, his eyes never leaving Dane’s. Dane looked at the lawyer and then the detective, wondering what he had done.