Authors: Kate Rhodes

Crossbones Yard (8 page)

BOOK: Crossbones Yard

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‘Jesus.’ Lola peered out of the window. ‘He was out of here like a bat out of hell.’

‘That’s how it goes,’ I nodded. ‘You think he’s doing okay, then you don’t see him for weeks.’

We watched Will’s van speeding away around the corner.

‘He was just beginning to relax.’ Lola’s eyes were brimming.

‘You did well.’ I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘You even got him to take a bath. He never does that for me. You must have special powers.’

‘I just want to help him, that’s all.’

‘I looked in his bag today, while he was asleep.’

‘Did you find what he’s been taking?’

‘He’s got a knife, Lo. A nasty one, with a horrible long blade.’

‘Jesus, the poor soul.’ Lola covered her mouth with her hand.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s terrified. He thinks the whole world wants to hurt him.’

I drew in a deep breath. ‘Do you think he’d ever use it?’

‘Course not, Al.’ Lola’s eyes were round with shock. ‘He’s still our Will, isn’t he? He wouldn’t harm a fly.’

She rested her head on my shoulder for a moment then went into the bathroom. Before long the flat filled with the scent of bath oil and her voice singing operatic scales, a fraction off-key.

The lift took several minutes to arrive the next morning. The interior looked the same as always, slick metal, big enough for six people to pack themselves shoulder to shoulder, like sardines. The whirr of the air-conditioning reminded me that you don’t die if you step inside. Lifts may look like coffins, but they rarely are, if you can hold your nerve. I jumped in before there was time to change my mind, and the floor lurched upwards as panic bubbled in my chest. The advice I gave my patients seemed ridiculous: distract yourself, control your breathing, imagine yourself somewhere safe. None of it worked. By the eighth floor I felt like an astronaut stuck in a capsule, oxygen supply almost exhausted. The walls played tricks on me, expanding and contracting like a concertina. And then I was back in the cupboard under the stairs, with no chance of escape, my father’s footsteps pounding on the floor above, bringing the ceiling down around my ears. The emergency button was no use. Pressing it would only make the lift stop immediately, and I would be trapped between floors. The idea made me want to claw through the metal walls. Luckily the lift juddered to a halt at the sixteenth floor. A student nurse watched me stagger into the fresh air.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Do you need to sit down?’

I tried to smile, but my legs were buckling. I made it to the toilets before the shaking kicked in, and the anger. Gradually
my breathing slowed down. It was a syndrome, that was all. Fear of confinement, a terror of losing control. People conquered claustrophobia all the time. After six cognitive behavioural therapy sessions they could use the Underground again, sit on a packed bus, walk through a busy shopping centre. But I still couldn’t do any of those things. My avoidance was getting worse. I had stopped travelling at rush hour, steered clear of shopping centres, anywhere where there would be crowds. My reflection stared back at me. I gave myself a forced smile, tried to make myself look like a normal person, rather than a neurotic idiot crippled by irrational fears.

Laura Wallis was already dressed and waiting for me on Ruskin Ward, eyes huge in her emaciated face. She observed me closely, like I might be dangerous, while I scanned her chart.

‘It’s looking good, Laura. At this rate you’ll be home in a few weeks.’

‘You’re not going to ask me loads of questions, are you?’ Her voice was a mixture of resentment and fear.

I smiled. ‘Not today. We’re just going for a walk.’

‘Where are we going?’ Laura shuffled along the ward like an old woman, skin stretched tight across the hollows of her face.

‘Not far. How about going round this floor, just once?’

She said nothing to start with, pausing every few metres to catch her breath. And then she began to explain, which is what always happens. Something about motion frees people to say what’s on their minds. The story ebbed out of her, a few sentences at a time. Bullying at school, her mother’s suffocating kindness, and the magazines she bought, populated by models who kept themselves child-sized. I don’t know why I took a liking to Laura. I think it was her determination to resist instructions, and the way she was trying so
hard not to be afraid. She leaned on my arm as we dawdled back through the ward, an odd combination of a geriatric and a child. I laid a blanket across her legs and sat down on the edge of her bed.

‘You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?’ Her eyes glistened.

‘Course I will.’ I touched her hand for a second and was surprised that she didn’t try to draw away.

Someone was waiting outside my consulting room when I got back. I could see who it was immediately. In his pale grey suit he looked like a huge boulder, dumped in the middle of the corridor. DCI Burns raised himself slowly to his feet and held out his hand.

‘Sorry to bother you at work, Alice.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got a few minutes before my next appointment.’

‘I thought you’d like an update.’

Burns sat opposite me. His shrewd eyes took in the details of my room. I wondered what he made of the abstract landscape an ex-patient had given me, and the cheese plant in its tiny pot, struggling to stay alive.

‘How’s the investigation going?’ I asked.

‘Not great,’ he sighed. ‘The official position is that we are following all available lines of enquiry.’

‘But having no luck?’

‘Fuck all, to be honest. The post-mortem told us what we already knew. The kid was starving by the time she died. The pressure sores on her back mean she was kept somewhere too small to stand up in, like the Benson girls.’

My eyes closed for a second. ‘He kept her in a box.’

‘Or a very small room.’ Burns flicked through his notebook as if he had lost interest in the topic. ‘No news on Morris Cley either, except he was spotted at London Bridge Station two
days ago. He hasn’t been to his mum’s place since he attacked you.’

‘So long as he keeps his distance, I’m happy.’

‘I bet.’ Burns peered over the top of his glasses. ‘How’s the face?’

‘Fine. I haven’t exactly been maimed.’

Burns’s smile was a tiny pink crescent against the pallor of his face. ‘You don’t believe in making a fuss, do you, Alice?’

For a second I thought about shopping Alvarez. No doubt Burns would take a dim view of coppers flirting with the women they were meant to protect. ‘There’s something I meant to tell you,’ I said. ‘I got a letter.’

‘Fan mail?’

‘Not exactly. It’s pretty nasty actually, posted to my flat.’

‘I’d better take a look. Bring it in if you like, or I’ll send someone round.’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said. ‘If a patient’s delusional, you can work your guts out and they still think you’re the enemy. And it can’t be that hard to figure out my address, if Morris Cley managed it.’

Burns looked aghast. ‘God almighty, there’s no way on earth I could do your job.’

‘No?’

‘Wouldn’t have the patience. That’s the good thing about my work. Someone does something wrong’ – he clapped his hands together as if he was closing a book – ‘and that’s it. End of story.’

‘Except it’s not always that simple, is it?’

‘Not this time.’ Burns passed a large white handkerchief across his forehead. ‘That’s why I came to see you.’

‘I thought there’d be an ulterior motive.’

‘The thing is, Alice, I need you to go and see Marie Benson. She’s in London for some hospital treatment.’

I stared at him open-mouthed. The idea of going to see the woman the tabloids billed as the most evil in Britain didn’t appeal at all. It sounded like the worst imaginable way to spend an evening, and it was bound to leave me processing the experience for days. If our memories were like hard-drives I wouldn’t have minded so much. That way I would be able to delete the experience as soon as I’d given Burns the information he needed.

‘I can’t do that. Sorry.’

Burns rested his heavy jaw on his hands. ‘Please, Alice.’

‘It’s not my specialism. I’ve told you, I don’t do forensic work. I’d be out of my depth.’

‘But you’ve been involved from the start.’

I leaned back in my chair. ‘More involved than I want to be.’

‘If you do it, I won’t ask for any more favours. I promise.’

Burns’s eyes bored into me. He was oddly hard to resist. There was something dogged about him, a pathological commitment to his work, no matter how tough it got. God knows how his wife would keep him occupied when she finally forced him to retire. Somehow he coaxed an agreement out of me, then levered himself out of his chair with unusual speed. Evidently his strategy was to escape before I had time to change my mind.

My next patient was a woman I had just begun working with. Her face was already swollen with anger because the start of her session had been delayed. As soon as she sat down she launched into a description of the rage she felt when she woke up each morning, the way it stuck to her like a dress she couldn’t take off, even when she went to bed. Another person inhabited her body. It made her yell at her kids. Yesterday she had punched her husband, for no reason she could identify. A torrent of words flooded out of her and I waited for a gap, so
I could explain that anger is often a symptom of depression. No gap came. She was so busy venting her spleen that she didn’t notice me staring out of the window, worrying about the devil’s bargain Burns had squeezed out of me.

Running downstairs gave me no pleasure that evening. Normally it’s a crazy four-minute dash past every landing, desperate to fly through the exit doors into air that hasn’t been filtered. But knowing what I had to do made me want to hide under my desk. I considered turning up my collar and sneaking away, but by now Burns would be waiting, and I couldn’t let him down.

A black car crawled past, lights flashing. Alvarez was in the driver’s seat, wearing his smart coat and his usual unreadable expression.

‘Where’s Burns?’ I snapped.

‘Stuck in a meeting. He sends his apologies.’ Alvarez parked in an empty space and turned to face me as I got in.

‘Can we just go, please? Let’s get this over with.’

‘Okay.’ He held up his hands. ‘But I should apologise first, shouldn’t I?’

‘You should,’ I agreed, ‘but the question is, do you know how?’

‘It’s not easy for me.’ He ran his hand over the back of his neck. ‘I’m Spanish, you see. My family are from Valencia.’

‘Is that meant to be some kind of excuse?’

‘Spanish men don’t apologise.’ His face was grave, but his tone suggested that he might be joking. ‘That would be a sign of weakness. It would be
una pérdida de honor
.’

‘What does
una pérdida de honor
mean?’

‘A loss of honour.’

‘Maybe you could do with losing some. We can start over, if you say sorry.’

He took a deep breath. ‘
Le ruego que me disculpe
.’

‘How do I know that’s an apology?’

‘Trust me, it was hard to say.’

I expected him to turn away, but he carried on studying me, beyond the point of comfort. His gaze passed across my face. He seemed to be memorising the colour of my eyes, the exact set of my mouth.

‘Shouldn’t we get moving?’

‘If you insist.’ Eventually he put his hands back on the wheel.

The car eased into the traffic on Newcomen Street and I glanced at him. His hair was too long, flopping across his forehead, dark stubble turning into a beard. Apart from his expensive clothes, he had forgotten how to take care of himself. I wondered what his wife felt about him coming home late every night. Maybe they had one of those marriages where no questions got asked, each doing exactly what they pleased.

‘I bet Burns had to twist your arm to do this,’ he said.

‘Too right. I wish I’d said no.’ I stared out of the window. We were crawling down the Walworth Road at walking pace. A group of women in hijabs were standing outside a halal supermarket. It was hard to tell whether they were talking or silent, black veils obscuring their mouths. ‘It’s not my idea of fun.’

‘I thought psychologists were fascinated by the workings of sick minds.’

‘I am, but there’s no point in working with psychopaths. Most of them are untreatable. If you have a personality disorder, no one exists except you. You’ll march over the dying bodies of your children to get what you want, without any guilt at all.’

Alvarez glanced at me. ‘Sounds like you’re scared.’

‘Not scared, just a bit apprehensive.’

‘Same thing, isn’t it?’

I was about to correct him, but we were already pulling into the car park of the Maudsley, on Denmark Hill. I’ve always had a soft spot for the place. I did my training there and lived with Tejo for five years in a flat in Camberwell that shook every time a train went by. We got used to it after a while. Every fifteen minutes the jam jars rattled in the cupboard like teeth chattering.

I followed Alvarez through the colonnaded entrance of the hospital. I’ve always loved the grandeur of the building, with its pillars and chequered marble floors. The Maudsley was built on a wave of Victorian scientific optimism, when they believed that even madness would find a cure.

Alvarez trotted ahead of me up the stairs. By the fourth floor he wasn’t even out of breath. I felt like challenging him to race me to my office at Guy’s, to see if he’d survive.

I couldn’t predict what kind of woman would be waiting for us in the consulting room. When I was a girl I was convinced that our faces held a record of our lives. If you studied someone’s expression for long enough, you would find an inventory of their deeds. Marie Benson had changed since her picture was splattered across the tabloids six years earlier. Back then she was the archetypal barmaid with a gap-toothed smile, bottle-blonde hair, a penchant for low-cut tops. She was unrecognisable now.

When she turned in our direction her face was expressionless. There was no evidence of the murders she had carried out, all the lies she’d told. It could have been exhaustion, or maybe she had been in solitary confinement so long that she had forgotten how to interact. Her grey hair was badly cut, a ragged frizz that almost reached her shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than fifty, but already she looked like one
of those old women you see in the lounge of OAPs’ homes, washed up on a tide of daytime TV.

Her gaze flickered in my direction when I introduced myself. ‘And who’s that with you?’

‘DS Alvarez, Marie. You remember me, don’t you?’

‘How could I forget?’ She primped her hair for a second, then folded her hands neatly in her lap, like gloves waiting to be put away.

When I sat down I noticed that her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, never anchoring on anything. It dawned on me that she must be almost completely blind.

‘What’s this about then?’ Benson’s voice was roughened by years of smoking. She angled her face to catch my reply, using her ears instead of her eyes to pick up nuances.

‘The police asked me to visit you, Marie. It’s nothing to worry about.’

She gave a loud, nasal laugh. For a moment I caught a glimpse of the woman who kept the journalists intrigued for all those months. She must have used that odd, leering smile of hers as a magnet to draw people into her orbit.

‘Nothing worries me these days, Doctor.’ She touched the small gold crucifix around her neck. ‘I’ve got everything I need.’

‘How’s Rampton treating you?’

Benson held the cross between her fingertips, like I was an evil spirit that only her faith could keep at bay.

‘Could be worse. They let me go to church, and I’ve got a radio, so I know what’s going on in the world. A woman reads to me now and then.’

She had hardly moved since the conversation began, hands lying tidily on top of each other. Her body was completely under control and, unlike most people, she wasn’t afraid of silence. Most of us cram every gap in a
conversation with excess words, but she was on her best behaviour like a well-raised child, speaking only when she was spoken to.

‘But you’re still campaigning to get out, aren’t you? Still defending your innocence.’

She gave another loud, scoffing laugh. Laughter seemed to be the only impulse she couldn’t suppress.

‘I can’t stop my supporters gathering their petitions, if they want to. But that’s not why you’re here, is it?’

For a moment I almost felt sorry for her. Blindness had made her vulnerable. She must have known we were staring at her, subjecting her to our scrutiny, but she had no way of guarding herself. Maybe that was why she had developed that mask-like expression.

‘I’d like to talk to you about the hostel, if that’s okay.’

‘How did I guess?’ Benson’s mouth twitched. ‘You want to know about Ray, don’t you?’

‘I want as much detail as you can give me.’

‘I know why you’re here.’ Her blank eyes skated past my face. ‘I heard what happened at Crossbones on the news.’

‘You’ve been to Crossbones, have you, Marie?’

‘Course I have, I lived just round the corner. It’s the prostitutes’ graveyard, isn’t it?’

‘Not exactly. It’s just a piece of unhallowed ground where the bodies of sex workers were dumped, because the Church didn’t approve. No headstones, and the graves weren’t even numbered.’

Benson’s expression remained as blank as ever, but her body language gave her away. She was leaning forward in her chair, as if she was expecting a morsel of prime gossip.

‘Tell me what the hostel was like, Marie. I hear it was full, every day. All those rough sleepers must have thought they’d landed in heaven.’

She gave a narrow smile then crossed her arms. ‘Do you know how many people have visited me over the years, Dr Quentin, digging for information?’

‘Dozens, I expect.’

‘Hundreds, more like. Police, shrinks, journalists. And it’s been worse since Ray went. Now there’s just me to chuck your questions at.’

‘Who knew, Marie?’

‘Knew what?’

‘About your special rules. Keep them in the dark, gagged and blindfolded, no food, no water, all those little scars. You told someone, didn’t you? It was too much to carry on your own.’

‘I didn’t know a thing, Dr Quentin,’ Benson whispered. ‘Ray ran the place, and he told me those girls had packed their bags and moved on. I had my head down, cooking, scrubbing floors, making beds. The cellar was Ray’s empire. He made furniture down there, when we first got married. He never let on where he kept the key.’

Benson’s words came out like a mantra. Maybe she had repeated them so often she believed them herself.

‘Five girls are still unaccounted for, aren’t they, Marie?’

‘So they tell me.’ Her hand flew up to her crucifix. ‘But how can I say where they are, if I don’t know?’

‘That cross comforts you, doesn’t it?’

‘I’ll be wearing it when they put me in the ground.’ She covered the cross protectively with the flat of her hand. ‘It reminds me I’m not alone.’

‘And what about your husband, Marie, did you see him before he died?’

‘The judge wanted us kept apart. We couldn’t see each other or use the phone. He said we were a toxic combination.’ The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘Bloody ridiculous. I worked
my guts out in that place. No thanks from anyone.’ Benson looked aggrieved, like she was still waiting for someone to give her a promotion.

‘We’d better leave you in peace.’

‘Leave me with Sergeant Alvarez, if you like.’ She twisted her body in his direction, giving her best open-mouthed smile, blank eyes trying to pinpoint him.

Alvarez’s expression was even more hostile than usual.

‘You’re out of luck, Marie,’ I said. ‘He’s married.’

‘Pity.’

‘Here’s my card. Call me if you feel like talking.’ I placed the card in her outstretched hand, taking care not to touch her.

‘I might just do that. It helps pass the time.’

Benson looked disappointed when we got up to leave. In her position any kind of human contact must have been better than none.

‘It’s not me you should talk to,’ she called as I opened the door. ‘Sergeant Alvarez knows exactly what Ray got up to in his spare time.’

Her eyes made direct contact with mine, and for a second I wondered if her blindness was just another lie.

‘What did she mean about you knowing Ray Benson?’ I asked Alvarez when we got back to the car.

He seemed reluctant to answer, as if he was admitting to something shameful. ‘It was me that heard Ray Benson’s confession. Fourteen hours, over two days. We picked him up at eleven o’clock from a pub in Borough. He was paying for last orders.’

‘And you grilled him all night?’

‘Off and on.’ Alvarez looked straight ahead, hands balanced on the dashboard.

‘That’s one hell of a conversation.’

‘He took twelve hours to break. Then the last two hours I couldn’t shut him up if I tried. He told me what he did to eight of the girls, every detail.’

‘But not the other five.’

‘He stopped talking and that was that,’ Alvarez frowned. ‘He hanged himself at Broadmoor five years later.’

‘Jesus.’

‘And that bitch could tell us exactly where those girls are buried right now, if she wanted to.’ A muscle twitched, just above his jaw.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought you knew.’ Alvarez stared at me. ‘Ray was only following her instructions. She wrote down the time she wanted it to take, the knives she wanted him to use.’

I closed my eyes and Marie Benson appeared out of nowhere, with her empty face and nondescript clothes. It was hard to imagine her possessing the energy to damage anyone. Maybe that was why she made someone else carry out her plans.

‘Did you get any counselling after listening to all of that?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No need.’

‘Of course not. That would be
una pérdida de honor
, wouldn’t it?’

He gave a low laugh. ‘Go on then, diagnose me, Dr Alice, I can see you’re dying to.’

BOOK: Crossbones Yard

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