Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  A low, single-story addition to Mr Symanski’s place below meant there was a narrow, flat section of their roof just beyond where I stood. At the edge of that roof, there was a drop to the street, and there was no railing.

  If I was careful and dangled at full length before I let go of the edge, I could reduce that drop to a couple of feet.

  I dressed fast. Jeans, bra, shoes, jumper, hoody. I opened the window, and I climbed out and along to the edge of the roof without looking back.

  I turned, brought my legs and the lower part of my torso over the edge, then eased myself down. The impact jarred hard on my knees and I fell back onto my bottom, scraping my hands when I instinctively flung them out behind me. But I was on the ground. I took a step back, gave half a thought to the window I’d left open in my excitement, and I laughed out loud.

  35.

  Mae

  As he rounded the final corner before Kit’s street, it occurred to him that maybe this was a bit weird. The heat from the takeout boxes burned as they brushed against his leg and he longed for a table to set it down on. He slowed up. Reassessed.

  It was gone ten o’clock. He’d left a message replying to hers, and he’d texted, twice, to ask where they should meet. But no reply. So he’d looked her up remotely on the system and found her house. Discovered that it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, even, that he could be dropping round to hers on his way back home. With a bottle of Chablis and a few boxes of food from the best takeaway in the borough. Casually.

  But now, thinking about it as he walked, looking for number 128: she’d probably have already eaten. Or, what if she just plain couldn’t stand Indonesian. Or had meant another night, or had gone to bed. Or changed her mind.

  A few doors ahead, the garden lit up and laughter tumbled out. Four, five voices, women’s voices, the sound pausing as the heads dipped, then a collective cloud of smoke as cigarettes were lit and the laughter resumed. Counting the doors as he passed 120, he realized the gathering was at Kit’s place. She had company. He’d come all the way here, and he’d brought wine, and fuck. She hadn’t meant tonight.

  It was too late to turn back. Was it? He passed 122. Yes. No. He would just walk straight past. No way she was a smoker herself, so maybe she would be inside still, he’d get away with it, she wouldn’t see him, it would be fine. Or he could just pop in and claim that he was … no.

  He kept his gaze straight ahead: 126 … and 130. He breathed out, kept walking.

  ‘Sarge?’

  He stopped. Turned. Kit, in an unreasonably short and low dress made entirely from gold sequins, her bare arms resplendent with anchors and roses, was walking down the path. She wore both a smile and a frown, and from her fingers dangled the neck of a Corona, complete with lime.

  ‘Sarge! It is you.’

  There was a hush across the garden, the other women pulling on their cigarettes, glancing at each other with eyebrows raised.

  ‘Oh, Kit,’ he said, half-heartedly feigning surprise. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You live round here?’ She asked him, benign confusion furrowing her face.

  ‘Shortcut,’ he said, then, because she’d noticed the bag, he raised it slightly and said, ‘taking this for a mate.’

  One of the women snorted, laughing, and turned her back.

  ‘Right.’ Kit nodded, but her eyes narrowed. ‘It’s a dead end.’

  A mere second of giggling from her mates before she shot them a look, then silence.

  He was a dick. He knew he was a dick. Would it be better to tell her, there and then, what a massive dick he was? Would acknowledging it help?

  One of the smokers, a short, solid woman with cropped black hair, sauntered down to stand next to Kit. ‘Evening!’ she said, brightly, before squinting at him, then Kit, then back to him, through a pull of her cigarette. ‘Who’s this then?’

  ‘Ben,’ Mae said, putting out a hand, which the woman shook with the grip of a docker.

  ‘Beer?’ she suggested. ‘We don’t bite.’

  ‘Actually Pain does, doesn’t she?’ one of the others muttered. More laughter.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ the docker conceded, ‘I meant the rest of us. Pain bites like a bastard, don’t you, sweetie?’ she cooed at Kit. Then cocking her head, ‘though maybe Sarge already knows that.’ She blew a thin jet of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

  Kit elbowed her friend, then, tossing a thumb towards her front door, said, ‘Do you want a drink, though? I’ve got a fuckload.’

  So he didn’t really have a choice, in the end. He followed her inside, past her amused friends, and put the food down discreetly just inside the kitchen door. Her hall was bedecked in kitsch: 7” records mounted on screws all over the walls, and strings of mismatched fairy lights. Nothing, nothing like any other police officer’s home he’d ever seen before. In the kitchen Kit opened a fridge and stuck her head inside and brought out a bottle.

  ‘It’s my derby name, by the way,’ she said, doing the flicky thing with her fingers that popped the beer cap off without any discernible effort or discomfort.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Pain.’ She handed the opened beer to him and watched him drink it, folding her arms. ‘Roller derby thing: everyone gets a name. I’m PC Pain.’

  He swallowed. ‘But you’re a detective. DC.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, stretching her arms above her head and loosening her neck. ‘Should’ve future-proofed it really.’

  He took another mouthful of beer. ‘I tried to call.’

  ‘Shit.’ She made an eek face. ‘Where’s my phone? Sorry. I had a bout. A match.’

  ‘And she fucking killed it,’ one of her mates added in a sing-song voice, coming between them and making a grab for a pitcher of something colourful that looked way too strong for a school night. ‘We left those bitches minced and bleeding.’

  Mae watched as the friend downloaded a mugful of fluorescence, gripped her eyes shut, then gnashed her teeth and shivered, before sashaying back into the living room, where the music had just risen by a handful of decibels.

  ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ Mae said, and he finished his beer in two swallows.

  Kit located her phone, plugged in beside the kettle, and woke the screen. ‘“Wine or beer?”’ she read, clearly baffled. Looking up, she said, ‘Did I … did we have a plan?’

  ‘Your text,’ he reminded her, but her frown only deepened, so he added, ‘Glug glug glug?’ Slowly, he was getting used to the idea of having cocked up in a way that would leave him blistering with embarrassment for weeks to come. ‘I assumed you meant …’

  She grabbed his arm, creasing up. ‘Oh! No! It’s the sound of the plug being pulled,’ she told him between hoots. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  He waited for her to compose herself. ‘Funny. I’d always thought of the plug being an electrical plug.’

  She tilted her head, considering it, then shrugged. ‘But listen, the point was I got a call from Colleen.’

  ‘Coll— McCulloch?’ Mae had never heard anyone refer to his boss by her first name. ‘Saying what?’

  ‘She wanted to know exactly what we had. So I told her, and she said she was going to speak to you. She wants us to hand it over to someone else, far as I can tell.’

  ‘Why?’ Mae asked, knowing perfectly well why.

  ‘She was pretty vague. Something to do with “history”,’ she said, miming the speech marks. In her defence, the questions Kit was evidently desperate to ask stayed unspoken. ‘Anyway,’ she said, after a period of time that confirmed to the both of them that Mae was not going to offer further illumination, ‘now you’re here: I got out to Feltham. Where Corsham’s car was, yeah?’

  She tapped on her phone and turned the screen to him. The image was of a car with a lot of past and not much future. Although sections of the rear were more or less intact, the skeletal front end was entirely blackened, the plastic components melted and cracked.

  He handed the phone back. ‘You find out how it got there?’


  ‘Nope. Fishy, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes and no. There’s no parking on the mooring, so it’s likely he’d usually park on-street somewhere. Meaning anyone might have clocked the car not being used, so—’

  ‘So could just be kids, joyriders? It’s old enough to be hotwired without too much trouble.’

  ‘Possible. I’ve got a contact in the CCTV room at the council. I’ll see what he can get.’

  Kit rubbed her face and groaned. ‘Can’t we just have a straight answer to anything?’

  Mae gave her a consolatory nudge. ‘Never know, though. Maybe your next job’ll turn out to be a frenzied knife attack, bloody footprints leading back to the suspect’s house.’

  ‘No, no, that’s not what I mean,’ she said, suddenly serious. ‘I really want to find him. I know he’s an adult and everything, but he’s someone’s son, isn’t he?’

  Mae felt the smile drop from his face. Found his head suddenly crowded with images from the thing he had spent so long burying.

  ‘What?’ Kit asked, putting her beer down. ‘What did I say?’

  With practised calm, he forced the image of his mother away. The video she sent. You’ll always be my son. But—

  The most destructive word in the English language. Three letters that turn everything that comes before them to shit. Makes them not exist at all.

  But.

  ‘Mae?’

  But I’m not coming back.

  ‘Yes. Fine,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’

  She eyed him, then upended the bottle into her mouth again.

  36.

  Ellie

  I stood there on the lamplit street for a good ten minutes, but no amount of calling through Mr Symanski’s letterbox or banging on the door had made him answer me.

  I went halfway up our front steps, then stopped. I didn’t have a key. There was no way I was going to get Mum up to let me in, not after what happened earlier. Left with no other choice, I started the long walk over to Matt’s.

  The pontoon was deserted when I arrived. There was an eerie stillness in there, as if it had been waiting for me. On the top step, delivered via the catflap, was a brown-paper parcel sealed up with wide brown packing tape. The package Mr Jupp had mentioned – he’d found it.

  I turned it over. There was a return address, inked in little black capitals along the short edge. Brighton.

  I realized what I was holding. Its shape and weight were as familiar as a favourite pair of shoes. I couldn’t tear through the tape, so I grabbed a knife from a drawer and made a slit. The first thing my fingers found was a note. Handwritten. Short, with the address again in the lower case of the same small, rounded hand, and a number.

  Dear Matthew, I read. Here it is. Please, please promise me you’ll keep it safe. Give my love to Ellie. She always was a lovely girl. My Jodie would have done anything for her. Lucy.

  Lucy Arden, Jodie’s mother. My Jodie caught like a bone in my throat. Tearing off the paper, I sat down heavily, causing the narrow keel to lurch. The book inside, roughly A5, was covered in purple vinyl. Bent and damaged at the corners, the spine cracked. The thing that made this particular book different from any of the hundreds that would have been printed at the same time was the unmistakable smudging of fingerprint dust.

  It was a diary, an old one, full of handwriting of two different styles. Half of it written by me, the other half by written by my dead best friend. Alternating entries, because we had taken it in turns to be the custodian and hand the book over next time we saw each other, to be read only later, alone, at night. I flicked through the pages, swallowing Siggy down into my clenched stomach. Here and there my words were carved deep into the paper, the pen conveying that early teen emotion – rage, love, sadness – that swelled us to bursting point.

  Reverently I turned to the back. The last entries before the empty pages. In her wide, bubbly hand, her near-hysterical declarations of love. Her many exclamation marks anchored with tiny hearts instead of dots, the same ones that topped her i’s and j’s. She never named the object of her devotion in case her mum ever found the diary, but I knew it. Could hardly miss it.

  Those first few days after Jodie went missing, Cox had called round every night. Wanting to talk to me, but Mum wouldn’t let him. She didn’t want him anywhere near me. She stopped working when it happened; she went with me everywhere. At first she’d insisted it couldn’t have been Siggy. Tried to make me believe that the scrapes I had could have been anything, were nothing to worry about.

  That intermission, between Jodie’s disappearance and what Mum found, was short-lived. Although I wanted to help the investigation, and I knew the only chance we had was to tell the police the truth, it was in those few days that the lies began to take hold. All Mum and I talked about were the details of it, going over and over them. Did I even know we were making it up? Remembering it now it seemed like some grey limbo, but we certainly never said we were talking about lying to the police. The origins of those fabricated details were lost now: the broken streetlight above the spot where I said Jodie got in the car; the argument I swore they’d had about her shoes; Cox calling her a fucking tart. It happened so gradually that the seam was invisible: where what might have happened became what I definitely, honestly saw.

  It wasn’t until Mum found her that we put it all together. The real version. By then, it was too late.

  I had been sleeping when she came in to tell me she’d had an idea of where Jodie might have gone. It had come to her out of the blue: that place she’d wanted to go camping, a few months before. Mum had tried to call Ben Mae about it as soon as she thought of it, she said, but he hadn’t answered. It was late, and he had a young family at home. So she’d just got in the car and gone on her own.

  As she walked around, something had caught her eye, something bright.

  And when she got closer, she’d seen that it was a scrap of Jodie’s hair.

  Mum had cut her hands on the brambles when she pulled her out: she showed me the cuts, the spherical globs of dried blood. There had been a tuft of black hair in Jodie’s hand, she said. I touched the sore spot on my scalp. There was nothing else to say, after that.

  Cox wasn’t an innocent person, but what I’d done to him, what we’d done, with that story when we’d known he hadn’t even been there: it wasn’t OK. What his life must be like now, after all that, was something I just couldn’t think about. The case against him had fallen apart when I did what I did with the knife. Mentally unstable, they said. Unreliable witness. But the damage was done. And he knew I’d lied.

  I folded the book shut and rested my fingertips on the cover. Not from a lack of appetite for it: after so long, I wanted to absorb the thing whole. But I needed to think. I traced a finger over the note from Lucy, who had begged me to stay in touch after her daughter disappeared, but whom my mother had banned me from contacting.

  It’s not safe for us, Mum said. It would only take one slip of the tongue.

  But here was our friendship, preserved, and Matt had found it. He had found Lucy Arden, and she had sent him this. The only memento she had of her daughter’s real thoughts and feelings before she died. The book she had hoped would prove Charles Cox’s guilt, but which was, in the end, dismissed as just the witterings of two teenage girls. Unspecific, circumstantial, anecdotal.

  So why did you have this, Matt? What did you want to know?

  *

  I read until I started to feel sleepy, then I got up, made myself stretch, get my blood moving. Outside, moonlight reflected in the still surface of the water, sending bright reflected ribbons up to dance and twine on the ceiling, and down the walls. I watched them, my lids hanging heavily, desperate for rest now, until suddenly I heard voices on the pontoon.

  Out of the window I saw a family I recognized: residents, Matt’s neighbours, out late. The dad carried the little girl, still in her school clothes, fast asleep against his chest, and the mum softly cajoled the toddler wriggling, a boy with eyes half-closed,
in her arms. The man turned and I saw, draped across his shoulder, something that triggered a snap in my temple. A jacket, cut from camouflage fabric. I hadn’t seen it before: he was in combats, too, and the T-shirt wasn’t brown but khaki. The man was a soldier. I gripped the edge of the kitchen surface and Siggy turned to me, her lifeless eyes hooded.

  My knees crumpled. I dropped onto the floor where they couldn’t see me, and the whisky spilled all over my jeans. I heard them move off, the toddler starting to whine. A flash of that child, the little boy from the dream, ignited behind my eyes and I dug my nails into my palms thinking no, not here. Come on, Ellie

  But it was coming whether I liked it or not. I couldn’t do anything, and the panic and the noise rose up around me like I was there, like Siggy was right there and the boy was right there just looking into my eyes and I can’t help—

  he’s crying because he’s hungry

  he doesn’t understand and you mustn’t

  Breathe – breathe – in for seven

  please leave him alone

  please don’t he’ll be quiet he will he doesn’t understand

  he doesn’t

  no

  don’t

  someone make him stop leave him alone

  don’t hurt him don’t hurt him no no no no no NO

  Cold liquid on my legs, seeping through my jeans

  please I want my mum. Please

  And my eyes were open, and the only sound was my own ragged breath. The image – that scene that was still there, somehow behind my vision – started to fade and then, with every lurch of my heart, the juddering panic slowed. My mouth was locked open, and I could still smell him, the soldier from Siggy’s dream, the smell of blood, all of it thick in my nostrils. Tears cooled down my face as I worked my jaw free. I shuddered, waiting for it to clear.

  When I eventually stood up, I poured what was left of the whisky down the sink. I moved slowly, with Siggy hanging like a smog around me, making me slow, dull, exhausted.

  Midnight came and went. I found a book, not knowing what to do to prevent myself from drifting off. Then the boat shifted in the water and when I sat up again, bolt upright with a gasp, I realized I had fallen asleep. I didn’t know for how long. Minutes? An hour? I was sure I hadn’t moved, but I could feel Siggy, sparking between the layers of my skin. Our skin. I pushed myself up, jumped up and down a few times, flexing and clenching my hands and dispelling her, until I remembered that family, those children sleeping only yards away from where I was. Plenty of the boats had no internal locks at all.