Random Acts of Unkindness (29 page)

I gather all my belongings. It’s chilly and my feet are numb. I want to carry on reading but I can’t stay here any longer, I have to go home and deal with things. The first thing I’ll do is send the WPCs on their way. Their forced encampment has made the house change, whether it wanted to or not. I wonder if they’ll take the cushions?

My next thought is about the Gables and my urgent need to tell someone about the photograph and how he disposed of his victims. The net closes tight around Connelly and his vile doings, while another one unravels around me, the story I’ve guarded so closely, so silently, the one that started with Bessy, pokes through the holes and struggles to get out.

I’ll have to tell Stewart where I got the photograph. And why. I know I’ll have to. So I’ll go home and make sure the house is locked up tight, just in case I’m arrested straightaway. I think about Bessy again, and how she left the back door open for Thomas, which was how I got in there in the first place.

I consider doing that, just in case Aiden comes home one night, cold and wet looking for his mum. Ironic, isn’t it, that I was only trying to find him, only trying to do the right thing, but somehow it’s twisted my thinking and I ended up stealing from a dead woman?

It’s over now, and although there’s always another Connelly to step into his shoes, that’s if they’ve even found him to arrest him, I expect his cronies will lie low for a while now. Besides, I might not be around long enough to need anyone to guard me. As I start up my bike, I think about the possibility of admitting everything, and the possible sentence I will get. Thrown out of the force, probably prison.

As I speed home my ears are ringing with the sounds of last night, the retching of grown men and the horror in Mike’s eyes. Then my elation, my joy at not seeing Aiden’s face. Pictures of Bessy, digging in her nightclothes, finally falling asleep on the moor, and Sarah counting her money.

It’s sunny now, and crisp and when I zoom past the crossroads I see the road’s been cordoned off with yellow tape and two uniformed officers are standing drinking brews. I barely register with them. Why would I? They’ve got bigger fish to fry now.

I want to know if Connelly is in custody, if Mike and Jim found anything else. I picture the mothers of the boys, each one collapsing with grief. Pat. Her face crumbling as she realizes it’s all been a setup, she’s lost her son and her life and all the time people nearby knew. Mothers and fathers of boys missing years ago, nodding sadly, as if they knew all along, but dying inside as they hear the details. I want to go in and help with the operation debrief, do my job.

I desperately want to stand there while they are told that their children are dead, and tell them that I know what they are going through, this time I do. Not the empty words I’ve used before, the platitudes my job requires of me. I know how they feel. But instead I drive home.

I know something’s wrong even before I park up. The garage door is slightly open. There’s faint glow from under it that means the kitchen light is on, and the side door is open. I turn to check that the police car is still there, and it is. I park up the bike and pull off my crash helmet.

A sliver of orange light tells me that the front door is slightly open and I push it a little. Is it Aiden? Has he come home and not found me here, so looked in the garage for me? My heart jumps a little at the thought of going inside and up to his room.

Is he there, lying on his bed with is headphones on, tapping his foot, smiling at me? Do I flick on the kettle and make him a hot chocolate, just the way he likes it? I blink into reality and the image disappears. It’s replaced by what appears to be a dark stain on my carpet. Hot chocolate? No too red. Blood. But how can it be?

My line of vision widens to the sofa. The coffee table is knocked over. The TV is on and it’s the end of a drama.
The Notebook
. The bit at the end where Noah and Allie are by the piano. The bit that always makes me cry.

I can feel the tears in my throat now and this time there’s no holding them back. I walk around the sofa and see the pink bunny rabbit slipper, one of the ears is twisted underneath in an awkward position, just above a snapped ankle. Her foot caught underneath the television stand as she fell backward. Fell. Fell. Did she? Would a fall be enough to crack open her skull?

Sheila’s eyes are closed and her mouth is twisted in pain. She’s bunched up, her foot straining enough for the bone to rip the skin, and I want to release it but I can’t. Did she fall? If she has, why would the coffee table be over? Why would the drawers be open in the sideboard?

I go through to the kitchen and see Sharon sprawled out on the tiles. She’s facedown, but from the side of her cheek, I can see, she has heavy bruising. She’s clutching a small butter knife and there’s an unbuttered piece of toast on the kitchen side. I feel her neck for a pulse, but there is none.

Looking closer, I can see a blade sticking through the blue winceyette of her dressing gown, making a small puncture. No blood. As I turn to check the garage, I remember that you should never try to remove a knife from a body, never open a wound.

Another body lies in the kitchen doorway. A young woman I don’t know, someone in their early twenties, in a police uniform. I can hear the credits roll on the film now, as I step over her and go upstairs.

It’s completely ransacked. The bathroom is smashed, all the bath panels have been removed and the shower screens ripped apart. I go to my room and it’s a mountain of jumbled clothes and MDF. Everything has been piled high on my bed, and I automatically look upward, then feel guilty.

Three dead bodies and I’m worried about the money. Who the fuck have I become?

The ceiling tiles are intact and I stand on my dressing table, which has been pulled out, to see if it’s still there. It is. Exactly where I left it. Of course it fucking is. No one else knows about it. Only Bessy.

I panic. I haven’t got to the end of her story yet. For all I know, the next bit of her notes could say that she informed the police or told a relative or even a friend, or Mothers for the fucking Missing. Jesus.
Come on, Jan. Come on
. I’ve got so used to looking up, reading the skies, that my heads in the clouds.

Still standing on the table, I assess the room. It’s hard to tell how it used to be, but I crouch down and think about what whoever did this could be after. What did I have that someone would need? I don’t have any money of my own.

I don’t have any police business kept here. Nothing at all. Obviously someone thinks I am hiding something. Is it Connelly, a payback for finding him out? What am I hiding? The money, but it’s not that. Unless they’ve killed three people and left empty-handed. What else? What else have I got here that someone else would want?

My eyes scan the room and finally rest on the remains of the small fitted cupboard in the corner of my bedroom. I jump down and pull away the debris, waiting for Aiden’s passport and bank card to drop out from behind the hardboard. But it’s gone. It was that.

Oh my God. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe Connelly does have Aiden, as special case, holding him to get at me. Somewhere, else, away from the Gables. Keeping him prisoner, a bargaining tip for when it all comes on top.

Now he’s going to take him away for good. But why would he do that? Why would he do any of this, now it’s over? Revenge? Or just because he can.

Just because he can, because it makes him powerful. Like the terrible signs in the sky, holding everyone’s fear high above them, reminding them that all he has to do is drop it and . . .

I rush downstairs. The money can wait. What Stewart doesn’t know will keep for the time being. This is more important. I pick up the house phone and dial the ops room. It’s engaged, and I phone Mike. He’s engaged too. Of course he will be. They’ll all be at the Gables, sorting their way through the carnage.

I dial the ops room again, pressing redial every time I hear the engaged tone. Come on, come on. I notice that there’s a terrible smell for the first time, shit and blood, not unlike the rooms where the boys were kept. Death. That horrible sense that someone has suffered. Someone’s life has ebbed away.

My mind races away from death and onto the passport. What would they want with Aiden’s passport if they didn’t have him? Aiden must be leaving the country. There’s no other reason for it. But why would Connelly take Aiden abroad? To sell him?

The thought repulses me, and I force back vomit. It wouldn’t be outside what Connelly was capable of, after all. And he did seem to have singled me out for some reason.
Come on. Come on
.

Then I see it. In the middle of all the fucked-up murder and the topsy-turvy furniture, I see it. Beside the torn ligaments and the bunny rabbit. I see it. Or, rather, I don’t see it.

I replace the receiver and scan the floor. I pull the coffee table away and reach around the floor for any sign of it. The small bronze statue of an eagle I bought in a junk shop in Italy in what seems like a lifetime ago. I researched it and found out it was a maquette. A scale model of the real thing, which, by some serendipitous occurrence, stood in a museum in Sal’s Italian hometown. It turned out that the area Sal’s family came from, Catania in Sicily, was very close to a raptor sanctuary. Famous for birds and famous for mafia connections.

We’d joked about it, but now it seemed eerily real. Sal denied it, dismissed it as conspiracy theory and ridiculous, but now I wonder if cruelty and violence is somehow genetic.

He’d coveted the eagle, his eyes glazing over and a vein in his forehead thumping every time I picked it up. I say maquette, he says plastico. We couldn’t even agree on that. I had it valued and it turned out to be worth in excess of ten thousand pounds, so I kept it locked in a reinforced glass-fronted cupboard in the lounge where I could both see it and keep it safe.

Sal loved it as soon as he set eyes on it. It was as if he already knew what it was, a little piece of his hometown, a little piece of him. When we divorced, he listed it as his, but I produced a receipt to say I had paid for it and I kept it. Because I knew how much it would get to him.

I bend down and see that the glass is not broken. It has been carefully opened with a key that only Sal and I know the whereabouts of, and locked again after the tiny bird has been taken out. I reach up above the curtain rail and the key is gone.

I perch on the edge of the sofa, not really wanting to believe what seems to be happening. Sal? Sal? Why would he do this? What would he want with Aiden’s passport? I suddenly remember the packed bag with the bank card and passport in the side of it. I run upstairs, through the debris and the bodies, and I stand on my dressing table again to reach the money.

No one will know I’ve been here. I rush back downstairs and try to leave the house, but I can’t. I can’t just leave them here like this. But I have to go right now. I try the ops room one more time, but it’s still engaged.

So I jump on my bike and speed down the road helmet-less, the money dangling from my arm in a carrier bag. Stopping at the place where I dropped my phone last night, I retrieve it and drop the money there instead. This is a black spot, no surveillance, no phone signal. So it should be safe from prying eyes. Prying eyes.

How could I have missed it? My head is filled with Sal’s stock sayings, one of the things that had endeared him to me. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Sal in the station, wandering around the ops room, preparing for our appeal. So angry when I took him to the interview room. Sal in Jim Stewart’s office. Sal, when we were still together, going for a pint with Mike. Sal. Waiting for me in the cloakrooms after work like a dutiful husband. Sal with my phone. Sal with my work notes. Why had I never seen it before? Why?

Had I been too caught up in my domestics with him to realise that he hated me so much that he would use me to get information?

Then it hits me. He must be working for Connelly. He must be. Otherwise, why would he need to run now? I backtrack, Sal in the background of everything. My phone call to him yesterday, he asked where I was. Was I outside?

Sal’s face when I’d found the passport, his anger. Sal, earlier on, in Jim Stewart’s office, probably while he took the call from Mike. Sal could have alerted Connelly. He was the one who cleared the Gables, fed Connelly the false information I had given Mike. Further back, to Operation Hurricane.

Sal offering to keep Aiden for weekends while I worked long hours, then bringing him back just before I arrived home and making me coffee. Talking to me. Asking me about what had gone on. I hadn’t told him any of the details, but I probably had said enough to hint at what the operation was about. He’d always shown an interest, even when it became clear that he resented my job.

I’m outside his flat now. I remember the security camera. I pull around in the background and go behind the post that holds it and throw and old rag I find on the steps over the lens. First time. I must be getting better, in my desperation.

Then I park under the balcony, just to be sure. Two steps at a time I reach the front door, pressing all the buzzers over and over until someone buzzed me in. I push my ear against the moulded plastic and hear nothing. So I feel for the key and it’s still there.

I turn it and push open the door quietly, but I already know it’s too late. Sal’s coats no longer hang by the front door. The hallway is empty, and as I walk through to the lounge, it’s like the first time I visited the flat with him before he moved in, to make sure Aiden would be OK here.

Empty. Except for a note on the kitchen side, alongside a stack of blank notepaper. I pick up the paper and feel it. It’s the same paper as all the other notes were written on. All the notes I thought were from Connelly.

The note tells me to check my phone. I turn on my mobile, fumbling with the buttons and will it to operate after a night outside in the damp. It does, and immediately beeps loudly into the echoing emptiness.

Lots of texts and messages from Mike, but only one from Sal. It’s a picture message. It’s him holding the eagle and two plane tickets, with his thumb over the destination. He’s too far away for me to see the time of the flight, but the backdrop is a thick plastic barrier and the flash from the phone has reflected in it.