Shatter (55 page)

The driver punches through a red light, ignoring the screeching brakes and car horns. At least four police cars are in our convoy. A dozen more are coming from other parts of the city. I can hear them chattering over the two-way.

The traffic is banked up along Marlborough Street and Queens Road. We pul on to the opposite side of the road onto the footpath. Pedestrians scatter like pigeons.

The cars rendezvous in Caledonia Place alongside a narrow strip of parkland that separates it from West Mal . We’re in a wealthy area, ful of large terraces, bed & breakfast hotels and boarding houses. Some of them are four storeys high, painted in pastel shades, with outside plumbing and window boxes. Thin wisps of smoke curl from chimneys, drifting west over the river.

A police bus arrives carrying another twenty officers. DI Cray issues instructions, unshakeable amid the mêlée. Officers are going door to door, talking to neighbours, showing photographs, making a note of any empty flats and houses. Someone must have seen something.

I look again at the satel ite map unfurled across a car bonnet. Statistics don’t make science. And al human behaviour cannot be quantified by numbers or reduced to equations, no matter what someone like Oliver Rabb might think. Places are significant. Journeys are significant. Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don’t even realise we’re fol owing. What was Gideon’s journey? He boasted that he could melt through wal s, but he was more like human wal paper, able to blend in and become simply background while he watched houses and broke into them.

He was there when Christine Wheeler jumped. He whispered in her ear. He must have been somewhere close. I look at the terraces, studying the skyline. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is less than two hundred yards to the west of here. I can smel the sea stink and gorse. Some of these addresses are likely to have a view of the bridge from the upper floors.

A man rides past on a bicycle with elastic around his trouser legs to stop the fabric getting caught in the chain. A woman walks her black spaniel on the grass. I want to stop them, grasp them by the upper arms and roar into their faces, demanding to know if they have seen my wife and daughter. Instead, I stand and study the street, looking for something out of the ordinary: people in the wrong place, or the wrong clothes, something that doesn’t belong or tries too hard to belong or draws the eye for another reason.

Gideon would have a chosen a house, not a flat; somewhere away from the prying eyes of neighbours, isolated or shielded, with a driveway or a garage so he could take his vehicle off the road and move Charlie and Julianne inside without being seen. A house that is up for sale, perhaps, or one that is only used for holidays or weekends.

I step across the muddy patch of grass and begin walking along the street. The trunks of trees are wreathed in wire and the branches shiver in the wind.

‘Where the hel are you going?’ yel s the DI.

‘I’m looking for a house.’

Ruiz catches up to me and Monk is not far behind, having been sent to keep us out of trouble. I keep looking at the skyline and trying not to stumble. My cane click-clacks on the pavement as I head down the slight hil past a row of terraces and turn into Sion Lane. I stil can’t see the bridge.

The next street across is Westfield Place. A front door is open. A middle-aged woman is sweeping the steps.

‘Can you see the bridge from here?’ I ask.

‘No, love.’

‘What about the top floor?’

‘The estate agent cal ed it “glimpses”,’ she laughs. ‘You lost?’

I show her the photographs of Charlie and Julianne. ‘Have you seen either of them?’

She shakes her head.

‘What about this man?’

‘I’d remember him,’ she says, when the opposite is probably true.

We keep moving along Westfield Place. The wind is whipping up leaves and sweet wrappers that chase each other along the gutter. Abruptly I cross the street to a brick wal with stone capping.

‘Give me a leg-up,’ says Ruiz, before stepping into Monk’s cupped hands and being hoisted upwards until his forearms are braced along the white painted capping.

‘It’s a garden,’ he says. ‘There’s a house further along.’

‘Can you see the bridge?’

‘Not from here, but you might be able to see it from the top of the house. There’s a turret room.’

He jumps down and we fol ow the wal , looking for a gate. Monk is now ahead. I can’t match his stride and have to run every few yards to catch up.

Stone pil ars mark the entrance to a driveway. The gates are open. Tyres have crushed leaves into the puddles. A car has been here recently.

The house is large and from another age. Overgrown with ivy on one side, it has smal dark windows poking through the leaves. The roof is steep with an octagonal turret on the western corner.

The place looks empty. Closed up. Curtains are drawn and leaves have col ected on the main steps and entrance portico. I fol ow Monk up the steps. He rings the doorbel . Nobody answers. I cal Charlie’s name and then Julianne’s, pressing my face against a slender pane of frosted glass, trying to catch the tiny vibrations of a reply. Imagining it.

Ruiz has gone to check out a garage at the side of the house, beneath the trees. He disappears through a side door and then appears again immediately.

‘It’s Tyler’s van,’ he yel s. ‘It’s empty.’

My head fil s with tumbling and leaping emotions. Hope.

Monk is on the phone to DI Cray. ‘Tel her to get an ambulance,’ I say.

He relays the message and snaps the phone shut. Then he raises his elbow and drives it hard against the glass pane, which shatters and fal s inward. Reaching gingerly inside, he unlocks the door and swings it open.

The hal is wide and paved with black and white tiles. It has a mirror and an umbrel a stand, as wel as a side table with a Chinese takeaway menu and list of emergency numbers.

The lights are working, but the switches seem to be camouflaged against the floral wal paper. The place has been closed up for the winter, with sheets and rugs covering the furniture and the fire grates swept clean. I imagine figures lurking unseen, hiding in corners trying not to make a sound.

Behind us a trio of police cars streams through the gates and up the gravel driveway. Doors open. DI Cray leads them up the front steps.

Gideon said Julianne and Charlie were buried in a box, breathing the same air. I don’t want to believe him. So much of what he said to people was designed to wound and to break them.

I stand swaying in the dining room, watching a spil of light from the patio doors. There are muddy footprints on the parquetry squares.

Ruiz has climbed the stairs. He cal s to me. I mount the stairs two at a time, gripping the banister and dragging myself upwards. My cane fal s from my hand and clatters down the steps to the black and white tiles.

‘In here,’ he yel s.

I pause at the door. Ruiz is kneeling beside a narrow cast iron bed. A child is curled on a mattress, her eyes and mouth taped shut. I do not remember uttering a sound, but Charlie’s head rises and turns to my voice and she lets out a muffled sob. Her head rocks from side to side. I have to hold her stil while Ruiz finds a pair of dressmaking scissors lying on a thin mattress in another corner of the bedroom.

His hands are shaking. So are mine. The blades of the scissors open and close gently and I peel back the tape. I am staring at her with a kind of wonderment, mouth open, stil not able to believe it’s her. I meet Charlie’s blue eyes. I am seeing her through a shining fluid that wil not be blinked away.

She is dirty. Her hair has been hacked to her skul . Her skin is torn. Her wrists are bleeding. She is the most beautiful creature to ever draw breath.

I crush her to my chest. I rock her in my arms. I want to hold her until she stops crying, until she forgets everything. I want to hold her until she remembers only the warmth of my embrace and my words in her ears and my tears on her forehead.

Charlie is wearing a bathrobe. Her jeans are on a chair.

‘Did he…?’ The words get caught in my throat. ‘Did he touch you?’

She blinks at me, not understanding.

‘Did he make you do things? You can tel me. It’s OK.’

She shakes her head and wipes her nose with her sleeve.

‘Where’s your mum?’ I ask.

She frowns at me.

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No. Where is she?’

I look at Monk and Ruiz. They’re already moving. The house is being searched. I can hear doors being opened, cupboards explored, heavy boots sound from the attic and the turret room. Silence. It lasts half a dozen heartbeats. The boots start moving again.

Charlie puts her head back on my chest. Monk comes back with a set of 24” bolt cutters. I hold her ankles stil as he eases the jaws around the shackles, pushing the arms together until the metal breaks and the chain snakes to the floor.

An ambulance has arrived. The paramedics are outside the bedroom door. One of them is young and blonde, carrying a first aid box.

‘I want to get dressed,’ says Charlie, suddenly self-conscious.

‘Sure. Just let these officers take a look at you. Just to be sure.’

I tear myself away from her and go downstairs. Ruiz is in the kitchen with Veronica Cray. The house has been searched. Now detectives are scouring the garden and the garage, poking at dead leaves with heavy boots, squatting to peer at the compost heap.

The trees along the northern border are skeletal and the shed has a derelict forsaken look. A wrought iron table and matching chairs are rusting under an elm tree, where colonies of toadstools have sprung up after the rains.

I walk out the back door, past the laundry and across the sodden lawn. I have the uncanny sense of the birds fal ing silent and the ground sucking at my shoes. My cane sinks into the earth as I walk between flowerbeds and past lemon trees in enormous stone pots. An incinerator built from breezeblocks is against the back fence, alongside a pile of old railway-sleepers meant for garden edging.

Veronica Cray is alongside me.

‘We can have ground-penetrating radar here within the hour. There are cadaver dogs in Wiltshire.’

I stop at the shed. The lock has been smashed open in the search and the door sags on rusting hinges. Inside smel s of diesel, fertiliser and earth. A large sit-on lawnmower squats in the centre of the floor. There are metal shelves along two wal s and garden tools propped in the corner. The blade of the shovel is clean and dry.

Come on, Gideon, talk to me. Tel me what you’ve done with her. You were talking half-truths. You said you’d bury her so deep I’d never find her. You said she and Charlie were sharing the same air. Everything you did was practiced. Planned. Your lies contained elements of the truth, which made them easier to maintain.

Leaning on my cane, I reach down and pick up the padlock and broken latch, brushing away mud. Tiny silver scratches are visible against the tarnished metal.

Then I look back into the shed. The wheels of the mower have been turned, wiping away the dust. My eyes study the shelves, the seed trays, aphid sprays and weedkil er. A garden hose is looped on a metal hook. I fol ow the coils, growing dizzy. One end of the hose droops downward against the upright frame of the shelf.

‘Help me move the mower,’ I say.

The DI grabs the seat and I push from the front, steering it out the door. The floor is compacted dirt. I try to move the shelf. It’s too heavy. Monk pushes me aside and wraps his arms either end, rocking it from one side to the other, walking it towards the door. Seed trays and bottles topple to the floor.

Dropping to my knees, I crawl forward. The compacted earth becomes softer near the wal where the shelf used to stand. A large piece of plywood has been screwed into place. The hosepipe hangs down the plywood and seems to disappear inside it.

I glance back at Veronica Cray and Monk.

‘There’s something behind the wal . Get some lights in here.’

They won’t let me dig. They won’t let me watch. Teams of two officers are taking turns, using shovels and buckets to scrape away the floor. A police car has been driven across the lawn and its headlights are al owing them to see.

Shielding my eyes to the brightness, I can see Charlie through the kitchen window. The blonde paramedic has given her something warm to drink and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

‘Someone you love is going to die,’ Gideon told me. He asked me to choose. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. ‘No choice is stil a choice,’ he said. ‘I’m going to let Julianne decide.’ The other thing Gideon said was that I would remember him. Whether he died today or spent a lifetime in prison, he wouldn’t be forgotten.

Julianne told me that she didn’t love me any more. She said that I was a different person to the one she married. She was right. Mr Parkinson has seen to that. I
am
different— more pensive, philosophical and melancholic. This disease has not broken me against a rock, but it is like a parasite with tentacles coiling inside me, taking over my movements. I try not to let it show. I fail.

I don’t want to know if she’s had an affair with Eugene Franklin or Dirk Cresswel . I don’t care. No, that’s not true. I
do
care. It’s just that I care more about getting her back safely. I am to blame, but this is not about seeking redemption or easing a swol en conscience. Julianne wil never forgive me. I know that. I wil give her whatever she wants. I wil make her any promise. I wil walk away. I wil let her go. Just let her be alive.

Monk cal s for help. Two more officers join him. The digging has exposed the lowest edge of the plywood. They’re going to rip down the wal .

Dust and dirt reflect in the beams of the headlights, penetrating the cavity. Julianne’s body is inside, curled in a foetal bal , with her knees touching her chin and hands cradling her head. I catch a whiff of the urinous smel and see the blueness of her skin.

Other men’s hands reach into the cavity and lift her body out. Monk takes her from the others and carries her into the light, stepping over a mound of earth and placing her on a stretcher.