A Promise to the Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a brilliant twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  He stopped as a sudden and unsettling uncertainty swept through him. There was something not right about this, not at this time of night.

  If he turned back now, would he be able to find help elsewhere?

  He stepped tentatively closer. He was going to speak, but as he neared the van, he saw something that kept the words held down, choking every syllable in the back of his throat. The blur of shapes began to sharpen, forming a clear picture that stood out against the darkened background. For a moment he couldn’t move, stuck fast to the ground, his fear rendering him immobile. He needed to get away from this place. He needed help.

  He turned to run.

  Through the feeling of terror that swelled in his chest like the onset of a heart attack, his legs pushed hard, his feet pounding the ground as he raced back to the lane. A rush of blood filled his head, so that all he could hear was his own pulse throbbing in his ears. Reaching the gate, he turned back on to the lane, fighting to hear the sound of footsteps following him once he hit tarmac. There was nothing.

  He sprinted as fast as he could, trying to work out how far away the car was. Then he remembered. There was no petrol. Panic gripped him, pushing frightened tears behind his eyes. Sprinting so hard for so long was making him feel sick, but he knew he couldn’t stop. He started to recognise shapes in the darkness, the silhouettes of hedgerows he had passed on his way up. Not far now, he told himself. Don’t slow down.

  Straining his eyes against the flood of night that swallowed the lane ahead, he waited for the sight of his car to emerge. And then he heard it: a low rumble of engine noise in the distance that was soon behind him, stalking him. He was thrown into the glare of the van’s headlights as they lit the road ahead of him. He spotted his car, so near now yet still too far away. The rev of an engine. The screech of brakes.

  Then his body was thrown into the air as though he was weightless.

  Two

  Detective Inspector Alex King and Detective Constable Chloe Lane stood at the side of the car and watched the white-suited scene-of-crime officer who was dusting the passenger-side door for fingerprints. The glare of the spotlights projected on to the man and his surroundings illuminated them like a studio set, as though the scene was set up with props and the people who moved within it were merely actors. The mountain road had been cordoned off for half a mile in each direction, though it was not much in use at that hour anyway. It was past 2.30 in the morning and the area was disconcertingly quiet despite the flurry of activity that had ensued upon the arrival of the emergency services. A team of officers was performing zone searches in the woodland surrounding them, their torch beams igniting life in the darkness.

  ‘So much for a night off,’ Alex said, giving Chloe a sympathetic smile. The younger woman had spent that afternoon planning her evening: an Indian takeaway for one and a film on the sofa. Having exhausted the subject of the limited vegetarian options available at Chloe’s local Indian restaurant, conversation at the station had drifted to debate about whether a box set on Netflix was preferable to a film; the disagreement interrupting the monotony of a relatively quiet day. Both detectives realised they should have basked in the rare air of calm while it lasted.

  ‘Remind me not to take meal recommendations from Dan again.’

  ‘Not good?’

  Chloe pulled a face and shoved her hands into her pockets. The air was bitingly cold and they stood with their coats zipped to their chins and arms folded across their chests. When the call had come in, Alex had been asleep, and she had pulled on yesterday’s clothes, left abandoned on the chest of drawers in the corner. Somehow, even at this hour of the morning, Chloe managed to look pristine, her newly darkened hair swept back into a neat bun at the back of her head. The 999 call had come in at around 1.30, after a passing motorist had noticed the damage to the windscreen of the car, which was seemingly abandoned at the roadside. Unprepared to face the cold, the darkness or whatever else might have been lurking beyond the safety of his own vehicle, the driver had stayed in his car at the junction with the main road a further mile down the lane, where he had been able to get a signal to make the call. He’d had the right idea, Alex thought; instead, it had been left to the first attending officer to confront the scene that awaited them.

  Alex looked through the window at the girl inside the car, who lay slumped face down between the front seats, her blonde hair matted with her own dark blood. She was wearing a dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the kind of reality television programme Alex could never understand the popularity of, and which seemed inappropriate for an early-March night – short, strappy and a size too small. Despite her heavy make-up, her skin managed to look almost translucent in death. A single bullet wound to the back of the head had ended her life. It had been fired through the front windscreen.

  The first attending officer had given Alex the handbag that had been retrieved from the floor of the car: a small silver clutch with a long metal chain handle. Inside, there was a candyfloss-pink lipstick, a tube of mascara, a mobile phone, a set of house keys, two ten-pound notes and a small collection of coins. Zipped into an inside pocket at the back of the bag was a bank card and a driver’s licence. The photograph was unmistakably that of the girl slumped between the seats of the car. Stacey Cooper. Twenty years old.

  A barrage of questions presented themselves, jostling for priority. What had the girl been doing on the mountain road at this time of night? Where had she been going? Had she been alone? And if not, why was no one with her now?

  Chloe leaned towards the car and took a closer look through the driver’s-side window. She had her own set of questions. ‘If she was trying to escape from someone, why didn’t she just drive away? Unless she was trying to escape from someone she was with.’

  Alex didn’t reply, for the moment lost in her own thoughts. Despite nearly two decades spent in the police force, she knew she would never get used to sights such as this. She didn’t want to become desensitised to it, as she’d seen happen to other detectives. Recent thoughts of her imminent departure from the force returned to the forefront of her mind. More so than ever, she knew she was doing the right thing. She had hoped to leave at a quiet time, though she realised those times were few and far between. Now, she thought, as she looked at the poor girl whose life had been brought to an end so violently, she wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  She pulled a pair of disposable latex gloves from her pocket and slipped them on before opening the driver’s door. The key to the 2004 silver Citroën C4 was still in the ignition. She turned it, expecting to hear the sound of the engine kicking into life. Instead, a low, dull spluttering sound emerged. She glanced at the dashboard. Empty.

  ‘She’d run out of petrol.’

  Scanning the inside of the car, she spotted a pair of high-heeled shoes lying in the passenger footwell. The angle of the girl’s body – her right knee twisted awkwardly against the handbrake and her left leg stretched out towards the pedals – suggested she had tried to get into the back seat from the passenger side of the vehicle rather than the driver’s side.

  ‘Actually,’ she amended, ‘someone else had run out of petrol. I don’t think anyone would attempt to drive in those shoes, do you?’ She reached into the pocket of the driver-side door and retrieved a mobile phone. When she pressed a button at the side of the handset, the screen came to life with a photograph of a young man smiling for the camera, gripping what looked like a sports trophy. He was handsome in a way Alex imagined young women might find attractive, with a fashionable haircut and eyes that seemed to look beyond what they saw.

  ‘Boyfriend?’ suggested Chloe, taking the phone from her.

  ‘Looks like. The car’s probably his then.’ Alex studied the windscreen from the inside. They would need ballistics to analyse the hole that had been made in the glass, but the size of it and the damage that had been incurred as a result suggested that the weapon used had been fired close to the vehicle. An expert would be able to tell them more; hopef
ully they’d also be able to identify the make and model of weapon used.

  Placing a gloved hand on the back of the driver’s seat and leaning over the girl’s body, Alex stretched to study the sole of the victim’s left foot.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Chloe asked, watching her.

  ‘I’m thinking she’d been outside the car at some point. Look.’ Alex got out and Chloe took her place on the driver’s seat. She leaned over and dipped her head to look at the girl’s bare feet. The pale soles were speckled with gravel and dirt, a few tiny stones still embedded in her skin.

  ‘Why would she get out of the car?’

  ‘To help with something, possibly.’ Alex stepped aside as the SOCO who had been scrutinising the other side of the car moved towards them. His brush worked the length of the window frame, his wrist deft in his task. ‘But what?’ she added, thinking aloud.

  ‘They run out of petrol,’ Chloe said slowly, backing out of the vehicle, ‘and he gets out of the car.’

  ‘The boyfriend?’

  Chloe nodded. ‘She then gets out too, following him perhaps, and they argue. Maybe she was annoyed with him for forgetting to fill up. Things get out of hand, he turns on her, she tries to escape and then …’

  ‘Why does he get out of the car?’ Alex challenged. ‘If he can see from the dash that they’ve run out of petrol, he doesn’t need to get out and look at anything. I don’t know,’ she said, her top lip curling. ‘Shooting someone over an argument about an empty petrol tank seems a bit extreme to me.’

  There were so many questions they needed to find answers to before they could draw any conclusions about the chain of events that had led to the young woman’s death. Where had the couple been? Where were they heading? Did the man own a firearm, and if so, why had he been carrying it?

  ‘He doesn’t look the type to carry a gun.’

  Chloe gave voice to the same thought Alex had been harbouring. Although she knew that killers came in every shape and size, and that assumptions based on appearance could prove dangerously misleading, the young man who had smiled at her from the lit screen of the mobile phone looked an unlikely suspect for a gun owner.

  ‘DI King.’

  Turning, Alex saw a uniformed officer approaching.

  ‘There are tyre marks just up the lane. Can’t tell if they’re old ones or not.’

  ‘I’ll be there in a second.’ She turned back to the car, studying the hole the bullet had made in the windscreen. If the gun hadn’t belonged to Stacey’s boyfriend, then that meant someone else had been there with them, either someone known to the couple or someone who was a stranger. For the moment, they had to assume that this girl and her boyfriend were the only people who knew what had happened up there.

  In which case, one question seemed more pressing than any other.

  Where was the boyfriend now?

  Three

  Kieran Robinson had been missing for sixty-three hours. His sister knew this because the last CCTV sighting of him had been recorded at 23.36 three nights earlier, and as no one had seen him since that time, to her mind that was the moment he had officially become a missing person. As the minute hand on the clock above her parents’ sink clicked forward, its sound echoing around the otherwise silent kitchen, she added to the time accordingly.

  Hannah Robinson was familiar with the expression of being able to hear a pin drop, but in this instance it didn’t seem at all suitable. The silence in the room was noisy and ugly and there was a tinny sound reverberating in her ears that she knew would grow as the day went on, as it had during those previous few days. Later, in bed, the noise would build to a crescendo and a pounding headache would keep her awake until the small hours. She would sleep a little, and then the pattern would repeat itself upon waking. They would do the same thing tomorrow: sit there, wait, achieve nothing.

  Hannah knew how all this worked. She’d watched enough television shows and heard enough similar stories to know that time meant everything and that their lives would now be structured around it, dictated by the passing minutes. Every hour that passed in which Kieran wasn’t found would inevitably chip away another piece of the hope that he would turn up alive.

  ‘Would either of you like a cup of tea?’

  Hannah glared at the family liaison officer, who seemed to have done nothing but boil the kettle since she’d arrived. She kept giving them empty reassurances that she would let them know as soon as there were any updates, yet all she had been able to offer them so far were regular top-ups of sugar and caffeine, which Hannah now felt sure were contributing to the migraines that were plaguing her.

  The truth of it was, her own guilt was as much to blame as the FLO’s ineptitude. She should be out there, she thought, doing something constructive; contributing something that might help put right what had gone wrong. She just didn’t know where she should start.

  She watched her mother, who was standing at the sink with her back to the room. She had recently had her blonde hair cut: a short, feathered chop that made her already prominent features look even sharper. It hadn’t been appreciated when Hannah had pointed out as much. Her mother had reacted with a comment about Hannah’s own purple hair – some smart-ass remark about the girl from that kids’ book who got blown up like a blueberry. An argument had followed, as could have been predicted by anyone in the house. It was typical of her mother to go that one step further, to make it even more personal.

  The sink at which Linda Robinson was standing was filled with dirty dishes and soapy water that had been left to go flat and cold; she wasn’t there with the intention of doing anything, only with the aim of staring out at the garden so that she didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. For countless hours during the past few days, Hannah had had to sit in the living room and listen to the sound of her mother wailing in the bedroom, unable to force herself up the stairs to offer any sort of comfort. They didn’t have that sort of relationship; they never had. She was there, wasn’t she? Under the circumstances, that was the best anyone could expect of her.

  It was her father’s job to be there supporting her mother, but yet again he had chosen to make himself scarce. He had a habit of hiding from his problems, though Hannah would never have anticipated that even he would hide away at a time like this. She wondered what her mother had done or said to keep him away. Regardless of his own failings, Linda had to be responsible for his absence at some level.

  ‘When is anyone going to do anything useful?’ Scraping the stool back across the tiled floor, Hannah stood and retrieved her mobile phone from the top of the microwave, her burgundy Doc Marten boots clomping across the kitchen tiles. She opened Facebook and scanned the posts relating to Kieran, but there was nothing new other than the wave of false pity that was currently swamping her newsfeed.

  OMG, I only saw him last week.

  Hope you’re okay hun xx

  Thoughts are with the family – let me know if there’s anything I can do xx

  All so meaningless, Hannah thought. She especially loathed the offers of help, as if anything these people could do would in any way improve the situation. She resented the gesture, knowing it was never meant anyway. People only ever said it when they knew full well there was sod all they could do and the offer would go unaccepted.

  The FLO moved to Hannah’s side, apparently immune to her hostility. She wasn’t much older than Hannah, though the buttoned-up cardigan and the 1990s bob hairstyle made her look as though she could easily be two decades older.

  ‘I promise you everything we can do is being done.’

  ‘Waiting for his body to resurface, you mean?’ Hannah stared the woman out, waiting for her to deny the accusation. She wasn’t able to: it had already been said too many times. Kieran’s mobile phone signal had been traced to the water around Cardiff Bay, where he had been on a night out that Thursday. Drunk was the assumption everyone had made. He’d had too much to drink, fallen into the water and drowned. Simple.

  Only Hannah didn’t bel
ieve it. They could keep saying it, but she would never accept it as a possibility. Something just didn’t ring true. His body would have been found, for one.

  And there was something else that didn’t sit right with her. She could count on one hand, with a couple of fingers to spare, the number of times she had seen her brother drunk. The first had been on his fifteenth birthday, when he’d had three pints of snakebite and vomited all over the carpet in their mother’s hallway. The second, not long after that, had been at a barbecue at a neighbour’s house, where Hannah was certain Kieran had got drunk just to wind up their parents, who had spent the day arguing over something so insignificant she wasn’t now able to recall it. The third and last time, over five years ago, had involved a litre of vodka and a game of spin the bottle, which Kieran had apparently repeatedly lost. In a drunken stupor and smelling of kebab meat and garlic sauce, he had turned up at Hannah’s student flat in tears, confessing that he had kissed one of his male friends. The following morning he had made her promise that she would never tell anyone, and that they would never speak of it again. They never had.

  Although she had seen him drunk, on none of those occasions would Hannah have said her brother was out of control; not so out of control that he might have injured himself or not been able to get help had it been needed. His experiences were no different to any of those of most other teenagers, and the years of sobriety and healthy living that followed suggested he had learned from his mistakes; something others took decades to do and some never achieved at all. He wasn’t drunk on Thursday, Hannah was convinced of that if nothing else. He might have consumed alcohol, but to her mind there was simply no possibility that he had been drunk enough to fall into the water at Cardiff Bay and drown.