Nothing but Meat: A dark, heart-stopping British crime thriller (4 page)

‘Really?’

‘Okay, it’s obvious why, but it’s even funnier knowing that
he’d put himself through an evening like that just to stop us from going
somewhere on our own.’

‘Laura had a good time.’

‘She could’ve had a good time at a funeral.’

The words Laura and funeral hung heavily in the air, Simone
knew there had been enough talk of death and murder already and there was
plenty more to come without the need to discuss the past, so she tried to keep
momentum to the conversation as they drove into the sleepy Fenland village of
Brior Fen and looked for Cromwell Road. ‘I couldn’t listen to that sort of
music now anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s teenager’s music.’

‘Never. I’ll concede that tastes mellow with age but I think
you’ve been with Mr Wet Wet Wet too long and you’ve forgotten what good music
sounds like.’

‘Ha-de-ha.’

‘I’ll take AC/DC over Erasure any day,’ he said.

‘He doesn’t listen to Erasure.’

‘Yeah well, he always looked the type.’

Simone managed to smother a burst of laughter before it
happened and chose to ignore his comment instead.

She indicated and turned into Cromwell Road, which was little
more than a dusty dirt track edged on one side by a field of crops. The surrounding
landscape was completely flat and the sun was high in the sky, the skyline
shimmered in the dusty heat making the area appear more like Texas than rural
England.

All the houses were well spaced and of decent size but they
had become tired and run down over the years, as was usually the way with
1960’s council houses. Simone slowed the car and leant forward in her seat,
looking at the houses as they passed. She pulled up on the side of the road and
pointed. ‘Thirty-six is that one there.’

Bloodshot eyes and five-day growth answered the door and they
identified themselves to Mr Redman who stood before them shielding his eyes
from the sun with his hand. When they entered they struggled not to show their
distaste at the human stench inside the house as Redman led them into the
living room, he was bare-chested and the metallic twang of his body odour made
the room seem damp. Redman was aware of the squalid conditions and apologised
for the mess as he pulled a stained vest over his skinny body. He opened the
curtains and the sunlight that streamed in cut through the dust and smoke and
made the filth more apparent by glinting off the glut of crushed beer cans,
fallen bottles, glasses and empty metal takeaway containers that seemed to
cover every flat surface. He opened the windows and began a futile attempt at
tidying up but there was nowhere to move the rubbish and so he ended up
shuffling it around for a while and then he tried to gather it together. He
didn’t look at the police officers and they could do was watch the top of his
thinning red scalp and the greasy ponytail that stuck to his pasty back until
Simone said softly, ‘Mr Redman, do you mind if we sit down?’

When he looked up he had tears in his eyes and managed to
grunt an affirmative from deep within his grief stricken throat. They sat on
the sofa and watched as he adjusted his armchair away from the television. He
smeared the tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand and it made his
cheeks glisten in the sunlight.

West said, ‘We are sorry for your loss Mr Redman.’

Redman cleared his throat and replied, ‘Are you going to
catch who did it?’

‘We’re going to do the best we can and I hope you understand
that we need to ask you some questions.’

Redman stared at the floor with dreamy eyes and mumbled to
himself. ‘The best you can.’

West spoke loudly. ‘Mr Redman?’

Redman jerked, switching his gaze. He looked at West with a
completely slack face.

West was steely and serious. ‘I’m good at my job and I will
do everything in my power to get who did it.’ He held his stare until Redman
looked at Simone and said, ‘She was a good girl. She looked after me.’

She said, ‘When was the last time you saw Victoria?’

He looked distant and guilty then said, ‘Thursday evening.’
West and Simone waited for him to elaborate. He cleared his throat. ‘She got
home from school and made our tea. We had chops and mash, I’m useless in the
kitchen; wouldn’t know where to start. We had tea and she did some schoolwork
in her room. After that she went out some time after six.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘She does…did, some work for the church, they have some group
on a Thursday evening and she helps set it up, gets the chairs out and makes
the coffee and tea, stuff like that.’

‘What group was it?’

‘I don’t know; some churchy stuff, helping tramps find Jesus
and crap like that.’

Simone said with a smile, ‘I take it she didn’t get her
religious beliefs from you?’

‘She just started going to church on her own every Sunday.
Out of the blue it was; she wanted me to go with her but I never did. The
thought of it made me feel uncomfortable, I’ve never been to church in my life
and I wasn’t about to start. I don’t know where she got it from but it was
something she believed in and it made her happy. And that made me happy, it
also made me feel that she was safe, it stopped her from falling in with the
wrong crowd. She had friends but wasn’t interested in going out to parties and
getting drunk like all the others. It’s a rare thing these days.’

‘And that was the last time you saw her?’

‘I went to the pub in the evening and didn’t get back ‘til
late. I had the next day off work so I had quite a lot to drink and I slept in
on Friday morning. I thought she’d gone to school. Didn’t think anything of it.
Anyway I went to London that afternoon, got the train down there and stayed at
a mate’s house, did some drinking and went to the football on Saturday
afternoon. I didn’t get back ‘til Monday.’

‘Did you try to call her at all over the weekend?’

‘Don’t have a mobile. I can’t understand them.’

‘You could have used a pay phone,’ Simone said with an
accusing tone she wished she could have disguised.

‘I could have but I didn’t, she’s eighteen years old she can
look after herself better than I can. I couldn’t imagine anything like this
would have happened. What do you want me to say? I took her for granted? Well
yeah, maybe I did, but I loved her so much and I want to kill the fucker that
hurt my baby.’

West understood the grief Redman was feeling and ignored the
threat, he said, ‘Tell me about her friends.’

‘She had a friend called Beth something; I don’t know her
last name. Go to the school, they’ll tell you more about her private life than
I can. You know what teenagers are like; they keep themselves to themselves.
They keep stuff from their parents anyway.’

‘Any boyfriends?’

‘Maybe, but she never said, never told me anyway. She spent
time on her computer. She was into that, whatever it’s called, social
networking, they all are aren’t they?’

‘We will have to take her computer Mr Redman because we may
be able to see who she was chatting to and whether she was in regular contact with
anyone.’

‘Take it. It’s in her room.’

‘Thank you. Can we take a look around while we’re up there?’

‘Go ahead.’

Victoria Redman’s bedroom made Simone sad as it reminded her
of her own at that age and illustrated exactly how young eighteen years old
actually was. As they stood in the teenager’s private space and looked at the
posters on the walls and the teddy bear collection on the bed Redman’s
defensive protests regarding his daughter’s ability to look after herself
seemed tragically laughable. She may have been strong minded enough not to
succumb to peer pressure or feel the necessity to hide her beliefs in an
attempt to win a classroom popularity contest but she was still nothing more
than an innocent young girl murdered viciously.

She had her whole life ahead of her and as if by way of
providing evidence of how little time she had been alive the sum of her
existence thus far was documented within the walls of her small room. If she
knew her abductor and clues to his identity were to be found they would most
likely to be found here.

The horrible image of Victoria Redman’s bloody corpse haunted
Simone and seemingly West too as they stood in silence side by side in an
unavoidable mark of respect for her private space. Simone had become accustomed
to the foul smell in the rest of the house and was now acutely aware of the
pleasant scent of perfume and clean clothes that hung faintly and yet
distinctly in the air. In any other circumstance this sweet fragrance of
youthful femininity would have been beautiful and pleasing but it only made
Simone feel sorrowful and intrusive.

West said, ‘I’m going to unhook the computer. I want you to
look around for anything that tells us more about her life. Imagine this was
your room when you were eighteen. Where would you hide your secrets?’

West went to the computer desk in the corner of the room and
set to work unplugging it while Simone went to the first and most obvious token
of affection in the room. On the windowsill, above her bed lay a single dead
rose. Positioned amongst small, framed pictures of happy school friends and
assorted friendship gifts of bracelets and ornamental cats it seemed to take
pride of place in the centre of the windowsill. She didn’t touch it; there was
no need, she just looked at it carefully from different angles. It looked to be
the type of rose people sold in pubs and bars by putting embarrassing pressure
on dating couples especially on Valentine’s Day. Martin always waved the
sellers away whenever they had been approached on a night out. To buy one would
have seemed tacky but at the same time Simone thought it would have been a nice
gesture. She always felt that gifts don’t need to be expensive or elaborate and
an impulsive gift - no matter how tawdry, given with a cheesy smile and an
affectionate glint in the eye could be more special than any other. Simone
thought that if someone ever bought her a rose from a chancer in the pub, she
would keep it too and if she had been given one by someone special when she was
Victoria’s age, she also would have put it on display in her room.

She looked around the bed area and in the drawers of the
bedside table but found nothing that any other teenage girl wouldn’t have. She
checked under the bed and found nothing but dust. She hit the jackpot when
looking amongst the books on the shelf above the head of the bed. There were
religious books, some popular fiction, a couple of A-level textbooks and also a
small collection of compact discs. Simone looked across the room and saw a
tower of about thirty CDs near the stereo, by the TV and computer. It seemed
strange that Victoria had kept these particular ones on a shelf, separate from
the rest when there was plenty of room to keep them all together. Gifts maybe?
There were five in all, four of them were popular current artists, but one of
them in particular stood out by not being the usual thing a teenager would
listen to – or anyone else for that matter.
‘Theodore Patterson Presents Movie Themes Played On The Hammond Organ.
Reggie Style!’
She lifted it from the shelf already suspecting its secret.

Simone thought that there was always a chance that friends
would ask to borrow popular music or books, or they may choose a CD to play or
a book to thumb through while spending time in someone else’s bedroom. So if
Victoria was to hide something personal then it made most sense to hide it
within the sleeve of probably the shittiest most unknown and undesirable album
in the history of unpopular music.

She opened the CD and slid the sleeve notes from the case. As
she suspected, when she fanned the sleeve, a series of small photographs fell
from their hiding place and onto the bed.

‘Found something,’ she said and looked across to West who was
coiling cables. He put the one he was holding on the top of the computer case
and joined her at the bed.
She picked up the photographs with one hand and handed the CD
sleeve to West. ‘Found them in this,’ she said. ‘It seemed out of place in a
teenager’s bedroom, but then it’d be out of place anywhere.’

West cocked his head and read the cover of the CD. ‘Sounds
all right to me.’

Simone immediately saw what the pictures were when they
scattered across the bed; the flesh tones of the images were a dead giveaway.
She thumbed through them: Victoria topless. Victoria naked. Victoria smiling,
lying back on a bed with mild embarrassment in her eyes, vulnerable and naked
but not unhappy, clearly not forced. Exposed but seemingly unthreatened. There
was another person in similar poses, the two of them were together naked and
grinning madly into a camera held at arm’s length. Victoria had a secret
relationship but not with a boy, the images were of her and another girl,
pretty and blonde with the same look of embarrassment in her eyes and she too
was pouting and grinning and happy.

West said, ‘Redman mentioned a friend…’

‘Beth.’ Simone finished and pointed to the framed pictures on
the windowsill. ‘The same girl is in those pictures.’

They went back into the lounge where Redman was sitting and
staring into space. Simone showed him the framed pictures and asked if Beth was
in any them. Redman pointed out the pretty blonde girl. It was definitely the
same girl who was in the private photos. Simone had put them in her pocket;
eventually Redman would have to clear his daughter’s room and pack away the
memories and if the private pictures were irrelevant to the case then he didn’t
need to see his daughter in a state of undress.