The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (49 page)

Two people come to use the phone box but he makes them move on, growling at them like he’s a madman.

After twenty minutes the phone rings and he rips it from its cradle.

Franco has an address in the Gilesgate district.

“This is a heavy scene here, PC Romeo. I tell you this not so you can call in a raid but go there yourself. You okay with that?”

“Fine, Franco.”

Tom pulls out his Durham A to Z and finds the address. Not too far. He starts to run. It takes maybe fifteen minutes; he runs like a fox chased down by hounds. He has no plan, he just wants to find her—he’ll threaten, barter and pay for her release from them. Anything. He will sell his soul to the devil to get her back.

“Even if she goes straight back to Duncan Cobhurn?” The devil hisses in his ear.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

In the guttering candlelight of the cathedral, Tom sways, his face drained of all color; contrasted to the bloom of blood on his shirt he looks like a dead man.

“I found her. Patty, I found her and—”

He sees her again, as she was that night. Lying naked, alone … already dead.

He finds it; a squalid house in a dirty street of student digs and squats. Its windows have boards nailed across them, the small front garden a tumble of weeds with the detritus of a washing machine lying tangled and twisted across the path leading to the door. Inside, the house seems dark and noiseless.

Tom strides up to the front door and hammers with authority, an authority he no longer feels. There is no answer. He drags a large piece of metal over to the window and stands on it, trying to look inside, but he can see nothing. He makes his way around to the back door. Again it’s locked. He lifts some metal, a battering ram of sorts, and begins to swing. It takes seven attempts to shatter the wood and push it through into the kitchen. Then he climbs through the hole he’s made, and falls into the darkness. He takes a torch from his belt and …

“Christ.”

In the beam a sea of cockroaches scuttle away. The smell of rotting food takes his breath away. The floor is sticky, there are empty take-away boxes everywhere, and they undulate with the movement of small insects. Tom pushes on, torch shining the way. He checks the downstairs and then up, up …

The first two rooms are empty, abandoned in a hurry. Tom shines his torch around and can see powder residue and empty phials. This had been a factory for the gang—probably where they cut the pure drugs for sale on the street. But they’d moved on—and in a hurry. Tom feels anxiety building in him as he goes room to room. Finally there is only one room left on the second floor. The moment he opens the door he knows something is wrong; an overpowering smell of bleach hits him. He shines the torch inside and it catches the edge of a mattress in the center of the room. He walks in, his boots crunching on shattered glass, bleach lies pooled at the base of the mattress. And there lies Dani.

She is naked—more than naked, if there can be such a thing. And she is dead. A syringe sticks out of her arm. Pushed in but never pulled out. Her hair is greasy, there is semen in it. The mattress is stained with sick and blood. Her legs and arms are heavily bruised, the paleness of the body makes them all the more livid as the blood has settled. Her hip looks swollen.

On her shoulder there is a dark scrawl that looks like a marker pen—but he knows is a primitive tattoo—a brand: J5. He touches her, she is a little stiff with rigor that is fading. Two days—probably two days dead. If only he could have … but what is the use of thinking like that? The room is cold, that has kept her looking fresher, but he knows that within a day or two she will start to bloat and insects will come. The bleach has been splashed around to keep anything off of her for a while. He is grateful for that, at least.

Tom kneels down to her and strokes her arm, up to her shoulder and then her hair. He sits there looking at her in the harsh light of his torch beam until he cannot bear it and turns it off. In the dark he does something he has not done since primary school. He prays.

In the cathedral the memories scorch his eyes from the inside.

“They just left her there; they just left her there with the cockroaches,” he howls like a wild animal.

Jim looks across from Tom, to his daughter as she stands tall, listening to the story of her own death. He cannot tell what she feels, or if she knows this part of the story at all. Maybe she had watched Tom find her that day, and sit with her lifeless form. Jim feels such sorrow for her.

Tom snorts away tears and snot before he continues.

“I didn’t have any plan. There was no power in the house but I found a candle and lit that. She looked so … I ran a bath and washed her. She was stiff, hard to maneuver at first but it was lessening and the bath helped. She looked so beautiful when I’d cleaned her up. I cut her nails and her hair a little. Then I wrapped her in a sheet I found—it wasn’t totally clean but it was better than nothing.”

Tom closes his eyes and remembers how she looked as she lay before him that night so long ago—pale but radiant in death. That night he cradled her head in his arms and spoke to her, told her all the things he’d always wanted to say but was too shy. He told her how much he loved her. He remembers kissing her one last time.

“As I sat there with her I realized I couldn’t let anyone else see her and think she’d chosen that awful death. I thought about taking her body away and burying her—but I knew I couldn’t do
that to you two.” He looks to Jim and Patty. “I had to let her be found, but not like that. I knew there was no way I could fool any pathologist or coroner; toxicology reports would show she was a chronic user and … and that would have been it. I didn’t know what to do but knew I couldn’t let the world think she—” He can’t finish the sentence.

“What did you do?” Jim asks.

“I made her comfortable and then I left her—just for a little while. I called Franco again. I told him what I’d found.”

“I am so profoundly sorry, my friend,” Franco had said, then he paused. Possibly realizing he had used the word “friend.” “You are a worry to me.”

“I can’t let her be seen like that, Franco. I can’t let the world know her like that.”

“You want history to remember her as a victim?”

“I want … those who loved her to remember the wonderful woman she would have become. Not the girl who lost her way and couldn’t get back.”

“You love her?”

“With all my heart.”

Franco had sighed. “This all very
Romeo and Juliet
. You are lucky I am a big romantic. Go back to your sweetheart and sit with her for a while. A man will be with you soon. Do as he tells you.”

“Thank you, Franco.”

“I am not doing this for you, Policeman,” Franco tells him and then rings off.

Tom goes back to the house and sits with Dani.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, stroking her face.

Then he begins to recite poetry to her. He had spent hours learning dozens of love poems for her—for the night he hoped they would be lovers. This is the closest he will ever come.

Finally, at around 10:30 p.m., there is a pummeling on the door and Tom goes down to answer it. Before him stands a tall, thin man with a long face. He has a pencil moustache that sits on his upper lip as if it’s been inked there. He’s dressed in the uniform of a detective inspector.

“You PC Fucking Romeo?” he asks.

Tom can only nod slowly.

“DI Dent.” He pushes inside. “Where’s Juliet?”

Tom treads up the stairs with Dent following, into the room with Dani.

When he sees her Dent gives a little wolf whistle. “She’s a looker.” He moves her head from side to side. “Dead thirty-six to forty-eight hours.” He touches her shoulder. “Branded—she was their Snow White, for any hardworking dwarf that wanted his wick dipped.”

Tom feels bile rise.

Dent touches her leg and swollen hip.

“And they fucked her bandy.”

Tom screams and swings a punch at Dent—but the older man is pistol quick. He feints to the side and drops Tom with a fist into the kidney. Tom falls and Dent grabs his arm and twists. Tom yells in pain.

“This is no fucking pantomime, you idiot. If you want your girlfriend to come out of this without looking like a whore you need to think like the shits that put her here. We need to lose the
brand—the hip works for us. Makes it look like she was forced.” He lets Tom go.

“How do we lose the brand?”

“We cut it or burn—”

“No!”

“She’s dead. The dead don’t feel pain.”

With a look of contempt, Dent walks out the door and down the stairs. Tom sits there, at Dani’s feet, lost.

“Are you fucking coming?” Dent calls up the stairs. With a last look at Dani, Tom leaves and heads down. The front door is open. Through it Tom can just about see the disappearing form of DI Dent. Tom bounds after him, catching up with him as he climbs into a squad car.

“Where are we going?”

Dent looks up at him from the driver’s seat.

“Just get in the fucking car, lover boy.”

Tom holds his anger in check and gets into the passenger seat. Dent pulls away from the curb. Tom turns to see the house disappear from view.

“Can you—” Tom starts.

“Button it. Look I don’t know how but you’ve got some seriously fucking important friends and I have been told to do whatever I can to make your lady friend smell sweet as a newborn.”

“I—”

“I said, button it. I don’t want to hear your stories. We need two things to make this work. Number one—we need some clean samples. Blood sample, piss and cotton swabs from a clean mouth.”

They drive in silence for another ten minutes and pull up in front of a regular residential house.

“Come on.”

Dent gets out and walks up to the house, Tom follows. Dent pulls keys out of his pocket and opens the door. Tom stops on the threshold.

“Is this your house?”

“Yes—get in.”

Dent walks in and heads upstairs, turning the lights on as he goes. Inside the house is really nice. Tom can see the quality of the carpets and the wallpaper. All the way up the stairs are paintings.