Текст книги "The Blissfully Dead"

Автор книги: Louise Voss

Соавторы: Mark Edwards
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter 50

Day 14 – 4 p.m. – Patrick

When Patrick knocked at the door of Chloe Hedges’ bungalow, it was opened by a boy of about seven or eight, the age where new front teeth have just come through and still look disproportionately enormous to the rest of the child.

‘Are you a politician?’ the boy asked.

‘No. I’m a detective,’ Pat replied, and the boy gaped at him.

‘Mu-um!’ he yelled, without turning away. ‘There’s a policeman here!’

‘All right, Brandon, you don’t need to tell the whole street,’ came an answering voice.

Mrs Hedges came to the door. She was a tired-looking slim lady, probably in her forties but who looked a lot older, perhaps from exposure to the elements. Her skin was weather-beaten and wrinkled. But she had a lovely smile, which she hesitantly bestowed on Patrick as he introduced himself. They shook hands.

‘Hello. I’m Rebecca Hedges. Would you like a cup of tea? Brandon, go and make the detective a tea. Milk? Sugar? Is this about Jessica McMasters? My daughter’s already given a statement, as you probably know.’

She ushered him inside and looked pointedly at his feet as he confirmed that a tea with milk would be lovely. Patrick looked down at them too, momentarily puzzled. Then light dawned as he noticed that she wore slippers, and Brandon was in his socks. ‘Shall I take off my shoes?’

There was that smile again. ‘If you wouldn’t mind . . . we just had the carpets cleaned. Thanks. Come through.’

He slipped off his brogues and followed her into the front room. It felt oddly intimate, being in a stranger’s house in just his socks – which, he noticed, were odd ones. He sat down where she indicated, next to a big ginger cat on the sofa. ‘I’m just following up a new lead in Jessica’s murder investigation, Mrs Hedges, and I wanted a quick word with Chloe.’

Rebecca Hedges looked pained. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Detective Lennon, but she’s gone out shopping at the Bentall Centre in Kingston with a friend. You just missed her. I’ll give her a call and ask what time she’ll be back.’

‘Who has she gone with?’ Patrick looked at the photographs around the room, mostly school portraits of the two kids at different ages, in different coloured school jumpers; Brandon with baby teeth, then no front teeth, then the massive ones in the latest photo.

‘Someone called Pareesa. I don’t know her,’ Rebecca confessed, pulling a mobile out of her cardigan pocket and holding it to her ear. ‘She’s been hanging out with some new girls from school, since Jessica died. It had a big effect on her, as you can imagine . . . No answer. It’s gone straight to voicemail . . . Chloe, darling, it’s Mum – give me a call back as soon as you get this message, would you? See you soon, don’t be late. Love you . . .’

‘Must have been a hell of a shock for her, Jess’s death. Has she been struggling?’ Patrick asked sympathetically, and Rebecca looked almost sheepish as she put her phone away again.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s the thing. I mean, yes, obviously she has in some ways. She gets a bit tearful at times. But I think in other ways it’s been a real wake-up call for her. She turned sixteen the other day and did a charity parachute jump! We’re so proud of her. It’s like she’s decided to embrace life, and just go for it. Today she was on a real high, just getting ready to go out shopping with her mates. She’s a great girl. And she deserves to look forward to life, after what she went through last year . . .’

She looked expectantly at Pat.

‘What was that?’

‘Oh, sorry, I thought you’d know. She nearly died, of leukaemia, you see. She was ill for a year, but she’s fine now.’

Brandon came slowly back into the room carrying the sort of cup of tea that Patrick, once he’d tasted it, realised only an eight-year-old could make – tepid, unboiled dishwater. He thanked the boy and left it undrunk on the floor by the arm of the sofa. Brandon disappeared again, looking pleased with himself.

‘Mrs Hedges, what I really wanted to ask Chloe – or you – was if she knew a girl called Rose Sharp?’

Rebecca’s eyes opened wide. ‘The other girl that was killed,’ she stated flatly, panic edging in her voice. ‘Why are you asking that?’

‘Did Chloe know her?’

Rebecca sank her head into her arms, then looked up fearfully. ‘You think Chloe’s in danger, don’t you? I’m going to ring her again. Let me ring her . . .’

‘Mrs Hedges, please, there’s no immediate cause for concern. I’m following up on a lead, and I need to know.’

She had the phone in her hand again, but didn’t lift it to her ear, just twirled it miserably between her fingers.

‘I don’t think she ever met her, no. But she and Jess went to the vigil for her, after the OnTarget concert at Twickenham. And I think they might have spoken on the – what do you call those websites where they chat about bands and stuff?’

‘Forums?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Forums.’

‘OK. And have you ever heard of a website called StoryPad? A lot of teenagers use it, particularly, it seems, OnTarget fans. They write stories about the band members.’

Pat’s own phone vibrated with a text, and he pulled it out of his coat pocket. The text was from Carmella:

ON MY WAY TO JADE PILKINGTON’S. BTW – PRESS HAVE GOT WIND OF HAMMOND’S ARREST. BRACE YOURSELF!

He sighed and put it away again.

Rebecca frowned. ‘I don’t know about that. Chloe loves writing stories, though. She got an A* in her last English test. I think she may have put some up online, yes, although I don’t know which website.’ She stood up, pressed the phone’s keyboard, and paced around the room listening, her slippers gently flip-flopping. ‘Still nothing. I’m getting worried. Should I be worried? I can’t believe I haven’t been more worried before, I mean, obviously, two young girls murdered around here and Chloe was friends with one and knew of the other one, I should never have let her go out on her own – but she’s not on her own, she’s with her friends – but is she? Maybe she isn’t! Oh my God, I need to ring my husband, get him to go and find her in Kingston. It’s not safe . . .’

The woman was becoming more and more distressed, so Patrick stood up too. ‘Mrs Hedges, please. We have just arrested someone for the murders of both Rose and Jessica, so it’s highly unlikely that Chloe is in any danger.’

Mrs Hedges sank back into an armchair. ‘Oh thank heavens. I’m so sorry, Detective. You must think I’m a terrible parent, letting her go out when I didn’t know you’d arrested someone. Who is it?’

At that exact moment, Patrick’s eye fell on a framed photograph that he hadn’t spotted before, tucked away in the corner of a built-in bookcase. It was of a girl, Chloe, he assumed, lying in a hospital bed hooked up to drips and monitors, deathly pale but with the biggest beam on her face. Flanking her, one on each side of the bed, were two men, each holding one of her hands. One was Shawn Barrett and the other one Mervyn Hammond.

He made an involuntary noise in his throat. Walking over to pick it up, he answered her question with another. ‘When was this taken?’

Mrs Hedges smiled fondly. ‘Last April, when she was undergoing her final chemo session. They were amazing, those two – and the other guys from the record company who made it happen for her. I honestly think that it got her through it, that visit.’ She turned serious again and repeated her question. ‘Who is it that you’ve arrested?’

Patrick knew that he shouldn’t tell her. But – in the light of the photo he was holding, and the fact that it would be all over the papers in the morning – he had to let her know.

‘Well. I’m sorry to tell you, and I shouldn’t really – but you’ll hear it on the news soon anyway – it’s actually him.’ He pointed at the photograph. ‘Mervyn Hammond.’

Rebecca’s face drained of every last bit of colour and she flopped against the back of the chair. ‘That’s impossible!’

Patrick sat back down again too, still holding the photo. ‘We’re questioning him about both murders, and another one, of an older lady.’

Her reaction surprised and worried him. She looked as though she had just been informed that her son, Brandon, was the serial killer.

She shook her head. ‘No. There’s no way!’

‘What makes you say that, Mrs Hedges?’

‘That man,’ she said, pointing a shaky finger at the photograph on Pat’s lap, ‘is a saint. A saint, do you hear me? I would trust him with my daughter’s life! Do you have any idea how much charity work he does?’

Patrick resisted the urge to cough out the words Jimmy Savile. He found it difficult to reconcile the image of the smug, nut-munching attitudinal cynic that he’d found Hammond to be with anything approaching ‘a saint’. And yet – first impressions, and all. PR people were notoriously good at projecting only the image they wished to project and, despite Winkler’s convictions, it just didn’t all add up.

Rebecca continued to sing Mervyn Hammond’s praises for several minutes more. She seemed torn between relief that she didn’t need to worry about Chloe being temporarily incommunicado anymore and genuine distress at the news about Hammond. Patrick cut her off as politely as he could, standing up and asking her to ring him the moment that she got in touch with Chloe. He dressed it up in a request to ask Chloe about StoryPad – but he still couldn’t shift a sense of unease that she was currently AWOL, arrest or no arrest.

Carmella rang him in the car as he was driving away.

‘Chloe Hedges wasn’t in,’ he said. ‘Her mum seemed devastated at the news that Hammond’s been arrested.’ He briefly told her about Mervyn’s secret charity work. ‘She said – and I quote – “That man’s a saint.”’

He heard Carmella snort down the phone. ‘Jade wasn’t home either. Nobody was in – a neighbour told me Jade’s mum was away visiting her sister. The neighbour, a Mrs Sherry Downs, saw Jade being dropped home at 3 a.m. the night before. We don’t know what time she went out again.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Patrick said, increasing his speed so he was just above the limit. ‘Mrs Hedges says Chloe’s gone shopping, but she’s not answering her phone either.’

‘Probably doesn’t want to be bothered by her mum.’

‘Maybe. But I’m going to phone the Bentall Centre in Kingston, ask them to put out an announcement over the tannoy, ask her to call home.’

‘I hope you don’t do that to Bonnie when she’s a teenager,’ Carmella said.

‘Huh. After this case, when Bonnie’s a teenager I’m never going to let her out of my sight. Did Mrs Downs say anything else about Jade?’

‘I was about to get to that. She said she was woken up, like I said, at about three by the sound of a car door slamming outside and loads of shrieking and laughing, so she looked out of the window and saw Jade coming through the front gate. She said she banged on the window to give Jade a hard time about waking up the whole street, and Jade was all excited. She called up to her to say she’d been to a party working as a waitress, that all of OnTarget were there, and Mervyn Hammond’s bodyguard had given her a lift home. Mrs Downs had assumed she was drunk, until Jade said she’d been working. Mrs Downs thought that was unusual – she’d never known Jade to have a job before. She also said she’d never seen Jade so happy and excited.’

‘Jade was at Hammond’s party.’ That was very interesting.

‘Yep. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘Call Gareth. Let’s find out everything we can about this bodyguard, assuming Gareth hasn’t gone off somewhere in a massive sulk. And I’m going to call Suzanne. I’m getting a bad feeling about Chloe and Jade. A very bad feeling.’

Chapter 51

Day 14 – Chloe

Shawn Barrett’s chauffeur, Pete, pulled off the road and drove down a small path, parking up outside huge iron gates in a tall, old-looking wall. He jumped out and deftly undid the padlock that held the chain together, opened the gates, drove in – then got out and re-locked the padlock.

‘We’ve got this place booked out, but they’re very security conscious,’ he commented as he got back behind the wheel. ‘It’s empty at the moment, but the developers were still really keen that nobody knew Shawn was coming.’

‘Oh,’ Chloe said, wondering why, in that case, there were no security guards to be seen. She wasn’t really sure what a ‘developer’ was either. Pete parked the car at the end of a long driveway, in front of an enormous house, all turrets and fancy stonework. Its front door was up a sweeping flight of stone steps, and Chloe looked longingly through the car window at it – even if it was closed, it was a place that would have a toilet! – as Pete walked round to open the door for her. That was more like a chauffeur should behave, she thought. He was carrying a black backpack that she hadn’t noticed before.

‘Could I nip in and use the loo before I meet Shawn?’ she asked shyly. Nerves were starting to get the better of her and she was desperate for a wee.

He looked at his watch. ‘Hmm. Sorry, love, time’s a bit tight. We need to get on, really. He’s a busy man. He just texted me to say he’s out there already and it’s cold!’

Chloe felt the disapproval in his voice. ‘Oh yes. Sorry. Sorry. I don’t want to take up much of his time.’ Again, she wondered why the symbolism meant so much to Shawn that he’d want to meet her in a freezing cold grotto in the middle of February, in the dark. And she hadn’t seen Pete reading any texts . . . She looked sideways at him.

‘One other thing,’ he said, as she climbed out of the front seat. He held out his hand, palm up. ‘You’re going to need to leave your phone in the car. Shawn’s got a strict rule about that, in case anyone tries to sneak a photo.’

‘Oh.’ Chloe’s prickles of unease increased. ‘I’ll turn it off, I promise.’

Pete shook his head. ‘Just leave it here, love, it’ll be fine. Look, I’ll put it in the glove compartment. It’ll be completely safe.’

She reluctantly handed it over, noticing that her heart rate had rocketed. Perhaps it was just excitement at being about to meet Shawn.

Was she about to meet Shawn?

Pete locked the phone into the car and hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder. That was bothering her too. Where had that come from and what was in it?

‘What’s in there?’ she asked.

He glared at her, not friendly anymore. ‘Stuff for Shawn. None of your business. Come on, then, we haven’t got all day.’

Chloe suddenly thought she was going to be sick. Her teeth chattering, she followed him as he walked away from the house, down a gravel path that curved away behind some tall forbidding trees in the house’s grounds. It was very cold, and getting dark. There was no sound anywhere apart from a distant rumble of traffic and then the sudden shrill bark of a fox.

Was it a fox? Her ears must be playing tricks on her, she thought. It sounded like a girl crying.

She forced herself to remember Shawn’s sweet messages on the forum. She was just being silly, going overboard on the ‘stranger-danger’ paranoia.

But something did not feel right. Always trust your instincts, Chloe, she heard her mother whisper.

Crunching along the gravel path in almost complete darkness behind Pete, Chloe dithered. For some reason she could not get the image out of her head of Rose Sharp, plump and freckled in the blown-up school photograph propped on the table at the vigil, nor of the wrapped-up poster in a tube that Jess had got her for her birthday. She imagined Jess’s fingers struggling with Sellotape as she put the garish gift wrap around it, the fingers that only days later were stilled forever, stripped of the cheap H&M gilt rings that were now probably in an evidence bag somewhere.

She stopped. Pete noticed, and turned.

‘Uh, sorry,’ she began, clutching her handbag closer to herself. ‘Bit of a nightmare, but I’m not feeling very well. I think I’m going to have to go home and meet Shawn another time. Can you apologise to him for me? You don’t have to give me a lift home or anything, just give me my phone back, and I’ll find my own way . . .’

The expression on his face was like nothing Chloe had ever seen before. He looked furious. ‘You can’t do that. Shawn’s gone to a lot of effort over this. He’s expecting you.’

Tears rushed into Chloe’s eyes. She hated making people cross and upset, and the thought of pissing off Shawn Barrett was unbearable. ‘I know, but’ – she never normally used her leukaemia as an excuse, apart from to get out of tidying her room, but it was all she could think of – ‘I’m sure he’d understand. He knows that I was really ill last year, he visited me in hospital, and I’m still not right . . .’

Pete put down the black backpack and walked up to her so that his face was mere inches away from hers. In the gloom, his eyes looked huge and black, demonic.

Oh shit, thought Chloe. The fox shriek came again, louder this time, and it spurred her into action. She turned to run, but his left arm had shot out and grabbed her biceps, squeezing it tight. She tried to shake it off, staring down at it in horror and pain, which made her not notice his right fist – until it connected with her collarbone in a sickening pistol-crack that sent agony flooding around her chest, up her neck and cascading down all her ribs.

She passed out.

When she awoke, the first thing she was aware of was being in a very cold and dark place, leaning against a wall that seemed to have been wallpapered with sharp stones that stuck into her back. The fox was still shrieking. It sounded so loud now that she thought it must be in there with her.

She opened her eyes to try to see it and threw up all over herself, causing the already sharp pain in her shoulder to intensify and amplify, so intense that she saw it as scarlet ribbons in her vision lighting up the darkness. She tried to lift a hand to wipe her mouth, but found she couldn’t – her arms were handcuffed together behind her body. She tried to move her legs, but they were bound together with what looked like rope.

Chloe groaned, in too much pain to properly cry out. She was a moron. Of course Pete wasn’t Shawn’s chauffeur. Of course it hadn’t really been Shawn Barrett messaging her . . . Oh God.

‘I’m going to die,’ she whispered.

Then, to her complete shock, the fox cry stopped and the fox spoke to her, a voice coming out of the darkness. ‘I thought you were already dead.’

She was hallucinating; she must be. This was some kind of horrific nightmare. But the stones sticking into her back and head and the pain in her chest told her that she couldn’t be.

She wailed, peering into the thick black air, trying to see the source of the voice. ‘Who are you? You’re a fox!’

The voice came back, more thickly. ‘I ain’t no fox, what are you on about? My name’s Jade, and he’s got me locked up in here too.’

‘Jade? Not Jade as in Jade and Kai?’

There was a faint snort. ‘Don’t talk to me about that twat.’

‘Oh my God, Jade, it’s me, Chloe Hedges. F-U-Cancer. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on? I came to meet Shawn.’

‘Oh, babe, so did I! I got a text at this party last night. Shawn was there and he said he’d seen me and thought I was gorgeous. Asked me to meet him at this place down on the Thames called Platt’s Eyot. Shawn, I mean the bloke pretending to be him, said he had a houseboat and was going to meet me there.’

How stupid and naïve, Chloe thought, then stopped herself. She had been just as stupid, hadn’t she? They had both allowed their desperation, the years of fantasy about meeting Shawn, to blind them to danger. Exactly the same thing must have happened to Rose and Jess.

Jade’s words tumbled out. ‘So I was, like, waiting there, on the edge of the car park, looking around coz there was no sign of him and the whole place was deserted coz it was pissing down with rain, and I got my phone out to Snapchat who I thought was Shawn and he came up behind me and grabbed me, stuck a knife in my back and told me if I cried out, I was dead.’

Chloe could hear Jade panting, seemingly drained by the memory and the torrent of words.

‘It’s only just struck me, but I’m sure I’ve seen him before,’ Chloe said. ‘There’s something familiar about him.’

Jade didn’t respond. What did it matter, anyway? He had them now, and all that mattered was whether he let them live. Or if they would die here.

‘You handcuffed too?’ Chloe asked.

‘Yeah, and my feet are tied to some weird sort of stone bench thing. I can’t move. My legs have gone dead. Everything’s numb.’ Jade started to cry again.

‘I think I know why we’re here. Why he chose us, and Rose and Jess.’

‘What? Why?’

‘The StoryPad thing. It has to be that. It’s the only thing that connects the four of us.’

‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit.’ Chloe could almost hear Jade’s brain whirring in the darkness. ‘That’s why he brought us here.’

‘What?’

‘I never told you, did I?’ Jade said. ‘The day . . . the day it happened.’ She began to cry. ‘I had no idea. If I’d known she . . .’ Jade’s voice broke apart and she dissolved into sobs.

‘We’ll die of hypothermia if he leaves us here all night,’ Chloe said when Jade was finally silent. Already her voice was coming out all funny with cold – her mouth wasn’t working properly.

‘Oh God, why did I do it?’ Her voice tailed off and the fox wail returned. Chloe wanted to know exactly what Jade had done, but for now it was far more important to attempt to get out of here.

‘Shhh, Jade, listen. I heard you crying back from where he parked his car. There’s a road not far away. If we both scream, someone might hear us.’

More sniffing. ‘I’ve already tried. Nobody came.’

‘Yeah, but there’s two of us now. We need to get out of here before he gets back. Let’s try it – after three: one, two, three . . .’

Chloe filled her lungs, although it was absolute agony on her busted collarbone, and the two of them lifted their heads and screamed as loudly as they could, the sound filling the small, freezing grotto, bouncing off the shells and – Chloe prayed – through the gaps in the boarded-up windows and the weird arched doorway, out over the trees to the road.

They screamed and screamed until their voices cracked and sputtered to nothing, like a gust of wind blowing a candle flame back to darkness.

When they stopped screaming, a man’s voice came out of the ringing silence – his voice. ‘Are we quite finished?’

Chloe’s heart somersaulted in her broken chest. Jade screamed again.

She heard someone moving towards her. He had been here, in the darkness, all along.