Dead Girls: An addictive and darkly funny crime thriller

‘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 (#ulink_3fee7665-ac29-589b-905f-3ad8697eb66a)

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.