The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (30 page)

‘Deny what?’

‘That a part of me knew exactly what a monster my husband really was.’

She rubbed her stomach gently, and when she looked up at us, her face was desperately sad.

‘That a part of me knew full well what he would do to a child of his own.’

Groves

The last image of him

It didn’t look as though the dead woman had been there for very long. She had been laid out like a star, her hands and feet tethered to the four bedposts with wire. Her hands, hanging down from their bindings, somehow reminded Groves of dead birds. Her head was tilted away from him, staring lifelessly towards the open window, where the dim light coming in revealed the extent of the injury to her throat. It looked as though she’d been nearly decapitated by the ferocity of the attack. Blood had crept down the white silk blouse she was wearing.

Groves took a careful step closer to the bed, edging around the base and towards the far side. He wanted to see the woman’s face, but at least some of the policeman within him remained. He did his best to move slowly and quietly, just as he often did at crime scenes, almost as though the victim was sleeping and mustn’t be disturbed.

The woman’s face was familiar, but for a moment he couldn’t place where he might have seen her before. Closer to, the other wounds she’d suffered were more obvious: cuts to her arms and body, done straight through the clothes, and several further slices on her face. Someone had drawn on the skin with a knife. A spray of blood from the larger wound had dried on the wall
beside her, and a pool on the floor beneath the bed had already congealed.

The same killer
.

Clearly it was: the same man who had killed Leland and Thompson. Which implied that this woman, whoever she was, had also been linked to Simon Chadwick and the rest of them. It was possible she had been involved in Jamie’s murder. That knowledge should have tempered his reaction to seeing her dead like this. It ought to have made it easier to look at the body, knowing that in some sense she had deserved it. It didn’t.

Groves wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but there was certainly no pleasure in knowing that this woman had suffered and died. If he felt anything at all right then, it was a profound sense of sadness. Whatever else it might have achieved, what had happened to these people wouldn’t bring Jamie back. In spite of the guilt he’d felt earlier, this didn’t look anything like justice to him. Suffering and evil could never be cancelled out by more of it.

He crouched down, careful not to touch the bed itself, and peered at the woman’s face. Even with what had been done to it, it was easy enough to imagine what she would have looked like in life ...

He stood up suddenly, taking a panicked step back.

Shit.
Shit
.

He didn’t know the woman’s name, but he knew where he recognised her from. Back when Jamie had been alive, she had worked at the nursery he’d attended. Laura something. That was her first name. He’d probably never heard her surname.

Groves nodded to himself.

He could almost have laughed.

Stitching me up good and proper, aren’t you?

What to do next? There didn’t seem any point phoning this scene in. It was the right thing to do, but it would surely damn him. However much Sean might want to believe him, the evidence against him was mounting. He needed to figure out the best way to handle it. He needed a hand of cards to play.

He turned to leave the room. And then froze for the second time.

Do you want to see your son again?

When he’d walked in, he hadn’t seen them.

Photographs. Stuck to the wall beside the doorway. There were about twenty of them, and they looked home-made, as though printed out on photographic paper. Each one showed almost the exact same scene: the room behind Groves; a child standing at the foot of the bed.

He took a step closer.

The light in each photograph was subtly different. Some appeared to have been taken in the daytime, while others were illuminated by candle- or torchlight. The girls and boys were of various ages.

This is where they brought them
.

This was where they had brought
Jamie
. Groves crouched down, panicking now, peering at the photographs. Laila Buckingham was there.
Oh God
. One by one, he looked, not believing that Jamie could really be here amongst these children, his gaze flicking from photo to photo, and then he stopped looking, because there he was. Everything in the world disappeared. Apart from the photograph, everything went away entirely.

It was strange how calm he felt.

Jamie
.

In the photograph, his son was standing by the bed dressed in the blue jeans and orange shark T-shirt Groves could remember so well, the clothes he’d vanished in. His blond hair, never cut, was brushed into a neat parting, and the ends curled up above his small shoulders, as though afraid to touch them. Groves had a sudden, visceral memory of how it had felt to touch his hair. How thin and soft it had been.

Jamie wasn’t crying in the photo, but his expression wasn’t blank either. Instead, he was looking at the camera with something approaching curiosity. His expression seemed to be saying:
This is strange; what is happening here?
There was certainly no indication that he was scared or hurt – but then he was never
easily cowed, never afraid of anything. Every new experience had been treated as an adventure, as though he believed the world couldn’t hurt him, because it never had. Until it did.

His cheeks were slightly red. Groves could see the rash just below his eye, and remembered rubbing cream into it the morning before he went missing, while Jamie tried to squirm out of Caroline’s embrace. He was exactly as Groves recalled him. A little boy, frozen forever in time.

This is the last image of him
.

Groves reached out to touch the photograph, not caring now about fingerprints, not caring about anything. There might be other pictures, of course – later ones that would be unbearable to see – but this was a more recent image than any in Caroline’s album, or in their memories.

He took the photograph from the wall. It was tacked on, and came away with a slight snap. He stared down at it again, then stroked his son’s face, surprised for a brief second that the paper was cold; he had almost been expecting the warmth that came from touching skin.

He put it in his coat pocket.

Time to leave. He went back downstairs, moving less carefully than before; there didn’t seem much point in trying now. He would be tied to the scene eventually, whatever he did, and it felt like the photograph had changed everything. He was going to call this in and deal with the consequences. He didn’t care any more.

He walked outside, where the rain had picked up, already taking out his mobile, but he didn’t have the chance to make the call. He faltered.
God will be with you
, he remembered, looking around the car park. Looking at the people walking quietly towards him.

Mark

The photographs

As I pulled up at the end of the cul-de-sac, directly outside Paul Carlisle’s house, I saw that his front door was slightly ajar. I remembered coming to visit him days ago – pulling up behind the large van that had been parked nearby. The street itself was empty now, dead. I stared at the house for a moment, watching the clouds reflected in the implacable glass of the windows, the windscreen of the car slowly smearing with rain.

‘Right,’ I told Mercer. ‘I’ll need you to wait here, John.’

‘I understand.’

I pulled out my mobile as I approached the house, dialling Pete’s number. Even though the rain was falling harder now, the weather still hadn’t broken the heat, and the air was clammy and moist as I made my way up Paul Carlisle’s path to the open front door. The house felt ominous, as though someone inside might be standing slightly back from one of the windows, watching me.

I stopped on the doorstep, the phone to my ear. The door was open far enough to give me a view of the kitchen beyond, empty and full of shadow.

‘Detective Pete Dwyer.’

‘It’s Mark.’

I gave him a rundown of the situation: that I’d persuaded
Mercer to come to the hospital with me, and what Charlie had told us there. I could hear he was annoyed at me involving Mercer again without his permission, but by the end of the account, he seemed to have decided to let it ride for the moment.

‘Carlisle’s front door’s open,’ I said. ‘It might be nothing, but I’m going in to check it out. His girlfriend lives here too, and she’s pregnant.’

‘Right.’ Pete sounded firm. ‘I’m sending a car, and I’ll be over straight away. Don’t take any stupid risks, Mark.’

‘Don’t worry.’

I hung up.

‘Mr Carlisle?’ I called out, rapping hard on the door. It opened a little wider. ‘It’s the police, Mr Carlisle. Are you inside? Can you hear me?’

There was no reply, so I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the kitchen. It was even messier than the last time I’d been here, but there was also an atmosphere to the place now that I didn’t like. The gloom seemed darker than it should have done.

‘Mr Carlisle?’

I moved through to the front room, and immediately stopped in the doorway. The room was empty, but there were obvious signs of a struggle: the coffee table had been knocked out of place, and was now pushed at an angle against the settee, while the television had fallen off the wall. The clothes and newspapers that had been piled on the seats during my last visit were scattered at random across the floor.

Charlie
, I thought,
what have you done?

What have your new-found friends done here?

‘Mr Carlisle?’

Again no answer. I stepped into the living room, my heart beating too quickly. Something in the house was making my skin crawl. I wanted nothing more than to back slowly out of the room and return to the car to wait, but I had to make sure that either Carlisle or his partner weren’t lying injured
somewhere. I made my way carefully across the room to the door at the far corner. Pulling my sleeve down over my hand, I turned the handle, stepping back as I opened it in case anyone was waiting on the other side. Nobody was.

The carpet on the staircase was old and battered, worn through in places, and the landing at the top was illuminated by a single bulb, the lightest place in the house so far.

‘Mr Carlisle?’

I was no longer expecting a response, but this time I did hear something – not a reply, but a sound coming from somewhere upstairs. Somebody crying. A woman, whimpering softly to herself.

I took the stairs three at a time.

‘It’s the police,’ I shouted. ‘Where are you, please?’

The woman was still crying, and the sound drew me towards the half-closed door of what was obviously the main bedroom. I pushed it open slowly, and saw her straight away: Carlisle’s girlfriend, sitting on the floor between a wardrobe and a dressing table, her back against the wall, her arms hugging her swollen stomach. I realised that I didn’t even know her name.

‘Miss?’ I said. ‘It’s the police. Are you hurt?’

She didn’t answer me.

I took out my phone and called for an ambulance. As it dialled, I asked her, ‘Is anybody else in the house?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘How long have you been up here?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was crying so hard that it was difficult to make out the words.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘They
took
him. They came in and
took
him.’

The hospital answered. I gave them my police ID.

‘I need an ambulance right now at 68 Petrie Crescent. Pregnant woman, possibly injured.’

‘On its way, Officer.’

I hung up, then pushed the door wider and stepped into the bedroom.

And faltered for the second time since entering the house.

The woman was sitting across from the bed, which I hadn’t been able to see before from the occluded doorway. Now that I was in the room, I could see the spiderweb that had been drawn on the wall above the headboard. It had been done hurriedly in black marker, and the design was different from the one at Gordon Peters’ house, but it was just as authentic.

I moved over to the bed, intending to get a better look at the web, perhaps thinking that by staring at it I might gain some insight into the sins Carlisle was supposed to have committed.
A part of me knew full well what he would do to a child of his own
. But as I stepped closer, I realised that the drawing was not the only thing wrong with the room.

There was a box file on the bed. Someone had opened it and emptied the contents over the quilt. My gaze moved over the papers and pamphlets and photographs, and I recognised with disgust what they were.

The papers were mostly photocopies. The one nearest to me had a hand-drawn picture of a naked child on it, sketched in pencil. Others had drawings that were even cruder and more explicit, depicting sexual scenarios between children and grown men and women. Many were almost cartoonish, depicted in seaside postcard style, while others were realistic. The pamphlets I could see appeared to be hand-printed and stapled and old: vile material that used to be passed around by hand long before the advent of the internet. Collectors’ items, perhaps. But there were printouts from online as well: stills from what looked like videos; real people in real poses.

And then there were the photographs.

I took another step closer to the bed, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to make sense of what I was seeing. There were perhaps twenty of them in all, lined up in the centre of the bed in rows and columns, like cards for a matching game. Each of them was similar but horrifyingly different. Similar
because they all showed a child standing in what appeared to be the same desolate room; horrifying because each child was different – boys and girls, ranging in age from infants to early teens. Each photograph was a memento of what I could only imagine had been an individual case of terrible abuse.