Читать книгу Dead Girls: An addictive and darkly funny crime thriller - Graeme Cameron, Graeme Cameron - Страница 16

Chapter 7

‘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.’