Behind Closed Doors (4 page)

They had had plenty of discussions about it. How it didn’t really hurt. How they’d managed to use a condom the first time but he’d taken it off halfway through the second time because he didn’t really like using them but it hadn’t mattered because he pulled out just before.

Cerys was suddenly worldly-wise. She was the one with the knowledge, and the balance of power had shifted in their friendship, as if Cerys was the grown-up one and Scarlett was still a child. If only she knew…

And, despite all the time she’d been spending with Mark, she hadn’t really been paying attention. She hadn’t thought of him in that way, not really, not until that last day in the library, and not really even then.

She hadn’t wanted to come on holiday at all. She’d been dreading it. A whole week with her parents, and her sister? She wouldn’t be able to stand it. They’d end up killing each other. Who knew what might happen?

‘I’ll stay here,’ Juliette had said, when they’d been booking the holiday.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ her mother had answered. ‘We’re not leaving you here.’

‘I can look after the cat,’ she’d volunteered. ‘And next door will keep an eye on me.’

Desperate, then, because she was allergic to the cat and avoided it at all costs.

‘She can’t do that!’ Scarlett had shouted, knowing full well that, left with her sister, their pet would go completely untended. And it would just be the three of them on holiday, a fate so hideous that she couldn’t bear to think of it.

‘Calm down, Scarlett. Juliette, you’re coming with us and that’s final.’

‘I don’t want to come!’ Juliette wailed. ‘I’m scared!’

‘Don’t be so dramatic. You should be grateful!’

‘Don’t make me go. Don’t make me go.’

Scarlett had seen Annie’s cheeks colouring. She had had rows with her mother too, at Juliette’s age – but hers had all been about independence and not being a child any more. She wanted to tell Juliette not to bother with the babyish overacting. It was easier just to give in, to let them have their way.
It’s better to grow up in private
, she’d thought.
It hurts less if you don’t fight all the time.

The van must have turned off the main road, the long, straight road with the van travelling fast and the whine of the engine underneath her, and there were twists and turns which threw her from one side of the van to the other. It was impossible to sleep. How long had it been? An hour, two? Maybe even longer. In the end she crouched in the corner, bracing her leg against one of the struts that supported the metal side. She felt motion-sick, the pizza and the water churning inside her belly. Despite the sleep she was exhausted; but now the adrenalin had kicked in again.

It was odd, she thought, how quickly the feeling of terror became the norm. The van had become her world. A night and a day and now it was night again, and in the space of that time she had veered along this crazy path between panic and normality.

But now, she was afraid. If they were off the motorway, travelling on smaller roads, then the journey was coming to an end. The van would stop and something would happen. Something was coming, and she would have to deal with it, whatever it was. They weren’t going to kill her; if they’d been going to do that they would have done it by now. But it wasn’t going to be good, was it? They weren’t taking her away from her fucked-up family and her stupid fucked-up life and giving her a better one, were they?

Whatever was coming, it was going to hurt. It was like watching a car heading towards you on the crossroads and knowing it couldn’t possibly stop in time. Or lying in bed listening to the sounds of the house and knowing you were better off staying awake.

The van stopped. Scarlett pushed herself, pointlessly, back as far away from the doors as possible. After a few moments, the side door was unlocked and slid open. It was dark outside. There were two of them, and at first she couldn’t tell if it was the same two that had taken her. Then she recognised the taller of the two, the one who had given her water. The one who had talked to her out on the street and shoved her into the van.

‘You get out now,’ he said, his voice low.

Scarlett wondered if it was worth screaming for help. ‘No,’ she said, before she had even made the decision to say anything. It was automatic. ‘No, no no no.’

‘You get out, we don’t hurt you.’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘just let me call my family. Let me call them. They’ll be worried…’

They looked at each other, and then the taller one, the one she thought was almost all right, climbed into the back with her. He was going to talk to her, to reason with her. To ask her nicely, or to offer some reassurance, or at worst just pull her out.

So she was off guard when he hit her in the face with his fist.

The shock of it registered before the pain, but when it came it was quick and hard and intense. He pulled her by the hair, dragging her backwards, her feet scrabbling against the floor of the van. There was blood pouring from her nose, blood all down her face. She coughed on it and the screams were coming without her thinking about it then, the pain saw to that.

And now she was struggling, fighting against him, pulling and scratching at his hands to try to get him to release her hair.

The man was saying something in that language, his voice low through gritted teeth, and her voice, crying out with pain, above it.

At the back of the van he released his grip on her hair and she slithered to the ground, curled up into a ball. The ground was rocky, uneven shale. She was sobbing, now, her hand over her nose. It felt as though her face had exploded. She was aware of him crouching beside her, the handgun loose in his hand, casually knocking it against his thigh. ‘You look.’

Her eyes cast a glance over him and then she closed her eyes. The pain thrilled her like an electric charge. He grabbed her hair again and lifted her head.

‘No, stop, no! It hurts! Let go, let go!’

But she opened her eyes. And the gun was there, held with a kind of easy self-assurance as though it was part of him, as natural a thing for him to be holding as a pen, or a mobile phone.

‘You see this? You think you have pain now? You make trouble, I shoot your foot off. Then I go back to Rodos and I shoot Nico, stupid fuck, and then I go find your baby sister and take her because she is worth big money to me, not like you.’

It was the first time there had been any mention of Nico. She sobbed at it and nodded some kind of assent, wiping her face, the blood and mucus and tears sliding across the back of her hand, smearing with the dust and the dirt of the ground beneath her.

‘All right now?’ he said, his voice almost gentle. ‘You stand? I help you, here…’ He put a hand under her armpit and pulled her upright. As though the madness was over, as though it had been someone else, not him, who had smashed her nose and pulled clumps of hair from her scalp.

They were on a road that was no more than a track, and behind them was a structure that looked like some kind of farm shack or outbuilding – concrete walls, a single window, a bright light like the motion-sensor-activated security light that they had at home on the front of the garage. This one lit up the uneven ground, revealing a rusted pickup truck with no wheels, a kennel.

Somewhere – though not in the kennel – a dog was barking, hadn’t stopped since the van doors had opened. It sounded like a big dog, the
ro-ro-ro
of its bark throaty and deep. Above that, the incessant carolling of the crickets and the buzz of the cicadas. She thought of those insects, the great ugly beasts like the one Nico had shown her, all around. Everywhere, out of sight but never out of earshot.

‘Where am I?’ she said. ‘Where is this place?’

‘You come with me,’ the younger one said. He pulled her by the elbow – not roughly, but then he didn’t need to. There was nowhere she could have gone.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked.

He laughed – a short, high laugh, oddly girlish. ‘I do nothing with you. In the morning, you meet your new friends.’

The traffic to Knapstone was bad, unusually. Ferries had once sailed from here to the continent, which meant that the town was accessed by a dual carriageway, straight from the motorway which led back to Briarstone. The ferry company had given up ten years ago, right about the time that a pretty fifteen-year-old named Scarlett Rainsford had disappeared while on a family holiday in Rhodes.

It turned out that a lorry had jack-knifed across both lanes, leading to stationary traffic backed up nearly to the motorway. It was being cleared, apparently.

Lou considered turning on the lights and speeding up the hard shoulder, but only for a moment. Being late for a briefing wasn’t technically an emergency, and the traffic was starting to creep forward, suggesting that somewhere up ahead the emergency services had managed to open at least one lane.

Scarlett Rainsford.

She’d always expected to hear that name again one day, but in all honesty she had never for one minute believed the girl was still alive. They had made mistakes with it, undoubtedly, which had been bad for the force at the time; and that was after the initial investigation by the Greeks. The Eden police had come to it late, which was never good. Within forty-eight hours they’d had a team out in Rhodes, but by then they’d all been working on the assumption that Scarlett had been murdered. They were expecting to find a body, because that was what the Greeks were expecting too. By the time they’d established that there was no evidence to support this theory, crucial opportunities had been missed.

Back in the UK, even as a DC new to Major Crime, Lou had been able to smell disaster.

Scarlett’s sister and her father had returned to the UK just a week after the holiday had been supposed to end. Her mother stayed out there on her own, but after another two weeks she too returned. The whole family had waited just three weeks for Scarlett. It didn’t seem very long. It was as if they, too, believed she was dead. Or maybe, Lou had suspected at the time, they even knew she was.

Well, she thought, as she finally managed to get her car out of first gear, she’d been wrong about that.

Knapstone Police Station had a tiny car park, for which it considered itself lucky. Even so, there were no spaces, and several cars were double-parked. Lou went back out again through the exit barrier, cursing. It was five to four. She hated being late. She drove around the streets nearby, looking for a space that wasn’t marked as ‘
Residents Only’
, and eventually found half a space, leaving the car with its front tyres sticking out over a double yellow.

She signed in at reception and was directed down the stairs to Special Branch, where she had to knock to be let in. A young woman in jeans eventually answered the door, and when Lou explained why she was here there was a bit of discussion with someone over her shoulder.

‘They’re upstairs, on the fifth floor. Our briefing room’s in use for another job.’

Lou found the lift. She’d been to the fifth-floor briefing room before, because it was the one Major Crime were invariably allocated when something kicked off in Knapstone. That was good: familiar turf.

But of course by the time she got there the briefing had started and she had to creep in. And there weren’t many people there either, so everyone turned to look at her and the paunchy man with thinning hair who was speaking at the head of the boardroom table – actually eight scuffed laminate tables pushed together, mismatched chairs around the perimeter – stopped what he was doing.

‘You are?’ he said.

‘DCI Lou Smith,’ she said.

‘Have a seat,’ he said, without introducing himself. He didn’t need to. He could only be DCI Stephen Waterhouse, and she hated his guts already.

All the seats around the table were taken, but two guys at the corner nearest to her shuffled their chairs round to make room. She pulled a hard plastic chair from under the window and squeezed between them. As she did so, her mobile buzzed in her bag. She pulled it out, checked the message in case it was urgent – it wasn’t – then adjusted the volume to silent. Waterhouse hadn’t resumed his speech.

It was stuffy in the room and Lou sensed an atmosphere. She looked around the table: six men, one woman – an older DC with short, greying hair. Nobody was smiling, and now they’d all had a good look at her they were avoiding meeting her eyes.

‘Right, for those of you that don’t know: DCI Smith was part of the original investigation into Scarlett Rainsford’s disappearance – when she was a DC. Mr Buchanan wants her involved.’

Lou chanced a smile but still none of them looked up. SB were not normally this grim. She’d been on nights out with them – not this lot, admittedly, but generally speaking they were a ‘work hard, play hard’ bunch. People joined SB and didn’t leave. It was considered a good place to work.

‘So,’ Waterhouse said, looking directly at her for the first time, ‘what can you tell us?’

He had to be joking, right? She’d barely sat down, and he was wanting her to show her hand first, as if this was some sort of test? She glared at him.

‘As you pointed out, I was a DC in Major Crime back then. I interviewed the family.’

‘And?’

Lou took a deep breath. She was going to have to put herself on the line, clearly, in order to get into the gang. ‘Didn’t feel right. I know that’s easy to say with hindsight. The family was odd – Scarlett’s sister was monosyllabic, hostile at first; the father was polite, helpful as far as it went. When the mother came back she was in a bad state emotionally.’

‘What happened with the Greeks?’

‘It was pretty chaotic. One minute they wanted our help, the next they didn’t. They told us some bits and left out other important things. They thought straight away that she had been killed and disposed of. Somehow the investigators who went out there got the impression they had evidence that she’d been killed, some forensics – but there was nothing like that. So for a couple of days we were looking for a body when we should have been checking the ports.’