Behind Closed Doors (2 page)

Pam and – what
was
the other one called? Lou could never remember her name, began with an S – were tapping their keyboards so fast it almost looked as though they were racing each other. A typing contest. Sue? Sarah? That wasn’t right… Sandra. That sounded more like it. Lou bit her lip.

‘He won’t be a minute,’ Pam said, without looking up.

‘Who’s he talking to, Pam? Do you know?’

‘The chief.’

‘Ah. Is something kicking off, then?’

Pam smiled and didn’t reply, which meant that it was.

The phone call finished. ‘Lou – when you’re ready,’ he called.

Lou stood up and straightened her skirt.
Here we go
, she thought.

‘Sir,’ she said as she went into his office and he waved her to a seat. ‘Everything all right?’

‘What are you working on? I know it’s mad down there – just run me through your current priorities.’

‘I’m overseeing the case file for the Leuchars murder still. Ali Whitmore is putting that together and Jane Phelps is the exhibits officer. They’re pretty self-sufficient, though. I’ve got that series of armed robberies, and now the two jobs that are being linked. McVey and Palmer – Op Trapeze. Why’s that? Something come in?’

He didn’t answer. The seriousness of his expression – when Lou was used to him being relaxed enough in her presence to ask what she was planning to do with her evening – made her sit up a little straighter. Had she pissed him off somehow? She started mentally checking through all the jobs she’d worked over the last couple of months – none of them, since the Polly Leuchars murder investigation that had resulted in her DI, Andy Hamilton, being suspended for gross misconduct, had left any cause for concern.

‘I had a look through your personnel file, Lou,’ he said.

That didn’t sound good. What was he doing, rooting through her file?

‘One of your first jobs as a DC. Ten years ago. Scarlett Rainsford. That name ring a bell?’

‘Of course I remember. Cases like that one stay with you, don’t they?’

‘Good job they do. Special Branch did a warrant on a brothel in Briarstone this morning as part of Op Pentameter. Guess who they found working there?’

She stared at him. He couldn’t mean Scarlett, surely? This must be some kind of cryptic question to which the answer would be one of the many witnesses they’d interviewed all those years ago – one of Scarlett’s classmates, perhaps, or her sister?

She cleared her throat, deciding to be brave and suggest the impossible. ‘You mean – not Scarlett?’

‘The one and only. As you can imagine, when the news leaks all hell’s going to break loose. They’re working on a media strategy but I don’t need to tell you that this has to be kept quiet. I’d like you to get on to DCI Waterhouse at Special Branch. He’s expecting your call.’

‘Is she all right? What has she said?’

‘Not a lot, so far. But she seems okay. Living and breathing, which is more than anyone expected.’

‘Where is she now?’

He smiled. ‘She’s in the Vulnerable Victim Suite for the time being.’

‘I thought they’d all been shut down.’

‘Technically. But they managed to reopen the Briarstone VVS just for Scarlett. Special treatment and all that. Special Branch don’t seem quite sure what to do with her – but if anyone’s going to be in on the debrief it should be you.’

‘Are they certain it’s her?’

‘Over the phone Clive Rainsford was muttering something about a DNA test, but it turns out she has a scar on her upper arm that’s pretty distinctive.’

Ah, the scar. Lou had forgotten about the scar, despite looking for it on the shoulders of just about every girl of Scarlett’s approximate age for years after the abduction.

‘What about the family? Has anyone told them?’

‘You won’t believe it. The mum and dad, sister – remember her? – they’re all on holiday. In Spain, this time.’

The vehicle had stopped moving, the engine idling. Scarlett, alone again in the back of the van, could hear the sounds of other cars passing at high speed, and she guessed they had pulled into a layby, or a service station. One of the van’s doors opened and she waited, holding her breath, expecting the door to open at the side of the van. Footsteps. She could hear the chorus of cicadas outside, then a splashing as one of the men took a piss. A minute later he climbed back into the cab, and then the van moved off again, gaining speed.

She should have shouted, or screamed. Someone might have heard.

Nico had shown her a cicada. A dead one. It had been lying on the sun-baked tiles of the restaurant terrace, presumably having flown into the glass door and stunned itself. He’d put it on the palm of his hand while she shrieked and drew back from him. It was the biggest insect she’d ever seen and had big, ugly bug-eyes and black and grey armour-plating over its body. But when she realised it was definitely dead she got closer, and for a moment she could admire the delicacy of the wings, wonder at how something with a body so big and wings so whisper-thin could ever fly. And then he’d pushed his hand quickly towards her with an angry buzzing sound as though the thing was alive and she’d screamed and jumped back, clutching her chest, and Nico had laughed at her.

‘That was mean!’ she’d said.

‘You’re so funny,’ he’d replied. ‘They don’t hurt. They are just loud.’ He’d held open Scarlett’s shoulder bag, dangling the insect over it by one of its legs. ‘We give it to your mother,’ he said. ‘What you think, she will like it?’

‘Nico!’

He’d thrown the bug out on to the street, dusted off his hands. Then he had rested both his arms on her shoulders, head on one side as though he was appraising her. ‘You are angry with me?’

How could she be? How could she ever be angry with him?

‘No,’ she’d said, and smiled.

And he had pinched her cheek between his knuckles and pulled her chin towards him so he could kiss her. The night before, he’d kissed her for the first time and it had been gentle; already their kisses were becoming hungry, hard, possessive. On her part as well as his.

It hurt her, now, to think of him. ‘Nico,’ she said, whispering into the dirty blanket underneath her that smelled of engine oil and something else, something bad that she could not give a name to.

Nico had not been the first boy who had shown any interest in her.

Mark Braddock had been told to sit next to her one day because she had been talking to Cerys and Mrs Rowden-Knowles had wanted to separate them. She’d used Mark Braddock to hammer home her punishment because he was weird, nobody liked him, and she knew that sitting Scarlett next to anyone else, male or female, would not have done the trick.

As it turned out, Mrs Rowden-Knowles’s ploy backfired because, to Scarlett’s big surprise, Mark Braddock was all right. Contrary to popular opinion, he didn’t smell of BO, he didn’t have bad teeth, and behind the glasses he had lovely blue eyes that took everything in. Trouble was, instead of Mark’s impeccable behaviour rubbing off on Scarlett, the opposite happened and she ended up corrupting him.

She started it by drawing a cock on his notepad. He blushed and put his hand over it until Mrs Rowden-Knowles’s back was turned, but then he lifted the page and turned to a fresh one. And then, the excitement of embarrassing him past, just as she was starting to get bored again, he reached across to her notepad and within a second had drawn a pair of boobs and a big smile underneath.

It made her laugh, stifled because all of a sudden she didn’t want to get moved somewhere else, or, worse, sent to see Mr Callaghan.

After that, it progressed to notes. Not about anything dramatic, just a conversation passed back and forth between two people who hadn’t realised they had anything in common until precisely that moment.

The next lesson they had together, she chose to sit next to him. She thought she would get some stick for that, especially from Cerys who had a gob on her like you wouldn’t believe, but in fact Cerys somehow got the impression that Mrs Rowden-Knowles had put her next to Braddock for the rest of the term, and Scarlett didn’t bother to put her straight. Possibly Mark thought the same thing, because his first note to her was an apologetic one saying he was sorry that she’d been put there. And she didn’t contradict him, either; she wasn’t prepared to admit to anyone, even herself, that she actually
wanted
to sit next to him.

Despite all the notes and the stifled giggles – for to her surprise he was funny, and clever, and very far from boring after all – she must have absorbed a little of his intellect through some kind of psychic osmosis, because she got good marks in the end-of-year exams. Her best results, in fact. Ever.

The last day of term. No lessons with Mark Braddock, but Scarlett had taken to spending time in the library even when all the exams were over and nobody was revising any more, because one day she’d walked past the library at lunchtime and seen Mark in there. Nobody would come looking for her in this of all places. Mark had been surprised to see her, but once he’d recovered his composure he’d sat down next to her and complained via note when she started disturbing him.

So she would sit and watch while he read textbooks that he didn’t need to read. She watched the way he pushed his glasses up the bridge of the nose when they slipped down, watched how he moved his hair up out of his eyes with one hand and how it fell down again immediately because it was silky-soft and heavy. He didn’t even seem to be aware that she was staring at him, because, unlike her, he could grow completely absorbed in a book and not notice anything that was going on around him.

But if she thought he was ignoring her, she was wrong. On the last day, when the bell went for the afternoon lesson – in her case PE, in his, Biology – he passed her a note that he’d scribbled hastily. It said:
See you in Sept
.

They’d still scarcely spoken to each other directly. Not because they couldn’t have done – although the library was supposed to be quiet, people chatted in there all the time. They could have spoken before or after lessons, or in the playground, or anywhere in fact. But it had become a kind of tradition between them, the notes, and Scarlett didn’t want to be the one to break it.

Yeah
, she wrote back. That was the trouble, she thought. He wrote cool stuff. Her notes to him were always a brief scrawl in response to something; his to her always felt intelligent, challenging, even when it was something straightforward. She was in awe of his brain, how it worked, how he knew the answer to everything without being pushy or loud like Cerys.

When we come back to school I have something to ask you
, his next note said.

What?
she wrote back, but he was already on his feet, his bag slung over his shoulder, heading for the door.

Dismayed, she said out loud, ‘Mark!’

He looked back at her, blushing, surprised. It was the first time she’d spoken to him.

‘What do you want to ask me?’

But he’d smiled and turned away. The summer holidays had started and in August she had come to Greece on holiday with her mum and dad and sister Juliette. And then she’d met Nico, and Mark had been forgotten, mentally discarded as if he had meant nothing to her, nothing at all.

Now, in the back of the van, she thought over and over again about Mark and how much she longed to see him right at this moment, how she would have given anything –
anything
– for the chance to ask him again what he wanted, and if it was that he wanted to ask her out she would accept without question, no matter what Cerys had to say about it, no matter that her father had made it very clear that she was too young to go out with boys. Mark Braddock had wanted to ask her out. She believed it now. And at the same time she realised she would never know for sure. She would never see him again.

Lou made the phone call to DCI Waterhouse while walking along the perimeter of the playing field to the rear of HQ. It was the only place she could pretty much guarantee that she would not be disturbed or overheard. She could have just gone back to her office and shut the door, but as she did this so rarely it would have been a general heads-up to everyone that something was going on.