Читать книгу Bleak Water - Danuta Reah - Страница 11

Kerry’s diary

Ellie’s mum died. I went to the funeral but I went late because I didn’t want anyone to see me. It was creepy because there was all earth in a pile where she was buried, not like the other graves, and the flowers were all piled up. I don’t want to be buried when I die. There was a grave with Ellie’s name on it and someone had put red flowers on it. I felt sad when I saw them…

I got lost and I was late. Lyn wasn’t there. She’ll be mad with me. She said that it was about dad. I don’t understand what she means. She told them things about dad. It wasn’t her fault. Dad says. Only now she says something else only I’ve got to see her. And now she’ll be mad at me.

Kerry heard Mum’s footsteps on the stairs and she pushed her diary under the mattress. The footsteps came to her door and stopped, then they shuffled past and she heard the sound of Mum’s door shutting. That would be it for the night. She’d left Mum downstairs in the kitchen. Mum had been nice at tea, she’d asked Kerry about school and about her friends and all the things they used to talk about. Kerry had pushed her oven chips round the plate and tried to say the right things, but Mum had her big green mug at the table, the one she pretended had tea in it. ‘Tea without milk,’ she’d say with that laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, as if Kerry was a kid, as if Kerry didn’t know. And after a while, she began.

‘Where were you on Monday night?’ she said.

Kerry thought that Mum hadn’t noticed how late she’d been. It must have been ten-thirty when she slipped her key in the lock and crept in, shivering with something that was more than cold. ‘Stacy’s,’ she said. She dipped her chip in the bean juice. The thin pink liquid dropped on to the cloth.

‘Kerry!’ Mum jumped up and came round the table to where Kerry was sitting. ‘That mess. On the clean cloth!’ She seemed about to cry. She grabbed Kerry’s arm. ‘Clear it up!’ she said, trying to rub the stain out with the sleeve of Kerry’s top, her best top that she’d sewed the sequins on to herself to make it look right. Kerry jerked away and she felt the sting across her face as Mum’s hand slapped out. There was silence.

Kerry looked down at her plate. She knew what was coming next.

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry, Kerry, I didn’t…’ And she hugged Kerry against her, against the chemically smell and the smell of cigarettes and sweat.

The tablecloth was mucky anyway. There were stains all over and some of them were from where Mum had splashed her drink over the table when she talked and laughed and waved her hands around. ‘Why don’t you bring Stacy back here?’ Mum said after a while. ‘You could have a sleep-over, I know that’s what you all like, having sleep-overs. Do you remember when you and Ellie used to have…’ Her voice trailed off and she picked up her mug and drained it. ‘I need some more tea,’ she said.

‘I’ll get it,’ Kerry said quickly. If Mum didn’t have any more now, she might go to sleep and then maybe she wouldn’t be so bad in the morning.

‘No, you stay where you are, sweetheart,’ Mum said. ‘You’ve been busy at school all day. I’ll get it.’

Kerry slid off her chair. ‘You’ve been at work…’ she began, and saw Mum’s eyes slide away and knew that Mum hadn’t been to work, again. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.

‘I said, I’ll get it!’ The shout was sudden and sharp, and Mum went into the kitchen and slammed the door behind her. Kerry sat at the table and squeezed her eyes shut tight. Her arms felt tingly and itchy, and she rubbed them. Then she pushed up her sleeve and dragged her nails across the skin, but the jumpy feeling stayed so she did it again and again until the skin was all sore, and the pattern of fine red lines that crisscrossed her arms stood out, red and angry. She could hear Mum moving around in the kitchen. She called out, ‘I’m going to do my homework.’

Mum’s voice sounded muffled. ‘You…do that.’

Now Kerry was sitting on her bed. It was dark outside. The streetlamp wasn’t working, but she knew it must be late because the kids who played out on the estate had gone in. She yawned. Mum ought to know why she didn’t bring Stacy home, or anyone. She had brought Stacy home once, and Mum had been OK at first. Kerry had seen Stacy’s eyes going round the room which was so different from Stacy’s house. Stacy’s house had all cushions and dried flowers and little ornaments, and three different curtains on the windows.

Only then Mum had started talking about where they used to live, and how it had all been different. Kerry had said, ‘Mum!’ in anguish, and Mum had started shouting and then she’d gone to sleep in the chair. The next day at school, Kerry had seen Stacy whispering with some of the other girls, but no one much liked Stacy anyway, so no one said anything.

Kerry turned the light out and curled up under the covers. She’d bunked off school and now she’d be in trouble, but she’d dreamed, that night. She had dreamed about Lyn, about the canal and the towpath, that she was on the towpath in the dark and something was chasing her, and her legs wouldn’t move as though the air had got thick, like treacle. She remembered looking back through the arched tunnel, and the sound of something in the water. And then it had been a bright, hot day, and the river was glittering in the sun, and there was Ellie, only she was walking away from Kerry, faster and faster, and no matter how Kerry called, she didn’t turn round.

She woke up in the darkness. Her face felt wet. It wouldn’t go away – the grave with Ellie’s name on, and the flowers all red like the jumper Kerry had been wearing that day. She wanted to see Lyn. She couldn’t talk to Mum, and she couldn’t talk to Dad. She used to talk to Maggie, but Maggie sent her away. And now Maggie was dead too.

Maybe Lyn had been waiting somewhere else. Maybe Lyn had tried to get in touch. Kerry hadn’t looked at the phone, left it buried at the bottom of her bag, trying not to think about the way the water in the canal had swirled and rippled as though something was moving through the water, stealthy, silent, intent.

Tomorrow was the day for a letter from Dad. He used to write every week, but lately…Maybe she could tell him what Lyn said, maybe Dad would know what she meant, and he could tell Kerry what to do. As she drifted back to sleep, things began to look a bit better. Its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18…

It was shortly after eight the following morning when DCI Farnham called his full team together. The canal death was now officially a murder. Tina Barraclough shook her head to clear away the fuzziness left from the sleeping pills she’d taken the night before. At least the pills meant she didn’t dream. Dave West had saved her a place, and she picked her way through the group to sit next to him. ‘Who were you up to last night?’ he said.

So she still looked like shit. Oh well. ‘No one you know,’ she said.

Farnham’s manner was quick, efficient, dispassionate as he gave an account of the post-mortem report which confirmed what they had already worked out – the woman they had fished out of the canal had been murdered.

‘We’ve got an initial identification,’ Farnham said. ‘She lived in one of the flats above the gallery – called herself Cara Hobson. We need to confirm that, find the next of kin, OK? She was murdered. There may have been an attempt to make it look like suicide, but it was pretty half-hearted.’

‘Maybe whoever it was didn’t mean to kill her,’ one of the officers suggested. ‘Panicked and dumped her in the canal afterwards.’

‘She drowned in the canal,’ Farnham said. ‘That’s the cause of death. But the initial post-mortem findings suggest we’re looking at something that was planned.’

Though Cara’s arms and legs had been free when her body was pulled out of the water, there were marks around her wrists and ankles that suggested she must have been tied at some time before her death. A cut cord that matched the marking on the wrists had been found in the water. ‘There’s no flow in the canal,’ Farnham said, ‘so anything that fell off her would still be close by. We haven’t found her bag, or a purse. Her money, her cards, her keys – they’re all missing.’

The damage to Cara’s hands had been noted when the body had been lifted out of the water. ‘They aren’t defence wounds,’ Farnham said. ‘And she didn’t break her fingers trying to pull the cord off her neck. They were broken before she died – someone twisted them until they snapped.’

There was a murmur around the room. Farnham held up a cloth sack with a drawstring. ‘This was round her neck, weighted with a stone. It’s the way you drown a dog, throw it in the canal with a brick round its neck. But the post-mortem suggests – this isn’t definite, but it’s probable – that she had already drowned before the weighted sack was put round her neck.’ He explained about the marks from the drawstring that had been twisted round Cara’s neck. ‘There’s very little bleeding into the soft tissue – it might have been an afterthought, make sure that her head stayed under the water just in case. There was no attempt to hide the body – she was caught in the mud. If she’d been pushed away from that, she’d have sunk and we probably wouldn’t have found her for a while.’

And the immersion had destroyed any physical evidence of Cara’s killer that might have been on her body. ‘What it does mean,’ Farnham had said, ‘is that whatever happened took time, and it wasn’t quiet. It’s unlikely she was attacked in the flat. The woman next door didn’t hear anything. No one heard anything on the canal bank. There’s somewhere else. He spent some time with her.’

The pathologist had not been able to come up with a close time of death. The cold of the water had made this even less certain than it usually was. Cara could have died any time between midevening and shortly after midnight the night before. She’d been dead for at least six hours when she was lifted from the canal at six-thirty that morning.

Tina’s mind went back to the flat, the dim room, the light switches that hadn’t worked, the heavy blankets over the windows, the flickering light of the candle. She missed the next bit. West nudged her and she hastily reconstructed what Farnham had asked – what time had Eliza Eliot heard Cara in the flat. ‘Around midnight,’ she said. ‘She’s coming in today to go through her statement.’

Farnham considered her for a moment then moved on. Tina breathed again. She could remember talking to the Eliot woman the evening before, struggling against a headache and a fatigue that threatened to overwhelm her. Eliot had been emphatic about hearing Cara, but had been uncertain about the time. ‘It was – I think I woke up,’ she’d said. ‘I think I’d been to sleep. So it must have been – I’m trying to think of something to give me a fix.’

‘Well, was it before midnight or after midnight?’ Tina had been desperate to get home, lie down, get over the speed hangover that was getting worse and worse.

Eliot had looked at her. ‘I’m not…’

‘We just need to get a general idea.’ If she didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to be sick.

‘…before. I think.’

‘If I say midnight?’ Tina said.

Remembering this, she felt her face flush and she concentrated on her notes to hide it. But it sounded like midnight was about right.

Farnham was winding up. ‘There was some disarrangement in the flat,’ he said. ‘Pillows displaced, stuff hanging out of drawers and cupboards. It doesn’t look like a struggle – but we can’t rule it out, not until we’ve got the forensics anyway.’ The candle had been burning for about eighteen hours – but that gave no indication of the time she had left the flat.

There was one more thing. Cara Hobson had been picked up on Broad Street and charged with soliciting three weeks earlier. Tina had been aware of a change of atmosphere in the room, a murmur that ran round the team. She thought she detected a certain relaxation in some of the men. A puzzling case had suddenly become a simple one. A prostitute. It was unfortunate, but these things happened. Occupational hazard.

Tina was assigned the job of going through the stuff that had been taken from Cara Hobson’s flat. It was something one of the uniformed officers could have done, and Tina wondered if Farnham had noticed her late arrivals, the signs of hangovers, the lapses in concentration. She had to get her act together. She sorted listlessly through the pile of papers, and tried to stop herself from looking at the clock. Eliza Eliot was coming in later that morning to go over her statement. That would give her a break.

If only her head didn’t feel so woolly from the sleeping pills. She could try and wake herself up with some…She dismissed the thought. Using the last of her coke might liven her up for the moment, but she’d come crashing down later. She started on the task of going through the stuff the search team had brought from the flat.

She remembered her first impressions of the flat – a strange, dim nursery lit by the flickering light of the candle. The nursery effect – more of a child’s bedroom effect, Tina thought, came from the toys scattered round the room – toys that were far too old for an infant: a rocking horse, a doll, a teddy bear, all larger than the baby herself; a counterpane printed with nursery-rhyme motifs. Presumably Cara was trying to create some kind of idealized child world for Briony Rose. One that she hadn’t had herself? Hold that thought.

She sorted through the clothes. Cara had favoured shapeless, baggy clothes, jeans with floppy, flared legs, loose-fitting sweatshirts, but there were one or two unexpected things – a basque, lacy stockings, what looked like an old-fashioned school tunic – odd things for a woman of Cara’s age and tastes to be wearing.

‘There’s not much here,’ Dave West observed. He had been taking witness statements, and had come along to offer a hand to Tina more as a gesture of support than because she really needed it. He started sorting through a box of papers.

According to Eliza Eliot and Jonathan Massey, Cara had lived in the flat for about three months. There should have been bills: utilities, council tax. There should have been some kind of evidence of Cara’s income: bank statements, Building Society books, benefit books. But there was nothing. There should have been personal stuff: addresses, phone numbers, some kind of reference to friends, to appointments. But again there was nothing. No one at the gallery reported seeing anyone visiting her – in fact, Eliza Eliot had specifically mentioned the solitary life that Cara Hobson had lived.

There was no phone installed. ‘Is there a mobile?’ West said.

Tina checked. It seemed logical, but there was no sign of one, and no record of any account. ‘That’ll need looking into.’ Tina made a note. A mobile could contain a lot of useful information. Cara’s killer could well have taken it, thrown it away. ‘Do you think someone cleared the flat out before we got there?’

West shrugged. It was possible. ‘Anything from forensics?’ he said.

‘The identifiable prints in the flat were Cara’s. There’s a thumb print that can’t be matched to anyone yet. They’re still looking at that one. Apart from that, there’s no evidence of a break-in.’ But stuff had been pulled out of the drawers, scattered around. A search, or the general mess that nineteen-year-olds tended to live in? The flat itself was bleak and comfortless – the walls new plaster, the bathroom untiled, no cooker, bare boards on the floors.

Having finished with the clothes, Tina began to go through the piles of papers that Dave had been sorting out. It was like he had said. There wasn’t much. ‘I’m going to talk to the people who rent the flats,’ Tina said. ‘This Trust or whatever it is.’ She began going through her notes, looking for the number.

‘Here,’ Dave had found it.

She negotiated her way through the electronic answering system, pressing buttons as an automated voice issued instructions, until she made contact with a human being. The woman at the other end of the phone admitted that she did know something about the Second Site flat, took Tina’s number and said she would phone her back.

‘She said “flat”.’ Tina remembered that they’d gone to the gallery expecting to find just one residence.

‘Doesn’t give you a lot of confidence.’ West was packing stuff back into the boxes. ‘If the boss can get anything out of this lot, he’s a better…’

The phone rang. ‘We have one tenant,’ the woman from the Trust informed Tina. ‘Ms Eliza Eliot. She took the tenancy of the flat in August last year, as soon as it became available.’

‘And the other tenant – the other flat, I mean,’ Tina said. ‘Cara Hobson and her daughter.’

‘There is no other flat,’ the woman said.

Surprise silenced Tina for a moment. ‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘That was where Cara Hobson was living.’

‘Well, I’m sorry…’ There was the sound of papers being moved around. ‘Let me go and check.’ Tina put her hand over the phone, and looked at Dave. She raised her eyes and pointed to her head. Brainless. Then the woman was back. ‘There are plans for a second flat,’ she said. ‘But the conversion isn’t complete. There are no plans to finish it before next summer. There’s only the one flat at present.’

Tina thanked the woman and hung up. ‘Hobson must have been squatting,’ Dave said, when she told him.

Tina thought about it. It explained the comfortless, unfinished appearance of the flat. But it seemed like an odd place for a squat. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to exclude her from the building – secure either of the access doors, and Cara would have been unable to get back in. On the other hand, if this was purely a temporary residence, it would explain why Cara had so few possessions and the lack of any paper evidence of her existence.

She expressed these doubts to Dave, who shrugged. ‘Who knows why they do anything?’

Who can understand the mind of a prostitute? Tina translated. Who cares?

‘What about this?’ Dave had a couple of sheets of paper in his hand and was unfolding them. She looked over his shoulder. They appeared to be press cuttings, photocopies of newspaper reviews. ‘Arty stuff,’ Dave said, dismissively.

Tina read through the first one, aware of a flicker of interest outside the routine of basic detective work that was – OK – important, but dull, dull, dull.