CRIME ON THE FENS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

As Nikki entered ITU, she was met by familiar faces. This was one of the few places where she was rarely known as a detective inspector, but simply as Hannah’s mum.

‘We almost lost him,’ said the sister shaking her head. ‘But he’s a tough little devil. The doctors are pretty certain that we can keep him stable this time.’

‘Is he off the ventilator?’ asked Nikki.

‘Yes, and he’s holding his own. We are just waiting for the anaesthetist, then we’ll bring him round.’ Leah looked at Nikki, her eyes full of compassion. ‘And considering your previous involvement with this procedure, it’s our joint decision that you wait outside for that bit. We’ll call you when he’s compos mentis, okay?’

‘You’re all very thoughtful,’ said Nikki, ‘and I really appreciate it, but I’m here with my police hat on today. It’s imperative that I hear everything that he has to say.’

‘It could still be very traumatic for you.’ Leah looked worried. ‘It’s bad enough without all the bad memories that you have.’ She squeezed Nikki’s arm. ‘I’ll come and get you immediately he’s stable, I promise.’

Nikki raised her hands in silent surrender, and secretly felt a rush of relief. After the panic attack in the barn, she still didn’t quite trust her own emotions.

‘I suppose you’ve had no luck finding out who he is, have you?’ Leah was asking.

‘Nothing as yet. Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’

‘Beautiful looking child, too. Well, he
was
before someone decided to re-sculpture his face.’

Nikki shuddered. ‘I cannot begin to wonder what he could have done to warrant such a brutal beating.’

‘Hopefully, we’ll know soon, then you can get the animal that did this.’ The sister looked towards the door. ‘I have to go. The anaesthetist is here. Keep your fingers crossed, Nikki, and I’ll be out as soon as I can, all right?’

Nikki watched as the nurse hurried away, then went back to the family room to find Joseph.

He stood up as she entered, and somehow that simple gesture touched her. It may have been just inbred good manners, or an army-indoctrinated respect for a higher ranking officer, whatever, it made her feel somehow worthwhile. And that was a welcome change to the kind of treatment she generally received.

‘How’s the lad?’

She slumped into a chair. ‘They are about to bring him around. It’s a critical time, anything can happen, and not all of the options are good.’

Joseph sat down beside her. ‘This must be hell for you.’

Nikki looked around the empty waiting area. ‘Put it like this, I’d never want to go through what I did with Hannah with anyone else, especially a loved one.’ She gave him a sad smile. ‘But right now, all I can think about is that little kid in there.’

‘How long does this procedure take?’

‘Not long. The anaesthetics they use these days are carefully patient targeted, so they can bring him out of sedation quite easily. It’s just that boys often fight for some reason, and they’ll want to know that he’s safe and calm before we see him. Luckily, apart from the bleed that they drained, they didn’t find any severe legions on the scan,’ Nikki paused, ‘. . . but until they wake him up and do some tests, they’ll have no idea of how the damage will have affected him.’

‘Have they told you what other injuries he sustained?’

‘Broken nose. Deep laceration to the right cheek. Three broken ribs and a cracked sternum, plus extensive bruising to the abdomen and groin areas. And that’s without the head injury.’

‘Then dumped naked in the bushes, presumably to die.’ Joseph’s face hardened. ‘What drives some of these animals?’

‘Drugs.’ Nikki almost spat the word out.

‘Yes, I guess so.
And
alcohol, and hate, and abuse, and neglect.’

‘But mainly drugs.’ Nikki sank further down in her chair. ‘I know that back at the station, the others think I’m obsessed, and maybe I am. But when you see the damage they do, the families ripped apart, and the abysmal waste of young lives, can you blame me, Joseph?’

‘No, I can’t. But whereas we see it every day out on the streets, it’s far worse for you, because it’s hurt you on a personal level.’

‘It’s not just Hannah. Although, God knows, that was enough to drag the heart from any parent.’

‘Your
bad case
?’ asked Joseph tentatively.

Nikki nodded. ‘My bad case.’ She looked at her sergeant, and saw a face full of compassion. Not a condescending kind of pity, just a simple understanding, from one injured soul for another. ‘Why don’t you go grab us a coffee, and I’ll tell you about Emily Drennan.’

When Joseph had sat back down, Nikki leaned back, legs outstretched, closed her eyes, and allowed a chestnut haired teenage girl to fill her thoughts. ‘Emily Drennan was highly intelligent, came from a good family with no money troubles, and was absolutely beautiful. She was the daughter of a local GP, and had secured a place at Durham university. But that was before she met the love of her life.’

Joseph sipped his coffee and stared at her over the top of his polystyrene cup.

‘Stephen Cox was known to most as a successful Greenborough Town footballer. We knew him as an aggressive little thug, skilled with his feet certainly, but also pretty skilled with his fists.’

‘I don’t like where this is going,’ murmured Joseph.

‘Cox got a signing for a big league team, and the money started to roll in. Get the picture? Sponsorship deals, fast cars, all that was missing was the pretty girl on his arm, and funnily enough, Stevie boy never seemed to keep his girlfriends for long. Until he met Emily.’ Nikki stared into her coffee. ‘I have no idea what happened when they met, but something did, some weird attraction of opposites, maybe. She was totally infatuated with him, and he saw something in her, something he could control, something he could own.’

‘You knew her, before she met this Stephen Cox?’

‘Oh, I knew her. She was three years older than Hannah, but the Drennan’s lived in the same village as we did. The girls played together as children. Emily was the most sweet natured kid I’d ever met. Hannah was always the feisty one, the one who questioned every damned thing you asked her to do, but Emily would just smile and nod and get on with it.’

‘Did she marry Cox?’

Nikki waited for a moment before replying, and watched through the glass door panel as two nurses hurried into the ITU. ‘No, they never married. I don’t think that was ever in his game plan. He convinced her to move in with him, then he began the long, slow process of destroying her.’ Nikki stared impassively at the door to the Intensive Care Unit. ‘I hadn’t seen her for almost a year, then one evening, I was just going off-duty when a call came in, someone had heard crying coming from a derelict building near the docks. Everyone on the incoming shift was committed, there’d been a major RTC, so I volunteered for the shout.’

‘Emily?’

This was not easy. Nikki had only twice spoken about what she found, once for her statement, and once, over a very large Scotch, to Rick Bainbridge. She had refused counselling, and had never allowed anyone to broach the subject again, including her family. Which, a long way down the line, she knew to have been a big mistake.

And now, here she was preparing to bare her soul to a stranger. But was he a stranger? She looked at Joseph thoughtfully, and wondered how this had come about. She’d decided from the moment that the super had told her about him, that they would not get on. She had wanted to hate him for intruding into her domain. Part of her couldn’t wait to find an excuse to send him scurrying back to Fenchester. But now . . .

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said gently. ‘The longer old pain has been buried, the harder it is to dig up.’

‘But you shouldn’t leave someone as beautiful as Emily Drennan buried in a cellar, should you?’ said Nikki. ‘She deserves to be brought into the light.’

And thinking about those words, Nikki steeled herself and slipped back into the past.

‘Is there anyone there?’ Her voice echoed back to her from the high, cavernous basement of the old warehouse. ‘It’s the police. I’m here to help.’

At first she heard nothing, except the dripping of water and the occasional scurrying of a rat. Then she caught the faint sound of a sob. Picking her way carefully through the debris of the deserted building, she moved towards the area where the sound had come from. ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you! Can you hear me?’

The sobbing was getting louder, but swinging her torch beam around, Nikki realised that she was walking beneath dangerously rotting timbers. The floor above had collapsed in several places, leaving splintered wood and chunks of masonry everywhere. Perhaps shouting loudly was not such a good idea.

Nikki stopped to get her bearings, and looked around. Shafts of late evening sun were filtering in from the ground floor, through the gaping holes, and into the cellar. They criss-crossed the dark, gloomy basement like a giant cat’s cradle of golden light. If it were not so treacherous, it may have been beautiful.

‘Over here.’ The voice was tremulous and weak.

Nikki sprang forward. ‘Where are you? Are you badly hurt?’

For a second she thought she heard a laugh. But it was not a happy laugh, or a laugh of relief that help was finally at hand. It was a sound that made Nikki’s blood run cold, and a sound she was to hear for years to come, in the dead of night, when sleep evaded her.

‘Help me.’ It was a girl’s voice.

‘I’ll get help, don’t worry.’ Nikki pulled herself around a pile of broken brickwork, and saw her.

The girl was lying, curled up in the foetal position, in the dirt and rubbish on the cellar floor. One ankle was twisted in an unnatural position away from her body, but she didn’t even seem aware of it. She cried softly, whispering one name, over and over. Stevie. Stevie. Stevie.

‘You’re safe now, sweetheart,’ Nikki dropped down beside her. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

‘Stevie? Oh, I knew you wouldn’t leave me.’ The voice was little more than a hushed sigh.

Nikki tried her radio but couldn’t get a signal. ‘I’ve got to find a spot where my radio works. You just hold on, I’ll be back, okay?’

She scrambled towards one of the holes in the ceiling, and managed to get a weak, stuttering message across for an ambulance and some assistance.

When she got back the crying had stopped. She sank down on the floor beside the girl and gently rubbed her wrists. ‘Come on, sweetheart. The paramedics will be here soon. You’ll be out of here in no time. I’m Nikki, can you tell me your name?’

The girl turned a little, and in the hollow eyes and the gaunt face of the heroin addict, Nikki saw the fleeting hint of a smile. Then she said, ‘I’m so cold.’

Nikki slipped off her jacket and wrapped it around the girl’s thin shoulders. Junkie or not, this kid was going to be lucky to make it. She needed to do all she could for her. ‘There you are. You just hold on for a bit longer.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Galena.’ The girl gave a shudder, then whispered, ‘I’m Emily. Emily Drennan.’

Nikki’s eyes flew open and she saw Joseph’s concerned expression.

‘I never recognised her!’ Nikki shook her head violently. ‘It was horrible! Not until she said her name, then I saw something in that ravaged face that I knew. That bastard had taken a beautiful, beautiful child and annihilated every lovely part of her.’

‘And the ambulance didn’t get there in time, did it?’ said Joseph.

‘That RTC I mentioned? Everything was jammed up. She died in my arms,’ said Nikki with a long, painful sigh.

‘And did you get Cox?’

‘It’s amazing what money can do, Joseph. He played the part of the grieving partner, and managed to get some cheap tabloid newspaper editor on his side. Vomit-making stories of how he’d tried to get her off the drink and the drugs.’ Nikki’s face screwed up with distaste. ‘But the worst thing of all, was the fact that she had loved him. She died believing that he’d come back for her. How could you build a case when Cox produced a dozen witnesses to say how much he loved her?’

Joseph took a deep breath, then raised one eyebrow. ‘But I’m guessing that you didn’t leave it there?’

‘I hounded him. Every way he turned, he found me watching him. I spent every moment, on and off-duty, haunting that evil little murderer. And then I hit on his dealers, and I hit hard. In the end, he moved out of Greenborough. Last I heard, he was in rehab and his money had run out.’

‘Good. That’s how karma works. What goes round, comes round.’

Nikki picked up her cooling coffee and drank it back. ‘And now, I wonder. If I’d known that my vendetta would wreck my marriage and ultimately leave my only child in a High Dependency Unit, would I have just let him go?’

‘I doubt it. Given the circumstances, we do what we think is right at the time. That’s all we
can
do. The fact that we agonise and moralise over it afterwards at least means we have a conscience, and that separates us from the ones who don’t give a toss.’ He shrugged and gave her bitter smile. ‘Believe me, there are things that I would have done differently in hindsight, but you can’t live your life constantly wondering about repercussions that
may
occur.’