White corridor (18 page)

31

LOST CHILD

The roads surrounding Camden Market had been severed by its network of sepia railway lines and canals, but also by the bombs that had removed so many Edwardian yellow brick houses, allowing them to be replaced by sixties buildings distinguished only by their paucity of imagination. In the high street, the area’s boom-and-bust arc was most pronounced. Ground floors had been converted into shops selling household items, then art deco antiques, then shoes and thrash metal T-shirts and finally magic mushrooms, drug paraphernalia and tattoos. It was into this last parlour that Banbury and Kershaw now stepped.

The store was called Tribe, and had proven popular with the gentle, literate Goth set. With a Chelsea haircut, cable-knit sweater and corduroy trousers marking him as a member of the upper middle classes, the medical examiner looked hopelessly out of place, but with their superiors still stranded in the West Country and all leave cancelled at the unit, he had little choice but to help out wherever he was needed.

‘I can’t believe anyone in England would allow themselves to be tattooed with that,’ he told Banbury, pointing to a design of a flaming skeleton riding a Harley. ‘Don’t they consider how bad it will look when they’re sixty?’

‘No-one looks their best at sixty,’ said Banbury absently. ‘Check these out.’ He pointed to a series of photographs tacked on the wall. A fat bare back adorned with a gigantic red spider, wide chrome studs pinning a spine from neck to sternum, a horned devil with hands like crab legs spread across a woman’s back. A centipede wrapped around a man’s pale chest, its claw-feet ending in hooks that actually pierced the skin. Beyond the examples of the tattooist’s work were photographs of more extreme scarification, multiple bolts through cheeks, steel horns inserted into foreheads, rivets through scrotal sacs…Banbury looked like he’d accidentally stepped on a three-pin plug in his socks.

‘Anyone home?’

A scrawny, sallow man who resembled an old-time carnival barker stepped out from behind curtains adorned with tarot symbols. Above his shaved eyebrows the word SATAN was spelled out in naked women. ‘Help you?’

‘Police officers,’ said Banbury. ‘Do you know this girl?’ He showed the tattooist the image he had taken on his mobile. ‘She would have asked for a tattoo on her left arm about eight months ago.’

‘I’m registered,’ said the tattooist. ‘Everyone’s kept on file with proof of their age and details of what they want done. I don’t work on anyone underage. I can’t tell from this picture.’ He handed back the phone.

‘She would have come back to you more recently to try and get the thing removed, but she was refused.’

‘That narrows it down. Give me a minute.’ He checked the ancient Dell computer on his counter, refining his search. ‘I remember this one. She wanted it taken off, had a real go at me because I wouldn’t do it. I’m not licenced for laser removal.’

‘Recall anything else about the day she came back?’

‘Let me think. I’ve a pretty good memory for the difficult ones.’ He scratched absently at a demon in a flaming hot rod. ‘We did the original tattoo in two sessions, and both times she was alone. When she returned for its removal she was with a little black dude, the new boyfriend I guess. They were holding hands. Don’t often see that these days.’

‘After she left you, she went ahead and carved the tattoo from her arm with a penknife.’

‘That’s not my responsibility. Be easier to find more details if you had an ID.’

‘Lilith Starr, but that’s unlikely to be her real name. Try Bronwin.’

‘No, she’s here under Starr, and it was a real traditional job, red-and-blue heart with an unfurled name panel.’

‘Do you have a picture of the design?’

‘Sure. I always take a picture once it’s complete. Sometimes they get the design altered somewhere else, then come back to me for a repair job, so I have to keep the original as reference.’ He turned the screen around. Lilith had pulled up her slash-neck T-shirt sleeve to reveal the tattoo. Her round face and snub nose were instantly recognisable, but her beautiful red hair had been raggedly cropped. Her small, freckled breasts appeared barely more than pubescent. She appeared ill at ease before the camera, frowning into the flash with discomfort.

Beneath her photograph was a copy of the design: a plump red heart with a banner wrapped around it, upon which was written a single word. The tattoo was almost as wide as her arm.

‘ “Samuel,” ’ said Banbury. ‘She must have been pretty serious about him to get that done, yet she wanted to erase his memory very soon after meeting Owen Mills.’

‘Happens a lot,’ said the tattooist. ‘They fall for someone else and try to get the name changed, but she just wanted it taken off.’

‘Maybe Owen told her to get rid of it,’ replied Kershaw, raising an eyebrow.

‘You think that’s why he came with her to get the thing removed? To make sure she did it? He doesn’t look the dangerous type.’

‘Difficult to know,’ said Kershaw. ‘Women see something in men that we hardly see in ourselves. We don’t find him threatening, but she might have been terrified of him.’

‘Or terrified of Samuel,’ said Banbury, thinking of the tattoo’s ragged remains.

DS Janice Longbright was not good at handling women like Felicity Bronwin. The author was a well-preserved woman in her mid-forties with all the assurance of someone who was used to being right, and clearly expected others to agree with her opinions. Her apartment was on the third floor of a polished-brick mansion block that provided a graceful lacuna within the arbitrary imperial architecture of Knightsbridge. Its décor was county-woman-in-London: traditional, floral, cluttered, and cold.

Felicity sat before the sergeant in a brown woollen skirt, legs neatly crossed at thick ankles, and exuded impatience, despite having just been informed that her daughter was dead. Her husband was little more than a ghostly presence in the room, grey in mustache and suit, washed-out, silent, keen to be among trees once more. He sat in the chair behind her, watching his wife intently, as if waiting to edit or censor her words.

The detective sergeant had asked if she could take something belonging to Mrs Bronwin’s daughter. With reluctance, Felicity had handed over a pink furry diary Lilith had left behind on her last visit.

Janice carefully leafed through the pages. ‘Your daughter—’

‘I have no daughter.’ Mrs Bronwin’s voice was toneless, disinterested. ‘What I have is a misfit who sought only to hurt me at every possible turn, and who died some while ago, as far as I or my husband is concerned.’

‘You don’t seem very surprised,’ Longbright ventured.

‘I’ve been expecting it for some time now. That’s what drug addicts do, isn’t it, repeatedly let you down before killing themselves?’

‘When did you last see Lilith?’

Mrs Bronwin winced, as if the very mention of her child’s name was objectionable. ‘Last Christmas, at our home in Somerset. Not a good idea to walk into the village pub with pink hair and torn tights. The place was full of our land-workers, and it makes them lose respect. Turned up here with a young man in tow, obviously on drugs.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We argued and they left.’ She sighed. ‘The endless rebellions, the pleas for attention, it’s all so drearily predictable of the young these days. The rules and traditions of country life are too boring for them, I suppose.’
For a woman who writes about understanding the female mind-set,
thought Longbright,
she doesn’t seem interested in understanding her own daughter
.

‘Do you remember the boyfriend’s name? Did he look like this?’ Longbright showed her Owen Mills’s photograph.

‘God no, he wasn’t black.’ She tried, but failed, to hide her distaste. ‘Fair, possibly ginger, with shaved eyebrows. But definitely not a—not black.’

‘You don’t remember his name?’

‘Luke,’ said Mr Bronwin, speaking for the first time.

‘Matthew,’ said Felicity, glaring at him.

‘Did you ever hear of your daughter going out with someone called Samuel?’

They exchanged glances. ‘No,’ they agreed, rather too quickly.

‘She never said anything about dating him? We have reason to believe they were seriously involved with each other for a time, up until she met Owen Mills.’

Mr Bronwin appeared about to speak, but changed his mind.

‘You show me a picture of a withered, bleached corpse,’ said Felicity Bronwin, ‘and I’m supposed to unfold our family history before you, just so that you can file away a report? I’m sorry to disappoint you. This pitiful creature you found frozen to death in a shop doorway bears no resemblance to my beautiful child anymore. Why should I feel any pain now, when I said good-bye so long ago?’

‘Because the death of a child is always a tragedy,’ said the sergeant hotly. She had met women like Mrs Bronwin too many times before. ‘Perhaps you don’t believe someone can still be a child at seventeen. But your daughter suffered a pauper’s death in the middle of one of the world’s richest cities, and I’m afraid you must bear some of the responsibility for that.’ Furious with the parents, but even more annoyed with herself for losing her impartiality, Longbright rose to her feet. ‘I’d like a recent photograph of Lilith, if you can spare one.’

‘I’m not sure we have any,’ said Felicity.

‘Yes, we do. I’ll get it for you.’ Mr Bronwin shot his wife an angry look and left the freezing room. He returned with a photograph showing the pale, scowling redhead standing in a corner of the Bronwins’ lounge, beside a gigantic Christmas tree. She was dressed for midsummer, in the standard Goth outfit of a black sleeveless top decorated with skulls, skin-tight black leggings and studded boots.

Who are you?
thought Longbright, studying the picture.
You were the last case Oswald ever handled. What did he discover about your life that was worth dying for?

32

SUBZERO

‘They spoke about something serious and personal shortly before she died, I’m sure of it,’ Longbright told him.

‘What makes you say that?’ asked Bryant, holding the mobile tightly to his frozen right ear.

‘Because I’ve been talking to Owen Mills again, and I’m sure he’s hiding something about their conversation that night. He’s more astute than I first thought, but he’s still holding back. Lilith had broken up badly with her former boyfriend, even going so far as to cut his name from her arm with a penknife, possibly at Owen’s request. Her drug-taking stems from around the time she took Samuel home to meet her parents.’

‘They admitted meeting this chap?’

‘As good as—I think they were trying to disguise his name but couldn’t agree on a new one for him. Matthew or Luke. What I don’t understand is, if she was so in love that she had him tattooed on her arm, why did she end up hating him so badly that she would put herself through agony? And why did Owen Mills let her?’

‘It sounds to me as if there were three of them in the relationship,’ said Bryant. ‘You know about the lives of two of the participants, Mills and the girl, but you won’t get any answers until you have more information on the third.’

‘Do you think I’m tackling this the wrong way?’ the sergeant asked, despondent. ‘It’s such an indirect approach. Perhaps I should be thinking more about Oswald rather than the boy who came to see him.’

‘You said yourself that Owen Mills was Finch’s only visitor. I don’t suppose John would agree with me, but in the absence of any other leads, it’s what I’d go after. The girl is dead, Oswald is dead, the ex-partner remains a blank, so you have to take aim at the last person to see Finch alive: Mills. Use everybody in the unit if you have to, but you must also keep an eye on Kershaw. He makes mistakes when he feels threatened, and I imagine he’s feeling pretty threatened right now.’

He was about to ring off, but came close to the mobile again. ‘I’m afraid I have to go. We’ve a murderer of our own to track down here.’ He shut the phone before Longbright had a chance to ask him what on earth was going on.

The detectives had reached a dogleg in the road, and could see across the valley onto the darkening moors beyond. ‘It looks like there’s another volley of snow coming in,’ said May. ‘We should get back to the van.’

‘Let’s check out a few more, just another hundred yards. I’m fine, I assure you.’ Bryant made his way up to the next vehicle.

This time, a young man opened the door of his Rover to meet them halfway. ‘You should stay inside your vehicles,’ he told them. ‘It’s not safe outside.’ He explained that he was a staff nurse at Exeter General Hospital, and had been further along the road calling on those still trapped in their vehicles.

‘I’m Jez Morris, pleased to meet you.’ He shook their hands with grave formality. ‘You’re really police officers?’

‘We’re attached to a special unit in London,’ said Bryant, explaining without revealing anything. He knew he might be facing the man who had murdered their truck driver. ‘How many more are back there?’

‘Thirteen by my count, including a couple of kids. I treated an elderly couple for early symptoms of hypothermic shock, but surprisingly there’s been nothing too serious. People in these parts are pretty tough. They know they’re taking a chance if they go against a blizzard warning. How many in your direction?’

‘We counted eleven,’ said May.
And one no longer alive,
he thought uncomfortably. They left Morris with a promise to check in on him within the hour. Behind the nurse’s car, a snow-weighted beech tree had collapsed across the road, and a narrow pantechnicon had been thrown on its side. The cabin was empty, but as May called out, the lower rear door was pushed up and a young black man in a store uniform looked out.

‘Hey, no sign of the rescue workers yet?’ he asked. His accent placed him from South London. ‘Are you stuck here, too?’

May explained. ‘What happened here?’ he asked.

‘I came around the bend and saw the cars across the road. Braked too hard to avoid the tree and my load shifted. Over she went.’ The driver introduced himself as Louis. ‘I’m supposed to deliver to Derry and Co in Plymouth by nightfall. Won’t make much difference when I get there now; the stock’s pretty messed up.’

‘Are you warm enough in there?’ May asked.

‘I’m carrying bed linen as well as crockery, so that’s not a problem,’ said Louis. ‘But some of the geezers behind me aren’t doing so well. I opened a few of the boxes and gave blankets out to the cars. My manager will go crazy, but I’ll tell him it’s good publicity for the store. I don’t want to lose my job, but I couldn’t just leave people freezing while I’ve got all this stuff, you know? Do you know what’s happening? My battery’s flat, so I’ve got no radio.’

May was about to answer when the bulky chop of helicopter blades displaced the air above them. Everyone looked up.

‘Is he attempting to land?’ asked Bryant.

The red air ambulance was trying to set itself down on the narrow ridge above the road, but great gusts of wind caught at its blades and threatened to flip it. After searching for other spots to land, it hovered beside the road and a crew member threw out supplies sealed in Day-Glo orange plastic packs that tumbled down the hillside trailing plumes of snow. The helicopter swung away in the direction of Plymouth.

‘Some good people out here,’ said May, watching the chopper depart. ‘They can keep an eye on the other drivers, but we can’t tell them who to watch out for. We haven’t seen this fellow clearly ourselves. What we need to do—’

His mobile rang. He checked the number and saw that Longbright was calling.

One of the orange supply packs lay in deep snow on the other side of the sallows and sycamores that lined the road, no more than a hundred metres from the Vauxhall in which Madeline and Ryan were sheltering.

Madeline scraped at the window and tried to locate it through the trees. Their padded jackets afforded protection against the subzero temperature, but neither of them had eaten more than a few squares of chocolate since the previous day. Ryan’s teeth were chattering; he needed something to restore his body’s energy. ‘It must be easy to open,’ she said, searching for a gap in the branches. ‘People can’t be expected to carry penknives on them.’

‘We’ve got a Swiss Army knife,’ Ryan remembered.

‘I left it in France, in your Spider-Man bag.’

An hour had passed without her catching sight of Johann. Heavy snow clouds were reappearing above the trees. It would take longer to bring supplies back in another blizzard, and harder to spot him if he decided to attack. ‘I’m going outside for a few minutes,’ she told Ryan. ‘I want you to lock the door as soon as I’ve gone, and don’t unlock it for anyone except me.’

She picked up the envelope containing the evidence and slipped it inside her jacket, then climbed out of the van. Their rented Toyota was five cars ahead. Keeping low, she moved quickly between the vehicles until she reached it, then dropped to her knees behind the car. The picture packet wedged easily under the wheel arch, and could not be seen from any angle. Satisfied that no-one else would know it was there, she set off towards the supply carton.

It proved trickier than she’d expected getting through the icy thicket above the roadway. The branches sprang up as stalactites broke from them, scratching her face, but she pushed ahead until she found herself standing in a field of flawless white with graceful bargellos of wind-sculpted snow crossing its edges.

The case had come to rest in the ditch that ran beside the trees. She tried to right it, but it was too heavy to shift. A nylon cord ran the length of the pack, beneath a perforated section of the plastic, and tore the wrapper open when she pulled it. Inside were meals that heated themselves in aluminium cans, blankets, a flexible-frame tent, light sticks and an array of tools. She wrapped the ready meals and hot drink packets in a blanket, and retraced her steps back to the thicket. Snow had started to fall once more.

A dark figure was standing in the shadows on the other side.

She stopped, her breath growing shallow. Pushing back through the branches would instantly reveal her whereabouts. She could see Ryan inside the van on the other side of the trees. The only answer was to go around to the first space between the low hawthorn bushes that surrounded the tree trunks. She moved as quickly and quietly as she was able, but the crust of the snow kept breaking, sinking her into the ditches and furrows of the field.

She reached the gap and ventured a backward glance. He had not moved. He had no need to; she would have to come back up the road and pass near him to reach the van. She stayed on the far side of the vehicles, taking care not to slip in the frozen tyre tracks. When she looked back up, he had disappeared.

He came for her when she was not expecting it, seizing her left hand, pleading in a low voice, causing her to drop the blanket, which opened, spilling its contents across the road. Johann’s face betrayed no emotion. He seemed hardly aware of his actions, as if he had decided it wasn’t worth bargaining with her any more.

Her hand slipped free of its glove, and she used the moment of surprise to run, back to the driver’s side of the van. She threw herself inside and punched down the door lock as Ryan screamed. ‘It’s all right,’ she told the frightened boy, ‘he can’t get in.’

Johann’s fist slammed a tattoo of frustration on the side window, but the glass held. He lowered himself to look inside, and gestured with an open palm.
Give it back to me
. She shook her head, shrinking from the window. He ran at the van, and seemed about to try and kick his way in when he suddenly froze and turned away.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Ryan.

‘Stay over here.’ She pulled the boy closer.

‘You dropped the food.’

‘I know, baby, I know.’ They looked out at the red blanket, which had splayed across the snow like a bloodstain, the cans and packets lying there beyond reach, and Johann, crouched beneath the overhanging branches, vulpine, waiting for them to emerge.