Dark Lies Read online

  She turns away, eyes blurring, nails digging into her palm. On the floor to her left is a stack of shoes, all carefully arranged with the exception of the smallest pair. Beside them is a toy tractor, crushed flat and with a wheel missing. She steps around this whole area, following the markers instructing her to do so, reminding her to stay on the right path, reminding her just how late she is.

  In the kitchen at the end of the hallway lights are set up and people are moving around busily as they go about their various assignments. She can still feel the heat of alcohol in her blood and wishes, for the hundredth time, that she’d listened to her boss’s advice to stay at home and get some sleep. Not that she will have learned her lesson. Most likely she’ll be doing the same thing tonight; anything, to try and wash away the collection of memories she knows she’s about to add to. She feels she ought to say something as she steps into the kitchen, something to break the oppressive silence, but when she finally gets a glimpse of what they’re working around, it’s all she can do not to cry out and run.

  The victim is young, possibly younger than her own forty years. She meets the eye of Kieran Smith, a young detective new to her team. She knows he’s looking for reassurance, but there’s nothing she can say to convince him they’re going to win here.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Sarah Cleve.’

  She glances across at Sarah’s wedding finger. ‘Husband informed?’

  ‘A couple of hours ago,’ says Kieran before looking away, as if he’s the one that should feel guilty for drawing attention to her tardiness. ‘DS Peters and I tried to… But he… But you can’t…’

  She knows exactly what he’s trying to say. She’d been the one to inform the husband of the first victim, Sally Brooks, a week ago. He’d refused her request to sit down before she told him the news, and when he’d started to fall she’d only just reached him in time. He’d cried on her shoulder and then squeezed her as if it might bring his wife back to life. If Katie could have swapped places at that moment, if she could have been the one carved up on the floor while the mother continued to raise her smiling children, she would happily have made that deal.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ she says to Kieran, managing half a smile. ‘You all have.’ Her voice barely carries to the rest of the room. Once, she’d have easily commanded the scene with clear and precise orders and everyone would have listened, knowing that it was going to get them what they all wanted, but that seems a very long time ago now.

  The forensic photographer steps aside to give her a better look. The woman’s naked body has been contorted to look as though she’s finishing a golf swing, except her hands have been wrapped around a carving knife instead of a club. Most likely it is the same knife that has been used to cut her neck from ear to ear and spilt a life’s worth of blood across the kitchen floor. Across her bare stomach, part hidden by the now-congealing blood, is a long caesarean scar, around which are hundreds of fresh, tiny slits, starting in a vertical line just beneath her breasts then spiralling round towards the belly button. Baked beans have been used on the floor to create a speech bubble from her mouth and written in the centre, in capital letters, is a single word:

  SLICE

  Someone moves alongside her. She doesn’t need to look across, knowing who he is from how close he’s standing.

  ‘Good night last night?’ he whispers. ‘When’s it my turn?’

  ‘Just a couple more billion first,’ she says, through gritted teeth. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘I know you shouldn’t be here in this state. I’d hate to think what might happen if word got back to the Super.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen a lot of terrible injuries,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you can imagine.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘It’s a request for you to stick to what you’re supposed to be good at, Dr Parker.’

  ‘And what are you good at now, DI Rhodes? Not such a star working on your own, are you? Not Daddy’s little protégé anymore.’

  She turns to look at him for the first time, lifting her stare past his jutting chest and up to his unbearable grinning face that others have described as handsome, but that she has only ever wanted to punch.

  ‘About forty years old,’ she says, this time with enough volume for the rest of the room to hear, her eyes still locked on his. ‘A blow to the back of the neck out in the hall, which knocked her out. She was then dragged through here, and her throat was cut with a serrated knife, likely the same knife which has been placed in her hand. Judging by the blood splatter and angle of flow I’d say the rest of the wounds were inflicted after death. Time, probably late yesterday evening. Eight o’clock-ish?’

  Dr Miles Parker blinks and takes a step back, almost treading on another forensic examiner crouched behind him taking photographs of a stain on the kitchen floor. He says nothing, but the look of surprise turning to anger is clear on his face.

  ‘Just remember who has the qualifications,’ he says, quietly. ‘From what I hear you barely went to school.’

  ‘If you think this job is about qualifications,’ says Katie, with a sigh, ‘then you clearly still have a lot to learn.’

  She returns her attention to the body, running her eyes across the figure until they fix on the inside of the woman’s right thigh. She’s poorly shaved up there, perhaps expecting such an area would not be seen by anyone, not even her husband now the young kids are dominating their lives. It feels like a crime in itself to be staring, to be focusing on such an intimate spot. But she has no choice. She has to know.

  She contorts her body to get a better view, her back starting to protest as it remembers a slipped disc from a reckless but successful pursuit in the past. It had earned her both a medal and a reprimand, but she knows she would be just as reckless now if it meant she could catch the bastard that did this.

  ‘It’s not there,’ says DS Peters, nodding towards the victim then looking away. ‘Perhaps the other mark didn’t mean anything.’

  Katie is sure she knows better. She doesn’t believe in coincidence. What she has always believed in is working as a team, sharing every thought and feeling, no matter how insignificant it might seem, and yet what she’s thinking and choosing to keep to herself right now is far from insignificant.

  ‘Could something have leaked?’ she asks, weakly. ‘Could this be a copy?’

  DS Peters nods towards the kitchen. ‘Do you really want two people out there to be capable of that?’

  She lowers and shakes her head at the same time, embarrassed by her suggestion, by her desperation. She’s known all along that Sally Brooks’ killer would strike again, and yet now that it’s happened she feels utterly unprepared. She has no idea where to begin, no instinct to go on other than to do what she’s never done in her eighteen years of service and walk away. Even when she pictures the other victims – the parents, the husbands, the boys and the girls – she finds no strength, no inspiration. All she can think to do is apologise. She turns towards the body, intending to do just that. She crouches down, struggling to keep her knee from the floor, and starts to whisper something in private, stopping abruptly when she spots a mark below Sarah’s right nipple. She blinks a couple of times and inches closer, focusing on two tiny dots on the skin. They could so easily be ignored, dismissed as two more among the many moles on this woman’s body. But just as with the first victim, Katie knows better.

  She reaches out to point, to share, then quickly pulls her arm back, lifting it to rub the back of her neck which has broken out in a sweat. The significance of her discovery is hitting home, bombarding her with possibilities that leave her breathless. Wordless. The room around her is starting to spin, and she stands up quickly for fear of contaminating the scene. She stumbles forward and for a moment believes she’s going to fall on the victim, but at the last second, a powerful arm grabs hold of her, stands her up and leads her out into the garden.

  DS Peters gives her time. He’s always given her time, as well as trust and re
spect. All the things she’d struggled to earn from the others. When he does speak, it’s with a soft and understanding voice.

  ‘This isn’t easy for any of us,’ he says, swallowing hard, and she’s reminded that he was the one who had to break the news to the husband. ‘Which is why we need to work together.’

  She steps back from his grasp and considers his stare, wondering if he knows that she’s been holding back, but all she sees in his eyes is concern.

  ‘The team is still with you,’ he continues. ‘Those that you aren’t always winding up.’ He nods towards Dr Parker, who’s watching her closely from inside the house.

  ‘It’s the one thing about him that’s hard to resist,’ she says, giving him a grin and a wink, before turning back to Peters.

  ‘We all know what you went through with—’ He breaks off, not needing to name the case, even though it’s been more than a year. ‘Perhaps this is your chance to get back on track. I mean, you saw those little boys. And the girls, last week…’

  Katie nods; she’s already there, thinking of the previous body, of crouching down to inspect the skull-shaped mark on the mother’s inner thigh. There can no longer be any doubt of what it had represented, not now she’s seen and recognised the two little marks on the second victim. The only certainty in all this swirling madness is where she needs to go. She’d thought it would never happen, that she would stick to her promise; it was the least she could do after all she’d put him through. But this – she stares through the open door into the kitchen, seeing the flash of a camera from the forensics team, then an image of the scene just as sharp in her mind – this has changed everything.

  Four

  Nathan sits alongside the wall of muddy stripes, staring at the tiny centre of the spiral and telling himself out loud over and over that he’s very nearly made it. He’s perched on the edge of the uppermost stair, and his legs and arms are drawn in as if trying to stop himself from leaping forward. It’s a thought which has certainly crossed his mind, and the daydream had been a bad one. He’s had several of late, moments of madness in between the routine, but this was so terrible, so vivid, so real, that the moment he’d woken from it and found his breath he’d started searching his entire body for cuts. Not that it was his body that had been under attack.

  He stares at the filthy lines on the wall and counts them again, just to be sure. Perhaps knowing there’s only three more days is the source of the problem, because some part of him, that part of him, isn’t going to go without a fight. In a container in his hand is the last of the sleeping pills. He’d come here with hundreds, four hundred to be precise, legally, and not so legally, acquired. He’d foolishly believed that one a day would do the trick, but some nights he’d needed to swallow down two or three just to keep things quiet. Now there aren’t enough.

  A week ago, he was in the middle of heating a tin of beans and sausage – an old favourite, a treat – and was absent-mindedly playing with the lid, running the sharp edge across the inside of his wrist, remembering the last time, thinking of the next time, when he’d felt himself drifting away suddenly, drifting into a vision, and to both his horror and delight he realised there was nothing he could do to stop it. The lid of the tin had become a knife, and ahead of him was a woman, just visible through a cloud of filthy stripes spiralling towards her centre where he knew, without a trace of doubt, that he was going to plunge every inch of the blade. Either side of the woman was a child, seemingly identical in almost every way except that one wore a look of absolute horror while the other was smiling just as broadly as he was.

  After it was over, and the excitement had left him, he’d cried his eyes out on the kitchen floor as he drew the tin lid across his wrist, following the lines he’d made there before. He’d known he had to stop before he’d even started. It was still too early; he hadn’t reached the centre of the circle; he hadn’t achieved the perfect symmetry.

  Five

  Katie pulls the car to the side of the road, telling herself it’s to give the car’s suspension a break, but in reality she’s having doubts and needs a moment. She’s been playing DS Peters’ words over in her mind, convincing herself that this case could be her salvation, the one that will bring her back from the edge. But to do so she will have to work with someone who’s already fallen over it. She pictures him and tries to remember the good times, but it’s like that period of their lives has been erased, overwritten by everything that followed.

  She very clearly remembers the last time she drove this road, gripped by a similar fear and on that occasion unable to stop, not until she had put more than a hundred miles between them. Now she estimates there’s less than a mile until she returns, and she wonders what’s waiting for her out there in the dark. Would she even know before it was too late? She used to trust her instinct, would have seen the truth the moment their eyes met, but she’s started to question that judgement of late.

  She turns on the light above her and finds herself checking her hair and make-up, as if adjustments to the surface might settle the mess that’s underneath; as if looking like the person she was might somehow make the transformation complete. Her tired eyes reflect back, and she considers turning the light off, tipping back the chair and catching up on a few hours’ rest. Surely it would be better, perhaps even safer, to find him in the daylight? She looks over her shoulder, as if she can somehow see back to London, several hundred miles away in the dark. It reminds her there’s no time to waste. The threat of what might be happening in the city matches with her desperate desire to do something about it, and her whole body stiffens, her foot catching the accelerator and making the engine in her dad’s old car roar.

  She turns, facing the front, and tries to take hold of the steering wheel but stops to stare at one finger: she is taken instantly back to the moment, more than a year ago, to that other case, when they had discovered the body of Steven Fish, whose wedding-ring finger had been torn free of the others, tendons snapped along with the bone. It was only a small detail of a bigger, more harrowing crime scene, but it has always stayed with Katie as a representation of what that case did: it broke her off from her most trusted partner, led to her losing her grip.

  Six

  Nathan wakes with a dull thud echoing at the back of his mind. He stares at the ceiling, wishing he’d taken another pill, but he only has two left, one for each of the next two nights: his last two nights. He doesn’t know what time it is; he hasn’t known the exact time for almost a year, but through the gap in the shutters he can see that it’s dark and his body clock is telling him it’s somewhere near midnight. The unmistakable crunch of gravel makes him sit bolt upright in his bed. He tries to listen harder, but now the only thing he can hear is his heart.

  The questions present themselves, urgent and loud. Who? How? Why? Are they lost? Could anyone ever be this lost? And what the fuck are they doing here now, with just three days to go until the year is up, with just three days to go until it’s over?

  He knows he needs to stay calm. He needs to stay still. If he remains where he is and says and does nothing, maybe they’ll go away on their own. He starts to picture the outside of the house, rising as if he were a buzzard spiralling above it on the thermals, looking down on the circular path he’s created from running. He’d planned to get rid of the tracks on the final day, to kick them over and cover them up, but it’s too late now; someone is out there looking at them, trying to figure out who or what might have been responsible: the restless footsteps of a wild animal driven mad from being kept inside a tiny enclosure. Perhaps that’s exactly what he is. Perhaps they’ll feel uneasy and leave him alone. Perhaps they’ll call the police.

  The thought creeps up on him, as is often the case. He could easily kill this intruder. He could take a tin lid, the only sharp object there is in the house, and slice it across their neck. He could feel the hot blood pour out onto his hands and watch their eyes slowly cloud over. In one simple stroke he could change everything, bring about a beginning,
not an end. He tells himself that he doesn’t want to hurt this innocent stranger, but, as always, he knows what he wants might have nothing to do with it.

  He looks at the gap in the shutter again and more rationally starts to wonder what sort of person would come to a house in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Are they running from trouble? Are they looking for trouble?

  Two knocks on the door. He can feel the sheets sticking to his skin. He’ll wash them again when this is over, when they’ve realised he’s not going to answer – never going to answer – when he’s saved their life by doing nothing. Then he’ll bury the sheets; he’ll bury everything deep in the ground, just as he’d always intended.

  Another knock, and the sound of a high-pitched shout. He drags the sheets from the bed and wraps them around him as he slumps down into the corner of the room. He feels the urge to shout out, to plead with them to leave him alone, but his hand shoots up to his mouth to stifle any words. He cannot afford for them to hear him.

  The blood is thumping so loudly in his ears he almost misses the sharp clink of something striking the wall outside. The second one is louder, closer, and he realises they’re throwing stones up at the window. He cowers again, as if the next one might strike him, as if it might bring the whole house down. At the same time his mind is whirling, working far faster than it has done in such a long time, calculating probabilities, possibilities and impossibilities. Another stone, a direct hit on the wooden shutter. He moves to stick his fingers in his ears, but he doesn’t get there in time.