Aftermath, p.1
Aftermath, page 1
Dedication
To Richard and Barbara,
good friends and gracious hosts
Epigraph
The evil that men do lives after them.
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgements
Excerpt from In the Dark Places
Chapter One
About the Author
Book by Peter Robinson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
They locked her in the cage when she started to bleed. Tom was already there. He’d been there for three days and had stopped crying now. He was still shivering, though. It was February, there was no heat in the cellar, and both of them were naked. There would be no food, either, she knew, not for a long time, not until she got so hungry that she felt as if she were being eaten from the inside.
It wasn’t the first time she had been locked in the cage, but this time was different from the others. Before, it had always been because she’d done something wrong or hadn’t done what they wanted her to do. This time it was different; it was because of what she had become, and she was really scared.
As soon as they had shut the door at the top of the stairs, the darkness wrapped itself around her like fur. She could feel it rubbing against her skin the way a cat rubs against your legs. She began to shiver. More than anything she hated the cage, more than the blows, more than the humiliations. But she wouldn’t cry. She never cried. She didn’t know how.
The smell was terrible; they didn’t have a toilet to go to, only the bucket in the corner, which they would only be allowed to empty when they were let out. And who knew when that would be?
But worse even than the smell were the little scratching sounds that started when she had been locked up only a few minutes. Soon, she knew, it would come, the tickle of sharp little feet across her legs or her stomach if she dared to lie down. The first time, she had tried to keep moving and making noise all the time to keep them away, but in the end she had become exhausted and fallen asleep, not caring how many there were or what they did. She could tell in the dark, by the way they moved and their weight, whether they were rats or mice. The rats were the worst. One had even bitten her once.
She held Tom and tried to comfort him, making them both a little warmer. If truth be told, she could have done with a little comforting herself, but there was nobody to comfort her.
Mice scuttled across her feet. Occasionally, she flicked her legs out and heard one squeak as it hit the wall. She could hear music from upstairs, loud, with the bass making the bars of the cage rattle.
She closed her eyes and tried to find a beautiful retreat deep inside her mind, a place where everything was warm and golden and the sea that washed up on the sands was deep blue, the water warm and lovely as sunlight when she jumped in. But she couldn’t find it, couldn’t find that sandy beach and blue sea, that garden full of bright flowers or that cool green forest in summer. When she closed her eyes, all she could find was darkness shot with red, distant mutterings, cries, and an appalling sense of dread.
She drifted in and out of sleep, becoming oblivious to the mice and rats. She didn’t know how long she’d been there before she heard noises upstairs. Different noises. The music had ended a long time ago and everything was silent apart from the scratching and Tom’s breathing. She thought she heard a car pull up outside. Voices. Another car. Then she heard someone walking across the floor upstairs. A curse.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose upstairs. It sounded as if someone was battering at the door with a tree trunk, then there was a crunching sound followed by a loud bang as the front door caved in. Tom was awake now, whimpering in her arms.
She heard shouting and what sounded like dozens of pairs of grown-ups’ feet running around upstairs. After what seemed like an eternity, she heard someone prise open the lock to the cellar door. A little light spilled in, but not much, and there wasn’t a bulb down there. More voices. Then came the lances of bright torchlight, coming closer, so close they hurt her eyes and she had to shield them with her hand. Then the beam held her and a strange voice cried, “Oh, God! Oh, my God!”
1
Maggie Forrest wasn’t sleeping well, so it didn’t surprise her when the voices woke her shortly before four o’clock one morning in early May, even though she had made sure before she went to bed that all the windows in the house were shut fast.
If it hadn’t been the voices, it would have been something else: a car door slamming as someone set off for an early shift; the first train rattling across the bridge; the neighbor’s dog; old wood creaking somewhere in the house; the fridge clicking on and off; a pan or a glass shifting on the draining board. Or perhaps one of the noises of the night, the kind that made her wake in a cold sweat with a thudding heart and gasp for breath as if she were drowning, not sleeping: the man she called Mr. Bones clicking up and down The Hill with his cane; the scratching at the front door; the tortured child screaming in the distance.
Or a nightmare.
She was just too jumpy these days, she told herself, trying to laugh it off. But there they were again. Definitely voices. One loud and masculine.
Maggie got out of bed and padded over to the window. The street called The Hill ran up the northern slope of the broad valley, and where Maggie lived, about halfway up, just above the railway bridge, the houses on the eastern side of the street stood atop a twenty-foot rise that sloped down to the pavement in a profusion of shrubs and small trees. Sometimes the undergrowth and foliage seemed so thick she could hardly find her way along the path to the pavement.
Maggie’s bedroom window looked over the houses on the western side of The Hill and beyond, a patchwork landscape of housing estates, arterial roads, warehouses, factory chimneys and fields stretching through Bradford and Halifax all the way to the Pennines. Some days, Maggie would sit for hours and look at the view, thinking about the odd chain of events that had brought her here. Now, though, in the predawn light, the distant necklaces and clusters of amber streetlights took on a ghostly aspect, as if the city weren’t quite real yet.
Maggie stood at her window and looked across the street. She could swear there was a hall light on directly opposite, in Lucy’s house, and when she heard the voice again, she suddenly felt all her premonitions had been true.
It was Terry’s voice, and he was shouting at Lucy. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then she heard a scream, the sound of glass breaking and a thud.
Lucy.
Maggie dragged herself out of her paralysis, and with trembling hands she picked up the bedside telephone and dialed 999.
Probationary Police Constable Janet Taylor stood by her patrol car and watched the silver BMW burn, shielding her eyes from its glare, standing upwind of the foul-smelling smoke. Her partner, PC Dennis Morrisey, stood beside her. One or two spectators were peeping out of their bedroom windows, but nobody else seemed very interested. Burning cars weren’t exactly a novelty on this estate. Even at four o’clock in the morning.
Orange and red flames, with deep inner hues of blue and green and occasional tentacles of violet, twisted into the darkness, sending up palls of thick black smoke. Even upwind, Janet could smell the burning rubber and plastic. It was giving her a headache, and she knew her uniform and her hair would reek of it for days.
The leading firefighter, Gary Cullen, walked over to join them. It was Dennis he spoke to, of course; he always did. They were mates.
“What do you think?”
“Joyriders.” Dennis nodded toward the car. “We checked the number plate. Stolen from a nice middle-class residential street in Heaton Moor, Manchester, earlier this evening.”
“Why here, then?”
“Dunno. Could be a connection, a grudge or something. Someone giving a little demonstration of his feelings. Drugs, even. But that’s for the lads upstairs to work out. They’re the ones paid to have brains. We’re done for now. Everything safe?”
“Under control. What if there’s a body in the boot?”
Dennis laughed. “It’ll be well-done by now, won’t it? Hang on a minute, that’s our radio, isn’t it?”
Janet walked over to the car. “I’ll get it,” she said over her shoulder.
“Control to three-five-four. Come in, please, three-five-four. Over.”
Janet picked up the radio. “Three-five-four to Control. Over.”
“Domestic dispute reported taking place at number thirty-five, The Hill. Repeat. Three-five. The Hill. Can you respond? Over.”
Christ, thought Janet, a bloody domestic. No copper in her right mind liked domestics, especially at this time in the morning. “Will do,” she sighed, looking at her watch. “ETA three minutes.”
She called over to Den nis, who held up his hand and spoke a few more words to Gary Cullen before responding. They were both laughing when Dennis returned to the car.
“Tell him that joke, did you?” Janet asked, settling behind the wheel.
“Which one’s that?” Dennis asked, all innocence.
Janet started the car and sped to the main road. “You know, the one about the blonde giving her first blow job.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Only I heard you telling it to that new PC back at the station, the lad who hasn’t started shaving yet. You ought to give the poor lad a chance to make his own mind up about women, Den, instead of poisoning his mind right off the bat.”
The centrifugal force almost threw them off the road as Janet took the roundabout at the top of The Hill too fast. Dennis grasped the dashboard and hung on for dear life. “Jesus Christ. Women drivers. It’s only a joke. Have you got no sense of humor?”
Janet smiled to herself as she slowed and curb-crawled down The Hill looking for number 35.
“Anyway, I’m getting sick of this,” Dennis said.
“Sick of what? My driving?”
“That, too. Mostly, though, it’s your constant bitching. It’s got so a bloke can’t say what’s on his mind these days.”
“Not if he’s got a mind like a sewer. That’s pollution. Anyway, it’s changing times, Den. And we have to change with them or we’ll end up like the dinosaurs. By the way, about that mole.”
“What mole?”
“You know, the one on your cheek. Next to your nose. The one with all the hairs growing out of it.”
Dennis put his hand up to his cheek. “What about it?”
“I’d get it seen to quick, if I were you. It looks cancerous to me. Ah, number thirty-five. Here we are.”
She pulled over to the right side of the road and came to a halt a few yards past the house. It was a small detached residence built of redbrick and sandstone, between a plot of allotments and a row of shops. It wasn’t much bigger than a cottage, with a slate roof, low-walled garden and a modern garage attached at the right. At the moment, all was quiet.
“There’s a light on in the hall,” Janet said. “Shall we have a dekko?”
Still fingering his mole, Dennis sighed and muttered something she took to be assent. Janet got out of the car first and walked up the path, aware of him dragging his feet behind her. The garden was overgrown and she had to push twigs and shrubbery aside as she walked. A little adrenaline had leaked into her system, put her on super alert, as it always did with domestics. The reason most cops hated them was that you never knew what was going to happen. As likely as not you’d pull the husband off the wife and then the wife would take his side and start bashing you with a rolling pin.
Janet paused by the door. Still all quiet, apart from Dennis’s stertorous breathing behind her. It was too early yet for people to be going to work, and most of the late night revelers had passed out by now. Somewhere in the distance the first birds began to chatter. Sparrows, most likely, Janet thought. Mice with wings.
Seeing no doorbell, Janet knocked on the door.
No response came from inside.
She knocked harder. The hammering seemed to echo up and down the street. Still no response.
Next, Janet went down on her knees and looked through the letter box. She could just make out a figure sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s figure. That was probable cause enough for forced entry.
“Let’s go in,” she said.
Dennis tried the handle. Locked. Then, gesturing for Janet to stand out of the way, he charged it with his shoulder.
Poor technique, she thought. She’d have reared back and used her foot. But Dennis was a second-row Rugby forward, she reminded herself, and his shoulders had been pushed up against so many arse-holes in their time that they had to be strong.
The door crashed open on first contact and Dennis cannonballed into the hallway, grabbing hold of the bottom of the banister to stop himself from tripping over the still figure that lay there.
Janet was right behind him, but she had the advantage of walking in at a more dignified pace. She shut the door as best she could, knelt beside the woman on the floor, and felt for a pulse. Weak, but steady. One side of her face was bathed in blood.
“My God,” Janet muttered. “Den? You okay?”
“Fine. You take care of her. I’ll have a look around.” Dennis headed upstairs.
For once, Janet didn’t mind being told what to do. Nor did she mind that Dennis automatically assumed it was a woman’s work to tend the injured while the man went in search of heroic glory. Well, she minded, but she felt a real concern for the victim here, so she didn’t want to make an issue of it.
Bastard, she thought. Whoever did this. “It’s okay, love,” she said, even though she suspected the woman couldn’t hear her. “We’ll get you an ambulance. Just hold on.”
Most of the blood seemed to be coming from one deep cut just above her left ear, Janet noticed, though there was also a little smeared around the nose and lips. Punches, by the looks of it. There were also broken glass and daffodils scattered all around her, along with a damp patch on the carpet. Janet took her personal radio from her belt hook and called for an ambulance. She was lucky it worked on The Hill; personal UHF radios had much less range than the VHF models fitted in cars, and were notoriously subject to black spots of patchy reception.
Dennis came downstairs shaking his head. “Bastard’s not hiding up there,” he said. He handed Janet a blanket, pillow and towel, nodding to the woman. “For her.”
Janet eased the pillow under the woman’s head, covered her gently with the blanket and applied the towel to the seeping wound on her temple. Well, I never, she thought, full of surprises, our Den. “Think he’s done a runner?” she asked.
“Dunno. I’ll have a look in the back. You stay with her till the ambulance arrives.”
Before Janet could say anything, Dennis headed off toward the back of the house. He hadn’t been gone more than a minute or so when she heard him call out, “Janet, come here and have a look at this. Hurry up. It could be important.”
Curious, Janet looked at the injured woman. The bleeding had stopped and there was nothing else she could do. Even so, she was reluctant to leave the poor woman alone.
“Come on,” Dennis called again. “Hurry up.”
Janet took one last look at the prone figure and walked toward the back of the house. The kitchen was in darkness.
“Down here.”
She couldn’t see Dennis, but she knew that his voice came from downstairs. Through an open door to her right, three steps led down to a landing lit by a bare bulb. There was another door, most likely to the garage, she thought, and around the corner were the steps down to the cellar.
Dennis was standing there, near the bottom, in front of a third door. On it was pinned a poster of a naked woman. She lay back on a brass bed with her legs wide open, fingers tugging at the edges of her vagina, smiling down over her large breasts at the viewer, inviting, beckoning him inside. Dennis stood before it, grinning.
“Bastard,” Janet hissed.
“Where’s your sense of humor?”
“It’s not funny.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Janet could see light under the door, faint and flickering, as if from a faulty bulb. She also noticed a peculiar odor. “What’s that smell?” she asked.
“How should I know? Rising damp? Drains?”
But it smelled like decay to Janet. Decay and sandalwood incense. She gave a little shudder.
“Shall we go in?” She was whispering without knowing why.
“I think we’d better.”
Janet walked ahead of him, almost on tiptoe, down the final few steps. The adrenaline was really pumping in her veins now. Slowly, she reached out and tried the door. Locked. She moved aside, and Dennis used his foot this time. The lock splintered, and the door swung open. Dennis stood aside, bowed from the waist in a parody of gentlemanly courtesy, and said, “Ladies first.”
