No Other Darkness (15 page)

‘No problem.’ He rang off.

Marnie called Noah, reaching his voicemail. ‘The peaches are bugging me. I’m going to Sommerville. If my phone’s off, call Ed’s. I’ll catch you later.’

Fran picked up on the first ring.

Marnie said, ‘You’ve finished with the tin of peaches, yes? Can I have it back?’

‘Feeling peckish?’

‘Not remotely, but I need the peaches. I’m hoping they might get me some answers.’

‘They’re all yours,’ Fran said.

In Flat 57 Arlington Court, Denis Walton eyed Noah Jake with the air of a spinster appraising the white elephant stall at a village jumble sale. ‘And you’re a detective?’

‘For my sins.’ Noah kept the police ID open in his hand, looking around the flat. ‘This is a nice place. Great view . . .’ across the pantiled roofs of Beech Rise, the angle hiding the back gardens on Blackthorn Road.

‘Better before the houses went up.’ Denis jerked his head at the greasy orange sofa. ‘Come on then. I suppose you’ll be after a cup of tea.’

Noah sat, smiling up at the man. ‘If it’s no trouble. That’d be great, thanks.’

Denis looked him over again: slim pickings on the white elephant stall. ‘I suppose I can show willing,’ he said, in a voice that could have begrudged litter to a bin.

He was a thin man with a fat stomach, making him lean backwards like a pregnant woman when he walked to the kitchen at the rear of the flat. His hair leaned in the same direction, growing like a pelt from the base of his bald head. Picking up his feet when he walked, new tartan slippers on his feet.

Noah heard the sound of a kettle being filled.

‘Biscuits?’ Denis called from the kitchen. ‘You’re lucky I popped to the shops.’

‘Thanks,’ Noah called back.

The rear of the flat overlooked the well between this block and its neighbours. Four blocks in total, built around a concreted area where wheelie bins and bike sheds took up most of the space. Unedifying, but Noah had been in worse places. According to the house-to-house team, Denis had lived here twenty-six years. He was seventy-two, single and childless. He remembered Beech Rise being built, and the travellers who’d been cleared to make way for Ian Merrick’s men.

Noah was figuring out the best way to ask the right questions when Denis reappeared with two mugs of tea, a packet of Hobnobs tucked under one arm.

‘You’ll be wanting to know about Connie.’ He held out a mug and lifted his elbow so that the biscuits slid an inch in Noah’s direction. ‘Tuck in.’

Noah rescued the Hobnobs from the man’s armpit, putting them on the coffee table as he took the mug of tea. ‘Thanks.’

‘Connie was a character all right.’ Denis stepped over the table to join Noah on the sofa. ‘Didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, got up in arms about that development before it even started. The way they threw those houses up . . . I’ve seen garden sheds with more to them. They’ve a brass neck calling themselves safety specialists. You know what they specialise in? Panic rooms for rich people who can’t take a ring on the doorbell without pissing their pants. And all that bull about the views . . . what about
our
view? That’s what Connie wanted to know.’ He chuckled, rearranging his stomach in his lap, propping his mug there. ‘You should’ve seen her with the Neighbourhood Watch lot. “Watch this,” that was her line.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘“Watch
this, nose disease” . . . That was Connie. She was a one, all right.’ He sucked at his tea. ‘Can’t say the same for everyone here, but she was a good neighbour. We got on like a shed on fire.’

Noah set his mug down on the table. ‘Connie lived . . . here? In the flats?’

‘Course she did. Number 55, that’s what I told your lass last night. What’d you think?’

‘That she was one of the travellers living in the field where they built Beech Rise.’

Denis snorted. He freed his pinkie finger from the mug’s handle and picked his nose with it, comprehensively. ‘I call that typical.’ He inspected the finger, eyeing the nasal hair he’d dislodged with the mucus before wiping the lot on the arm of the sofa. ‘Connie would’ve had another word for it.’

Noah tried not to think about his suit, and the sofa. He said, ‘Connie had two boys?’

‘Not her.’ Denis reached for the Hobnobs, tucking the packet back into his armpit while he worked a biscuit free from the wrapper.

Noah said, ‘She had no kids. And she wasn’t a traveller. She didn’t live in the field.’

In other words, he was sitting on a sofa whose patina was nine parts snot and the other part God knows what, for no good reason.

Denis spoke through a mouthful of Hobnob. ‘Her daughter’s kids.’

‘Her daughter . . . was a traveller?’

‘No.’ Denis eyed him. ‘You have some funny ideas, son.’

‘But you saw the children with Connie?’

‘I saw
pictures
,’ Denis amended. ‘I told your lot that last night. Didn’t dress it up. Haven’t seen Con in five years. That’s why I’m surprised you bothered coming back.’

‘Connie’s grandchildren were boys?’ Noah referred to his
notes. He needed to salvage something from this, if he could. ‘Aged about five and seven?’

Denis nodded. ‘Her angels, she called them.’

‘This was five years ago?’

‘Give or take.’

‘I don’t suppose you remember their names?’

Denis looked at him. ‘Of course I bloody remember. Christ. Just because one of you lot wrote down the facts half-arsed.’ He blew his nose into his fingers. ‘Fred and Archie, her angels. Fred was the littlest. Archie was his big brother.’

Fred and Archie . . .

Noah held a breath in his chest for a second. This could still be nothing. Connie hadn’t lived in the field, the children weren’t hers. It could still be nothing.

‘Mr Walton, what happened to Connie?’

‘The travellers happened.’ He wiped his fingers on the sofa, looking disgusted.

‘Did Connie upset them? Get into a fight?’ Noah was reaching, wanting a reason to connect Connie to the case. ‘Was she afraid of the travellers?’

‘Afraid of them,’ Denis snorted, ‘that’s rich. She bloody went with them!’

‘She . . .’

‘Upped sticks and went with them.’

He flung an arm towards the window. ‘When they got cleared out of that field, Connie upped sticks. Sod her friends, sod everything. Overnight, more or less. Left the council to clear her flat. Never came back, never wrote a word about where she was, or why.’

Denis Walton snapped damp fingers in Noah’s face. ‘Buggered off, just like that. Haven’t seen her since, and don’t want to. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Stephen Keele sat in the visitors’ room, skinny in his grey sweats. Black curls, blue eyes, looking like an angel with his shoulders sloped, their blades sharp enough to be hiding wings.

Marnie smiled at the escort, keeping her left hand in her pocket. ‘Detective Inspector Rome. I called ahead. Paul Bruton arranged the visit.’

Her escort nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

When it was just her and Stephen, Marnie took her hand from her pocket and put the tin of peaches on the table.

Metal on metal, the sound making the table jump and echo.

Stephen’s eyes jumped too. To her hand, and then to the tin with its jaunty blue and yellow label, its ring-pull that counted as a weapon, in this place.

Under Sommerville’s rules, Marnie should have surrendered the tin at the main gate. She certainly should not have put it within grabbing distance of a nineteen-year-old inmate, a convicted murderer. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

Stephen tipped his head, light sliding down the side of
his face. He knew she’d broken the rules, bringing the tin in here; she saw him calculating what it might mean. A dozen recessed bulbs in the ceiling gave him a dozen shadows, in all directions at once. He didn’t speak.

This was what he did. How he kept control. By keeping his mouth shut.

‘You know.’ She waited a beat. ‘Don’t you? You’ve seen it before.’

She was tired and angry, and she didn’t bother hiding it.

She had always taken care to hide it, in the past.

Stephen registered this change in her, the skin stiffening under his eyes, where it was thinnest, where she could see the blood under the surface.

‘I know you’ve seen this before. You know
how
I know? I read your notebooks. I was looking for clues, some reason for what you did. I found doodles. Gibberish, at least that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t, was it? It meant something.’

She put her hand on the tin. ‘It meant this.’

Still Stephen didn’t speak.

‘No? All right.’ She put the peaches away and took out the torn page from Clancy’s notebook. ‘What about this?’

Stephen didn’t look at the page, keeping his eyes on her face.

Marnie tried to take his pulse from his stare, the fractional changes in his pupils. ‘Bruton says you wanted to see me. You’ve been completing a lot of visitor orders.’ She put her hand on the torn page. ‘Well, here I am.’

His eyes flickered as if she’d told him a lie.

‘Or were you just practising your handwriting, filling in time . . . You must get bored. Bright boy like you, in a place like this. Isn’t that what the psychologists say? You’re bored.’

Stephen was half the size of the shadows he was casting. Always so much smaller than she remembered him being, when she was away from here. He hooded his eyes from
her stare. Looking different. Not scared, not that, but different. Not quite so much in control.

Good.

‘You’ve been getting parcels, too. Things you didn’t ask for. Food, mostly. Bruton hasn’t passed any of it to you, he says, because that would be breaking the rules. You have to fill in a form if you want someone to send you a parcel. And
they
have to fill in a form. No forms, no food. That’s how it works. But you’ve broken the rules before, haven’t you? Smuggling my dad’s spectacles in here, and my mum’s brooch. Bruton thinks he’s too smart to let that happen, but he’s not so smart. He thinks you’re just a kid.’

Stephen’s eyes flickered again.

‘Who brought those things in here? The glasses, the brooch? Who’s sending you parcels? The same person, that would be my bet. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a detective. I find this stuff out for a living. Bruton may not be smart enough to figure it out, but he’s not me.’

This time, the only part of his eye that flickered was the iris.

‘Then there’s this.’ Marnie touched the tin of peaches. ‘It was left outside a house where two boys died. Most people leave flowers, or toys if children are involved. Cards with messages. Candles. We have to check the messages, in case one was written by the killer. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean.’

‘What did they leave for you?’ Stephen asked.

His voice was the same, too deep and old for a nineteen-year-old.

What did they leave for you?

It took her a second to realise he wasn’t talking about the Doyles’ house. He meant her parents’ house, five years ago. His eyes hadn’t left her face.

She wanted to rub at the stain put there by his stare.

When she didn’t speak, he filled the silence with, ‘Flowers? Or toys, because a child was involved?’ He sounded genuinely curious. ‘Why do people do that?’

‘I don’t know, Stephen. Why do people do anything? Why did
you
do what you did?’

He measured her with his stare, stretching the moment thin and taut, until it was in danger of snapping. Then, ‘I did it,’ he said softly, ‘for you.’

Behind them, on the other side of the wall, some kid was playing music in his room; the dead beat of a bass, no rhythm to it and no rhyme.

‘You . . .’ She didn’t want to rub at his stare on her face. She wanted to tear at it, with something sharp. ‘Say that again.’

He lowered his lashes at her in a slow blink, dark blue. ‘I did it for you.’

‘
Why?
’ she demanded. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Places of exile,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s written on your hip.’ He paused. ‘Your left hip. I knew what it meant. Places of exile. I knew how you felt.’

She felt beaten, out of breath. ‘And the parcels? Who’s sending those? Who’re you in touch with?’

He shook his head. ‘No one. I thought it was you.’

‘You thought
I
was sending you food parcels?’

He nodded.

‘Why would I do that?’

He shifted the slope of his shoulders. ‘Places of exile,’ he repeated, as if this answered her question.

‘I’ll find out,’ Marnie said. ‘I’ll find out who it is.’

‘Good,’ Stephen said, ‘because the fucker’s freaking me out.’

They looked at one another across the short distance of the table.

Was he telling the truth? She didn’t know, but she doubted
it. Doubted that he knew what the truth was, let alone how to tell it.

‘There aren’t many people who know you’re in here. Your legal team. Your parents.’

That landed. His stare sparked, coldly.

‘Theo and Stella Keele,’ she said slowly. ‘Have they been in touch?’

He didn’t answer, reverting to a lush silence she knew he wouldn’t break, not this session. He had what he wanted. Her, on the back foot again. He was happy because she’d come here, dancing to his tune. She should have known better.

‘You think you can play games with me?’

She stood, so smoothly he blinked. ‘I’ll play. You’ll lose.’

 • • • 

Ed was waiting in the car. ‘Home?’

‘Home.’ She swung into the driver’s seat, fastening her belt.

It wasn’t yet 2 p.m. If nothing else, this trip had been quick. Plenty of time left in the day for what mattered, checking in with Noah and the team. Just as well.

She’d learnt nothing useful about Clancy’s notebooks. She still didn’t know who’d left the tin of peaches outside the house in Blackthorn Road. She’d thought there must be a link, a connection, to the preppers perhaps, knowing what little she did about Stephen’s past.

Or had she used that as an excuse to break her new rule and come back here? Chasing answers, not for this new case but for the old one. Adam had said he was sorry, about her parents, and she’d hoped . . . she’d let herself believe that Stephen might finally be sorry too. Ready to talk, to give her the answers she needed to make peace with her parents’ deaths.

I did it for you.

It couldn’t be true. All the way back into London-bound traffic that felt safe, like burrowing into anonymity, she told herself it couldn’t be true.

I did it for you.

It was a lie, like everything Stephen gave her. Just another lie, only this time he’d twisted it into such a terrible shape that whichever way she tried to take hold of it, she cut herself on its sharp edges. He was finding new ways to make her hurt. It was what he did. His madness kept moving, so she could never get an angle on it, never second-guess him.

So she could never lose interest.

The traffic thickened, slowing to a crawl.

Ed was watching her, quietly, but with concern. ‘What happened in there?’

‘I’ll tell you. Just . . . Let me try and make sense of it first.’

Ed nodded his acceptance of this.

Marnie rested her head on the door frame and watched the sun strip the metallic paint from the retreating traffic. ‘I will tell you,’ she promised.

The car fumes helped. She breathed them gratefully, a smell she understood. An honest, overpowering smell, wiping her out.

Her phone, on hands-free, played Noah’s tune.

She answered the call. ‘What’ve you got?’

‘Names,’ Noah said. ‘I think I’ve got names for our boys.’