Текст книги "The Blissfully Dead"

Автор книги: Louise Voss

Соавторы: Mark Edwards
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Epilogue

It was the third encore, ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, and Patrick sneaked a look at his wife, standing beside him, mouthing the words along with the singer on stage. She looked about eighteen, with her long hair tied back and minimal make-up, the heat and excitement giving her cheeks a pink flush.

‘My God,’ he shouted in her ear. ‘I haven’t seen you smile like that for years!’

In reply, she slipped an arm around his waist and hugged him. He’d almost forgotten how much of a Cure fan she was too, how that was the first thing that had bonded them all those years ago when they met.

It had been in the function room of a pub down by the river in Hammersmith, a mutual friend’s thirtieth birthday party. Pat had turned up not knowing anyone except the birthday girl’s fiancé, and he’d been on the verge of going home again when suddenly ‘Just Like Heaven’ came on over the PA and Gill, sitting at a table nearby with a bunch of mates, had started to sing along, her lips moving in perfect synch with every syllable and phrase.

Patrick hadn’t wanted to go home again after that. And when he did, eventually, it was with Gill on his arm, and they’d been almost inseparable from that point on. Until . . .

Well, no need to think about that. Not tonight, he thought, with Bonnie safe on a sleepover with his mum and dad, a nice three-pint beer buzz on, his wife’s arm around his waist and his idol, Robert Smith, on stage.

It had been a tough month, one of the toughest, especially Wendy’s funeral last week. Patrick and Suzanne had driven up to Wolverhampton together to represent the MIT, their faces rigid with the effort of not displaying the emotion they felt, surrounded by Wendy’s weeping family and friends. It seemed unthinkable that Wendy was no longer on the planet, her chirpy presence and eager voice gone forever – particularly because Pat felt so responsible. Suzanne had been great – quietly supportive, surreptitiously putting a hand on his arm during the funeral when she felt that he was about to lose it – and he had been grateful to her.

He’d been anxious about spending so much time with her that day, just the two of them, but the gravitas of the situation had instantly and utterly expunged any hint of romance. Suzanne had been warm and kind, but, to both their unspoken surprise, there hadn’t been a trace of flirtation or any of their prior longing glances. Perhaps Wendy’s death was the stopper that had crammed that particular genie firmly back in its bottle before it escaped altogether.

It was a relief. Patrick hadn’t realised how much added pressure it had been putting on him, the possibility of something happening between him and Suzanne, and the inevitable nightmarish ramifications of it. Keep it simple, stupid, he muttered to himself. That would be his mantra from now on. ‘Simple’ was the simplicity of the family unit, the absence of choice, the embrace of commitment. Him and Gill and Bonnie; that was all that mattered.

At least that’s what he’d thought until Suzanne texted him halfway through the gig. He pulled out his phone and surreptitiously read the message:

HOPE YOU’RE LOVING THE GIG. YOU DESERVE A BIT OF FUN! MISS YOU. SX

 

Miss you? He deleted the text without replying, but he could not delete the feeling that it left inside his head and in his heart. She had never said anything so overt to him before, and he felt a flash of anger at her choosing to do so now.

He would still ‘keep it simple’, he decided – but those few words on his phone’s screen made him aware of how difficult it would continue to be. You couldn’t just switch off your feelings for someone, no matter what the circumstances were.

He tried to look at the positives. At least he still had a family, a career, his life – unlike Wendy, who had nothing and who’d been killed for nothing.

Patrick felt again the sting of how senseless her death had been. DI Strong’s team, working with the Global Sounds IT department, had traced a deleted conversation between Wendy and Graham, posing as a user called Mockingjay365. Graham had clearly been worried that Wendy had found out something that would get him arrested, but in reality Wendy’s theory didn’t exist. Graham had had no reason, even following his own twisted logic, to kill her.

It was a sickening waste. And Patrick would always feel partially responsible.

The final triumphant guitar chord of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ rang out and the band bowed and smiled through the cheers.

The house lights came up and the crowd started shuffling out, streaming down stairs and through the venue’s reception, ready to do battle with the knock-off merchandise sellers and overcrowded Tube trains.

‘Best birthday present ever!’ Pat said as they pushed through to the exit. ‘Thanks, angel, I loved it.’

‘I could tell!’ Gill laughed, and kissed his cheek. ‘So did I.’

They were almost at the door when someone caught Patrick’s arm. ‘Mate!’ said a man. The man was young, muscular and very familiar-looking, although Patrick couldn’t place him. The fact that he wore mirror shades and a huge woollen fashion-victim cap didn’t help.

Patrick and Gill stopped, jostled on all sides by the departing crowd. ‘Yes?’ Patrick said suspiciously.

The man lowered his shades and flashed a smile at him. ‘It’s me – Shawn.’

Gill made a strange sound in her throat and started subconsciously fiddling with her hair. She’d recognised him before even Patrick had.

‘Shawn Barrett,’ he hissed. ‘Sorry about the shades, but you know . . .’

Patrick raised his eyebrows. Shawn Barrett. He remembered then that Shawn was a Cure fan too, via his grandfather. His grandfather, for fuck’s sake! he thought.

‘Quick word?’ Shawn dragged them to one side of the reception area. It was astonishing that nobody seemed to recognise him at all, but he guessed it was because most of the audience here were at least twenty years older than Shawn’s ‘target’ market.

‘This is my wife, Gill,’ Patrick said, grinning at Gill’s star-struck face as Shawn shook her hand. She wasn’t remotely a fan of OnTarget, but Shawn Barrett was a very good-looking bloke.

‘Awesome gig, wasn’t it?’ Shawn said, pulling at a tuft of facial hair under his lower lip. ‘Anyway, mate, just wanted to say good job, like, for catching Graham Burns and getting Mervyn off the hook. He can seem like a right twat, but he’s got a heart of gold, that one. And as for Burns, fucking hell, what a number. Doing that shit to those poor girls. Unbelievable! If I’d had any idea what he was like . . .’

Patrick couldn’t help but remember Carmella’s account of little Roisin McGreevy and how Shawn Barrett had ruined her life. And how ‘heart of gold’ Mervyn Hammond had had no qualms about buying her silence.

Still, he thought. Nothing was ever straightforward, was it? He had a brief flash of memory of Suzanne in the park, in her running gear . . . Fifty shades of grey, indeed. Wasn’t everything, where morals were concerned?

‘Hey, is it true?’ Shawn whispered. ‘That Mervyn is Graham’s dad?’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ Patrick replied.

‘Ha!’ Shawn grinned his famous grin.

But it was true. Mervyn Hammond was Graham Burns’s father. After the ambulance had turned up and taken Graham away, under police escort, Patrick had gone back into the barn and released Mervyn, who sat shivering and snivelling on the chair. Patrick had a feeling Mervyn would never be the same after this.

‘It’s true, what I told him,’ Hammond had said as Patrick struggled with the wet rope that bound Mervyn to the chair. ‘He is my son. It was a long time ago, when I was just starting out and did the PR for this little club in the East End. I’ve never been, ah, a very sexual person.’

Patrick had wondered if he really wanted to hear this, but nodded for Hammond to continue.

‘But Sandy, that was her name, she had this magnetic quality. A seductive quality. We did it once, in a dressing room, thirty seconds of fumbling, and three months later she told me she was pregnant. I’m ashamed to say that I freaked out. I really didn’t want kids, and Sandy had a reputation . . . I accused her of lying, said she couldn’t know who the dad was because she slept around so much. She went away and I forgot all about it.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Made myself forget about it.’

‘But Graham ended up in the care system?’ Patrick had asked.

‘Yeah. But I didn’t find out about that for years. It was about ten years later, when I was starting to get pretty successful. I bumped into an old mate from the club who asked me if I’d heard about what happened to Sandy. He said she’d had the baby but hadn’t been able to cope, was still going out, taking drugs, sleeping around . . . leaving her son at home alone. Social services had intervened and taken the baby into care.’

Patrick had removed the rope, freeing Mervyn, but he remained in the same position, his head hanging low.

‘I knew the baby would be, what, nine or ten by this point. And I started to wonder . . . was he my son? My own dad had just died and I was feeling vulnerable, thinking about family and the meaning of life, all that shit.’ He laughed without humour. ‘So I decided to track down Sandy’s little boy, spoke to some social workers . . . greased a few palms. And there he was, at St Mary’s. They told me he had a lot of behavioural issues, that they hadn’t been able to place him in long-term foster care or find anyone to adopt him because he was too difficult.’

Mervyn had pushed himself to his feet, bones and joints cracking. He’d drifted over to his model railway, watched the locomotives running round the track, a faraway look in his eye.

‘I still didn’t know if he was my son . . . until I saw him. The second I laid eyes on him, I knew. He was my flesh and blood. But . . . I didn’t have room for a kid in my life. I was so busy, travelling here, there and everywhere, working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. I thought he was better off where he was. The solution, I thought, was for me to start visiting St Mary’s, under the guise of a mentor, helping coach the troubled kids. I mean, I still do it now. I enjoy it. It makes me feel like I’m atoning for my past mistakes, for all the bad stuff I’ve done.’

Patrick had nodded.

‘But I kept a close eye on Graham. Him and his little girlfriend, Melanie. They were inseparable, you know. If anyone did anything to hurt her . . . well.’

‘He’d hurt them?’

‘I never knew what he did. But whatever it was, the person who’d upset Melanie never went near her again.’ Hammond had fiddled with the controls of his train set. ‘I didn’t even know he was still in touch with her, after they left St Mary’s. I thought she was off the scene. Because I took him out of that world, got him jobs, helped him – like an invisible, guiding hand. A guardian angel. That’s what I thought anyway.’

Mervyn had looked like he was on the verge of passing out.

‘Funnily enough, I mentioned Melanie to Graham the other day, asked him if he was still in touch with “that weird girl” he used to be so crazy about. He snapped at me, said she wasn’t weird. But I didn’t think anything of it.’

‘When was this?’

Mervyn had gone quiet and Patrick had thought he’d slipped into shock. But then he’d said, ‘Monday. The day before the party.’

At that point, more paramedics had arrived and taken Mervyn out to an ambulance and to hospital to be checked over. Patrick had stood in the converted barn for a while. He expected this would all come out at the trial. Mervyn Hammond’s career would be ruined. And Patrick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He thought about Mervyn mentioning Melanie to Graham. Was that why Graham had chosen to frame Mervyn, because he was angry about him calling Melanie weird? Patrick had wondered why Graham had left more than a week between targeting Rose and Jess and then Chloe and Jade. This was something he intended to ask Graham, but his guess was that Graham had been scared after the police visited Global Sounds, decided to lie low. Maybe Mervyn had stirred up Graham’s anger again, prompting him to finish what he’d started sooner rather than later.

An examination of Graham’s phone had answered the final question. As Peter Bell had predicted, a cache of photos Graham had sent to the girls through Snapchat had been stored in a folder on the phone. They knew exactly how he’d lured them to their deaths. The evidence against Burns was rock solid. Even if he had the best lawyer in the world, he was going to prison probably for the rest of his life.

‘So what are you boys up to these days?’ he asked Shawn now. ‘New album in the pipeline?’

Shawn looked surprised. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ He sounded slightly outraged. ‘OnT have split up. This thing with Burns was, like, the final straw, but I’ve been thinking about going solo for quite a while, you know, be a real musician. No more of that manufactured shite.’

‘Oh right,’ Patrick said politely, declining to add that he’d been rather too busy attending court as a witness for the prosecution of a serial killer to have noticed that Britain’s favourite boy band had gone their separate ways.

‘Speaking of real musicians, I’m just on my way backstage now to meet Bob and the lads,’ Shawn said casually. ‘I remember you mentioned you’re a fan. Want to tag along? I can get you a couple of these, no bother.’ He stuck out his hand to show off his Access All Areas wristband.

Gill’s eyes opened wide as saucers. Patrick smiled at her, then looked back at Shawn Barrett; little more than a kid with muscles, really, he thought. A very rich kid with muscles.

‘Very kind of you,’ he said. ‘I’m tempted – but to be honest we need to get home. Send him my best, though, won’t you?’

‘Are you insane?’ Gill asked him once they were on the train, surrounded by hot, excited middle-aged people in Cure T-shirts. ‘I thought you’d have sold your mother for a chance to meet Robert Smith. We don’t even have to get back for a babysitter!’

Patrick looked pensive. ‘Yeah, a few years ago maybe. But you know what they say – never meet your idols.’

He saw the girls then in his mind’s eye: Rose, Jessica, Jade, Wendy . . . and Chloe Hedges, at least home now with her family. Thank God one of them was. The blissfully dead. It was a phrase from ‘Lullaby’, the song the band had opened their set with, and it chased itself around his head.

He hoped that they were; that such a thing was possible.

Letter from the Authors

Dear Reader

Thanks for reading The Blissfully Dead. It goes without saying that we hope you enjoyed it and would love to hear your thoughts about it. Our email address is [email protected] or you can message us through our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/vossandedwards.

In this letter we’re going to tell you a little about the inspiration behind this book and also how we write together. Please be aware that this letter may contain some spoilers, so please don’t read it if you haven’t already finished the book.

The initial idea for this book came from a TV documentary called Crazy About One Direction, which was shown on Channel 4 in the UK in 2013. In this documentary, a number of teenage fans of the titular boy band demonstrated their extreme love for their idols and revealed the rivalry and jealousy that can spring up when emotions are high and hormones are running riot. One interesting thread of the documentary focused on fan fiction and ‘shipping’, the creation of stories in which members of the band are engaged in a love affair.

The documentary itself was illuminating, but the reaction of One Direction’s fans was even more fascinating. Twitter exploded with outrage and horror, the girls who appeared on the programme were vilified and, bizarrely, thousands of fans began to tweet claims that a number of ‘shippers’ were so distraught they had committed suicide. These claims were false, but it demonstrated how fandom and social media can collide to create what can only be described as hysteria.

We are both big music lovers and first bonded over our love of The Cure (whose song ‘Lullaby’ gave this novel its title). Also, Louise used to work in the music industry. We knew writing a novel set in that world would be fun.

As we started to write The Blissfully Dead, and to think about the relationship between fans and celebrities, our thoughts turned to the Operation Yewtree investigations of the last few years. For non-UK readers, these investigations exposed a number of high-profile pop stars, DJs and TV personalities when women came forward to claim that they had been sexually assaulted as teenagers by these famous men decades ago. In most cases, they had been afraid to accuse them at the time – or had done so and been ignored or ridiculed. As we write, some formerly much-loved stars are now in prison, their pasts exposed, their reputations destroyed.

We should point out that all of the characters in The Blissfully Dead are fictional and not based on any real people, but some of the cases referred to in the book, including Ian Watkins, the former singer with Lostprophets, are factual. OnTarget are not based on One Direction but are a composite of all the manufactured bands who have inspired devotion over the years.

So how did we write it? This is the question we get asked more than any other: exactly how do two people go about writing a novel together? We live several hundred miles apart (that’s not too bad; we wrote our first novel with one of us in London, the other in Tokyo) and don’t meet up very often. But when we start, we get together and discuss the basic plot of the book and create a chapter plan.

We follow the ‘driving in the dark’ method of writing, where you can only see a certain distance ahead. So our initial chapter plan might cover the first ten chapters. We divide them up and get going. One of us writes a chapter and sends it to the other. That person edits it and makes comments, then sends it back. When we are both happy with the chapter it goes into a master document.

Our books nearly always have multiple narrators, so we each choose characters to write, though we take turns to write from our main character’s point of view. There are certain types of scene that suit us best. For example, Mark usually writes action scenes and Louise tends to write more emotional chapters. But we mix these up more than we used to. We’re not saying who writes the sex scenes . . .

During the writing of the novel we meet several times to discuss the plot and when we finally reach the end, we both go through and produce a huge list of points to be addressed. But co-writing is much easier than writing a novel solo because you get instant feedback and somebody to bounce ideas off. We highly recommend it – as long as you find the right person. It’s no lie to say that over the course of six novels together we have never argued. We imagine that married couples who co-write books have far more heated discussions than we’ve ever had!

The Blissfully Dead is the second novel to feature DI Patrick Lennon, following From the Cradle. We have lots more adventures planned for Lennon and we hope that you’ll be there to find out what challenge he faces next . . . and whether Winkler will ever turn out to have any redeeming qualities.

Best wishes

Louise and Mark

P.S. If you want to be the first to find out about our new books, special deals, etc., you can join our email list at www.vossandedwards.com/newsletter.

Acknowledgements

A number of people generously helped with research for this book, including Elizabeth Haynes, Simon Alcock, Chris Phillips, Elaine Burtenshaw and (for Dublin-based information) Alice Brady. As always, any procedural inaccuracies are ours.

Thanks to everyone who helped us make this book better, including our editor Katie Green, our agent Sam Copeland and Sara Edwards who read an early draft and helped with research into the foster care system. Thank you too to Gracie Voss for helping with the teen speak!

A big thank you to everyone at Thomas & Mercer, especially Emilie Marneur, for her passion and enthusiasm, and to the rest of the T&M team, especially Sana Chebaro, Neil Hart and Eoin Purcell.

Finally, we want to thank our readers on facebook.com/vossandedwards who are not at all like the fans in this book – though they can be as enthusiastic! Some names in this book were provided by members of that group, including Cassandra Oliver and Sandra Mangan, whose surname we borrowed. We would also like to thank Tracy Fenton and all the members of THE Book Group on Facebook for being such fun and keeping Mark’s ego in check.