Like This, for Ever (23 page)

‘You look different,’ he told her. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Different good or different bad?’

‘Good, I think, although it’s hard to know for certain with you.’

‘I slept,’ said Lacey. ‘Which I don’t normally – not well, anyway. There’s something about being accused of multiple murder that seems to relax me.’

Slept? It was almost an understatement. She’d wound a thin, clean tea-towel around the cut on her wrist and fallen into bed. The next thing she knew it had been nine-thirty in the morning. She hadn’t slept like that in years.

‘Dana’s having a hard time of it right now,’ said Joesbury. ‘There’s stuff you don’t know about. She took it out on you, which she shouldn’t have done, but we’re none of us perfect.’

Except you,
she thought.
You look close to perfect to me right now.
And that adorable child of yours. Two perfect men, who could be mine, if only …

‘And you do seem to have a knack of attracting trouble.’

Possibly the two saddest words in the English language:
if only.

‘Is she at the post-mortem?’ asked Lacey.

Joesbury nodded. ‘Just to warn you, she’ll be wanting to talk to you again. She can’t believe you have no idea who sent that text.’

‘She’s right. I know exactly who sent it.’

Joesbury looked like she’d slapped him.

‘Don’t you start as well. I can’t prove anything,’ she told him.

‘Chat in two minutes, Mark,’ a large, older bloke who looked like a coach called to him as he jogged past. Joesbury nodded briefly. ‘For God’s sake, Lacey, don’t get yourself involved in anything …’

‘I need to handle it myself first. It’s about trust. And not scaring people. If you tell her I told you, I’ll deny it.’

Joesbury looked exasperated. ‘What is this? A test? You’re trying to find out where my loyalties lie?’

‘How devious. I never thought of that. But I guess we will, won’t we?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t have you down as manipulative.’

‘Liar, I bet there isn’t a negative adjective in the English language you haven’t applied to me at some point.’

‘Dad, do you want a bite of mine? Lacey, we got you one of your own.’

Lacey looked at the ketchup-smeared, soft bread-roll, crammed with bacon, and realized she was genuinely hungry. Another first in a long time. Huck was holding it up to her expectantly, as though he couldn’t imagine anyone turning down a bacon sandwich. His own was more than half eaten. He had ketchup smears around his mouth and a dollop like clown’s make-up on his nose. Lacey reached out and wiped the ketchup from his nose with her index finger.

‘Huck,’ she said, ‘if your dad were even half as cute as you, I would definitely be his girlfriend.’

Without thinking, she raised her ketchup-smeared finger to her lips. She was about to open her mouth when she remembered. The sight, the taste, the smell of fresh blood. Nausea washed over her.
She had no right to be here, with these people, who were normal.

‘Excuse me,’ said Joesbury. ‘I need to go and break a few bones.’

‘Hi, Barney, enjoying the game?’

Barney turned and looked at Lacey. He saw immediately that she was different. Her face was harder, her eyes colder. She knew. They both did.
So this is what it’s like,
he thought,
to have an enemy.
‘Yes, thanks,’ he replied. ‘Are you?’

Her lips stretched sideways. If a snake could smile, that’s what it would look like. ‘Oh, I’ve always been a big rugby fan,’ she said. ‘Where I come from it’s impossible not to be.’

The wind was messing up her hair. It stretched out in his direction, he could almost imagine it wrapping itself around him, pulling him closer, holding on tight.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked her, noticing that the others were sidling further away down the touchline. Only Jorge was close enough to be in earshot.

She seemed to think about that for a second, then, ‘I was brought up in Shropshire,’ she said. ‘Very close to the Welsh border. We knew a lot of Welsh people. The Welsh live and breathe rugby.’

‘My dad likes it,’ he said, fixing his attention on the game. ‘A few of my mates’ dads play. And one of our teachers from school.’

Seemingly tired of hair in her face, Lacey pushed it back behind her head, then twisted it round at the back of her neck into a knot. She stuffed the loose end into the collar of her coat. He’d never seen a woman do that before. ‘I got your text,’ she said. ‘The one you sent me last night.’

Careful now. Barney saw Jorge stiffening. He’d heard her, too. He just had to hope Jorge had the sense to keep quiet.

‘I was at a mate’s house last night,’ said Barney. ‘I sent a couple of texts to my dad. Did I send one to you by mistake? Sorry.’

‘No, I mean the one about Deptford Creek. About what you saw down there.’

Barney looked Lacey full in the face. He was a good liar, he took after his dad, this would be easy. The hair she’d imprisoned was starting to break free and fly in the wind again, like ribbons, like weed in a rough sea.

‘I didn’t send any about Deptford Creek,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was someone with a similar number.’ He pulled his phone out of his pocket, reeled off his number. ‘Anything like that?’ he asked her.

‘I can’t check right now,’ she said. ‘The police have my phone. It may take them a few days, but they will trace who texted me last night. It will be better to own up now.’

She was bluffing, she had to be. It was a pay-as-you-go phone, it couldn’t be traced.

‘Barney, I heard you all come home. It was obvious something had happened. Ten minutes later, the text arrived. Whatever you were doing down there, however much you think you might be in trouble, I promise you, the police won’t be interested. All they care about is making sure they have as much information as possible about what happened there last night.’

Exactly,
thought Barney.
If they find out we were there, they’ll find out Dad was. Hatty will describe that sweatshirt and then that will be it.

‘Barney, this is a murder inquiry. A multiple-murder inquiry. I’ll come with you, but you have to talk to the police.’

No, he was not going to tell the police that his dad had been at the boat. There would be a perfectly good reason, there had to be.

‘I’m sorry, Lacey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘SUSAN, IT’S DANA
Tulloch.’

‘Hi Dana, anything new?’

‘Yes, I think so. I’ve just had a report back from the lab and it’s interesting.’

‘Hang on, let me grab a pen.’

Dana waited. She’d never been in Susan Richmond’s office, could not picture the room where the psychologist was right now. She looked down at the notepad on her desk. She’d written the name PETER SWEEP in a large circle and was drawing faint pencil lines from one letter to another, in the time-honoured way of solving anagrams. So far she’d come up with Peeper Stew, Peep Wester and Weeper Step.

‘OK, fire away,’ said Richmond.

‘The clothes that Jason and Joshua Barlow were found in were sent away, which is perfectly normal procedure,’ Dana told her. ‘Their father had confirmed they were the clothes the boys were wearing when they went missing, so potentially what we found on them could be important.’

‘I guess you’re always hoping for the killer’s DNA.’

‘Goes without saying. There were quite a lot of hairs and fibres on both boys’ clothing, but that’s perfectly normal for children of this age who’ve spent the day at school.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘There was a lot of blood around the necks of the boys’ sweaters, but again that’s exactly what we would have expected.’

‘I guess.’

‘There was also blood, or what appeared to be blood, on Jason’s trousers. Left leg, just below the knee. When we had the initial report, we assumed it was just spatter.’

She paused, giving the other woman a chance to catch up with her notes. ‘And now you know it’s not?’ Richmond asked after a second.

‘It’s not even blood,’ said Dana. ‘Or rather, not real blood.’

‘What other kinds of blood are there?’

‘It’s fake blood,’ said Dana, looking at the picture she’d found on the internet. ‘The sort you buy in bottles in joke shops. Or theatrical make-up suppliers. You even see it in supermarkets around Hallowe’en. It’s actually pretty realistic. Sort of gloopy and shiny and just the right dark-crimson colour.’

‘Fake blood?’

‘Which the boys didn’t have, according to their parents. And which the school tell me would definitely not be allowed on school premises.’

‘So you’re thinking it came from the killer?’

‘Do you remember Sergeant Anderson suggesting our killer might be doing a Ted Bundy? He may have been closer than he knew. Ted Bundy pretended to have a broken arm. What if our guy appears to be badly hurt? What if he’s clutching a bleeding wound, maybe asks the child to phone for help for him.’

Silence, whilst Richmond thought about it. ‘A lot of children would find that scenario very frightening in itself. A strange man, dripping with blood.’

‘Yes, they would,’ agreed Dana. But if it were a woman who appeared badly hurt?

‘Do you think there could be a woman out there called Pet Sweeper?’ she went on.

‘Sorry?’

‘Oh, nothing. It just occurred to me Peter Sweep might be an anagram of the killer’s real name. Not working though, too many Es.’

‘Your mystery woman on the beach still a mystery?’

Dana gave up, dropped the pencil and crumpled the paper. ‘Completely,’ she said. ‘No matches even close on the system. Whoever she is, she’s not a villain with a police record of any sort. Which is odd, in its way, because I’m not the only one here who thinks she looks familiar.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Richmond, ‘because I showed her picture round the office here, and got no reaction at all. Which would suggest she’s not a celebrity or simply someone with one of those common faces. She’s someone who just the police are finding familiar. Have you thought about releasing the picture?’

‘My boss won’t do it without a little more to go on than a sighting under Tower Bridge,’ said Dana. ‘You have to see his point. She’s probably nothing to do with the investigation at all and I’m just wasting time thinking about her.’

‘What are you afraid of, Lacey?’ asked the counsellor.

Back again, in the torture chamber. It seemed to get smaller and dimmer with every visit. Lacey wondered how the woman coped if she had a claustrophobic patient to deal with.

‘Do I strike you as a fearful person?’ replied Lacey, who’d learned long ago that if you asked lots of questions in these sessions, there was always less time to give away the important stuff.

‘We’re all afraid of something,’ said the counsellor, who was wearing a darker shade of grey than usual this afternoon. It made her face less pink, her hair more silver. ‘Given your recent history, one might expect you to be more fearful than most. You’ve experienced a very dark side of life. It’s bound to have an impact.’

‘Yes,’ said Lacey. ‘You would expect so, wouldn’t you?’

‘Have you hurt your wrist?’

‘What?’ Lacey tugged the sleeve of her sweatshirt, bringing the edge of the cuff close to her knuckles.

‘You’ve been rubbing it a lot,’ said the counsellor. ‘I just wondered if you’d sprained it, with all the weights you lift.’

‘I did,’ said Lacey, trying not to show relief. ‘But it was boxing, not weights. I hit the bag badly. Nothing serious.’ Of course, thought Lacey, were she to admit to deliberately cutting herself, taking a knife to her own vein, then running her tongue along the
thin, red line, letting the sharp-tasting liquid wash around her mouth, it would be game over. She’d never be signed fit for work again. Especially when she confessed that the need to do it a second time was building.

‘I’ve been wondering how much of this need to get your body to maximum fitness is actually about fear,’ said the counsellor. ‘Subconsciously, your mind is telling you that the stronger and fitter you are, the more able you’ll be to fend off the next attack. Because I think, deep inside, you’re afraid of the next attack.’

Sometimes this woman was verging on smart. And sometimes she was completely clueless. Lacey pulled her arms around her body to make herself look vulnerable, and to keep her fingers from worrying at the sore on her wrist.

‘Are you still planning to leave the police?’ asked the counsellor, after a moment.

Lacey nodded. ‘After the Cambridge trial,’ she said. ‘How much of what we discuss here do you pass back to my superiors?’

The counsellor looked shocked. ‘None of it,’ she said. ‘These sessions aren’t about your fitness to do your job, I thought I’d made that clear when we started. They’re to help you deal with what you went through in Cambridge. And last year.’

‘Yes, you did say that. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Are you afraid of what people think of you?’

Bless her, she had no idea.

‘I’m not scared,’ she said, in a small voice.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Lacey went on, speaking louder now. ‘I can’t feel fear any more. I sometimes wish I could.’ She leaned forward, closer to the counsellor. ‘I test myself, I go out walking after dark, around some of the roughest parts of London. I walk through deserted open spaces, even along the riverbank at low tide. All the places where women alone are supposed to be at their most vulnerable. Where sensible women wouldn’t dream of going.’

‘You think you’ve lived through the worst, what else can there possibly be?’ asked the counsellor.

‘In a way, but I think it’s worse than that.’

‘What can be worse than that?’

Lacey thought about Tulloch’s eyes upon her in the interview room, about the way Sergeant Anderson, DC Stenning and all her other former colleagues couldn’t quite look at her. She thought about Barney and his mates at the rugby yesterday, terrified and fascinated in equal measure.

‘I’ve become what other people are scared of,’ she said. ‘I’m the thing they fear.’

‘I won’t keep you long, Sir. I just want to ask you a few questions about the boat you keep at Deptford Creek.’