Cry for Help (33 page)

The days after that had been a blur. Eddie knew he'd slept in a bed in her house, and that she gave him pills of some kind, and dabbed at his forehead. He had memories of her repeatedly bandaging his hands, and smearing cream on them that made the wounds sting. He wanted to know if he could see through them, but she wouldn't let him look. He'd laughed a lot more, and it was only when he thought of Dave Lewis that he stopped.

In some of the earlier memories, Mary wasn't crying anymore. In the later ones, she was. That didn't make any sense at first, but eventually he discovered it was because she'd gone to collect his car, intending to hide it. That was when she found the cardboard box with his collection in it, and understood what he'd done.

But his sister had continued to tend to him and look after him, weeping softly to herself, as though he was an injury of her own that she needed to make better.

'Get out of there,' Eddie said.

She couldn't, of course, and it delighted him, even as he felt repulsed by himself.

'I said,
get out
.'

She screamed through the gag as he grabbed her by the hair - ignoring the pain in his hands - but that didn't work, and he took hold of her blouse instead, folding her over the back of the car, so that her hair trailed down to the ground. Then he lifted her legs, and she tumbled forward into the mud, landing on her shoulder, her legs smacking wetly down a moment later. She lay there crying.

The rain fell down around them, and he thought:

You let her die.

He didn't know if it was directed at himself or Dave Lewis, or everyone in the world. It didn't matter anymore. Every single thought stoked the fire of hatred he felt inside.

Eddie crouched down over her, and prodded at her shoulder to roll her over on her back. It was difficult, with her hands tied behind her, but he managed it. Then he sat on her stomach, his legs to either side, knees pressing in against her shoulders. She was so small. Her eyes were shut tight, and she flinched as he delicately brushed strands of hair from her face.

He would tie her to a tree. Somewhere she'd never be found.

'He let you die,' Eddie told her, and he didn't know or care who that was directed at either.

All the same. Everyone the same.

And then he heard something.

Eddie glanced back towards the dirt path.

Four men were walking towards him through the rain. All of them were black, and three of them were very big indeed. The fourth - Charlie Drake - was a little in front of them, and he was holding a gun. As they approached, Drake raised it and pointed it at Eddie.

'Thought I recognised your car back at the house.'

Eddie stood up quickly and backed away towards the embankment - but his foot slid, and this time he fell, landing on his side, hand splayed out in the cold mud. Pain thudded up.

'Good job I did, isn't it?' Drake said.

He checked something on the gun and then looked back up.

'Not for you, though.'

Instead of walking right the way up to him, Drake stopped a little way short, by Tori, and crouched down beside her. He put his hand gently on her shoulder, inclined his head, and whispered something that Eddie couldn't hear. Then he stood up again, shooting a glance at one of his gang. The three men bent to help her while Drake continued over to where Eddie was lying.

'Stand up.'

He did.

The man moved to one side of him, and Eddie could see that Tori was on her feet now, leaning against one of the men while another cut the rope from her with a knife.

A second later, he felt the gun pressed against his temple.

He was going to die, he realised. Right here and now, standing in this dirty place in the rain. The most surprising thing was that a part of him felt relief at that. It wanted to say 'thank you'.

Drake said, 'Don't watch this, sweetheart.'

And before he could think anything else, Eddie was gone.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Sunday 4th September

It was just after ten o'clock in the morning, and Detectives Sam Currie and Dan Bright were standing on an embankment at the edge of Brimham Woods. Neither of them spoke. The rain hadn't stopped all night, and the body of John Edward Carroll was lying in front of them; it had been here, exposed to the elements, since the previous afternoon. Yellow police tape was threaded across the path behind them, preserving what was left of the scene. The SOCOs had erected a small white tent over the remains, but they could still see the body.

Eddie looked like a dead fish in the mud. His skin was bright white, and his eyes were open wide and staring at nothing, pushed absurdly large by the gun blast that had occurred behind them. His bottom lip protruded. But most of the blood had washed away, and the bits of skull and brain dotted around had been washed bland as litter.

Swann walked up and stood beside him.

'Gum?' Swann offered.

'Thanks.'

'Dan?'

Bright took a piece as well, but didn't say anything. He seemed hypnotised by the body.

'I just got off the phone to Rawnsmouth,' Swann said. 'They've picked up a guy called Jeremy Sumpter. He's the one living in John Carroll's flat down there.'

'What did he have to say for himself?'

'Nothing - for all of about five minutes. Then he started to sweat, if you know what I mean. Said he was a mate of Eddie's, and that he'd been crashing there for as long as he could remember. Eddie started coming up here two years ago. Spent more and more time away.'

'Two years,' Currie said. 'Just after his father got released.'

'Maybe he wanted to be close to his sister. Apparently, she'd go down there sometimes as well. Last visit was a couple of weeks back, but she was on her own that time. Thursday, eleventh of August.'

'Very exact.'

'A red-letter day for Jeremy. She gave him some money.'

Currie thought about it.

'Let me guess. To pretend to be her brother if anyone called?'

Swann nodded. 'Which he did, incidentally, when you spoke to him on the phone. Jeremy is suitably ashamed of himself.'

'Jeremy will be.'

That was the week that Eddie was reported missing. He chewed the gum and nodded to himself, fitting it together in his head.

'My guess is that Choc, Cardall and Lewis went to see Eddie after they'd been to Staunton that Sunday, and they gave him a beating. Shot him through the hands. That must have been when Cardall got hold of Alison Wilcox's mobile. They probably went through his pockets.'

'And afterwards, Eddie went to his sister's house.'

'The only place he felt safe. Because she'd always looked after him. I saw blood on the door handle when I was there. I thought it was from her, but maybe it was his.'

'We can check, if it's still there.'

Currie nodded. But it was just one more mistake he'd made.

'Four days later,' he said, 'she'd found out what he'd done and was down in Rawnsmouth trying to cover up for him.'

'She'd already reported her father by then. Why didn't she turn Eddie in? He was doing to other girls what had been done to her. She should have hated him.'

Bright said, 'Because he was her brother.'

He was still staring at the body. The expression on his face was sad, as though he was seeing the same little boy that Mary must have. Perhaps he was even feeling a similar sense of responsibility. For the things that were done and the things that weren't.

'Looking after Eddie was all that mattered to her,' Bright said. 'I think it was the only reason she ever found the courage to escape in the first place. She was always desperate to protect him from the effects of her father's violence. And that's all she was doing here.'

Currie thought about that and nodded slowly.

'We know from Dave Lewis's computer that she contacted him through the dating site on Tuesday, twenty-third of August. That's the day I went to see her.'

He remembered how desperate Mary had been to convince him her father was the man behind the murders. When he'd told her Frank Carroll was electronically tagged she became frantic, insistent, as though everything was suddenly falling down around her. At the time, he'd thought it was because she was scared of her father. Now, he understood it for what it was.

'She realised her father wasn't going to be arrested,' he said. 'So it would only be a matter of time before we took a closer look at her brother.'

'Yeah, but why Dave Lewis?'

Currie shrugged.

'Maybe she saw Eddie was disintegrating. He was going to take revenge on Dave Lewis for what happened that day. So to make us think it was Frank, she needed to connect herself to him before that happened. Make it look like the killer could be after her, not Lewis.' What had she told him? You won't believe it until he comes for me. 'She made herself the target: got involved with Lewis, while her brother went on to attack Julie Sadler, Emma Harris and Tori Edmonds. Eddie must have known what she was doing, but maybe not until it was all underway.'

'Have you heard the tape?' Swann said.

'Oh yes.'

They'd located Dave Lewis's car after they picked him up from the house on Campdown Road. Inside, they'd found a cardboard box full of the dead girls' clothes, and a digital recorder. Lewis had taped everything that happened, from the first phone call Eddie made to him, to the conversation he'd had with Rob Harvey at the university. Taken alongside the phone and photocopies he'd sent through the post yesterday, it was obvious Lewis had been thinking ahead. He had conclusive proof he was being manipulated.

'So Eddie tried to force Lewis round to Mary's house,' he said. 'While she goaded Frank into coming for her.'

'I can't imagine that,' Bright said. 'She was terrified of him.'

'Maybe she was hoping Lewis would save her.' He thought of Mary's small body, and the way it had looked when they found it in the living room of her brother's squat. He said, 'Counting on it, even.'

'Yet she did it anyway.'

They stood quietly for a moment. The rain tapped peacefully on the canvas over Eddie's body.

Currie didn't know how to feel. A part of him remembered standing in the bedrooms of the murdered girls, looking down at their bodies and feeling such sorrow that nobody had come to save them, and he couldn't help but hate the people responsible: Eddie Berries - and Mary by association. But he could also recall her face that day, when she'd begged him to help her. Nobody had ever come to save them, either, including him. That thought was resting in his mind, and he refused to examine it too closely. Not right now. But he felt it there anyway, like a sliver of something radioactive, gently pulsing.

'There's one flaw in this theory,' Swann said.

'Which is?'

'No evidence Lewis ever went near him that day.'

That was true. 'Where is he now?'

'He just got discharged from the hospital. He's back at the department. Minor concussion, but he'll live.'

Currie blurred his eyes slightly and watched the body in front of him dissolve into shapes, until he wasn't even sure what he was seeing anymore. He thought to himself: priorities. It was what he'd told himself when Eddie had been abducted - that they had to concentrate on Alison Wilcox's murder instead. So that was something else he could blame himself for, wasn't it? If they hadn't had other priorities, all this might never have happened.

The pulsing feeling intensified.

'Let's head back then,' he said.

Swann breathed out heavily, and Currie recognised the weariness in it. 'I hope you remember what the gum means.'

At just after twelve, Currie was sitting across from Dave Lewis, this time in Interview Room One. It was a large room on the first floor, and it had a window.

He glanced at the recorder, the small red light indicating the current silence was being stored away. No answers to his questions, one after another. So far, in fact, Lewis had said nothing other than to confirm his name. His only movement was to pick at his nails, an act that he appeared to be concentrating on now, ignoring Currie completely.

'You're going to have to talk to me eventually, Dave,' he said.

Lewis stopped picking.

'You haven't even told me how she is yet.'

Hallelujah, Currie thought. The man still wasn't looking at him, but at least he'd found a voice.

'You mean Tori Edmonds? She's okay. She's in hospital.'

'What happened?'

Currie opened his mouth to say that he'd be the one asking questions here, but stopped as he remembered what Lewis had said on the digital recording.

It doesn't matter what he does. It only matters what I do.

I couldn't handle it if I could have saved her.

He saw the bandages and bruises, and knew that all those had occurred simply because Lewis had tried to save Tori Edmonds. He'd been dropped into a form of hell, and he'd kept going. Whatever else he might have done, which Currie was determined to find out, Lewis at least had a right to know.

'Tori was found wandering along a country road yesterday afternoon, ' he said. 'She was in pretty bad shape.'

Which was an understatement. If Edmonds hadn't been in hospital right now, it was likely that she'd need to be sectioned. As a result, she'd yet to be formally interviewed, and it hadn't been until this morning that she'd managed to give them even a disjointed account of what had happened. John Edward Carroll - known to her as Eddie Berries - had abducted her from her house, and she'd been kept in the boot of his car. She didn't know why, or for how long, only that eventually he'd driven her up to Brimham Woods. Once there, he'd untied her and then shot himself in front of her.

There were two obvious problems with that story. The first was that she'd barely been able to walk when she was found; her legs were cramped from being confined in such a small space for so long. So how had she been able to get as far from the scene as she had? The second was more of an intuitive one. Depending on how you looked at it, her inability to remember the scene until the rain had slurred the ground and made it unreadable was either a complete coincidence or incredibly convenient.