Like This, for Ever (33 page)

‘As, coincidentally, is the killer.’

‘Peter Sweep isn’t the killer, the MIT have been very clear about that.’

‘And of course they’re never wrong. Now, when are you going to tell me what’s up with you?’

Somehow they never stayed on safe ground for very long. Lacey shook her head. ‘I’m OK. I’m struggling with that business in Cambridge, but I’m coping.’

Silence. She was getting the steely-eyed treatment again. Well, that was OK, she just had to sit it out.

Seconds ticked by. At least six, maybe she even made it to seven.

‘I’ve done something really stupid,’ she said, and could feel the tears smarting behind her eyes.

The other woman was marble still. ‘I doubt that, but I’m listening.’

Lacey tried to smile, didn’t quite make it. Then she tugged the sleeve of her sweater up over her wrist. She untied the knot and started to unravel the bandage. The girl reached out and stopped her.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know what you did.’

‘It’s like scratching an itch,’ said Lacey, as though pleading to be understood. ‘Once you think about it, you can’t not do it.’

‘Does it help?’

‘Yes. It really does. It’s like a drug. Like Valium. The scream that’s been building up inside me just melts away.’

‘Until the next time?’

Really no need to answer that. Overcome with shame, Lacey dropped her eyes to the Formica tabletop. When she finally looked up, the face opposite hers was that of a crestfallen child.

‘I really screwed you up, didn’t I?’ said the prisoner.

A damp film was swimming across Lacey’s vision. Tears were very close. ‘I think I managed that one by myself,’ she answered.

‘Ten minutes, ladies!’ called the officer on duty. There was a general flurry around the room as people began the process of getting ready to leave.

‘How’s Mark?’ asked the prisoner.

Lacey sighed. ‘Avoiding me. I haven’t seen him since – well, since he found out I’m not as tough as he likes to believe. I don’t know, maybe he thinks I had something to do with the murders as well. He started out believing me guilty of everything, maybe he’s just reverting to form.’

‘Ever thought of telling him the truth?’

A long silence. Visitors were starting to leave the room. Prisoners were filing out of a door at the back.

‘No, you’re right. You can’t. And you can’t be with someone and keep a tiny piece of yourself back.’

‘This is not a tiny piece we’re talking about,’ said Lacey, keeping her voice low, as people passed close by. ‘It’s who I am. And not with him, no. For some reason, he’s the one person I can’t hide anything from. Apart from you, of course.’

‘You really do love him, don’t you?’

Lacey leaned back in her chair. Love him? Did that really, honestly, come anywhere close?

‘If I wasn’t around, you could be with him.’

All the light had left the other woman’s face. Lacey knew instinctively she was deadly serious. She sat upright again.

‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but I think you need to stop,’ she said.

Simultaneously, both women stood. ‘Maybe we need to face facts,’ said the other. ‘If I disappear, you’re safe. Nothing to tie you to what happened before. Nothing for anyone to find out.’

‘I’m not listening.’ Lacey bent to pick up her bag, blood pounding in her ears.

‘I’ll do it. For you. I’ll do it gladly.’

‘Stop it. Now.’

Around them, faces were turning their way. Violence erupted so swiftly and suddenly in these situations, everyone was constantly on their guard.

‘You are the one person I can be myself with,’ said Lacey, not caring who heard, as long as the girl in front of her got the message. ‘If I didn’t have this time with you, I’d be lost.’

‘If you lost me, you could have him.’

A heartbeat. A decision, made years ago, never articulated before.

‘Then I choose you. Do you hear me? I choose you.’

‘ABBIE, DO YOU
remember my mum?’

Abbie Soar, Harvey and Jorge’s mum, put down the chopping knife and gave the smallest, saddest shake of her head.

‘I don’t, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘It was just you and your dad when you first arrived at pre-school.’

The kitchen door opened, Jorge’s strong, clear voice rang throughout the house and Harvey appeared, tugging at the waistband of his school trousers.

‘Mum, can you get me Tommy Hilfiger’s boxer shorts?’ he asked, heading for the counter, nose in the air, like a hound sniffing out truffles.

‘Possibly. But what would Tommy Hilfiger wear?’

Harvey pushed his body against that of his mother. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said, looking up into her eyes and digging his chin into her breastbone in a way that looked pretty uncomfortable but which Abbie didn’t seem to mind. She wrapped her hands around his middle and worked her fingers inside his waistband. Then she bent her head and nuzzled her face against Harvey’s neck. It was the sort of physical intimacy of which Barney had no personal experience.

He turned away, fixing his attention instead on the photographs on the wall. They were in black and white, all taken by Abbie in
foreign countries: black kids dressed as soldiers, who might have been playing a game except for the hollow look in their eyes; women with dark headscarves and startlingly pale eyes, watching out over arid landscapes for men who would never return; people limping from a burning hospital.

It was pretty depressing stuff. Not a single picture on the wall made you feel good about life. But the picture he could see reflected in the glass of most of the photographs was disturbing him even more. A mother, treating her child’s body like an extension of her own; her son nestling against her as though they were two adjoining pieces of a jigsaw. For a second, Barney felt rage threatening to overwhelm him.

Not fair, not fair!

OK, Harvey didn’t have a dad, but dads weren’t the same. Dads earned money and kept you fed and clothed and drove you around the place, but mums wrapped their bodies around yours and made you feel safe. Mums were the ones who cried when you cried, but loved your tears all the same because they had the power to make them go away. Mums were there in the night, when dark, twisting fears were wrapping themselves around you. Mums were the ones who lay down close and whispered stories about riding through tropical forests on blue elephants. Mums were the ones who could put their hands on your bare bum and bite your neck and nobody would think it at all unusual.

Not fair!

He’d heard nothing from Lacey. He’d known it had been bad luck to mention his mum to her. Now he’d done it with Abbie, too. In the picture glass he could see her now, watching him over Harvey’s head.

‘Tell you what, hon,’ she said to her son. ‘Will you go and get my phone for me? I left it in Jorge’s room.’

With a heavy sigh, as though there were no end to the effort expected of him, Harvey left the room.

‘Did you take all these?’ asked Barney, embarrassed now, feeling as though he’d give anything to take back what he’d just revealed about his mum.

‘Years ago,’ Abbie said. ‘Before Harvey was born.’

Upstairs, Jorge had stopped singing. Barney could hear him and Harvey talking.

‘I asked your dad once about your mum,’ said Abbie. ‘Not being nosy, just friendly. He told me it was just you and him. And he said it in such a way that made me feel he didn’t want me to ask any more questions. So I didn’t. As far as I know, no one else ever did either.’

Barney looked at a picture of a boy of about his own age, gazing up at the camera. A boy with a blood-soaked bandage around his head. ‘You’ve seen some pretty nasty stuff,’ he said.

Abbie came closer, until she could put a hand gently on Barney’s shoulder. The little finger of her hand brushed softly against his neck.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have.’

‘YOU SAVED ME
the best view,’ said Dana, as she settled into the chair by the window and stiffened against a shiver. It would be cold here, floor-to-ceiling windows made it inevitable in March, but the view from the first-floor Blue Print Café on Butler’s Wharf was just about worth it.

‘Actually, I didn’t,’ replied Detective Superintendent Weaver, nodding downstream. Judging by the level of wine in his glass, he’d arrived early. ‘That’s the one I prefer.’

Dana had been looking past the thousand-year-old Tower of London towards the metallic gleam of the City. Every brick, every steel plate, every pane of reinforced bomb-proof glass sang out power. She turned a 90-degree angle. Warehouses, dock buildings, rotting wooden piers.

‘Whistler did a series of sketches of the Thames warehouses,’ said Weaver. ‘I’ve got copies at home. I’d have them on the wall, but Mary thinks unsigned prints are naff so I keep them in a folder in my study. Incredibly atmospheric – I’ll bring them in some time. Torn sails flapping in the gales, masts brushing against the rooftops, buildings that seem to be growing out of the river and tumbling into it at the same time. Working boats like beached whales, you can’t see how they’ll ever get out of the mud.
And then the tide comes in and they’re off again, to distant shores.’

‘Very poetic, Sir.’

‘And so many people, scurrying around like ants, with their individual jobs and their collective purpose. In over a hundred years it hasn’t changed.’

‘I hadn’t appreciated luxury riverside apartments and embankment restaurants were popular in Whistler’s day,’ said Dana, as the waiter approached them.

‘Yes, very funny. The detail might have evolved, but the picture remains the same to me. East of here is what London’s really all about. The City, on the other hand, could be anywhere. What’ll you have?’

With the skill born of frequent practice, Dana opened the menu and spotted the choices that would be the easiest to force down. ‘Salad and the risotto, please,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to kick off ?’

Weaver pulled out a notebook and put it, unopened, on the table. Dana had brought her laptop.

‘The exercise we did monitoring traffic in and around the dump sites threw up several dozen vehicles that travelled along more than one of the routes being watched on the evenings the bodies were left,’ she began. ‘We’re following them up to see if any of the registered keepers have a record of any kind. If they do, we want to know what they were doing on the nights the boys went missing.’

‘Anything yet?’

‘Nothing, but we’re not quite through the list. After that, we’ll go back to those who don’t have form.’

‘This doesn’t feel like first-offence territory to me,’ said Weaver.

‘No. But it could just be someone who didn’t get caught. Dave Cook’s team have finished their search of the main Thames bridges. Apart from the one they found on Tower Bridge, there was nothing.’

The day Oliver Kennedy had been found safe and well in a London church, the line-access team had searched Tower Bridge and found a parcel similar to the one retrieved from Southwark Bridge by Constable Finn Turner. A heavy-duty black bin-liner, stuffed with two taped-together pillows and the decomposed carcass of a pigeon. Peter Sweep, it seemed, had been planning his own particular take on the practical joke for some time.

‘Any idea how he got them up there?’ asked Weaver.

‘The line-access team think “down there”,’ said Dana. ‘They tried swinging a similar package from above on a line and letting it go. They think Sweep must have dropped his over the side and possibly lost quite a few in the process.’

Weaver nodded.

‘As you know, the search of the area around Deptford Creek Marina found nothing,’ said Dana.

That hadn’t been strictly true. The search of the Deptford Creek Marina had unearthed a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of stolen goods, stashed away in old vans and Portakabins. All small-scale stuff that Dana had been happy to hand over to local CID.

‘And I understand it is quite possible for Tyler’s and indeed Ryan’s bodies to have been washed up the Creek from the Thames?’ Weaver asked.

Dana nodded. ‘Since DI Joesbury spent his childhood on the river, there’s been a big development at the mouth of Deptford Creek,’ she said. ‘It’s altered the way the river flows. Now it’s quite common for debris to get carried up the Creek when the tide’s coming in, and then get trapped there. Once we heard that, we scaled down our search of the marina.’

Weaver glanced down at the screen on his mobile phone.

‘The fibres we found on Oliver Kennedy’s clothes have been identified as coming from a fleece jacket made by a company called J. Crew,’ said Dana. ‘They’re a popular supplier of casual, outdoor-style clothing. We’ve traced it to a particular batch and should be able to match it to the garment itself, if we ever find it.’

For a second she thought she’d lost her boss’s attention. He was staring across the river towards Wapping.

‘One of those Whistler sketches features the police station,’ he said. ‘The distinctive shape of the roof, the bay windows on the front. Over a hundred years ago, a senior police officer sat in Dave Cook’s office and looked across to where we are now. I mention it because I’ve just had a bill for the search of the storm drains he had his dive team do. Is it too much to hope it gave us anything?’

A joint operation of the Marine Unit, Lewisham MIT and the Environment Agency had conducted a search of the two-mile
stretch of the south bank between Tower Bridge and Bermondsey. They’d been looking for traces of blood around the storm drain and sewerage outlets. In summer – even in dry autumns, the team from the Environment Agency had told them – there would be no question of it being a search for a needle in a haystack. All polluting substances entering the Thames would leave a trace of some sort. But in March, given the above-average rainfall they’d had in the past few weeks, it had been a long shot. One that hadn’t paid off.

‘We still haven’t found out who sent Lacey Flint that text,’ said Dana, mentally making her way down her checklist. ‘Nor are we likely to, unless Flint herself comes clean with us.’

‘Sent from a pay-as-you-go phone, is that right?’ said Weaver.