Before Her Eyes

by Jack Jordan

  ‘It wasn’t Dane who started the altercation.’

  She looked back down at the page. ‘They’re lucky I haven’t locked them both up until their court dates.’

  ‘So she isn’t allowed to walk down the street any more?’

  ‘She can do what she likes as long as she doesn’t breach her bail conditions.’ She sighed and took off her reading glasses. ‘Look, if you feel so strongly about police protection for Naomi Hannah, why don’t you do it yourself?’

  ‘And work around the clock? When do you expect me to sleep?’

  ‘I don’t expect anything from you. It’s your idea, your problem.’

  ‘But if Naomi is attacked again—’

  ‘If she stays at home until the court date, she’ll be fine. She’s a grown woman, Marcus. She should be able to handle herself.’

  ‘I think you’re making a mistake.’

  Lisa shut the file and clasped her hands together, her steely eyes zoning in on his.

  ‘No, Marcus, you’re the one making a mistake. You won’t get far as a detective if you refuse to take orders, trust me on that. You’re making the decision to let you go after your six-month probation extremely easy. Look at Blake, for instance. He might not be the best detective out there, but he falls in line when he’s told, follows every order he’s given.’

  ‘So do dogs, boss.’

  ‘Call him what you like, but he’ll go far while you’re still pushing paper around because your superior cannot trust you to follow the simplest command.’

  ‘It’s not authority I have a problem with, boss, it’s injustice. I can’t stand by while an innocent person is persecuted for a crime she didn’t commit.’

  ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Not exactly concrete evidence,’ she scoffed, and opened the file again. ‘And all I have is a victim who swears Naomi slit her throat. What a fool I’ve been.’

  ‘You can’t trust Josie. She’s lying to you.’

  ‘No, Marcus, I can’t trust you.’

  Their eyes met again.

  ‘Why can’t you be like Blake? Follow orders and keep your head down? You’re making it hard on all of us. It’s detrimental to the investigation.’

  ‘You want me to be like Blake? Have my daddy hide evidence to keep me out of trouble? He should never have been allowed on the force. This whole place is corrupt.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Blake said behind him.

  ‘I’m not talking to you.’

  ‘You’re talking about me. Why don’t you turn around, say it to my face?’

  Marcus turned. Blake was standing in the doorway. His face was red. Veins were elevated in his neck.

  ‘You shouldn’t even be a detective,’ Marcus said. ‘The superintendent worries about losing the trust of the town, and it’s because of what you and your father did. How can any of us expect respect when you’re here cosying up to the lead detective on this case? You shouldn’t be on the case at all; you should be investigated yourself.’

  ‘That’s enough, Marcus,’ Lisa said.

  ‘What evidence did you and your daddy dispose of, Blake? What are you hiding?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Blake spat. ‘Shut your damn mouth. It never happened. It was a rumour, a rumour that almost cost me my career before it had even begun.’

  ‘Tell the truth. What happened to Hayley Miller? What did you do to her? And Amber, what were you two arguing about just hours before her murder?’ He looked at Lisa, who was eyeing Blake with a new sense of doubt. ‘Oh, you didn’t know about that? Just hours before Amber was killed, the two of them were arguing in this very building. She was begging him for help and he shrugged her off.’

  Blake lunged forward, his fist heading towards Marcus’s jaw. Marcus ducked out of the way, grabbing Blake’s wrist with one hand and his collar with the other, and launched his head into the front of Lisa’s desk. A glass was knocked onto its side, spilling water over the file Lisa had been reading.

  ‘Get off him!’

  Lisa lunged over the desk to split them up, just as Blake stumbled to his feet and thrust his forehead against Marcus’s nose. Marcus stumbled back, narrowly dodging another punch. Blake’s fist cracked into the wall. Marcus jabbed two punches into his ribs before Blake was yanked away. Lisa pushed him to the floor, then pressed Marcus against the wall with her forearm.

  ‘Keep going, fucker,’ she hissed. ‘Give me a reason to kick your teeth in.’

  Marcus panted and licked blood from his lips. The skin on his knuckles was pulsing. Blake stumbled to his feet. Blood dripped from a cut on the bridge of his nose. Lisa stood between them with her hands on her hips.

  ‘None of us have to like each other, all right?’ she said. All three of them were breathless. ‘But we do have to work together. I haven’t got time to waste as you boys measure your dicks to see who’s the bigger man. This isn’t about us. It’s about the victims.’

  Blake stared at Marcus, panting heavily. A drop of blood fell from the tip of his nose onto the carpet.

  ‘If anything like this happens again, I’ll drag the pair of you outside and knock ten tons of sense into you. Understand?’

  Both men nodded, wiping blood onto their sleeves in red streaks.

  ‘Get out,’ she spat as she sat behind her desk again and picked up the wet documents.

  Marcus and Blake left the room, bleeding and panting. As they sat down at their desks, they kept their gazes fixed on each other, both refusing to be the first to look away.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Naomi woke to the sound of a crash.

  She screamed and ducked her head beneath the sheets. Something had hit the window; she could hear the glass slowly cracking in the pane, like small bones being crushed.

  ‘KILLER BITCH!’ a voice shouted. The words echoed down the empty street.

  She covered her ears and clamped her eyes shut.

  With the next bang, her bladder clenched with the shock and released. Urine poured down her thighs and soaked into the sheets.

  ‘Hey! Get out of here!’ a different voice shouted.

  Multiple pairs of footsteps pounded against the road until everything went quiet.

  I’m safe inside. They can’t get in.

  Silence fell. The house grew colder. The chill crept into bed with her and cooled the urine on the sheets.

  Someone will call the police. They will be here soon. They will help me.

  Hours passed. The street was silent except for the hum of the street lights and the whistle of the wind, but she was too frightened to lift her head above the duvet. Her nightgown stuck to her thighs. It reminded her of the night at the bus stop, shivering in the dark with the scent of urine filling her nostrils. Eventually she peeled the covers back and got out of bed with her hands outstretched. She pressed them against the window. Faint cracks ran through the glass.

  A gust of wind caressed the skin on the backs of her legs. Her teeth chattered as the cold night drifted through the door from the landing; the outside had made its way in and was curling up through the house.

  She crept to the en suite, stripped off her nightgown and dropped it in the bath with a weighty splat. Then she snatched her dressing gown from the door, wrapping it tightly around her body, and stepped into her slippers.

  The house felt abandoned: the night air had chilled the banisters, the floorboards, the paint on the walls, until everything felt damp. She stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Gusts of wind whistled through the ground floor. The curtains flapped with the breeze and strands of hair fluttered against her face.

  The stairs creaked beneath her feet. As she reached the bottom, she grimaced, covering her nose and mouth as a foul smell drifted towards her. She sniffed the air and gagged. Excrement. Someone had put faeces through the letter box.

  She stumbled away and leaned against the stair post, trying not to heave.

  Glass crunched under her slippers as she moved through into the sitting room and st
opped before the window. The cold night air tightened the pores on her face. She stepped back and hit something hard with her foot. She bent down and felt a rock lying on the floor.

  George hadn’t checked on her, hadn’t protected her from the yobs who had attacked her house. Had he stayed in bed listening to the attack, their shouts, and waited for the night to fall quiet again before turning over and going back to sleep? Maybe he believed the papers and the talk of the town. Maybe she was guilty in his eyes too.

  She stood before the broken window, frozen to the spot.

  She couldn’t call her mum. Grace was right: Rachel was too fragile to be put through such hell. She made her way to the side table and held the phone in shaking hands. She keyed in her sister’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ Grace’s voice was thick with sleep.

  ‘Grace, it’s me,’ whispered Naomi, as though the whole street could hear her through the broken window. ‘Something’s happened. Will you come over?’

  FORTY-FIVE

  Marcus arrived at Naomi’s house at dawn. Exhaustion blurred his vision. He had two black eyes and a nose swollen to twice its usual size.

  He looked at the house and sighed. The living room window was shattered, covered with a white tarpaulin sheet from the inside, glass littering the grass beneath like frost. One of the windows on the top floor was cracked. But it was the front door that was the most menacing. The red letters were large and jagged, like they had been cut into the flesh of the door, causing it to bleed. The red paint had dripped down to the doorstep in thick streaks and pooled on the concrete path.

  A police patrol car was parked outside the house. He glanced inside. If he hadn’t known that it was PCs Billy Edwards and Kate Finch who had attended the call-out, he would have worked it out from the sight of the McDonald’s bags shoved into the footwell. He had received Billy’s call at 5.30 that morning. He was the only detective who had picked up. He had slept on the sofa again to avoid Natalie.

  A lone paparazzo was lurking outside the house, waiting patiently for a glimpse of the Blind Widow.

  ‘You want to make a comment?’ the man asked. He sounded Eastern European. His gut folded over the waist of his jeans.

  ‘You’re not a journalist,’ Marcus said. ‘Leave the questions to them.’

  The man snorted and dragged on his cigarette. ‘Prick.’

  Marcus pushed open the gate and looked up and down the street. Figures stood at windows watching the activity. The town was waking up. It wouldn’t be long before journalists flocked to the house.

  He found a dry spot on the door and pushed it open. Glass sparkled on the floor and reflected the orange of the sunrise beaming through the door. He spotted a large rock on the rug in the sitting room.

  ‘Five hours is a disgrace,’ a woman said from the kitchen. ‘The station is up the bloody road.’

  ‘We’re here now,’ Billy said, his back to the door. Kate stood beside him, jotting something down in her notepad.

  ‘Yeah, and we’re freezing.’

  ‘Grace, it’s all right,’ Naomi said.

  ‘No, it’s not all right. This is serious. It could have been life-threatening. What if the rock had hit her?’

  ‘We take crimes like this very seriously.’

  As Marcus stepped through the doorway to the kitchen, Billy and Kate looked round. Billy frowned, taking in the swollen nose and black eyes. ‘Jesus, what happened to you?’

  ‘Later,’ Marcus said.

  ‘DS Campbell?’ Naomi said.

  ‘Hello, Naomi.’

  ‘This is my sister, Grace.’

  Grace was an attractive woman, but evidently exhausted, with untamed brown hair and odd socks on her feet. She wore a tracksuit beneath her coat. She was older than Naomi, maybe by a couple of years or so, and her skin was a darker shade of ebony. Grace stood an inch or two taller beside her sister with her arms crossed over her chest.

  Marcus thought of the Hayley Miller file. He tried to compare the woman standing in front of him with the young girl from the police interview. She looked strong, together, unrecognisable from the terrified teenager documented in Hayley’s file. With Grace here, her husband Craig would be alone. Marcus decided to call in on his way back to the office. It might be his only chance to talk to him.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this, Naomi,’ he said. ‘Do you know who it was who—’

  ‘It’s got to be someone close to Josie,’ Grace interjected. ‘Her whole family is a bunch of scumbags.’

  ‘I’ll make sure they are looked into.’

  ‘But it’s not just this,’ Grace said. ‘Our mum has been subject to abuse too.’

  ‘What?’ Naomi said. ‘What kind of abuse?’

  ‘Letters about her raising a monster. Some were racist.’

  Naomi looked away. Her jaw clenched beneath the skin.

  ‘I’ll need to see the letters,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘You’re going through enough,’ Grace replied dismissively. She looked at Marcus. ‘Could Dane have done this?’

  ‘I’ll certainly investigate that possibility. I will make sure you’re safe, Naomi. I’ll look into protective housing. I can’t make the final call, but I promise you I’ll do everything I can.’

  Naomi nodded silently.

  ‘That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?’ Grace asked. ‘Would it be local? We’d need to be able to reach her if she needed us.’

  ‘Naomi’s safety is our prime concern. Right now, it seems she would be better off away from Balkerne Heights.’

  Grace sighed. ‘Can we clean up the mess now? You’ve taken enough photos. This place is bloody freezing.’

  Marcus looked at Billy.

  ‘We’ve got her statement,’ he said.

  Marcus nodded at Grace, then turned to Naomi.

  ‘Naomi, remember the card I gave you. If you need me, call.’

  She looked in his direction, but didn’t reply.

  Billy followed him through the house as Kate nosed around the living room. He hadn’t even noticed that she had slipped past him as he stood in the kitchen. He had been too focused on Naomi, at the anger flickering in her eyes. He was losing her trust.

  ‘Kate,’ Billy said quickly.

  She put the photo frame back on the mantelpiece and pointed her thumb over her shoulder as she headed for the door. Marcus glanced at it: a picture of Naomi, Dane and Max, a small but happy family. Marcus wondered if she knew it was still up there, the past staring out at her whenever she passed.

  He opened the front door. Cameras flashed. The press had heard about the attack. A neighbour had probably called it in. No one had bothered to ring the police, but they’d had time to contact a journalist to line their pockets.

  Marcus walked up the path, blinking away the blots in his vision. When he got to the garden gate, he saw them: seven neighbours wrapped in dressing gowns and winter coats, frowns creasing their brows. The photographers lowered their cameras. Children watched from windows, rubbing sleepy eyes.

  ‘We want her out of here.’ Their spokesman was a man wearing a coat over his pyjamas and wellies on his feet. ‘We’ve got kids, mate. We can’t have journos and photographers blocking the road and yobs shouting in the night.’

  ‘I understand,’ Marcus replied. ‘We are assessing how best to make sure that Ms Hannah and her neighbours feel safe during this time.’

  ‘I don’t give a flying f—’

  ‘Daniel!’ The woman next to him poked his arm.

  ‘I don’t care how she feels. My family don’t need this crap.’

  ‘She needs to go,’ an older woman said, puffing on a cigarette between thin, wrinkled lips. The back of her hand was covered in sun spots.

  The others murmured in agreement.

  ‘We are doing everything we can,’ Marcus said, and opened the gate.

  The man moved in front of him. ‘We need more than that.’

  ‘Daniel!
’ The woman pulled at his arm.

  ‘Don’t do something you’ll regret,’ Marcus said. He held his palm out behind him to Billy as he heard him open his cuff case.

  Billy’s fluorescent jacket reflected in the man’s eyes. The man backed away with his hands clenched by his sides.

  ‘It’s in hand,’ Marcus said.

  Tyres screeched on the road as a broadcaster’s van turned the corner wildly and slammed on the brakes in a space across the street.

  ‘Question as many neighbours as you can,’ Marcus said to Billy and Kate. ‘Maybe one of them saw who did this. Remind them that if they cooperate, it will make this whole thing go a lot faster. And let them moan, because they will. They’ll want to feel that they’re being heard. Call me if you get anything. Once you’re back at the station, leave a copy of the reports on my desk.’

  The door to the van slid open and a woman in her thirties clambered out, her long black hair blowing in the wind, followed by a man with a camera on his shoulder and a tripod tucked under his arm. Her microphone was powered and poised.

  As Marcus lowered his head and walked towards his car, the reporter ran after him, shouting questions at his back, her high heels clacking against the pavement.

  ‘Who was behind the attack on the Blind Widow, Detective Campbell? Is it true that Naomi Hannah attempted to kill Josie Callaghan? Is she suspected of killing the other women? How are the people of Balkerne Heights meant to feel safe in their own town when suspected killers are allowed to roam the streets? Is the case connected to the unsolved disappearance of Hayley Miller?’

  ‘No comment,’ Marcus said, and slammed the car door behind him. He didn’t have time for the press. He had to talk to Craig Kennedy before heading to the office. He had to find some sort of lead. Naomi’s fate depended on it.

  FORTY-SIX

  Marcus pulled up outside the Kennedys’ house. It was a new-build property with large bay windows and two potted shrubs outside the front door, groomed into perfect swirls curling up the trunks.

  He hovered his hand over the doorbell and glanced at his watch. It was early, but he remembered that the Kennedys had young children. They would likely be awake, which meant Craig would be too.