Dead Girls: An addictive and darkly funny crime thriller

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 (#ulink_1a7116b8-0eef-5f83-90cb-cb983a91b845)

Chapter 7 (#ulink_847d312f-4b0a-50cd-af40-da7a509dae56)

‘Michelin Agilis,’ Kevin said.

‘Who?’

‘Adj-i-lis. Ad-jeel-is.’

‘?’

‘It’s a van tyre. 215 mm wide. Standard fit on a Transit.’ Which was the answer I was both hoping for and dreading. And so it was that I drained my fifth coffee of the afternoon, and tried in vain to rub some of the pain from my temples, and left the finger-thin file open on my desk and walked quietly with Kevin over to the impound garage.

It was chilly inside, and harshly lit by fluorescent strips that were like daggers to my eyes, so I put my sunglasses on and tolerated the CSI jokes between Kevin and the pale but craggily handsome chap who signed us in, whose name I’m going to say was Paul, though I might be wrong.

Paul directed us to a bay more or less in the centre of the warehouse, so I ducked out of the line of mirth and set off at a purposeful stride, leaving Kevin halfway through a joke about me auditioning for a Hangover sequel. That he assumed I was still hungover at five in the afternoon, I mused to myself, was the reason he was still a constable.

The place was laid out with a certain kind of haphazard logic. The vehicles that came in under their own power – the uninsured and ill-gotten ones – were lined up on the far shore of a sea of jagged wrecks, crushed and burned and prised apart. In time, Fairey’s Mondeo would be slotted amongst them by an indifferent forklift driver, just another tombstone, all in a day’s work. But for now, there was only one thing in here that bothered me.

There was no dramatic reveal; the Transit was the largest thing in the warehouse, looming above and beyond its devastated neighbours, and I could see it as soon as I walked in. It was parked with its back to me, the tall white double doors ajar, like an invitation. I’d accepted once before, and noted with indifference the ratchet straps, the ceiling hooks, the hose-down floor liner, the white vinyl covering the walls. It had looked to me, back then, like any other van, albeit a sparkling clean one. Now, it looked like such a glaring cliché that I wondered if I hadn’t simply subconsciously dismissed it for being too ludicrously obvious.

Or maybe it was all about context. Here, in this place, under these lights, knowing what I knew now, every step I took towards it made me shiver a little bit harder.

It was certainly no longer sparkling. It was caked up to its door handles in dried-on mud, some of which had cracked and fallen away to form a dusty brown ring on the garage floor. The mirrors were missing, the front tyres flat, and the length of each side was streaked with dirt and crushed weeds and metal-deep scratches ingrained with splinters and bark. And at the front, it was no longer a van so much as it was the mould for a tree trunk.

It had hit just left of centre, the front fascia punched inwards in a ragged semi-circle to the base of the shattered windscreen, the door on that side creased and limp on its hinges, the buckled wheel jammed back into its arch. The bonnet was folded in half and pitched in the middle, the white paint cracked away, exposing glistening sharp edges like knife blades. I stared them down for a moment, trying to feel some – any – kind of emotion, but none stirred in me. It was just metal.

Inside was different. The driver’s door still worked; I unlatched it and it swung stiffly back on its hinges until it caught against the displaced front wing. And here the carnage continued, the dashboard shunted back on the passenger side, pinning the seat against the bulkhead.

It was the undamaged driver’s seat that held my stare, though – the seat from which Erica Shaw had fled the scene of the van’s demise in the woods and somehow spirited herself away from the marksmen, the dog handler, the damn helicopter for heaven’s sake – the seat in which That Man had presumably stalked and watched and waited to himself spirit away Kerry, and Samantha, and God only knew who else.

For a split second I thought that I could smell him in there, beneath the oil and the mud, but I knew it was just an illusion. He had no smell, to my mind. Just the smell of that house; of frying meat, and citrusy bleach, and the blood in my nostrils.

‘She was lucky.’

I jumped half out of my skin at Kevin’s words. I hadn’t heard him sneak up on me; in fact, I might even have forgotten he was there. ‘Stop fucking doing that,’ I snapped.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t mean to,’ which I knew was a lie.

I let him squeeze into my personal space to get a look inside the van. I didn’t care about his elbow digging into my ribs; I was too preoccupied with the thought of That Man’s sweat soaked into the seat, my brain like a blacklight in one of those germ commercials, luminescing the oil from his fingers on the steering wheel, the gear lever, the stalks and the switches, the sun visor and the door handle, the parking brake and th—

‘I just meant,’ he said, ‘she could have been badly hurt.’

I snapped back into myself. Shook the shudder from my spine. ‘We don’t know that she wasn’t,’ I said, and then let the moment’s silence between us fill in the rest.

‘We’d know, though, right? If she’d been treated anywhere?’

I shrugged at his optimism. He knew as well as I did that it was a lottery; that whatever name she gave at a casualty desk would only lead us on a wild goose chase.

I couldn’t know what Kevin was thinking, of course, but in my mind, his words had triggered a vision, or perhaps a memory; I wasn’t sure which. I saw Erica, a gun in her hand – not a replica, not an airgun or a starter pistol, but a functioning firearm, which I’d seen her discharge, seen the spray of blood from That Man’s arm, seen her turn it on me, the barrel a black, hungry tunnel, all-consuming, with no light at its end. I saw her above me as I lay on the ground, my hand around her throat, hers clawed and desperate, nails breaking the skin of my cheek. I saw That Man pull her away, and I saw her look down at me and aim the gun again, not at my face this time but a little away, somewhere to the side of me, her eyes frightened and hurt and filled with a knowledge she was too young, too naive, too human to have to bear. She spoke, though I couldn’t make sense of the words. They were just a jumble; too many for an apology, too few for an explanation. I couldn’t remember, and it hurt to try.

And then I saw her climb into the van and turn the key and drive away, over the field and into the forest, although I may have been imagining that part, just as I was imagining her now, falling from this smoking, gushing wreck, clutching herself tightly, her legs folding beneath her. I saw her force herself to her feet, clawing at the van for a hold to pull herself up, a sheen of blood sliding like a visor down over her forehead, over her eyes. I heard her cry out, saw her swipe at her face with her sleeve. I saw her double over and sway and throw up between her feet. And then the sound of engines, and the bark of a dog, and the rattle and hum of rotor blades, and I saw her running, hunched and unsteady, willing her legs to work. I saw her plunge into the river, sobbing in lungfuls of air, thrashing her way through the water until she could crawl, thigh-deep in mud, onto the opposite bank. I felt the adrenaline coursing through her, the urgent noise of her pursuers filling her ears, and I shouted at her to run, Erica, as fast as you can, just run sweetheart and don’t look back!

‘Ali? You all right mate?’

I realised my leg was shaking and my eyes stung like hell, and then I saw the worried look on Kevin’s face and away they went, spilling fat tears down my cheeks before I could stop them. I pretended not to notice. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why, what’s up?’

I could see he didn’t know what to say. His hands fidgeted awkwardly at his sides and his mouth flapped open and shut, and for a moment I thought he was going to try to hug me again. If I’m honest, and a little bit cruel, I quite enjoyed watching him flounder, though had he actually tried to hug me, I probably would have let him. But he didn’t, which was equally fine, and so I forced a bemused expression and said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I . . .’

Come on, McManus, you can do it.

‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘Just . . .’ He glanced over his shoulder, pointedly. ‘You know, that was a bit loud.’ He nodded backwards in the direction of the office door and, beyond it, Paul.

My heart sank, though I made the best attempt I could at keeping the horror from my face. How much had I said out loud? And why did I not know the answer to that?

As frustrating as the holes in my memory were, my brain noted that moment as the first in which I was truly afraid of it. And now it was my turn to not know what to say, although however freaked out and confused I was all of a sudden, I was damned if I was going to show it, or stand there and say nothing at all, so I shook my head and brazened it out and said, ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘You were shouting ab—’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I repeated, fixing him with an unblinking stare that probably made me look like a fucking lunatic, on top of sounding like one. ‘You’re mistaken.’