When She Was Good, page 5
“Harley must still be here,” says Jack, pointing out a battered white van. “We’re on the second floor.”
Pushing through the entrance, we step past chained bicycles and folded prams, before reaching the stairs and starting the climb. Someone has discarded an armchair on the landing, which we step around.
“Fourth door along,” says Jack.
Lenny goes ahead. I’m next. We pass a flat where a couple are arguing. Another has a TV set turned up loudly, to drown out the domestic dispute.
We’ve reached the flat. The door is slightly ajar. Lenny nudges it open with her foot and feels for a light switch.
“Call your friend,” she says, moving into the living room. Jack takes out his mobile and punches buttons. A phone responds. The ringtone is “Wonderwall” by Oasis. It’s coming from the bedroom.
“He’s still here,” says Jack, yelling, “Hey, Harley!”
Lenny holds him back, bracing her arm across the door, telling him to stay.
She looks at me. “You OK with this?”
I nod.
Using hand signals, she sends me towards the kitchen, while she skirts the opposite wall, heading in the direction of the ringtone. The flat isn’t large. Light from the living room spills across the linoleum floor of the kitchen. It creates a diagonal across the legs of a bearded young man sitting in a chair, facing away from me. His wrists and ankles are bound together with plastic ties.
“Harley?” I say, stepping around him. His head is cocked to one side and his eyes and mouth are open. For a moment I think he might say something, but a garroting wire has severed his windpipe.
Lenny’s name gets caught in my throat. I turn. She’s in the doorway. My shock registers on her face.
“Ambulance?” she asks.
I shake my head.
She steps into the room and pulls me away, raising her phone to her mouth. I catch only some of the words. “Deceased. Male. Homicide. Forensics.”
I keep seeing flashes of Harley’s bulging eyes and his twisted mouth. There were paintbrushes in the sink. He was rinsing them when someone knocked on the door. He answered. The visitor had a police badge. Harley invited him inside. Turned his back.
I move through the other rooms. Most have been recently painted and some are still covered with drop sheets. The smallest of the bedrooms has a single bed and a clothing rail hung with shirts and trousers. This is where Hamish Whitmore was living. It has a small desk squeezed into the corner beneath the lone window. The drawers have been pulled out and searched. Empty manila folders are scattered on the floor. A laptop power cord is plugged into the socket, but the computer is gone.
Whitmore had a whiteboard fixed to the wall above the desk. It has the torn corners of photographs stuck beneath Sellotape. Hand-drawn lines make connections between the missing images. Some have names written beneath them. Samantha Doyle, Abbie Harper, Arjan Kulpa—all victims of Eugene Green. The other names are not familiar. Gina Messud and Patrick Comber. Missing, maybe. Unsolved crimes.
I scan the whiteboard, wishing I had some table or list of contents to explain what it means. Without the photographs and other notes, the arrows have no context or meaning. It’s then I notice a new name, written in the bottom left-hand corner. Linked by a single red line, the words read:
Angel Face
London
2013
8 CYRUS
The clock on the dashboard of the police car has ticked past midnight. Blue flashing lights are strobing across nearby yards and parked vehicles. Jack is sitting in the back seat, holding his head.
“We’ve known each other since primary school. We grew up two streets apart. We shared our first beer. Went to our first concert…”
“Is Harley married?” I ask.
“Not yet.” The words catch in his throat. “He and his girlfriend, Nicole, were going on a holiday next month to Sri Lanka. Harley was going to propose on Hikkaduwa Beach at sunset. He showed me the ring.” Jack drops his head. “Oh, fucking fuck! Who’s going to tell her?” He opens the side door and spits into the gutter, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
Lenny emerges from the block of flats, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. She jogs across the road.
“I’m going to be a while,” she says, addressing me. “I’ll get someone to drop you at your car.”
“What about me?” asks Jack.
“You should go back to the Whitmore house. Be with your wife.”
I step out of the car and pull Lenny farther away. Her features are set hard as though fixed by a wind change. A double murder with all the hallmarks of a professional hit. Trouble.
“What was in those files?” I ask. “Whitmore must have stumbled upon something.”
“By sunup this will be someone else’s case,” she says. “The grown-ups will want to take it over. Xcalibre most likely.”
“What if it’s not gang-related?”
“Not much happens in Manchester without the gangs knowing or being involved.”
“You saw the whiteboard. He was investigating Eugene Green.”
“That case was closed.”
“Why would a retired detective be interested in a convicted pedophile without a friend in the world?”
Lenny isn’t biting. Normally, she appreciates having a fresh set of eyes on a case, someone who isn’t the police or a lawyer, but this time she doesn’t want me involved.
“It wouldn’t make him popular with his old colleagues,” I say.
“A copper didn’t do this.”
“He had a warrant card.”
“Maybe,” she grunts. There is a sharpness in her tone. I’ve noticed it before whenever I’ve questioned the integrity or behavior of the police. She circles the wagons, defending her own.
I want to talk about the names written on the whiteboard. Six children. Three of them were known victims of Eugene Green. Two other names I didn’t recognize, but they’re most likely missing children. The last name was Angel Face. I’ve read Evie Cormac’s files—there are volumes of them—and none of them mention Eugene Green.
Lenny signals a young uniformed officer, giving him orders to take us back to Eileen Whitmore’s house and then drop me at my car, which is still at the warehouse where Hamish Whitmore died.
Jack and I ride in silence until we reach the house. The lights are still on downstairs. As the car slows, the curtains open and a pregnant silhouette is framed by the light of the bay window.
“I knew she’d be awake,” says Jack.
“When is she due?”
“Any day now.” He hesitates before opening the car door. “What do I tell her?”
“The truth. She’ll find out anyway.” I reach back to shake his hand. “Did Hamish ever talk about Eugene Green—why he had doubts?”
“He said it was like a puzzle that had to be solved. Not like a jigsaw. He saw it more as a Rubik’s Cube, you know, where you have to keep turning the sides and trying all the combinations until the colors line up.”
“He secured Green’s conviction.”
“It was the biggest case of his career, but he wouldn’t let it rest. When Green died, Hamish went along to the funeral. Nobody else bothered showing up except for Green’s mum and some bloke she’s living with. Hamish talked to her afterwards. She wasn’t angry. She knew Eugene had done terrible things, but she said that somebody had twisted his mind. Manipulated him.”
“All mothers make excuses for their children.”
“Hamish thought so too, but she begged him to visit her and he came back with a box of stuff, convinced that he’d missed something.”
“What stuff?”
Jack’s shoulders lift and drop. “Whatever it was, he said it was too big for him. There were too many pieces. Too many players. Every time he followed a strand, it branched off into another six different directions.”
The front door opens. Suzie stands with one hand on her hip and the other on her stomach.
“He did mention the name of a place,” says Jack as he opens the car door. “A children’s home in Wales.”
“Why was it important?”
Jack shrugs. “He said Eugene Green had gone there.”
I hand him my business card with my pager number. He looks at the small square of cardboard and runs his thumb over the edges. “It could have been me, you know. I could have been at the flat, not Harley.”
At that moment he looks at me like a man who has lost trust in his own shadow. “Catch them, will you. Give me something to tell Nicole.”
9 EVIE
Usually I get advance warning when Cyrus visits me at Langford Hall. He sends a message, or Davina yells along the corridor, making some crack about my boyfriend being here. Today he just turns up, waltzing into my room without knocking.
“You can’t just burst in on me,” I say angrily. “I could have been naked.”
“The door was open.”
“I could have been doing something private.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Masturbating.”
“Were you masturbating?”
“Ew! No.”
“I could come back when you’re finished.”
“Don’t be disgusting. I don’t have my face on.”
“You don’t need makeup for me. I’ve told you that.”
I feel my cheeks flush and hate the feeling. Stupid girl. Foolish girl.
Cyrus laughs, which makes it worse. “You weren’t worried about being naked at the police station.”
“That bitch told you!”
“Caroline called and said you’d been mistakenly arrested, but it all worked out.”
“The police are pigs.”
“I work for the police.”
“Yeah, well, enough said.”
He looks at me like a disappointed parent, only he’s not my parent, or my foster carer. He was once, but we managed to fuck that up.
“Did you bring Poppy?” I ask.
“What do you think?”
I grab my hoodie.
“Put some shoes on,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
I run barefoot along the corridor until I reach the nurses’ station. I tap on the glass. Davina looks up from her computer. I mouth the word “please” and point to the outside door. Cyrus has caught up to me. Davina flashes him a smile. She fancies him, it’s so bloody obvious. And she’s got a bloke at home and a baby boy.
She unlocks the door remotely. My beautiful black Labrador goes batshit crazy when she sees me, wagging her tail like she might break in half. She leaps into my arms, knocking me backwards, licking my laughing face. Poppy is the reason I stay sane. Poppy loves me unconditionally. Poppy is my family.
“How have you been?” asks Cyrus when I finally sit on the bench next to him.
“The same.”
“Are you sleeping?”
“Are you?”
We always start this way. Cyrus can’t help acting like a shrink, even when he tries to be normal. Langford Hall looks like a three-star motorway hotel from this angle or a nursing home for dementia patients prone to wandering off. I throw a stick. Poppy chases.
“Did you ever meet a man called Eugene Green?” he asks, dropping in the question like we’re tossing pebbles into a pond.
“Who’s he?”
He pulls out a photograph of a fat-faced man with steel-wool hair, red cheeks, and a down-turned mouth. It’s one of the photographs that police take when you get arrested, with a height chart at the side.
“Recognize him?”
“Nope.”
He has more photographs.
“Why are you showing me these?”
He adds another image. I snatch a breath and look away, squeezing my eyes shut. When I open them again, it’s the same picture: a young boy is standing on a concrete ramp with one foot resting on a skateboard. He’s dressed in jeans and brightly colored trainers, with different-colored laces on each shoe.
“You’ve seen him.” I can hear the excitement in Cyrus’s voice.
I shake my head.
“You reacted, Evie.”
“No.”
He touches my arm. I pull away.
“His name is Patrick Comber. He went missing seven years ago. Eugene Green was suspected of taking him.”
“Why don’t you ask this Eugene Green?”
“I would, but he’s dead.”
I flinch.
“Where did you see this boy?” he asks.
“I didn’t.”
“You’re lying.”
“How the fuck would you know?” I explode. “I’m the one who can tell, remember?”
He ignores my outburst. “Patrick has a family… people who love him.”
The word “family” puts a bad taste in my mouth. I want to yell at him to leave me alone, to stop analyzing me and looking into my past. I don’t want him to discover the truth about me—what they did to me, what I became. People think Terry Boland was a monster who kept me locked in a secret room. They called him an evil pervert who raped me and burned me with cigarettes. None of that is true. They don’t know the whole story. The real story. How it began…
* * *
I thought Terry was a giant when I first met him. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen, with arms like legs of ham, covered in tattoos that had faded and merged into a mottled blue mess. He had a crooked nose and bushy eyebrows and hair cut so short that it stood up like a scrubbing brush.
Terry was supposed to wear a coat and tie when he drove the Merc, like a proper chauffeur, but as soon as we were clear of the big house, he would shrug off his coat and loosen the tie and undo the top button of his shirt. He had a chain around his neck with a small silver medallion. He told me later that it was a medal of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. “You pray to him when you lose your car keys or your wallet or your phone, and he helps find them.”
I wanted to ask whether Saint Anthony also found lost families, but I didn’t speak to Terry for the longest time. I wouldn’t even look at him. Instead, I curled up on the back seat and covered my face. Terry didn’t seem to mind. He talked as though we were having proper conversations, commenting on the weather or the scenery or pulling random facts out of the air, like the time I sneezed and Terry said, “Bless you,” and told me if someone forces their eyes open and sneezes, their eyeballs can pop out. Who discovers something like that?
I began sneaking glances at him in the mirror while he was driving. Sometimes he’d catch me looking and I’d pretend I was cleaning my fingernails. His eyes were soft. Not like the other men, who had hard eyes or hungry eyes.
One day I fell asleep before Terry came to collect me. He carried me to the Merc. I breathed him in, the sweat and oil and mint. I put my face close to his shirt and it filled my nose.
Terry rode a motorbike when he wasn’t driving the Merc. I would hear him pulling into the courtyard beside the kitchen, parking under the big tree, where he took off his helmet and unbuckled his leather jacket. While he changed his clothes, I waited downstairs. Dressed up. Looking pretty. Sometimes I wore pinafore dresses or tunic frocks or a school uniform. Mrs. Quinn would do my hair in pigtails or ribbons or a single woven plait that fell down my back.
Mrs. Quinn was the housekeeper. She made me my meals, but I didn’t eat very much. Nothing would stay in my stomach. Terry would sometimes come into the kitchen and drink coffee or make toast. He wasn’t allowed in the rest of the house.
“Hello, Scout,” he’d say. “You ready?”
He called me Scout because he said that was the name of a little girl in his favorite book about a mockingbird that died.
When Terry drove, he talked. “Hey, Scout. Look at the cows!” he’d say, like I’d never seen cows before. “Hey, Scout, look at the wind farm.”
I said nothing. The steering wheel looked small in his hands and he had a ring on his pinkie finger that had a little silver skull and red stones for eyes.
When we reached the address, Terry would jump out and open the door like I was a film star on a red carpet. He carried my overnight bag and rang the doorbell.
“I’ll pick you up here tomorrow,” he’d say after the door opened and he made sure I was at the right house. The next morning he’d be standing on the doorstep, taking the bag, never asking about what happened inside.
One day we stopped and picked up burgers and fries on the way home. Terry ate and drove, cramming chips in his mouth from the bag on his lap. My food grew cold because I was too scared to swallow.
“Maybe you like your food on a plate,” he said to me. “Like a proper princess.”
The next time he picked me up, he produced a plate and a knife and fork from the glove compartment. He put my burger and fries on the plate and kept glancing in the rear mirror, hoping I would eat something, but I didn’t touch the food.
Terry didn’t get angry. And he didn’t stop talking. He told me he used to work as a bouncer at a strip club, stopping the girls from being “touched up” by the punters.
“What’s a strip club?” I asked. These were the first words I’d said to him.
He looked embarrassed. “It’s a place where women dance.”
“Who are punters?”
“Customers.”
“Do they touch the dancers?”
He glanced in the mirror. “No. It’s not… it’s… complicated.”
Another day, we stopped at a park where kids were playing on swings and climbing on a colorful pyramid of painted metal poles.
“Do you want to climb?” he asked.
“I’m wearing a dress.”
“Oh. Right.”
“And I’m a bit old for playgrounds.”
“Right. Good. Sorry. I should be better at this. I got two boys. Jonno and Dean. They’re nine and seven.”
“Where do they live?”
“With their mother.”
Terry made them sound like they were perfect children, well behaved and good at school, “everything I wasn’t,” he said. “I wasn’t dumb. I just didn’t listen.”
Whenever we passed someone on a motorbike, he made a point of telling me the make and the model and the engine size and how fast it could go.
