Behind Closed Doors (27 page)

Before getting into bed Lou checked her phone, as she always did. There was one message, from Jason.

The car stopped. Scarlett had been dozing a little, lulled by the motion of the car and by the whisky she’d drunk on an empty stomach.

‘Where are we?’ she said.

‘We are here,’ he said. ‘You can get out.’

She clicked her seatbelt free and opened the door, stepping out into the cold. They were in some kind of industrial estate, behind a warehouse. There was no car park as such, just an expanse of concrete through which weeds sprouted in tufts, litter pressed against a chain-link fence by an icy wind, lit from overhead by street-lights that gave everything a sickly greenish glow. Another car was parked next to them, a grubby Opel, half-rusted, and a Transit van that looked newer. From behind the corrugated iron wall of the unit, a crane rose high above her head. She looked up. The top of it was half-hidden in low, misty cloud. The chill in the air and the metallic, salty smell made her wonder if they were near the docks.

‘Is this the safe house?’ she asked. ‘It doesn’t look like much of a house.’

‘Come,’ Stefan said, taking her by the arm. ‘It’s okay.’

She was shivering against the cold as he pulled her along towards the building. A door opened inwards, through what must once have been an office of some kind. Abandoned, by the look of it, although the fluorescent lights overhead were on, showing a bare room with a desk, a filing cabinet, waste paper on the floor. A bad smell was coming from somewhere and Scarlett recognised it – raw meat, gone off. Blood. Something soiled. Fear.

That was when she panicked.

At the same moment that she pulled back, away from him, he gripped her tight enough to bruise and called out something in Dutch. Immediately two men appeared from inside the warehouse, big guys with shaven heads, and Scarlett screamed.

Scarlett wasn’t answering her phone – or, more specifically, Sam’s spare phone – which was annoying. It would have been so easy for her to have just answered it, said, ‘Yeah, thanks, I’m staying with friends,’ and then Sam could have gone home, put her feet up and relaxed. Instead, of course, she was out driving around hunting for Scarlett – just in case she’d got herself into trouble, just in case she had nowhere else to go.

Past midnight, there weren’t many public places offering shelter from the rain, and Sam had almost given up when she finally struck lucky.

Scarlett was in the bus station, the grey hood of her sweatshirt pulled up over her head, buried inside her brown coat. She was sitting on a bench with her knees drawn up, while around her the drunks waited for sleep on their own benches, and the clubbers waited for buses that at this time of night were sporadic at best.

Sam sat down on the bench. Scarlett looked in her direction, alarmed, ready to run.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.

‘Yeah, it’s me.’

‘You know, when you ring someone six times and they don’t answer, it usually means they don’t want to talk to you.’

‘I’m not so good at taking hints, sorry.’

Scarlett chewed at her cuff. ‘You can’t make me go to bloody Charlmere,’ she said. ‘Fucking hostel with homeless alkies and smackheads. No, thanks.’

‘I know. Just wanted to check you were okay, that’s all.’

‘I’m fine. And you can piss off now, too.’

But Sam stayed where she was, not moving. She half-expected Scarlett to get up and walk off, and, if she had, Sam would have had to let her go, but for the time being they sat like bookends at either end of the bench and waited. Sam wondered if Scarlett realised that detective sergeants didn’t routinely go looking for missing persons – not that she fitted into that particular category. She was an adult, and, after what she’d probably been through in the last few years, a streetwise adult at that. So Sam had, realistically, nothing to offer her.

‘Why are you still here?’ Scarlett said at last, clearly irritated.

Sam took a deep breath. ‘Look, I’m not going to follow you around. I just wanted to check you were okay. I’ve done that; now I’m going to leave you alone. If you need a friend, someone to talk to, or if you need help, you can ring me.’

‘You can’t help me. Nobody can.’

Sam got to her feet. Scarlett looked up at her. In the grim orange light of the concrete bus station she looked so young, Sam could easily have believed she was still fifteen. For a moment she looked lost, and then she offered Sam a smile. When she smiled, she looked totally different: beautiful.

Sam looked away immediately.

‘Thanks,’ Scarlett said. ‘And thanks for lending me the phone. I will give it back.’

‘Whenever,’ said Sam, keeping her eyes down.

‘No, I will. You’re not like the rest of them.’

Sam chanced a look back at the girl on the bench. Whatever she’d seen there – that moment when something had wrenched inside her – it had passed.

‘Take care, Scarlett,’ she said, and walked away up the slope towards the bowling alley which had closed down, conveniently leaving three parking spaces outside.

Back in the car, the doors locked, Sam sent a text to Lou.

It wasn’t a good result. In all probability they might never see Scarlett again, and Sam had lost her emergency phone.

Inside the main warehouse it was dark. Scarlett was being half-dragged, half-carried across the concrete floor and she could make out several large, corrugated rectangular shapes – shipping containers, and one larger unit with a pair of metal doors that stood open. A dull light was coming from inside. She could hear voices, laughter from somewhere, and another voice that sounded muffled. They passed the open doors to the unit. Inside Scarlett could see that the walls were lined with ridged foam, as though the whole thing was a giant, room-sized packing crate for some expensive electronic equipment.

The smell was worse.

I am going to die in here.
 

A man came out from the soundproofed room, resting his hands on the metal doors as if to pull them shut behind him. He saw Scarlett and stopped, watching. The light was behind him. She couldn’t see his face. She saw him move, take hold of something and drag it, scraping along the floor, to the doors of the room. When the light illuminated it, she saw it was a spotlight on a tripod-like stand, an electric cable coiled around the height adjuster.

‘Help me,’ she said, but not loudly, whimpering. ‘Help me. Please.’

They pulled her to one of the smaller shipping crates and opened it, shoving her inside. The door boomed shut behind her and she heard the metal bang of the locks being pulled across.

It was pitch black. Not a glimmer of light. ‘No, no!’ Scarlett shouted. ‘Don’t leave me here!’

She pummelled with her fists on the cold metal of the door, then listened. The echo of their retreating footsteps on the poured-concrete floor outside.

And then a different sound to replace it.

Breathing.

Someone – something – was in here with her.

‘Hello?’ she whispered.

There was a movement behind her. ‘
Engels?
’ came a whispered reply.

‘
Ja
, Engels.
Ik
ben Engels.
I’m English.’

No response.

‘Let me out!’ Scarlett screamed, pounding with her fists.

Abruptly she heard the footsteps coming back and the sound of metal scraping against metal. She expected the door to open, but it didn’t. She could hear voices close by, a foreign language she didn’t recognise or understand. And then, without warning, a woman’s voice rising quickly to a panicked wail – ‘
Nee! Nee,
alsjeblieft
!
’ No. Please.

A second female voice, moaning. Footsteps.

‘What are they doing?’ Scarlett asked.

In her crate, silence other than the breathing.

Outside in the warehouse, the voices of two women lifted in screams, and then another metallic door closing. The women were in the soundproofed box.

And then, without warning, muffled but still audible, a bang.

Silence for a second, other than the pounding of Scarlett’s heart in her chest. She pressed her cheek to the metal, straining to hear what was going on.

Seconds passed. Another bang.

Silence.

Scarlett choked back a sob.

From the back wall of her crate, she heard her companion.

‘Next time is us.’

There was no more opportunity to worry about Scarlett Rainsford.

Area had arrested a nineteen-year-old called Aaron Sutcliffe, who had been mouthing off in one of the pubs formerly owned by Carl McVey. He’d had a go at breaking a glass and threatening a member of the door staff with it, then he’d run off. They’d identified him from the CCTV outside the pub and found him vomiting his way out of a hangover in the back bedroom at his mum’s house.

Lou had seen his name before. He had been at school with Ian Palmer; they’d interviewed him early on, more than once, since he had a record for GBH and assault as well as criminal damage and theft. But he’d had nothing useful to tell them, at the time. On the night Palmer was assaulted Aaron had been in hospital himself – attending the birth of his first daughter.

The custody photo of Aaron Sutcliffe showed he had acquired another tattoo on his neck since his last visit – ‘Ella-Mae’ – just scabbing over nicely, an elaborate, swirly font. Being a father clearly hadn’t endowed him with a renewed sense of personal responsibility, however. He was sneering at the camera, one eye twitching in a wink just as the image was taken. For that to have got through to the main database, Lou knew, the detention officer would no doubt have taken several pictures and finally given up.

Lou had sent Les Finnegan down to Briarstone nick to meet with the Division CID and collaborate with the interview. It was worth a shot, and from other witness statements taken in the Railway Tavern Aaron’s argument with the doorman seemed to have something to do with what had happened to Ian six weeks ago.

While she waited for Les to report back, Lou received a phone call from Caro.

‘I heard Sam Hollands found Scarlett last night,’ she said.

‘Yes. Couldn’t get her back, unfortunately. She was at the bus station. Let’s hope it was just the safest place she could find to sleep, and not the first step in her moving somewhere far away.’

‘I don’t think she has, yet. Have you seen this morning’s CAD about the burglary?’

Lou sat up straight, moving her mouse and clicking over to the Computer Aided Dispatch program that logged all the calls to police as they were received. ‘No – have you got the number?’

Caro recited the eight-digit identifier and Lou repeated it as she typed it in.

‘Shit,’ Lou said, when the details of the call came up on her screen. ‘A car key burglary?’

‘Last night. They were all asleep, apparently. I found out about it when I rang Clive Rainsford this morning to ask for a meeting. He won’t leave the house at the moment; they’re all waiting for CID and Forensics. And they can’t actually go anywhere, so I’m going to go down and speak to my captive audience. Do you want to come with me? I said I’d be there at eleven.’

Lou pulled a face. ‘I can’t, really – can I send Sam instead?’

Sam was on her way into the office. Lou asked her to meet Caro in the CID office at Briarstone at a quarter to eleven, and then went back to her computer and read through the CAD again, slowly.

She knew better than to jump to conclusions, but even the scant information on the CAD had set alarm bells ringing. There were usually at least two or three criminal gangs involved in car key burglaries at any one time – breaking into properties in order to steal the keys of the expensive-looking car on the driveway, and then the car itself. This particular offence was unusual. The method of entry was odd, but not unheard of. Often thieves would take anything of value that they came across while looking for the car keys, so easily portable items like cash, cards, laptops and mobile phones were frequently added to the property list. In this case, though, the car had been an eight-year-old Volvo. Again, they had seen car key burglaries for lower-value vehicles before, but those cases often involved large-scale theft from the property, where the car had been taken as a means to transport heavier items like TVs, computers, even the odd safe. Sometimes the lower-value car was taken alongside the higher-value vehicle parked next to it – possibly to be used in other crimes, rather than being sold on. But neither was a factor here.

She sent Sam a text.

A few moments later, Sam sent a reply.

Lou went back to the CAD, read through the list of items that had been stolen. The items of jewellery suggested a thorough search – that the burglar had had time to look. And yet the occupants had been asleep upstairs.

Lou sent another text.

It was rare for Sam to take an instant dislike to someone, but she had to admit she hadn’t been keen on Clive Rainsford from the moment she’d met him. Armed with the details of Lou’s report about her meeting with Annie, she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.

He had been perfectly polite, inviting her and Caro into the kitchen. He didn’t look to the outside world like the sort of man anyone would have cause to fear. But Sam, who had cheerfully conversed with some of the nastiest individuals society had produced, knew better than to judge on appearances. Clive had celebrated his seventieth birthday the week before the family had flown to Spain. Sam wondered if it had been a birthday treat, the holiday, and, if it was, how he felt having had it interrupted. He looked fit and well, his hair thinning but still fair enough for the grey not to show too much. He didn’t look seventy.

‘Your forensics people have been,’ he said, ‘so apparently we can make ourselves at home again. We’re just waiting for the locksmith now. Have a seat. Coffee?’

Sam sat next to Caro at the large, stripped-pine kitchen table. ‘Thanks, that would be great. I’m sorry to hear about the burglary. It looks like you lost quite a few valuable things.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All insured, of course, but a pain. Annie is finding it very difficult to cope – the thought of those people in the house while we were asleep. Dreadful.’

‘Do you have a laptop? Mobile phones?’

‘My phone was upstairs, by the bed. The laptop – well, I cracked the screen just before we went away. I left it with a former colleague; he was going to try and fix it. Lucky really, since I imagine that would have been stolen too. I was going to take the girls out for a meal tonight, take their mind off things. Do you think that would be okay? Leaving the house, I mean… they’re not going to come back, are they?’