Hurt (The Hurt Series) (2 page)

She headed against the flow, away from the congestion and thankful for it. Another mile and she’d be on the M4 and just thirty minutes from London. Such was the accelerated growth of her home city, she had often mused it would not be long before the thirty-five mile gap between the city’s would close. After all, what with boasting the UK’s tenth largest shopping mall, and a football team that had made it into The Premiership, her city was attracting the sort of blue chip companies and IT giants that used to favour the country’s capital.

Of course, with such rapid economic growth came a population growth, and with nearly 3000 new residents a year settling into the new landscape, she was beginning to feel like a stranger in the city she used to call home.

She sighed as up ahead she could see the white top of the 85 metre wind turbine, a recent addition to the city, which welcomed one and all from the M4 junction. What it did not welcome, however, was enough wind to justify it, and was deemed a colossal failure. This always brought a wry smile to her lips. Money may be able to buy progress, but it could never buy common sense. And the great white stationary eyesore was a glaring tribute to this.

Just as such cynical thinking was an acknowledgment of her need for a holiday from a city getting younger whilst she grew older.

She made a right turn, neglecting to signal, and winced at the blaring horn punched by the disgruntled driver she’d cut off.

Ray’s words this morning muffled the noise of the horn reverberating in her head:
‘One more week, detective. Suck it up. Then we’re outta here.’

“Outta here” was Chicago, where they would begin their two week drive to LA along Route 66. An unconventional honeymoon, sure, but a trip that had topped Ray’s Bucket List since forever.

She recalled the look in his muddy grey eyes when she’d surprised him with the news she’d booked the trip. She wished she were looking into those eyes now instead of the drab, drenched housing estate, where a drenched uniformed officer was securing yellow crime scene tape across the communal door of apartment block C.

Parking alongside the curb, she flicked her coat hood up and left the warmth of her car. By the time she had tip-toed across the water-logged cul-de-sac and reached block C, her trouser legs were drenched and somehow water had seeped through the right toe of the H&M boots she’d bought yesterday.

Cursing the boots, she flashed her warrant card at the young PC looking as wet and miserable as she felt, and ducked beneath the yellow tape. She ascended the stairs to the first floor landing of the three storey block, where she found Mason crouched next to a white glossed door numbered 64, scrutinising the brass lock mechanism.

Mason turned from the door, eyed the drenched cuffs of her black trousers, frowned. ‘New boots?’

‘I assumed they were.’ She made a mental note to return the boots and unleash hell upon whoever was passing as the manager of the store that day. Picking up one of the white Tyvekforensic suits her perceptive DI had brought, she asked ‘What we got?’

‘
No sign of forced entry.’ Mason stood, stretched his long back, snapped off a pair of latex gloves and raked a hand through his short, thick brown hair. As usual her 6’ 2” DI with the perpetual frown and intensely dark eyes was impeccably dressed, sporting a grey shirt and tie combo to compliment the charcoal suit his rangy physique carried so effortlessly. ‘Victim’s name is Tanya Adams. Twenty-five. Got a six-year-old daughter, Keisha. Poor kid reported the crime to her friend and neighbour, Carly Samuels.’ Mason motioned across the landing to number 65. ‘Brooke’s with her now, but the kid aint said a word since.’

‘Give her time.’ She slipped on the CSI suit and snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves. She couldn’t help but imagine the gloves were a pair of Marigolds, and that she was about to wash up the breakfast dishes instead of poke around a bloody crime scene.

Sucking in a deep breath, she turned to the door and examined the lock. Mason was right about no forced entry. Both the gloss frame and brass lock were intact, as was the security chain. She stepped over the threshold into the flat, took a look through the spy hole in the door back out onto the landing. The magnified view was clear. She considered the communal door to the block with its keypad and intercom entry system.

Had Tanya known her killer?

Closing the door, she surveyed the short magnolia painted hallway with its clean terracotta carpet. On her right, both bathroom and kitchen doors were open. Straight ahead, the living room door was closed, as was the second bedroom to her left.

She closed her eyes, inhaled long and deep, and deduced Tanya Adams was a smoker. Of course, above the stale stench of cigarette smoke that clung to the upholstery there were two more prominent smells coming from the first bedroom to the left. But these smells would not have been present when the killer had arrived.

Only after he had left would the stench of blood and urine dominate the flat.

As always, she began her investigation with the closest room to the point of entry. In this case, the bathroom, which proved clean and tidy with no toothpaste streaks on the sink, no smudges on the mirror above the sink, and no hairs in the bath. A single mother herself for so many years, she knew what it took to maintain a clean house, and was quietly impressed with Tanya’s efforts.

Just as she was about to leave the bathroom, she noticed a damp towel flung on the blue linoleum floor just behind the door. Above it, an identical dry towel was folded neatly over a towel rail.

Exiting the bathroom, she noted the two damp coats hanging up on the coat rack on the wall. Moving on, she entered the kitchen, where on the floor next to the door were two cheap, blue plastic carrier bags of shopping. Glancing in one of the bags, she spotted a pack of Lambert and Butler, confirming her theory Tanya was a smoker.

The small kitchen was as neat and organised as the bathroom, with a place for everything and everything in its place, as her mother used to say. Except everything was not in its place, she noticed. A knife was absent from the wooden butchers block, which sat at perfect right angles to the spotless breadboard.

Back in the hallway, she eyed a shelf on which Tanya kept a framed photo of her daughter alongside a glass dish containing loose change and her house keys. Neither item appeared to have been disturbed.

She shunned the two closed doors leading to the living room and Tanya‘s bedroom, for already she had a good idea of the order of the events that had preceded Tanya’s murder. For in death, as in life, we always look to the past so we can learn about the future.

Sometime around nine this morning, Tanya and Keisha had walked to the small parade of shops down the road. They’d been caught in the rain, which had come down just after nine when
she
had just awoken and was already looking forward to the lazy day with Ray. On the girls’ return home, Tanya had either run into a friend and invited them in, or had let a friend in via the intercom system before she’d had a chance to unpack her shopping and dry off.

Whilst Tanya was in the bathroom drying her hair with the towel, Keisha had gone straight to her room to change out of her wet clothes. This was when the supposed friend had taken the knife from the butchers block and gone to Keisha’s room. The young girl called for her mum, who’d dropped the damp towel and ran to her daughter’s room.

Jessop hovered in the doorway to Keisha’s bedroom, a tidy pink haven of innocence and childhood imagination. From this moment on, though, this was to be the hellish dungeon from which poor Keisha would never escape. For what happened after Tanya had run to her daughter’s screams lay curled up in a foetal position on the crimson stained blue carpet at Jessop’s feet.

With slim hips, long legs, silky black hair and flawless cappuccino skin, Tanya Adams was undeniably beautiful, even in death. Jessop crouched down besides the young mother, whose beige turtle neck sweater and faded blue jeans were streaked with the blood she lay in. She considered Tanya's tear and blood streaked cheeks, and how such violence could spawn such a look of serenity.

A look she'd seen too many times.

She took a measured breath, heard the front door open and close softly and footsteps enter the room. She did not have to turn around to know Mason was hovering behind her.

The thirty-five-year-old detective had been her first choice for promotion when her previous DI had transferred to forensics under a dark cloud. Not only did his sharp instincts, cool head, and seemingly perpetual patience under pressure command respect from his peers, he understood and accepted her somewhat unorthodox work ethic, which his predecessor had once described as “unhealthily obsessive”.

Along with his impressive arrest record and eagerness to learn, it was this understanding that had secured him not only the job but her trust, and the right to be the only person she allowed to interrupt her initial assessment of a crime scene.

‘She bled to death,’ she said.

Mason crouched down beside her, examining the slices along Tanya’s forearms from elbows to wrists. ‘Vertical cuts. Next to impossible to stitch up.’

‘And deep, too. Hit a bunch of veins.’

Mason agreed, scrutinising the many rivers of blood snaking down Tanya’s slender arms. ‘She would have been petrified, causing her heart rate to accelerate throughout the ordeal and increasing the blood flow.’ Mason sighed. ‘Whoever did this was making sure she didn’t live to tell.’

‘I think Tanya knew who did this,’ Jessop said. ‘No sign of forced entry, and no disturbances throughout the flat. I figure the killer was a friend she invited in.’ She stood, stepped toward Keisha’s bed, on which the missing bloodied kitchen knife appeared to be bleeding onto the crumpled pink duvet.

‘Keisha’s talking.’ Mason said.

‘Already?’

‘The kid’s tough.’

‘She’s in denial. What did she say?’

‘She said the killer was already in her room with the knife when they returned from the shops.’

The flesh on the nape of Jessop’s neck prickled. She hadn’t considered the possibility the killer may have been such a close friend they’d had their own key.

Why?

‘
Could be good news for us,’ she said. ‘What else did she say?’

‘According to Brooke, Keisha said the killer cut her mum’s arms and made her watch as Tanya bled out.’

Jessop bit down hard on her gums.

‘There’s something else…’ Mason hesitated, looking as troubled as she had ever seen him. ‘She said the pain she is feeling is the breaking of the shell of her understanding, and she should embrace it.’

‘Come again.’

‘The killer told her to memorise it.’

Chapter
Three

He punched mum in the face. She fell down and he cut her arms. Then he grabbed me and put the knife to my neck and told me to be quiet and watch. But I couldn’t watch because mum was crying and her arms were bleeding. Then he told mum to stop crying and stand up or else he would cut me with the knife.’

Jessop looked up from the statement DS Brooke Fuller had taken from Keisha. The petite twenty-eight-year-old detective was her secret weapon when interviewing witnesses. The soft brown hair, impish face, welcoming smile, and empathic doe eyes could unlock the most frozen of recollects and loosen the tightest tongues. Having just completed the first stage in the kinesics course she was taking didn’t hurt either.

Through the crack in the bedroom door, she winked at Brooke perched next to Keisha on the single bed draped with an Arsenal duvet. Dressed in baggy jeans and a pink Adidas tracksuit top, Keisha was thumbing her Nintendo DS with impressive agility, seemingly oblivious now to her new friend.

Jessop shivered as she was reminded of a girl the same age as Keisha, who also resembled her mother. But instead of sitting quietly on a bed, this girl was cowering in the back of a squad car. And instead of playing a computer game, this girl was working on a word search puzzle in the vein hope that when she'd completed it, she’d awake from the nightmare and her family would be alive and everything would be back to normal.

Mum did what he said, but she was wobbly and kept telling me everything was going to be alright. But I knew she was lying because she was crying and kept asking the man what he wanted. But the man said nothing, just squeezed me harder and put the knife near my eye. Then he said I needed to watch closely, because the pain I was feeling was the breaking of the shell of my understanding, and I should embrace it. He told me to repeat it over and over till I memorised it, so I did until mum fell over and it looked like she’d gone to sleep. Then the man left and I ran over here.’

Keisha’s little legs swung faster off the side of the bed, her feet kicking together and making the heels of her white trainers flash with red light. Jessop watched a single tear run down the little girl’s smooth cheek, on which there was a slim red flesh wound. Such flesh wounds healed with time, and were eventually forgotten. Unfortunately, the memories of the man who had cut her mother, dressed in a black jacket, hoody, jeans, gloves, and with a scarf over his face would not dissipate so easily.

From the living room down the hall, Jessop heard a child’s laugh rise above the cartoons playing on the TV. She wondered how long it would be before Carly Samuels requested rehousing for her and her two boys: five-year-old Daley and two-year-old Robby. Keisha may have witnessed her mother’s murder, but Carly was the first to find her best friend curled up in the pool of blood. From that moment on, the place she called home would hold only one memory for her. Not only did evil leave a stain on the soul, it infected the ground it touched.

Jessop turned at the sound of Mason stepping through the front door and hanging up on the call he had made.

‘Davies is working the quote Keisha was made to memorise. How’s she doing?’

She glanced back into the room, where Keisha finally looked away from her game and acknowledged the attentive brunette next to her. ‘Is my mum gonna be alright?’

Brooke snaked an arm around the young girl’s tiny shoulder, pulled her close and tight and
whispered
something into Keisha’s chestnut hair.