Tastes Like Fear (D.I. Marnie Rome 3) (15 page)

‘What …?’

‘I should have told you sooner. He must have watched me at the house, years ago. Saw the tattoos but never mentioned them. Then the last time I visited, he said that’s why he killed them. “I did it for you.”’

‘What bullshit.’ Ed’s eyes were bright with anger. ‘That bastard.’

‘I know it’s bullshit. It’s okay.’ She smiled, holding his hand steady. ‘I know he’s lying. I even know
why
he’s lying. To mess with me. It’s what he does, all he has. At least … We talked about care packages. Someone’s sending him food, books. He claims he doesn’t know who it is. His parents, probably. But he’s not interested in playing games with them. It’s my attention he wants.’

‘He should’ve been moved to an adult prison years ago.’

‘I don’t want him moved.’

‘What?’ Ed stared at her.

‘Part of me wants it, of course. Part of me’s glad he’s finally going to be punished properly. But it’s a part of me I’m not proud of. Just as I’m not proud of the way I behaved when I was May’s age and going off the rails, chasing trouble, putting my parents through hell.
That
girl cheered when she heard the news of Stephen’s move, but I don’t like her very much. I’m trying not to be her any longer.’ She waited, but Ed didn’t speak, staying close, hearing her out. ‘Do I want my parents’ murderer to be punished? Yes. But do I want him in a place where he’s likely to learn worse ways to hurt other people? No. And that’s if he survives. There’s a good chance he won’t, and if he dies before I’ve come to terms with what he did, I’m not ready to cope with that. I want him alive and safe, and
growing up
. I’m managing to do that, and I want the same for him. I want him to regret what he did. Even if he can’t explain it, I want him to be
sorry
.’

Six months ago, a bereaved mother had told Marnie that remorse was a weapon: ‘If there was someone you wanted to punish, someone who’d hurt you personally, that would be the way to do it. Make them feel remorse. Inflict it on them in whatever way you can. There’s no pain like it.’

Remorse as punishment. Was she hoping to
hurt
Stephen by forcing him to face up to what he’d done? She didn’t want to believe it, but it had the hard ring of truth.

‘You’re remarkable,’ Ed was saying. ‘Did you know that?’

She shook her head. ‘
Remarkable
would’ve moved on by now. Or opened up to you much sooner than I’m managing.’

‘Take me with you?’ He curled his hand around hers. ‘Next time you go to see him. Not into the detention unit. I’ll wait outside. You needn’t talk afterwards, just let me be with you.’

‘Of course.’

‘I know someone at the prison he’s being moved to. This man’s been in isolation for eight weeks, from choice.’

‘How is he?’

‘Paranoid. Hostile. That’s what isolation does. Makes you afraid of everything.’ Ed shook his head. ‘You’re anticipating danger the whole time and you’re scared, so you start behaving aggressively, which makes people avoid you. The stuff of vicious circles.’

Marnie was intimately acquainted with the damage fear did, how it stopped you in your tracks, eroded your identity. According to plenty of profilers, killers were afraid – of seeing what they couldn’t have, and of always being alone. They felt threatened, especially by those they selected as victims. ‘Fear gets a foothold,’ Marnie’s therapist said in the months after her parents’ deaths, ‘and we close all the doors. Living is hard. Living with fear is even harder. To get past that place you have to fight, and it might be the toughest thing you ever have to do.’

How many girls were fighting right now? How many were living in fear, perhaps even with May’s killer? And was
he
afraid, too? Feeling threatened, isolated—

Her phone rang and she reached for it.

Tim Welland said, ‘Sorry to spoil your evening, but since Traffic have stuck a road cone up mine, I thought I’d pass the pain along. They’re treating Logan Marsh’s death as manslaughter. Joe Eaton is waking up to a whole new headache tomorrow.’

‘Have they arrested him?’ Marnie uncurled from the sofa, putting her feet on the floor.

‘They’re interviewing the bereaved parents. Sergeant Kenickie, d’you know him? One-man circle-jerk, cracks walnuts with his bare face … He’s taken a dislike to your eyewitness, for reasons best known to himself. I thought you’d want to know he’s on the warpath.’

‘Thanks for the warning. How are Logan’s mum and dad?’

‘Much like the Beswicks, I imagine. With divorce thrown in, and no surviving sibling.’

‘I should give them my condolences …’

A nod in Welland’s voice. ‘Kenickie would approve. He’s rattling a sabre for your missing girl. Expect interference if you find her.’

‘I’ll take all the interference on offer,’ Marnie said, ‘if we can find her alive.’

22

Christie

Harm was washing at the sink, the light sharp on his shoulders where the muscles moved like music, up and down, up and down. Scooping water from the basin on to his face. The light catching the water, making it shine, polishing his neck and hands.

The water in the sink ran brown, but his neck was silver-white. Christie wanted to kiss it. She wanted to rest her face between the blades of his back and whisper what she knew.

Ashleigh
.

Ashleigh was gone.

No more slick smiles across the supper table, or clumsy fumbling with her eyes. She was never any good. He’d thought he could help her like the others, but he couldn’t. She was rotten when she came here, when Christie brought her back.

‘Let me help,’ she whispered.

He didn’t hear, still turning his hands under the water.

Christie knew what he was thinking. So many girls living on the streets, needing help. Lost girls, like his sister, Neve. Sometimes he could save them, set them straight. When they listened, if they wanted to be saved.

Ashleigh had only wanted one thing, the usual thing.

The one thing he wouldn’t give them.

But here was Harm with the light like an axe on his back, shining, shining.

Not knowing, not yet, what she’d done.

23

Noah reached the station just after 7 a.m.

Marnie was in the incident room, tacking photos to a clean whiteboard. Girls’ faces, smiling, posing for the camera. One was blowing a kiss, another so heavily made-up it was hard to see how young she was underneath. Noah counted seventeen photos. Marnie had highlighted four, next to the evidence board from Battersea. She’d added new sketches by May, of the power station.

‘You’re early. Is that coffee?’

‘Yes.’ He’d bought two flat whites on the off-chance he wouldn’t be the only one wanting to get started this early. ‘These are the girls who’ve gone missing in London recently?’

‘None of them looks like Traffic’s girl, but at least three went missing in circumstances similar to May’s. Normal family life, no inciting incident, nothing taken from the house. The fourth is the right time and place but the investigating officer thought she was a classic runaway. Trouble at school, tension at home, new stepfather … If we counted every teenager who ran away from home or care, we’d need evidence boards from here to Rockall. Runaways typically come back. Missing means taken. These girls? Are missing.’ Marnie sipped at the coffee. ‘I’m filling in time until we can get started on the house-to-house, or until Fran calls. All this could be nothing. Coincidence.’

Noah stepped up to the board to study the girls’ faces, and to memorise their names.

Sika Khair wore a mask of make-up, false eyelashes, a piercing through her bottom lip, black and gold tiger stripes in her hair. Sixteen years old. The girl blowing a kiss to the camera was Ashleigh Jewell. Hair scraped into a high ponytail, the kind worn by the girls on the Garrett. Lots of lip gloss, a vest top showcasing spray-tanned cleavage, distinctive crook in her nose, heavy ear lobes pierced in three places, studded and hooped in gold. Fifteen, missing for nearly four months. The other two girls had the same spray tans, vest tops, heavy lips and lids, skin-lifting ponytails.

‘Why do they do that?’ Noah wondered. ‘Dress so alike? We see it all the time where we live. The girls look the same even when they’re out of uniform. Boys too, as if there’s a factory somewhere cloning them … Must make it hard if you don’t fit the mould. That’s a lot of pressure, conformity.’ He thought of his own teenage years, choosing to come out when his mates were joining gangs. Hard to swim against the tide, to keep your identity when everyone around you was acquiring camouflage of one kind or another. He thanked God for Dan, the safe place they’d found, their happiness. ‘Which is the girl with the stepfather?’

‘Sika Khair.’ Marnie perched on the edge of the nearest desk in jeans and a grey crewneck, her hips as narrow as a boy’s. She looked at the faces on the board and she must have been thinking the same grateful thought about safe places, because she asked, ‘How’s Dan?’

‘Good, thanks. How’s Ed?’

She nodded. ‘We should get together some time. The four of us.’

It was a big deal. She ring-fenced her privacy. Noah said, ‘I’d like that.’

‘I don’t mean a dinner party.’ She arched an eyebrow, smiling with one side of her mouth. ‘I wouldn’t subject you to that. Maybe a drink somewhere.’

‘Great.’ Noah smiled back. ‘I know a couple of places. Not a club crawl,’ he added, in case she was imagining that.

‘What makes you think we wouldn’t be up for a club crawl, Detective?’ She was deadpan, but he knew her well enough to recognise the laughter behind her eyes.

‘In that case we’ll plan a night of it. Does Ed like tequila?’

‘He spent a year in Mexico. I’d call it a safe bet.’ Marnie nodded at the board, refocusing the pair of them. ‘Fran thinks May was dehydrated. The full autopsy should give us a better idea.’

‘So maybe she wasn’t as well cared for as we’d thought? Street kids get dehydrated. Did the security at Battersea not throw up anything?’

‘Nothing on the front-of-site CCTV or the riverside. We’re getting plans through this morning to see how else he might’ve got her in there.’

‘These sketches of May’s are good.’ He followed the pencil lines, remembering what Dan had taught him about art. ‘She loved the power station, but it scared her too.’

‘Show me?’ Marnie moved to stand at his shoulder.

Noah traced the lines with his thumb. ‘It’s the places she’s put the shadows. Intimidating, don’t you think?’ The chimneys, grotesquely tall, looked almost human.

‘She was somewhere with a view into the site,’ Marnie said. ‘When she drew these.’

‘Inside the Garrett, in one of the south-facing flats? The floor above Mrs Tarvin’s would have a view like this. Do you think he was holding her on the estate?’

‘I doubt it. Too many people around. How would he get her there without being seen? The residents might not like the police, but they wouldn’t hide a child killer. No, I think he’d want somewhere private. Maybe Colin can work up a structural plan of the area, possible hiding places with a view of the chimneys.’ She made a note and stuck it on the corner of Colin’s monitor. ‘I’ve told Ron to head up the team on the Garrett. I need you to work on a profile of our killer, see whether it matches anyone with access to the site in the last twelve weeks.’

‘What’s happening with Traffic’s girl? Do they know she’s connected to May?’

‘Not yet, or not officially. Welland’s going to break the news just before the press briefing.’ Marnie’s phone rang. ‘Fran. Are you ready for us?’

‘And waiting.’

The mortuary cafeteria was doing a brisk trade in bacon sarnies. Marnie and Noah joined Fran at a table with a view of Westminster’s rush-hour traffic.

‘So … May was pregnant, as you know. Seven or eight weeks at the outside. No evidence that the sex was anything other than consensual. No lesions or bruising, nothing nasty. Nothing recent, either. No semen in or on the body. No DNA that wasn’t hers.’ Fran crunched a piece of toast. ‘I got the writing off with baby oil. No needle marks, bruises, abrasions. No defensive wounds, nothing to suggest she put up a fight. But nothing to say she was unconscious when he strangled her. Most fit young people would fight back.’

‘When
he
strangled her,’ Noah said. ‘You’re sure it was a man?’

‘Based on the bruising, the width of the palms, yes.’

‘Have you narrowed down the time of death?’

‘No more than six hours before she was found, no less than two. That puts it between about one and five p.m. You found her just after seven, so it was close.’

‘He drove a dead body through rush-hour traffic, and got her into that site before it was dark.’ Noah was making notes on his phone. ‘That was risky.’

‘And he’s careful. He wore latex gloves, kept everything clean. Stomach contents is interesting. Lentils and smoked fish. Not what I’d have picked for a last lunch. The fish was full of salt. Highly preserved, in other words. She’d been eating too much salt for some time, judging by the state of her kidneys.’

‘Hypernatremia.’

Fran nodded. ‘Generally caused by a deficit of free water in the body, only rarely by excessive sodium intake. My first thought, seeing the bloods, was an eating disorder, but she wasn’t malnourished and her protein intake was high. No evidence that she was sweating excessively, or being denied water. Skin condition was good. She’d been eating too much salt. If the rest of her diet was like the fish, then maybe dry-salting, brine-curing – whatever our ancestors relied on before we invented fridges.’

‘What would the symptoms be?’ Marnie asked.

‘Thirst, mainly. Possibly vomiting or diarrhoea. No evidence she was suffering from either of those. Twitching, tremors. Confusion’s common with elderly sufferers. Worst-case? Seizures. Coma. May’s wasn’t a worst-case, but it was severe. I’d have wanted her IV’d if she’d been found alive.’

‘High protein intake,’ Noah said. ‘But wasn’t she a vegetarian?’

‘According to her parents.’ Marnie nodded. ‘For six months or more. Sean thought it accounted for her lack of appetite.’