Dead Girls Read online

  Kevin nodded. “Which was thoughtful of them.”

  “Ha. So who, and why now? It’s been two months.”

  He thought about it for a moment. Scratched his head. “Is there anything significant about the date?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  I knew where he was going to go before he went there. “Well, if we were in a film, I’d say, ‘The perp is sending us a message,’ but...we’re not, are we?”

  “Well, you might be,” I conceded, “but whoever dumped this here isn’t. We’ve got a convenient trail of bread crumbs, but it’s just muddy tire marks and you can’t really engineer those. If they lead all the way to the burn site, it’s an accident. Also, never say ‘perp’ again. You sound like an idiot.”

  “Agreed.”

  “It’s a pretty thin theory, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of.”

  “So what am I going to find when I leave you here to chase around after Sandra and go follow that trail by myself?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  Chapter 3

  No, you come on. I was tired, hungover, thirsty, more than a little confused, and I wasn’t even supposed to be here today or indeed any day this week, and I thought a nice gentle drive in the countryside would do me good. Frankly, I thought it was probably a waste of time; you can only load your tires with so much muck, so the trail was bound to go cold in short order, leaving me free to pop into the nearby village and buy some sugary drinks for myself and maybe even Kevin, if I was feeling more generous by then.

  He didn’t put up too much of a fight, either. He was obviously enjoying his moment, peacocking around the place as the only—and therefore most senior—detective on the scene. He probably had another hour to enjoy it, so I was happy to let him. And Geoff was clearly happy to let me go, too, because he lifted the tape clean over my head this time.

  The trail was laughably easy to follow: clumps of earth and sand and clay, and weeds snatched out from the verge by a vehicle clearly a few inches wider than the single-track road. And leaky, too. Whether it was oil or hydraulic fluid, it shone beautifully in the sunlight, a spot the size of my fist every ten yards or so.

  I was in no hurry. I didn’t even touch the throttle, just stuck it in second and let the clutch out and allowed the car to roll along at its own leisure. It was that kind of morning. The roadblock slid lazily aside to let me out, and we all exchanged smiles and waves as I idled by. Then I was free, turning right onto the little B-road that led to the village, and immediately I knew my hopes for a jolly to the shops were dashed, because there were muddy tracks and spots of oil on the other side of the road, too, and I only had to follow them for a couple of miles before they arced left onto a wide concrete track and escaped under a three-bar metal gate.

  I stopped the car, and sighed, and thought about what I might do next. I knew exactly what I should do, but my mouth was dry and tasted evil, and my temples were threatening to throb, and I had no phone signal, anyway, and the village was only a mile farther down the road, so I thought Fuck it, and did that instead.

  * * *

  There was, thank God, a newsagent’s shop in the village, and it was open, if not altogether welcoming. A portly, ruddy-cheeked old chap in a tweed jacket eyed me from behind the counter in some kind of appraisal or other, his eyes boring into the back of my head as I grabbed three cans of coldish Coke from a chiller that was probably older than me. I forced myself not to meet his eye, instead scanning dusty shelves packed with canned goods and decade-old toys, looking for something I might want to eat at this time of the morning and happily finding a box of Nurofen that was, surprisingly, in date. That would do, although I grabbed a handful of Twixes and a mint Magnum for good measure and finally gave the guy a smile as I dumped the lot on the counter. “Morning,” I said.

  He gave me a tight nod and a casual, “How are you today, Officer?” as he rang up the till.

  My neck prickled and my breath caught in my throat and I instinctively flashed a look over my shoulder at the empty shop. Was his face familiar? Should it be? Was mine? “I’m sorry?”

  He paused for a beat, then hit a button on the till with a sound like crashing thunder. The total flickered green on the little pop-up display. “How are you?” he repeated.

  I held his stare for a moment, perhaps a moment too long. His left eyelid began to twitch. “I’m good,” I said. “Thank you. Sorry, have we met?”

  He narrowed his eyes, flickered an inscrutable thought and said, “I don’t think so, miss, no. That’s six eighty-five.”

  What does “six eighty-five” mean? Mind racing, panic setting in. This was not expected. “Six eight—” I noticed the till then: £6.85, all squared off and glowing green. Right. “Right.” I nodded, shaking the blankness out of my head and fumbling for my purse. Only then did I realize that I was still wearing the lanyard around my neck, which of course made me bark a startled laugh that must have made me look even more special than I already did. “Right,” I reiterated, holding the badge up meekly as I handed the guy a tenner. “God, I thought you’d recognized me from somewhere. Sorry, I’m not awake yet.” I smiled in an effort to pretend I wasn’t suddenly entirely on edge.

  He relaxed visibly, even if he didn’t return my grin. “Best part of the day,” he said, handing me my change.

  I took the opening. “It is peaceful,” I said. “I’ll give you that. I don’t suppose you have the need to call my lot out too often, do you?”

  He regarded me curiously, a blue twinkle flashing across his bloodshot eyes. I’m sure he knew as well as I did that I already knew the answer to that. He humored me, though. “Not really,” he agreed. “We don’t have a lot of differences we can’t take care of between us. They say strange things pass through here at night, but the streetlights go out at eleven so I don’t see none of ’em.”

  I hid the shiver that ran down my spine, and asked him, “What about in the daytime?”

  He just shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell me anything, but he might at least be able to save me some time, so I pressed on. “Maybe you can help me,” I said, undeterred by his blank expression. “About a mile back that way, on the right-hand side, there’s a concrete track with a gate across it. Can you tell me where that goes?”

  He gave it a moment’s thought. Probably figured it was nothing I couldn’t look up on a map, anyway. “The old airfield,” he said.

  “It’s not an airfield anymore?”

  “Not since the war. Bomber base.”

  “So what is it now?”

  “Wheat and barley now.”

  “Can you tell me who owns it?”

  “That’ll be Giles.”

  I waited for him to crack a smile, but his poker face was strong. “And Giles is a farmer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Farmer Giles.”

  He nodded slowly. “I never heard it like that before,” he said. “That’s funny,” though he still didn’t smile.

  I quit while I was ahead.

  * * *

  Farmer Giles timed his arrival perfectly. I knew full well that the creepy shopkeeper would phone him the second I was out the door, so I saved myself some hard work and just sat in the entrance to the old airfield until he turned up, which he did, in a brand-new Range Rover, just as I was nibbling the last of the chocolate from my ice cream stick.

  “Giles, is it?” I said, stepping from the car as he did the same. “Thanks for getting here so quickly. I’m Detective Sergeant Green. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out with something.”

  “Giles Wynne-Parker.” He extended his hand to shake mine. “What can I do for you?” Cut-glass accent. Neatly cropped hair, graying at the edges. Strong, dimpled chin.

  I flicked the Magnum stick away to shake his hand. He watched it fly with a raised eyebrow. “Oops,” I said. “There’s proba
bly a law against that.” I paused, just long enough for his face to register that his jig was up. “Your tractor could do with a service,” I suggested, indicating the trail of oil on the ground.

  Giles sighed and nodded at his strangely unmuddied Buckler boots. “I know,” he conceded with a resigned smile. “It’s hydraulic fluid. I’ve got a leaking piston.”

  “I’d get that seen to before you leave any more anonymous donations,” I said, ducking my head to peer up into his eyes. “But thanks for giving us our car back—we’ve been wondering where it went.”

  He snapped his head up at that, and the eyes that met mine now were a little wider than they had been a moment ago. “Your car?”

  “Oh,” I laughed, “yeah, it’s a police car. That’s not really the worst of it, though.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” he said. “How much trouble am I in?”

  I chewed over that for a moment, let a few scary thoughts roll through his head, just for the sake of it. Finally, I said, “Let’s not worry about that. I mean, yes, you’ve been a bit of a plank, honestly, and you did dump it right next to the sign telling you not to dump anything, which, you know, we could easily take as you sticking two fingers up at us, and on a personal level, I’m not actually supposed to be at work today, so I kind of wish you’d waited until Monday, but right now, what I really need more than anything is for you to take me to wherever you moved it from, because there are a few bits still missing, and it’s also potentially a murder scene.”

  The color drained from his face faster than piss from a flushed toilet. “Murder?”

  “Why did it take you two months, Giles?”

  “Two months?”

  “That’s how long we’ve been looking.”

  “I...” He shook his head, eyes wide, nervous. “We were away. Florida. We’ve only been back a fortnight, and I don’t really use this gate. The main one’s at the other end of the runway. There’s nothing over here. I only came because some of the chickens got out. I...”

  “Why didn’t you call us?”

  “Wh—” He puffed out a sigh and shook his head. “Honestly?”

  I waited for him to tell me that we wouldn’t have bothered coming, that the council wouldn’t have been interested in removing a burned-out car from a private field. And he’d have had a fair point, but he didn’t go there; he just shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just how about you show me the spot, okay?”

  He took a moment to breathe, and then nodded and said, “Sure. Okay.” Then he took a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and unhooked the gate and opened it a crack and said, “You won’t need your car. It’s right over here.”

  * * *

  It was barely inside the gate, on a barren patch of clay off to the right of the track, shielded from the road by a grassy bank and from the rest of the farm by a clump of trees and overgrown bramble bushes. A twenty-foot black square, dotted with lumps of twisted, melted stuff, identifiable only by guesswork and its relative placement—a bumper here, a tire there.

  The ground was hard, but two months ago it hadn’t been; there were wheel tracks leading to the burn site, until this morning cast into the earth but now crumbled and flattened by Giles’s tractor, its hefty tires overlaying them with a patchwork of deep chevrons. I tutted at him quietly, although it made no real difference; this was quite evidently the crime scene, however much he’d trampled on it.

  And more than that, Giles had approached and retreated from the spot in a straight line, and hadn’t strayed around the edges of the square, and this, I realized as I surveyed the scene, might be very good news indeed. I turned to him as he stood awkwardly beside the Range Rover, picking at the skin around his thumbnail, and pointed at his car and asked him, “Giles, did you drive that over here at any point?”

  He took a few steps toward me and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  I indicated the patch of ground between the scorch marks and the road. “You didn’t pull up alongside the car to have a look?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  I nodded thanks, and looked back to where a second set of churned-up tracks splintered off from the rest and curved around the burn site at the foot of the roadside bank, coming to an abrupt end a few yards beyond where the car had sat. As they straightened, they became clearer, and where they ended they were very clear indeed.

  They were perfectly preserved, the tread pattern pressed into soft clay and then baked in the persistent sun, this heatwave of which the Great British Public had grown weary within a matter of days, but for which I now offered up a silent prayer of thanks.

  “So you’re telling me,” I called, “that there’s no reason you know of for anything to have been parked here?” He shook his head. I nodded mine, and took out my phone. Still no signal. I stood, gritted my teeth through a twinge in my hip and joined him beside his car. “Next question,” I said. “Have you got a phone on you that works? I need to make a call.”

  I surveyed the scene as he mumbled and fumbled in his jacket. I didn’t know the circumstances. I didn’t know whether John and Julian had died here, and if so, whether they’d come of their own free will. But common sense told me this would be a strange place to arrange a meeting, especially with the kind of man who’d shared their final farewell.

  Because yes, as much as I didn’t know the order of events, I sure as hell knew who was responsible.

  Sort of.

  Chapter 4

  I can’t remember his name, or what he looks like. However many times they tell me, or show me his picture, it’s always the same: within minutes, I’ve forgotten.

  I’ve all but given up trying. His picture is only an e-fit, anyway, and no one really knows his name; he went by so many that in the end they just picked one and stuck with it, even though they knew he’d stolen it from a baby’s grave. I tend to just call him That Man. That man who hurt me. That man who took away my memories, my hopes, my future. That man who all but killed me with his bare hands.

  It’s not just the forgetting. There’s the falling down, too. Some days I can’t walk very well, because the nerves to my right leg are fused, or snagged, or...something. I’ve got it all written down. In any case, I might be in the street, or in the supermarket—never anywhere soft like the garden or a bouncy castle—and oh! There it goes, folding under me like the bolt just fell out. It happened in the car once, and I couldn’t get to the brake and had to swerve into a hedge to avoid a cyclist. I didn’t tell anyone in case they stopped me from driving, but I’m scared sometimes.

  Often, I feel like I’m not entirely inside myself, like I’ve fallen out of my body and haven’t quite slotted back in right. It’s like there’s a satellite delay between my body and my senses, like having a fever but, most days, without the cold sweats and the nausea. It’s surreal and a bit frightening, and when it happens it’s often accompanied by a little shock, like when something makes you jump. I used to pay good money to feel like that of an evening. I miss having the choice.

  But it’s not every day. Some days I can walk and grip and find things funny. And there are a lot of things I can remember, too. Most days I can think of my own name, which comes up more often than you’d guess if you’ve never had to write it on your hand in biro.

  I can remember liking broccoli, which makes me gag on sight now.

  I can remember my wedding day, looking at my ridiculous cake of a dress in the mirror and wondering how I’d ever let him talk me into it. I can remember holding my decree absolute in my hands and trembling under the sudden weight of my freedom.

  I can remember sunshine and walks in the park, watching other people’s children hurtle down the slide and boing around on those spring-mounted wooden horses, and wishing not to be among the throng of parents standing by with pride or impatience or overprotective anxiet
y or idle indifference, but to dare to come back when they’d all gone home and play on the rides myself.

  I can remember our family Keycamp holiday in France, a hundred degrees, me at eight chaining Calippos in my minibikini, my sister, Reena, at thirteen head-to-toe in black and wincing through cups of bitter coffee, trying to impress the pool boy with the 750 Suzuki. I can remember him offering her a ride to the beach on the pillion seat, and Dad’s face turning from brown to purple at the very idea. I can remember the sirens blaring past the caravan site when he roared off on it alone and died under a farm truck.

  I can remember my first day at school, screaming for my mum while the other kids stared at me blankly, and I can remember my last day, laughing off my A-level results and wondering how I was going to break the news at home.

  I can remember all of my first days as a police officer: my first day of training, my first as a probationer on the beat, my first dead body, my first arrest of a blushing teenage shoplifter who didn’t run, struggle or even argue but just sat sadly in the back of the car, crying over the trouble he was in. I can remember my first day as a detective, my first incident room, my first postmortem. And, clearest of all, I can remember the first time I knew I was going to die.

  * * *

  It was 10:25, Tuesday morning, nine weeks ago. Twenty-six degrees C and pouring with rain. I was standing in the car park behind the constabulary’s headquarters, watching it bounce off the tarmac and soak through the canvas of my shoes. I was wearing a twenty-year-old pac-a-mac from The Gap, which in the heat was keeping me as wet inside my clothes as out. I was confused.