by CJ Carver
‘Er . . .’ said Lucy.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mac. The neutral expression remained but his eyes began to dance. ‘Lucy and I met on a team-building exercise in Wales for new recruits. We found we had a mutual passion for coasteering.’
At the words new recruits Jacko lost interest but Lucy could feel her cheeks beginning to heat. She fixed her gaze on Jacko’s shoes, wishing, longing for them to both go away.
‘I gather it’s thanks to you that Bella was found,’ Mac said. ‘Well done.’ The amusement was gone. He was all business, expression attentive. ‘Jacko tells me you want to be involved on the case. And that you’re keen to join CID.’
‘Yeees.’ The word drew out slowly, indicating her caution.
‘How would you like a support role on my team?’ He turned to Jacko. ‘That OK with you, sergeant?’
Jacko nodded, looking pleased with himself at orchestrating the offer.
Mac looked enquiringly at Lucy. When she didn’t respond immediately, Jacko also looked at her, eyebrows practically in his hairline and obviously mystified that she wasn’t leaping at the chance. She couldn’t refuse to join now. Not unless she wanted to appear totally fickle.
‘It would be a great opportunity,’ she said stiffly. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good,’ Mac said. ‘I’m going to the halls of residence to double check Bella’s room this morning. I’d like you to come with me. In half an hour, OK? I can brief you en route.’
She opened and closed her mouth. Managed to say, ‘OK.’
‘If you do well, it’ll look good for your career.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ She sat down and picked up her pen, writing a sentence of complete gibberish on the back of an arrest form and, to her relief, when she glanced up both men had gone.
Lucy went limp. Perspiration dampened her neck and forehead. Of all the police stations in all the world, why had he been transferred to hers? She’d been unfaithful to Nate once. Once! And here she was, being faced with her living, breathing misdemeanour as though she had to be reminded what a terrible person she was.
She hadn’t been engaged to Nate back then, but even so, her behaviour had been unforgiveable. And it wasn’t just because she’d been going out with Nate either. Having a sexual relationship with a superior officer wasn’t forbidden but it wasn’t exactly encouraged either. Why had she slept with Mac? Why, why? Yes, he’d looked good, but it was more than that. She could remember standing in the car park when they first met and staring at his hands and wanting to feel them on her body. She’d been aflame for him the second their eyes had met. She had looked up at him longing, yearning to kiss him. It was as though he wore an invisible magnetic cloak that had pulled her straight against his chest.
She felt like tearing out her hair. An invisible cloak! As if that was any kind of excuse! She’d practically dragged him to the beach that Sunday and ripped off his clothes. And it had been fantastic. Seriously incredibly fantastic. But when Mac had asked for her phone number later, she’d panicked. She hadn’t told him about Nate.
She’d left the course early. She’d made up some ridiculous excuse about forgetting a meeting and raced back to London. Mac had rung her at the Met a couple of times but stopped when she didn’t return his calls. She put him firmly in the past and whenever she thought about him, the memory felt like nothing more than an extremely sexy dream she’d once had.
And now here he was, in the same cop shop, under the same roof. Faris MacDonald. Her DI.
*
Before she joined Mac, Lucy hastily read up on the case. Motive, means and opportunity. Motive was anger, she reckoned. Anger and fear. There was rage in the attack. Raw brutality. Personally, Lucy didn’t think Bella was meant to survive. The only reason why the girl hadn’t suffocated in the freezer was because the seal had perished. Plus the fact that the drain hole at the bottom hadn’t been bunged up.
Means? Bella had been tasered. The taser, however, could have come from anywhere. Lucy had recently arrested a teenager who had zapped his maths teacher as he’d stood outside the school gates. The kid had purchased the taser over the Internet for less than fifty pounds, delivered by post. The Internet had made it far too easy for arms dealers to circumvent the law. No clues there.
Opportunity? Bella had been taken from or near her accommodation. There was no evidence of a struggle. Her handbag, purse and keys were still in her room. If he’d tasered her there, how would he have got her outside without being spotted? Or did he lure her to his car and taser her once she was inside? If so, it would mean he was either incredibly persuasive or she’d known him. What about fingerprints? Lucy checked the file and saw that there were no matches, and no evidence that Bella had been sexually assaulted. Nothing was missing, which pointed to the possibility that he wasn’t a sexual predator or a thief, which Lucy found extremely odd. No clues with the ketamine either, she saw. It wasn’t particularly difficult to get hold of. He probably administered it to keep her quiet. It created a dissociative state that would have made her malleable and it was also a painkiller. If he was moving her around it would stop her moaning or screaming.
‘Lucy?’
She scrambled to her feet and joined Mac outside. As they walked to his car she surreptitiously studied his profile, wondering why he’d moved from Bristol, but not daring to ask. She didn’t want to get on to anything personal. If anyone found out she’d slept with a colleague – a superior officer at that – it would totally undermine her.
He beeped open an unmarked Vauxhall. They climbed inside.
She expected him to start talking straight away, but unnervingly, he didn’t. He drove the car in silence, his brow furrowed, obviously deep in thought, and it wasn’t until they were over the River Tees – its water the colour of dull pewter – that he finally spoke. ‘Why did you run away?’
She closed her eyes. Here we go.
‘Lucy?’
‘I heard you.’
‘Why?’ he pressed.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Silence.
Lucy chewed her lip. Please let it go. Please.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. The frown was still there. ‘But what if I do?’
No way. She had to put a stop to this. And right away. She said, ‘Do we have a psych on the case?’ Her voice was stiff.
It started to rain. Mac switched on the wipers.
‘I’d like their view on the handcuffs,’ she added.
He turned in the direction of the University of Durham and accelerated past a white van. He heaved a sigh. ‘No psych,’ he said. ‘They can’t help until they’ve cleared three cases. How’s Nate?’ he added without missing a beat.
She would rather cut off her own arm than have him know Nate was no longer around.
‘Nathan,’ she said coldly, ‘is fine. How’s your girlfriend?’
‘Cleo’s fine, thank you.’
She blinked. Had he been seeing this Cleo back then? Had they both been unfaithful at the time? If so, how did she feel about it? Not great, she decided. How she wished she could take back every step, every touch, every kiss . . . to her horror, she started to flush. Get a grip!
‘There’s something you don’t know,’ Mac said.
OK, so Cleo wasn’t his girlfriend. He was married. Big deal.
He said, ‘Bella wasn’t tortured in the container. Forensics say that would have happened elsewhere. And I split up with Cleo, by the way,’ he added, suddenly looking cheerful. ‘I’m currently single.’
Lucy scowled but his cheerful look remained until they arrived at the student accommodation block. She followed Mac inside, shaking water from her jacket, assailed by the palpable smell of student living. Fried food, baked beans and toast, stale coffee. Bella’s room overlooked the river. A small desk stood beneath the window covered with stacks of reference books and box files, notebooks and pens. A space indicated where a computer would have sat, a computer that was now with forensics.
Posters, memorabilia
and photographs adorned one wall. Happy pictures of Bella and friends. Quite a few appeared to be missing, no doubt taken by the police. Lucy stared at a photograph of Bella standing with her arms straight in the air, a wide grin lighting up her face. She was in a stadium strobed with coloured electric lights. Behind her was a gigantic hydraulic dragon on top of which was a red and gold howdah. Inside the howdah were four men, waving.
Frank, Bob, Graham and Steve.
Johnny had come on later.
‘Lucy?’
She’d been at the same concert. Well, maybe not exactly the same one, but she’d policed one of them. Baz knew she was a bit of an At Risk fan and had managed to wangle her the job in her last week at the Met. ‘My goodbye present for you,’ he’d grinned.
Wembley. The national stadium. Seating for ninety thousand people and the second largest arena in Europe. Host to the FA Cup Final and the Horse of the Year Show, and concerts by Coldplay, Madonna and lastly, At Risk. Although Lucy knew she’d be working, she’d really looked forward to it.
She’d seen the group’s grand entrance atop the dragon, heard the crowd go wild. It had looked to be a fantastic evening until for no reason whatsoever, the crowd had fallen silent. Eighty-five thousand noisy, happy people suddenly seemed to freeze. The band faltered but continued playing and soon the fans were singing along again, waving their arms, everyone acting normally except for Lucy, who remained still and quiet. Her mouth was dry, her heart beating fast. An increasing sensation of dread began to build inside her. Why had the crowd fallen silent? What was going on? Was a terrorist attack imminent? Was the stadium about to explode or burst into flames?
She became convinced something awful was about to happen. That they were all going to die. She started to head to another police officer, to talk it over, but was overcome with such a strong sensation of fear all thought fled. She simply turned for the nearest exit, and ran for her life.
She erupted outside the stadium and kept running until she reached the exterior barriers. Only then did she turn and look back, doubled over, trying to catch her breath, gasping and sweating.
Absolutely nothing happened. No disaster. Nothing.
A young man with dreadlocks had come up to her and asked if she was OK. He called her Lucy, confounding her for a moment until she remembered her name was on her epaulettes. She brushed him off before hurrying back inside. Fortunately her colleagues assumed she’d been caught short and had to rush for the loo. She hadn’t corrected them. Whenever she thought back on the experience, how she’d deserted her post, her face burned with shame.
Discreetly over the next few days she’d tried to make sense of what had happened, searching the news as well as the Web, but although there were small pieces in the newspapers and some chat on social network sites, nobody else seemed to have experienced Lucy’s immense dread. They didn’t appear to take the strange event seriously, and most made light of it referring to angels flying overhead.
Looking back, she saw how stressed she’d been, not just at splitting up with Nate, but losing her job at the Met as well. And what about the damage done by being exiled up here? No wonder she’d lost control in Baz’s office, and then lost it again at the concert, which had obviously triggered something in her psyche – fear of being found out, fear of failure, fear of the future. She supposed she’d had a breakdown of sorts and, as she pictured herself back then, terrified and furious all at once, she felt immeasurably sad.
‘Lucy?’
‘I can hear you, Mac.’
‘I’m done here. You?’
‘Yup.’
That night, she had the same dream that had dogged her since the concert. She was in uniform, watching the dragon sway across the stage. Everything was silent. There was no music. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Her dread was like black treacle oozing through her veins. She wanted to flee, to run to safety, but for some reason she couldn’t move. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t open her mouth. She was frozen with fear.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tuesday 27 November, 9.00 a.m.
Grace reached for a pair of bronze and pearl dangly earrings and was immediately reminded of Jamie, who’d asked where she’d bought them as he thought Gemma would like a pair. He was still missing but there was little she could do about it, especially since it was her mother’s funeral today.
The autopsy had been completed, the death certificate issued, the body released to the funeral directors. She knew the system and how it worked but she’d never been part of the inexorable chain before. Now she was in the thick of it. The outpouring of sympathy. The constant act of reassuring people she was OK when she was anything but. She couldn’t shake the strange breathlessness in her lungs. No matter how deeply she breathed, it never let up. She felt constantly short of oxygen, lightheaded, dizzy.
She pulled on a pair of sheer tights and slipped into a deep blue velvet skirt. A soft cherry silk blouse followed, along with a floaty multi-coloured scarf. Chunky necklace. Bracelets.
You look like a fortune-teller.
Her mother’s voice. But it wasn’t disapproving. When she’d worn this combination of clothes to lunch one day, Mum had looked at her with not a little approbation.
I wish I could wear what you do, she’d said wistfully. But I seem to be welded to the dreaded suit.
Grace touched Simon’s face in the photograph that sat on her chest of drawers. ‘Keep her safe,’ she told him. ‘Tell her I love her.’
The doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it,’ Ross called.
She put on some lipstick then checked her appearance in the mirror. Her face was bloodless. She looked like a vampire. She scrubbed it off.
She heard men’s voices downstairs. Gradually, Ross became politely insistent, before falling silent. When she heard the front door close, she went to the window and looked outside to see a man in his fifties, dressed in a double-breasted camel coat, with a fedora and a pair of leather gloves, walking back up the path.
‘Who was that?’ she called.
‘A friend of your mother’s. He wanted to speak with you but I said he could wait until after the funeral.’
The word funeral was like a hammer blow in her lungs.
Oh, Mum, she thought. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t I hug you closer, press my head against your chest and listen? I would have heard your heart was in trouble immediately. Instead of a steady thump-thump I would have heard a thump-shoosh and I wouldn’t have let you put off your operation, not even for a day. I would have dragged you into the operating theatre myself.
It transpired that Stella’s doctor, Murray Walsh, had sent her to a specialist three weeks ago, who had immediately diagnosed aortic stenosis. Murray had talked Stella through the ramifications. Stella had appeared resolutely calm. Murray had told Stella how she should talk to her family and her work colleagues about her change in circumstance. He’d tried to persuade her to allow the cardiac specialist to make an immediate date for surgery. Stella had looked Murray straight in the eye and said calmly that she needed more time.
‘She told me that she had urgent, important things to settle first,’ Murray told Grace.
‘What things?’ Grace asked.
Murray, thickset, greying, shook his head. ‘She didn’t say. But from her demeanour they weren’t trifles. I told her to take things easy, not to put herself under undue stress.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘She laughed. I mean, genuinely laughed. She said her health was the least important thing at the moment. She was still laughing like it was the greatest joke. I told her it wasn’t a laughing matter and she sobered immediately. She said, “I know”. And then she said again, “Seriously, Murray, I have things to do that cannot wait”.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Grace felt bewildered. It was like being shown a completed crossword puzzle with all the letters filled in but each word was gibberish. ‘She put these other things before her own health? Her own life?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Murray sighed. ‘I wouldn
’t usually . . . but you’re a GP. I thought you’d understand . . .’
He thought she’d take his version of her mother’s response to a life-threatening problem with more aplomb. But she couldn’t. The patient had been her mother.
Now, Grace dithered over whether to wear a hat or not. From downstairs she heard Ross call, ‘Gracie, my love. Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ she called back, thinking No, I want to rewind time and turn up at Mum’s and not have a shower and this time, save her.
She’d found a strange solace being at work over the last few days. Kerry and Hugh, the practice’s partners, had told her to take time off but she found she was better at work and that the distraction helped. On her first morning back, she’d been disconcerted to find three emails from her mother, sent just minutes, maybe even seconds, before she’d died. In one, her mother had apologised for not telling her of her bad health before and then listed what appeared to be a lot of unconnected and random names, mostly from Grace’s childhood.
The second email contained a list of banks, sort codes and bank account numbers. Aside from the bank addresses, all were incomplete. Oddly, one bank was in the British Virgin Islands. Also, what appeared to be an address: Ocean View, Nail Bay. She couldn’t find any reference to Ocean View on the Internet, but Nail Bay looked spectacular; acres of white sands, tropical blue ocean rimmed with palm trees. Grace had dashed off a quick letter to Ocean View, in case it existed and someone there was connected with her mother.
The third email simply said: Dearest Grace, If anything out of the ordinary happens, remember one thing: trust no one. Love, Mum x
Her hair had just about stood on end when she’d read that. What in the world had she meant? What did ‘out of the ordinary’ mean? Was she talking about her own death? Or something else, something to do with the urgent, important things she wanted to settle before she had heart surgery?
‘Gracie,’ Ross called. ‘I don’t want to pressure you, but . . .’
‘I’m coming,’ she called.
She walked down the stairs. Ross came to her, expression sombre. He said, ‘I know it’s probably not the time or place, but you look beautiful.’