by Kate Medina
Callan covered her hand with his. ‘That’s not an unreasonable explanation.’
‘Yes, but Allan made me feel guilty. And I feel guilty, because I know how much Robbie needs help.’ She gave a brief, dispirited smile.
‘He’s not your problem.’
‘He’s got to be someone’s problem and I’m the last man standing. Clinical psychology is my job, Callan, and I’m good at it. I can’t just abandon him. Also, he reminds me a bit of me when I was a teenager, except that the bullying he has experienced is so much worse. And that almost makes it harder for me to see and help him, as it makes me feel as if I’m digging over my own hideous childhood experiences, not just his. It’s almost too close to home, too emotionally painful.’
‘You can’t help him at your own expense.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘At the expense of your sanity.’
‘I think that my sanity packed its bags and headed on out many years ago,’ she said, returning his squeeze. ‘Anyway, enough of the Parkers for now. There’s something else that I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘What?’
She took a sip of wine. ‘You,’ she said evenly. ‘Something up, isn’t there?’
He pulled his hand from hers. ‘No, there’s nothing “up”, as you put it.’ An edge to his voice.
She held his gaze coolly. ‘I can tell that something’s wrong.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Jessie, I’m your boyfriend, not one of your patients.’
‘Right. You are my boyfriend and it’s my job to look after you.’
He gave a wry half-smile. ‘Aren’t I supposed to look after you?’
‘Don’t be a sexist idiot.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Yes, you were.’ She reached for his hand again, still holding his gaze. ‘I saw it. I saw the letter from Frimley Park Hospital.’
Callan frowned. ‘You shouldn’t have been looking through my private stuff.’
‘I wasn’t. You borrowed my Mini and didn’t put the key back on the rack. I didn’t want to wake you at three a.m. to dig them out of your coat pocket for me.’
His gaze moved from hers to fix on Lupo, the light of the flames beyond the dog dancing in his unsmiling eyes. ‘Did you read it?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘Though now you’re being so weird, I wish I had read it.’
His strong fingers traced patterns in the thick white fur of the big dog’s back. ‘My epilepsy is getting worse,’ he murmured, after a moment. ‘Significantly worse.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He stroked Lupo, without looking up. ‘You’ve had too much on. Too much stress with the murders of those little girls, and now this … this dog murder thing.’
Jessie shook her head. ‘You’re by far the most important thing in my life.’
‘Sure, but you love working with Major Crimes.’
‘I do.’ Tears welled in her eyes. She blinked them away. ‘But I love you more. Much much more than my stupid job.’
‘I’m going to resign my commission, leave the army.’
Fumbling his hand from Lupo’s back, she squeezed it tight. ‘You can’t do that. You love being a Redcap.’ She forced a half-smile. ‘Even more than I love chasing murderers.’
He didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t have a choice. They’ll find out any day. I’ll have an epileptic fit at work—’
‘Why don’t you wait until that happens? It may never.’
‘Because what if I’m driving? Or on a case? Chasing a suspect, or in the middle of the fucking office, for Christ’s sake. How humiliating would that be?’
‘There’s nothing humiliating about it.’
‘There is to me.’ He was still looking down at Lupo, deliberately refusing to meet her gaze. A muscle twitched in his jaw. ‘I may need an operation to remove the bullet.’
‘Why? They said that it was safer to leave it.’
‘My neurologist suspects that the bullet has shifted, that it’s creating swelling in my brain and that’s why my epilepsy has worsened. He suspects that it might now be too dangerous to leave.’
Jessie squeezed his hand tighter. But what if something happens to you? What if I lose you? I can’t lose you. I love you too much. She didn’t verbalize any of those thoughts. They sounded too needy, too selfish.
‘When are you seeing him?’
‘The day after tomorrow for some tests so that we can make a final decision one way or the other.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘I want to.’
‘What about the case?’
‘Fuck the case. It’s not as if I feel I’m adding much value, so I’m sure they’ll cope perfectly well for a few hours in my absence. And anyway, we might have found him by then,’ she finished, though she knew how faint a hope that was.
51
Now for that glass of wine.
After the shock of that ridiculous moment of intense terror yesterday evening, with the Scooby-Doo monster, Denise had stayed firmly off the wine. But now, after a tedious day and with a second evening alone looming, she was so desperate for just one glass that she could almost taste the woodiness of the Chardonnay on her tongue, feel its cool sliding tantalizingly down her throat.
God, I really am an alcoholic, fantasizing about wine.
She loved Leo desperately, loved being a mum, but he was hard work and little children could be so terribly boring. Being alone all day with only a toddler for company was isolating, and now all she had to look forward to was another lonely evening in front of the television. At least Simon was getting back from Wiltshire late tonight. Though she’d doubtless be fast asleep when he got home, he’d be there when she woke in the morning.
Leo was sound asleep now, thank God, Baloo clutched in his pudgy arms, and she hummed as she jogged back down the stairs – that blasted Scooby-Doo theme tune, she realized with a grin. Reaching the kitchen, she went straight to the fridge. A blast of freezing air hit her full in the face as she hauled the fridge door open and she shivered. She loved this Tardis of an American-style fridge that could swallow a whole week’s shopping and open its gaping mouth for more, the only downside being that she felt as if she was being dunked in an Arctic ice flow every time she opened it.
Actually, the kitchen was cold, colder than it had been when she’d taken Leo upstairs to bed, she realized as she shut the fridge, clasping the bottle of Chardonnay. And even with the fridge door shut, she felt a lingering, tingling chill – not on her face, but from behind her. She lifted a hand to the back of her neck, feeling the raised hairs, the nobbles of goosebumped flesh, refusing to turn, to give in, again, to fear. Stepping sideways, she reached to the cupboard next to the fridge to grab a wine glass. But as she lifted her arm, her gaze was caught by a loose thread on the sleeve of her jumper. It was dancing, waltzing, as if to an inaudible tune. An inaudible tune, or … or a breeze?
It’s windy outside.
But all the doors and windows are shut and locked.
I checked them, double checked them.
And so—
Forcibly, Denise blanked her mind, shutting and locking the door on her manic, fearful thoughts before they bolted away to that Scooby-Doo monster, to that poor sad woman in the pastel-pink suit at the village fete. As she lowered her arm, wine glass in hand, the thread stopped dancing. But the hairs on the back of her neck, the goosebumps refused to settle. Oh, for God’s sake. Turning, her gaze found the double doors to the garden, the lock.
The key was missing.
It’s in the drawer.
But it wasn’t in the drawer. Simon wouldn’t allow it.
Through the dark glass, she could see the ghostly shape of the weeping willow. Like the thread on her jumper, it too was dancing, waltzing to that silent tune. And superimposed over its shimmying form, reflected in the glass: a thick strip of pale ceramic kitchen floor, the thin, dark brown ridge of the oak table top, her precious alumin
ium American-style fridge, huge and shiny grey, and the pale blob of her own tense face in front of it.
Something wasn’t right. What was it? It took her nervy, addled brain a few moments before she knew. A square of reflection was missing, as if one of the glass panes in the door had been painted a dull black.
Or …
Or … as if it wasn’t there at all.
Yes, she could see that now. One pane, to the right side of the door lock, was missing. And on the floor? Glass. Broken glass.
And now she felt it.
The fear.
Utter terror that clenched a stone-cold fist around her heart.
A scream from upstairs. Leo. My baby. The bottle of Chardonnay slid from Denise’s hand, and she watched it fall, pitch to the kitchen floor, bounce and crack, but not the bottle – the floor, her precious ceramic tiles. Oh God, Simon will be furious.
Another, piercing scream.
Silence.
My baby. Oh God, my baby.
52
Marilyn and Jessie stood on the gravel drive, breath making clouds in the chill night air, listening to the crack of the steel enforcer splintering the Lewins’ sage-green-painted front door. One, two, three solid smacks before the lock gave way and the door ricocheted back on its hinges, slamming against an unseen inside wall and jarring back at the firearms team, four black shadows pressed against the brick wall either side of the porch. A black-booted foot was extended to inch the door slowly back open, a raised, black-gloved hand indicated two rooms to the left, another two to the right of the hall, stairs beyond, to the left.
They had rung the front doorbell first, a ludicrously, mundane, everyday action given the tension that radiated like heat from everyone involved in the operation.
Ghostie.
Leo has an active imagination.
It’s the weeping willow.
Lifting her latex-gloved hands from where they were glued to her forensic-suited thighs, Jessie pressed them together, fingers steepled, praying. Praying for the little boy and his blonde Boden mum, even though she had lost her belief in God the day she’d found Jamie hanging by his red-and-black-striped school tie from the curtain rail in his bedroom.
The firearms team had waited a full minute after ringing the bell, all eyes fixed on the blank rectangle of sage green. But there had been nothing. No answer. No audible sounds from inside the house. Just the sound of Jessie’s own stressed heartbeat knocking in her ears, Marilyn’s chill breath hosing the air next to her.
The bell again, longer this time, the sound, a frantic bee in a jam jar, echoing throughout the house. Another tense minute, each second stretching nanometre-thin, each second feeling like an hour in itself.
Still no answer.
The woman – Denise, she was called, Jessie reminded herself, she did have a name, wasn’t just ‘Boden mum’ – was definitely at home. Her husband’s frantic 999 call had made that clear. He had telephoned his wife first, twice, calls that had rung and rung unanswered.
Her hands still pressed together in silent prayer, trying to keep the stress she felt from leaking out into other visible tics or jitters, Jessie realized that she had never experienced anything like this in real life, had only seen it stylized on the television screen. The reality was so much grittier and yet, at the same time, much more achingly normal. The grey, graffiti-covered, run-down, drug-fuelled housing estates of television were here transplanted by a street of well-tended detached houses, fronted by paved or gravel drives, bordered by neat flowerbeds and low hedges, a car or two in every drive.
Two marked cars were parked fifty metres either side of them, blocking off the road from traffic, though Jessie doubted many people, apart from residents and their visitors, drove down this quiet, leafy village lane. Their lights cast an intermittent wash of blue across the red-brick fascia of the nearby houses and the gawping faces pressed to upstairs windows, the neighbours having been instructed to stay inside.
‘Be careful where you tread and don’t touch anything,’ Marilyn yelled, for the umpteenth time, at the firearms team’s retreating backs as they surged forward through the door and into the house. This time they didn’t even lift a hand to acknowledge that he had spoken. Jessie watched them moving down the hallway, giving each other cover, ducking into one room and then the next, shouts of ‘Clear’ reverberating back into the still night air. She laid a hand on Marilyn’s arm.
‘What?’ he snapped, pulling his gaze from the hallway – empty now, just the muffled sound of feet pounding up carpeted stairs – and fixing it on her.
Dropping her hand, she shook her head. ‘Nothing. Just—’
‘Chill?’
‘Understatement of the century. I know it’s beyond hard, but yes—’
‘They have a child,’ he said. ‘He’s three years old.’
‘I know,’ Jessie murmured. I met him. I met them both.
They lapsed into tense silence once again. Biting her lip, Jessie dropped her gaze to the drive, hopscotching it across the pale pebbles, a move which transported her straight back to Wittering Beach, early September, just six short weeks ago, to two dead little girls; further, to last November and Sami Scott. A deeply damaged four-year-old boy. Would Leo, the little boy who lived inside this house, get away with being deeply damaged? Only being deeply damaged?
Despite what Jessie had said to Marilyn – her feeble attempt to encourage him to chill – Jessie sensed him jittering beside her. He’d had a heated argument with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes DCI, Janet Backastowe, in the car on the way over here, and Jessie had heard the strain in his voice as he had tried to remain civil. He was by nature a loner – a maverick, he’d probably be called if he was an American fighter pilot – and he didn’t take kindly to interference. He had wanted to go into the house first, just him and Jessie, to get a sense of the crime scene and its perpetrator before every Tom, Dick and Harry tramped it to smithereens. But DCI Backastowe wouldn’t hear of it.
This situation could potentially be a red herring: a woman who had taken a pill to help her sleep in her husband’s absence, bolting upright in her bed in terror at the sight of a masked man, clad fully in black and toting a Heckler & Koch MP5 carbine, in her bedroom, though that scenario, the one they were still all secretly hoping for, was looking increasingly unlikely. Or it could be a crime in progress – White Fang, Jessie’s name for him, though she hadn’t shared it, aware of Marilyn’s abhorrence for any tags that glamorized criminals – still in the house, hence DCI Backastowe’s insistence that the firearms team went in first to secure the scene. Or it could be a scenario that had already played out its grisly reality, too late to stop another murder. Two more murders.
They’ve got a three-year-old boy.
Leo. He’s called Leo.
Denise and Leo.
Whatever happened inside that house this evening, Jessie and Marilyn would be interviewing the husband. His terrified insistence that his wife and son could be the third victims of the killer, of White Fang, hadn’t escaped either her or Marilyn’s attention. What had made him so certain?
It’s personal.
Did Denise’s husband know what that personal connection was?
And it’s about watching.
Watching what – or who? What could possibly have been watched, seen, that had led to this calculated, controlled barbarity?
The murders of the Fullers had made the front page of all the local and regional press, had featured in small articles in the nationals and been discussed at length on local radio and TV news programmes. The second, the Whiteheads’, just a few nights later, had propelled the case fully national, newspaper journalists and radio and TV reporters descending on this sleepy corner of Sussex in their droves. And now this, the third – if indeed there was a third – would send it stratospheric. Global. Intergalactic. The pressure was on all of them, and the last thing Marilyn wanted was for the firearms team to stamp all over his forensic evidence with their size twelves before Tony Burrows had had
a chance to preserve every stray hair and skin cell of it. But he’d lost. Janet Backastowe was fierce. Jessie could see exactly how she had ended up heading Major Crimes; she wouldn’t like to mess with her.
Boots crunching on gravel yanked her back to the present. She looked up into a shocked pale face. The firearms officer was early forties; he’d have been on the job for twenty-plus years, would have seen it all. Almost all.
‘The house is clear.’
‘Are they dead?’ Marilyn asked. No point sugar-coating.
He nodded. ‘She. One woman.’ He pointed skywards. ‘In the bathroom. Door to your right at the top of the stairs. We left it closed.’
‘Was that how you found it?’ Marilyn snapped.
‘Exactly how we found it. The only thing we left is footprints on the carpet, DI Simmons.’ A pause. ‘We’re just doing our job.’
Marilyn nodded curtly. ‘Where is the child?’
‘There is no child.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘We’ve searched the whole place, house and garden. There is no child on the property.’
‘Fuck,’ Marilyn said, with feeling, though Jessie wasn’t sure that she agreed with that sentiment. A missing child still had hope; a dead child had none.
Without meeting her gaze, Marilyn clapped a hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ he called back over his shoulder to Tony Burrows, who along with his CSI team was suiting and booting in the road. ‘Give us ten minutes, Tony.’
Jessie glanced across at him as they started together down the gravel drive. Marilyn’s gaze was still fixed on the rectangle of light-filled hallway visible through the front door. He didn’t – wouldn’t, she sensed – meet her gaze. Not that she blamed him. Her own heart rate was through the roof and she felt as if a cannon ball had been wedged down her throat, a ball that wouldn’t go up or down however much she swallowed. She bit her lip, her teeth finding the well-worn groove they’d worked on creating since the moment she’d received Marilyn’s call as she and Callan were getting ready for bed, tasting copper this time, blood.