Praise for Graeme Cameron

‘If you loved Graeme Cameron’s Normal, you’d better hold on tight, because his exceptional follow-up hits it out of the park. Shot through with dry humour and darkness, and starring a female detective who will blow your mind, Dead Girls is an utterly compulsive read’

Fiona Cummins

‘Deeply creepy and very clever story’

Heat

‘An utterly compelling crime novel with an unforgettable heroine. I hope this is only the start of Ali’s story’

Elly Griffiths

‘Hypnotic and chilling – you won’t forget this in a hurry’

Lee Child

‘Blackly humorous …. Normal marks Cameron out as one to watch’

Daily Express

‘Original and gripping’

Clare Mackintosh

‘I didn’t like Normal. I loved it’

Michael Robotham

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Graeme Cameron 2018

Graeme Cameron asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9781474046688

For Helen Cadbury, the best and bravest

and

For Derek

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Episode 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Episode 2

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Meanwhile . . .

Episode 3

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Episode 4

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Episode 5

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Episode 6

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Acknowledgments

Extract

About the Publisher

‘Something’s wrong.’

Detective Sergeant Eli Diaz, formerly of Thetford CID, latterly seconded to the Major Investigation Team at Police Headquarters, and until today engaged in the search for a number of young women missing from across the county, took a moment to consider the redundancy of his statement.

He was standing at the foot of a metal-framed single bed, bolted into the ground through the black rubber floor. The bed was in a steel mesh cage some twenty feet across, the cage in a basement, the basement concealed beneath a garage, the garage nestled beside a stone cottage in a twenty-acre clearing in the forest.

It belonged to a man largely suspected, at least until that moment, of harbouring Erica Shaw, formerly a missing young woman, latterly upgraded to the status of fugitive, and last seen in front of the garage an hour ago, shooting one person dead and attempting to kill two of Eli’s fellow detectives before effecting her escape.

And now one of those detectives, Sergeant Ali Green, formerly of Norwich CID, latterly of the aforementioned Major Investigation Team, and currently somewhere up there alone with that man, was not answering her phone.

Diaz snatched up his own phone from the floor where he’d thrown it and made for the door of the cage, throwing an afterthought of a wave at a constable who was about to feel very alone and decidedly uneasy. ‘Keep trying to call her,’ he barked.

He took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the splintering pain in his skull from misjudging the height of the false cupboard as he burst through into the garage.

‘Green,’ he snapped, seizing on the first pair of eyes to meet his own; one of the DCs from Norwich Road, he thought. Winters or Winterbourne or something. ‘Have you seen Ali Green?’

A shrug. A confused shake of the head. A voice from somewhere behind him: ‘She’s with the owner. They were heading to the house.’

‘Fuck.’ Less a word than a grunt, choked by panic. Diaz bolted from the garage into chaos and driving rain, shouldering aside the crime scene techs struggling to erect a white tent over the body on the drive, forgetting his breathing, legs out of sync, staggering at full tilt toward the house, nothing like the machine he imagined himself on his morning run, as though the absence of lycra and trainers and a Fitbit reduced him to a gangly, stumbling foal.

He knew before he got there that he was out of control and wasn’t going to stop, that if the door didn’t break when he hit it, then this was going to hurt.

It was ajar. He wasn’t expecting that. It cannoned back on its hinges, barely slowing his progress, and his feet found a bundle of coats and an overturned hat stand and then he was sliding on his face across the hallway, breath punched out of his lungs, skin peeling from his nose and elbows and knees.

He didn’t notice the pain. Fear had him on his feet and pushing off from the wall that had further dented his head and he whirled around from door to door, from kitchen to stairs to living room.

He stopped dead still and held his breath; strained his ears over the roar of the rain and the chatter of radios and uniforms and diesel engines.

Silence.

He gambled on the kitchen, sliding to the edge of the door frame and peering inside. Empty. Chair upturned. A slippery crimson mess on the splintered oak floor. His stomach flipped and he tasted bile in his throat. Christ no, what did he do to her?

Opposite the kitchen, the living room. The door open. A sense of something inside. A sofa. A spray of dark hair. Stillness.

Diaz panted three painful breaths and, with one eye on the top of the stairs, edged to the door, darting his head just far enough inside to get a snapshot of the room.

Empty, except for her.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. His back to the hallway. His ears wide open. ‘Green?’

No reply.

‘Ali?’ he snapped, loud enough to startle himself.

Nothing.

He blew out the adrenaline from his lungs. Checked the stairs again. Winced at the pain in his head. Squeezed his fingers into his palms and nodded some kind of vain self-encouragement. Then he said, ‘It’s okay, I’m here,’ and stepped inside the room.

It was cold. Cold, and still, and quiet. The television was on, but it wasn’t regular programming, it was something else, and Diaz knew what from a single glance. It was a high-definition feed from inside the cage, where the constable he’d just left behind was still poking at his phone, presumably searching for a number he didn’t have.

It was dark, too. The curtains were drawn across both of the windows, one to the front and one to the side, and the lamps were off and the fire unlit and everything was shadow; the hulking bookcases overstuffed with books and trinkets and paperwork, the corner tables with their strange disfigurines, the long, low couch and the wingback chairs and the coffee table with the two full mugs and the solitary mobile phone – everything but the TV screen and the dome of light that it cast, unflickering but dancing with particles of dust, and reflected as two tiny pinpricks of silver in Ali Green’s eyes.

They were open, but vague, unfocused. Her legs had fallen open and her hands lay at her sides, fingers curled into her upturned palms, and her hair was splayed roughly over the back of the sofa where she’d slumped down in her seat. Her mouth was open and as Diaz knelt, cursing, between her knees, he could see the pool of saliva around her tongue and hear it bubbling in her throat as she took each shallow, unsteady breath.

‘Ali,’ he whispered, suddenly painfully aware of the silence and the need to preserve it, to hear whatever small sound she might make, should it be her last. ‘Can you hear me?’ He placed a hand on her arm and could feel a trembling that he couldn’t see, a vibration almost, from deep inside her somewhere, but she didn’t respond, didn’t so much as blink.

He leaned in closer then, moved to put his lips to her ear, but the blood stopped him. A thin trail, trickling through the neat channel between her ear – such delicate ears, he noted, and pointed sweetly at the top, like pixie ears – and the back of her jaw, and down the side of her neck and onto the collar of her shirt, to bloom inside her jacket.

He painfully swallowed his breath and rocked back on his haunches and pulled out his phone from his pocket and said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, Ali, you’re going to be okay,’ as calmly as he could, as though he believed it. And he punched in the code to unlock the phone, and keyed in the number to summon help, and he looked up into her eyes and was startled to see that she was looking right back at him in piercing focus, and her lips were moving as though she were trying to speak, and he let the phone drift away from his ear as he nodded and said, ‘You’re okay,’ and placed a comforting hand on her knee.

‘B—’ she whispered. ‘B—’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, shaking his head and nodding at the same time and hearing the voice on the other end of the phone and shushing and telling her, ‘Help’s coming. Just relax, you’ll be okay. We’re going to find him.’

And he raised the phone back to his ear, and the voice on the phone said, ‘Sarge?’ and Ali Green said, ‘Beh—’ and a single tear rolled down her cheek, and his breath caught in his throat and in the second before she closed her eyes, one of the tiny spots of silver turned black.

And all he could think of to say was, ‘He’s behind me, isn’t he.’

EPISODE 1

Chapter 1

T wo months later

It’s funny, isn’t it, how your mind can always find a way to surprise you? Take mine, for example. After thirty-four years together, I like to think I know it pretty well. And having spent the whole of my childhood being forcibly drummed into myself, and most of my adult life breaking my back to conform to it, God knows I should. And yet, here I was with an unexpected dilemma.

I could hear my phone ringing over the splashing and thumping coming from the bathroom, and I knew that at six in the morning the call was likely important enough that I should answer it. But I didn’t know where I’d left it, and that was a problem.

Normally, like anyone else, I’d crawl out of bed, take a moment to steady myself and for my head to stop spinning, and I’d assume I’d left it in my bag and that my bag was in the lounge, and I’d go find it. And if it wasn’t there and had stopped ringing, I’d call it from the house phone and sooner or later I’d track it down and return the call and receive some bad news and then drink a gallon of coffee in the vain hope that it might make me somewhat safe to drive, and I’d get dressed in a hurry and be on my way.

But I couldn’t do that, not this morning. For one thing, unlike most mornings, I was completely naked under the duvet, and the one eye I could open was so blurry and achey that I couldn’t see any of my clothes. Which, given the mortifying likelihood of bumping into whoever was about to jump out of the shower, meant wrapping myself in a king-size quilt and stumbling around trying to figure out the layout of this house, which, I dimly realised, wasn’t mine.

And now the ringing had stopped, and the light shafting through the thin blind was a dagger to my skull, and then the shower was abruptly silent and my heart began to thump against my ribs and all I could think to do was pull the covers over my head and pretend I didn’t exist.

I don’t know how long I waited. I heard footsteps on the landing, the creaking of stairs; assorted kitchen clangs and clunks and tinkles. My phone again. Damn it. And then the footsteps coming back up the stairs, and the ringing getting louder, and oh God, it was coming into the room.

‘Hmm.’

I froze.

‘Well I’m sure she was in here a few minutes ago.’ A woman’s voice, faintly familiar. ‘Where on earth could she be?’

Dazed now, utterly confused. The phone still ringing. A clunk above my head – a mug on the table? A weight beside me, the edge of the bed sagging beneath it, pulling me towards it.

‘Are you alive under there?’

I took three breaths, and nodded.

‘Are you nodding?’

I shook my head, and heard a giggle.

‘There’s coffee here. And your phone’s ringing.’

‘I know,’ I croaked. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll just leave it here for you. Are you hungry?’

I wasn’t sure. Horror kind of feels like hunger, right? ‘Probably.’

‘Bathroom’s free,’ she said, and patted my hip through the duvet. ‘I’ll let you answer that.’ Then she stood up and was gone.

I unscrewed my eyes and eased the duvet aside. Blinked the blinding light out of them. There was a plain green mug steaming on the bedside table, face cream and biscuits and tissues and a library book shoved aside to make room. And on the floor beside the bed, my bag, jangling incessantly.

I reached down, hissing away a twinge in my back, and dug out my phone. I begged it to stop ringing, but someone was unshakeably determined to speak to me. Kevin, as it turned out. I answered. ‘Kevin,’ I sighed.

‘Ali,’ said Kevin, ‘it’s Kevin.’ Which I knew. ‘Where are you?’

I have no fucking idea. ‘What do you mean, where am I? I’m in bed. It’s fuck-off o’clock in the morning. What do you want?’

‘It’s six eighteen,’ he said, ‘the sun’s been up for over an hour and you need to be here twenty minutes ago.’

From the gentle mooing in the background, I deduced that he was most likely overdramatising. ‘I can hear cows,’ I yawned, and peeked inside the little drawer of the bedside table. It was full of hair ties and old sweets, pastel-coloured biros and Blu Tack and various kinds of charger.

‘I’m standing in a field.’

‘Sounds thrilling,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got the wrong Monday. I’m not back until next week.’ I picked up the library book; The Good Girl, it was called. I cringed.

‘Not any more.’

‘I think you’ll find I am,’ I laughed. Laughing made my forehead throb. My mouth tasted like a badger’s arse. ‘I only saw Occy Health on Friday. I’m still off sick, I’m in bed, I’ve got another headache which you’ve just given me, I’ve got a million and one things to do today, none of which involve farm animals, I’m desperate for a wee, and unless the next thing you say to me is “I’m sorry, Ali, pret—” no, “Sarge. I’m sorry, Sarge, pretend I never rang, take care of yourself, have a good weekend,” I swear to God I’m going to hunt you down and beat you savagely about the face and neck. In a week.’ She was using her library card as a bookmark. It said Edith Macfarlane on it. Christ on a bike, I knew her.

‘I am sorry,’ he sniggered as my heart sank further into my bottom. ‘DCI says otherwise. I thought you’d had a call already, but I guess I’m not surprised. Whatever, this one’s kind of got your name on it.’ He waited for what seemed like days for me to ask him what he meant, but it was quite obviously nothing I wanted to hear, so I didn’t. Also, I was holding my breath in an effort not to wet the bed. Finally, he said, ‘We’ve found John Fairey.’

And I exhaled.

The bathroom was still warm, the window and the mirror still steamed over from Edith’s tenure. The dregs of her bathwater lingered in the bottom of the tub, sending my feet aslither as I cranked open the shower. I braced myself against the tile, gritted my teeth through the cycle of polar-cold and scar-hot until the water settled on a comfortable shade of warm. I scrubbed myself with Edith’s soap until the knot of panic began to unravel. Lathered with Edith’s shampoo. I rinsed the strands of Edith’s hair from my fingers as they attracted to me from Edith’s conditioner bottle. I would have used Edith’s facial scrub, but there was only a small squeeze left in the tube. Instead, barely five minutes after I got in, I shut off the water and, in spite of it still being damp, dried myself with Edith’s towel.

Thankfully, I did have my own clothes, although they were crumpled and smelled of pub and my knickers were a bit the worse for wear. Hearing Edith still downstairs, I eased open the top drawer of her dresser, avoiding my own eye contact in the mirror as I rooted around in the tangle of loosely balled briefs at the back, behind all the neatly folded silky arrangements. I tugged a pair free and shook them out. Hello Kitty. Fine, whatever.

Everything else would have to do. My bra was on its third outing, the cropped black denims maybe their sixth. I had a bright yellow off-the-shoulder top that was okay under the arms but reeked of booze and perfume everywhere else, although deodorant and fresh air would sort that, probably. And I had at least had the accidental foresight to wear shoes I could run in, inclined as I was to duck my head and sprint straight out the door.

But to where?

I gingerly opened the blind, shielding my eyes with my spare hand and squinting through my fingers at the view. There wasn’t much of one; just a row of boxy houses on the other side of the street, driveways lined with German and Swedish cars in various shades of black and grey, including the one directly below the window. Mine is bright red, so it was immediately apparent that it wasn’t there. God, where the hell was it? And, more to the point, where the hell was I?

Edith was easier to locate. She was at the breakfast table, and she greeted me with a ‘Hey’ and a smile. Nothing between the lines; just your usual good-morning pleasantry. She’d clearly been listening out for me; she’d poured me a fresh cup of coffee and a bowl of Rice Krispies and the latter were still popping and cracking, or whatever it is they do. ‘Made you breakfast.’

I sat across from her, silently giving thanks for my complexion; the Middle-Eastern half of me is all on the outside, so I don’t burn in the sun and, more importantly, I blush very, very quietly. ‘Morning,’ I said, my deliberate effort to keep a steady voice naturally achieving the opposite. ‘Thanks.’

‘Sleep well?’

My insides recoiled in horror. Was it a trick question? Could she tell that I had no recollection of the night before? ‘Like a baby,’ I said. ‘You?’

Another neutral smile. ‘As well as can be expected. Did you find your towel?’

Oh. ‘Yes,’ I lied, giving it away by shaking my head at the same time. ‘Thank you.’

I watched her read the Independent as I crunched a mouthful of cereal, wishing there was a radio or television to muffle the sound of my munching. Her own efforts seemed so much more refined than mine.

She’d finished dressing; a black tailored five-button jacket with matching skirt to just below the knee. Her legs stretched beneath the table, her ankles – slender, lightly tanned – crossed comfortably beside my own. Chestnut hair lowlighted in black, thrown up into a loose ponytail. Sunlight, splayed and rainbowed by the flowers and antique bottles on the windowsill, playing on the triangles of her neck, settling in the hollow of her collarbone where it peeked from behind her shirt. The swell of her breas—

‘You okay?’ See anything you like?

I looked up, startled. Felt my face flush. ‘Hmm?’

She folded the paper and tossed it aside, slid her coffee close to her and spooned in sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table. ‘You don’t look very well,’ she said, circling the spoon handle at me as though casting a spell. ‘You’re not going to throw that back up, are you?’

I realised I had a mouthful of lukewarm milk and soggy Rice Krispies which, somewhere along my train of distraction, I’d somehow forgotten to swallow. I did so now. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, flatly.

She gave a cynical snort. ‘Oh, really?’ Stirred her coffee. ‘I’ve seen you looking fine, and it didn’t look like that.’ Raised it to her lips, blew primly across the surface before taking a sip. ‘You’re not upset with me, are you?’

I dropped my spoon into the half-empty cereal bowl and pushed it away, my appetite lost. ‘Of course not.’ Mortified, yes. Confused, bemused and deeply, shamefully embarrassed, but not upset.

‘Good, because . . . you know . . .’

Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. ‘I know.’

‘I mean, it’s not like . . .’

‘No, I know.’

‘I mean, I had a great time last night, but—’

I choked on my coffee. ‘But now I have to go to work,’ I smiled.

She smiled back, and thought for a moment and then looked at the table and nodded firmly and said, ‘Yeah. Me too.’

‘Only I don’t know where my car is.’

‘Ah,’ she chuckled. ‘You left it at the pub, remember?’

No.

‘I’ll drop you off,’ she said. ‘Ready in five?’

I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say, really, so I just blurted out, ‘I borrowed some knickers. Hope you don’t mind.’

She gave a snort and a sideways look. ‘No, that’s fine,’ she laughed. ‘Just . . . have a good day, okay? Be careful, and don’t work too hard.’

‘Oh, I don’t intend to,’ I laughed. Riding out on a shudder of relief at the rapid change of subject, it was a laugh I would have found disproportionate and vaguely chilling were it directed at me. Fortunately, Edith either didn’t notice or at least had the good grace not to raise an eyebrow. ‘I’m . . .’ trying to think of something to say . . . ‘planning on shouting at my boss for dragging me out, and being home in time for Cash in the Attic.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ she agreed, and then giggled to herself. ‘Hey, you know what’d be even better?’

‘What?’

‘Tango & Cash in the Attic.’

Ha ha.

I knew I’d be fixed by lunchtime. The cold light of day would see my head straight and my priorities in order in no time. Or at least that was what I thought.

As it turned out, the light of day was already as hot as the belly of Hell when I stepped from my car onto flame-scorched sand, hung my badge from its lanyard around my neck, and entered a world of violence and horror for the likes of which even the most depraved of my many nightmares had left me woefully underprepared.

It was 6.59 a.m. My name is Alisha Green, and this, to the best of my understanding, is the truth about Erica Shaw.

Chapter 2

A squirrel darted a stuttering dash along the bough above my head, twitching its velvety grey nose at the edges of the shadows among the leaves and sniffing suspiciously at the encroaching sunlight. In the dense cover high above, a lone woodpigeon flexed its wings and fluttered the sleep from its rumpled feathers. He looked like he’d had a rough night.

I looked worse, if my reflection in the car window was anything to go by. I’d had them both open all the way here, and my undried hair had frizzed up into a bouffant bird’s nest. I slipped the hairband from my wrist and bundled the mess into a rough, damp knot at the base of my neck. If it didn’t improve me, it might at least give the pigeon second thoughts about moving in.

I propped my foot on the sun-bleached picnic trestle beside the car and bent to tighten my shoelace. A pair of wasps buzzed hungrily around the rubbish bin beside me, keeping a respectful distance from one another as they took turns to dive inside for a bite. A third investigated the sticky rim of a Coke can, idly dropped in the grass not three feet away, the silvered peaks of its crushed carcass shimmering thousands of tiny jewels of light across the fixed-penalty warning notice plastered to the receptacle. No Littering. Maximum fine £2,500. The futility of mandatory environmental correctness, summed up in a shiny red aluminium nutshell. I picked up the can and disposed of it properly. The wasp didn’t flinch.

This, right here, is the kind of peace I crave: the earlymorning sun prickling my upturned face; the idle lapping of the river against the pebbles on the bank; the soft quirrup of ducklings perpetually distracted from the arduous task of keeping up with mum; the merest whisper of distant traffic, just there enough to temper the isolation without intruding on the blissful, cossetting quiet of—

‘Oi! Pocahontas! Over here!’

Oh. Right. Kevin.

I took in a lingering lungful of cowshit and pollen.

Geoff Green – no relation – greeted me with an indifferent nod as I slipped between my Alfa and the adjacent patrol car. I’d seen the burly constable around often enough to know his name, but his snakelike eyes and disdainful demeanour had always deterred me from wanting to know much more about him. Whether he perpetually wished he were somewhere else, or simply didn’t like the look of me any more than I did him, I couldn’t entirely tell. Nor did I particularly care.

Geoff had been left in charge of guarding the inner perimeter. It was clearly a hurried affair, the blue-and-white warning tape sagging between posts speared skew-wiff and at random intervals into the sandy earth as it bisected the picnic site. It also seemed a somewhat extraneous measure, given that the access road was barricaded by patrol cars at its inception half a mile back, the car park entrance was itself taped and guarded, and a fourth cordon encircled what seemed to be the object of the collective attention – a burned-out car slumped at the far side of the clearing.

If I’d known him better, I might have accused Geoff of erecting the barrier himself, just to look as though he had something important to do. However, half a dozen years having passed between us without the need for small talk, and with neither of us any more inclined than the other to fix what wasn’t broken, I kept my suspicions to myself and simply returned Geoff’s sulky nod as I ducked under the tape, which he lifted just high enough to garrotte me had I not been half-expecting it.

At the other end of the mood swing, and entirely at odds with his tone on the phone, Kevin McManus was a veritable grin on a stick. He picked through a maze of yellow plastic markers and staked-off squares of sand, sterile suit rustling, teeth flashing, arms wide like he thought he was going to get a hug. ‘You know, for a minute I thought you might blow me out,’ he crowed, his voice sounding hollow and windswept against the squawk and chatter of radios and crime scene techs and the rattle and hum of a diesel generator.

‘Save it,’ I warned him. ‘You’re at the top of my shitlist today.’

‘Well, aren’t we the little ray of sunshine?’ In defiance of the mechanics of the human face, and presumably working on the assumption that I was joking, he broadened his smile to within a whisker of obscuring his own vision. ‘Listen, don’t go shooting the messenger, okay? You know I wouldn’t kick you out of bed without—’

I choked on my own spit.

‘I mean. . . You know, drag you out of—’

‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

Oh, Jesus Christ, Kevin. ‘Anyone you like. Take your time, I’ve got all day.’

‘John,’ he remembered, with none of the exaggerated embarrassment you or I might affect when caught with our wits down. Instead, he ran a hand through his dark, wiry mop and scratched at the short patch over his crown, a remnant of a recent pistol-whipping. ‘He’s, um . . . in the car,’ he said. ‘I think.’

‘You think?’

‘Well, it’s . . .’ He glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the car and just sort of sighed.

‘What about DC Keith? Any sign?’ John Fairey hadn’t been alone when he’d seemingly vanished into thin air; there was no trace of the freshly minted detective he’d snagged for a dogsbody, either.

Kevin gave me a shrug and a sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get you a suit,’ he said.

‘Where’s Mal?’

‘The what?’ Kevin dropped a fetching pair of white rubber boots at my feet and handed me the paper jumpsuit he’d retrieved from the back of the nearby CSI van. He’d tried to flirt with Sandra, the duty pathologist, but she was on the phone and had batted him away with an irritable glare. His smile had faded rapidly.

‘Mal,’ I repeated. ‘Mal Lowry. He should be here.’

Kevin narrowed his eyes and nodded with a look that said No shit, Sherlock. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got personal problems, right?’

I didn’t know what he meant by that; I just knew it didn’t explain where my DCI was. I flattened the suit out on the ground and slipped my feet into the leg holes. ‘You know what else I can’t see?’ I pulled it up to my waist and realised I had it back to front.

‘What?’

‘Any bodies in that car. Where are they?’ Did I turn the suit once or twice? It now appeared to be upside down.

‘I was getting to that.’ Kevin eyed the jumpsuit curiously as I attempted vainly to pass it behind my back without reversing it. ‘Do you want a hand?’

‘Could you?’ I don’t know how many of these godforsaken things I’ve had to clamber into over the course of my career, but it’s one of those tasks – most of which, come to think of it, seem to involve items of apparel – for which practice will never make perfect. I will never be able tie an apron behind my back, and I will never be able to get into a front-fastening one-piece paper jumpsuit without the assistance of a third party. Fact of life.

‘Don’t worry about Lowry,’ he said, which seemed strange, because I wasn’t. ‘Just enjoy the peace and quiet while it lasts.’ He turned me around by the shoulders, scrunched the suit up in his hands and squatted behind me, tapping each of my legs in turn as he wanted them lifted and lowered. ‘’Scuse fingers.’

‘Keep them below the knee,’ I laughed. ‘Geoff’s watching.’

The constable looked casually away as Kevin yanked the suit up over my hips and said, ‘I think he’s got the hots for you, you know.’

I stifled a chuckle. ‘Well, he all but pulls my hair every time he sees me,’ I said.

‘Boys are always mean to girls they like,’ he agreed, standing to guide my arms into the appropriate holes and slide the shoulders of the suit up onto my own. ‘You can manage the zip on your own, right?’

I gave him a withering look and said, ‘Ha bloody ha. Who called us?’ as I fumbled hopelessly with the zip and Kevin pretended not to notice the trembling in my fingers.

‘The usual,’ he said, handing me a full-face particulate mask. ‘Dog walker. Said his dog wouldn’t stop barking at it, so he took a peek. Watches a lot of true crime shows.’

‘Him or the dog?’

‘Not sure.’

‘What time?’

‘Five thirty-five.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I sent him home. He’ll come in this afternoon if we need him to.’

‘You talked to him yourself?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did he seem?’

‘Genuine.’

I nodded and snapped the mask over my head and Kevin did the same. ‘Ogay,’ I said, waving to Sandra and getting a thumbs-up in return. ‘Ned dayg a nook.’

There was no denying it was my old partner’s Mondeo. I’d spent a lot of hours staring pointedly out of the window of that car, or gripping the sides of my seat, or instinctively thumping my right foot onto an imaginary brake pedal. I was in it when he creased the wheel arch against a bollard, and I was standing right where I was now when he kicked the dent into the front wing in anger at some humiliation or other. My seat was gone, just a buckled metal frame remaining. The worn carpet in the footwell was gone, too – in fact everything was gone; it was just a ravaged shell. But those dents were as good as a fingerprint.

It wasn’t blue any more. It was orange and black and brown, rust and soot and death. It sat sadly on its sills in the sand, one back door hanging limp on twisted hinges. The roof sagged from front to back, the tailgate bent on its frame so that the lid reared up, arched like a mouth shrieking in horror. And in that mouth was what I could only assume were the remains of my two former colleagues.

Bone is bone. It doesn’t really look like anything else. I suppose I could have convinced myself it was coral, or pebbles at a push, but I didn’t bother to try. It was a grey rubble of bone, fragmented, cemented with splatters of rain-pasted ash. To my untrained eye it could have been anyone, or anything. Sure, I know all the words; I read the same books you read. Skull sutures. Pubic symphysis. Phalanges, which just reminds me of Phoebe from Friends. I could even tell you what they mean, and relate the most reliable method of estimating the height of a person from their skeleton, or of determining the gender and racial profile of a skull. But I’m no more than an armchair expert; my opinion isn’t worth the calories I’d expend merely forming it, and the jigsaw puzzle in front of me now was far beyond my understanding of how a person could even begin to make sense of it. And so, knowing in my gut that this was the final resting place of Detective Inspector John Fairey and Detective Constable Julian Keith, I resisted the urge to plunge my hand into the ashes, pull out a shard of calcined something-or-other and shout ‘Aha’, and I walked away from the car.

‘Okay, first screamingly obvious things first,’ I said, once I’d flicked the mask off my face and could breathe again. I pointed at the square of blackened grass beneath my feet; one of a dozen I could see, evidence of a summer of careless barbecuing. ‘There are burn marks just about everywhere except under the car. Who’s out looking for the crime scene?’

Kevin looked from me to the car and back again, and scratched the back of his head. ‘Not organised that yet,’ he said, which I had to concede was an accurate if inexhaustive statement. ‘Been a little bit busy on my own here. I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet.’

Signed off till Monday. Not going to feel guilty for having breakfast. ‘You’ve done a good job,’ I said, although I knew Sandra had probably beaten him here and taken control of the scene herself. ‘We haven’t got the whole car here. The bumpers, the tyres, all of the plastic and rubber bits that have melted off. They’re not here. We’re missing a debris field. Plus there are no drag marks, but there’s a trail of mud and oil at least all the way back to the top of the road. See?’ I indicated a set of thick, wide-treaded tyre tracks printed in clods of earth and clay, leading to and from the Mondeo and punctuated by a circular swirl on the tarmac at the entrance to the picnic site. ‘Someone carried it here on a tractor, right? Frontloader, teleporter, whatever you want to call it.’

Kevin nodded. ‘Which was thoughtful of them.’

‘Ha. So who, and why now? It’s been two months.’

He thought about it for a moment. Scratched his head. ‘Is there anything significant about the date?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

I knew where he was going to go before he went there. ‘Well, if we were in a film, I’d say The perp is sending us a message, but . . . we’re not, are we?’

‘Well, you might be,’ I conceded, ‘but whoever dumped this here isn’t. We’ve got a convenient trail of breadcrumbs, but it’s just muddy tyre marks and you can’t really engineer those. If they lead all the way to the burn site, it’s an accident. Also, never say “perp” again. You sound like an idiot.’

‘Agreed.’

‘It’s a pretty thin theory, isn’t it?’

‘Kind of.’

‘So what am I going to find when I leave you here to chase around after Sandra and go follow that trail by myself?’

‘Oh, come on!’

Chapter 3

No, you come on. I was tired, hungover, thirsty, more than a little confused, and I wasn’t even supposed to be here today or indeed any day this week, and I thought a nice gentle drive in the countryside would do me good. Frankly, I thought it was probably a waste of time; you can only load your tyres with so much muck, so the trail was bound to go cold in short order, leaving me free to pop into the nearby village and buy some sugary drinks for myself and maybe even Kevin, if I was feeling more generous by then.

He didn’t put up too much of a fight, either. He was obviously enjoying his moment, peacocking around the place as the only – and therefore most senior – detective on the scene. He probably had another hour to enjoy it, so I was happy to let him. And Geoff was clearly happy to let me go, too, because he lifted the tape clean over my head this time.

The trail was laughably easy to follow; clumps of earth and sand and clay, and weeds snatched out from the verge by a vehicle clearly a few inches wider than the single-track road. And leaky, too. Whether it was oil or hydraulic fluid, it shone beautifully in the sunlight, a spot the size of my fist every ten yards or so.

I was in no hurry. I didn’t even touch the throttle, just stuck it in second and let the clutch out and allowed the car to roll along at its own leisure. It was that kind of morning. The roadblock slid lazily aside to let me out, and we all exchanged smiles and waves as I idled by. Then I was free, turning right onto the little B-road that led to the village, and immediately I knew my hopes for a jolly to the shops were dashed because there were muddy tracks and spots of oil on the other side of the road, too, and I only had to follow them for a couple of miles before they arced left onto a wide concrete track and escaped under a three-bar metal gate.

I stopped the car, and sighed, and thought about what I might do next. I knew exactly what I should do, but my mouth was dry and tasted evil, and my temples were threatening to throb, and I had no phone signal anyway, and the village was only a mile further down the road, so I thought fuck it and did that instead.

There was, thank God, a newsagent’s shop in the village, and it was open, if not altogether welcoming. A portly, ruddy-cheeked old chap in a tweed jacket eyed me from behind the counter in some kind of appraisal or other, his eyes boring into the back of my head as I grabbed three cans of coldish Coke from a chiller that was probably older than me. I forced myself not to meet his eye, instead scanning dusty shelves packed with canned goods and decade-old toys, looking for something I might want to eat at this time of the morning and happily finding a box of Nurofen that was, surprisingly, in date. That would do, although I grabbed a handful of Twixes and a mint Magnum for good measure and finally gave the guy a smile as I dumped the lot on the counter. ‘Morning,’ I said.

He gave me a tight nod and a casual ‘How are you today, officer?’ as he rang up the till.

My neck prickled and my breath caught in my throat and I instinctively flashed a look over my shoulder at the empty shop. Was his face familiar? Should it be? Was mine? ‘I’m sorry?’

He paused for a beat, then hit a button on the till with a sound like crashing thunder. The total flickered green on the little pop-up display. ‘How are you?’ he repeated.

I held his stare for a moment, perhaps a moment too long. His left eyelid began to twitch. ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Sorry, have we met?’

He narrowed his eyes, flickered an inscrutable thought and said, ‘I don’t think so, Miss, no. That’s six eighty-five.’

What does six eighty-five mean? Mind racing, panic setting in. This was not expected. ‘Six eight—’ I noticed the till then: £6.85, all squared off and glowing green. Right. ‘Right,’ I nodded, shaking the blankness out of my head and fumbling for my purse. Only then did I realise that I was still wearing the lanyard around my neck, which of course made me bark a startled laugh that must have made me look even more special than I already did. ‘Right,’ I reiterated, holding the badge up meekly as I handed the guy a tenner. ‘God, I thought you’d recognised me from somewhere. Sorry, I’m not awake yet,’ I smiled, in an effort to pretend I wasn’t suddenly entirely on edge.

He relaxed visibly, even if he didn’t return my grin. ‘Best part of the day,’ he said, handing me my change.

I took the opening. ‘It is peaceful,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you that. I don’t suppose you have the need to call my lot out too often, do you?’

He regarded me curiously, a blue twinkle flashing across his bloodshot eyes. I’m sure he knew as well as I did that I already knew the answer to that. He humoured me, though. ‘Not really,’ he agreed. ‘We don’t have a lot of differences we can’t take care of between us. They say strange things pass through here at night, but the streetlights go out at eleven so I don’t see none of ’em.’

I hid the shiver that ran down my spine, and asked him, ‘What about in the daytime?’

He just shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell me anything, but he might at least be able to save me some time, so I pressed on. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ I said, undeterred by his blank expression. ‘About a mile back that way, on the right-hand side, there’s a concrete track with a gate across it. Can you tell me where that goes?’

He gave it a moment’s thought. Probably figured it was nothing I couldn’t look up on a map anyway. ‘The old airfield,’ he said.

‘It’s not an airfield any more?’

‘Not since the war. Bomber base.’

‘So what is it now?’

‘Wheat and barley now.’

‘Can you tell me who owns it?’

‘That’ll be Giles.’

I waited for him to crack a smile, but his poker face was strong. ‘And Giles is a farmer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Farmer Giles.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I never heard it like that before,’ he said. ‘That’s funny,’ though he still didn’t smile.

I quit while I was ahead.

Farmer Giles timed his arrival perfectly. I knew full well that the creepy shopkeeper would phone him the second I was out the door, so I saved myself some hard work and just sat in the entrance to the old airfield until he turned up, which he did, in a brand-new Range Rover, just as I was nibbling the last of the chocolate from my ice cream stick.

‘Giles, is it?’ I said, stepping from the car as he did the same. ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. I’m Detective Sergeant Green. I was wondering if you might be able to help me out with something.’

‘Giles Wynne-Parker.’ He extended his hand to shake mine. ‘What can I do for you?’ Cut-glass accent. Neatly cropped hair, greying at the edges. Strong, dimpled chin.

I flicked the Magnum stick away to shake his hand. He watched it fly with a raised eyebrow. ‘Oops,’ I said. ‘There’s probably a law against that.’ I paused, just long enough for his face to register that his jig was up. ‘Your tractor could do with a service,’ I suggested, indicating the trail of oil on the ground.

Giles sighed and nodded at his strangely unmuddied Buckler boots. ‘I know,’ he conceded with a resigned smile. ‘It’s hydraulic fluid. I’ve got a leaking piston.’

‘I’d get that seen to before you leave any more anonymous donations,’ I said, ducking my head to peer up into his eyes. ‘But thanks for giving us our car back, we’ve been wondering where it went.’

He snapped his head up at that, and the eyes that met mine now were a little wider than they had been a moment ago. ‘Your car?’

‘Oh,’ I laughed, ‘yeah, it’s a police car. That’s not really the worst of it, though.’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ he said. ‘How much trouble am I in?’

I chewed over that for a moment; let a few scary thoughts roll through his head, just for the sake of it. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s not worry about that. I mean, yes, you’ve been a bit of a plank, honestly, and you did dump it right next to the sign telling you not to dump anything, which, you know, we could easily take as you sticking two fingers up at us, and on a personal level, I’m not actually supposed to be at work today, so I kind of wish you’d waited until Monday, but right now, what I really need more than anything is for you to take me to wherever you moved it from because there are a few bits still missing, and it’s also potentially a murder scene.’

The colour drained from his face faster than piss from a flushed toilet. ‘Murder?’

‘Why did it take you two months, Giles?’

‘Two months?’

‘That’s how long we’ve been looking.’

‘I . . .’ He shook his head, eyes wide, nervous. ‘We were away. Florida. We’ve only been back a fortnight, and I don’t really use this gate. The main one’s at the other end of the runway. There’s nothing over here. I only came because some of the chickens got out. I . . .’

‘Why didn’t you call us?’

‘Wh—’ He puffed out a sigh and shook his head. ‘Honestly?’

I waited for him to tell me that we wouldn’t have bothered coming, that the council wouldn’t have been interested in removing a burned-out car from a private field. And he’d have had a fair point, but he didn’t go there; he just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just how about you show me the spot, okay?’

He took a moment to breathe, and then nodded and said, ‘Sure. Okay.’ Then he took a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and unhooked the gate and opened it a crack and said, ‘You won’t need your car. It’s right over here.’

It was barely inside the gate, on a barren patch of clay off to the right of the track, shielded from the road by a grassy bank and from the rest of the farm by a clump of trees and overgrown bramble bushes. A twenty-foot black square, dotted with lumps of twisted, melted stuff, identifiable only by guesswork and its relative placement; a bumper here, a tyre there.

The ground was hard, but two months ago it hadn’t been; there were wheel tracks leading to the burn site, until this morning cast into the earth but now crumbled and flattened by Giles’ tractor, its hefty tyres overlaying them with a patchwork of deep chevrons. I tutted at him quietly, although it made no real difference; this was quite evidently the crime scene, however much he’d trampled on it.

And more than that, Giles had approached and retreated from the spot in a straight line, and hadn’t strayed around the edges of the square, and this, I realised as I surveyed the scene, might be very good news indeed. I turned to him as he stood awkwardly beside the Range Rover, picking at the skin around his thumbnail, and pointed at his car and asked him, ‘Giles, did you drive that over here at any point?’

He took a few steps towards me and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

I indicated the patch of ground between the scorch marks and the road. ‘You didn’t pull up alongside the car to have a look?’

‘No, definitely not.’

I nodded thanks, and looked back to where a second set of churned up tracks splintered off from the rest and curved around the burn site at the foot of the roadside bank, coming to an abrupt end a few yards beyond where the car had sat. As they straightened, they became clearer, and where they ended they were very clear indeed.

They were perfectly preserved, the tread pattern pressed into soft clay and then baked in the persistent sun, this heatwave of which the Great British Public had grown weary within a matter of days, but for which I now offered up a silent prayer of thanks.

‘So you’re telling me,’ I called, ‘that there’s no reason you know of for anything to have been parked here?’ He shook his head. I nodded mine, and took out my phone. Still no signal. I stood, gritted my teeth through a twinge in my hip, and joined him beside his car. ‘Next question,’ I said. ‘Have you got a phone on you that works? I need to make a call.’

I surveyed the scene as he mumbled and fumbled in his jacket. I didn’t know the circumstances. I didn’t know whether John and Julian had died here, and if so, whether they’d come of their own free will. But common sense told me this would be a strange place to arrange a meeting, especially with the kind of man who’d shared their final farewell.

Because, yes, as much as I didn’t know the order of events, I sure as hell knew who was responsible.

Sort of.

Chapter 4

I can’t remember his name, or what he looks like. However many times they tell me, or show me his picture, it’s always the same: within minutes, I’ve forgotten.

I’ve all but given up trying. His picture is only an e-fit anyway, and no one really knows his name; he went by so many that in the end they just picked one and stuck with it, even though they knew he’d stolen it from a baby’s grave. I tend to just call him That Man. That man who hurt me. That man who took away my memories, my hopes, my future. That man who all but killed me with his bare hands.

It’s not just the forgetting. There’s the falling down, too. Some days I can’t walk very well because the nerves to my right leg are fused, or snagged, or . . . something. I’ve got it all written down. In any case, I might be in the street, or in the supermarket – never anywhere soft like the garden or a bouncy castle – and oh! There it goes, folding under me like the bolt just fell out. It happened in the car once, and I couldn’t get to the brake and had to swerve into a hedge to avoid a cyclist. I didn’t tell anyone in case they stopped me from driving, but I’m scared sometimes.

Often, I feel like I’m not entirely inside myself, like I’ve fallen out of my body and haven’t quite slotted back in right. It’s like there’s a satellite delay between my body and my senses, like having a fever but, most days, without the cold sweats and the nausea. It’s surreal and a bit frightening, and when it happens it’s often accompanied by a little shock, like when something makes you jump. I used to pay good money to feel like that of an evening. I miss having the choice.

But it’s not every day. Some days I can walk and grip and find things funny. And there are a lot of things I can remember, too. Most days I can think of my own name, which comes up more often than you’d guess if you’ve never had to write it on your hand in biro.

I can remember liking broccoli, which makes me gag on sight now.

I can remember my wedding day, looking at my ridiculous cake of a dress in the mirror and wondering how I’d ever let him talk me into it. I can remember holding my decree absolute in my hands and trembling under the sudden weight of my freedom.

I can remember sunshine and walks in the park, watching other people’s children hurtle down the slide and boing around on those spring-mounted wooden horses, and wishing not to be among the throng of parents standing by with pride or impatience or overprotective anxiety or idle indifference, but to dare to come back when they’d all gone home and play on the rides myself.

I can remember our family Keycamp holiday in France, a hundred degrees, me at eight chaining Calippos in my mini bikini, my sister Reena at thirteen head-to-toe in black and wincing through cups of bitter coffee, trying to impress the pool boy with the 750 Suzuki. I can remember him offering her a ride to the beach on the pillion seat, and Dad’s face turning from brown to purple at the very idea. I can remember the sirens blaring past the caravan site when he roared off on it alone and died under a farm truck.

I can remember my first day at school, screaming for my mum while the other kids stared at me blankly, and I can remember my last day, laughing off my A-Level results and wondering how I was going to break the news at home.

I can remember all of my first days as a police officer; my first day of training, my first as a probationer on the beat, my first dead body, my first arrest of a blushing teenage shoplifter who didn’t run, struggle or even argue but just sat sadly in the back of the car, crying over the trouble he was in. I can remember my first day as a detective, my first incident room, my first post-mortem. And, clearest of all, I can remember the first time I knew I was going to die.

It was ten twenty-five, Tuesday morning, nine weeks ago. Twenty-six degrees C and pouring with rain. I was standing in the car park behind the constabulary’s headquarters, watching it bounce off the tarmac and soak through the canvas of my shoes. I was wearing a twenty-year-old pac-a-mac from Gap, which in the heat was keeping me as wet inside my clothes as out. I was confused.

I’d read the DNA results four times and I didn’t understand. The victim, Mark Boon, was a twenty-five-year-old convicted sex offender. He was one week dead, his neck snapped, his face slashed with a knife as an afterthought. His apartment, a grim, barely furnished sweatbox on a council estate north of the city, had been a mine of bodily secretions, hair, fibres, fingerprints. But none of it made sense.

His bed had been made up on the sofa, the stains all his. Though he ostensibly lived alone, the bathroom had been littered with women’s clothing and beauty products, and the one bedroom had reeked of perfume.

There had been three distinct DNA profiles in that room. One, naturally, had belonged to Mark Boon, and its make-up had been fairly repulsive: specks of blood on the skirting board, traces of vomit on the carpet, fossilised tissues under the bed.

The second had belonged to Erica Shaw, twenty years old, missing from home for three months by then but known to be very much alive. I’d seen her with my own eyes, two days before Boon’s murder, in That Man’s home – that man who, at the time, despite circumstantial evidence linking him to a disappearance, I suspected of being little more than an arrogant prick.

Erica seemed to have been sleeping in the bed; hair and other traces on the sheet and pillow, and her underwear strewn about the place. There was no indication that she’d shared the bed with Mark or with anyone else, or, crucially, that she’d touched anything but her own belongings. And that’s where it began to baffle me.

The third profile had been that of Erica’s best friend. Sarah Abbott had vanished on the same morning as Erica, and by all accounts she hadn’t been seen or heard from since. But there’d been a thong with her DNA on it stuffed behind the bed, and a hairbrush in the bathroom wrapped in strands of her hair. And yet there’d been only one batch of her prints in the entire flat, on a pack of cigarettes and a lighter with her initials engraved on the side. And for however long they’d sat in the centre of the chipped old fake-pine coffee table, nobody else had laid a finger on them.

‘It’s horseshit,’ I said, to no one in particular.

‘What’s that?’

Kevin had emerged from the building, having done whatever it is he spends so long in the toilet doing, and he was standing behind me, just far enough away not to give me any of the benefit of his umbrella.

‘What are we supposed to believe?’ I asked him. ‘That Erica’s been shacked up with a rapist for three months, and now she’s killed him, and what? That she’s on the run with Sarah? Or that Sarah was with them, but Boon did something to her? And that’s why he’s dead? She did it in self-defence? In which case, where is she? I don’t get it. Why now?’

Kevin gave me the side-eye and said, very slowly, ‘Well, that’s what we’re meant to find out, isn’t it? That’s what detectives are for.’

I ignored his sarcasm, for now, because actually it was Kevin who was being a bit thick. ‘You’re missing my point,’ I told him. ‘It’s bollocks. Sarah Abbott hasn’t been living in that flat, for a start. A few strands of hair and a packet of fags is hardly proof of residence. They could have come from anywhere. She might have been there at one time, but if that’s the case, where else has she been? She’s been nowhere. So if Boon killed her, he did it back in February. In which case, why was Erica still around? We know Boon wasn’t keeping her hostage. So did she plan Sarah’s murder with him, or just choose to carry on living there like nothing had happened? And in either case, why were those cigarettes still on the table?’

He thought for a long moment, and then shrugged out a ‘Dunno’.

‘Can we talk about this in the car? I’m getting soaked.’

A glimmer of mischief flashed across Kevin’s face, but he followed me into the Focus anyway.

‘Think about the one other place we know she’s been,’ I said. ‘Which, coincidentally, happens to also be the home of someone I questioned myself because we suspected him of being a killer. Is this making any sense to you?’

‘Not really. It all seems a bit . . .’ He shrugged again.

‘Far-fetched?’

Nod.

‘Exactly. It’s horseshit.’

‘So what do we actually think?’

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? ‘Christ knows, but someone’s been playing us for idiots. We’ve been told a story that makes no logical sense, and the only part of it that’s demonstrably true is that Erica is still alive, or was a week ago, and the only reason we know that is because I saw her.’

I didn’t bloody realise I’d seen her until after the fact; she wasn’t even my case then, and by the time I’d notified the Major Investigation Team, and we’d secured a search warrant, and Mal Lowry and Eli Diaz and John Fairey and I had piled into a couple of cars and sped out to the forest in the south of the county and searched every square inch of that house and questioned That Man, whom we knew at the time as Thomas Reed, all knowledge was plausibly denied and the trail had run cold.

‘So,’ Kevin said, stifling a yawn. ‘Now what?’

‘Simple,’ I said. ‘We start again, at the last place Erica was seen alive.’

‘Reed’s place?’

I nodded. ‘Happy with that?’

‘Makes sense to me,’ he said. ‘Can we stop and get a McDonald’s on the way?’

‘If you’re pay—’ I was interrupted by a startling thump on the window. Kevin jumped in his seat. I gave Eli Diaz a smirk as I slid the glass down a crack. ‘You made one of us jump,’ I said.

Diaz laughed. ‘Sorry, Kevin. Ali, you haven’t seen John Fairey this morning, have you? He was meant to be taking the new guy out canvassing toms last night and they didn’t check back in. Their phones are off and apparently no one’s heard from them since lunchtime. Any ideas?’

Knowing John, they were probably locked in a pub somewhere, but my blood ran cold of its own accord. ‘Can you not track his car?’

‘What do you think?’

I glanced over at Kevin. There was no way of telling whether he was thinking what I was thinking, but he looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘This is all about Erica, isn’t it?’

‘You read the report,’ Diaz reminded me. ‘It doesn’t add up, does it?’

‘That’s exactly what I was about to ring Lowry about,’ I said, which was only a white lie. ‘I want to head down to the Reed place and re-interview him. Maybe we can stir something up.’

He nodded. ‘Great minds think alike,’ he said. ‘We’ll be ready in twenty minutes.’

Fine with me. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ I said. ‘Kevin needs feeding.’

Diaz patted the roof of the car and tried to get back in through the fire escape he’d emerged from. It was shut. He swore to himself and hurried off around the corner of the building, out of sight. Kevin laughed.

‘Grab my bag from the back,’ I said, once we were a few miles from the house. ‘My notebook’s in there, it’s got Reed’s number in it.’

Kevin wiped his greasy fingers on a paper napkin and retrieved the book. ‘Dial it?’

‘Yes please. Let’s rattle this guy’s cage. Use mine, it’s on the hands-free.’

He held my phone up for me to tap in the unlock code, and then keyed in the number. It went half a ring before That Man’s voice barked out of the speaker, startling both of us.

‘I’m here! Where are you?’

I had a brief moment of doubt then. He couldn’t have known we were coming, could he? ‘Hi,’ I stuttered, trying to sound unfazed. ‘It’s . . . Are you okay?’

‘Who is this?’ he said. That voice. I remember that voice – deep, like a river of dark chocolate. Like leaning over an abyss. I wasn’t who he was expecting to hear from, but that knowledge didn’t settle me one bit.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s Ali Green. Have I caught you at a bad time?’ I sensed Kevin shifting to attention in his seat and glanced at him, mirroring his raised eyebrow.

‘Sergeant Green,’ That Man said. ‘No. Perfect timing. I’m having a shitty day anyway, you can’t ruin it this time.’

I feigned laughter. ‘That’s not my intention,’ I said. ‘I was hoping I’d catch you, though.’

‘You don’t say,’ he replied. Indifferent. Smug, almost.

Kevin chuckled beside me, and I shot him a look. Then I went for broke. ‘I’m on my way there,’ I said. ‘There are a few things I need to talk to you about.’ Silence on the other end. ‘And before you say it, they’re actually not all about you.’

There was a long pause before he said, ‘I don’t understand.’ There was a definite crack in his voice then, barely detectable, but there. Something wasn’t right.

‘Neither do I, believe me. The sky’s probably about to fall down, but I’ve been over and over it in my head, and it’s hugely irritating, but we might actually need each other’s help.’ We were ten minutes away. ‘I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Okay?’

Another interminable silence. Then, ‘Actually, I was just about to go out.’

‘You’ll wait,’ I said, perhaps a little more firmly than I intended, but it seemed to do the trick because his tone lifted instantly.

‘Oh, yeah, of course,’ he said, and faked his own laugh. ‘I just meant I’ve got to fix something round the back, that’s all, so if I’m not around when you get here, just come in and make yourself at home.’

Kevin’s face twisted in exaggerated incredulity, and he mouthed what the fuck at me as I tried to keep a straight face. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I said. ‘I’m going to stop and get a cup of coffee and a muffin. Let’s say I’ll be there in an hour, how’s that?’

‘That would be better,’ he said. I was sure he knew it was a lie, but that suited me just fine. Whatever happened next would happen through a jumble of double- and triple-guessing. ‘Can you tell me what this is ab—’ He stopped so suddenly I wondered for a moment if we hadn’t been cut off, but the speaker was clear enough that I could still hear him breathing. Fast, shuddering breaths. Either he was playing with himself or he was nervous as hell.

‘Are you alone, Mr Reed?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, hoarsely, forcing the words, sounding for all the world like he’d just seen a ghost. ‘Sorry, I’m just getting dressed and I strangled myself.’

‘Right.’ I was already pressing the throttle to the floor. ‘In that case I’ll let you go before you come to any more harm. But to answer your question, we urgently need to discuss Erica Shaw.’

‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Ms Green, I’ve already told you everything I know about that girl. I really don’t know how else I can help you.’

‘It’s just routine,’ I told him. ‘Crossing the “i”s and dotting the “t”s. I’ll see you in an hour.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘One hour.’ And then he was gone before I could say goodbye.

Kevin opened his mouth to speak.

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ I said.

Whatever I’d been expecting to find when we arrived, I was completely unprepared for what happened. I’d radioed for urgent backup; I’d called Diaz, and he was on his way with the DCI and an armed response unit. I knew I should have waited, hunch or no hunch. But I didn’t.

I stopped for nothing but the heavy iron gate across the track that led half a mile through the woods to That Man’s house. Kevin was out of the car before it stopped rolling, and then the gate was open, and I was already moving again when he scrambled back in. My temples were pounding, my eyes as focused as a hawk’s. Kevin was silent beside me, a little pale, gripping the grab-handle above his head.

When we reached the far side of those trees, the car sliding sideways out onto the wide gravel driveway in front of the house, the shooting had already started. And it was Erica Shaw behind the trigger.

I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I remember staring down the barrel of a revolver. I remember being on my back on the ground, Erica’s nails pressed hard into my cheek. I remember the rain hitting the gravel, and bouncing back red with a young woman’s blood. I remember That Man, weak but in full control, deciding Erica’s fate with nothing more than a look. And I remember Eli Diaz’s face staring up at me from the pool of blood in my lap, his body sliding away, slumping across my feet, detached.

The blood. I remember all of the blood.

Chapter 5

DCI Malcolm Lowry was missing. No one was saying it, but everyone was thinking it. Losing Eli had triggered the breakdown we’d all known was coming since his wife had filed for divorce a month before. He’d been in hospital with chest pains within hours, signed off by the end of the day, and by the end of the next he was holed up in a static caravan on the Welsh coast, ignoring all offers of counselling and pleas to go back to hospital. After a week he’d stopped returning anyone’s calls, and within a fortnight he’d fallen off the grid altogether.

I learned this from Jennifer Riley, as I stood open-mouthed in the shambles of an incident room trying to figure out exactly who was in charge. Jenny and I came up through training together; she was always a couple of steps ahead of me, always seemed more suited to the touchier, feelier side of the job. And now, true to that, she was hugging me tightly, telling me how glad she was that I was back, how much she’d missed me, and how was I, and how sorry she was, both as my friend and now also apparently as my acting DCI, that she’d thrown me straight into the deep end without offering any briefing or preparation or indeed any kind of communication as to what the hell was going on. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, plucking one of her long copper hairs from the side of my face. ‘I know it’s my arse. To be honest, everything’s my arse right now. I’ve only been active on this for a week. Look at the state of the place. This whole thing’s been a fuck-up from the start. No offence.’

I scanned the room, the rogues’ gallery of whiteboards lined up along the wall beneath the windows, each plastered haphazardly with photographs, names, dates, but nothing, as far as I could see, of any real substance.

On one, the sorry, bedraggled mugshots of Kerry Farrow and Samantha Halloran, two working girls at the bottom of their profession and the top of their narcotic dependency, and both missing within weeks of each other. Fairey and I, at the height of our differences, had been working on Kerry’s disappearance when I was seconded to the search for Erica Shaw.

Erica’s face, full and pouting and framed by a long, dark mass of tight curls, shared a board with her best friend Sarah Abbott and former schoolmate Caroline Gray – both of them tall, slender, high-cheekboned and blonde and missing from within a couple of miles and less than a week of one another – and Rachel Murray, who wasn’t missing at all when she died. Below them, a column of faces; girls of a similar age, with glowing hair and sparkling eyes and perfect white teeth beaming from school photos and portfolio shots. Beside each, a town: Reading. Bristol. Portsmouth. Guildford. Bradford. Chelmsford. A lot of Fords, I noted, shuddering at the photo of the white Transit van beside the e-fit of That Man on the third board.

Nothing in that face I recognised, or in the half-dozen views below it of the inside of the metal cage I now knew to be secreted under his garage. But there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that whoever and wherever he was, he was behind those girls’ disappearances.

On the fourth board, Mark Boon. A fright of pumpkin orange hair and an impetuous sneer. And below, with a gashed cheek and bloodshot eyes, the same face staring up from the floor, dark and unseeing atop a body that faced resolutely down.

And finally, blown up from their personnel files, Fairey and Keith’s ID photos, the only note below their names a giant black question mark in an emphatically drawn circle.

‘Do you want to talk me through it?’ I said.

Jenny nodded. ‘I’ll get us a coffee first though, yeah?’

‘Tell me what you saw this morning,’ she said, sipping from a mug that read Despite the look on my face, you’re still talking.

My mug had disappeared from the kitchen, so she’d given me one that said I’m not dead yet, which made me laugh, but not in a good way. ‘It’s John’s car,’ I said. ‘Whether the remains are his and Julian’s, I have no idea. It’s a bootful of calcined bone, shards of it, bits and pieces. Whether it’s two bodies’ worth, or whether it’ll even be possible to piece it all back together, God only knows. Either way, it’s obviously a deliberate act, I’d say fuelled by a lot of accelerant.

I don’t know what temperature you need to melt steel and cremate bodies, that’s not my field, but it was a hell of a fire. Twisted the whole frame of the car. And, you know, what or whoever burned up in there, they were in the boot. So there’s that.’

Jenny nodded quietly, her eyes dark, her thoughts her own. I sipped my coffee. It needed more sugar and less milk, though I was sure I’d watched her make it the same way she always had.

‘Also, we’ve got tyre tracks,’ I said, swiping open my phone and loading the photo to show her. ‘At the burn site. Landowner says they’re nothing to do with him, but they’re clear; clear enough to get a brand and size, at least. Sandra’s got Jim processing them. May give us something.’

‘What’s your instinct?’

‘I don’t know.’ My instinct was still in intensive care, is what it felt like. ‘How is it that we weren’t able to track John and Julian?’ I asked her.

‘We were,’ she said. ‘There was no tracker in the car, but we pinpointed the phone signals as soon as we knew they were missing. They were at that house the day before you—’ Her eyes flicked away for the briefest moment. The slightest hitch in her breath. ‘Before what happened. But the last signals came from right here, at five in the afternoon. We knew that before it all went down, I think.’

We might have done. ‘I don’t remember,’ I said, and left it at that.

‘No,’ she nodded. ‘Well, that’s yet another thing that muddies the waters. They were out there, but as far as we know they came back. Just, nobody ever saw them again.’

I didn’t know what that meant, or why it only cemented the connection in my head, but it did. I studied the e-fit again. It was utterly generic. Just a nothing face. Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth. A chin. Some hair. ‘How,’ I said, ‘can we not have a better picture than that? It could be anyone.’

Jenny nodded and put her coffee down on the table between us, a spark of triumph returning to her eyes; a question she could answer. She flipped open her laptop, tapped in her password, opened a folder and spun the machine around so we could both see it. ‘We’ve got a driving licence,’ she said, opening a scanned image of a photo card. ‘The two vehicles we recovered are registered to this guy. You know the name: Thomas Reed. Look familiar?’

I laughed. The man had a full beard and shoulder-length hair, his dark eyes all but hidden behind two great draped curtains of it. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, cheaply.

‘I know, right?’ She clicked through to an image of a passport in the same name, with the same photo. ‘If I was religious I’d call it a miracle, because this Thomas Reed doesn’t exist. Or not any more. He died of whooping cough in 1980. Unlike . . .’ next image, a second driving licence, same photo . . . ‘James Faulkner, who drowned at the age of three.’ Click. Another passport. ‘James owns the house and the sixty acres around it.’

‘What about bank accounts?’

‘We haven’t found those yet. And neither of these characters is paying any kind of income tax. HMRC have nothing registered at the address. But also, he was holding keys to at least eight other properties.’

‘So, what, he rents out houses? He’s a landlord, maybe?’

She shrugged. ‘Right now, there’s no money trail at all. No mortgage, no car payments, no credit cards . . . If we had him actually buying something, then maybe, but short of tracing the serial numbers on everything in that house, and then hoping he didn’t pay in cash . . .’

I gave her a look that I hoped said it might yet come to that.

‘I know,’ she said, and gulped down the rest of her coffee.

‘What about DNA?’

‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got fucking tons of the stuff. Just nothing to match it to. There’s no Breckland Butcher in the database, unfortunately.’

‘No what?’

‘That’s what the papers have been calling him.’

Ugh. ‘Well they can piss off.’

‘Yes, I told them that.’

‘So.’ I scanned the boards a second time. ‘Aside from Erica, how many of them can we place there?’

‘One,’ she said. ‘Kerry Farrow.’

My stomach flipped. ‘Kerry,’ I repeated. I’d been there, looked That Man in the eye as he swore he’d never laid eyes on her; as he smugly pointed out the errors in our evidence; even as he correctly predicted that a body we’d found didn’t belong to her. ‘Where? In the . . . that cage?’

She nodded again and then cocked her head at the photos of the cell, I guessed as much to avoid my eye as anything else. ‘Yeah, and only in the cage,’ she said. ‘Unlike Erica, who’d been all over the place. The cage, and every room in the house, including sleeping in the master bedroom.’

I heard a voice in my head then, although it was indistinct, genderless, and I couldn’t for the life of me place it. ‘I’m not going back in a cage,’ it shrieked.

Jenny saw me shudder and said, ‘You okay?’

I wasn’t. Trying to think felt like staring into a black hole. I’d already forgotten the names she’d just given me, and the rest, whatever she said before the part about the DNA, was little more than a faint echo. ‘Kerry,’ I said, for no reason other than to try to hold my focus. ‘Kerry was at the house.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, but I didn’t know what she meant, and had I done so, I probably wouldn’t have believed her anyway. I needed to press on.

‘No trace of Samantha?’

‘None. Nothing in the van, either. All we harvested from that was bleach.’

I thought back to the first time I’d met That Man. I’d been there, right in the back of that Transit. It had smelled of sweat and peroxide. There’d been a box – a large one, large enough to hide in, and filled with thick grey woollen blankets. ‘Was there anything in the back when you recovered it?’ I wondered aloud.

‘No, I think it was empty. Why?’

‘If there’s a box of blankets in the inventory, they need swabbing.’

She made a note.

‘Is there any connection between Samantha and Kerry,’ I asked, ‘besides their job?’

‘Not that we’ve established yet. But what we have got is footage that puts Reed, or whatever we’re calling him, close to where Kerry was last seen, and we’ve got her DNA in a dungeon under his property. That’s a done deal, Ali. Anything we find on Samantha is a bonus at this point.’

‘A bonus?’

Jenny raised a defensive hand and said, ‘I know. I know what you’re about to say. But right now, we’ve got nothing on Samantha, and the only way we’re likely to get anything is if we find Reed and he talks to us, because no other fucker is.’

I tried to take stock, to dismiss the feeling that it all made less sense now than it had when I’d walked in. What had Jenny said about Erica? That her DNA was all over That Man’s house? It didn’t fit with what I thought I knew about her, but what was that, really? That she was an innocent victim, an abductee? I couldn’t know that, could I? She’d come out of that house shooting, but at what? At whom? ‘Jenny,’ I said, almost afraid to ask the question that was playing on my mind. ‘You’re not entertaining the idea that Erica and that man could be collaborating, are you?’

Jenny looked at me like I’d completely lost the plot. ‘I don’t know what the hell I think,’ she said. ‘But frankly, I hope they are on the run together because we’ve got about as much chance of tracking him down on his own as we have of catching Jack the Ripper. The man’s a ghost. We don’t know who we’re looking for. He could be anywhere, or nowhere, and everyone who’s seen his face is either dead, missing or in this room.’

And I couldn’t remember it. ‘And Kevin,’ I reminded her. ‘Kevin’s seen it.’

She dropped her eyes to the desk and heaved a deep sigh. ‘Yes, well, Kevin took a blow to the head too, didn’t he.’

‘So what you’re saying,’ I said, the dread tingle of hopelessness trickling through my veins, ‘is that we’re absolutely nowhere?’

Jenny, expressionless, sipped her coffee. ‘We’ve got four missing women we think are connected,’ she said. ‘We’ve got one gunshot victim, two presumably dead detectives, a basement, a van, a shitload of keys and a man who doesn’t exist. So yeah, to all intents and purposes, we’ve got fuck all. We’re nowhere. Square one.’

I looked back to the board, to a photograph of a collection of door keys arranged in a neat square on a table, all but one or two attached to hand-numbered yellow tags. ‘Christ,’ I thought aloud. ‘You said at least eight potential properties?’

Jenny nodded, sniffed, frowned. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Meaning at least eight potential cages, and no way of tracking them down.’

We shuddered in unison, and shared a moment’s silence. And then I was confused again, and feeling like I’d missed something. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Did we lose the witness as well?’

She looked at me blankly for a second, and raised an eyebrow and shook her head and shrugged. ‘What witness?’

‘The witness John interviewed. Who was with him on the night Kerry disappeared. It was the first thing he told us when we questioned him.’

A flash of panic passed across Jenny’s face, though she tried to hide it. She took a slow breath, and leaned forward across the desk, her brow furrowed deeply. ‘Ali,’ she said. ‘What are you on about?’

I felt heat spread through me, shame and panic and frustration all tangled together as I tried to remember. ‘John,’ I repeated. ‘He talked to a woman. Anna? Annie? A witness. An alibi, I guess. Didn’t you know?’

Jenny shook her head. ‘When was this?’

‘I wasn’t with him,’ I said. ‘It was after that first interview, though. Look it up. It’s in the file, right?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it isn’t. There’s no mention of any of it. What are you . . . Ali. Look at me.’

I met her eye. It was emerald green, bright with adrenaline. I felt sleepy all of a sudden, and my leg hurt.

‘Ali,’ she said. ‘What witness?’

Chapter 6

Annie was drunk, just like yesterday, but just like yesterday, she wasn’t going to let that stop her. There was daylight left, hours of it, but it wasn’t enough. Between them, the plodding train, the circuitous bus and the overstretched minicab company would ensure that darkness was waiting when she got home.

It had beaten her before, the sunset, two weeks ago, when she’d been late coming off shift. The village got dark too quickly; too many trees, not enough streetlamps. No light pollution out there, away from the city. Just shadow, and sky. She’d pulled up a few houses from home, main beams illuminating the road, the fence line, the hidden places between the hedgerows, and there she’d sat for a quarter of an hour until she was certain nothing was waiting for her. Or at least nothing that walked upright. Afterwards, she’d swung the car across the road and lit up the front of the house, aiming the lights through the windows, searching for silhouettes. By the time she’d made it inside and turned on all the house lights, her head had been throbbing from the tension in her shoulders. She hadn’t slept all night.

It wasn’t going to happen today; she was confident of that as she stumbled against her fossil of a Renault and dropped her keys on the ground. She laughed hoarsely to herself and tried to focus on them steadily enough to pick them up; took a deep drag on her cigarette before bending adeptly at the waist and scooping them up on the end of her finger. ‘See?’ she said aloud, for the sake of the imagined company that comforted her when she was alone. ‘I’m not even actually drunk.’

She carefully turned the keys over in her palm and selected the one for the car door. It slipped to an oblique angle between her fingers and she couldn’t quite slide it into the lock. The more she twisted her wrist to compensate, the more it rotated until the shaft was resting on the back of her hand. ‘Oh, for the . . .’ she sighed, and dropped them again.

The hairs went up on the back of her neck then. She didn’t remember a lot, not lately, but the memory of all those films was clear in her head: panicking women with big 80s hair, fumbling their car keys to the ground as the killer bore down on them. Her pulse quickened in her throat, squeezing out her breaths. Her body chilled and prickled to high alert. Her mind raced. There was someone behind her.

Annie spun around with a bark that first made her jump, and then, as she encountered no one, embarrassed her. She caught her breath as the adrenalin sparked out of her, and then she shook her head and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Annie,’ and bent to scoop up the keys again.

She got one into the lock this time, but it was the wrong one, so she tried again, more successfully this time, albeit at the expense of a few more paint chips as she stabbed all around the door handle.

Finally the door was open, and she took another look over her shoulder before she tossed her bag inside and her cigarette to the ground and tumbled into the car.

Her eyes were heavy now, but she couldn’t worry about that. She slammed the door and found the ignition key and somehow rattled the car to life. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ Then she looked up at the rear-view mirror, and everything was not fine.

It had been knocked askew, so that it afforded a view of the worn and bobbled headlining. She reached up instinctively to adjust it, and then froze. She’d seen this film, too, and so she knew without a doubt as the fear slithered up her spine that the last thing she’d see as she twisted the mirror into place was a pair of eyes staring at her from the back seat.

She closed her own eyes, all but oblivious to the spinning of her head. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’

Out of town, the traffic was light, but she didn’t want the traffic to be light because there was a police car behind her and nothing in front, no flow to keep up with, and the road was twisty with a fifty mile-per-hour speed limit, which seemed generous considering the blindness of some of the bends, but she didn’t want to appear to be driving too slowly. And concentrating on her speed and constantly checking her mirror for signs of interest was tightening her grip on the wheel, making her turns sharp and sudden and her straights a series of imprecise corrections. Every time she tried to relax her grip and focus on the road far ahead instead of right under the nose of the car, her speed crept either up or down, depending on which was more wrong.

She’d turned the radio off to concentrate, and what felt like a sizeable swerve had resulted from that, so now she was afraid to adjust the heater, which was inexplicably on, and so was simultaneously burning up on the inside and shivering under a cold sweat on the outside.

Annie was probably going to be sick.

Finally, having endured this torture for what seemed like hours but in reality, she knew, was only five and a half miles, she witnessed a ray of glorious sunshine slice through the clouds of her panic; the little Gulf station she drove past every day but at which she’d never had cause to stop, save for that one time the garage next door had put an old convertible BMW up for sale on their cracked concrete forecourt. What a heap that had turned out to be.

Annie mirrored, signalled and manoeuvred all at the same time and without slowing, so that she crossed the corner of that forecourt at forty-nine miles an hour before standing on the brakes and bringing the Renault up at a neat twenty-degree angle, ten feet past the pumps. She didn’t look over, just swivelled her eyes as far as they could go to watch the patrol car cruise past, braking as it did so, which gave her a fright, although the driver wasn’t watching her. She held onto the door handle nonetheless, ready to spring out of the car and attempt to vanish into thin air if it turned around.

It didn’t.

Annie gave it a full minute before she stepped out of the car, met the eye of the station attendant peering curiously out at her from the window, and strolled with what in her head was a kind of whimsical purpose into the store. She knew, though, as she stepped into the air-conditioned chill and felt her forehead light up with icy beads of sweat, that the attendant could see every one of her nerves jangling, and so, not trusting her voice any better than the rest of her, she didn’t try to speak. She just gave him a polite nod and a crooked smile and bought herself a Cornetto and a packet of crisps.

Some time later – she couldn’t say how long, but her foot ached from feathering the accelerator and her eyes from bobbing on the ends of their stalks – she made it home. Or at least, she made it to the side of the road in front of her house. Home was another matter. The closer she came, the further she felt from the sanctity of that locked door. Like that famous shot in Jaws, where Chief Brody’s face zooms into tight focus as the background shrinks away, blurry and sickly and terrifying. A ‘trombone shot,’ they call it. Or a ‘dolly zoom’, because that’s how it’s done: dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Dolly in, zoom out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Calm the FUCK down, Annie.

Annie breathed, and gripped the wheel, and listened to the tick of the cooling engine, and tried to laugh at the thought of changing her name to Dolly Zoom. Maybe it could be her stripper name, she thought, if things got any worse at work.

Eventually, her heart and her breathing slowed to something like a workable rate, and she rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, and smoked it right down to the filter as she stared in turn at each of the windows of the house. And then she stared a little bit longer, until she was satisfied that it was just a house, her house, empty, familiar, safe.

Ha. Safe. Yeah, right.

Annie reached up and twisted the rear-view mirror around to look at herself. She sighed at her smudged mascara, the worry lines etched black around tired, bloodshot eyes that had lost all of their sparkle, all of the intelligence that had set her apart from the pretty but vacuous girls at school, for better or worse. She thought, briefly, about digging some wipes out of her bag and cleaning the paint off her face then and there, but, deciding that whilst she was sober enough to notice, she was still too drunk to bother, she left it. Instead, she slapped the mirror roughly back into place, grabbed her bag, took a deep, steadying breath, and threw open the car door.

It was only twenty yards to the house. She had the key out ready, gripped tightly between her thumb and forefinger and angled so that, hopefully, it would slip smoothly into the lock without her dropping it. Deep down, out here in the crisp afternoon light, she knew no one was going to sneak up behind her. She just didn’t think she could take another shot of adrenaline; that pure, irrational it’s-behind-you fear that would inevitably accompany a floorward fumble of the keys. And so it was, the jagged little shaft click-clicking happily into the lock, the lock turning smoothly within the door, the door falling ajar, Annie swatting it open with the palm of her hand and stepping inside and throwing it shut behind her without the merest glance over her shoulder. Whatever was out there was staying out.

The relief, however, didn’t come.

The house was cold, downstairs at least; the hedges and the blossom-laden trees shaded the south-facing windows. Upstairs, where the slope of the roof cut through the bedroom ceiling, it would be sweltering, particularly in that spot below the skylight so beloved of next door’s cat. But the cat hadn’t been around in a while, and the heat hurt Annie’s head when the drink started to wear off, so she dropped her bag beside the sofa and just stood for a while in the cool gloom, rubbing the goosebumps on her arms and trying to figure out what felt different. For a minute, or maybe three or four, she managed to distract herself from the unease in her belly by cataloguing the contents of the room: the lamps with their cracked-mirror finish, seemingly absorbing rather than reflecting the smoke-tinted magnolia of the walls; the television on its ill-fitting mahogany-look flatpack unit, its screen partly obscured by the stack of unwatched films; the cabinet full of Wade Whimsies, fastidiously collected in childhood but now little more than a twee reminder of an alien past. The ashtray that seemed to fill and empty itself of its own accord. The sofa that wouldn’t stay plumped up between her leaving for work and staggering home. The faint, sweet aroma that was sometimes there and sometimes not, and impossible to place when it was. The ticking of the clock. The ticking. The ticking. The ticking of the clock . . .

Annie stared at the second hand as it did what a second hand does, at the precise speed a second hand does it. And she was sure, she was sure she hadn’t replaced the battery in that clock. However much she’d drunk, however many minutes or hours ago she’d drunk it, she was sure that clock shouldn’t be running. And she was sure, without daring to drag her eyes to her watch, that as much as it shouldn’t have been showing the correct time, it very much was.

But there had to be an explanation, right? After all, she couldn’t remember everything she did after a drink or six. Most of the time she flat-out didn’t want to, but in this case she was willing to make an exception. So she stared at the clock and chewed her nail and racked her fuzzy brain and conceded that she had been under a lot of stress lately. That was why she’d been drinking so much, wasn’t it? The stress? It wasn’t a need, an addiction or even a habit. It was just stress. And stress can do all kinds of things to a person’s brain, her perception, her memory. And, even to Annie, that made a damn sight more sense than someone – than anyone – than that man – coming into her home and changing the battery in her clock. Didn’t it?

‘Twat,’ she said, out loud to herself, because however she may or may not try to convince herself otherwise, she knew that there was nobody else in the house, and nor had there been. Whatever odd thing she was feeling, it definitely wasn’t that. And the sound of her own voice echoing around the room calmed Annie, and momentarily she dropped her arms and tore her eyes from the second hand of the clock and thought about making a cup of tea. And so she went to the narrow little kitchen that led off the lounge, and she filled the kettle and switched it on. And then she saw the mug upside down on the draining board, the one with the chip in the rim that had cut her knuckle the last time she’d washed it. The one her mother used to use when she’d come to stay for the weekend. The one she couldn’t throw away. The one she’d put back in the cupboard and never, ever used again. Upside down, on the draining board, a dozen tiny spots of water tracing a drying path to the sink.

Annie took a breath and waited for her heart to start beating. And when it finally did, she slumped to the floor in the corner of the kitchen, and shuffled back into the crook of the wall, and drew her knees up to her chest, and listened to the kettle boil, and cried and cried and cried.

EPISODE 2

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