by Kate Simants
‘It’s why I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that he’s manipulating her in some way. She’s a naturally very dependent person, and if you’re asking me, I’d say it has occurred to me that this, whatever it is, going missing, is some kind of game he’s playing with her. I know he was speaking to Lucy Arden, for example. Jodie’s mother.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘I overheard him. After that I … well, it’s not going to reflect very well on me but I’m not going to hide anything from you. I checked his phone. So yes. I knew he was talking to Cox.’
Mae nodded, giving nothing away. ‘And what did you think of that?’
‘What do you think I thought? I told him he might as well give her a rope and have done with it.’
‘Ms Power,’ Kit said, ‘Have you seen him, at all?’
‘Cox?’
‘We understand he may have been in the neighbourhood recently.’
‘Matt’s neighbourhood?’
Kit made a face. ‘This neighbourhood. Here, actually.’
Christine stood up abruptly. Eyes wide, looking between Mae and Kit. ‘You’re telling me he’s stalking us?’
‘Not at all. We wanted to know if you’d seen him.’
Christine pulled her jumper closer around her as if the room had suddenly gone colder. ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do to avoid having to ever see that man again as long as I live.’
‘So you haven’t seen him?’ Kit went on.
‘No.’
‘At work, or on your way home from work?’
‘No.’ Christine gave a slow shake of her head, confused at the question. ‘No, of course not!’ She gave an abrupt, brittle laugh. ‘Do you not think I would have noticed?’
‘Of course, I mean—’
‘What was he doing, watching us?’
Kit consulted her notebook, but Mae knew she was playing for time, framing her statements to minimize alarm. ‘So far we’re just looking at the activity on his vehicle.’
‘What car?’
‘A van, actually. Charles Cox has a silver Volkswagen Transporter registered in his name.’
She got to her feet and pounded along the hall. Mae got up, saw her open the front door, scan the street. When she came back in, she was shaking.
‘I know the one you mean. It’s been there … weeks.’
Mae nodded, and Christine visibly sagged.
‘Does Ellie know?’
Mae cleared his throat. ‘She is aware that there’s a connection. She’s been to see him.’
Christine pressed her lips between her teeth, nodded slowly. Eyes on him. When she spoke again her voice was low, controlled. Not addressed to either or both of them.
‘Please understand this. After Jodie disappeared, we tried to find our balance again, to get back to normal. But Ellie has battles every day of her life that you and I can’t begin to imagine. She doesn’t know who she is going to be from one minute to the next. Just everyday life, things that we don’t even notice, they send her—’ she mimed an explosion. ‘She is fragile. Not that she hasn’t made a fantastic effort to conceal that, of course. The whole façade she does sometimes, the performances I’ve seen her give to strangers, to Matt, even.’ She paused there to throw up her hands. ‘Inspirational. But every time, she’ll come back here at the end of it, and it’s me who drags the blankets out to the front door to wrap her up when she can’t take another step. Me who has to rock her back to sleep when she wakes screaming from the horrifying things she sees in her sleep. She depends entirely upon me. For safety, for comfort, for everything. I live entirely for her. Do you understand that?’
Kit’s notebook was hanging lightly from her fingers, forgotten as she listened. Mae filled his lungs to reply, but Christine was addressing him now and he was unable to interrupt her.
‘After what happened with Jodie, every little thing became a trigger for her. We spent years of our lives repairing the damage you and Sergeant Heath did. Oh, I know,’ she told him, waving away the protest she could see he was about to make, ‘there were other factors. Her friend had disappeared, the whole thing was awful for everyone. Of course it was. But the treatment she got from the police? The accusations, that-that rage your colleague had. And what did you do to stop it? Nothing. I don’t suppose your new colleagues know about it, what you drove Ellie to.’
It took an effort of will to contain the flinch as she mentioned it, and Mae could feel Kit’s eyes on the floor, pointedly not looking at him. What she was talking about wasn’t in her case file, he’d made sure of it.
‘DS Heath was sacked, Christine. I testified about what happened.’
‘And then you walked free.’
He didn’t need to justify it to her. But he found himself saying it anyway, the thing he’d told himself hundreds, thousands of times.
‘I was a junior officer. It was my first case.’ I should have stood up to him, but I didn’t, and I will regret that until the day I die.
‘You could have stopped him. It’s your fault as much as his.’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Christine.’ But the way it came out, no one would believe it, least of all her. Least of all him.
Christine watched them both, Mae’s denial hanging there between them like the blade of a guillotine.
‘This is exactly why we have tried to stay away from you,’ she went on, her voice still in that groove of wrathful calm. ‘You are poison. Do you understand that? And you come back and what are you offering to us? Help? Protection? No. You’re drip feeding fear back into our lives and waiting to see what it will do to her.’
Seeing the rage building, Kit took a step between them. ‘Christine—’
‘No, get away from me. You have no idea what you’re doing to her.’
She was shouting now, her hands balled in stiff fists by her sides. Mae turned his face to rubber, hard and impermeable. He couldn’t hear it. Whatever it was she said, all the hate that she had been carting around for him for what he’d done, he would stand there and feel it ricocheting off the walls until it slowed and lost its power. All he had to do was wait.
But Christine didn’t just shout. She lunged at him: fists on his chest, a hard slap on the side of his face, and then she was kneeling, with Kit next to her, holding her wrists.
‘Christine Power, I’m arresting you on—’
‘No!’ Mae told her. Kit stopped, looked up at him, and he shook his head. Said it again, softly. ‘No. We don’t need to do that. I’m going to go outside, and we’re all going to calm down. All right, Christine?’
She didn’t answer him. As he left the flat, her gaping, hollow sobs followed him down the hallway.
‘We just want to be left alone,’ she was saying. ‘I just want to look after my poor girl and for all of this to go away.’
Kit walked ahead of Mae back to the car. She’d already got into the driving seat, finding the ignition with the keys, before he’d even crossed the road. They sat staring ahead saying nothing, the engine still dormant, for a few moments before she turned to him. Whole torso. He wanted to face her, face it, but he couldn’t.
‘You want to tell me what that was about?’
‘I don’t know, Kit.’
Kit didn’t grace that with a reply. She just waited.
For the first time he found himself wishing it was in the main file, not locked away in Professional Standards somewhere. That way, she’d already have read it, would have already judged him for his part in it on her own time. That way, he wouldn’t have to sit there now in the knowledge that within a few short minutes, her opinion of him was going to nosedive beyond salvation. The car was silent apart from the soft sound of his lips parting, the rushing sound of the deep breath he took before he finally got it out.
He told her the whole thing. About Heath, half-cut from an intensive hour at the pub, losing the plot in the interview room. Blaming her. Telling Ellie she was a nutcase, that she might as well have killed Jodie herself. The FLO had first demanded
Mae step in, but when he had idiotically, pathetically, shamefully deferred to his superior, still believing in chain of command, the FLO had run out into the corridor, calling for assistance.
But by then, the damage was done.
‘And when Ellie got home, she took a kitchen knife to her throat. She lost a huge volume of blood, had to be put in a medical coma. Twenty-one stitches.’
There was no sudden intake of breath from Kit. She kept her eyes on him, listening, her face a mask.
Later, at his tribunal, Heath had claimed he’d been at breaking point, that the booze was killing him, his marriage was over, his kids … All the sob stories at once. The fact remained that his excuses didn’t make any difference to Ellie, who’d hung onto life after her suicide attempt by a thread.
The excuses hadn’t helped him, either. A panel found Ian Heath grossly negligent and he was summarily discharged. Less than a month later he was dead, crushed in his car on an A-road central barrier, five times over the limit.
Kit didn’t interrupt. She didn’t ask questions. When Mae finished, she carried on staring out of the window. She looked furious.
‘You’re not saying anything,’ he said after a while.
She blinked, as if released from a coma, her face lined with the effort of formulating a response.
‘Did it-did it seriously not occur to you to tell me this sooner? Prior to any of this?’
She met his eyes then. It held.
And then she wasn’t pissed off. It had gone, evaporated. Just for that moment, a thread connected. The very edges of him, the raw ends that he’d thought too tattered to do anything but fray further, wound around something of hers and then, somehow, it didn’t all seem so ruined. She looked away and sighed heavily: something that ten minutes previously would have sounded like derision, or frustration, or disappointment. But it wasn’t any of those things.
It was forgiveness.
Kit turned the key in the ignition and lifted her left hand to the gearstick, but instead of moving to find first gear, she let it fall the other side, landing for a moment on his.
‘I’m pretty sure you’re not that man anymore.’
And then she lifted the hand again, the ringing of her phone snapping everything back into sharp normality. She straightened to take the call, but his own focus was slow to shift. The five soft patches where her fingertips had touched his skin shone into him, and he couldn’t have turned them off if he’d tried.
Kit’s call lasted less than a minute, her end of it supported mainly in monosyllables.
‘Yep, right, good. Got it.’ She met Mae’s eye and mouthed got him. ‘You’re sure it’s his? OK. Great. Be right there.’ Finishing the call, she beamed at him. ‘That garage your CCTV guy mentioned? Haringey? It checked out: Cox’s van’s there. They’re just taking it back to the nick.’
‘Fucking A.’
‘Quite.’ She pulled away from the kerb and grinned at him, and there was the sense, to Mae, of the ground levelling after a long climb. Of something like the sun coming up.
50.
Ellie
The sky was shot with charcoal grey, with a low pale sun bleeding wide across the cold stretch of cloud. I hadn’t been to Richmond in years, but it was easy to navigate through its low-rise, high-rent streets and out towards the river.
Bernadette, who I was about to meet, had contacted Samira Anand out of the blue, and could be anyone. I had to keep reminding myself of that fact, and that this trip might be a total waste of time. But as I walked, moving against the flow of commuters and shoppers marching towards the station, I also thought of what Matt had said. That what I believed wasn’t always the truth. I consulted him in my mind. Made myself pitch it, gauged his probable reaction.
She says she’s my aunt, I told him.
But you don’t have an aunt.
That’s what Mum said. Always. Her parents were dead, she was an only child.
I imagined his eyes on me, forehead creased.
Are you saying you can’t trust her?
I waited for Siggy, expecting her to bait me. But all I could find of her was the glowing outline of her, a swirl of anticipation coming from where she usually lay glaring. I pressed on towards the meeting place, increasing my speed.
We’d lived near here once, along the river in Kingston, but it hadn’t ended well. Mum had been noticed in the box factory where she worked nights, some guy saying one night how much she looked like Christine Power, you know, the bird off the news! Next night he’d worked out it really was her. Pestered her all shift. An hour after she got back we had everything in the holdalls, and we were on the night bus to a new hideout – a new home, she said – on the other side of the city before the sun rose.
On the waterfront, the cobbles were glossy under a sheen of recent rain, and the air was cut with metal. I stood with my toes edged right up against the wall that dropped suddenly away to the river below, and watched the water. High tide, almost exactly. A blistered willow leaf floating from the east slowed to a stop on the surface before turning a few lazy circles in the water and drifting back the way it had come.
A string of wrought-iron edged benches lined the stretch of grass set back from the waterfront and I chose one, brushing the worst of the wet away from its narrow planks and spreading out a discarded Metro to sit on.
I waited. A mist of finely sifted drizzle started up and when I shielded my eyes against it, there was a hand on my shoulder.
‘Ellie?’
I squinted up into the rain. Beige wool coat, like she’d said in the text. A knitted hat. But what really identified her was her face: pale skin, intense blue eyes, bright like they were lit from inside.
She could have passed for my mum.
But she took her hand from my shoulder as soon as I lifted my head.
‘Gosh,’ she said, crossing her flat hands at her throat, ‘I do apologize. I’m just waiting for …’ and she let the sentence drift off, running her eyes over my clothes. Confused, but I couldn’t see why: I was wearing exactly what I’d described.
‘Ellie Power. It’s me,’ I told her, rising.
But she took a step back, shaking her head in quick, worried movements.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I-I’m sorry. I think there’s been some kind of mistake.’
51.
Mae
The car park of the station was floodlit and alive with activity when Kit pulled the Focus in. The two of them got out, but before Mae’d taken a step, McCulloch spotted him.
‘Just the man,’ she said, striding over. She steered him out of earshot of his colleagues.
For a brief moment he considered his options. But his boss was someone who appreciated directness, so he’d be direct.
He said it before she got a chance to say her piece. ‘I want to see this one through, Ma’am.’
‘Ah. So that’s why you’re avoiding my calls.’
There was zero point denying it. ‘I know I should have told you the Powers were involved but—’
‘Yes. You should.’
‘But I promise you, I don’t have skin in this game. I’m just treating it like any other case.’
She looked at him for a moment before softening into a gentle laugh. ‘Come on, Ben. No skin in the game. You’re not a fucking android. But I wasn’t going to take you off the case, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No. I wanted to give you an out, if you wanted one. Nobody would have to know if you decided you’d rather—’
‘I really don’t.’
She assessed that for a moment, her eyes narrowed, then allowed it with a small wave of her hand. ‘Remember I do actually care about you, Mae. What happened before was … well, it was a tough thing. One of the toughest.’
He kicked a stone. ‘Long time ago now.’
‘OK, Ben. Received.’ Then, happy to change the subject, she led him over to the secure garage. ‘So. This van. Interesting bit of kit.’
A couple
of gloved and shoe-covered CID newbies, same intake as Kit, were bagging and tagging out of the back of a silver Volkswagen Transporter. It looked expensive, pristine, not a mark anywhere, its windows heavily tinted. Kit appeared beside him.
‘No. Flipping. Way,’ she said, eyes wide.
Now Mae had never been much of a surfer, and he could safely say he’d never camped in his life, but from what he understood, when these vans were converted they were ordinarily kitted out like tiny homes: foldaway beds, miniature kitchens, cupboards for food and bedding.
Not this one.
This one was something else. There was a yoga mat rolled up in one corner and strapped to the partial bulkhead that separated the front seats from the main space. The rest of the van was given over entirely to what appeared to be decks and drives. There was a laptop, a deep little monitor with a needle dial on the front of it, and a couple of compact little decks, like baby versions of DJ equipment.
With extreme care, the guy in the van was contorting himself into the corner behind the driver’s seat to get a picture of what appeared to be a dish, a couple of feet in diameter, standing on its edge and secured at the top and bottom so that the rim of the dome faced the blacked-out window of the van. At its centre was a stubby cylinder, and attached behind was a rod, bent down at both ends like handlebars.
Kit turned to her DCI with a face like she’d just struck oil. ‘You know what that is?’
McCulloch shrugged. ‘High-end divining rod? Dildo?’
‘Parabolic microphone,’ Kit said. ‘Saw one on some spy thing, they were …’ But she trailed off, locking eyes with Mae, who said, ‘That guy. The neighbour.’
What was it he’d said? Something about surveillance.
They’d laughed at him.
‘Someone going to fill me in?’ McCulloch asked. ‘What neighbour?’
‘The guy under the Powers’ flat, he was pretty agitated about us being … I don’t remember, Secret Service, was it?’
‘MI5,’ Kit said, screwing up her face in apology. ‘We, ah, we thought he was nuts.’