‘Right.’
‘We thought it was because something bad happened to her here, when she was a teenager. That maybe this was the location in which she was once abused.’
Inside the wall cavity she leaned across the large metal duct and started bashing the vent that capped off the end of the duct, trying to dislodge it.
‘Queenie said Cassie ran away because she knew someone was hiding something.’
A commotion in the corridor. The thump and scuffle of security guards arriving. They stepped inside and two of them approached her warily.
‘Put down the hammer, Miss Gooch.’
She looked up and blinked, trying to focus. When she realised who they were she laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said, and carried on with what she was doing.
‘If you don’t put the hammer down we’ll have to forcibly restrain you.’ They were moving closer to her, but Jessamine wasn’t fazed.
‘Malcolm’s right. There is something pressing on the electrics, something that’s been there for over a decade.’
She got down on her knees and reached inside the duct. Above her, the bust of Lord Reith looked on, his forehead high and wide.
‘I thought Queenie was talking nonsense. I was wrong. What she was saying, what she was trying to tell me, made complete sense. I just wasn’t listening properly.’
The security guards signalled to each other and then they pounced. Taking one leg each they grabbed Jessamine and pulled her away from the wall cavity. But as she emerged from the duct they saw that she had brought something with her. A crumbling roll of fabric. She pulled it into her lap and something brown and withered slipped out and onto the studio carpet. The security guards recoiled in horror.
‘Queenie wasn’t talking about someone hiding something that had happened, she was talking about some thing. A physical thing.’ She considered the mummified feet and toes now poking out of the bottom of the fabric, only just identifiable inside a pair of small sandals. ‘Whoever “he” was – and, thanks to those production logs, I’ve got a pretty good idea – Cassie saw him hiding a body.’
2003
Rowena
I make my way along the towpath. To my left is the canal, the water still and black. To my right is the embankment, thick with cow parsley. It has spent all summer growing onto the path and it’s impossible to avoid the tickly overhang of its white flowers.
I pick up the pace. I am to meet Leo under Duke’s Cut, a bridge a short way from here. In my back jeans pocket is the map I drew marking the location of the body. I’m going to show it to him and he’s promised we’ll come up with a plan about how best to tell the police. He agrees, it doesn’t matter how famous they are, we have to make sure the people responsible for Billy’s murder are brought to justice.
I pass a lock. The water level on the other side is much lower. Metal ladders fixed to the wall start to appear at regular intervals. They have the same looped white handles you use to climb down into the deep end at the swimming pool. I guess they’re there to help the people on boats come ashore. Ahead is a small bridge. A couple pass underneath and, although they aren’t talking loudly, it amplifies their voices and the sound echoes into the air.
I’ve decided that after this is over I’m done. No more parties, no more men. Most importantly, no more booze. No matter how much it dulls the edges. I’ve seen what it can do to people, what it’s starting to do to Queenie.
I saw her last three nights ago when the celebrity dropped me off outside her Brixton flat. Throwing up like that turned out to be the best thing I could have done. It meant he drove me there without so much as a squeeze of my thigh. It took a while to wake her. I thought it was because it was so late but when she let me inside I saw the stuff on her night table. Empty vodka bottles, old squares of foil, blackened in the middle. That was why I hadn’t seen her around these last few weeks. We crawled into her single bed together and while she stroked my hair I told her everything: about the celebrity, about Billy and his racing-car sandals. Just before we fell asleep I made her promise not to breathe a word to anyone, to keep it secret until I could go to the police.
The canal bends round to the right. I follow the curve and then I see it. Duke’s Cut. A bulky concrete bridge with a road on top. Its mouth gapes blackly. A car crosses overhead and the splash of its headlights illuminates Leo on a bench below. Facing the opposite direction, he is talking to someone on the phone.
‘She’s not here yet.’ His voice sounds odd. At first, I put it down to the echo. ‘No . . . Yes, I know that.’ The clouds clear away from the moon and for a brief moment his wrist glints. A bracelet with a nameplate. ‘I’ll call when it’s done.’
I stay where I am, hidden by cow parsley.
The man waiting for me is not Leo.
He finishes the call and I watch as he looks around, searching the gloom. He fiddles with something in his jacket pocket and then he slides the edge of it out into the light. A thick black handle, the hammer poking out of the back like a shark’s fin. I recognise it immediately. Sunny has brought his gun.
I rack my brain, trying to understand what is happening. Leo has sent Sunny in his place. He lied. He doesn’t care about Billy hidden in the wall: all he cares about is himself, his reputation, his career.
Sunny gets up from the bench and starts prowling beneath the bridge. I search the dark for an escape. I could scramble up the embankment to the road but it is steep and the noise is bound to alert him to my being here. I consider my only other alternative. The canal. A few paces back I passed one of those ladders. Slowly, I retrace my steps and, once Sunny is looking the other way, I grasp hold of the white metal handles, place my foot on the first rung and climb down, into the water.
I submerge my leg all the way up to my calf. It is freezing. I keep going, lowering myself in until only my head and shoulders are left above the surface. Shivering, I keep hold of the ladder and press my body in close to the slimy moss-covered wall. Below the water I can feel the weight of my sodden jeans and trainers and think of my map, ruined in my back pocket.
Above my head I hear footsteps. Sunny.
The ladder is rusted. Some of its bolts have worked their way out of the stone.
He spits.
‘Waiting here for hours.’
It sounds like he’s directly above me.
‘Like his bloody errand boy.’
I pray he doesn’t look down. My shivering is violent and I have to squeeze my jaws together to stop my teeth chattering.
He waits a little while longer. It must be only a few minutes but it feels like for ever. My legs and feet are numb.
He spits again and I hear an electronic beep. His phone.
‘She’s still not here.’ A beat. ‘Maybe she changed her mind.’
Finally he walks off. I listen to his footsteps getting quieter. Silence. He’s gone. Still, I wait a few minutes more before hauling myself out of the canal. I drag myself onto the path and then, water pouring from my clothes, I scramble up the embankment, tearing at the cow parsley, until I reach the road. I look back at the towpath where I’ve just been. I follow the curve with my eyes, towards the direction Sunny was heading. I blow him kisses, one, two, three for luck, and then I start to run. I’m going to disappear. Somewhere they can’t find me. Somewhere he and Leo won’t know to look. Not now not ever.
Tuesday 7 February
Present day
Jessamine
It was almost midnight when an exhausted Jessamine got out of an Uber and climbed the five steps to Dougie’s block of flats. She checked the text message he’d sent inviting her to dinner back at the start of January, buzzed the corresponding door number and slumped against the wall.
Her last eight hours had been spent at the police station, giving a statement about the afternoon’s bizarre sequence of events. As she’d left Paddington Green she’d known that, although she wanted to go home, she was too restless for sleep.
A click and the intercom cr
ackled to life.
‘Hello?’ His voice was groggy.
‘It’s me. Jessamine. Can I come up?’
A beat.
‘I thought it wasn’t a good time,’ he said, quoting her platitude back at her.
She cringed. On the way here, in the back of the cab, she’d imagined this exchange differently. In her version, Dougie would be sleepy but intrigued to find her on his doorstep, and then, once he understood her intent, delighted at her spontaneity.
She’d been mistaken. She’d arrived unannounced, uninvited and, worse, she’d woken him up. She was gripped by a terrible thought. Maybe he already had someone there.
‘I just . . . it’s just.’ She took a step back. She was such an idiot. Arrogant too. She’d ignored him for weeks and now, on a whim, she’d decided to look him up. ‘Maybe I should go.’
Another beat. She was about to retreat down the steps when she heard a metallic clunk. He’d unlocked the front door.
She went inside, made her way up to the third floor, turned the corner and there he was, shivering in his boxer shorts.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ he asked, blinking against the light. His hair was flattened on one side, his eyes bruised with sleep. ‘Everything okay?’
Everything was far from okay but she’d spent the entire afternoon talking, first to her employers about her termination from the job she’d held for the last eleven years and then to the police.
She had not come here for the conversation.
Earlier, uncertain what time she’d be finished, she’d arranged for Sarah to spend the night at Paris’s house. It meant that, if she wanted to, she could stay out all night.
She moved in close until their faces were almost touching and then she reached out her hand and brought his mouth to hers. He tasted of beer and toothpaste. She felt for his chest and smoothed her palm down the ladder of his ribcage. His skin puckered with goosebumps. She dropped her hand lower, feeling for him through his shorts. His breath quickened. He stopped kissing her and held his mouth near to hers so that, for a few moments, they were sharing the same air. Pushing her coat away from her shoulders, he reached inside her shirt and slid his thumb inside her bra. Finding her nipple he circled it slowly, then pulled her inside the flat and kicked the door shut.
Jitesh
Jitesh finished the last of his cornflakes and tried to figure out what yesterday’s events meant to the search for Cassie Scolari. Did the body Jessamine found have something to do with the woman’s disappearance or were the two things entirely unconnected? He tried to focus but his mind kept drifting, just as it had done yesterday in that police interview room, to a comment Jessamine had made about her daughter, Sarah.
At the time it had jarred, although he didn’t know why. Then, when she’d started tearing at the wall with a claw hammer, he’d forgotten about it. But this morning, in bed, he’d remembered and now he was able to pinpoint what had bothered him so.
The day he’d overheard Sarah on the phone she’d talked about getting her passport renewed. She’d said she’d hassle her mum into doing it under the pretence of needing it for a school trip. Sarah was lying to her mother, he was sure of it. But why? Where was she planning to go and with whom? And why did she need to keep the trip a secret from her mum?
Upstairs in his room he closed the curtains and opened the laptop. It took him half an hour to get into Sarah’s social media. At first, the contents of her Messenger seemed to suggest she was involved with an older man. But then, as he read the exchanges in more detail, his blood ran cold. It was all so much worse than he’d first thought and, in recent weeks, it seemed things had started to escalate.
He was so immersed in the task at hand that it took him a while to register his father was at the door.
‘You have a phone call.’
He checked for his iPhone. It was right there, next to his laptop.
‘The landline,’ said his father, heading back downstairs.
Jitesh came down to discover the cordless handset on the hall table. He put the phone to his ear.
‘H-hello?’
‘Jitesh?’
‘M-Meera?’
‘Hope you don’t mind me calling.’ She sounded upset, her voice small and quiet. ‘I got your number from my dad.’
A flicker of dread. Had something happened with Kishor? ‘Are you okay?’
‘Not really.’
The dread grew stronger. He’d failed to protect her. He should have told her the truth, explained exactly what she was getting herself into.
‘After that night at Kishor’s birthday I kept thinking about what you said.’ She paused. ‘I looked up Shanae’s Facebook. Saw the tributes.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘Jitesh, what did he do?’
Relief. Meera was okay. She was distressed because of what she’d learned, not because of something Kishor had done. But his respite was short-lived. Now he had to decide whether or not to admit to his own role in Shanae’s demise, to explain how, ultimately, he was responsible for her death.
The day after he’d found the recording of Shanae and Kishor having sex on Kishor’s computer he’d approached Shanae in the corridor at school. He’d thought she’d want to know, that she’d report Kishor to the police. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Her face was red.
‘S-so you c-c-can do something about it.’
A group of boys across from where they stood laughed at some joke that was nothing to do with them and she flinched, suddenly paranoid. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘B-b-but it was wrong. We need to tell a t-t-teacher or the p-police.’
‘It’s embarrassing enough as it is. Reporting it will make it ten times worse.’
‘B-b-but—’
‘It’s my choice. You have to promise you won’t say anything.’
‘Sh-Shanae.’
‘Promise.’
What else could he do? He promised. He had no idea how much he’d live to regret it.
The next day Shanae wasn’t at school. Same on Wednesday. On Thursday he’d come across her in the queue by the common-room vending machine and watched as she fed it some coins and retrieved a packet of crisps. Then she’d just stood there, staring at the packet, as though she wasn’t sure what to do with it. When he saw her in the weeks that followed she no longer dragged her fencing kit in her wake.
He’d heard the news the morning of his first A-level exam. One of the other parents from school called his mum. Shanae had killed herself. Pills. No note.
After that his memories were patchy. He must have gone to school, sat his exam and answered all the questions correctly, if his stellar results were anything to go by, but it was all a blank. As were the weeks that followed. It wasn’t until his final exam that he seemed to wake up. He’d emerged from the school into the sun and seen Kishor punching the air, triumphant at having finished his last paper. Kishor felt no sadness, no responsibility about what had happened to Shanae. Jitesh felt the opposite. If he hadn’t alerted her to the existence of the video, if he hadn’t promised to keep quiet, she might still be there.
While his friends had gone to celebrate at the pub he had made his excuses and gone home, up to his room. An online tutorial showed him how to fashion a noose from the belt on his dressing-gown. Then he hanged himself from the hook on the back of his bedroom door. His father had found him just in time.
Jitesh’s hand went to his neck. The bruising beneath his ears and at the corner of his jaw was long gone. Still, he touched the area gingerly, as if afraid of causing himself pain.
‘Jitesh, you still there?’ asked Meera.
He’d yet to tell anyone the truth about Shanae and why he’d done what he’d done. Not his parents, not Marty, not anyone. He was too ashamed. It would be a relief to say the words.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I-I’m here.’
Jessamine
Jessamine stepped under the shower, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the
water. She chose a shampoo from Dougie’s random collection of bottles and as she washed her hair she was smiling. Despite everything that the last six months had thrown at her – her break-up with Mick, Tasha’s murder, her suspension and then finally, yesterday, being fired from a job she’d loved – here, now, under this shower, she could feel the beginning of something that just might, at a push, be described as happiness.
Yesterday.
She thought again of the crumbling duvet she’d found behind the wall and shuddered. An autopsy would take place later this afternoon but, until then, the general consensus seemed to be that the constant flow of cold air through the services duct had mummified the body over what was almost certainly a period of years. The persistent technical problems in that row of studios had been caused not by mice or dodgy wiring, as was previously thought, but by the corpse collapsing down onto the circuits. The autopsy would also confirm if the person she’d found was male or female but the size of the corpse was unambiguous. Someone had sealed the body of a child inside the walls of Broadcasting House.
She turned, letting the hot water needle at the muscles in her shoulders. Determining the gender of the child was one thing but whether or not they’d ever be able to figure out who the kid was or what had happened to them remained to be seen, especially as Cassie Scolari was the key: she had seemed to know the corpse’s location.
The police would want to talk to Jessamine again at some point in the next few days. Meanwhile Went/Gone would continue at pace. She’d talked over her plans with Dougie last night in bed. Told him how she planned to drive out to Berkshire today and explore the area in which Cassie’s phone had been turned on some thirteen days after she went missing. He’d helped her figure out the best place to park in relation to the coordinates the detective had given her. Although she knew there was likely to be nothing there, other than motorway and a few fields, it was one final thing she wanted to tick off her list.
Jessamine had her head tipped forward, rough-drying her hair with a towel, when she thought she heard her phone. She stopped, trying to isolate the sound, but it was hard to make out anything over the noise of the extractor fan. Was it coming from the flat next door? If it was her phone it was probably Sarah, calling to check in before she left for school. She wrapped the towel around herself and smoothed her hair away from her face. She’d call her back, then go home, change and be on her way to Berkshire.
The Dangerous Kind Page 27