Authors: Michael Robotham
She starts to explain, growing tearful.
“I meant to be back by now. I thought I could catch a train and you’d never know. Jacob wanted to go to this party and now he’s wasted… and my phone is dead… and it’s too late to get a train.”
I can picture her standing slightly pigeon-toed, pushing her fringe from her eyes. My mouth is clogged up and I can barely speak.
“It’s OK, Charlie.”
“You’re angry.”
“No.”
“Please don’t be angry.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“That means you’re
really
angry.”
“How much money do you have?”
“Eleven quid.”
“What’s the address of the party?”
“Are you going to call the police?”
“Someone else.”
Vincent Ruiz answers on the second ring. Insomnia replaced his third wife or maybe he just retired from sleeping when he quit the Met and handed back his badge.
Ruiz is a friend of mine, although we started off disliking each other when we first met eight years ago. That’s one of the intuitive things about life: meeting people that we seem destined to know. Ruiz is like that. Our initial mistrust grew into respect then admiration then genuine affection. Sacrifice comes last. Ruiz would give up a lot for me, perhaps even his own life, but he’d take a dozen people down with him because he doesn’t surrender without a fight.
“This better be important,” he barks down the phone.
“It’s Joe. I need your help. Charlie’s in trouble.”
I can hear him sitting up, swinging his legs out of bed. Cursing. Fully alert now.
“What’s wrong?”
“I stubbed my toe.”
He’s looking for a pen. I give him the address.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pick her up. Put her to bed. I appreciate this. I’ll take an early train.”
“I’m on it.”
That’s what I like about Ruiz. He doesn’t need to rationalize or debate the pros and cons of a given situation. He goes with his gut and it rarely lets him down. Other people need to feel good about themselves, usually at the expense of others, or they keep a ledger of favors owed. Not Ruiz. When Julianne and I separated, he didn’t take sides or pass judgment. He stayed friends with both of us.
Before he hangs up: “Hey, Professor, did you hear they just brought out a new ‘Divorce Barbie’? She comes with all of Ken’s stuff.”
“Fetch my daughter.”
“Done.”
Julianne picks up on the half-ring.
“Charlie’s fine. Ruiz has gone to pick her up.”
“Where was she?”
“With Jacob.”
“Where?”
“He took her to a party and then got wasted instead of bringing her home. She’s pretty upset.”
“She should be.”
“I’m sorry—I should have been watching her.”
Julianne doesn’t respond. I know she’s angry. I had one job to do—look after Charlie—and I proved myself incapable. Useless. Feckless. Pointless. Aimless.
I wish she’d shout at me. Instead, she says goodnight.
I lie awake until Ruiz calls to say that Charlie is asleep in his guest room. It’s after three. I won’t sleep now. So I pack Charlie’s things and check out the train timetables. I’ll take the first available service to London and then drive Charlie home. We’ll work out a story in the car, polishing the script until we have something that Julianne accepts.
I miss this. I know that sounds bizarre, given what’s happened tonight, but I miss the daily dramas of being married, the ins and outs of everyday domestic life. We’ve been separated for three years, but whenever something goes wrong Julianne still calls me. In the event of an emergency, I’m still her go-to man, the number one person in her life.
There’s a downside, of course. She wants me to handle the bad stuff, not the good stuff.
I
don’t hear him coming.
I don’t hear him move the furniture or open the trapdoor. It’s strange because normally I’m such a light sleeper.
When I do wake, I think it must be the police. Tash has brought help. They’ve found me. But then I hear his voice and my heart freezes and the cold reaches all the way to the ends of my fingers.
He’s already down the ladder. Standing over me. He grabs my hair and pulls me out of bed and throws me against the wall, bouncing my head off the bricks. He does it again, holding my hair, making syllables into words as my head hits the wall.
“YOU… THINK… YOU… ARE… SO… FUCK… ING… CLEV… ER!”
I crumple on the floor, trying to crawl away, but he grabs my leg and pulls me across the concrete. I can feel the skin being torn from my knees and elbows.
A forearm snakes around my neck. He pulls me back into his chest and wraps his fist in my hair.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“Please don’t hurt me.”
“Tell me—what are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know.”
The blade of the knife is pressed under my left eye, digging into the skin.
“Do you remember how I cut her? Do you want that to happen to you?”
I shake my head.
“When are you going to learn?”
“I will.”
“I’m trying to save you,” he says, almost pleading with me now, still tightening his arm across my neck. “I’m trying to save you from yourself.”
I try to nod, but I can’t move my head.
“You smell!” he says, pushing me away. “Don’t you ever wash?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that. You think I’m stupid?”
“No.”
“You think you’re clever helping her escape. She’s not coming back. She’s dead. You killed her. It’s your fault.”
I don’t believe him. He’s lying.
I’m lying on the floor. He kicks me before I can curl into a ball. I do it anyway, trying to protect myself, covering my head.
I hear him moving, but I don’t look up. I can hear water echoing against the metal sides of a bucket. He stands over me, pouring the water slowly over my head and my arms and legs. The cold takes my breath away. He fills the bucket again. I don’t move.
Here it comes again. He kicks me.
“On your back! Open your legs!”
I turn over. He pours the water on my groin and tosses me a scrubbing brush with hard bristles.
“Wash yourself.”
I don’t understand.
He kicks me again. “I said, wash yourself.”
I use the brush, rubbing it along my arms.
“Not there! There!”
He points. I put the brush between my thighs.
“Scrub!”
I hesitate.
“You do it, or I’ll do it for you. That’s it. Harder! Harder!”
I can’t see through the tears. I can barely hear him.
When he’s satisfied, he takes the brush away from me. Then he collects the remaining food in a plastic bag, my last can of beans. He carries it up the ladder and turns off the light.
“When you’re really sorry, we’ll talk again. Maybe then I’ll turn the lights on.”
The trapdoor shuts. The darkness comes to life, breathing into my ears, whispering, sighing.
On my hands and knees I crawl across the room to the sink. The vomit that comes out of me is bitter water. My clothes are soaked. The bunks. The bedding. I still have gas in the cooker.
I make myself a cup of tea, feeling my way around the basement. Then I sit with my head over the bedpan, wanting to be sick again. I’m not scared of the dark any more. I’m used to it now. The darkness used to be like death, now it’s like the womb.
He told me nobody wanted me. He told me they stopped looking because nobody cared. He said Tash was dead. I’m not going to believe his lies.
I shake the ladder. I shout at the trapdoor. “I need a dry blanket.”
Nobody comes.
“I need a dry blanket.”
Still nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
I
t’s still early when I arrive at Ruiz’s house in Fulham. Mist hangs over the Thames, blurring naked trees on the distant bank. Rowers appear from the shroud, pulling into view with choreographed strokes like a ballet on water.
Ruiz answers the door in a short bathrobe, bare legs and Ugg boots.
I look at his feet. “You’re wearing dead sheep.”
“How observant of you. No wonder you’re a psychologist. They were a gift from Miranda. They’re so ugly I’ve grown fond of them.” He wiggles his toes. “I’m thinking of giving them names: Lambchop and Shaun.”
His arms fold around me in a proper hug. Not many British men can hug, but Ruiz makes it feel as easy as a handshake. I follow him down the hallway to the kitchen.
“Do you want to put some trousers on?”
“No.”
“Charlie?”
“Still asleep.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She puked her little heart out about 3:00 a.m. I gave her an aspirin and put her back to bed.”
Ruiz fills a teapot and covers it with a knitted cozy. Sits opposite. Pours. Milk. Sugar. Even dressed in a bathrobe he can look intimidating, yet there is a gentle stillness about him that I’ve always admired, a quiet dignity. He doesn’t offer unsolicited advice. His two children are grown up. One of them is married. Guidance might be reassuring, but it’s rarely helpful.
“So how are you doing?”
“Good.”
“Seeing anyone?”
“No.”
“How’s Julianne?”
“She’s being reasonable and polite. I wish she’d get angry.”
“Not everyone is like you.”
“You think
I’m
angry?”
“I think you’re furious. I think you wake up in the morning and if you’re not angry you hold a mirror over your mouth to see if you’re still breathing.”
Not rising to the bait, I try to change the subject. I don’t want to talk about Julianne. Instead, I start telling him about Oxford and the Bingham Girls.
He remembers the case. That’s one of the remarkable things about Ruiz—his memory. For him there has never been such a thing as forgetting. Nothing grows hazy or vague over time, fraying at the edges. Some people think photographically or chronologically, but Ruiz connects details like a spider weaving a web, threading one strand to the next. That’s why he can reach back and pluck details out of the air from criminal cases that are five, ten, fifteen years old.
“Natasha McBain’s body was found four days ago in a frozen lake.”
“How long had it been there?”
“Thirty-six hours.”
Ruiz whistles through his teeth. “So she’s been alive all this time. Any idea where?”
“No.”
“How did you get involved?”
“They want me to review the original investigation.”
“And you said no.”
“Correct.”
“But you’re doing it anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Why you?”
“I’m an outsider.”
“Which would normally count against you.”
“The chief constable is concerned about the fall-out. He wants to avoid allegations of a cover-up. It’s not a witch hunt.”
“Not yet,” says Ruiz, swallowing half a mug of tea and pouring himself another. “I remember they suspected a school caretaker and they also looked at Natasha’s old man. Isaac McBain served five years for armed robbery. He got mixed up with a couple of gangster-wannabes called the Connolly brothers who knocked over a payroll in London. When it all went pear-shaped, McBain copped a plea and grassed up the Connolly brothers for a lesser sentence. After the girls went missing, the police thought the brothers might have orchestrated the kidnapping as payback.”
“What happened?”
“They were interviewed; denied everything. Then the abduction theory ran out of steam.”
“What changed?”
“There was a third girl,” he says. “Emily Martinez.”
“The best friend.”
“She told police that Natasha and Piper were planning to run away. I guess everyone expected the girls to turn up once they’d run out of money or had a falling out, but it never happened.”
“And the investigation?”
“The Hadley family kept up the pressure. You must have seen the mother on TV. She can’t pass a camera without making a speech. She’s a good-looking woman, if you’re into hard-bodied, gym rat chic.”