No Other Darkness (10 page)

Kate Larbie stands at Marnie’s shoulder, so that they are looking at the diary together.

It should feel comradely. Kate’s the same height as Marnie and a good friend, one of the best. But Marnie has grown these spines all over, like a porcupine. She rattles. Even when she’s standing still, she rattles, warning people to stay away.

The words of a childhood rhyme keep looping in her head: ‘Porcupines are always single, poor old ’pines they must not mingle.’

She knows that the rhyme, like the spines, is in her head for protection, cladding against the cold reality of getting on with her life, but there are times when she wishes she had no protection, when she longs to rub up against that reality, even at the cost of getting cut, because she’s sick of feeling numb. Sick, and scared.

What if I never feel anything ever again?

What if I only ever see them as photos, or bloody footprints on the kitchen floor?

She wants her life back.

Not the way it was before; she knows she can never have that. Just the connection, the ability to put out her hand and touch the person standing right next to her, instead of feeling she’s inside a torture device with the spikes on the outside.

‘I wish I could be more helpful,’ Kate says. ‘But honestly? The patterns could be anything.’

Circles within circles, interlinked, repeated at intervals.

‘They could be anything.’

Kate is a documents examiner. She’s subjected the diary to every test she knows, and some she didn’t, to appease Marnie’s need for answers. She wants to help.

‘Not anything,’ Marnie insists. ‘You’ve ruled out a secret code, for starters.’

‘I have,’ Kate agrees. She looks sad.

Everyone around Marnie is sad.

It’s something else she’s getting sick and scared of.

‘He wouldn’t need to write in code,’ she tells Kate. ‘My parents were the last people to snoop in someone’s room.’

‘Of course . . .’ Kate slips a hand through the spines to touch Marnie’s wrist, pressing her thumb to the spot where the bone’s too prominent.

Now the diary’s bathed in white light, but the tears don’t fall, drying so fast Marnie’s eyes itch from the salt. She presses back at Kate’s hand, numbly.

Marnie is wearing a new suit, bought in a panic because none of her other clothes fit properly; she’s lost too much weight. The new suit is sleek and expensive, charcoal grey. She’s thrown out her black clothes, fearing an extended period of sympathy if people think she’s kitted out in mourning. Some people – most people – still can’t look her in the eye.

Kate says, ‘Have you spoken with Ed?’

Marnie shakes her head, then nods. ‘I will, soon.’

As soon as she’s figured out a way to separate Ed from his job title.

Victim Support – she grows a spine for each syllable.

Porcupines are always single, poor old ’pines they must not mingle . . .

There wasn’t much in her parents’ house that belonged to Stephen, but there was this.

A hardback diary bound in manila card, in which Stephen had recorded dates, the start and end of school terms. The date of their murders he had left blank, pristine on the page.

Marnie would have preferred to see the date slashed in black, or ripped from the book. Stephen had marked a date later in the same month, some school trip or other, and this led the prosecution to argue that the killings were unpremeditated, as if otherwise he might have written ‘On trial for double murder’ after the date in question.

Of course she’s not allowed to employ humour in that way, even if it makes her feel better, more human. She must get used to hushed voices when she enters a room, and the shift of eyes away from her. No one likes a victim in their midst. She can’t blame them. She’s going out of her way to avoid victims. Their loss gets in the way of solving whatever crime is responsible for it, like a hazardous spill holding back a fire crew.

‘It’s not a logo,’ she says to Kate Larbie. ‘But I don’t think it’s just doodling. He’s not the type. Everything he does is deliberate. You saw him in court. He doesn’t fidget, he doesn’t daydream. He’s focused. Everything he does is focused. So these,’ she reaches through her shield of spines to put a finger on the page, ‘mean something.’

Kate has covered the open pages of the diary with a square of magnifying glass.

Marnie’s finger leaves a mark, a print. The heat in her eyes paints it red, like the prints in her parents’ hallway where he sat waiting for the police to come.

Circles joined to smaller circles, the pattern repeated at intervals.

This is what Stephen Keele drew in his diary in the days leading up to the one when he killed Greg and Lisa Rome.

Circles joined to smaller circles, empty rings, like eyes on the page.

Marnie refuses to believe that the circles mean nothing. She refuses to repeat the healing mantra that says, ‘Some crimes are without meaning,’ even though she knows it’s true and she’s been told by everyone from Tim Welland to Lexie, her therapist, that this crime was like that: meaningless. She refuses to believe it.

So she puts out spines and she asks questions, of everyone.

Victims rarely ask questions. That’s for detectives to do. She’s proving a point, putting distance between her and the crime, another layer of protection like the new suit, but what alternative does she have? Should she stop asking why
?

Why and why and why . . .

She doesn’t think she can. The questions are all she has and it’s not certain, yet, that there are no answers.

He’s only fourteen years old.

He can’t keep quiet for ever.

People at the secure unit, specialists, are trained in extracting questions from kids who’ve gone off the rails, even ones who’ve done it as spectacularly as Stephen.

She doesn’t know, yet, that he has spines that make hers look like freckles. That he’s as empty of answers as the circles he draws, again and again, in the hardback diary.

She doesn’t know that she will see those same circles again five years later, when she’s asking different questions but with the same intent.

To heal someone’s hurt. To take home answers so that someone can lie down in the dark and weep, until the world comes back upright.

Marnie sat in the car outside the Doyles’ temporary home, resting her hands on the wheel and watching the street for Clancy Brand. She needed to see the boy in daylight, not hiding behind a curtain or standing in the shadows. She didn’t trust her memory not to make a monster out of a normal teenage boy.

Her phone buzzed. ‘Noah. What’ve you got?’

‘GPR are just finishing up. They’ve found six bunkers, none of them filled in.’ Noah sounded relieved. Did he?

‘Tell me.’

‘They’re all empty. Nothing with the right mass to be bodies, they seem fairly confident about that. There’s a problem, though, at number 8.’

Number 8 was where Douglas Cole lived.

‘What kind of problem?’

‘Mr Cole is home, finally. And he’s unhappy about the GPR team going into his garden. Very unhappy. He’s asking for you.’

Marnie held the phone to her ear, tenderly, because her
skin felt thin and hypersensitive, all her nerve endings alert, on edge. ‘Have they gone in?’

They had the paperwork, nothing Cole could do about that.

‘Only just. It’s getting a bit noisy here. The press want an update. They’re asking for you.’

‘Who’s asking, in particular?’

‘Hang on. He gave me his card . . .’ She heard Noah searching his pockets and she shut her eyes, mouthing the name in synch with his next words: ‘Adam Fletcher.’

‘Tell Mr Cole I’m on my way. And do what you can to keep the press wide of number 8. I’ll deal with it when I get there.’

Through the car’s windscreen: a loping figure in a hooded jacket.

High shoulders, narrow build.

His hands stuffed into his pockets, his head down.

Clancy Brand.

‘Is she coming?’ Adam Fletcher rolled an unlit cigarette between the fingers of his right hand.

Noah hoped he wasn’t expecting a light. He was surprised the man wasn’t self-conscious about smoking so near to a crime scene. But Fletcher didn’t look like he cared much what other people thought of his bad habits. He was aggressively good-looking, at least a couple of inches taller than the slouch in his spine suggested, and healthier than anyone with a nicotine habit deserved to look. Clear skin and eyes, athletic build.

‘DI Rome?’ Fletcher prompted. ‘Is she coming?’ He nodded at the GPR team. ‘That needs a statement, surely.’ A drawl in his voice said he’d spent time abroad, in the US maybe.

‘It’s important you don’t get in the way, sir. I’m sure we’ll have an update soon.’

Fletcher accepted this with a nod. He snapped a disposable lighter at the cigarette, his eyes on Julie Lowry’s house, his free hand shoved into the pocket of his Levis. He wasn’t dressed like the others and he was standing away from the crowd, wearing old jeans and a dark jumper, knackered boat
shoes on bare feet. If he hadn’t presented the press card, Noah wouldn’t have guessed he was a journalist. ‘Any chance of a scoop?’ he asked next.

Noah smiled at him. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think she’s got you well trained.’ Fletcher’s teeth were too white for a smoker’s. Maybe he had them bleached every six months. He shut an eye against the smoke lazing from his mouth, and thumbed a crumb of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Where’d you put the kids?’

‘I’m sorry?’

Fletcher jerked his head in the direction of the Doyles’ house. ‘Clancy,’ he drew out the name like a splinter from a thumb, ‘and the others . . . You moved them all out, right?’

Noah shook his head, sticking to the smile. ‘Sorry, I need to get on with my job.’ He paused. ‘You understand, because you’re
just doing yours
. That’s right, isn’t it?’

Fletcher gave him a dazzling smile. ‘All any of us can do.’

He was the second person in the same hour who’d wanted to know about Clancy. As if there was something remarkable about a teenage boy being fostered in a house with a secret burial chamber in its garden, as if the two things had to be connected.

Noah needed to speak with Marnie before she walked into this. Not just the press and Douglas Cole; the rubberneckers had started a cordon of their own. Misery merchants, Ron Carling called them. He’d have tried to break up the crowd if he was here. It was one of the reasons Marnie kept Carling wide of crime scenes.

Noah wondered whether Ron had uncovered anything more about the website selling tinned food. The preppers could be a blind alley. Julie Lowry thought the travellers were a better avenue of investigation. Condoms in the garden . . . Noah couldn’t see the connection to their boys. No
evidence of abuse, Fran had said. And no evidence that anyone had opened the bunker since the boys died down there, years before the travellers came, and went.

So why was Douglas Cole in such a state?

Noah moved away from Adam Fletcher, carrying the scent of the man’s cigarette in his clothes. It reminded him of Sol. When his phone played Dan’s tune, Noah knew he was calling about Sol; sensory premonition.

‘Where is he?’

Dan said, ‘He’s here. How did you know . . .?’

‘I smelt him.’ Noah carried the call away from the crowd.

‘You . . . Okay.’ Dan laughed, persuasively, like someone who expected the favour he was about to ask to meet with resistance. ‘So he’s here, at the flat. I said he could stay.’

‘Why?’

‘To be friendly . . . He’s your little brother.’

‘No, why does he need to stay?’

‘He hasn’t said. Just that he wants to crash for a couple of days.’

‘Does he have a bag?’

‘What? Probably, does it matter?’ He heard Dan drop his voice and walk through to the kitchen, where the floors were wood and threw echoes.

‘If he has a bag,’ Noah said, ‘that means he’s hiding out. It probably means he’s pissed off Mum and Dad. We’re his last resort.’

‘Because he couldn’t drop in on his big brother without an agenda? Look, he just wants a bed for the night. We can do that.’

‘Find out if he has a bag,’ Noah said, ‘but don’t open it. Don’t even touch it.’

Dan said, ‘Seriously? Only I was going to get pizza and Beck’s.’

‘I’m working. I’ll be late. Don’t let him smoke in the flat.’

He ended the call and pocketed the phone.

Where was Marnie?

Clancy’s go-bag was slung across one hunched shoulder. Inside the hoody, his face was pale, pixelated by teenage spots.

Marnie climbed from the car. ‘Can I have a word?’

The boy’s eyes slid about the street, over parked cars, along the houses, anywhere but her face, her questions. His shoulders were so high they nearly topped his head. Outsized hands and feet, like all adolescents, a width to his wrists that warned her to keep her distance. He was strong. Skinny, but strong; already his shoulders were filling out.

‘Can I have a word?’ she said again.

‘You can have two: piss off.’

Funny kid. Bit of a cliché, but funny. Even slightly reassuring; kids were rude to the police every day of the week. He was just a typical teenager. Except he wasn’t.

‘I have something of yours. Something I thought you might need.’

She watched for a reaction, but he just shoved his stare away from her, to the other end of the street. ‘I don’t need anything.’ Contempt in his voice, but sullen, the sort kids like this reserved for authority figures.

‘Not even your haloperidol?’

‘What?’ The word meant nothing to him. Why would it? He wasn’t a dispensing chemist, or a pharmaceutical technician.

‘Your pills,’ Marnie said.

He kicked a foot at the tarmac. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was wearing beaten-up Converse All Stars, their laces ripped out, caked with dirt the colour of the mud in the garden at Blackthorn Road.

Her neck was hurting her, standing this close to this kid. He stank of pheromones. He wouldn’t let her see his eyes. He was stronger than he looked, and
hiding
 . . .

The hood, hands buried in his pockets, high shoulders either side of his head; she knew he was hiding something.

‘Clancy, when your dad found that bunker—’

His eyes thumped to her face. ‘He’s not my fucking dad.’

She nearly took a step back, curling her hands in her pockets.

‘Terry,’ she corrected. ‘When Terry found that bunker . . . did you know it was there?’

He didn’t give an answer, just stood with his black eyes branding her face before loping away, up the street. Heading to the house where Beth was waiting, where he shared a room with Carmen and Tommy Doyle.

Marnie really hoped she hadn’t given him a fresh reason to be angry at the people who were trying to help him.