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

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘I’ve not managed to speak to him yet, but his wife seemed guarded about it. Judging from her tone, I’d say any blame lies with him, or at least she thinks so.’

  ‘So if he’s been in Bali for the past two weeks, he’s out of the frame?’

  ‘Looks like.’ Dan sighed and gave her an optimistic smile. ‘Unless we’re looking for more than one person. Onwards and upwards, I suppose.’

  Chloe felt her mobile phone vibrate in her pocket. She had a WhatsApp message from Scott: a photograph of a vegetable curry he had told her he was going to attempt. He had stayed at her house the previous night, with a day off work in prospect and no intention of moving any further than to the kitchen. She smiled when she noticed the edge of his face at the side of the photo, grinning over the curry while giving the camera a thumbs-up.

  Looks amazing, she texted back when Dan had returned to his desk. Shame I probably won’t be back in time to enjoy it. X

  A moment later she received a reply. Still no closer? Keep going. I’ll put some in the fridge for you. X

  She returned her phone to her pocket and her attention to the computer screen, pushing to one side the momentary pang of resentment she felt at being kept away from the comforts of home. This was the life she had chosen, and she had chosen it with good reason. She couldn’t allow her recently discovered happiness with Scott to get in the way of that. There was a way of making both lives work for her, and whatever approach was needed, she was determined to find it.

  Shifting her thoughts back to the case, she continued her search. At the sound of her name, she turned to find Alex heading for her desk.

  ‘We need to tighten our focus on Darren Robinson.’

  Chloe raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘His daughter’s just been in. She heard him arguing with Kieran last Wednesday evening.’

  Chloe pushed her chair back from her desk. ‘And she didn’t think to tell us this sooner?’

  ‘Didn’t think it was relevant, apparently. Didn’t want to drop Darren in the shit, more like.’

  Chloe glanced at the padded envelope Alex was holding. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No idea. Any joy?’ she asked, gesturing to the computer screen.

  With a shake of her head, Chloe scrolled through the list of search results as a demonstration of the scale of the task she had ahead of her. ‘Like pissing in the wind, as you would say.’

  Not for the first time, she found herself unable to keep her eyes from Alex’s scars: the pale streaks that snaked up her colleague’s neck and face. There was a part of Chloe that still blamed herself for what had happened. Even though Alex had reassured her that her injuries would have been far worse if not for Chloe’s intervention, Chloe had relived those moments over and over, constantly seeking a different outcome, in which Alex’s suffering was erased entirely and the scars ceased to exist.

  Alex ripped the corner of the envelope and dragged her finger across the sealed edge. ‘I guessed as much. Sorry. We have to try.’

  Looking back to the screen, Chloe began to explain the complications they were facing. ‘God knows how many of this particular range of gun have been sold. Shooting things is a lot more popular than I thought. Fancy finding that a source of enjoyment: going out and having a pop at things just for fun. I don’t understand how—’

  ‘Fuck!’

  Chloe turned to Alex, the room falling abruptly silent. A couple of members of the team seemed to be holding back sniggers at the unexpected expletive: Alex rarely swore, and certainly didn’t make a habit of doing so while at work.

  But Alex wasn’t laughing. She had jolted back from Chloe’s desk as though she had been bitten, dropping something on the floor and staring at it as though waiting for it to attack again. Chloe followed her horrified gaze and felt a wave of bile rise in her throat.

  At Alex’s feet, resting on the hard carpet of the office floor, lay a finger.

  Twenty

  Dear Elise,

  I’ve just read over my previous letter and I’m sorry if nothing seems to make sense. By the time I’ve completed this, I hope things will be clearer. I need to make them clear as much for my own sake as for yours, if only to make peace with the decisions I’ve taken. When you return to me, I want us to start anew, put all this behind us, firmly in the past. I think it’s possible. I have to believe that it is possible.

  Not long before you left, you asked me a question I never answered. Do you remember what it was? I am able to recall it as though it was only yesterday. It was a Saturday morning, still before sunrise; you were sitting in the kitchen with my newspaper open on the table, your attention fixed on its contents as you sipped your first cup of tea of the day. If I close my eyes, I can imagine you now as vividly as I saw you that morning, as though you are still right here in front of me. You looked so beautiful in the dawn light as it came through the window.

  You were reading an article about the divorce of a famous couple: two Hollywood actors who between them should have had the world. You said, ‘Well that’s it, then … if they can’t make it, we’re all doomed.’ There was a hint of a smile on your face, yet your words were soaked with such sadness. And then you asked me something I tried to ignore – something I perhaps should have just answered there and then.

  ‘How many people have you loved before?’

  I suppose it was the unexpectedness of the question that made me falter – it wasn’t the sort of thing we asked one another – and I remember trying to find anything I could as a distraction. It was untrodden territory for us and I was scared to step upon it for fear of detonating a landmine that would explode between us and rip the two of us apart. I was a coward then, but I am braver now. You have made me stronger. If you were here, I would give you the answer to your face.

  One.

  Before I loved you, I had only loved one other.

  Benny x

  Twenty-One

  The house looked lifeless, with no sign of any lights on inside, but Darren knew that Linda was at home: her car was parked on the driveway and she rarely went anywhere without it. He pulled his van up alongside it and cut the engine, waiting a few moments before opening the door. Everything was going to come out sooner or later: secrets always did in the end. They had always known that, and yet they had kept theirs locked between them as though they were strong enough to hold it together by themselves. The police were too suspicious of him for it not to emerge eventually. His marriage was dead in the water; it had been for some time now. There was nothing left to lose by telling Linda the truth.

  The sound of the front door closing behind him seemed too loud in the silence of the hallway. He pushed off his boots and kicked them to the side, padding to the kitchen in his socks. Her silhouette at the breakfast bar made him jump. He had thought that maybe she was upstairs in bed; instead, he found her sitting in the darkness, wearing her coat. He hadn’t seen her since Saturday, and in that time she seemed to have changed so that he almost failed to recognise her. Linda Robinson, once so confident and headstrong – the things he had loved about her that had become the things he had grown to loathe – was now a broken woman, deflated by events of the past five days.

  ‘Where have you been?’ It seemed she was beyond anger; in its place, her voice was exhausted, defeated.

  ‘Kieran knew,’ he said, deciding that wasting time would only prolong the inevitable. She was going to hate him regardless of the order the words came out or how he attempted to soften the blow. She hated him already.

  In the darkness, Linda’s eyes homed in on him, her disbelief quickly replaced by panic. ‘Knew? What do you mean, he knew? Knew what?’

  Her husband’s inability to look her in the eye and the wordless response that seemed to scream through the silence of the kitchen gave her the answer she needed. It had always been her greatest fear, ever since Kieran had been a little boy. She should have told him herself, but there had never seemed to be a right tim
e. The longer it went on – the more weeks that had rolled into months and months that had grown into years – the easier it had become just to say nothing. It had seemed harmless, until now.

  ‘Wednesday night. I came home and he was upstairs in our bedroom.’

  Linda looked ghostly in the darkness, her face paling further with her husband’s every word. ‘What was he doing in our bedroom? He never goes in there.’

  ‘He said he needed his birth certificate. For an application form or something.’

  She was shaking her head, disbelieving. ‘He would have asked me for it.’ It couldn’t be true; Kieran would have said something to her. One of them would have told her at the time.

  But why would they? she thought. Darren was barely there any more, and when he was, they hardly spoke to one another. Kieran had become increasingly distant, shutting himself up in his room for days on end or simply disappearing out of the house, always secretive about where he had been and what he had been doing. It seemed she was the last person anyone in her family wanted to confide in.

  ‘I don’t know what he was doing in there. I only know that when I went upstairs, he was furious with me, calling me all sorts. When he left, I just thought he needed time alone to calm down.’

  ‘You didn’t think to go after him, after what he’d found out?’

  ‘I just told you,’ Darren said, his frustration rising, ‘I thought it was best to give him some space.’

  Linda stood and pushed the stool back, its legs scraping across the tiled floor. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘I thought he’d just gone somewhere to cool down for a few days. I thought maybe when he came home he’d have come round … that you wouldn’t have to know anything about it.’

  Linda looked at him, incredulous, before turning to the fridge and taking a bottle of wine, already half finished, from its door. The yellow strip light cast a momentary glow across the room before she closed the fridge again, taking a glass from the cupboard and filling it. ‘I bet you wish he’d disappeared years ago, don’t you?’

  Darren didn’t respond. There was no right answer: whatever he said was only going to make her angrier. She knew how he felt, how he had always felt; he had never been anything but honest with her, in those early days at least. Going over it again now wasn’t going to get either of them anywhere. It wasn’t going to help bring Kieran home.

  ‘You need to tell the police. It might help them find him.’

  He couldn’t speak to the police, but he couldn’t explain that to Linda. ‘That probably won’t help,’ he said, gesturing to the wine.

  With a dexterity her husband hadn’t realised she possessed, Linda swung around and threw the glass at him. He managed to dodge its path, darting to one side as it hit the wall behind him and smashed into pieces.

  ‘You never loved him!’ she screamed, her eyes flashing with a rage that was animalistic. ‘You never even tried to!’

  Darren stayed where he was, wine and broken shards of glass at his feet. He had never seen her like this. Any anger Linda had previously felt had manifested itself in bouts of silent isolation; when she was upset, she’d preferred to be alone with her misery, where she could let it fester and grow. He had never witnessed any violence from her, but he knew that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. People were capable of anything under the wrong circumstances.

  ‘That’s not fair. And you know it’s not true.’

  ‘Isn’t it? I know it, Hannah knows it – Kieran especially knows it. No wonder he’s the way he is.’

  With a shake of his head, Darren stepped back and flicked the kitchen light switch. They were thrown into the harsh glare of the bulbs that hung between them, almost naked but for the copper mesh that encased them like metallic webs. He had always hated those light fittings. He hated a lot about the house, but it was easier to just let Linda have her own way. Now, too late, he realised that letting Linda have her own way was only easier in the short term.

  ‘You keep blaming me, but the truth is, Kieran’s the way he is because of you. You’ve babied him, mollycoddled him like some little mummy’s boy, and now he’s a grown man who doesn’t have a clue about real life or how to stand on his own two feet. The same goes for Hannah. Why do you think she acts like she does, always angry at something, always looking to start an argument with anyone who looks at her the wrong way? You’ve smothered Kieran and done fuck all for Hannah, and that’s why the pair of them are so fucked up. You want to blame someone for the state of those kids, Linda, then take a look a bit closer to home. You know, maybe Kieran’s buggered off somewhere just to get some peace and bloody quiet, to escape your clutches. He’s got the right idea—’

  Suddenly Linda lunged to the draining board and grabbed a knife left propped in the cutlery tray. Darren barely had time to acknowledge her movement, let alone respond, until he felt a searing pain and looked down to see the knife embedded in his body.

  He stared in horror at his stomach, his eyes widening at the small circle of blood seeping through his clothing, the shock of the sudden and unexpected pain rendering him almost incapable of speech.

  ‘You crazy bitch,’ he gasped, his fingers reaching for the handle, his palm soaked red with his own blood. ‘What have you done?’

  Twenty-Two

  The team gathered early on Wednesday morning with the news that the mother of missing Kieran Robinson had stabbed his father the previous evening having spread faster than nits in a junior school. Alex had found out on her way to the family home: officers had attended a call about a domestic incident, and Darren had already been taken to hospital, where he had undergone emergency surgery. Linda Robinson was currently in custody facing a charge of attempted murder. It was a turn of events that no one had expected.

  ‘Do we know the details of what happened?’ asked Dan.

  ‘Not yet,’ Alex told him. ‘I’m hoping Darren might be a bit more forthcoming than his wife. She’s currently refusing to speak to anyone.’

  Alex had been to the custody suite to see her earlier, but Linda Robinson was refusing to so much as make eye contact. Alex felt an underlying sympathy for the woman. Her son had been missing now for almost a week; during that time, her husband appeared to have done nothing to support her, and had indeed made himself a suspect. Perhaps Linda too thought he was involved in their son’s disappearance in some way. Until she was able to speak with Darren, Alex doubted she was going to get any closer to the truth.

  ‘Think she knows he’s involved in their son’s disappearance somehow?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, but why wouldn’t she just tell us?’

  ‘Is she protecting someone else?’ Dan suggested. ‘What if incriminating her husband means exposing her daughter? Hannah lied to us as well. Whole family’s starting to look dodgy.’

  Alex pressed her fingertips to her forehead. ‘I thought the same. But I don’t know. Hannah’s angry, but I think that’s just her default setting. I just can’t see her being involved in any of this.’ But it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve been wrong, a voice in her head told her.

  ‘What’s Darren’s current condition?’ Jake asked.

  ‘He had emergency surgery during the night, but he’s currently stable. Chloe and I will be going to the hospital later to speak to him.’

  ‘So we’ve no idea what happened between him and his wife?’

  ‘Not yet, but Darren Robinson remains our focus at the moment. I’d like us to take a closer look at him – let’s get access to his emails and phone history. There’s something going on there, something I reckon Linda knows about.’

  Alex paused and looked up at the most recent addition to the evidence board: a photo of the severed finger that she had received the previous afternoon. ‘You all know about this,’ she said, pointing at the image. ‘The print has been taken, but no match has shown up on the system. Our victim at number 14 had a finger removed either prior to or following death. It’s impossible that the finger I received yest
erday belongs to the same victim – this one has only been recently removed from its owner. We need to consider the timing. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it – me receiving that finger just after a body with a finger removed is found?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Dan asked. ‘You think the two are connected in some way?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Alex admitted. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences though.’

  ‘The finger couldn’t have been frozen all this time?’ Jake asked. ‘Someone’s kept it and sent it now they know the remains have been uncovered?’

  Though Alex had considered this herself, it was impossible. The remains were decades old, but there was no doubting that the finger she had pulled from that envelope was recently removed. So who the hell did it belong to, and why had someone chosen to send it to her?

  She shook her head. ‘Not for the amount of time we’re looking at here. I’ve reviewed the CCTV footage from the front of the station.’ She leaned forward and clicked on an image, projecting it on to the screen behind her. ‘We need to find out who this young man is.’

  The screenshot from the CCTV footage showed a boy aged between eleven and thirteen standing next to a bike. With one hand he gripped the handlebars as he propped the bike against the side of the station’s front steps; in the other he was holding the envelope that Alex had received the previous afternoon.

  ‘Let’s get this image out to the public, please. Someone knows who this boy is. My guess is he didn’t have a clue what was in that envelope. Right,’ she said, shifting the focus of the meeting, ‘we’ve had the DNA results back for the body under the patio.’ She looked at Dan. ‘Have you managed to run the results through the database?’

  Dan had been the first member of the team Alex had seen that morning when she’d arrived at the station. They had been eagerly awaiting any possible results from the DNA testing, with both detectives intrigued by the potential history surrounding the mysterious and macabre discovery. It was likely that whoever the person beneath the patio was, he had been reported missing at some point. Someone had been missing him for all these years, grieving for a son, a brother, a boyfriend, the not-knowing making it impossible for them to ever find closure. Now, decades later, this person could be returned to their family for the ending they deserved.