As they crossed the field in front of the cottage, their bags bulging with food, Arni was waiting nonchalantly in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb. John knew it was an act. Arni’s jaw was clenched and the veins in his arms showed his tension.
Arni stepped forward as they got closer and held out his arms. Gemma and Dawn passed over their rucksacks, and Arni’s lips were pursed as he looked through them. Dawn was trembling next to John, and so he turned to nod and smile, but she didn’t respond.
Arni pointed at John and then towards the van. ‘It needs cleaning out,’ he said. ‘And there is some mesh near the barn. Cover the cottage windows with it. We need to be ready.’
‘What for?’ John said.
Arni glowered. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Until then, you don’t need to know.’ And then he went back into the house.
Once Arni was out of earshot, Gemma said, ‘I’ll help you with the van.’
John smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He knew the rhythm of the group now. Arni was the enforcer, Henry the inspiration. ‘I’ll sort out the mesh.’
He went to the side of the house to find what he needed as Gemma went to get a bucket. He approached one of the farm outbuildings where he had seen the wire mesh rolled up earlier, leaning against a wall. John picked up the roll but then stopped to peer into the shadows of the outbuilding. There was a large sliding door that ran on rusty rollers, and it had been left ajar. As he looked, he saw a metal barrel, just like the one Arni had unloaded earlier.
John looked around to check that no one was watching, and then stepped inside.
It was cold and dark and smelled of oil and old machinery. His shoes scraped on grit, and so he walked slowly, anxious not to betray his presence.
John looked at the barrel. There was nothing written on the outside, but as he got closer he saw that it wasn’t welded shut but had a lid.
He looked around to check that he was still alone, and then he lifted it slowly and peered inside. It contained white crystals, the barrel half full.
He heard voices, and so he dropped the lid and went back outside. It was the Elams collecting eggs. Jennifer looked up and waved. He waved back, and then went to pick up the mesh. Gemma appeared behind him, dragging a hosepipe to the van. He smiled at her as she filled the bucket with water and then clambered into the back.
Dawn was sitting down outside, watching them, absent-mindedly throwing stones like a bored child.
John thought about the barrel as he watched Gemma spray at the floor of the van, her boots loud in the confined space as they scraped on the dirt and the grit. Water started to stream out, like dark rust, staining the courtyard.
Gemma had been there on the first night, when he’d been brought blindfolded to the farmhouse. Someone had sat him in a chair and then tied his hands to the back. John remembered his nerves, his breaths fast, his tongue flicking over his lips to remove the sweat, the creaks of his chair audible above the sounds of people around him.
He had seen the light come on, bright even through the blindfold, so that he had moved his head around, more nervous as he tried to work out what was going on. There had been hands on him. Soft hands, feminine hands, running up his chest, his legs, his groin, touching him. People were laughing, young women giggling. It was a tease, a joke, but the powerlessness turned him on.
Then fingers had tugged at the small knots at the back of his head and the blindfold was loosened.
The glare from the light had been bright, and so he squinted and turned away. As the room had come slowly into view, all he could see were smiling faces. It had been carefree, but mixed with the flush of arousal, the glint of excitement that something new was happening. He thought then that there didn’t seem to be many men, that it had been mainly young women, some little more than late teens. His eyes had moved frantically from one to the other, checking for hostility, or hatred or danger, some sign that he had read everything wrong, but there were none. They wore the same look of contentment they had worn when they had visited him at his own house.
Then he had seen him for the first time. Henry.
John heard him before he saw him. There was a rustle behind the lamp, the crossing of legs, a cough. Then Henry commanded everyone to sit down, his voice quiet, but it had held everyone’s attention, because they all did just that, sitting cross-legged on the floor. John had known that Henry was their leader, because everyone else had talked about him so much, but that was the moment when John knew exactly how much Henry led, and how much they followed.
Henry had leaned forward into the beam from the lamp, so that it cast a halo around his hair. It was wild, long and unkempt, and dark strands against the brightness of the light made it fan out.
‘I’m Henry,’ he said.
John had looked down at first and licked his lips, like a nervous twitch. When he looked up again, his voice was strong. ‘I’ve heard of you.’
There had been silence at first, everyone waiting on Henry’s response, but then his laugh started as a low rumble, a deep chuckle, and everyone else joined in, laughing at John’s innocence, his impudence. Everyone remembered the first time they met Henry, John knew that now.
Henry had leaned into him, and John got a scent of sweat and oil and dirty hair. Henry was unwashed, grubby, with dirt around the collar of his denim shirt, but John knew that he shouldn’t turn away from it.
That was the first time John saw Henry’s eyes.
Everyone talked about Henry’s eyes. They were bright, excited, piercing, but searching and compassionate. They could be everything to everybody, and back then his eyes looked joyful, wide, to match the grin that gleamed through the dark shadow of his beard.
‘There’s no going back, John, you know that,’ Henry had said, but it hadn’t come out like a threat. It was more a statement of fact.
Henry had clicked his fingers, and then he had seen her. Gemma. She had been the one he had been drawn to when they had visited his house. There had been a connection with her, and she had felt it too, he was sure, but it had been impossible to speak to her on her own, because she was never alone. He remembered the flutters of excitement when he saw her, her body young and lithe.
John’s focus had been entirely on Gemma as she went to her knees in front of him, flutters of excitement in his chest as her hands ran along his legs. Her eyes never left his, a half smile on her face, flirting. As her hand went slowly between his thighs, just brushing him over the cloth of his trousers, it had seemed unreal, almost hazy, because he knew that people were watching, but in that moment it was just Gemma, the soft movement of her fingers on him. He had tried to fight his arousal, but his hands were still tied, and so all he could do was go with the sensations.
Then it was just a blur of images, of sounds. The pop of his trouser button, the cloth sliding down his legs, Gemma warm on him, soft moans, flashes of bodies in the candlelight, other people naked, all the time Henry’s quiet laughter in the background. He had felt the rope slip from his wrists and Gemma led him to the bedroom. Once in there, he had let Gemma take charge.
John took a deep breath. That had been just three weeks earlier. He had relived that memory on those nights when Gemma wasn’t there, and he had waited for it to happen again. And it had, whenever Henry allowed it.
‘You’re daydreaming again.’
‘Uh-huh?’ John said, and then he realised that Gemma was talking to him. He laughed and splashed some water towards her. She giggled and squeezed on the hose, sending a jet of water towards the stains on the floor from whatever had been in the van, before flicking it upwards, laughing with him, sending an arc of water towards him. John threw some more water at her, dunking his cloth and splashing her, her pink skin visible through the wet cloth.
Gemma jumped down from the van and put her hand on her hips, as she mocked up a stern look. John flicked some more water towards her, making her shriek out, laughing.
She must have heard the voices first, because her laughter disappeared, and as she turned around, John followed her gaze, and then he heard them too, excited laughter and shouts. There were other people in the house. They must have arrived when they were at the shop.
There were people coming out of the house, shaking hands with Arni and walking towards two old cars parked further along the farm track. John hadn’t noticed them before. John counted nine of them, and they looked like the type of people in the photographs that adorned the walls. Mohican haircuts, long scruffy jumpers, hobnailed boots. White boys in dreadlocks and small wispy beards.
‘What’s going on?’ John said.
‘Probably a planning meeting,’ Gemma said.
‘What for?’
Gemma looked at him and blushed. She glanced over at Arni and then shook her head. ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because not everyone knows,’ she said, and then smiled. ‘It’s going to be a big surprise when it happens though.’
John looked back towards the group. As they got nearer to their cars, Arni turned towards him.
John waved. Arni stared back, and even though he was a distance away, the coldness of his eyes made John lower his hand and turn away.
Sheldon cricked his neck as he got closer to the Incident Room. He had left Christina, Billy’s housekeeper, with Tracey. A woman-to-woman talk might elicit more information.
He had spoken to Jim Kelly to try and get him to delay the story, but Kelly hadn’t been interested. He had a failing paper to keep in business, and so the sensitivities around Billy Privett’s death didn’t matter to him.
Billy Privett’s story was inextricably mixed up with Alice Kenyon’s, and her murder hung around the local police like a stain on the uniform. Now that Billy was dead, all the mystery surrounding Alice Kenyon’s murder would burst to the fore again, and with Jim Kelly ready to write his story for the paper, he expected it to be on the front page.
For Sheldon, though, it had never gone away.
He saw Alice’s dead body when he least expected it, during his quieter moments and when he thought he was a long way from his job. Reading the newspaper, sitting in the park. And it wasn’t just Alice. He remembered all of them. Young women murdered by random strangers. Men punched and stamped to death outside nightclubs, just because they looked at someone the wrong way. Victims of domestic abuse who endured years of beatings until finally he went too far, and all those lost chances to get away came to nothing. Or old men battered in their homes for the contents of their dead wives’ jewellery boxes. Lives ended by violence, all leaving extra victims. The grieving mothers, and husbands and wives, or children who grow up never knowing their mother or father. The injustices stayed with Sheldon, and his memories seemed like a film on fast forward, speeding glimpses of limp flesh or blood-soaked clothing, except that with every year, with every new case, the film just got faster, so that he couldn’t make out the faces anymore. It was just a stream of images, like a flicker book. Pink. Brown. Fat. Thin. But at the end of all of it was Alice Kenyon.
He looked up and realised that he had stopped walking. He was standing in the corridor, his fists clenched so hard that his fingernails dug into his palms, making small crescent cuts in the skin.
He scrambled in his pocket for his pills, his blue saviours. He popped one into his mouth and swallowed. It seemed to catch in his throat, but he kept on gulping to force it down. Tugging at his cuffs, he told himself that he was ready to do this, and then walked into the Incident Room.
People watched him as he went in. The corpse had been confirmed as Billy Privett by fingerprints, and the mood seemed different to earlier in the day, as if everyone had felt the spotlight turn on them, making them more earnest.
Duncan Lowther was at the other end of the room.
‘CCTV?’ Sheldon shouted.
Lowther looked up and then pointed towards his computer monitor. ‘I’m going through the footage now. I’ve got it on here, if you want to see it.’
Sheldon nodded that he did and went to stand behind Lowther’s shoulder, other detectives crowding round.
‘The hotel only records the lobby,’ Lowther said. ‘It gets used a lot for conferences, and not many people will want to stay in a hotel that might film them room hopping.’ He moved the footage back quickly, so that the woman behind the reception desk seemed to vibrate. ‘This is Billy checking in,’ and he let it play at normal speed.
Sheldon watched as Billy moved into shot. He looked like he was trying to hide his appearance. He was wearing a baseball cap low onto his brow and sunglasses, so that he just drew attention to himself in the opulent surroundings of the lobby.
‘Why were you there, Billy?’ Sheldon said to the screen.
‘It’s more about why he was keeping it such a secret,’ Lowther said.
‘What about later on, nearer the time when he was murdered? Is there anyone unusual coming into the hotel?’
‘I haven’t gone through all of it. I’ve got a list of every guest and their checking-in time, and so I’m looking at that to get a description. Every time someone appears on the screen, I work out who it is, and note down what they are doing. By the time I’ve finished, I should have accounted for every guest and worked out if there is anyone in the hotel who isn’t a paying guest.’
‘And once you’ve done that?’
‘I check out each one, and look for someone giving false details.’ Lowther smiled. ‘That’s the fun part, because I can bet that we’ll drag at least a couple of people in who gave false addresses to keep their stay secret. You can’t beat the twitch of a cheating spouse to brighten your afternoon.’ When Sheldon scowled a rebuke, Lowther added, ‘We’ve been getting plenty of calls from the press.’
‘Speak to the Press Officer and make it official then,’ Sheldon said. ‘Have we had any fresh information about Billy since the news broke?’
‘Just a few calls about his lifestyle, but nothing we didn’t know. We’ve had a few putting Ted Kenyon’s name forward.’