Tastes Like Fear (D.I. Marnie Rome 3) (13 page)

‘Let’s start ticking names off the list we do have. How’s house-to-house going?’

‘The usual, “strangers in white vans”. We’ve got white vans coming out of our arses round there. I’m heading back in a bit. We’re getting a picture of Traffic’s girl to show around, right?’ When Marnie nodded, he said, ‘How’d you get on with the parents?’

‘Sean Beswick’s convinced May never went near the Garrett, but Loz suggested it was worth following up. If Traffic’s girl is living there, I want her found. She’s our best lead to what happened to May in the hours before she was killed.’

‘You think May might’ve been on the Garrett? She’d be in Emma’s book, wouldn’t she? Not much gets past our Emma.’ Ron sounded proud of the pensioner.

‘We know May was obsessed with Battersea Power Station. She drew these.’ Marnie handed him the sketchpad she’d borrowed from Sean. ‘Make copies for the board. We need to concentrate on the site where she was found and the place where Traffic’s girl was last seen. So the power station, and the Garrett. And let’s take another look at May’s movements in the last twelve weeks. I want a sense of where she was living. Was she on her own, or with friends? I don’t think she was on the streets. She was healthier than she looked in her last family photo. I want to know who was looking after her, and where.’

Like Welland, Ron said, ‘Her parents are decent people. We didn’t find anything to say otherwise, and we dug deep. Kids run off for all sorts of reasons. Look at Clancy Brand, six months ago. His parents had more money than most, spent it all on alarm systems. Bet
their
cameras were connected. Pair of security nuts. But he still scarpered.’

The Brands had been paranoid about danger, obsessed with what was lurking outside their front door. Hiding from living, and trying to force their teenage son to do the same. Clancy had ended up running away at the age of fourteen – headlong into danger, but preferable, he’d said, to being at home. Some parents bred fear in their kids just by trying too hard to keep them safe. Marnie didn’t believe the Beswicks fell into that category, but her conversation with Loz had forced her to rethink what she thought she knew about the family.

‘Leave the Garrett until the morning,’ she told Ron. ‘I want the team fresh and on their toes for the interviews with whoever’s been at the power station. OCU’s organising extra manpower, but I want you heading up the Garrett team. You know the territory.’

As if the estate was a war zone.

It
was
a war zone.

‘Enemy lines,’ Ron said, reading her mind. ‘I’ll draw up a battle plan.’

20

Aimee

May came home. I heard her voice. I was out of bed, half dressed, not caring about his rules or anything else except May.

She’d come back. She was here. I
heard
her.

I was on the stairs in his white nightie with the light making me see-through, nothing between me and his stare, when I stopped.

It couldn’t be May. How could it be? She wasn’t coming back. They mustn’t see me like that.
He
mustn’t see me. Tonight at supper …

He turned his back on all of us.

Washing at the sink, but his back was turned too long and he kept washing and washing, his shoulders working until I thought he must be crying. He didn’t say a word all through supper, didn’t tell me to eat up or to drink my water, didn’t look at any of us.

Something had happened. It happened days ago, after Gracie left, like she’d taken a bit of him with her when she ran, the bit making him work properly, keeping him from being just broken.

Everything must always,
always
be the same. But it wasn’t. It was different. He was
different. It was all candle-and-scrubbed-face now. No hugs, no
good girl.

Christie was trying to act normal, but her eyes were all over the place. ‘Ashleigh, you can take first turn in the bathroom.’

He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He smelt sharp, like firewood.

The candles put a deep, deep shadow up his back.

Christie licked her fingers and pinched at the flames until all the candles were out, just four grey threads of smoke twisting up from the table.

Much later, I thought I heard May’s voice. But I was wrong. I’d got her sketchpad in bed with me, hidden under the covers. The room stank of sickness.
I
stank. I needed to wash, and change the sheets, but I didn’t have the energy. It was easier to stay where he wanted me, curled in bed. Just like when I was little and Mum kept me home from school, saying I was sick. She was a worrier, my mum. That was why I thought I knew what I was up against with Harm, because I recognised the symptoms, the checking and double-checking, the routines. I thought he was like my mum and that he’d look after me the way she did, until she couldn’t any more.

Catastrophising, that’s what they call it. A social worker explained it to me, after they took mum to the hospital. It’s when you let negative thoughts get out of control and worry yourself to death over things you can’t do anything about. You put all these measures in place to try and keep safe but they don’t work because your brain just comes up with worse and worse stuff to worry about. They think there’s a paranoid gene now. If there is, maybe they’ll find a cure. But it’d be too late for Harm. It was too late for my mum, and he was worse than she ever was.

At least May wasn’t eating his freeze-dried crap any longer or listening to his lectures about the dangers out there.
He
was the danger. Just him. May was okay now. I made myself repeat that – she was okay. Hard to believe we were ever stupid enough to feel safe here. Except he was different, said we mattered,
I
mattered. You won’t understand what that means unless you’ve lived on the streets. It’s not just being hungry or cold or afraid of getting beaten up, or worse. It’s the way it
empties
you. I could stand to be hungry and cold, I could even stand to be raped, although it only happened once. What I couldn’t stand was not being
me
any more.

Homeless
is just another way of saying
empty
.

That night Harm found me …

All right, so I thought he wanted sex. I went with him thinking that was what he wanted. I wasn’t stupid. Men didn’t pick homeless kids off the street without a reason, but I thought it was fair enough given what he was offering. A bed for the night, decent food, a place to get dry. It’d been raining for days and I was sick with a cold, coughing my guts up; I didn’t need to fake it at the beginning.

I undressed and showered, because I stank. It was good to get clean. Then I climbed into bed and waited for him. A clean bed, smooth sheets. As long as he didn’t hurt me, it’d be worth it. I wasn’t a child; I knew what I was doing, and I thought he couldn’t be that bad because the room was warm and the house felt safe. Just an ordinary house, but Christie kept it nice. I didn’t meet her or the others that first night. He took me to a room at the back and it didn’t have a lock so he couldn’t keep me there if he turned out to be a pervert. It felt okay. After I’d been in the bed for a bit, I rolled on to my stomach because I thought he might prefer finding me like that, but he never came. I fell asleep waiting for him. Next morning, I put on my old clothes and went downstairs. He was cooking pancakes for breakfast. The smell made my mouth water.

‘I left clean clothes out. Why don’t you get changed and I’ll wash those old things.’ He served the pancakes on to two plates. ‘After breakfast,’ he said, smiling at me.

The pancakes were amazing.

Afterwards, I went upstairs and changed into the clothes he’d left out: black school uniform skirt and a white shirt – and I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that. The skirt was long and he’d put tights out, proper thick tights, not kinky. The clothes were a better fit than my baggy jumper and jeans. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a flat-chested schoolgirl.

The uniform was embarrassing, but I got used to it. It didn’t mean what I’d thought it meant. Nothing did, with Harm. For weeks I was expecting him to touch me, especially because he was always sending me to bed. My cough cleared up after a few days in the warm, eating good food. But he didn’t want me to get well. He wanted to look after me. Just like my mum did, before she got too sick. I used to be good at faking it with her. It was harder with him.

Six of us in that house. It must’ve belonged to his parents, because I kept finding baby photos. A girl, and a boy who looked like him. Christie, Grace, Ashleigh, May and me – all in that house until he said it was getting too small, too hard to keep safe. He hated the garden even after May tried to bring it back to life. Too easy to break into, he said. That was when he found us the new place, with my own room, the split-level flat.

I hated being in bed there. Ashleigh bitched about it. I got her into trouble by saying she wanted me doing chores like the rest of them. That pissed him off. But I was going mad up there, like that crazy woman in the attic except I wasn’t a woman, I was his sick little girl.

Solitary confinement causes hallucinations. Did you know that? People go mad in prison. I was staring at the ceiling with its damp patch like a map, trying to imagine open sky, birds, trees, an outside world. May and the baby …

Sometimes I couldn’t breathe. It was like something was squatting on my chest. A child or a dwarf, heavy and hot. I could hear its blood beating and feel the weight of it pressing me down. Its breath was disgusting, like something greasy died in its mouth.

Whole days lying like that, and he was glad I was too sick to get up. He didn’t care if I was suffocating, if some fucking
thing
was
on my chest, holding me there until I wanted to write all over myself, the way Grace did, and May. Except I’d write the truth. About what he was doing to us in that prison we were stupid enough to call home.

Real pain and imagined pain feel the same. They trigger the same part of the brain, the social worker told me. Towards the end, Mum didn’t know which threats were real and which weren’t. Both kinds felt exactly the same, her brain freezing, then flooding with adrenalin, making her run, making her jump. We’re the sum of our fears, the social worker said. That’s what I’d write. I’d get the wire out of May’s sketchpad and scratch words all over myself,
Harm did this
, and
fuck
him
…

For making Grace run, and May run. For taking away my best friend, the only thing that made this place bearable. Just me now. Me and the thing squatting on my chest with its breath in my face so I couldn’t get up from that bed even if I wanted to, so it was less and less like faking and more and more like the real thing.

It was what he wanted.

Me in that bed. Face up or face down, it didn’t matter. Except I suppose in the end he’d lay me face up, with my hair brushed neat against the pillow. I didn’t think he’d bury me. I didn’t think he’d want to do that. He’d keep me there until I started to smell so bad, someone would call the council to take me out, a foul thing in a black bag, and no one would know what to do with me. No one would know who I was or where I’d come from. Not unless they dug really deep, all the way back to that subway, the tunnels where we sheltered from the rain, where I was sitting with soaking feet, coughing my lungs up. Until he came.

May was okay. She
was
.

I heard them downstairs, Ashleigh and Christie, moving slowly so as not to disturb him.

Could I trust Christie? No, I couldn’t trust any of them.
He’d made me into a monster, their bogeyman, his precious little girl. No wonder Ashleigh hated me.

The wire wouldn’t come out of the sketchpad, not easily, but I was working at it. I thought if I warmed the metal with my fingers and my breath, I could make it come.

It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was all I had.

I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. No point with May gone.

I’d kept the peace for her sake, but I was on my own now.

Me and him, that was what it’d come down to.

It was always going to come down to that.

Me, and him.

21

Noah woke to a dark room. His temples throbbed but the migraine had retreated, leaving a soft wash of endorphins in its wake. He lay blinking at the pillow, light-headed with relief.

‘You’re awake?’ Dan was at the side of the bed.

‘Mmm.’ He moved on to his back, nursing the blissed-out feeling. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly seven.’ Dan found his hand and held it. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Better.’

Dan’s thumb traced his knuckles. ‘Sure?’

‘Yes. Come here.’ He pulled Dan down into a kiss, making it hard enough to persuade the pair of them that he was fine. ‘Where’s Sol?’

‘He went out when I got back, said you needed to sleep it off. He’d been keeping an eye on you. He’s a good brother.’

Noah didn’t argue. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, waiting to see if the pain would catch up with him before he attempted to stand. Sometimes the migraines hung around for days, but this one was gone. He let out the breath he’d been holding and smiled at Dan. ‘I’m fine. Really. I couldn’t fake it if I wasn’t.’

Dan said simply, ‘I know.’ Then, ‘Convince me again?’

Noah leaned the pair of them into the wall for a long minute, convincing Dan with his hands and his mouth, before saying, ‘I need to eat.’

‘I noticed.’

‘Come on.’ Noah made a fist of their hands, moving in the direction of the kitchen.

When he passed the sitting room, he stopped, remembering the raised voices. Someone in the flat with Sol … A mate, his brother had said, but he hadn’t sounded friendly. Calling Sol a little fucker, threatening him …

The room was empty, just the shape of Sol’s head in the sofa cushions. No mess, or nothing that wasn’t explained by his brother’s relaxed attitude as a house guest. ‘Where’d Sol go, did he say?’

Dan shook his head. ‘Just that he wouldn’t be late.’