Hush Hush Page 18

  I’d trawled waste disposal sites for evidence before. Knives, photographs, guns, handbags thrown into city skips following rapes and murders. I prayed as I drove through the boom gates and parked between two police cruisers that I’d be looking for such an item again. But as Nigel Spader spotted me from a huddle near one of the large sorting buildings, I knew from his face what was happening. He was wearing gloves and forensic booties. He peeled the gloves off, pocketed them and lit a cigarette on his way to greet me at the car. I watched him approach in the rear-view mirror, unable to move, hoping somehow that if I stayed where I was the awful truth might stay where it was too, in the unknown future.

  I popped open my door and he leaned on the frame. I looked at him hopefully. He shook his head.

  ‘The baby?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re still searching.’

  Chapter 74

  A LIGHT RAIN started falling, misting, swirling in by Nigel’s breath. There were flecks of shredded paper in the mud everywhere under my boots, like fallen snow, little letters and numbers discernible on some of the tiny pieces. I got out of the car, threw my phone back on the seat. My shocked brain’s hyper focus on tiny details and the cool, cloudy sky in contrast to the searing heat I’d been in only hours ago made the whole situation seem unreal. The men standing by the corner of the sorting building were actors in a play waiting for me to join them. Harriet Blue enters stage right. They looked at me sadly, the usual hatred gone. Death does that. Makes everyone equal.

  ‘Does he know?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been in a meeting for the past three hours,’ Nigel said. ‘We didn’t want to disturb him. Needed time to figure out who’d be the best person to tell him. No one wanted to do it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to do it,’ one of the guys said. He shook his head. ‘No way in the world.’

  ‘We got his brother,’ Nigel said. ‘He told him. They’re on their way out here now.’

  ‘Here?’ I looked around. ‘He can’t come here. This is … No. What condition is she in?’

  ‘There was no stopping him.’ Nigel shrugged. ‘He’s a cop, Harry.’

  ‘Oh no.’ I went to a patrol car parked nearby and opened the boot. I began to shiver under the rain, my skin raised in goosebumps. I pulled on some gloves and booties. I’d need a whole suit to attend the scene properly, but I just wanted to look. To see if there was anything I could do. A part of me knew there wasn’t going to be. That nothing could soften the horror of a father seeing his daughter’s murdered body. I walked past the gathering of men and women outside, into the huge warehouse, where there were dozens more officers milling around, making phone calls, taking photographs and measurements, standing, talking.

  There wasn’t much to see. Tonya Woods was buried in the trash, lying on her side, one pale arm slung up and over the handle of what looked like an old pram. I saw her long dark hair, a glimpse of her ear. Bruises on her neck. Probably strangled. My eyes wandered over the things she was buried in, wanting to record everything. There were papers, empty food tins, small plastic bags of wet and lumpy items, cleaning-product bottles and cardboard boxes. The rubbish had been dumped alongside a long, wide trench running the length of the warehouse, where it would be sorted and carried away on huge conveyor belts. Tonya must have been spotted as the truck pulled up to the trench, and instead of dumping the load for sorting the driver had dumped it on the ground to get a better look.

  I felt his presence. The low voices of the men and women around me snapped off as though a switch had been flipped. The sound of trucks rumbling and machines grinding and the pattering of rain on the warehouse roof seemed to dim. There was a ringing silence as Joe Woods approached and stood next to me.

  I watched his face, trying to decide what might come next. He could have any kind of reaction. I’d seen the families of homicide victims burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of what they were seeing. I’d seen them scream and faint and close in on themselves, blank, numb, the shutters pulled down to protect the mind. Walking zombies.

  Joe Woods didn’t do any of those things. His eyes fell dark, his jaw clamped shut, and he seized my arm, almost lifting me off the ground. He turned and marched me towards the door.

  Chapter 75

  THE HAND ON my arm was like a vice. I knew simply from his grip that Woods was going to put all his rage at the situation onto me. That was confirmed when I tried to resist. He slammed me onto the ground outside the sorting building. The breath left me. I could only lie there while he ratchetted cuffs onto my wrists. Nigel and his group of officers were watching, motionless. I sucked in a lungful of air painfully.

  ‘Nigel, help me, you arsehole!’ I managed. But he didn’t. He couldn’t, and I knew that. There was a man standing by the row of cars, big and broad like Joe, probably his brother, watching the arrest with his mouth open.

  Woods hauled me up and shoved me towards a patrol car so fast my feet dragged in the dirt. I fell into the back seat and he slammed the door behind me and got in the front. I looked around and saw that everyone from inside the warehouse where Woods’s daughter lay had come outside to watch me being taken away.

  ‘Woods,’ I managed. ‘Just –’

  ‘You had your chance,’ he snapped. His voice was unrecognisable. Low and dark and gravelly, a sound that made my blood run cold. ‘You could have saved them. You could have stopped this.’

  He pulled the car out of the space it was parked in so fast and hard I fell sideways on the seat. When I righted myself we were driving towards the highway.

  I let some time pass. The cuffs were so tight I couldn’t feel my fingers. Woods’s knuckles on the steering wheel were white, his palms wringing the leather, making grinding sounds. I searched for words, but there were none. He was taking me back to prison. I had failed to find his child safe, and he was going to make sure I had nothing to do but think about that failure while I stared at the blank concrete wall of my cell for the next decade or more.

  I sat back in my seat and watched the suburbs roll by, perhaps for the last time in a long time. I was so consumed by my own thoughts that I didn’t notice we had missed the road that led to the highway. Woods turned the car into a street I didn’t recognise, full of houses, gardens. Empty of people.

  Woods parked the car neatly on the side of the road and pulled the handbrake on, turned the ignition off.

  Then he put his head in his hands and cried.

  Chapter 76

  I LISTENED FOR a long time. He cried hard and desperately, not caring, or perhaps having forgotten completely that I was sitting there. Joe Woods was not a nice man. He had, in the past, endangered my life and the lives of my friends, thrown me in prison, threatened and abused and manhandled me. But the pain in his voice brought tears to my eyes. All the numbness I’d had left after leaving prison was gone. I wiped my eyes on my shoulders and sat quietly until Woods was done. He put his head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat and stared out the windscreen.

  ‘Woods?’ I said from the back seat.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Look, I’m just going to talk,’ I said, shuffling forward. ‘You can listen if you want. I hope you do.’

  He was still and silent.

  ‘Somebody else in my position right now would probably say all kinds of nice things,’ I said. ‘About being sorry for what happened to Tonya. About how you did the best you could and there’s nothing you should have done differently and all that sort of stuff. But lots of gentle, supportive people are going to come and say that to you in the next few weeks, so I’ll leave it to them. It wouldn’t mean much coming from me, anyway. We’ve always hated each other’s guts. I’m not one of those gentle supportive people, and I’m on the clock here. I’ve got a killer to catch. So I’m going to plead my case instead, OK?’

  Woods turned his head slightly.

  ‘You hired me to do a job,’ I said. ‘Throwing me in prison will mean I can’t do that.’

  ‘What does it matter now?�
�� Woods asked. His voice was so small I could barely hear it. ‘They’re gone.’

  ‘It might not matter to you at this very second,’ I said. ‘But it’s going to matter soon. We don’t know that Rebel is back there. She might still be alive. And you will want whoever did this brought to justice. You’re going to want your time with him, and I can give that to you. We are within reach of finding your family’s killer, sir. Don’t throw it all away now because you’re angry.’

  He didn’t answer. I shuffled again, pressed my face against the steel mesh separating us.

  ‘I can do this, sir,’ I said. ‘Give me one more chance.’

  Deputy Commissioner Woods sat quietly for a long time. Then he got out of the driver’s seat and opened my door. He dragged me out of the car by my elbow and dumped me on the wet road.

  The handcuff key tinkled as it hit the asphalt. I sat up and watched him climb into the vehicle and drive away.

  Chapter 77

  SHE SMILED WHEN she opened the door, and he was watching for the little sparkle of surprise and delight when she saw it was him. The smile quickly twisted into confusion, maybe a little disgust, as she took in his clothes, hair, face. Like a monster from the wilds turning up to ruin a pristine family picnic. She was all clean and beautiful, her hair falling in a single perfect roll on her shoulder, her make-up done. She was even wearing heels. In her own house.

  In contrast, Tox had been in the desert all day, and the back of his neck and his forearms were scorched red. His hair was thick and coarse with dust, his nails blackened with dirt, and he almost certainly had microparticles of bodily remains on him from digging and turning up bones, pulling leather biker jackets and boots with foot bones still in them out of the sand. He was like a death dealer standing there after a long hard day collecting souls from the Earth, returning to an angel in her spotless apartment.

  ‘Turning up unexpected and unannounced is a bit of a thing with you, isn’t it?’ she asked, the smile slowly returning.

  ‘It keeps people on their toes,’ he said. ‘But I see you have guests.’

  ‘They’ve just gone,’ Chloe said.

  ‘I think I just passed them at the lift. Two pretty ladies.’

  She nodded. He stood there in the hall and she stood in the doorway, both of them smiling, remembering what they had done the last time they were together. Taking a moment to enjoy the anticipation of what they would do now. He stepped in and she led the way to the shower, unzipping her dress as she went.

  Chapter 78

  THE GYM WAS full of young people. A pair of boys were sparring in the ring while Pops stood at the ropes shouting directions, other kids were working a circuit through a row of bags hanging from the ceiling. I stood and watched from the door to the house as the boys on the bags dropped at the sound of a buzzer and did a round of sit-ups, and then flipped into push-ups at the next buzzer. There was a young girl shadow-boxing in the mirrors by the roller door and another girl strapping herself up to enter the ring. Pops spotted me and came over, and we went into the house together.

  ‘I’m going to take a nap,’ I said, pointing to his bedroom.

  ‘Jesus, Harry, what the hell happened?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I know they found Tonya Woods’s body and Woods dragged you off, and that’s it,’ Pops said. ‘No one has seen you since.’

  ‘Wrong.’ I went to the freezer and took out an icepack, pressed it against my ribs. ‘The first two people to see me after Woods dumped me, handcuffed, in the middle of suburbia, were a very frightened Russian couple.’

  Pops stared at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘Woods decided he’d arrest me because I didn’t find Tonya in time,’ I said. ‘Then I talked him down, so he tossed me out of his car, threw a handcuff key after me and bolted. I heard the key hit the road but I didn’t see it, and when I looked all around I couldn’t find it. I think it must have bounced down a drain or into the grass somewhere.’

  Pops’s mouth fell open.

  ‘So there I am in some street I don’t recognise, without a phone, handcuffed and alone. I went to the nearest house and kicked on the door but no one answered. Took me three houses before I found someone. A Russian couple. No English. I tried to explain who I was and what had happened but they weren’t buying it. So I shoved past the guy into the house, trying to indicate that I wanted to use the phone, but he just kept shouting and she just kept screaming. Eventually they locked me in their laundry and called the police, and a couple of young patrollies came and picked me up.’

  Pops laughed an exhausted, sad laugh and covered his face. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘They didn’t unlock my cuffs until they got me back here,’ I said. ‘Dickheads.’

  ‘Oh, Harry.’

  ‘So now I’m going for a nap, and then I’ll call Dolly,’ I said. ‘You’d better get back in the gym. You’ve got a lot of teenagers in there. If you take your eye off them for too long they’ll start drinking beers and making out.’

  I turned towards his bedroom. His voice stopped me in the doorway.

  ‘They haven’t found the baby yet,’ Pops said. ‘There’s no sign of her.’

  I thought about that, nodded. There was still hope.

  Chapter 79

  THE COLDNESS CAME over her as she lay beside him afterwards on the bed, their bodies still damp and hot from the shower, the sheets and coverlet kicked into a pile on the floor. He was lost to her, staring at the corner of the ceiling, thinking, dozing now and then. At home. He had said little to explain his state. A desert, she knew. Bodies. Bikers. The girl and her daughter who were missing.

  The coldness that fell softly on her skin wasn’t the breeze coming from the open window but the passion easing away, realisation hitting her. That they were really doing this now. They were together. He was going to keep showing up and sleeping with her and she was going to keep thinking about that in the moments when he wasn’t around, having imaginary conversations with him, remembering the feel of his big, hard hands on her. She was going to think of him and wince privately at the sharp plunge of her stomach. If they kept on through this phase, it would lead to other things. She could see it in the way he looked at her. There would be dinners. Presents. Weekends away. Friends meeting. Anniversaries. Promises. More lines crossed.

  It couldn’t go on like this. She wanted it to, so badly, but there was pain and ice at her core.

  He kissed her on the mouth as he slid over her, stood and grabbed a towel from the floor and wound it around his waist. She heard the shake of his cigarette packet and looked up at him as he drew one from the pack.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. It was the truth. ‘Stay here again tonight.’

  He looked pleased with that. He walked out and she heard the door to the balcony slide open.

  She slept, mere minutes. And then something snapped her awake. A change in the air, maybe. Electricity. It was impossible that they could be connected that way after such a short time together, she knew. But she could almost feel the horror rushing through him, sizzling through the air to her. She got up and slipped into a robe, went to the living room and found him standing at the bookcase.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she heard herself say.

  The picture was tiny. An egg-shaped silver frame that had been tucked behind some knick-knacks on the middle shelf. She’d forgotten it was there. When Chloe wanted to look at pictures of her dead mother and brother she had a whole album of them hidden away in a cupboard that she leafed through. Tox could only have found the small picture frame when he wandered in from the balcony and started perusing her shelves. He was holding it now, and she could see from where she stood that his hands were trembling. He lifted his eyes to hers and she knew.

  He knew.

  Chapter 80

  ‘WHAT …’ HE BLINKED. Looked at the picture again. ‘What …’

  She couldn’t find the words. For a moment they just stood there in the light from t
he apartment building across the street, breathing hard, minds racing.

  ‘Anna Peake,’ Chloe said. ‘And David Peake.’

  ‘I know who they are,’ Tox said. His eyes were big and glassy, full of something. Fear or rage, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘My mother and my brother,’ Chloe said.

  Tox exhaled hard, looked around like he suddenly didn’t know where he was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Chloe said. She took a step towards him. Just one. ‘You couldn’t have known. I changed my name years ago, to her maiden name. I should have said something. From the beginning. I just …’ She felt tears beginning. ‘I knew when you came in that day. When you came into the emergency room. I looked down at you and I knew who you were, even with the new name. The other boys from the bridge, I know what their new names are, too. I’ve sort of kept an eye on you all, over the years.’ The words were rushing out of her. She wiped her face. ‘One of them’s dead. One has a family up the coast.’

  He wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking at the picture.

  ‘But I knew your face, too,’ she said. ‘I saw you in the paper once. And I remember the day it happened. You ran past me. All of you. I was crossing the bridge walking home, and I heard the crash and smelled the smoke. Didn’t know what it was. Then you all ran past. You were the last one. We looked at each other.’

  Tox said nothing.

  ‘I should have told you from the beginning,’ Chloe said.

  Tox put the picture back where he’d found it. He strode rigidly to the bedroom, dressed and walked out of the apartment, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Chapter 81

  LESS THAN A third of the inmates at Johnsonborough Correctional Complex were women. So at night, there was no dedicated doctor servicing the female section and the doctor on roster for the male sections would be summoned if necessary. When Dolly complained of stomach cramps at seven that night, she was taken from her bed in the infirmary to the empty doctor’s surgery and chained to the table.