Girl Seven (22 page)

‘Have you ever met Noel’s wife?’ I asked as we waited in the tiny claustrophobic room, instantly wishing I hadn’t.

To my gratitude, Mark didn’t react with scorn. He barely reacted at all.

‘Caroline? A few times. Have you?’

‘I’ve only seen her, twice, in passing.’ I blushed.

‘She’s one of the quickest people I’ve ever met. Fast, serious and extremely,
extremely
appealing. You know what I mean, if you’ve seen her.’

It was nice of him to indulge me with this trivia. ‘Is she nice?’

‘Yeah. Wouldn’t want to ever get on the wrong side of her, but she’s nice.’ He glanced at me, and then continued. ‘Noel feels overmatched, but then he’s right. If life were a Regency costume drama she would have been married off into her own class and they both know it, but that’s not how love works, is it?’

I swallowed, unsure as to whether the knowledge was mak­ing me feel worse or better.

Mark nudged me. ‘You’re not the only person who’s ever had to look at a marriage from the outside, you know. For a while you’re not sure whether you want to replace the other person or become them. But it’s not their identity, it’s their memories you want. Yeah?’

I exhaled audibly. ‘You sound like you have some experience here.’

‘Well—’

Footsteps, the door opened, and Leo Ambreen-King entered with a warden holding two cups of tea. I never did get to hear what’s Mark’s experience was because Leo sat down and glared, and I became choked up and panicked.

The warden loitered for a moment until Mark sipped his tea and said, ‘Thanks,’ indicating that, yes
,
he should definitely leave us alone.

‘No comment,’ Leo said, as soon as the warden had left.

‘We haven’t yet asked you a question.’ Mark sat back in his chair, amiable.

‘No. Comment.’

‘Who did you call after the last time we spoke to you?’

Eyes to the table. ‘No comment.’

‘You must have called someone. He tried to kill her.’

It was as if he forgot his script. Leo looked up, stricken, unable to keep his fear from his young eyes. He unfolded his arms, which dropped to his sides.

‘What?’

Mark indicated his head at me. ‘The man you called, the one who paid you to kill Nate Williams, he tried to have her murdered when you alerted him that two people had come to see you. He knew she was on to him, you see.’

I could hardly believe what Mark was saying.

Leo was gazing at me, open-mouthed.

Mark raised his eyebrows, encouraging me to elaborate.

I took a breath. ‘The boy you killed, Nate Williams, he saw the faces of the men who murdered my entire family. He was the only one who did. I know someone paid you to do it, no matter what you say, and I know he was a police officer. He may have given you a false name but he’s really called Kenneth Gordon and he has a shit comb-over and you know who I mean,
right
?’

Leo looked between us, face wide, a living exclamation mark. ‘Who the fuck are you? You crazy!’

‘You fucking
listen
to me!’ I snapped, taking the drawing out of my pocket and sliding it across the table at him. ‘
This
is him, isn’t it! He’s said he’ll sort you out when you leave, with money and a job or whatever shit he’s promised you, but he won’t. Know why he won’t? Because he’s a liar. He’s a liar and he had you kill a
boy
! This piece of shit tried to have me hacked to death after you spoke to him – now
admit it
! Fucking
admit it
!’

Cringing. ‘You ain’t police?’

I wanted to climb over the table and punch him in the face, pummel him into the floor. ‘Oh, have a gold star! Well fucking done!’

‘Look.’ Mark stood up, one hand on my shoulder as if to hold me to the ground. ‘Let’s all just calm down for a moment, OK?’

‘I can tell ’em!’ Leo glowered, baring his teeth. ‘I can tell ’em you ain’t the police,
Inspector
.’

I sat down. ‘Go on. I bet they’ll believe the word of an illiterate child-killer over us.’

‘Who the – what the fuck are you asking me?’

‘I—’

‘Leo, we know you’ve been promised money from DCI Kenneth Gordon,’ Mark interrupted me, which was probably for the best. ‘DCI Kenneth Gordon is responsible for the deaths of her parents, her sister, almost her own death... after you told him we’d come to see you. We’re just asking you to stop lying. He’s not going to keep his promises to you. You must know that. What obligation does he have to someone like you? You’re nothing. You are nobody to someone like him. His association with you is a piss-stain and you won’t ever see him again. You will never see anything of what he’s promised you, not one thing. You know that, right, Leo?’

Leo seemed very small suddenly, shrinking down in his chair and shielding himself with his forearms and trying to duck his face beneath the collar of his uniform shirt.

I wondered what kind of life he led in here. Was he the sort of boy who had learnt by way of the cigarette burns down his back that the only way to assert your authority was with increasingly brutal acts of violence? Would he talk to me, take me seriously, if he knew I was capable of hurting him? Because that was the only language he understood?

He must have known that whatever he had been promised was a fantasy, but he probably wanted to believe it, even now. It was the only way his crime could be justified. Without the reward, another kid was dead and he wouldn’t even be able to enjoy any benefits from it.

‘I don’t know what the fuck you talking about,’ he said, raising a hand to his mouth and curling it into a fist.

I was still standing.

I put both hands on the table and leant forwards a little, speaking quietly. ‘Leo, I’m going to find DCI Kenneth Gordon and bring him to justice with or without your help. You just need to think very carefully about whether you want to be on my good side or my bad side when that happens.’

He looked me up and down.

I was barely blinking. ‘If you’re on my good side, I have a reward for you that’s better than anything that he promised you, because I’m going to reward you with your life. You’ll get to leave behind your sorry fucking episode as collaborator with the scum who killed my family, and live whatever piece-of-shit life an
insect
like you can make for yourself.’

My hands were shaking a little and I tried not to let it creep into my voice.

‘If you don’t tell me the truth right now, and end up on my bad side, I’m going to find DCI Gordon, cut out his insides and
decorate
him with them like a fucking
Christmas tree
, and then... one day... maybe when you get out of here but maybe before, I’ll find you and do exactly the same to you. They won’t even know if you’re a boy or a girl by the time I’m done with you.’ I had moved so far across the table we were almost face to face. ‘Now you seem to think you’re a pretty good liar, so look at my face. Do you think I’m
fucking
lying?’

Mark didn’t say anything else.

Leo stood up, never taking his eyes off me. ‘You... You fucking crazy...’

I kicked the leg of the table and the sudden noise made everyone flinch. ‘He
paid
you, Leo! Admit it, he fucking paid you!’

Leo backed away against the wall, turned and started bang­ing on the door of the interrogation room.

‘I wanna go back!’ he shouted, still looking at me as though I was about to attack him. ‘Hey! Oi! I wanna back now! Oi, lemme out!’

I wanted to cross the room, grab him by the back of his collar and smash his face into the closed door until he con­firmed to us what we both knew. I wanted to be able to
make
him tell us what we needed to know. I wanted to hurt him so much, with a heavy violent need right in my gut, that it scared me a little.

Taking deep breaths, I forced myself to sit back down, and exchanged a look with Mark.

I am sitting on a mountaintop.

Leo continued hammering on the door with both fists.

I can hear the wind in the trees.

But I wanted to smash his face into the door until there was nothing left.

I couldn’t read what Mark might have been thinking.

‘Lemme out! Oi! OI! LEMME OUT! FUCKING LET ME OUT!’

‘I don’t drink,’ I said when Mark offered me a whiskey in his kitchen after driving me back, waving away the bottle on sight.

‘You should,’ he replied, pouring himself one. ‘I think you’d make a fabulous angry drunk.’

‘You think I have repressed anger issues?’

‘Girl, I
know
you have repressed anger issues. I’ve seen them in action. In fact, calling them repressed is a bit of an exaggeration. You make a shotgun in the face look repressed.’

His tone was good-natured but he must have been saying it for a reason.

‘You think I went too far,’ I said, hoisting myself up to sit on the worktop next to the cooker and taking off my jacket, but not the chiffon scarf.

He took a sip of whiskey and thought. ‘I think we could have got further by making him feel worthless rather than scared, but you were in the zone. It was a bold move and it could have worked. I wouldn’t regret it too much.’

I didn’t. I wished I could have gone further. So much further.

‘You’d be a natural at my type of work,’ Mark said with a wink. ‘Don’t let that go to your head too much.’

‘Can’t we just torture it out of him?’ I asked, looking him right in the eye. ‘I mean, can’t
you
just torture it out of him?’

‘If he wasn’t incarcerated, but—’

‘No, not Leo. Gordon.’

It seemed like a simple proposition, but I didn’t expect Mark to react with such sensitivity to the idea. He sipped his whiskey and took a breath.

‘I wouldn’t advise it, no,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He put his glass down on the work surface and turned to face me. ‘Because if I said to you, “Did you kill these people?” you’d say no, wouldn’t you? Because you’d know you hadn’t.’

‘Well... yes.’

‘Now imagine I kept asking you, with the intention of getting an admission, “Did you kill these people?” and all the while I was flaying pieces of skin off your back. Do you think you’d keep telling me the truth? Or would you just tell me what I wanted to hear, so it would be over and I could just kill you?’

For a second, I tried to imagine him flaying someone alive and wondered if he ever had, but just as quickly I pushed all the mental images away in disgust. Even though he was working for me, even though I heard the little hints and offhand com­ments, I couldn’t picture him actually torturing someone.

My lip curled a little. ‘No. No, I guess I’d just tell you what you wanted to hear.’

‘You can’t torture an admission out of someone. You can torture information out of someone because information is there to be checked and confirmed but otherwise... hell, torture him for punishment, Seven, not for an answer. At least then it’s fun.’ He grinned. ‘And more importantly it’s worthwhile, of course.’

I tried to estimate the number of people he might have killed and tortured but gave up.

‘Are you wondering how many people I’ve killed?’ he asked, eyes sliding sideways at me.

For the first time since I’d met him, I saw something in his face that scared me: a kind of repulsive elation. For a moment, I thought he was the Devil himself. Maybe it was a similar expression that my grandmother had seen in me that had made her feel so uneasy? Well, that and what had happened with the bastard cat. But that had been an accident, obviously. At least I think it had been.

‘No.’

‘Yeah, you were, but I don’t know now. I used to keep count but it reaches a point where you just can’t, because it’s your day job. Would you keep count of how many papers you delivered or braces you fitted?’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s into triple figures though... It would have to be, I’ve been doing this a long time.’

I’d never before been able to guess at his age. His features could be placed at twenty, thirty or even forty, in different lights.

‘How long?’

He just smiled at me, and finished his whiskey. ‘I’ll see if I can get anything else out of the police, see if I can get an informer on the informer. What are you going to do?’

I noticed that he asked this with a pointed look at the chif­fon scarf.

Without thinking, I swallowed and it hurt. ‘I don’t know. Work. Take my mind off it.’

‘If anything weird is going on, or... something happens, please call me.’

‘Yeah, of course.’ I smiled. ‘Do you still have that basic info sheet on Gordon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can I have it?’

A knowing expression, and then he went to retrieve it from his bag. ‘Yeah.’

It wasn’t said out loud but it might as well have been because we both knew what he was thinking, and it was that, once again, I wasn’t as good a liar as I thought I was.

In a state of boredom and slight curiosity, I decided to look through the flat when Mark had left, thinking that I might find some clue as to... to what, I didn’t know. It might have been just any old clue as to
him
. I thought more and more about Darsi’s signs and symptoms of the psychopath and tried to work out if Mark was one. Or, more importantly, if I was.

You’d be a natural at my type of work.

There wasn’t much lying around. Just the few bits of food in the fridge, some dark men’s clothes in the wardrobe, TV, remote controls... But what I was really interested in was the locked chest of drawers in the living room. I guessed that Mark must have the keys because I couldn’t find them anywhere. I turned the place inside out looking for them until I eventually sat down on the floor in front of the drawers with a packet of biscuits and one of my daggers, furiously inserting it into the locks and attempting to destroy them with brute force.

‘Fucking... Come on, you bitch!’

I took the dagger out and kicked the piece of furniture. I slid the blade into the small opening between the drawer and the chest and tried to crowbar it open but that didn’t work either. I was sweating by the time I threw the dagger to the floor, snapping, ‘Fuck!’