Here, now, she feels absurdly pleased that she has shown Mark where she is from. She likes that he has listened. She has told him her best stories. Told him a little about being a detective. She is proud of her job, and does not mind talking about work. She has asked him a few questions about his own job, but each time the conversation has steered back to her. She has rarely felt as interesting or desirable.
She giggles as Mark closes the door behind them, then puts a hand to her mouth. ‘I’m not a giggler,’ she says, primly. ‘I hate those giggly girls. That just slipped out.’
Mark turns her towards him and gives her a warm, forgiving smile. ‘It’s nice,’ he says. ‘You can do whatever you want. Be whatever you want. I like whoever you are.’
Helen looks away, embarrassed. Thinks about making coffee, then decides to stop the charade. She pulls him to her, and opens
her mouth for his kiss, eyes closed. When she opens them again, Mark’s face is an inch from her own. ‘Are you sure?’
She grabs him by his short, brown hair, and pulls his mouth onto hers, kissing him hungrily, wetly, drunkenly. She is ferocious and rough with him, forcing his mouth onto her neck, her shoulders, grabbing his hands and forcing them onto her breasts. She feels outrageous and wanton, wildly happy. He pauses, grabbing her wrists so as to be able to look at her properly. ‘You’re beautiful, Helen. Not here. Bedroom?’
She holds his gaze. Nods. Takes his hand and leads him to her room. It’s not much different to when she used to stay here as a teenager. The walls used to be patterned with Formula one posters. Now the prints are in frames, and there is a little more order to her wardrobe, but it is still an unashamedly teenage room.
Mark doesn’t comment. Just turns her to him and presses himself against her. She tears at the buttons of his shirt, but he smiles and does it himself. Lets the garment fall to the floor. Stands there, muscled and perfect. Tattoos, artful and expensive, upon his shoulders and chest; a mayoral chain of Italian lettering inked into his skin.
She presses her face to it. Traces the outline with her mouth. She doesn’t care what it says. Just wants to consume it. To consume him.
Mark pushes her back onto the bed. Pushes up her dress. Kneels before her and pulls down her knickers. Smiles at her. Tastes her. Doesn’t even wince as she digs her nails into his skin and wraps her strong thighs around his head.
Panting, breathless, he turns her over. Plants soft kisses on the back of her thighs.
She hears him removing his clothing. Feels tiny, delicate touches on her skin. Feels his warm hands upon her hips.
‘Are you a bad girl?’
The words make her wriggle. She turns back to him. He reaches forward, puts his fingers to her lips. Lets her taste herself. She sucks on his fingers. Tastes something else, too. Bitter. Unpleasant. But it is gone in a moment, replaced by fresh pleasures as he uses his other hand on her.
‘I’m such a bad girl.’
She hears him breathe deep. Inhale. Slide inside her. And then she is lost in pleasure. In his movements. In the warmth in her belly and the sloshing pleasures in her skull.
She doesn’t see the camera.
Doesn’t see the tiny lens, busily recording it all.
Doesn’t imagine, as she loses herself in another climax, that she is being watched. Filmed. Immortalised electronically, having cocaine snorted off her arse and rubbed into her gums by a man who works for the very gang she is supposed to be trying to put away …
*
4.36 a.m. The A180. Five miles from Barton and two screaming boys.
She’s doing 80 mph in the outside lane, Soul II Soul on the CD player and a mug of black coffee rattling in the holder; police radio on the passenger seat and a satnav set barking lefts and rights.
Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, putting on makeup in the rear-view mirror and steering with her thighs, trying to remember the right word for what has been done to Yvonne
Dale. Ex-something.
Excoriated
? No.
Excommunicated
. Don’t be fucking daft.
The glass of the convertible is misting up so Pharaoh swipes a hand across the glass. She clears a porthole, jewelled with droplets and streaks. Peers through at the pissy yellow street lights and the damp grey motorway; at the distant line of pyrite glow and the beginnings of a sepia sunrise through a sky of wire wool.
She snaps her fingers.
Exsanguinated
. Bled out. Emptied. Cut to the femoral artery and left to empty on the lino.
Pharaoh is too drunk to drive, but she’s driving anyway. She does, sometimes. She lives an hour from her office and downs a bottle of wine and a few vodkas every night. Sometimes she’s still over the limit when she leaves the house in the morning, though she gets her kids up, dresses them, feeds them and makes packed lunches, without any noticeable sign of intoxication. She doesn’t plan on stopping drinking, doesn’t think she would be able to if she tried. She’s a drinker. Always has been. And she has to drive. She makes no excuse for it. If she gets caught, she’ll take her punishment. She’ll accept the headlines and the loss of her rank. That’s life. You do what you want to do, or what you have to do, and you deal with the consequences. That’s justice. That’s police work. That’s what she is for …
The radio crackles. A voice asks her whereabouts.
‘I’m ten minutes away. See you in three.’
She’s up two hours earlier than usual, so reckons there is no doubt that she is still technically over the limit She feels fine though. Better than she should.
Pharaoh was the first senior CID officer to answer the phone.
The uniformed constable who attended the house in Barton had immediately called in the duty inspector, and he in turn had alerted CID. The duty detectives had passed it up the line, and ACC Everett was woken at home. He bumped it back down again, and within half an hour of Yvonne Dale’s body being discovered, the three most senior officers in CID were getting calls on their mobiles. Pharaoh answered on the second ring. Said she’d be there within half an hour. Pulled on leggings, boots, a smartish jumper and a light suit jacket. Phoned her mum and asked her to come sit with the kids. Made a strong coffee, took her anti-depressants and her antacid tablet, and jumped in the car.
Pharaoh lives in Scartho in Grimsby. She pronounces the word properly, though true locals insist on ‘Scather’. It’s happily middle class, with a couple of foodie pubs and the kind of swimming pool where people actually get out of the water if they want to go for a piss. A lot of the properties are set back from quiet side streets, all white paint and neat hedges. Pharaoh does not have the funds to even dream of such a home. She earns a good wage on a superintendent’s salary but historic debts, costly childcare and her husband’s condition mean she is grateful to scrape together enough each month to pay the mortgage on their three-bedroomed semi in the circle of a quiet cul-de-sac. Her name and hers alone is on the mortgage. Her husband lost everything when his business went bankrupt. Lost their big home on the outskirts of town. Lost their fancy 4x4s and Florida holidays. Paid the price for thinking too big, and then let the stresses and guilt squeeze his brain like a fist.
Five years ago, aged just forty-four, he suffered the stroke that has left him crippled down one side and a stranger to his children. Adapting their house to his needs took the few savings Pharaoh
had kept back when he was trying to keep his business afloat. Her home life is hard. She feels half-widowed. She still has her man; still sleeps next to him in their remote-control, adjustable bed. But he struggles to make himself understood. Can’t hold her. Can’t get his lips to form the right shape for the word ‘love’. The children know him as little more than a living ghost; some grunting, malevolent spirit of a man they half remember. They struggle to know how to love him, and she does not know how to teach them. She feels the loss of who he was more keenly than her kids. She remembers their life. Remembers the fire in him. The fight. The way he grunted, animal-like, as he moved inside her. Remembers, too, his temper. His hands on her throat. His spittle on her face. Remembers loving and wanting and hating him all at once. She never expected to pity him. And yet that is the emotion she now feels most keenly. Sorry for him, to be so reduced. Sorry for herself. Sorry that nobody kisses her properly. Sorry that while the bitches at work put about the rumour that she’s some kind of slag, she hasn’t been fucked yet in her forties.
Pharaoh spots the house as soon as she turns off the motorway and drifts down the steep hill into the town. There are two patrol cars on the road and a third in the drive. An ambulance is parked across the road and a police constable is wrapping blue and white tape around a lamp post. Lights are on in windows all the way down the road. Faces peer out through glass. Some doors are open: householders on doorsteps, wearing dressing gowns and drinking tea. The properties here are worth twice what Philippa Longman paid for her place, but the reaction of neighbours to death in their midst is the same in any postcode.
Pharaoh pulls up against the kerb, one alloy hubcab scraping
the stone. She flashes her badge at a slim WPC and ducks under the tape. She spots a familiar face over by the garage.
‘Guv.’
‘Morning, Lee.’
‘We got a call from DCI Barclay from Grimsby CID. Seemed to think this was his …’
‘I’m sure he did. So, what have we got?’
Detective Sergeant Lee Percy is a twenty-year veteran, who started as a uniformed constable around the same time as Pharaoh. He made it into plain clothes before she did, but when she finally got the call into CID, her career took off, while his did not. They were sergeants together, and were both up for the same inspector job. It went to Trish. He took it okay, but Pharaoh fancies that after a few drinks he will lance his spleen and spew bitter rants about how he lost out to a token woman who shagged her way into the job. She hopes she is wrong, of course, but has been right too many times to hold out much hope.
Sergeant Percy weighs things up and then shrugs. Decides that all the arguments will be among people well above his pay grade. He started his shift at 6 p.m. and had been planning an easy night writing up statements and trying to persuade a reluctant eyewitness to a hit-and-run to make a statement. He hadn’t been prepared for this. Hadn’t been prepared for what he saw in Yvonne Dale’s bathroom. He stands against the brick of the flat-roofed garage, hands in his pockets, short-sleeved, pale-blue shirt flapping around arms that lack muscle or definition. He’s got the slightest of pot bellies and a weak chin, but has caught his share of crooks.
‘Bloody horrible, Guv.’
‘Tell me everything.’
Yvonne Dale’s body was discovered not long after she took her last breath. Her neighbours had been woken by a furious banging on their door and had come downstairs to investigate, expecting to find a drunk or gang of difficult teens. Instead, they found the glass in their uPVC front door had been smeared in what they took to be red paint. They did not take it to be so for long.
‘Tried to wash it off, Guv. Old couple they are. The sort who don’t leave a job until morning. Filled a bucket of warm water and started soaping it off. It was only when they started doing it they thought it might be something a bit more sinister. Old boy licked some off his finger. Threw up in the azaleas.’
‘How did it get there? Does that mean the killer banged on the door? Why? Did he want us to find her?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Guv.’
Pharaoh presses her lips together and scratches her nose. ‘Better, I would say. And then?’
‘They phoned 999. Uniforms started an immediate search of the area. One bright spark found a footprint in the mud of next door’s garden. Found another outlined in the gravel of the drive. Followed the trail next door and banged on the door. Got no answer so tried to get the householder’s details. Phone rang for ages. Then a little kid answered. PC persuaded him to come open the door and the poor little sod did. Uniform went inside and did a search for Mum. Found her in the bathroom in more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life.’
Pharaoh screws up her eyes. ‘Two kids, they said on the way over …’
‘The youngest didn’t wake up until one of the uniforms came and scooped him up. Little bugger went nuts. There was proper screaming. They’re with one of the uniformed sergeants now,
down the street at a neighbour’s house. We’re trying to get hold of any other family.’
‘Dad?’
‘Lives abroad. They’re divorced.’
Pharaoh nods. ‘How much did they see?’
Percy shrugs, but not unkindly. He just doesn’t know.
Pharaoh says nothing for a moment. She turns, as if to say something to somebody behind her, then remembers he isn’t here. She gives a nod to Percy and pulls out her phone. She is scrolling down to McAvoy’s number when she stops herself. Thinks of the bags under his eyes and the teething, red-faced baby he keeps trying not to mention at work. She decides he deserves another couple of hours. Sometimes, when the world seems more ghastly than usual, she likes to think of him asleep. It soothes her. When she pictures him, he is peaceful, bare-chested and flat on his back, baby in one arm and Roisin in the other. She enjoys the vision for a second, then puts her phone away. She gives a wave and tells Percy to lead on. She pulls a pair of blue plastic bags from a pocket and slips them over her boots, then tucks her hands into her pockets to avoid the temptation of touching anything. Then she follows him into the house.
As she steps inside, she hears sirens, growing closer. She hears more tyres grinding to a stop by the road. It’s beginning, she thinks. Won’t be long until the press are here, waking up any neighbour still lucky enough to be asleep and asking them precisely how sad they are that a neighbour has been bled out on her bathroom floor.
‘Body’s upstairs. You need to see?’
At the foot of the stairs, Pharaoh pauses. She can already imagine the scene. She has seen scores of bodies in her career
and accepts it as part of her job. She no longer shudders at the thought of flesh and bone torn open, and the only time she can’t stop her eyes from filling with tears is when the corpse before her is that of a child. But this is a
mum
. A woman only a couple of years older than herself, who put her kids to bed, sat up for a while, then walked up these stairs for the very last time. She feels herself grow warm across her back and shoulders. Feels her cheeks flush.