The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (15 page)

‘And Carlisle?’

‘Is not happy about the situation,’ I said.

Pete grunted. ‘That’s understandable, I guess. His new partner’s pregnant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, the whole thing certainly sucks for him, doesn’t it? But at least Charlotte Matheson is still alive, and she’s our main responsibility right now. Any idea of motive?’

I shook my head. ‘Carlisle’s got nothing. And as far as I can tell, there’s nothing obvious about either of them. I’ll get someone on to their acquaintances tomorrow, get them all talked to. Because there has to be
some
reason that someone chose her.’

‘Yes,’ Pete said.

‘There’s something else too. A detail in the file I saw at the time. It niggled at me when I first read it, but I didn’t appreciate the significance.’

I told them about the information in the report about Charlie’s missing day: that she’d called in sick to work on the morning of her abduction, but according to her husband had left as usual.

‘Again, Carlisle’s got no idea,’ I said. ‘And at the time, it was just a discrepancy. But obviously, given what we know now, that’s important.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’ll go back to her tomorrow morning,’ I said. I would have to be careful, of course, but that detail could be the key to all of this. ‘And I’m going to find out where she really was that day.’

Groves

I’ve been through hell, sir

The end of the day.

It felt to Groves as though it had gone on for ever. The discovery of the burned material at Angela Morris’ house had knocked the energy out of him. At the train station, the concourse was busy with a thrum of people, but the sound of their mingled conversation and rolling suitcases drifted around him, only half heard. He bought coffee and a newspaper, then headed through the barriers, out into the cool waft of air on the platform. His train was waiting on the left, doors open, the interior sickly and yellow in the gloom.

Inside, a handful of other travellers were spread out down the carriage, tops of heads visible above the seat backs. Nobody was talking; there was just the quiet vibration of the engine, low and ready and somehow everywhere at once. Groves wandered a little way down the carriage and found a seat. The table in front of him was covered with an old newspaper, the pages splayed out at weird angles. He scooped them together and pushed them on to the seat opposite, then spread out his own and had a sip of coffee so hot that it set his upper lip singing.

He had his back to the doors, but still, he was suddenly aware of a presence behind him. Some kind of difference in the air quality, perhaps. He turned around in his seat and saw that
a man had got on and was now leaning over and talking to a young woman sitting closer to the doors.

The man was probably in his early twenties at most, but looked considerably older. Along with the patchy stubble of a teenager, he had the sallow skin and mussed, lank hair of an addict. He was dressed in faded army fatigues, the green fabric greasy-looking in places, and he had a grey knapsack slung over his shoulder. He was bent over beside the woman, intent on her, his hand circling the air on a scrawny wrist. The woman was doing her best to ignore him: headphones in; staring studiously at the iPad she was holding.

Begging for change
, Groves thought. Some of the homeless people did it here – paid for a platform ticket and harangued a captive audience for as long as possible before security staff moved them on. But this man was also just by the doors, and the train was about to leave. It was perfectly possible for him to make a last-minute grab for that iPad, leap off and dart back towards the crowds. Which was what some of the homeless people also did.

Groves stood up and walked down the aisle towards them.

‘Everything all right?’

The girl looked up at him a little helplessly, not wanting to say no for fear of provoking the man, but clearly not wanting to say yes either. The expression on her face answered Groves’ question as far as he was concerned. The man straightened up and turned to him as he approached.

‘Police,’ Groves said. ‘You shouldn’t be on here and you know it.’

He was expecting the standard junkie four-step defiance. When you tried to move people on, they tended to keep a certain distance and say they weren’t doing anything wrong; then they demanded an explanation and complained; then they insulted you; finally, when you moved towards them, they ran. But instead of doing any of those things, the young man looked helpless. In fact he looked like he was about to cry.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Thank God! I’m sorry. Please help me, sir.’

His reaction pulled Groves up short.

‘I can’t help you, mate, sorry.’

The man took a step away from the woman, holding his hands up. There was a desperate expression on his face, as though this was his last chance and he needed to make Groves understand.

‘I just need fifty pence.’

For a second, Groves stared into his eyes. Although watery, they were the exact same clear blue that Jamie’s had been, and beneath the grime, his hair was the same length and colour. In fact, up close he looked a lot younger than Groves had first thought – late teens, maybe younger. Too old to be Jamie grown up, of course, but close enough to cause a momentary jolt – for the ridiculous idea
this could be him
to briefly enter his mind.

Groves shook it away.

‘Sorry, mate. You need to get off now.’

‘Please. It’s so important.’

‘I can’t help you.’

How could fifty pence be so important anyway? It wouldn’t help the boy in any realistic way. And yet there was something about the desperation on his face. For whatever reason, he clearly believed that it would make all the difference in the world to him. Maybe it was that, or just the partial resemblance to Jamie, but Groves found himself reaching into his pocket.

As he did so, the young man turned his head slightly and pulled his hair to one side, showing the whole of his face, and Groves stopped.

He hadn’t been able to see the side of the boy’s head before, but now that he could, it was obvious that he’d been badly injured. It looked like he’d been in a fire of some kind. A patch of his hair had burned away entirely, leaving him with a half-Mohican and gnarled pink skin. His ear was mostly gone, and white burn scars stretched along his jawline, the layers of damage overlapping like fingers of bleached seaweed on a beach.

He said, ‘I’ve been through hell, sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Carl. I’ve been through hell. You look kind.’

Groves stared at the damage.

‘What happened to you, Carl?’

‘Burned, sir. Badly burned. I was a prisoner of war.’

That was obviously a lie; it fitted with his clothes, but not his age. The boy let go of his hair, and it fell back over the wound, covering it. Groves was about to say something – challenge him, maybe – but the boy held out a trembling hand.

‘You look like a good person. Please help me.’

Groves found a fistful of change in his back pocket, extracted a fifty-pence piece and passed it to him.

‘God will be with you,’ the boy said quietly. ‘Never forget.’

Outside the train, the guard was whistling, and waving above his head with one lazy, overfamiliar arm. The homeless boy held Groves’ gaze for a moment, then turned around and stepped calmly off the train. As he did, Groves heard a clatter.

‘Wait,’ he called.

But the doors shushed closed behind him. Through the bleary plastic window, Groves saw the guard attempt to hurry the boy out of the way, as though he were a pigeon that had fluttered into his path.

Groves moved to the door as the train lurched slightly then juddered off and began crawling away from the platform. He could see the homeless boy standing there, receding. He was staring at Groves, his bright blue eyes following him as the train moved off. The expression on his face was peaceful now. Clear and thankful.

Groves looked down at the grimy floor.

A phone.

The boy had dropped a mobile phone.

Sasha

The photograph

Sasha arrived home before Mark, still annoyed with herself over what had happened that afternoon. The mistake she’d made. It was only a little thing, and nobody else knew about it, but that didn’t make any difference.
She
knew, and it had been eating at her ever since.

She dumped her bag down on the settee harder than normal – a pointless little punch at the world that she was glad nobody was around to see – then went through to the kitchen and poured a glass of white wine from the box in the fridge. She leaned on the counter, hands on either side of the glass, and stared down at it.

It hadn’t been anything serious. It hadn’t really been anything at all. The department was doing its biannual public crackdown on the supply of stolen goods, and Sasha had been involved in one of four coordinated raids across the city. In her case, the team had been helping to search a pub in the centre. The King’s Arms was a dive, and the rumour was that it was a hub for shoplifting: customers would literally bring in a list, then sit with a drink while things were stolen to order from the nearby shops.

There had been thirty or so customers in when they’d arrived, and the place had been sealed while they were all searched then
allowed to leave one by one. The team had recovered a haul of clothes and handbags, including goods stored in the building’s cellar, and made five arrests, including the landlord. A good result.

Sasha had been on the door, taking names and addresses and checking for outstanding warrants on each person as they left. She should have been keeping an eye on the searches too – a secondary precaution – but twenty minutes in, her attention had started to wander. She’d got distracted: stopped paying attention. And at least one person she’d let out, she couldn’t be sure afterwards that he’d been searched.

It meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. But you couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that, however small. Just because you got away with one didn’t mean you’d get away with the next. In her line of work, an officer daydreaming could end with someone badly hurt or worse.

Sasha drank a couple of mouthfuls of wine. It was so cold she felt her breastbone beginning to throb. She put the glass down, then leaned back, closed her eyes and sighed.

Her professionalism mattered to her, and a mistake, however small, was intolerable. She was angry with herself. She shouldn’t have been distracted, damn it. But she had been. She still was now.

Still thinking about Mark.

It had surprised her, how quickly she’d fallen for him. Throughout her twenties, she’d hardened up and become guarded with the men she dated. She didn’t expect much, and she was generally rewarded with just that. When she was a teenager, her father had told her that when you met
the one
, you just knew, and even then she’d scoffed at the notion. The idea of
the one
was ridiculous in itself. Looking back, the men she’d gone out with had generally been interchangeable. But she couldn’t deny that when she’d met Mark, something had clicked immediately, and she’d understood what her father had meant.

Things had seemed relaxed and natural between them from the start. The passion was there, but they fitted together in
other ways too. If they hadn’t been lovers, they would still have been best friends, which wasn’t something she could say in all honesty about her former boyfriends. She had fallen in love with him long before she told him. Rather than being frightening, it had surprised her – again – how strangely
freeing
saying it had felt.

The past couple of weeks, though, things hadn’t felt quite the same as they used to. It was difficult to pin down anything in particular. Aside from his behaviour at the engagement party, there was nothing she could point to and say,
That! That thing you just said or did right then! Why are you being like that?
But there had been some kind of change. All relationships settled down after that initial burst of intensity, of course, but she recognised those subtle ebbs and flows, and this was different. One of the things she’d always loved about him had been his ability to talk to her – presumably a benefit of his interview training – and yet it felt now that there was something he wasn’t telling her.

Something was going wrong.

He’s not happy. Not really
.

It felt heartbreaking because it was so very obviously true.

Sasha drank more wine. The engagement seemed to have changed everything. Had it come too soon? She’d certainly never pressed for the proposal – never thought she’d marry anyone, if she was honest – but she’d been genuinely thrilled when he asked. Any last trace of cynicism inside felt like it had melted away as he got down on one knee and completely messed up the speech he’d been preparing to say. He’d probably been more nervous than she had. She’d said yes without thinking, because it had felt so right she hadn’t needed to think.

And yet now, barely two weeks later, that had changed.

Now, she thought, it didn’t feel right at all.

He was regretting it.

Upstairs, Sasha walked round to Mark’s side of the bed.

He had a small cabinet there. In the top drawer she knew that he kept important things like documents, passport and
chequebook, but also items that held more personal significance. There were ticket stubs from memorable concerts and films and theatre trips, for example, one of which was from their first proper date last year. There was a ring his grandmother had given him when he was a boy. In terms of
them
, there were the small number of birthday and Valentine’s cards she’d so far had the chance to give him, along with the little notes and drawings she occasionally left if she was working late. Mark kept everything like that. He was far more sentimental than he sometimes let on.

She opened the drawer.

Nothing explicit had ever been said about the privacy or otherwise of this, but it certainly felt like an invasion, and she was careful to note the arrangement of papers and objects inside so she could leave it exactly as she found it. Would he know how the drawer looked? She wasn’t sure, but it was important he didn’t know she’d gone looking. And she supposed that was deeply wrong, because healthy couples didn’t keep secrets from each other. If you didn’t have mutual and unconditional trust, then what did you have?