Текст книги "The Blissfully Dead"

Автор книги: Louise Voss

Соавторы: Mark Edwards
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OTHER TITLES BY LOUISE VOSS AND MARK EDWARDS

Killing Cupid

Catch Your Death

All Fall Down

Forward Slash

From the Cradle

 

OTHER TITLES BY MARK EDWARDS

The Magpies

What You Wish For

Because She Loves Me

Follow You Home

 

OTHER TITLES BY LOUISE VOSS

To Be Someone

Are You My Mother?

Lifesaver

Games People Play

The Venus Trap

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2015 Louise Voss & Mark Edwards

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 978-1503947474

ISBN-10: 1503947475

Cover design by bürosüd^o Munich, www.buerosued.de

This one is for Louise’s fiancé, Nick Laughland, and for Mark’s wife, Sara Edwards.

Contents

Prologue

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

PART TWO

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Epilogue

Letter from the Authors

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Download a Free Short Story by Voss & Edwards

Prologue

Rose looked up at the hotel, wishing she’d been allowed to save the image on her phone, that it wasn’t against the rules. This was definitely the place – although, as with everything in her life, she retained a niggle of doubt. She was surprised that he would stay in a Travel Inn. That was the kind of lame place her dad stayed in when he went away on business. But she guessed that was the point. He was being clever. He had arranged the rendezvous – the word sending a little frisson of excitement through her insides – here because it was exactly the kind of crap-hole where nobody would expect him to hang out.

She was wearing her new pants – pink with the word ‘LUCKY’ stamped across the front. She’d flushed the same shade of pink as the knickers when she’d put them on the counter in Primark, though the woman who served her didn’t even smile as she stuffed them in the paper bag. If only that woman knew who Rose was meeting, she would be sick with jealousy, and she would see – like everyone would see, soon enough, when the whole world found out about their love – that she, Rose Emily Sharp, was special.

Not different, as Dad said, thinking it was a compliment. Not weird, like the girls at school sneered.

Special.

The first photo had been of this hotel, taken from this very spot, with the caption ‘11 p.m.’. She stood and fiddled with her phone, drizzle spotting its shiny surface. There was hardly anyone about, probably because of the weather, and the streetlamps struggled to cut through the gloom. A couple of young blokes in hoodies strolled past. Her whole body clenched, but they ignored her, not even bothering to give her the once-over. Not that she cared, anymore, if boys noticed her.

It was 10.59, and as the time on her phone rolled over to eleven o’clock, she received another photo, dead on time. She stared at it, her heart pounding, knowing that she only had ten seconds before it would disappear. The picture showed a pair of grey doors, with one of those big wheelie bins in front. She looked up at the hotel, confused for a moment, then got it.

He wanted her to go round to the back entrance. Of course. This was a secret rendezvous. He didn’t want anyone at the front desk to see her or, worse, try to stop her. He wanted to make sure that nothing stood in their way.

She smiled. He was so thoughtful, even more so than she’d gathered from his interviews and tweets.

Rose waited for the green man and crossed the road on shaky legs. She felt as she had that time when she’d been sent to see the head teacher after screaming at that slut Bethany Douglas in class, who had spread a rumour that Rose had wet the bed on the school trip. Bethany also said that OnTarget were a band for tweenies and toddlers, and had made up her own lyrics to their biggest hit, ‘Forever Together’, replacing ‘together’ with ‘bed-wetter’. The head teacher, Mrs Morpurgo, had sighed and said, ‘What are we going to do with you, eh, Rose?’

Rose ground her teeth together at the memory. Mrs Morpurgo would regret it when Rose was famous and spent some of her millions on buying the school and firing the head teacher. She hadn’t yet worked out what she would do to Bethany, but it would involve public humiliation and Bethany sobbing an apology that Rose would gracefully accept.

It was dark behind the hotel, the rain coming down more heavily now, and Rose swore to herself. She’d spent ages doing her hair. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she thought she saw a figure move in the trees around the edge of the staff car park, but when she looked again there was nobody there.

She felt sick. Sick with nerves and adrenalin, and from the cheeseburger she’d consumed earlier because her tummy had a tendency to rumble embarrassingly when she was hungry. But she was regretting it now, as the burger was repeating unpleasantly on her. She wasn’t supposed to be out this late. Mum thought she was in her room. Rose had left the TV on and hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. But what if Mum came up to bring her a cup of tea, as she sometimes did, got worried when Rose didn’t respond and crept inside? Rose just had to hope that tonight was one of the five nights out of seven, since the divorce, when Mum glugged a bottle of wine and passed out on the sofa with her ancient Whitney Houston CDs playing.

The photo on her phone had long since disappeared, and she was under strict instructions not to take screenshots, but there it was – the back entrance.

She grasped the handle with a sweaty hand (oh God, what was she going to do about that? He’d be disgusted!) and pulled it open, slipping inside. She could hear clattering and somebody whistling in a kitchen, then heavy footsteps coming towards her, so she ducked around a corner and hid in a corridor.

A man came out of the kitchen and went through the double doors. She heard the spark of a lighter and caught the faint whiff of cigarette smoke. The man coughed and Rose’s heart pounded. She felt paralysed with nerves and had a moment of sickening clarity. This was crazy, what was she doing here, did she really think that he would be interested in her? It was probably Bethany, or one of the other girls, the girls she spent so long chatting to online, pranking her. She should go now, walk out the front door of the hotel and go home to her bed, give Mum a kiss, forget all this nonsense. She was meant to be revising and, as Dad reminded her so often, the chances that she was going to be famous or married to a pop star were about as strong as the chances of him winning Britain’s Got Talent with a PowerPoint presentation about accountancy.

But the desire for this to be real, for it all to be true, was too strong. He had contacted her after reading her tweets and checking her Tumblr. He really did want to meet her. She pushed down the doubts, mentally deleting them, consigning them to history like the Snapchat photos. This was her chance. She had to believe if she wanted to achieve. That’s what the kitten poster on her wall said: Believe to achieve.

She believed.

Her phone flashed again and her heart thudded. This time the picture was of a door. A hotel door. The number was 365.

She smiled at the reference.

This was really going to happen. But when she emerged from the corridor and got into the lift, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Oh shit, she looked like a drowned rat! Her hair was sticking to her forehead and mascara was running down her cheeks. She was sweating too and probably stank, her Friendship perfume washed away by the rain. She needed to find a bathroom, to clean herself up.

But as she thought this, her phone flashed again.

It was a picture of him, that shy smile on his face. The caption read, ‘I CAN’T WAIT ANY LONGER.’

She caught her breath. It would be OK. He would like her exactly as she was. That was the kind of person he was. She read an interview once – actually, she’d read it a hundred times – in which he said that he liked girls to be natural. And he’d also said, in a Q&A with an American website, that his favourite smell was fresh rain.

The lift door pinged open. The corridor was empty. As she walked down towards room 365, she felt light, like she was full of helium, and as she knocked on the hotel door she experienced a great sensation of warmth, of peace, a feeling that she could describe only as coming home. Like this was where she was meant to be. It was her destiny.

The door was pulled open and she stepped into the room. She could smell air freshener, the same one her mum used at home, but she couldn’t see anyone in the room. Just a bed, with – what was that lying on the sheets? Something metal, glinting in the harsh light.

He was, she realised, standing behind her, but before she could turn she felt a sudden, sharp pain in her head, and then she was being dragged, with blood in her eyes, across the room. All she could hear was breathing, and all she could think about was Mum, her lovely mum, knocking on her door at home with a steaming mug of tea.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Day 1 – Patrick

DI Patrick Lennon was in a foul mood as he drove around the one-way system of Kingston-upon-Thames’s town centre with the unmarked pool car’s blues and twos on. He was trying hard not to let it show, out of respect for his passenger, his colleague DS Carmella Masiello, but she knew him all too well.

‘Come on, Pat, spit it out. You look like a bulldog chewing a wasp.’ She chuckled. ‘Don’t you love that expression? I think it’s my favourite, with “a face like a slapped backside” coming a close second.’

He didn’t smile, although her deep voice and soft Irish accent usually helped lift his spirits when he was in a funk. They’d been working together for three years now and increasingly he thought that he couldn’t imagine anyone else as his partner. The traumatic events of their last case had served only to strengthen their bond.

‘Are you thinking about the girl?’ she prompted, then paused, her chatter halted by the grim awareness of what awaited them in the hotel at the end of their car journey.

There was a long silence that Patrick finally broke, his voice barely audible above the wail of the siren.

‘No. I probably should be, but I’m not.’

‘What is it, then?’

Patrick took a corner too sharply and a corkscrew of auburn hair fell loose from Carmella’s long ponytail. She blew a sharp puff of air from her mouth to get it off her face, then tucked it reflexively behind her ear. It was that habitual gesture that finally made Patrick crack a small smile.

‘Sorry, Carmella, ignore me. I’ve just had it up to here with living with my mum and dad. It was a necessary evil when Gill was . . . not around . . . but now she’s out, it just seems crazy that me and Bonnie are still cooped up in my old tiny bedroom, while Gill has our whole house to herself! I can’t moan about it at home because my mother already thinks Gill is the Antichrist. And she’s been so helpful – Mum, I mean. I couldn’t have managed without her and Dad, but they’re clearly knackered as well. It’s been eighteen months! Imagine, living with your parents at my age for eighteen months! Sharing a bedroom with a toddler! My street cred is in tatters, and let’s not even mention my sodding sex life . . .’

He was joking – sort of – but somehow couldn’t raise another smile. Carmella was his friend as well as his partner, but he suddenly wished she hadn’t wormed it out of him. The words had gushed out involuntarily, but now, far from being cathartic, it felt emasculating. He accelerated around a line of stationary cars and zoomed past a red light, on the wrong side of the road, as if the speed could shake off some of his frustration. Frustration, and humiliation, that everyone at the station by now knew his situation. DI Winkler, the perennial thorn in his side, had asked if ‘his mummy tucks him in at night’ just the other day, and it had been all Patrick could do not to sock him one.

He shifted gear up to fifth and took off down the long straight road.

‘Slow down, boss,’ Carmella said. ‘The girl’s still going to be dead when we get there. So, tell me to mind my own business, but when do you think you’ll be able to go home? Doesn’t seem right, somehow, when you’re not the one who can’t be trusted with Bonnie . . .’

Patrick shot a sidelong glance at her – his instinct to tell her, yes, mind your own business – but he knew she was only concerned. And the truth was, he’d bottled it all up for so long that it would be a relief to talk about it. Doing so while driving at seventy in a 40 mph zone seemed as good a time as any.

‘It’s been six months since Gill was released. She seems absolutely fine, and Bonnie sees her most days – unsupervised now. But her doctor recommended that she shouldn’t feel she has total responsibility for Bonnie until she’s completely ready, and I don’t want to push her in case . . . you know . . .’

He still couldn’t say the words out loud: in case my wife tries to kill our child again. He didn’t think it could ever happen again – Gill had suffered a huge mental breakdown – but, on the other hand, he’d never had any indication that it could happen in the first place, and the risks just seemed too great. Sleeping in his single bedroom at his folks’ house with Bonnie in a toddler bed next to him – which meant actually in bed with him at some point every night – had been a small price to pay for the knowledge that she was safe. But he still had to go out to work every day, so his mum and dad had taken over the childcare. There had been no other options – at least, not affordable ones.

‘Does she want you both to come home?’

Patrick saw the distinctive red and white lettering of the hotel’s sign in the distance and slowed down, killing the blues and twos. He turned and gave Carmella a rueful smile.

‘She does, but she’s scared. I’m not sure she trusts herself around Bonnie anymore, however well she feels now.’

Carmella opened her mouth to ask another question and Patrick would have put money on what it was: What about you and her? But thankfully she chose not to ask.

Because that was one question Patrick really couldn’t answer.

He pulled into the hotel’s car park and parked in a space next to the three squad cars and one police van already present.

‘Right.’ They got out and strode purposefully towards the hotel entrance. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

Chapter 2

Day 1 – Patrick

Crime tape was strung across the third-floor corridor, the rooms in this stretch vacated, the guests moved to other rooms. In the lobby, Patrick had spoken briefly to the manager, a woman with a Brummie accent who looked like she’d applied her eyebrows with a child’s black crayon, and told her that they would need a list of all the guests, including anyone who had checked out. He had expected the usual tedious complaint about privacy and the bloody Data Protection Act, but the manager, whose name was Heidi Shillingham, had said, ‘Yes, of course. Anything we – anything I – can do to help.’

She smiled obsequiously and, in the lift, Carmella had winked at Patrick and said, ‘She wants you.’

Patrick ducked under the yellow tape just as DS Gareth Batey emerged from the room, his face white with a hint of green. His jaw clenched and he swallowed, like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up. A bad sign. Gareth was a valuable member of MIT9, a young detective who was definitely going places – though with every day, with every grim case, the sheen of his enthusiasm and earnestness was rubbed off a little more. One day he’ll be as hard-bitten and resigned as the rest of us, Patrick thought. Poor sod.

‘All right, Gareth,’ he said.

‘Boss.’ Batey swallowed again, blew air from his cheeks.

‘Feeling OK?’

Gareth nodded, but his eyes showed that he was feeling far from OK. There was a rich smell creeping out of the room – the coppery odour of blood and something else. Cheap perfume or aftershave that stung Patrick’s nostrils and made him want to sneeze.

‘The SOCOs here yet?’ Patrick asked.

‘On their way.’

‘Good. So tell me what we know so far.’ He knew that as the first senior officer on the scene this case would almost certainly be his. He took out his pocket-sized Moleskine notepad and looked at Gareth, daring him to smirk. But the younger cop was too nauseated, and too used to Patrick’s little quirks, to be amused.

‘The chambermaid entered the room this morning just after 10 a.m. and found her. She was very cool about it, apparently. No screaming. No panic. She made sure she didn’t touch anything, locked the door behind her and calmly went downstairs to tell them what she’d found.’

‘OK. Is she still around? I’ll want to talk to her.’

‘Yes. She’s downstairs in the manager’s office.’

‘Good.’ He nodded for Gareth to continue.

‘I already asked Ms Shillingham for details of who was staying in the room. But nobody was checked in. The room was supposed to be empty.’

Bang went the chance of this being an easy case, a nice stat to make the clear-up rate look better.

Gareth fell quiet, as if he had nothing more to say – not till Patrick had looked in the room, witnessed the scene. He was aware that he was stalling, delaying the moment when he would have to see the body, the source of that bloody smell. Recently he’d begun to wonder if he was losing the stomach for this job, if he should quit, do something different. But what else would he do? The only other job he’d wanted was to be a rock star, to go on tour supporting his heroes, The Cure. That was one dream that would never come true.

He motioned to Carmella. ‘Come on, then. Let’s take a look.’

Being careful not to touch anything, he entered the hotel room. Immediately, the chemical sting of perfume made him sneeze, and as he opened his watering eyes he saw her. The victim. He heard Carmella catch her breath behind him.

She was laid out on the bed, naked and spread-eagled in an X-shape, each limb pointing towards a corner of the bed. She had light brown hair; pale, freckly skin; downy hairs on her arms. A strip of pubic hair, shaved legs and armpits. Patrick felt his breathing deepen and the anger that fuelled him, that kept him doing this damn job, bubbled and simmered as he realised how young she was. Somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. A child, though doubtless she would have recoiled to hear herself described as one.

Her eyes were open, staring at a future that would never come. What had this girl’s dreams been? To travel the world or have a family? Be a doctor or pilot or footballer’s wife? However modest her ambitions, they were over. She would never go to university, get her first job, give birth, grow old. This was it. A life truncated. A full stop.

Patrick stepped closer, trying to ignore, for the moment, the injuries, the mortal wounds, his eyes refusing to focus on them. He wanted to see the victim, to get to know her for a moment. To make this personal.

The girl was fleshy, with large breasts and a soft stomach, wide thighs. He guessed she had a BMI of about 26 or 27. It was a body that hundreds of years ago would have been considered perfect, the ideal of womanhood, but not now, in the days when emaciation was the look most young women craved. He studied her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in a conventional way, anyway. Her nose was a little too large, her eyes too close together. It crossed his mind that this would make the media less interested, that her face wouldn’t sell many newspapers, which could be both positive and negative for the investigation. The last big case he’d worked, the so-called Child Catcher case, had been a media shit storm from the off. Unlike his colleague DI Winkler, Patrick wasn’t the kind of cop who craved attention. In fact, despite his youthful desire to be a singer in a band, he abhorred it.

He closed his eyes for a second and made this young woman a silent promise. He would do everything he could to find the person who had done this. The man – in this case, it surely had to be a man – who had ended her young life.

There were marks on her throat that made it evident she had been strangled. But that was far from the most striking thing. There were cuts, short and shallow, all over her body, including her breasts and inner thighs, tiny trickles of blood patterning her skin. One of her outstretched hands was twisted and bloody, as if it had been stamped on. Her lips were puffy and smeared with dried blood too, like they had been punched or, perhaps, bitten. As he stepped closer he noticed that her skin was shiny in patches around the welts, and also around her vagina. The smell of perfume coming off her was intense.

‘I think he sprayed her with perfume – in the cuts.’

Carmella stared as he pointed.

‘He cut her, then sprayed perfume into the open wounds.’ He kept his voice even. ‘He tortured her.’

Patrick noticed a patch of blood on the pillow beneath her head and stepped around the bed. The hair at the back of her scalp was matted with blood, where she had apparently been struck with a heavy object, or banged against a wall.

He caught Carmella’s eye. Her own shock was morphing now into something else. Determination. He nodded and they left the room, just as the scene of crime officers – the SOCOs – arrived. Patrick and Carmella headed back down the corridor, Gareth following. They would leave the SOCOs to do their job.

Thirty minutes later Patrick and Carmella sat in a conference room on the ground floor, the cleaner who had found the body sitting across from them. The room was dry and hot and smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac. Patrick was sweating, his white shirt sticking to him, but the cleaner, whose name was Mosope Adeyemi, was cool, leaning back in her chair like she was about to interview them for a job. She was an attractive woman, with large, bright eyes and long limbs that Patrick fleetingly imagined wrapped around him.

‘Where are you from?’ Carmella asked. Patrick had asked her to conduct this interview while he made notes.

‘I live in Teddington.’

Carmella smiled. ‘I meant originally.’

‘Abuja, Nigeria. I was a teacher over there, you know. Now I clean rooms, make beds.’

‘For how long?’

Mosope twisted her lips. ‘Hmmm, a year. Just over.’ She leaned forwards conspiratorially. ‘The people who come to this hotel, they are disgusting. Animals. And they never leave tips.’

‘Can you walk us through what happened this morning?’ Carmella said.

The woman sighed. ‘I’d already cleaned half the rooms on that floor, apart from the ones where the guests were still in their rooms, like lazy pigs.’

‘This was, what, just after ten?’

‘Ten fifteen. I checked the time after I found the girl, because I knew you’d ask.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you. Why did you go into room 365 if it was unoccupied?’

‘Because I smelled the perfume.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘Terrible. Cheap. It was coming under the door, the smell. I was curious, so I went in, saw the girl on the bed and came straight out again. That’s it.’

‘Did you see anything strange in the room? Anything different?’

She tipped her head. ‘You mean apart from the dead white girl on the bed?’

Patrick liked this woman, wanted to engage with her. But he stayed silent, letting Carmella continue. ‘I mean . . . You clean these rooms every day. You know how they look. Apart from the body, did you notice anything unusual, anything that struck you?’

Mosope thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Apart from the smell, no.’

‘You didn’t move or remove anything?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Did you see anyone in the vicinity of the room this morning?’

‘Just guests coming in and out of some of the other rooms.’ She paused. ‘There were no clothes on the floor of room 365. You noticed that? I guess he took them with him.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Like a souvenir.’