Dead Girls Read online

  Thankfully, I did have my own clothes, although they were crumpled and smelled of pub and my knickers were a bit the worse for wear. Hearing Edith still downstairs, I eased open the top drawer of her dresser, avoiding my own eye contact in the mirror as I rooted around in the tangle of loosely balled briefs at the back, behind all the neatly folded silky arrangements. I tugged a pair free and shook them out. Hello Kitty. Fine, whatever.

  Everything else would have to do. My bra was on its third outing, the cropped black denims maybe their sixth. I had a bright yellow off-the-shoulder top that was okay under the arms but reeked of booze and perfume everywhere else, although deodorant and fresh air would sort that probably. And I had at least had the accidental foresight to wear shoes I could run in, inclined as I was to duck my head and sprint straight out the door.

  But to where?

  I gingerly opened the blind, shielding my eyes with my spare hand and squinting through my fingers at the view. There wasn’t much of one—just a row of boxy houses on the other side of the street, driveways lined with German and Swedish cars in various shades of black and gray, including the one directly below the window. Mine is bright red, so it was immediately apparent that it wasn’t there. God, where the hell was it? And, more to the point, where the hell was I?

  * * *

  Edith was easier to locate. She was at the breakfast table, and she greeted me with a “Hey” and a smile. Nothing between the lines—just your usual good-morning pleasantry. She’d clearly been listening out for me; she’d poured me a fresh cup of coffee and a bowl of Rice Krispies and the latter were still popping and cracking, or whatever it is they do. “Made you breakfast.”

  I sat across from her, silently giving thanks for my complexion; the Middle-Eastern half of me is all on the outside, so I don’t burn in the sun and, more importantly, I blush very, very quietly. “Morning,” I said, my deliberate effort to keep a steady voice naturally achieving the opposite. “Thanks.”

  “Sleep well?”

  My insides recoiled in horror. Was it a trick question? Could she tell that I had no recollection of the night before? “Like a baby,” I said. “You?”

  Another neutral smile. “As well as can be expected. Did you find your towel?”

  Oh. “Yes,” I lied, giving it away by shaking my head at the same time. “Thank you.”

  I watched her read the Independent as I crunched a mouthful of cereal, wishing there was a radio or television to muffle the sound of my munching. Her own efforts seemed so much more refined than mine.

  She’d finished dressing—a black tailored five-button jacket with matching skirt to just below the knee. Her legs stretched beneath the table, her ankles—slender, lightly tanned—crossed comfortably beside my own. Chestnut hair lowlighted in black, thrown up into a loose ponytail. Sunlight, splayed and rainbowed by the flowers and antique bottles on the windowsill, playing on the triangles of her neck, settling in the hollow of her collarbone where it peeked from behind her shirt. The swell of her breas—

  “You okay?” See anything you like?

  I looked up, startled. Felt my face flush. “Hmm?”

  She folded the paper and tossed it aside, slid her coffee close to her and spooned in sugar from the bowl in the center of the table. “You don’t look very well,” she said, circling the spoon handle at me as though casting a spell. “You’re not going to throw that back up, are you?”

  I realized I had a mouthful of lukewarm milk and soggy Rice Krispies, which, somewhere along my train of baffling distraction, I’d somehow forgotten to swallow. I did so now. “I’m fine,” I said flatly.

  She gave a cynical snort. “Oh, really?” Stirred her coffee. “I’ve seen you looking fine, and it didn’t look like that.” Raised it to her lips, blew primly across the surface before taking a sip. “You’re not upset with me, are you?”

  I dropped my spoon into the half-empty cereal bowl and pushed it away, my appetite lost. “Of course not.” Mortified, yes. Confused, bemused and deeply, shamefully embarrassed, but not upset.

  “Good, because...you know...”

  Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. “I know.”

  “I mean, it’s not like...”

  “No, I know.”

  “I mean, I had a great time last night, but—”

  I choked on my coffee. “But now I have to go to work.” I smiled.

  She smiled back, and thought for a moment and then looked at the table and nodded firmly and said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “Only I don’t know where my car is.”

  “Ah,” she chuckled. “You left it at the pub, remember?”

  No.

  “I’ll drop you off,” she said. “Ready in five?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say, really, so I just blurted out, “I borrowed some knickers. Hope you don’t mind.”

  She gave a snort and a sideways look. “No, that’s fine.” She laughed. “Just...have a good day, okay? Be careful, and don’t work too hard.”

  “Oh, I don’t intend to.” I laughed. Riding out on a shudder of relief at the rapid change of subject, it was a laugh I would have found disproportionate and vaguely chilling were it directed at me. Fortunately, Edith either didn’t notice or at least had the good grace not to raise an eyebrow. “I’m—” trying to think of something to say “—planning on shouting at my boss for dragging me out, and being home in time for Cash in the Attic.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she agreed, and then giggled to herself. “Hey, you know what’d be even better?”

  “What?”

  “Tango & Cash in the Attic.”

  Ha ha.

  * * *

  I knew I’d be fixed by lunchtime. The cold light of day would see my head straight and my priorities in order in no time. Or at least that was what I thought.

  As it turned out, the light of day was already as hot as the belly of hell when I stepped from my car onto flame-scorched sand, hung my badge from its lanyard around my neck and entered a world of violence and horror for the likes of which even the most depraved of my many nightmares had left me woefully underprepared.

  It was 6:59 a.m. My name is Alisha Green, and this, to the best of my understanding, is the truth about Erica Shaw.

  Chapter 2

  A squirrel darted a stuttering dash along the bough above my head, twitching its velvety gray nose at the edges of the shadows among the leaves and sniffing suspiciously at the encroaching sunlight. In the dense cover high above, a lone wood pigeon flexed its wings and fluttered the sleep from its rumpled feathers. He looked like he’d had a rough night.

  I looked worse, if my reflection in the car window was anything to go by. I’d had them both open all the way here, and my undried hair had frizzed up into a bouffant bird’s nest. I slipped the hairband from my wrist and bundled the mess into a rough, damp knot at the base of my neck. If it didn’t improve me, it might at least give the pigeon second thoughts about moving in.

  I propped my foot on the sun-bleached picnic trestle beside the car and bent to tighten my shoelace. A pair of wasps buzzed hungrily around the rubbish bin beside me, keeping a respectful distance from one another as they took turns to dive inside for a bite. A third investigated the sticky rim of a Coke can, idly dropped in the grass not three feet away, the silvered peaks of its crushed carcass shimmering thousands of tiny jewels of light across the fixed-penalty warning notice plastered to the receptacle. No Littering: Maximum Fine £2,500. The futility of mandatory environmental correctness, summed up in a shiny red aluminum nutshell. I picked up the can and disposed of it properly. The wasp didn’t flinch.

  This, right here, is the kind of peace I crave: the early-morning sun prickling my upturned face; the idle lapping of the river against the pebbles on the bank; the soft quirrup of ducklings perpetually distracted from the arduous task of keeping up with mum; the m
erest whisper of distant traffic, just there enough to temper the isolation without intruding on the blissful, cossetting quiet of—

  “Oi! Pocahontas! Over here!”

  Oh. Right. Kevin.

  * * *

  I took in a lingering lungful of cow shit and pollen.

  Geoff Green—no relation—greeted me with an indifferent nod as I slipped between my Alfa and the adjacent patrol car. I’d seen the burly constable around often enough to know his name, but his snakelike eyes and disdainful demeanor had always deterred me from wanting to know much more about him. Whether he perpetually wished he were somewhere else, or simply didn’t like the look of me any more than I did him, I couldn’t entirely tell. Nor did I particularly care.

  Geoff had been left in charge of guarding the inner perimeter. It was clearly a hurried affair, the blue-and-white warning tape sagging between posts speared skew-wiff and at random intervals into the sandy earth as it bisected the picnic site. It also seemed a somewhat extraneous measure, given that the access road was barricaded by patrol cars at its inception half a mile back, the car park entrance was itself taped and guarded and a fourth cordon encircled what seemed to be the object of the collective attention—a burned-out car slumped at the far side of the clearing.

  If I’d known him better, I might have accused Geoff of erecting the barrier himself, just to look as though he had something important to do. However, half a dozen years having passed between us without the need for small talk, and with neither of us any more inclined than the other to fix what wasn’t broken, I kept my suspicions to myself and simply returned Geoff’s sulky nod as I ducked under the tape, which he lifted just high enough to garrote me had I not been half expecting it.

  At the other end of the mood swing, and entirely at odds with his tone on the phone, Kevin McManus was a veritable grin on a stick. He picked through a maze of yellow plastic markers and staked-off squares of sand, sterile suit rustling, teeth flashing, arms wide like he thought he was going to get a hug. “You know, for a minute I thought you might blow me out,” he crowed, his voice sounding hollow and windswept against the squawk and chatter of radios and crime scene techs and the rattle and hum of a diesel generator.

  “Save it,” I warned him. “You’re at the top of my shit list today.”

  “Well, aren’t we the little ray of sunshine?” In defiance of the mechanics of the human face, and presumably working on the assumption that I was joking, he broadened his smile to within a whisker of obscuring his own vision. “Listen, don’t go shooting the messenger, okay? You know I wouldn’t kick you out of bed without—”

  I choked on my own spit.

  “I mean... You know, drag you out of—”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  Oh, Jesus Christ, Kevin. “Anyone you like. Take your time, I’ve got all day.”

  “John,” he remembered, with none of the exaggerated embarrassment you or I might affect when caught with our wits down. Instead, he ran a hand through his dark, wiry mop and scratched at the short patch over his crown, a remnant of a recent pistol-whipping. “He’s, um...in the car,” he said. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, it’s...” He glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the car and just sort of sighed.

  “What about DC Keith? Any sign?” John Fairey hadn’t been alone when he’d seemingly vanished into thin air; there was no trace of the freshly minted detective he’d snagged for a dogsbody, either.

  Kevin gave me a shrug and a sympathetic smile. “I’ll get you a suit,” he said.

  * * *

  “Where’s Mal?”

  “The what?” Kevin dropped a fetching pair of white rubber boots at my feet and handed me the paper jumpsuit he’d retrieved from the back of the nearby CSI van. He’d tried to flirt with Sandra, the duty pathologist, but she was on the phone and had batted him away with an irritable glare. His smile had faded rapidly.

  “Mal,” I repeated. “Mal Lowry. He should be here.”

  Kevin narrowed his eyes and nodded with a look that said No shit, Sherlock. “I know,” he said. “We’ve all got personal problems, right?”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that; I just knew it didn’t explain where my DCI was. I flattened the suit out on the ground and slipped my feet into the leg holes. “You know what else I can’t see?” I pulled it up to my waist and realized I had it back to front.

  “What?”

  “Any bodies in that car. Where are they?” Did I turn the suit once or twice? It now appeared to be upside down.

  “I was getting to that.” Kevin eyed the jumpsuit curiously as I attempted vainly to pass it behind my back without reversing it. “Do you want a hand?”

  “Could you?” I don’t know how many of these godforsaken things I’ve had to clamber into over the course of my career, but it’s one of those tasks—most of which, come to think of it, seem to involve items of apparel—for which practice will never make perfect. I will never be able to tie an apron behind my back, and I will never be able to get into a front-fastening one-piece paper jumpsuit without the assistance of a third party. Fact of life.

  “Don’t worry about Lowry,” he said, which seemed strange, because I wasn’t. “Just enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts.” He turned me around by the shoulders, scrunched the suit up in his hands and squatted behind me, tapping each of my legs in turn as he wanted them lifted and lowered. “’Scuse fingers.”

  “Keep them below the knee,” I laughed. “Geoff’s watching.”

  The constable looked casually away as Kevin yanked the suit up over my hips and said, “I think he’s got the hots for you, you know.”

  I stifled a chuckle. “Well, he all but pulls my hair every time he sees me,” I said.

  “Boys are always mean to girls they like,” he agreed, standing to guide my arms into the appropriate holes and slide the shoulders of the suit up onto my own. “You can manage the zip on your own, right?”

  I gave him a withering look and said, “Ha bloody ha. Who called us?” as I fumbled hopelessly with the zip and Kevin pretended not to notice the trembling in my fingers.

  “The usual,” he said, handing me a full-face particulate mask. “Dog walker. Said his dog wouldn’t stop barking at it, so he took a peek. Watches a lot of true-crime shows.”

  “Him or the dog?”

  “Not sure.”

  “What time?”

  “Five thirty-five.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I sent him home. He’ll come in this afternoon if we need him to.”

  “You talked to him yourself?”

  “Yep.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Genuine.”

  I nodded and snapped the mask over my head and Kevin did the same. “Ogay,” I said, waving to Sandra and getting a thumbs-up in return. “Ned dayg a nook.”

  * * *

  There was no denying it was my old partner’s Mondeo. I’d spent a lot of hours staring pointedly out of the window of that car, or gripping the sides of my seat, or instinctively thumping my right foot onto an imaginary brake pedal. I was in it when he creased the wheel arch against a bollard, and I was standing right where I was now when he kicked the dent into the front wing in anger at some humiliation or other. My seat was gone, just a buckled metal frame remaining. The worn carpet in the footwell was gone, too—in fact, everything was gone; it was just a ravaged shell. But those dents were as good as a fingerprint.

  It wasn’t blue anymore. It was orange and black and brown, rust and soot and death. It sat sadly on its sills in the sand, one back door hanging limp on twisted hinges. The roof sagged from front to back, the tailgate bent on its frame so that the lid reared up, arched like a mouth shrieking in horror. And in that mouth was what I could only assume were the remains of my two former colleagues
.

  * * *

  Bone is bone. It doesn’t really look like anything else. I suppose I could have convinced myself it was coral, or pebbles at a push, but I didn’t bother to try. It was a gray rubble of bone, fragmented, cemented with splatters of rain-pasted ash. To my untrained eye, it could have been anyone, or anything. Sure, I know all the words; I read the same books you read. Skull sutures. Pubic symphysis. Phalanges, which just reminds me of Phoebe from Friends. I could even tell you what they mean, and relate the most reliable method of estimating the height of a person from their skeleton, or of determining the gender and racial profile of a skull. But I’m no more than an armchair expert; my opinion isn’t worth the calories I’d expend merely forming it, and the jigsaw puzzle in front of me now was far beyond my understanding of how a person could even begin to make sense of it. And so, knowing in my gut that this was the final resting place of Detective Inspector John Fairey and Detective Constable Julian Keith, I resisted the urge to plunge my hand into the ashes, pull out a shard of calcined something-or-other and shout, “Aha,” and I walked away from the car.

  * * *

  “Okay, first screamingly obvious things first,” I said, once I’d flicked the mask off my face and could breathe again. I pointed at the square of blackened grass beneath my feet—one of a dozen I could see, evidence of a summer of careless barbecuing. “There are burn marks just about everywhere except under the car. Who’s out looking for the crime scene?”

  Kevin looked from me to the car and back again, and scratched the back of his head. “Not organized that yet,” he said, which I had to concede was an accurate if inexhaustive statement. “Been a little bit busy on my own here. I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet.”

  Signed off till Monday. Not going to feel guilty for having breakfast. “You’ve done a good job,” I said, although I knew Sandra had probably beaten him here and taken control of the scene herself. “We haven’t got the whole car here. The bumpers, the tires, all of the plastic and rubber bits that have melted off. They’re not here. We’re missing a debris field. Plus there are no drag marks, but there’s a trail of mud and oil at least all the way back to the top of the road. See?” I indicated a set of thick, wide-treaded tire tracks printed in clumps of earth and clay, leading to and from the Mondeo and punctuated by a circular swirl on the tarmac at the entrance to the picnic site. “Someone carried it here on a tractor, right? Front loader, teleporter, whatever you want to call it.”