The Cutting Crew (12 page)

This time, it was different:

No new messages

I looked at the screen for a while, feeling the kind of sheer, sudden panic you'd get if you were sitting there happily and a tiger walked into the room. I was very still, not wanting to move in case I made anything worse.

She's read them all, I thought after a moment, attempting to convince myself. And failing.

I clicked Inbox to make sure the mailbox homepage wasn't lying to me out of spite, but it wasn't. All the messages were in plain text, while unread messages were always highlighted in bold.

So either she'd read them all, or else she'd finally done what she'd always wanted and sent Rich the account details.

I clicked the Sent Items icon and saw that somebody had sent Lucy an email the night before. I clicked on it, read it. And of course, it was from Rich. They had arranged to meet each other on a respective break. I checked my watch and realised that they would be with each other now. Talking things over.

'I hope you'll be very happy,' I said. I logged out and left.

That night, I told Rachel that I didn't love her anymore. It was a combination of everything. I'd thought about it all day, and the conclusion I'd come to - the realisation, I suppose - was that I was in love with Lucy and I needed to tell her. I hadn't thought about Rachel all day, beyond how hard it was going to be to do this and how much I was risking. But I wanted Lucy now. If I didn't move quickly then I'd lose her for ever, and that meant I had to convince her that I was serious. I really don't know what the fuck I was thinking.

I went home and saw Rachel, and she was smiling and happy; she said hi, and came over and tried to kiss me. I hated myself at that moment more than ever, and it made me realise that regardless of what happened with Lucy - Rachel deserved better than me and always had. And in some ways, because I kept that thought in mind, it was easier to do than I'd expected.

So Lucy and I both had news for each other the next time we met.

Except that I didn't tell her, because she was so clearly happy and I didn't have the heart to do it - to her or to myself. Even though Rich was married, she found that everything she'd felt about him was still there, and she thought that he felt the same. As bad as it was, she was going to see him again that week. They would just be friends, she said. But I didn't believe her.

I'd had grand ideas about telling her I'd left Rachel, but it felt empty and pointless in light of the glow she had. It would achieve nothing. I'd known all along that she didn't love me - not like that - but I'd done it anyway. Now, all I had to cling to was that it was the right thing. If Rachel had known then she would have wanted it like this; and because she didn't it was harder for her - but that didn't change the fact that it was right. Rachel was better off without me. And when I saw that glow of happiness in Lucy, I realised that she was better off without me too.

And it's only a matter of time before you start generalising out from ideas like that and figure that everyone is. I moved out into my flat, and it took a month before I'd moved out of everything else as well.

Chapter
Eight

Half an hour passed before I heard the car pull up. The noise made the walls hum slightly, and then the humming died, and then I heard two voices: a man and a woman making their way into the house. My first thought was that she'd brought Rich along with her. It was stupid, but he'd been on my mind and - despite the fact that he was still with his wife - it was possible that the two of them had been together when Lucy had got my message. But as the voices got closer, I recognised Rosh's voice, and shook my head. I'd asked her to phone him. This was all of our business, after all.

'In here,' I shouted.

'Martin?'

'In here.'

They walked in. As always, Lucy led the way - just that little bit more impatient and impetuous - with Rosh following behind: a little calmer, a little more careful. She looked exactly the same as I remembered, and there was something quite startling about that.

Because her image had occupied my thoughts so totally, it was a surprise to find she actually looked like that; like if you saw a celebrity on the street. Behind her, Rosh was still Rosh. He looked like a monster out of a horror film: something that had calmed down, given up on attacking unsuspecting campers and undergone a little grooming.

They were both visibly tense as they entered, but they relaxed a little when they saw it was only me in the room, sitting against the wall. Rosh holstered his gun. Lucy squatted down beside me, placed her stripped-down forensics kit on the floor, and touched my shoulder - gave it a squeeze.

'Martin. Are you okay?'

'Yes.'

'You don't look okay.'

I looked at her. 'Did you call this in?'

'No.' She stood up. 'We didn't know exactly what there was to call.'

'Good.'

Leaving aside the problem of who'd buried the Missing Persons Report, I still didn't want the department involved. Sean had passed this to me, and now I was sharing it with Rosh and Lucy. It wasn't police business: we'd taken care of things by ourselves in the past, and there was no reason why it should be any different now.

Especially when it was one of our own.

'Good,' I said again, getting to my feet. 'We need to keep this away from the department at the moment. It's a big thing to ask, but I think it's necessary.'

If it really was a big thing to ask, neither of them seemed particularly perturbed. For a second, I experienced that flush of rightness again - the same as when the investigation had felt like it was coming together - and it seemed like no time had passed and nothing had changed. But that flush vanished quickly as Lucy opened up the kit and reminded me why we were here.

Rosh said:

'Start from the beginning then.'

Start from the beginning.

Later, as everything went to hell, I would begin to understand how difficult it was to start from the beginning. But right then, it was easy. Even if everything was mysterious and confusing, at least it all still seemed linear.

So I began with the delivery of Sean's note and the identification of Alison Sheldon; then I ran through my brief investigations with her parents and the Missing Persons Bureau. I mentioned the boyfriend, and then explained about the email forwarding to Dr Mark Harris I'd discovered when I visited the university. Finally, the delivery of the video, which led here: to me, slumped against the wall in a killing room.

As I told my story, Lucy processed the scene around us as best she could. Lucy handled evidence on a day-to-day basis. She was good: there were maybe two or three people in the department who could work a scene as well as she could. On the few occasions when our unofficial investigations had demanded it, she had used a stripped-down version of proper procedure, and that's what she did now: beginning by walking around carefully, getting a feel in her head for what had gone on here, and then taking photographs with a small digital camera. Click after click. Images of everything: the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Rosh and I moved out of the way so that she could get a picture of the wall where I'd been sitting.

'Where was the video camera?' she asked.

'Over here.' I pointed behind me and then gestured across the room. 'Filming in that direction.'

Lucy aimed the camera.

'About here?'

'Yeah.'

She took the picture. Later, we would be able to compare it to a still from the video and see what, if anything, had taken place in the room since the film was shot.

'Make sure you get that graffiti,' I said. 'Over there in the corner.'

Click.

' "Eli is rising",' she read out. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It might not mean anything,' I said. 'The name sounds familiar, but I don't know why.'

'Let's get it anyway.'

She took another picture and then put the camera away in the box. Now, she would work the room for prints. In a perfect world, the graffiti might be good for it, because it had been written by fingertip. The men in the video had been wearing gloves and so I wasn't holding out much hope, but you never knew. Maybe they had made a mistake somewhere, or else perhaps the graffiti was nothing to do with them. In either event, we'd see. After the prints, Lucy would take samples of blood, in the hope of identifying Sean and anyone else who might have been injured in here.

'We'll need to see the video,' Rosh told me. 'Where is it?'

'It's at home.'

'At home?'

The realisation hit me as he said it, and I closed my eyes.

'I was so upset that I didn't even think.'

The video was the best evidence we had. I'd watched it once and tried to look closely, but with the shock I was likely to have missed important details. However unpleasant, repeat viewings would be necessary. And what had I done? I'd left the tape at my house.

Whoever had delivered it knew where I lived, and so if it was still there then we would all be very lucky. If not, we would have a breakin scene to process, and I would punch myself repeatedly in the face. Rosh was more charitable.

'If it's not there, I'm going to slap you,' he said. 'And you're getting out of shape so it won't be hard. We'll worry about it later.'

Lucy was dusting the wall around the graffiti with black powder.

'You said the men were wearing gloves?'

'Yes,' I told her. 'Gloves and masks. All black.'

'Well, there are some prints here. Did Sean touch the wall?'

I tried to think, but I couldn't be sure. I was still privately kicking myself about the video.

'I can't remember,' I said. 'Maybe.'

'Okay.'

One by one, she lifted prints from the wall onto tape and from there onto evidence cards. She labelled each one but moved quickly, giving an appearance of carelessness.

Rosh said, 'Did you see anyone on the way over here?'

'Nobody.'

'You took the tram?'

'Yes.'

'Did anyone get on at your stop?'

'No. Nobody got off at the same time, either.'

'And the video was delivered ... when? What was the window?'

I'd already thought this through while I was waiting for them to arrive.

'I left the house about one. It was about six by the time I got home. Maybe a little after, but I didn't check my watch.'

'Where do you live?'

I gave him the address. 'You know it?'

Rosh nodded. 'Vaguely, yeah. I'm not sure about coverage, but we do have cameras in that area. If we're lucky, we might have the delivery boy on film. That's something we'll need to check.'

Across the room, Lucy was now collecting samples of blood. She was scraping the wall very gently with the edge of a scalpel and catching the crumbling blood on a sheet of white paper. She transferred it to a small envelope, labelled it, and then started to take samples from the floorboards.