Tastes Like Fear (D.I. Marnie Rome 3) (7 page)

‘It started out like that,’ Sean said. ‘But they stopped hoping after the first fortnight.
We
haven’t. We can’t. But it’s too long to ask ordinary people to stay interested in someone else’s kid. Kat says that at work they won’t look at her any more, as if they’ve decided it’s been so long, May must be … dead.’ His teeth clenched on the word. ‘They’ll start up again when it comes to trial. When you find whoever did it.’ His face collapsed, then reconfigured, scrabbling after a look that didn’t spell despair. ‘I don’t mean … It’s
them
, not us. We’re still hoping.’

But he wasn’t. No glimmer of hope anywhere on his face. As if he knew for certain that his daughter was gone.

‘We understand,’ Marnie said. ‘We’ve not given up either.’

‘You came here to warn us not to hope. When we hear the news about this girl from last night, you don’t want us to get our hopes up. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘I wanted you to know as much as we do at this stage. I’m afraid it’s not much. As I say, the driver doesn’t think it was May, but we’re doing everything we can to make certain.’

Sean jerked his head in a nod. ‘I understand. Hope’s a horrible thing. I’ve learned that in the last three months. A horrible, horrible thing. But you can’t stop.
We
can’t stop. Not until you kill it.’

He pointed a nicotine-stained finger at the street. ‘When you knock at that door to tell us you’ve found her?’ His hand shook. ‘That she’s … that you’ve found her. That’s when we’ll stop.’

10

Aimee

Ashleigh was in the bathroom, trying to get the candle wax and spit off her face. I could hear her moving around. Happy because the heat was off her, even if his spit wasn’t. She’d never liked May, and she hated me.

‘I was here three fucking months,’ that was her favourite bitch, ‘before you two showed up.’

True, but it wasn’t my fault he liked me best. It wasn’t like I
wanted
him to like me.

Christie had been with him nearly two years, longer than any of us. She’d found Grace about a year ago, and the two of them had found Ashleigh. Always the same story, the same hook.

‘I know this guy,’ Christie would have said. ‘He’s got this house. He’ll let us stay if we behave ourselves.’

Grace probably said something like, ‘Yeah? Behave ourselves on our backs, or behave ourselves on our knees?’ Ashleigh, too.

And Christie would’ve said, ‘He’s not like that,’ and I bet Ashleigh was actually disappointed.

The house was decent. Clean clothes, hot water, food. All of it free, and even if it wasn’t, so what? We’d all done worse, out on the streets. Except May, but she had me. We thought we were good, May and me, because we had each other. It wasn’t until the house got too small and we moved to the flat that the fairy tale turned to shit. We were a couple of stupid, dreaming kids, but we didn’t deserve that. May didn’t deserve it.

Here’s the dumbest thing. We thought
we
chose
him
, not the other way around. We thought we were so clever tricking him into giving us a roof over our heads, free food, presents. Ashleigh with her tits like heat-seeking missiles. Wild Gracie, always fighting. May who looked like an angel but she wasn’t, she wasn’t – and now everyone knew it. And me, the victim. His favourite. He liked to sit at the side of my bed and hold a cloth to my head, a glass to my lips. He wouldn’t touch, except to take my pulse, and even then it wasn’t like you’d think. He wasn’t the sick one. It was me. Every day a little weaker, lighter, less like
me
. He was wiping me out with his cold cloths and his hot stare.

So in case you’re thinking I was mad to ever come here, it wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time it was great. And we
wanted
to be in his good books, that’s the thing. It wasn’t easy to be in Harm’s good books. He wasn’t like other men, most men.
Any
men. I wished he was.

I understood men. I knew what they wanted and how to keep them happy, but Harm wasn’t like that. Grace thought he was, it’s why she had to go. Insulting him by suggesting he wanted us in that way. He doesn’t. I don’t think he can. He never touched May, but she was pregnant and no one knew how. She wouldn’t say, wouldn’t breathe a word.

I heard Ashleigh finish in the bathroom and walk back to her room. It was quiet, just London’s noise washing at the windows. I was waiting for May to come up. She always came to see me before bed. To talk, to say goodnight. I needed to know she was okay.

This place – I could feel it boiling under me.

I wanted her up here with me, not down there with him. If I’d had the courage I’d’ve gone to her room, braved the dirty looks from Ashleigh, risked getting caught by Christie, or Harm.

My whole fucking life was if-I-had-the-courage.

I’m pregnant.

I’d been counting the minutes, hours, since she’d said that.

Wanting her up here with me.

Scared that she was down there, with him.

And that he’d turned his back.

11

Noah heard the TV as he was unlocking the front door. Shouting and bullets being fired, guttural screams, wet flesh. Another zombie all-nighter. He dropped his keys into the bowl in the hall and toed off his shoes, going through to the sitting room.

His kid brother Sol was sprawled on the sofa next to Dan, their faces lit red and green by the TV, which was showing a close-up of a machete removing the top of someone’s head.

Sol grinned up at Noah. ‘Hey, bro.’

‘Hey. Sorry I’m late. Did I miss supper?’

‘I got your text.’ Dan rolled upright, coming around the sofa to kiss him. ‘Ordered Chinese. It should be here in twenty minutes.’

On the TV, a man with a face like a chisel was wielding a crossbow at an approaching corpse. Sol slapped his knees. ‘You’re for it now, dick-brain!’

Dan said innocently, ‘It’s won a Golden Globe.’

‘Twenty minutes until the food gets here?’ Noah hooked his thumb through the belt loop on Dan’s jeans, steering the pair of them into the hall. ‘Help me work up an appetite.’

Dan pushed the sitting room door shut with his foot, leaving Sol with the TV. ‘We should warm some plates.’

‘Hmm. Warm me first.’

‘You don’t need it, you’re always hot.’ Dan tossed Noah’s tie over his shoulder, leaning in to tongue at his neck. ‘Taste good, too.’

Noah let his hips go loose, relaxing into Dan’s grip, his breath hitching. ‘Christ… You’ve been watching way too many zombies.’

‘You don’t like being bitten?’

‘Rather be sucked.’ Pulling at Dan’s blond fringe, wanting the hot blue of his eyes. ‘Or kissed.’

Dan pressed him into the wall, kissing until Noah’s head started to spin. ‘You taste of apples.’

‘Hmm. That was lunch.’

‘DI Rome doesn’t feed you?’

‘Not her job. We were busy. Over in Battersea, by the power station.’

Dan rolled his hips against Noah’s. ‘Love it there. Keep getting invited to go climbing one last time before the rest of the chimneys come down.’

‘Your place-hacker friends,’ Noah deduced.

‘Urban explorers,’ Dan corrected. ‘Take back the city from the planners …’

‘… get arrested for trespass. Break your neck. Just as well you’re too smart to say yes to these adrenalin junkies.’

‘It’s not just about adrenalin.’ Dan propped an elbow next to Noah’s head, kissing him between sentences. ‘It’s reconnecting with what’s ours, getting through the fences, under the city’s skin.’

‘Hmm. Your mates’ll get caught sooner or later. More CCTV cameras in the UK than the rest of Europe put together. They know that, right?’

‘They know I’m screwing a detective sergeant. That tends to limit the invites.’

‘Whatever works. I’d hate to have to handcuff you to a Heras fence.’

‘Not going to happen.’ Dan laughed into Noah’s neck. ‘But I get where they’re coming from, don’t you? Hardly anyone nowadays has a sense of place. You must see it all the time, kids on the streets with nowhere to go, not giving a shit about private property or Keep Out signs. They’ve got nowhere, so they make everywhere theirs. Go where they please, do what they want.’

‘Your urban explorer friends aren’t kids and they aren’t poor. Most are in work, and well-off. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have the cash to finance the exploring.’

‘How’d we get on to this?’ Dan kissed him again. ‘Oh, right. Battersea Power Station, phallic chimneys,
you
being hot …’

Someone was buzzing to be let into the building.

Sol stuck his head around the sitting room door. ‘Supper’s here.’

‘I’ll get it.’ Dan peeled away. ‘You can warm the plates.’ He headed out of the flat.

Sol shook his head at Noah, tonguing the inside of his cheek. ‘You’re not even out of your suit, man. What’d your boss say?’

‘She’d say, “Is your kid brother still hanging out at your place, Noah, and did he nick your Oyster card?”’

‘Needed stuff from home.’ Sol fished in the pockets of his jeans. ‘Cheers, yeah?’

‘Next time, ask for cash.’ Noah pocketed the card. ‘I need this.’

‘Chill.’ Sol went in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Beer?’

Dan came back with carrier bags smelling of fried rice. ‘Let’s eat.’

They were decanting the food on to plates when Noah’s phone buzzed. ‘Boss?’

‘May Beswick.’ Marnie stripped the words back to a knife edge. ‘We’ve found her.’

Dead.

Noah could hear it in her voice.

May was dead.

He put down the foil dish of rice, turning away from the table. ‘Where?’

‘Battersea Power Station. How quickly can you get here?’

12

London leaned in through long windows to look at what was done here. Its shadows stained the floors and walls, and the glass gravel in glazed pots where fat cacti sat. The same shadows stained the girl’s feet and legs, lying in the gutter of her stomach like dirty water.

Noah stood in the penthouse flat with the power station’s famous chimneys at his back, seeing a dead daughter and sister. A murdered girl.

London looked indifferently on May Beswick. Wiped out her face, pressed her hands to her sides, made it hard to read the black scratch of words across her body. She looked very little, lying on the bed. She was sixteen years old. Naked except for a pair of white cotton knickers and the writing. Her body was covered in writing. Black ink, from the broad nib of a marker pen.

Ugly. Slut. Dog. Bitch.
The same words, over and over. Up her legs and down her arms. Across her stomach and chest. Higher, right up to her sternum.
Bitch. Slut. Dog.

In the open palms of her hands.
Whore
.

The words shouted, filling the room, throbbing in Noah’s skull as if someone had turned up the volume in here. Everything shouted. The colours, the smell, her stillness. The way she lay on the bed with her pale-blonde hair brushed neat on the pillow.

Round cheeks and a wide forehead, but she was no longer the girl in the photograph who’d haunted his sleep for the last twelve weeks. He could hear brush strokes in her hair, the slow settling of the blood at the backs of her legs. He clenched his hands and his jaw, focusing on the crime.

The words were neater on the left side of her body. If she was right-handed, she could have written them herself. It was hard to look at her, but he had to look. That was his job, the only excuse he had for being here, staring at a dead teenage girl. The picture broke up and became just so much static. He heard rather than saw it, a high-pitched scrabble adding to the noise in his head.

‘We need Forensics. Fran Lennox …’ Marnie was speaking into her phone. Her mouth marked a line on her face. ‘No, I want Fran. Tell her I asked for her especially. And put Family Liaison on standby.’ She was at the foot of the bed. ‘This is now a murder investigation.’

Noah could hear the man’s hands on May’s throat, squeezing. Big hands, their size shouting from the blue spread of bruises. She’d been strangled. Recently, by her colour. He could hear her feet kicking. It didn’t happen here.

‘Talk to me,’ Marnie said. ‘Tell me what you’re seeing.’

‘He didn’t do it here. She was dead when he put her here. It’s not … I don’t think it’s a sex thing. She’s … a child. He sees her as a child.’

‘He undressed her.’

Noah shook his head in protest. ‘She looks like a child.’

‘We’ve been looking for a child. The Beswicks’ daughter.
Their
child.’

‘Loz’s sister.’ He felt nauseous. ‘Her big sister.’

‘Why isn’t it a sex thing? Tell me what you see.’

‘The way he’s brushed her hair …’ Noah had seen women laid out like angels by their killers, or laid out like whores. This wasn’t the same. ‘He’s brushed her hair like a child’s.’

‘Plenty of people kill children. Too many.’

‘Yes. But this doesn’t sound … doesn’t
look
like that. Not to me.’ He had to stop looking at the bed, just for a moment.

Hanging above it: a painting of the power station. It had been chilling his peripheral vision since he’d stepped into the room. A cool grey study of scale and slippery depth – the feeling that if you looked too long or hard you’d fall into the canvas and struggle like a fly in a spider’s pantry before acid ate you alive. He’d seen paintings like it in exhibitions he’d visited with Dan. Dirt scraped from railway arches and storm drains made the paint fat and irregular, clots of dust and hair growing like cysts under the skin of the canvas. His gut fisted, looking at it.

‘How did he get her in here?’ Marnie turned from the bed towards the long windows. ‘It’s secure. Probably more secure than it’ll be when they’ve finished the work. CCTV, alarms, patrols.’

A patrol had called in the crime. A security guard, doing his rounds, had found May’s body and called the police, sounding sickened but not panicked.

‘Jamie Ledger, ex-soldier,’ Marnie said. ‘He’s seen worse, but not in London. He’d thought this was a quiet job, guarding penthouses. We need to talk to him.’

Noah nodded, but didn’t move. He wanted to stay here until the body on the bed was quiet. ‘The killer risked getting caught to bring her here.’ The chimneys were heavy at his back. Monolithic. Iconic. ‘He wanted us to find her like this. And
here
… right here.’ Her hair brushed neat, hands at her sides. ‘It’s a ritual, or a confession.’ All Noah’s training, in psychology and as a detective, said that this was someone who’d do it again. It was a long climb through the building site. CCTV, alarms, patrols. ‘He went to trouble to leave her here.’