A Cry in the Night (25 page)

‘Not really. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s private and not relevant to the case.’

‘I see.’

Her eyes were fixed on his. Just as they had been the previous night outside the police station. But then she was out in the open, out in the dark. Today, she sat behind a desk, shielded by the finery of her office.

‘I suppose I was just wondering,’ he continued, ‘if you could help me with a series of coincidences.’

She shook her head, as if she didn’t understand. But she knew exactly where he was taking this, he was certain of it. She picked up a pen and began to doodle on a large notepad which had the chambers’ name printed in an embossed font at the top of the page.

‘What coincidences?’ she asked.

‘Well, ma’am—’

‘Ma’am? Behave yourself. I’m Helen.’

‘Well, then, Helen, I’m a little intrigued by the cases that you’ve been choosing recently.’

The pen stopped, choked for a second, then continued. She didn’t look at him.

‘A series of cases,’ he continued, ‘in which you seem to have shown unusual interest, involving yourself at stages that wouldn’t normally require someone like you.’

‘Someone like me.’

‘Someone as important as you.’

Her tongue touched the top of her lip and then disappeared. It made Sam think of a snake.

‘And in all these cases, there is the violent murder of young children,’ he added, waiting for the punch to hit.

Helen feigned a yawn. ‘Yes, it’s been a strange run I’ve had,’ she said. ‘But this isn’t really something for a policeman to bother himself with, is it?’

‘Well, there’s the nature of the cases and also the manner in which you’ve defended them.’

‘Which means what?’

Sam leaned forward in his chair. He faced her full on, there was no point pretending any more.

‘I’m investigating you.’

Sam let this comment stew for a moment, then looked around the office and pretended to admire a large oil painting on the wall. But Helen didn’t bite. She waited calmly. Like a trap.

He finally looked back at her. He couldn’t resist. He’d
come here to face her, to see her for real and let her know that he was going to stop her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she snapped, her bookish pretensions falling away from her. She clutched the pen in her hand like a dagger now.

‘Now, now, Helen,’ he crowed. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist.’

It was lovely to see just how much the words angered her and how she had to work to hide it.

‘You have quite a nerve,’ she said. ‘Swanning in here, all on your own, with these smears and threats.’

She stood up, silhouetted by the sun that had broken through the clouds and now shone into the room.

‘You really should have thought your actions through a little more before charging in here with your empty words and big fists. You stupid little man.’

Sam found that he was standing.

‘You come here, into my office,’ she continued, ‘to do what? You have no questions, you have no facts. Why are you here, Mr Taylor?’

‘I was hoping to—’

‘We’re not in your cosy, beefcake cop shop now. You’re not here with your hairy mates, farting and laughing all day. This is my office.’

‘I can see that.’

There was a wildness in her eyes that flared and then
faded. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth before refocusing on Sam. She pushed her chair back slightly.

‘I think it is very typical that a man like you would waltz in with nothing but his dick in his hands and expect a result. You have no power here. Do you get that? You are nothing. No, I’m wrong, scrap that, I know what you are. You are a lapdog – running along to another man’s wishes. Sam, you need to go back to your nasty little den and leave me alone. You don’t screw with someone like me and not feel the whiplash.’

‘Someone like you?’

‘Yes. Someone with some real fucking power.’

The phone on her desk rang but she didn’t bother to answer it. It rang interminably but neither moved. Then Sam nodded, thanked her for her time and walked out. He tried to do it nonchalantly, but he felt heavy and awkward as he went. Behind him the phone stopped ringing, but he didn’t hear Helen answer it and he imagined she was right behind him. He turned, a little spooked, and indeed there she was, standing in the doorway, arms folded, watching him.

She was right. He could feel her power. He knew she had influence and authority, and that ornate office had told him so clearly enough. But that was not all. She wasn’t strong because of this. It was her. She was the power. She stared Sam down and he marvelled and feared her in equal measure.

Real fucking power. The words chased him home, spinning amongst the litter that the wind picked up and skittered at his feet. They were coughed from the engines of the cars in the slow rush-hour traffic.

He slammed his front door shut and went straight to his room, ignoring a call from his mother. He spilled the files out onto his bed, going through them all again. Again and again and again.

*

The fever calmed a little over the hours that passed, but still those guilty women’s faces burned out at Sam from the papers. Their cold, emotionless expressions haunted him as their details lay scattered across his bed at home. He looked away from them and saw his wife’s photograph smiling at him from the chest of drawers. Magda had laid some ironed clothes in front of the frame, which meant that only Andrea’s twinkling eyes were visible. He looked away, back down at the case photographs. Eventually he stacked them into a neat pile and hid them out of sight.

He went downstairs in search of some food and found Magda alone in the kitchen. She was talking to someone on the phone in her native tongue which he couldn’t understand. She had a wild, loud laugh and let out a coarse bark of delight just as Sam entered. She turned, surprised by his presence, and for a second her eyes were full of anger. They reminded him of his murderous women.

Magda hung up quickly. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hi. Is there any food?’

‘Of course,’ she replied, as though he was a child. ‘What you want?’

‘Whatever you’ve got. Something easy you can reheat?’

She shrugged and went to the fridge.

‘And where is everyone?’ he asked. In response he heard a scream upstairs –
Stay the fuck out of my fucking room!
And heard girls’ feet stomping and two doors slamming.

‘Your mother is not right,’ Magda said as he stared uselessly as the ceiling.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your mother. She is … going away.’ Magda frowned and then nodded as though these words were correct.

‘What? Going where? What?’

‘Your mother.’ Magda tapped her head to make the point more clearly.

‘Oh. Yeah.’

Yes, she was going away. Slowly disappearing, inevitably forgetting and fading from somewhere inside herself. Sam wondered what had happened that had made Magda notice, but he didn’t want to talk to her about this. He should do something, he thought, but he felt so tired. His mind went blank. And then Andrea was there, laughing as she always did when he told her about his dreary work, jokingly making up her own events where a supermarket shop became a guntoting
heist. And she always saved the day. Sam’s eyes welled up with tears and he had to wipe them away.

He sat at the table and a few moments later Magda placed a large plate of stew before him. She returned with a glass of water. As she moved on, she let her hand rest on his shoulder for a moment.

Sam ate quickly then dumped the empty plate in the washing machine. He stared at his glass of water and he remembered the lake, stretching out before him, calm and cold, hiding its secrets deep down in the rocks and mud.

He didn’t know how it happened, but the glass smashed and cut his hand. Blood and water mingled and spiralled together down the plughole. He saw beautiful patterns and a seductive dance as these ribbons slipped into the drain. And he imagined a woman’s laughter and delight.

On the other side of the city, Zoe sat at her desk and stared at her computer screen. The inbox for her email was packed with abusive messages. She deleted each one methodically, but couldn’t stop herself from reading them first and soaking up the hatred. She reminded herself that all of these messages were, most likely, the work of only one or two men. But they had been busy and the violence and anonymity of it spooked her. She wanted to be stronger and not to care, but it was impossible.

It was dark outside and the office was empty. There would be two duty officers around somewhere, but right now she was alone and she hated it. She needed Sam but he wasn’t answering his phone. The door opened at the far end and then slammed shut. She turned around. There was no one there.

Disconcerted, she stood up and walked towards the door, pulling it open and peering out into the corridor. Someone
had switched the light off. She reached for the switch, but when the lights clicked back on, there was nothing to see. So this was the new game.

It wasn’t too late to write up a report that claimed self-defence and reasonable actions by Sergeant Cartmell. It was all she had to do and she had always prided herself on being part of the gang. But when a door at the other end of the office slammed shut and suddenly the entire CID office was plunged into darkness, Zoe knew that she would never write that report.

She slipped back to her desk. She was lighter and more dextrous than any of her colleagues and she could play in the dark all night. She heard two men slip in by the entrance next to the DCI’s office and she knew that they’d come for her. She heard their breathing and saw them peering into the dark, taking slow, tentative steps forward, waiting for her to call out and reveal herself.

Once, an officer called Jared McLean had decided to rat on his colleagues when he believed that they’d stolen some of the proceeds of a post office robbery. They came for him at his home, stuffed a pillow case over his head and threw him into the back of a van. He was found the next morning, tied to a post, waist-deep in the river, screaming hysterically as the tide rose.

Zoe had made no accusations, not yet. And this wasn’t stolen money, this was just a cop and a little grunt on an estate. But they were coming for her, nonetheless.

She kept away from her desk and – slowly, silently – she moved to the far end of the office, so that she was near a door if and when they decided to turn the lights back on. She wondered if they’d got colleagues waiting in the corridors, so that if she did run, they’d be ready for her. She even thought about how she’d get out to her car. The tyres would be let down, no doubt. Maybe a key had been scratched across the door or bonnet.

They all look the same, she thought. All in blue, all talking the same, thinking the same, doing the same. All part of the same horrible club. She was angry that she’d been a part of it for so long.

And where the hell was Sam? Why wasn’t he answering her calls? She flinched at the sudden idea that he’d turned his back on her. Maybe they’d gone to him and told him their version and he’d bought it and let them go for her. That was why he wasn’t here now. He’d told them she was fair game.

She cursed his name silently in the darkness and felt the throb of tears which she stuffed back down inside. She stood in the darkness and watched the thugs stumble forward and, in that moment, she decided that she would find Helen Seymour again.

Unable to stop, Sam worked through the papers once more. He had taken the photos of the female suspects and laid them out at the top of the bed, on the pillows, then started to circle relevant corresponding details and placed them in lines below the head-shots. It created long rows of paperwork that streaked down the bed like some sort of anarchic family tree. He crouched amongst the rest of the files, reading the same facts over and over again.

He’d lost track of time when he heard a knock on the door. He waited, and Magda entered quietly. She smiled a little coyly, but he noticed how her eyes flicked around to the chaos of the room with some alarm.

‘Yes?’ he snapped.

‘You missed a phone call. Your phone, it was downstairs. I answered.’

‘Who was it?’

‘A girl. Ashley.’

Her name jolted him.

‘What did she want?’

‘She wants you to call.’

She handed Sam the phone and he checked the screen – a mobile number he didn’t recognise was the last call listed. He’d given Ashley his card back at Lullingdale. It seemed a lifetime ago.

‘She is young?’ Magda asked with a teasing tone to her voice.

‘She’s a witness in a case,’ he replied. Magda shrugged that same old shrug and was no less irritating for it. But she didn’t leave the room. It was as though she was toying with an idea, and it was some time before she spoke again.

‘Was she good?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘As a witness. I don’t think she was very good, was she?’

Sam looked at her, surprised. Magda barely spoke to him normally and would usually drag herself around the house. But there was that moment last night and then, tonight, her hand on his shoulder. And now she talked as though she knew Ashley.

‘Say that again.’

‘I just say, she wasn’t very good.’

‘Why? What did she say to you on the phone?’

Her repeated shrugs and face-pulling only annoyed him more.

‘Magda, I haven’t got time to screw about with you. What did she say?’

‘You want to screw with me?’

‘No! No, God, no. I’m saying I don’t have time for games.’

‘But you want to screw with Ashley.’

Sam was on his feet now.

‘Magda. What did she say to you?’

‘You call her.’

And that was all she gave him. She padded away and he heard her bedroom door shut. Sam dialled the number immediately, but it went straight to voicemail. He turned around, frustrated, and trod on some of the papers, kicking them out of their muddled order. He squatted down and tried to organise them again.

What had Ashley said to Magda? It was as though she had slipped through the phone and into his house. Her scowl and sly laugh were somehow hiding under his bed now, whispering along the corridors, crouching at the doors of his children’s bedrooms. And it was as though Magda had let her in.