Behind Closed Doors Read online

  06:25

  She woke up and the van wasn’t moving. The engine noise was different, somehow; the vibration of the metal floor under her was different. She could feel a rolling, swaying motion. Instantly she felt sick.

  As she started to stretch, the pain in her limbs made her cry out. Immediately she heard a sound next to her. A hand went over her mouth. She tried to move but her body felt odd, heavy, as though she was tied up again even though she wasn’t.

  “You quiet,” a voice said beside her. A man’s voice, heavily accented. She thought it was the same one as before, but her ears felt funny, as if she’d been swimming.

  It was dark in here but even so it was hard to focus. Something cold and metallic was pushed against her cheek. She smelled oil and garlic on his hands.

  “You stay quiet or I will kill you.”

  Scarlett was struggling to find focus. The world was rocking, spinning, inside her head. It felt easier just to lie still.

  “Where are we?” she whispered, after a few minutes.

  He didn’t answer, or didn’t hear her. She tried to turn her head, to look at him. Whoever he was.

  “Please,” she said, a little louder. “Please, just let me go. I want to go home.”

  Movement again, the sounds of shuffling and then his breath on her cheek. “I said, you quiet. You not understand?”

  She didn’t say anything else. Closed her eyes and waited.

  LOU

  Thursday 31 October 2013, 14:10

  Buchanan was on the phone. Two of the management secretaries—not Mara, whose services were shared between Buchanan and two other superintendents—were at their desks, both of them typing at a speed that surely was not possible. Through the open door to his office, Buchanan saw her and held up a finger to indicate she should wait. She took one of the visitor’s chairs.

  Pam and—what was the other one called? Lou could never remember her name, began with an S—were tapping their keyboards so fast it almost looked as though they were racing each other. A typing contest. Sue? Sarah? That wasn’t right . . . Sandra. That sounded more like it. Lou bit her lip.

  “He won’t be a minute,” Pam said, without looking up.

  “Who’s he talking to, Pam? Do you know?”

  “The chief.”

  “Ah. Is something kicking off, then?”

  Pam smiled and didn’t reply, which meant that it was.

  The phone call finished. “Lou—when you’re ready,” he called.

  Lou stood up and straightened her skirt. Here we go, she thought.

  “Sir,” she said as she went into his office and he waved her to a seat. “Everything all right?”

  “What are you working on? I know it’s mad down there—just run me through your current priorities.”

  “I’m overseeing the case file for the Leuchars murder still. Ali Whitmore is putting that together and Jane Phelps is the exhibits officer. They’re pretty self-sufficient, though. I’ve got that series of armed robberies, and now the two jobs that are being linked. McVey and Palmer—Op Trapeze. Why’s that? Something come in?”

  He didn’t answer. The seriousness of his expression—when Lou was used to him being relaxed enough in her presence to ask what she was planning to do with her evening—made her sit up a little straighter. Had she pissed him off somehow? She started mentally checking through all the jobs she’d worked over the last couple of months—none of them, since the Polly Leuchars murder investigation that had resulted in her DI, Andy Hamilton, being suspended for gross misconduct, had left any cause for concern.

  “I had a look through your personnel file, Lou,” he said.

  That didn’t sound good. What was he doing, rooting through her file?

  One of your first jobs as a DC. Ten years ago. Scarlett Rainsford. That name ring a bell?”

  “Of course I remember. Cases like that one stay with you, don’t they?”

  “Good job they do. Special Branch did a warrant on a brothel in Briarstone this morning as part of Op Pentameter. Guess who they found working there?”

  She stared at him. He couldn’t mean Scarlett, surely? This must be some kind of cryptic question to which the answer would be one of the many witnesses they’d interviewed all those years ago—one of Scarlett’s classmates, perhaps, or her sister?

  She cleared her throat, deciding to be brave and suggest the impossible. “You mean—not Scarlett?”

  “The one and only. As you can imagine, when the news leaks all hell’s going to break loose. They’re working on a media strategy but I don’t need to tell you that this has to be kept quiet. I’d like you to get on to DCI Waterhouse at Special Branch. He’s expecting your call.”

  “Is she all right? What has she said?”

  “Not a lot, so far. But she seems okay. Living and breathing, which is more than anyone expected.”

  “Where is she now?”

  He smiled. “She’s in the Vulnerable Victim Suite for the time being.”

  “I thought they’d all been shut down.”

  “Technically. But they managed to reopen the Briarstone VVS just for Scarlett. Special treatment and all that. Special Branch don’t seem quite sure what to do with her—but if anyone’s going to be in on the debrief it should be you.”

  “Are they certain it’s her?”

  “Over the phone Clive Rainsford was muttering something about a DNA test, but it turns out she has a scar on her upper arm that’s pretty distinctive.”

  sAh, the scar. Lou had forgotten about the scar, despite looking for it on the shoulders of just about every girl of Scarlett’s approximate age for years after the abduction.

  “What about the family? Has anyone told them?”

  “You won’t believe it. The mum and dad, sister—remember her?—they’re all on holiday. In Spain, this time.”

  Intel Reports on Ian Palmer

  5X5X5 INTELLIGENCE REPORT

  Date: 11 March 2013

  Officer: PC 9921 EVANS

  Subject:

  Thomas PALMER DOB 22/04/1990, Ian PALMER DOB 19/04/1993, Ryan COLEMAN DOB 12/01/1990, Darren CUNNINGHAM DOB 12/11/1976

  Grading: B / 2 / 1

  Stopcheck outside the Co-op on Turnswood Parade. Darren CUNNINGHAM sitting in the driver’s seat of a stationary BMW which is registered to his mother Sara CUNNINGHAM DOB 14/02/1952. CUNNINGHAM was issued with a driving ban last month but claimed Thomas PALMER has been driving him around. Despite a strong smell of cannabis around the vehicle no drugs were found. Vehicle taxed and insured. Suitable words of advice given. Also in the vehicle were Ian PALMER and Ryan COLEMAN. A few minutes after the stopcheck Thomas PALMER and CUNNINGHAM swapped places in the front seats and Thomas PALMER drove the vehicle away with all four inside.

  5X5X5 INTELLIGENCE REPORT

  Date: 23 September 2013

  Officer: PC 9921 EVANS

  Subject: Ian PALMER DOB 19/04/1993, Ryan COLEMAN DOB 12/01/1990

  Grading: B / 4 / 1

  Ian PALMER is friends with Ryan COLEMAN. It is believed COLEMAN was at school with PALMER’s elder brother Thomas and they have been friends ever since.

  (Research shows Thomas PALMER DOB 22/04/1990)

  SCARLETT

  Saturday 23 August 2003, 18:32

  The vehicle had stopped moving, the engine idling. Scarlett, alone again in the back of the van, could hear the sounds of other cars passing at high speed, and she guessed they had pulled into a layby, or a service station. One of the van’s doors opened and she waited, holding her breath, expecting the door to open at the side of the van. Footsteps. She could hear the chorus of cicadas outside, then a splashing as one of the men took a piss. A minute later he climbed back into the cab, and then the van moved off again, gaining speed.

  She should have shouted, or screamed. Someone might have heard.

  Nico had shown her a cicada. A dead one. It had been lying on the sun-baked tiles of the restaurant terrace, presumably having flown into the glass door and stunned itself. He’d
put it on the palm of his hand while she shrieked and drew back from him. It was the biggest insect she’d ever seen and had big, ugly bug-eyes and black and gray armor-plating over its body. But when she realized it was definitely dead she got closer, and for a moment she could admire the delicacy of the wings, wonder at how something with a body so big and wings so whisper-thin could ever fly. And then he’d pushed his hand quickly toward her with an angry buzzing sound as though the thing was alive and she’d screamed and jumped back, clutching her chest, and Nico had laughed at her.

  “That was mean!” she’d said.

  “You’re so funny,” he’d replied. “They don’t hurt. They are just loud.” He’d held open Scarlett’s shoulder bag, dangling the insect over it by one of its legs. “We give it to your mother,” he said. “What you think, she will like it?”

  “Nico!”

  He’d thrown the bug out onto the street, dusted off his hands. Then he had rested both his arms on her shoulders, head on one side as though he was appraising her. “You are angry with me?”

  How could she be? How could she ever be angry with him?

  “No,” she’d said, and smiled.

  And he had pinched her cheek between his knuckles and pulled her chin toward him so he could kiss her. The night before, he’d kissed her for the first time and it had been gentle; already their kisses were becoming hungry, hard, possessive. On her part as well as his.

  It hurt her, now, to think of him. “Nico,” she said, whispering into the dirty blanket underneath her that smelled of engine oil and something else, something bad that she could not give a name to.

  Nico had not been the first boy who had shown any interest in her.

  Mark Braddock had been told to sit next to her one day because she had been talking to Cerys and Mrs. Rowden-Knowles had wanted to separate them. She’d used Mark Braddock to hammer home her punishment because he was weird, nobody liked him, and she knew that sitting Scarlett next to anyone else, male or female, would not have done the trick.

  As it turned out, Mrs. Rowden-Knowles’s ploy backfired because, to Scarlett’s big surprise, Mark Braddock was all right. Contrary to popular opinion, he didn’t smell of BO, he didn’t have bad teeth, and behind the glasses he had lovely blue eyes that took everything in. Trouble was, instead of Mark’s impeccable behavior rubbing off on Scarlett, the opposite happened and she ended up corrupting him.

  She started it by drawing a cock on his notepad. He blushed and put his hand over it until Mrs. Rowden-Knowles’s back was turned, but then he lifted the page and turned to a fresh one. And then, the excitement of embarrassing him past, just as she was starting to get bored again, he reached across to her notepad and within a second had drawn a pair of boobs and a big smile underneath.

  It made her laugh, stifled because all of a sudden she didn’t want to get moved somewhere else, or, worse, sent to see Mr. Callaghan.

  After that, it progressed to notes. Not about anything dramatic, just a conversation passed back and forth between two people who hadn’t realized they had anything in common until precisely that moment.

  The next lesson they had together, she chose to sit next to him. She thought she would get some stick for that, especially from Cerys who had a gob on her like you wouldn’t believe, but in fact Cerys somehow got the impression that Mrs. Rowden-Knowles had put her next to Braddock for the rest of the term, and Scarlett didn’t bother to put her straight. Possibly Mark thought the same thing, because his first note to her was an apologetic one saying he was sorry that she’d been put there. And she didn’t contradict him, either; she wasn’t prepared to admit to anyone, even herself, that she actually wanted to sit next to him.

  Despite all the notes and the stifled giggles—for to her surprise he was funny, and clever, and very far from boring after all—she must have absorbed a little of his intellect through some kind of psychic osmosis, because she got good marks in the end-of-year exams. Her best results, in fact. Ever.

  The last day of term. No lessons with Mark Braddock, but Scarlett had taken to spending time in the library even when all the exams were over and nobody was revising anymore, because one day she’d walked past the library at lunchtime and seen Mark in there. Nobody would come looking for her in this of all places. Mark had been surprised to see her, but once he’d recovered his composure he’d sat down next to her and complained via note when she started disturbing him.

  So she would sit and watch while he read textbooks that he didn’t need to read. She watched the way he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose when they slipped down, watched how he moved his hair up out of his eyes with one hand and how it fell down again immediately because it was silky-soft and heavy. He didn’t even seem to be aware that she was staring at him, because, unlike her, he could grow completely absorbed in a book and not notice anything that was going on around.

  But if she thought he was ignoring her, she was wrong. On the last day, when the bell went for the afternoon lesson—in her case PE, in his, biology—he passed her a note that he’d scribbled hastily. It said: See you in Sept.

  They’d still scarcely spoken to each other directly. Not because they couldn’t have done—although the library was supposed to be quiet, people chatted in there all the time. They could have spoken before or after lessons, or in the playground, or anywhere in fact. But it had become a kind of tradition between them, the notes, and Scarlett didn’t want to be the one to break it.

  Yeah, she wrote back. That was the trouble, she thought. He wrote cool stuff. Her notes to him were always a brief scrawl in response to something; his to her always felt intelligent, challenging, even when it was something straightforward. She was in awe of his brain, how it worked, how he knew the answer to everything without being pushy or loud like Cerys.

  When we come back to school I have something to ask you, his next note said.

  What? she wrote back, but he was already on his feet, his bag slung over his shoulder, heading for the door.

  Dismayed, she said out loud, “Mark!”

  He looked back at her, blushing, surprised. It was the first time she’d spoken to him.

  “What do you want to ask me?”

  But he’d smiled and turned away. The summer holidays had started and in August she had come to Greece on holiday with her mum and dad and sister Juliette. And then she’d met Nico, and Mark had been forgotten, mentally discarded as if he had meant nothing to her, nothing at all.

  Now, in the back of the van, she thought over and over again about Mark and how much she longed to see him right at this moment, how she would have given anything—anything—for the chance to ask him again what he wanted, and if it was that he wanted to ask her out she would accept without question, no matter what Cerys had to say about it, no matter that her father had made it very clear that she was too young to go out with boys. Mark Braddock had wanted to ask her out. She believed it now. And at the same time she realized that she would never know for sure. She would never see him again.

  LOU

  Thursday 31 October 2013, 14:27

  Lou made the phone call to DCI Waterhouse while walking along the perimeter of the playing field to the rear of HQ. It was the only place she could pretty much guarantee that she would not be disturbed or overheard. She could have just gone back to her office and shut the door, but as she did this so rarely it would have been a general heads-up to everyone that something was going on.

  Already she was starting to question why Buchanan had involved her in this. Whatever Lou’s previous role, she was Major Crime; Op Pentameter—the U.K.-wide operation dealing with human trafficking for sexual exploitation—was very much a Special Branch thing. They didn’t like to share. The possibility of a media frenzy surrounding Scarlett’s reappearance was a likely explanation. A couple of years from retirement as he was, if there was a bit of glory to be obtained, Buchanan would want a chunk of it. Senior officers across the force would be circling the investigation like sharks, all trying to find some
tenuous link to the job so that they could get a bite at it.

  There was a brisk wind blowing across the grass and not only was it chilly, but she wondered whether Waterhouse would even be able to hear her when the call connected.

  Stephen Waterhouse answered with a tone that suggested he was incredibly busy and this-had-better-be-bloody-important. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Lou Smith, Major Crime—”

  Before she had time even to mention Buchanan’s name, Waterhouse interrupted. “Oh, right, hold on a sec.”

  The muffled sound that followed implied he was holding the mobile to his chest while barking instructions at someone else. Then he was back.

  “When can you get over here?”

  Lou felt her hackles rise, but kept her voice even. “What exactly do you need from me?”

  There was a pause and Lou thought she heard a sigh from the other end. It might have been the wind. “I don’t actually need anything. Mr. Buchanan suggested you might have some expertise to offer because you dealt with the investigation ten years ago. Personally I can’t see what difference that makes, but still . . .”

  “She is in the VVS, is that right?”

  “At the moment.”

  “In that case I’d like to listen in. Presumably you’ve got a family liaison officer lined up for the family? Mary Nott was the original FLO but she retired three years ago—”

  “We’re Special Branch; we don’t have FLOs. And in any case I don’t think she qualifies, since she’s not a suspect, nobody’s died, and she’s not been in an RTC.”

  Lou’s temper frayed as the line got muffled again—he was clearly carrying on a conversation with someone else. “Fuck’s sake,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. When’s your next briefing?”

  “Four, but—”

  “I’ll see you then,” she said.

  She disconnected the call. What an absolute arse. Four o’clock, and it was half-past two already. She had time for a quick refresher of the main details of the case—the files and notes long since having been archived—and then she would have to head off to Knapstone. Seaside town, grim in parts, in the center of it an unattractive concrete block of a building that served as the local police station. In the basement was the headquarters of Eden’s Special Branch.