Dead Girls Page 12
* * *
The Volvo was parked at the curb, one house away from the Abbotts’. I swung in diagonally behind it and was out of the car before it had stopped rocking, sweeping the street first of all for Sandra, who stood shakily from inside the CSI van and raised her phone-free hand, and then for anyone else. Nothing was moving, but I could hear sirens on the main road, heading for the estate.
“You okay?” I called.
Sandra nodded and barked something into her phone and hung up. “Inside the car,” she said.
Right. I guessed this wasn’t going to be pretty. “Annie,” I said, my heart thumping with adrenaline and dread. “Get DI Riley on the line and keep her there.” Which wasn’t really necessary, but if Sandra was spooked, then I wanted Annie out of the way and focused on a task, rather than staggering around throwing up her liquid lunch all over a crime scene.
I took a breath. Listened to the sirens draw closer. Watched a tabby cat stroll casually across the road from the next house along and hop up onto the rim of an overfilled wheelie bin in the driveway opposite. It tucked its nose under the propped-up lid and had a good sniff, then assumed some kind of liquid form and poured itself in between the bags of rubbish and disappeared. I sniffed the hot air, thinking I might melt, too. The air smelled wrong. Bad. Dark.
I threw another glance back at Sandra, who just stood there beside the van and gave me a sad smile. And then I pressed my nails into my palms and clicked my heels together and walked to the driver’s door of the Volvo.
The first thing I saw was blood. Lots and lots of blood. It streaked the windscreen and dripped onto the dashboard, like a can of it had been shaken up and opened. The tan-colored steering wheel was coated in a filmy residue, vivid red in patches, transparent in others where the blood had slid off and soaked into the driver’s trousers.
The driver himself was sitting quite upright, his formal shoes still on the pedals, both hands lying palms-up at his sides. He was wearing his seat belt, for all the good it had done.
Richard Cockburn’s throat had been cut, and cut deep.
“I saw the car arrive,” Sandra said, close behind me now. “I didn’t think anything of it. I heard the door slam but I didn’t watch. I was there in the van and I didn’t see a thing. I’m sorry I freaked out. I didn’t expect it. I banged on the window and his fucking head fell off.”
Which wasn’t far from accurate. Whatever had sliced through his neck had only stopped when it had hit bone, and so that was all that connected his head to the rest of him. It had lolled onto his shoulder, leaving a clean cross-section but for a rough patch at the back where the weight of it falling had torn some flesh.
It was too familiar. The blood. All of the blood. The open, sloshing wound: vivid red muscle and yellow fat and dark, severed vessels, overflowing. It was the last thing I’d seen before I’d passed out on That Man’s couch, and it was the last thing I’d seen every night and the first thing I’d seen every morning since. I’d seen it in those photographs on Jenny Riley’s computer, from a mortuary table in Swansea. And now it was here, right in front of Sarah Abbott’s house, an insult to add to the injury.
And more than that, it gave me a serious problem. Because I knew which way the fingers would point; Erica was Public Enemy Number One, a fugitive, wanted for the murder of at least two of my friends and colleagues. And even if she hadn’t been the one wielding the knife, her troubled history with Richard was compelling.
I had my first real wobble right then. Because what if Annie had been right, back in Jen’s office what now seemed like days ago? What if I’d got it all out of shape? What if everyone else was right and I was wrong? What if Erica was the one in the driving seat?
I let the thought trickle into the dark corners of my mind as I watched four patrol cars blast into the street, blue lights spinning furiously, sirens wailing. And then I dragged my hand across my face and wiped that shit clean like an Etch-a-Sketch, because whatever the truth about Erica, I had a much bigger problem to worry about.
I knew who’d made that cut, and it sure as hell wasn’t Erica Shaw.
Chapter 16
Erica Shaw, as it turned out, was at that moment in the driving seat, of her late Nana’s old Mercedes, heading northeast on the A11 at a steady seventy miles per hour. Within twenty minutes of Sandra’s discovery, she was negotiating the beginnings of rush-hour traffic on the Norwich ring road, and forty minutes after that, having pit-stopped at a Tesco for fuel and a few basics, she was leaving the A149 at the top of its lazy inland loop and guiding the big old tank between hedgerows and farm gates, following the sat nav on her phone to the last place on Earth she wanted to go.
It had been a dozen years since she’d last made this trip, in the back of her dad’s Éspace, watching Toy Story 2 for the umpteenth time with Marie from school, and she recognized none of it—not the tunnels of trees, or the remote shack incongruously advertising windows and doors on a faded and splintered hand-painted sign, or the dilapidated old barn with the collapsed roof, or the pretty houses with roadside stalls selling speckled eggs and wildflowers and freshly cut asparagus.
Indeed, she only knew she’d arrived when, on the stroke of six o’clock, the signs stopped pointing the way to Cart Gap and the road ran out.
In her mind, those summers were endless and epic and impossibly hot, hotter even than it was now as she stood with her back to the falling sun, gazing down the long, steep lifeboat ramp, the one landmark she thought maybe she did remember. The taste of their memory in her mouth, though, was a bitter one.
Her last trip had marked the end of the last summer she’d spent with her father before...what happened. Before people started talking in hushed tones around her, before her friends stopped coming over, before her father disappeared for three days and came back an alcoholic and, ultimately, before that Wednesday afternoon in December, the day before school broke up for the Christmas holiday.
That Wednesday had been a regular day, or at least what had come to pass for a regular day. Whispers behind her back. Huddles of girls she’d thought were her friends, parting in front of her, forcing her to walk between them, her face burning in the heat of their stares. Kids she didn’t even know pushing in front of her in the lunch queue. Worst of all, the pitying looks of her teachers as, in every lesson, she sat beside an empty seat.
Marie was the only one who’d talked to her. She wondered now whether it was through guilt or shame or apology, or whether Marie was simply as baffled as she was. Because for all of their passive cruelty, the most hurtful thing those kids ever did was to never tell her what she’d done.
She’d pieced it together by now, of course. As an adult, reminiscing over brunch on a beautiful spring morning, she’d remembered it all as clearly as she could see it now, standing here at the top of the ramp. The five of them—Mum, Dad, her, Charlotte and Marie—traipsing down to the beach, arms weighed down with blankets and clothes and canvas windbreaks and coolbags full of bland sandwiches and packets of Wotsits and cartons of Um Bongo.
They’d walk for what seemed like miles along the beach, trying not to kick sand in anyone’s face until they ran out of faces in which to kick it. Miles from the car. Miles from the toilet. If anyone needed a wee, they’d have to squat in a cave. Otherwise, she and Marie would paddle in the sea and skim pebbles and build intricate castles with separate rooms for their action figures, and then patiently build them again when Charlotte knocked them down with her spade, and Dad would wind Mum up while she was trying to read.
At midday, Dad would call lunch, and they’d all sit on the blanket together and eat their sandwiches, which would live up to their name no matter how careful they were. And afterward, Dad would announce that he was going to the ice cream van on the clifftop.
“Erica,” he’d say. “I think you want a Cornetto.”
She’d roll her eyes and sigh. “No, Dad, you know I want a Feast, li
ke every time you ask.”
“I do,” Mum would say, and he’d give her two thumbs-up and put on his flip-flops and trample sand all over the blanket as he considered the three girls like it was the first time they’d been through this production.
“Marie. Come on, you can help me carry.”
And off they’d go, in the opposite direction from the car, leaving Erica to help her mother put away the lunch things and clean the food off Charlotte’s face, and twenty minutes later they’d reappear bearing ice creams, and Marie would always look a little bit scared.
Erica had never wondered until that spring morning how it had always taken them twenty minutes, and yet the ice cream was never melted when they got back. Or why, if the van was close enough for the ice cream not to melt, her dad didn’t just park near it.
In any case, if what happened was anything to do with Marie, no one had ever uttered a word about it to Erica. If they ever did, she’d entertain the thought, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Marie’s family had moved to New Zealand, Carla was a master of keeping secrets, and Erica was too late to save her father by the time she found him in the garage, hanging from the rafters.
* * *
The lifeboat scrambled just before seven o’clock. It came down the ramp backward on a trailer attached to a blue tractor; a leviathan of a machine, articulated in the middle like an insect, rolling on ridged tires that were taller than Erica. Its grunting diesel engine belched foul breath through a pair of snorkels extended above the raised cab as it followed the boat and trailer into the sea, the volunteer crew wading in beside it to board and launch the vessel.
Erica sat in the shadow of the cliff, watching as the few remaining beachgoers began to drift away from the small crowd that had assembled to watch the action. The tide was coming in and a chill had cut through the air, setting her shivering. The spectators were still in sunlight, just, and dressed for it, save for one or two who’d draped towels over their shoulders. Children ran between their parents’ legs, chasing each other in circles, stumbling through abandoned sandcastles and falling in holes.
After twenty minutes or so, the boat returned exactly as it had departed, with no drama and with only its crew on board. The tractor, left napping on the sand, barked into life in a pall of black smoke, and a shoreman urged the crowd to take a few paces back as it began to slide the trailer back into the water.
Within moments, both tractor and trailer were all but submerged, the lifeboat captain skillfully maneuvering the craft to align it with its berth before giving it an armful of throttle. It surged backward between the caged sides of the trailer, and two crewmen from the stern clambered overboard, one steadying the boat as the other attached the winch hook.
Erica watched rapt as the crew secured the lifeboat and themselves within the trailer, and the tractor driver swiveled around in his chair and gunned the engine.
Nothing happened. There was smoke, and noise, but no movement. He gave it more throttle, the sea frothing and churning above what Erica imagined were frantically spinning wheels. If anything, the tractor was sinking backward, digging itself into the seabed as sure as the tide was rising to drown it. A ripple of excitement ran through the crowd as the machine folded itself in the middle, thrashing for grip, burying itself further still.
The crew abandoned ship then, piling out of the back of the trailer and swimming to shore as the tractor driver flipped open the escape hatch above his head and stood on his seat with his arms raised in a helpless shrug.
Erica laughed, a genuine laugh, for the first time in weeks. If ever there were a clumsy metaphor for her life right now, she was sure this was it.
She stood, rubbing heat into her bare arms as she made her way to the ramp and turned her back on the unfolding debacle.
* * *
It was warm in the caravan, and the gas bottle was full and the water and power supply connected and working, for which she gave some small thanks to Carla’s need for a bolt-hole.
She boiled herself some pasta and stirred in a jar of green pesto, which she ate at the lounge table overlooking the sea. Afterward, she sat with a cup of tea, sharing her attention between the book she’d picked up on impulse from the supermarket and the farm tractor towing the stricken lifeboat rig from the water.
Finally, as the sun dipped below the horizon, she grabbed a double chocolate Feast from the freezer, flipped on the lamp in the bedroom, threw her clothes all over the floor and lay and read in the soft yellow glow until her eyelids grew heavy.
This place had been Carla’s one and only act of defiance. She’d never told Richard, and Erica knew that meant she’d never betray it to anyone else, either. She fell asleep smiling at the thought that no one would ever find her here.
* * *
At first, she thought the postcard on the doormat was some kind of bizarre mistake. The house number was the same, but the street name was different and the village in question was miles away. And she’d never known anyone with that name.
She stared at the card, perplexed, as she filled herself with bacon, eggs, fried bread and sweet tea. She picked it up and tilted it against the glaring early-morning sunlight, comparing the craggy coastline depicted on the front to the one outside her window.
It was only when she turned it over in her hands for what must have been the tenth time that she groggily realized there was a message in the bottom corner, opposite the address. An instruction.
Her heart stopped. She turned the card back around and looked at the photo again. Later, she’d look the place up and confirm what she already knew. But for now, she’d just hide it under a book, and drink her tea, and hyperventilate a little, and cry, and ask herself the question to which she was sure she didn’t want to know the answer:
Who was Annie Fisher, and what had she done to deserve this?
Chapter 17
Wednesday, 6:30 a.m.
Annie woke up drunk again, on the sofa, three hours after she’d fallen asleep, with sunlight streaming painfully into her eyes from between her haphazardly thrown-together curtains. She lit a cigarette, and smoked it where she lay, gingerly turning her neck to crack the kinks out of it and trying to distract herself with things that didn’t frighten her. Laundry: she had a lot of laundry to do. That wasn’t frightening. Pizza: the Domino’s ground beef, sweetcorn and jalapeño pizza she’d forced herself to eat in a break from Carla Cockburn’s interview at Thetford police station at ten o’clock last night had been tasty and filling. In fact, her appetite for it had grown with every bite, until it was only with snarling reluctance that she’d shared a couple of slices with the uniformed staff.
What else? The ten-year school reunion group she’d been added to on Facebook, by someone she’d forgotten she was even friends with and hadn’t thought about in years? No. No, that was scary. Everyone had a hard time at school in one way or another, she’d come to realize. Some kids had unrealistic expectations foisted upon them by overbearing parents. Others were shy or introverted and had difficulty relating to their classmates. Some were ashamed of who they were, and so pretended to be someone else every minute of every day. Some were hopeless at sport and were the last to be picked for team games on the rare occasions they failed to get out of PE lessons. Others still were subjected to years of daily torture and torment, perceived as weak, or annoying, or stupid, or just plain different. And some, Annie knew, ticked all of those boxes and more besides. And those people, she reflected now, stubbing her cigarette out on the coffee table because she couldn’t reach the ashtray, did not attend ten-year school reunions.
And so Annie thought about the emerald-green Jeep she’d once owned, a symbol of another time, when her life had been filled with love and laughter and her career had seemed like it had a future. She wondered where that Jeep was now; whether the festering cockblanket who’d stolen it had stripped it down and sold the parts, or exported it to Uganda or som
efuckingwhere, or whether someone else was happily driving around in it at that very moment, making their own joy-filled memories.
She concluded that in all probability it had met the same fate as the love, the laughter and the career, and so she lit another cigarette and thought about making a cup of tea instead.
Inevitably, though, by the time she’d managed to lever herself upright and stand with an alarming crack from her lower back and shuffle through to the kitchen and flick on the kettle, she’d run out of happy thoughts. She tried to focus on Carla Cockburn—specifically, the immediate change in her demeanor upon learning that her husband had been murdered right in front of Sarah Abbott’s house.
It had been, for want of a less tired analogy, like flipping a switch. The trembling and the crying had stopped with such startling suddenness that it was as though her own throat had been cut. Her horizontal shoulders had dropped, her rod-straight back curling into her chair, and her clenched jaw had relaxed such that it changed the shape of her whole face, from square and lined and hard to soft, slim, youthful. In an instant, whatever she’d lost and however keenly she’d felt it, Carla and Annie alike had known that she’d been set free. And from that second onward, she hadn’t uttered another word.
Annie thought about that freedom while she made herself a cup of coffee and some toast with thick-cut marmalade. She watched the birds outside her window and wondered how she’d feel if her own freedom came at the cost of someone else’s life. It would, she concluded, have to be someone nobody would miss—check—and who’d taken their own share of human lives—check. But could she be the one to pull the trigger, or plunge the knife, or just deliver the firm nudge that would send the bastard windmilling from the clifftop to be dashed against the rocks below and washed out to sea and eaten by the crabs and fishes and hungry mermaids? Sure, she thought, if she were drunk enough.