The Score (20 page)

A teenage girl, dressed in what appeared to be a type of choirboy’s outfit, white and flowing, though with no ruff at the neck. The still captured from the upload gave little away, but the setting could, just
could
, have been the same as the one in the other girls’ videos. The performer was named as
RhiP
. Rhi, short for Rhiannon? It seemed like a reasonable guess. Still, it didn’t necessarily mean she was Welsh. Maybe her parents had been Fleetwood Mac fans.

She clicked on play.

The girl was captured in a tight spotlight, her voice cracking with nerves at first, but once she settled down her talent was obvious. She was a natural alto, a lower register than the other girls, had more trouble reaching the higher notes, hadn’t yet learned how to sing across the break in her voice. The scenery in the background looked vaguely similar to the others. It was less clear, but there was a wash that could have been the same grey stone effect.

The waitress who had been patient with Cat that day came over, clearly wanting her to pay up and get out. Cat dropped money – too much money – on the table. Her mind was elsewhere.

She took a still of the girl, clipped it down to a headshot and loaded it to her phone.

She called Thomas. He was all ready to give her more of his bullshit, but she cut through it.

‘I’ve got an IP address that I need tracing. There’s a girl on YouTube who might fit the profile. I think I should go see her.’

‘
Might
. Sounds a bit vague. You’ll have a warrant for that request, of course.’

She said nothing.

‘It’s an offence to get that kind of thing without a warrant.’ He didn’t say he
couldn’t
do it, Cat noted, just that he wouldn’t.

‘Right, and yesterday you felt that Riley was resisting arrest for really quite a long time. Resisting arrest quite hard and repeatedly.’

‘That’s different. Look, if you can work up an application for the warrant, I’ll see if I can get it. But this is a big case now. It’s like every fucker in Camarthen wants a piece of it. I’ve got to play it by the book.’

‘OK.’

‘Sorry.’

Cat rang off. Sod it.

She was standing on the street outside the café. For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. Just stuck out on a big London street, breathing exhaust fumes. A cycle courier drew up to some red traffic lights and, by twisting his front wheel, the courier managed to stay balanced until the lights changed, his foot not once touching the ground.

Cat retreated to a quieter side street and called Kyle. She explained what she needed and why. She didn’t give full details, just said that an internet search had identified another possible woman at risk and she wanted to check on her.

‘You need a warrant for that,’ said Kyle brusquely.

‘I know. But all I’ve got is a hunch, not evidence.’

Kyle paused a moment, long enough that Cat wasn’t sure she was still there. Then: ‘OK. Hold.’

Cat held. She could hear Kyle talking on another line in the
background.
It was true: you couldn’t source an IP address from the provider via Command and Control without getting a warrant. But a tame SPOC dealt with the same liaison at the service providers every day. Inevitably things got matey. For a highly placed officer to source that kind of information on the quiet wasn’t a big ask. Maybe Thomas just wasn’t senior enough. Maybe Camarthen was too far out of the loop.

Kyle came back. ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ She gave Cat an address in Blackheath, South London. An address and a phone number. A surname too: Rhiannon Powell.

Cat noted the details.

‘Got that?’

Cat said ‘yes’ and would have said something else, but Kyle was already gone.

Cat made a roll-up and smoked it quickly. That full English breakfast was still making its presence felt. It was bad food for her. Her body needed vits and good quality proteins. She looked down at her forearm, the skin puckering to gooseflesh. Sweat was cooling on the small of her back. Her face was hot then covered with a creeping chill. It was partly the withdrawal symptoms, partly exhaustion.

Enough prevarication. She called the number Kyle had given her. It went straight through to voicemail.

16

THE TAXI DRIVER
drove fast, aggressively, in tune with Cat’s mood. Rain gusted against the windscreen. There were only a few people out, huddled under umbrellas.

In three-quarters of an hour they made Blackheath. The street turned out to be a well-lit cul-de-sac, fringed by trees and houses whose frontages at least seemed as impressive as the Highgate properties. But the multiple doorbells suggested most had been divided into small flats and bedsits: dimmed lights flickered over galley kitchens and over living spaces just big enough for a couple of armchairs and a portable TV.

Cat paid off the driver at the head of the road, somehow not wanting him to know her final destination. He gave her a blank receipt, which she pocketed. She could argue with her conscience later about how to fill it out.

The girl’s house was about fifty yards down. It was set back from the road, the hedges lacking any structure, growing out onto the pavement. The paint of the front door had faded to a dull brick and partly peeled away. The column of ill-assorted doorbells gave no hint as to the house’s inhabitants. There was no list of flat numbers. On the ground, a crumpled KFC box spilled chips onto the concrete.

She started with the bottom doorbells, worked from left to right. The right-hand bell on the second row brought a response. A gruff voice, apparently not surprised at a visit from a stranger
on
a rainswept night. A buzzer sounded, releasing the door. Inside, the lighting was dim. She followed the stairs up to the next floor. Two doors led off the landing. She listened for signs of life. Silence at first, then the sound of a floorboard wincing behind the door on her left.

She slapped her palm against the door. And again. Another creak. The door opened, revealing a chain. Cat pulled her warrant card out of her pocket. Thrust it forwards. Reached back into her pocket, took out the image of the girl frozen on her screen, held it to the door with her other hand.

‘Which flat?’

The door closed.

She shouted, ‘Hey!’ Slapped her hands hard against the wood.

‘If you want me to call my colleagues and have them break this door down, I’ll do it.’

From inside: ‘Give me a moment.’

The man disappeared for just long enough to hide his drugs, then came back and unslid the chain. He backed away down his small hallway, seemingly caught between fear and politeness. She was police, but she wasn’t behaving like police. Cat tried to take in the flat, but the lighting inside was only just brighter than it had been in the hall. The walls were covered in framed prints to an eccentric extent. There were so many that they acted as wallpaper, each only millimetres from its neighbour. She peered at them. They all seemed to depict ships in painstaking detail, but they were more like engineer’s drawings than conventional art.

The flat-owner stood in the kitchen doorway, scratching his beard. He was wearing jeans and nothing else, backlit by a dying fluorescent strip which flickered on and off. The light lent him a corona that gave the scene an unearthly aura. She approached
with
her warrant card and her phone. He glanced at the girl’s picture briefly, motioned with his hand.

‘You want the top floor.’

She backed out quickly, took the stairs at a run. At the top there was a door on its own. This was a converted attic room, the door much shorter than normal, the slope of the roof cutting the hinges on the diagonal. Unless the landlord had a habit of renting this room out to the seven dwarves, the tenants must have had to crouch to enter.

Cat knocked but there was no reply. She crouched, pushed at the door, pushed again. Back down to Mr Jeans downstairs. She asked him if he had a key, if anyone was a likely keyholder for the girl on the top floor.

He knew nothing.

Cat went back upstairs. There was no real choice here. Not after Nia and Delyth. Not after Esllyt.

She sprung out a straight kick at the door, so she met the wood with the sole of her foot. Stupid. A jolt of pain went through her ankle. The lock was tougher than she had expected. She changed feet, kicked again, using the walls to steady herself. It was only on her fifth attempt that she heard the reassuring crack of splintering wood as the door swung open.

‘Rhiannon?’ There was silence.

Cat called again as she shuffled into the flat, straightened up on the other side of the door. Light bled into the room from the landing, the far side partially illuminated by the street lamps outside. The curtains had been left open. The place smelled stale.

Ahead there was an attic living space. In the right corner a galley kitchen contained the basics: a two-ring hob and sink over a small cupboard and bar fridge, a microwave. In the opposite corner there was a single armchair, a table on which stood a mug,
a
partly eaten digestive biscuit on a coaster. The mug contained an almost full cup of tea.

At the end of the room a door led through to another space. This was darker than the first, but a gap in the thick curtain admitted a limited amount of light. The room was dominated by a small double bed. There wasn’t room for anything else.

Some attempts had been made to make this space more homely. On the window ledge stood three large pebbles painted with psychedelic patterns, a couple of small plant pots holding cacti. Cat peered through the gap in the heavy curtains. Streetlights weakly illuminated the house’s back garden. Close to the wall she could make out an assortment of objects – rusting bed frames, old paint cans. A path, partly overgrown with weeds, bisected the grass, the wind moving the grass softly. In a tree in the garden next door, multicoloured lanterns swayed homely light – orange, yellow, red – across the detritus of the back garden.

Something caught her eye, a movement amongst the rusting debris. A shadow from the lamps maybe, as they lolled in the breeze? She looked again, another movement. No, what she had seen did not configure with the lanterns. What was it then? She glanced back into the living space, saw Rhiannon’s mug. She ran, cracked her head on the flat’s low front door as she left, took the stairs two at a time. Below she found a corridor leading to a back door, the glass in its top half latticed with wire like in an institution. She flipped the Yale latch down, headed into the garden. Cat stumbled on her way across the grass, fell to her knees, stopped still for a moment, dazed.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw something, a lithe movement followed by complete stillness. Slowly and cautiously she moved her head, saw two shining beads ten feet away from her, suspended from the ground. She focused. The beads were two eyes, staring at her from above a fragile snout. A fox, quite a
young
one. That’s what she had seen from the flat’s window, an urban fox nosing through the rubbish.

She stared at the creature, it stared back, stock still. It seemed to tremble with fear of her. She felt tender, she relented, waved her hand quickly to scare and release it from their immobilising gazes. The fox flinched, darted on silent paws deeper into the darkness of the garden and was gone.

Cat rose up from her knees, pulled out her mobile to try to call Rhiannon again, peered across the garden as she dialled. The phone rang, and what was that? Some trilling like cicadas. She moved towards the sound, which now increased in volume. She closed the call to Rhiannon and abruptly there was silence.

Cat pelted deeper into the garden, towards the sound she now knew was Rhiannon’s ring tone. She reached a patch where the long grass lay differently, wasn’t moving in the wind. She glimpsed something light, a silver belt over white jeans. Cat fell to her knees, crawled along the grass, parting the tall stalks with her hands.

The girl was lying on her back, the body that used to be Rhiannon Powell. That used to be a singer. That used to choose a silver belt to go with her new white jeans.

Cat reached across, carefully pulled the jacket open. Dark crimson. The breasts of the girl were punctured and soaked with blood. Cat touched her. She was as cold as the garden.

Cat felt herself tremble. She made to retch, but nothing came. She looked up and the surrounding windows were dark. It was unlikely she had been seen by anybody. Some crazy part of her wanted to stay with the girl, offer her some respect, some consolation, but she knew she couldn’t. The part of her that felt the most warred with the part of her that thought the most. The thinking side won, as it had been trained to.

She called Kyle, told her what had happened. This situation
wasn’t
just Cat’s problem, it was Kyle’s too now. What story could Cat give for finding the body that didn’t simply track back to the IP address, obtained without warrant?

Kyle thought briefly, then said, ‘Just call it in. I’ll handle the IP address.’

‘And link it to Riley? What do I tell the Met?’

‘This is Thomas’s case. Tell the Met anything you like, but this is Thomas’s case.’

‘OK.’

Cat left the garden through the house and made the call. The police operator told her calmly a response team would be with her shortly.

Cat made a roll-up, hands shaking. She would call Thomas but not yet.

She would call Martin too, but she had only bad news for him. Her chances of finding Esyllt alive, already poor, had just diminished significantly. The night suddenly seemed very dark.