Loe raamatut: «Eyes Wide Open»

For Scarlett. Because you’re not alone any more.

For Sophie. Because you said those words to me when I most needed to hear them. I love you babygirl.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Book List

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Three

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Resources

Endpages

About the Publisher

Part One

‘I’m not afraid of the darkness outside. It’s the darkness inside I don’t like.’

(Shelagh Delaney)

You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories

(Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)

Coventry, 2014

My heels jab the pavement like knives. Any other girl would be balanced precariously in these boots, tottering unsteadily even without the influence of any illicit substance, but I wear mine like weapons. One of the tools of my trade.

It’s cold out tonight, the wind lashing my thighs under the hem of my ridiculously short skirt. Another tool. For practical purposes as well as image; it makes for easy access. The other women are lined up the road like soldiers, each inhabiting their own particular spot. We all look the same in the dark; interchangeable.

And then I see her. Tottering down the pavement looking lost.

From the distance she could easily be one of us; same outfit, same big hair, too much makeup. Only when she comes closer can I see that she isn’t one of us after all, that she doesn’t have that grubby hollow-eyed look about her, or any faded bruises not quite covered by cheap concealer, or tell-tale marks in the crook of her arm. And anyway, it’s her walk that gives her away. She looks like she’s going somewhere.

I don’t know why I do it. The other girls are looking at this stranger in our ranks as if she might be a threat, a new worker trying to find a patch, or as if she could be prey, with a well-padded purse to plunder. There’s no reason for me to care.

Yet I go up to her, smiling in a way that I hope looks friendly.

‘Got a fag?’ I say, in my most non-threatening manner. She looks at me, her eyes a little unfocused, swaying on her part-time stilettos. Her lips are glossy, her teeth white and even. If I was in any doubt, the teeth give it away. None of us has teeth like that.

She reaches into her bag and pulls out a half-empty packet of fags and a lighter.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask. She looks at me in surprise, then looks around and frowns. I see a light dawn in her eyes as she takes in her surroundings and the faces looking at her. She takes a step back, the fag packet still held out in front of her. I take one before she changes her mind.

‘I was looking for the taxi rank,’ she says.

‘It’s back that way,’ I wave my arm vaguely. She doesn’t take the cue to leave but just stands there staring, then passes me her lighter. I light my fag, glancing back over my shoulder to see the others looking in our direction, having all moved a little closer together. Them and us. I belong over there. Yet something in the girl’s face gives me an urge to make sure she really is okay. There is something unsullied about her, in spite of the condoms in her bag and the smell of cheap wine coming off her.

A car crawls past, its headlights sweeping over me, and I wonder what she sees in its lights. It carries on, equally slowly, and I don’t need to look back over my shoulder to know that the others will have stood to attention, forgetting about us for the moment. I make my decision.

‘Come on, I’ll show you the way to the taxi rank.’ I walk past her and she follows me, falling into step so that we’re walking side by side, both in our short skirts, pulling on our cigarettes. Normal girls.

She keeps giving me little sideways glances, nervous yet curious. Like she wants to ask questions but is worried I might turn on her, steal her handbag and pretty jewellery and disappear into the shadows with the others, who will of course have seen and heard nothing. On another night that might be my intention but for reasons I can’t explain, that’s not the case tonight.

‘I don’t know my way around here,’ she says unnecessarily, then more surprisingly, ‘I’ve not been out clubbing before.’

‘Why are you on your own?’ I shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t get involved, but I find myself wanting to know.

‘My friend Hazel left me. She went off with some guy.’

‘Shit friend,’ I say. She nods.

Then she starts to talk, and we stop walking for a bit and I listen. I’m good at listening, always have been, but the things she tells me I’m not expecting. It feels like the night is listening too, the very air holding it’s breath to hear the rest of the story, and I almost want to interrupt her and move her on. I’m losing money playing counsellor.

But I don’t. I listen, and the night listens with me, and for a moment I really wish I could help her, but I can’t. It’s not such an unusual story, really, just a terrible one, and I realise that in spite of the posh shoes and the shiny teeth she’s a lot like me, more so than I thought. Maybe not-so-normal girls after all.

I tell her, a bit. I tell her, ‘Me, too,’ and she just nods, like she kind of expected it. Well, let’s face it, I’m not selling my cute little ass on cold street corners ‘cos my life is all moonlight and roses, am I? Then we stop talking and just walk in silence for a little while. I feel like I know her now, and almost don’t want to watch her go. I think about what she’s going back to, that life so different and yet not so different from mine, and I don’t know if I’m jealous of her or terrified for her.

But I don’t say any of that. We get to the end of the road that will lead her back to the taxis and I point out the way.

‘You’ll be okay from here.’

‘Thank you.’ She looks like she means it, her eyes all wide and grateful, like a rescued puppy. I shrug. It’s no big deal.

Then her face crumples a little.

‘My dad’s going to kill me,’ she says. ‘I’ve got school tomorrow.’

I try not to laugh. I dropped out of school last year. I would have been taking exams this summer.

I walk quickly back to my spot, heels jabbing at the pavement. I’ve still got her lighter. I pause, about to run back and give it to her, then shrug and put it in my pocket. It might come in handy. I get the vague feeling I might see her again one day.

In fact, it’s the last time I see her. Alive, anyway.

Chapter One – Sunday

DI Matt Winston looked out of the window of his office and immediately wished he hadn’t. It was raining, again, so heavy that it was impossible to see anything beyond it. Not that the view behind Coventry’s main police station offered any comfort to the eye. Before, Matt had always liked the rain. Enjoyed the sound of it, and the way it blurred the stark city into a watercolour of greys and lilacs. Now, it just made him feel lonely, and restless.

He looked up just as WPC Kaur came into the room, her face twisted into a grimace. Something had happened, something big. A murder, maybe. He felt his stomach twist, with a mixture of excitement and the guilt that inevitably followed at the thought of how someone dying was the only thing that could snap him out of his self-induced fog.

‘A body’s been found in Waterloo St. Female, blow to the head. Crime scene’s being processed now, though there are locals crawling all over it.’

Matt felt almost disappointed as he stood up and swung his jacket over his shoulder. Waterloo St was bang in the middle of Hillfields, Coventry’s notorious red-light district, and crawling with drug dealers and addicts. Otherwise known as ‘Crackhead Central’, even by those who lived there. Chances were the victim would be a local prostitute fallen foul of her pimp. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the unfortunate woman – someone had to – but rather that cases like this were always difficult to solve. There were never any witnesses, rarely any family pushing for a resolution, and generally even CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, were less than interested in pursuing these crimes. They usually led to dead ends and frustration.

‘Do we know who she is yet?’ he asked, already pulling up a picture in his mind. A junkie, most probably, with a couple of kids in care, who had upset one of her peers or tried to rob a punter and got unlucky. There had been a serial killer preying on the girls a few years back, but a blow to the head sounded more like a one-off attack of aggression. Bound to be a pimp.

Kaur hesitated, and an expression Matt couldn’t quite read passed over her fine-boned features. For a second, it almost looked like disgust.

Then she told him. And Matt felt sick.

She was silent on the way to the scene, staring out of the window at nothing, her face turned fully away from him so that he wondered if she was still annoyed at his initial lack of interest. There was certainly nothing to see on the other side of the glass; the rain was coming down in sheets, meaning any evidence at the scene was very likely to have been ruined, although depending on how long the body had been there it may have been ruined anyway. It was busy for a Sunday evening and, stuck in traffic, Matt wished he was in a squad car rather than his Merc. But of course, a dead prostitute didn’t warrant sirens. Not even this one. Kaur sniffed next to him, and he saw an almost imperceptible tremor cross her shoulders and understood why she was keeping her face out of his vision. She was trying not to cry.

‘It might not be her,’ Matt said, his voice soft. ‘The girls are always nicking each other’s ID. And the description was pretty generic.’

Kaur didn’t answer him or turn to face him. Rather, the atmosphere between them grew colder as she straightened up in her seat and continued staring out of the window. It wasn’t the done thing to draw attention to any display of emotion from an officer concerning the case in hand, and Matt wished he hadn’t spoken.

Nevertheless, he had seen first-hand how Kaur had been affected by the sex ring case last year. Following on from larger, more high-profile cases in Rotherham and Sheffield, eight men in Coventry had been arrested for sexually abusing and exploiting young girls. The girls had been seduced with presents and sweet talk, then beer, drugs and the social status of having an older ‘boyfriend’ before being intimidated and eventually forced into sex acts with the entire gang of perpetrators and their friends. The oldest victim had been sixteen. The youngest, twelve.

As with similar crimes in other cities, a special Sex Crimes Unit had been set up, mainly consisting of outside officers. Matt had been effectively sidelined, a decision he hadn’t raised much of a complaint against. Sex crimes against minors were on no officer’s list of desirable cases and, on a personal level, he had to admit to himself he had had little to offer at that time. Kaur, however, had then been their most empathetic and hard-working Family Liaison Officer and had been absorbed into the unit to be heavily involved in the aftercare of the girls and their families as the harrowing details had come painfully and grudgingly to light. It had been over a year ago, and all eight men had been prosecuted, yet Kaur remained tight-lipped, and she had acquired that haunted look all officers involved in the more heartbreaking cases got, sooner or later. Matt had acquired his a long time ago, only to have it replaced by the impervious mask one learned, with time, to wear.

They remained silent as they reached Waterloo St and got out of the car, Kaur protected by an oversize navy umbrella. The rain had slowed somewhat, but still rolled in fat, cold drops down the back of Matt’s neck, pooling in the gap between his collar and his skin. A uniformed officer waved them over. The response team and the Divisional Surgeon were there, along with a small, achingly thin guy who visibly flinched as Matt approached. He looked to be one of the area’s proverbial crackheads, and not happy at the presence of so many police officers. Across the road a small crowd had gathered, and an expectant hush fell over them as they saw Matt. The guy in charge had arrived.

Matt hadn’t felt in charge of anything, least of all himself, for quite some time. Feeling the beginnings of a headache starting to pulse at his temples, he frowned at the uniformed constable.

‘She was found out on the street, like this?’

The constable nodded towards a large bin a few feet away.

‘Looks like she was dumped behind that, but a dog found her and dragged her out. It was worrying at the body when Jacob came and it ran off.’

Matt grimaced, not entirely at the gruesomeness of the image the young man presented but by the fact that meant even less chance of getting any usable trace evidence from the body. Next to him he sensed rather than saw WPC Kaur shudder, and looked in the direction of her gaze. The body was being zipped up ready to be taken to the station’s morgue, and the bag was just closing over her face. In spite of the large head wound and the obvious effects of being left out to the cruel mercy of the elements, Matt saw a young, blonde girl, young enough to be his daughter. He spoke in a low voice to Kaur.

‘It’s her?’

Kaur nodded, just once, such a tiny motion that he only saw it because he was expecting it. It was her; the only victim Kaur hadn’t been able to help. Matt felt a sinking feeling low down in his guts, that physical intuition that had only ever meant one thing; this was going to be bad.

*****

Rachael blinked, then sat up in panic as the phone rang loudly next to her ear. Her cat, Tabs, yowled in protest as she was pushed away from the comfort of Rachael’s lap. She scrambled for the mobile, sighing as the familiar number flashed up on her screen. She had always been a passionate believer that her job didn’t end when she shut the office doors and went home; that she had a vocation, not a career.

But two o’clock in the morning was taking the piss.

Rachael answered her phone in as polite a voice as she could muster.

‘Deirdra, how are you?’

Muffled sobs came down the phone. Rachael waited patiently. Deirdra as she preferred to be called, had been a service user for as long as Rachael had run the Sex Workers’ Safety Project, and for all her regular histrionics Rachael found herself more and more often viewing the younger woman as a friend. It wasn’t strictly ethical, but it wasn’t as though Rachael had a whole heap of friends. People tended to be either fascinated or repulsed by what she did for a living, by her daily contact with those they classed as ‘low-life’. The other women she worked with seemed to find Rachael unapproachable, a facade she had deliberately cultivated herself when she had been new to the post and now regretted. When your closest friends were people you were trying to help because their lives were, to put it nicely, complete train wrecks, you knew you were in trouble.

Friend or no friend, however, Deirdra’s late-night calls were beginning to get on her nerves. The sobs were turning shallower now, a sign the other woman was about to speak, and Rachael was surprised to hear herself making soothing noises she hadn’t been aware she was emitting. It was a toss-up between three possibilities, she thought with undiluted cynicism. Either Deirdra had been robbed by one of the other girls and wanted money, or had been robbed by a punter and wanted money, or had once again decided she needed to turn her life around and wanted money to help her do so. She settled back against her pillows as Deirdra started to speak.

Then sat bolt upright again.

‘Say that again,’ she said, urgently, not wanting to believe what she had just heard, wanting Deirdra to be wrong, for it to be a bad dream.

‘She’s been murdered.’ Deirdra paused and let out a ragged breath. Her voice sounded broken, and slightly slurred, after having been sober for three months. But now wasn’t the time to question her on her drinking. In fact, the urge to get completely obliterated looked at once very tempting to Rachael herself. Deirdra repeated the statement again, with a kind of wonder in her voice as though she had only just realised the truth of her own words. ‘Kitty’s been murdered.’

Kitty. It sounded like exactly the sort of moniker you would expect a prostitute to adopt, but had in fact been the girl’s real name. ‘Just Kitty,’ she had told Rachael defensively, ‘not Katherine or Katrina or Katy. It’s Kitty.’ She had seemed determined to hang onto her real name, and why not? She had lost everything else – not that her fourteen years of life had yielded her much to begin with. Of course, she had put her age down as sixteen on the service user forms, but a little digging from Rachael had unearthed both her name and her background. For the past week Rachael had battled with herself. By law, she had to report any danger to a minor to Children’s Social Services. She had stalled, knowing that to do so would not only break Kitty’s tentative trust in her but also possibly push the girl further along the path she had ‘chosen’. Social Services were often viewed as the Bogeyman to girls like Kitty, and any whiff of their involvement would have caused the girl to bolt.

Now, Rachael wondered if the girl would have still been alive if she had filed the report. The guilt, freshly born, hung over her head, ready to descend with the full force of its crushing weight.

She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, listening to Deirdra’s story as though in a trance, the information coming to her slowly, as if through a fog.

‘… found her under a bin, as if she was rubbish. She was just a kid!’ Deirdra wailed. The full impact hit Rachael then, like a physical blow, and she slid off the bed, her legs boneless. She reached for the bedside lamp and adjusted the dimmer switch, turning it up to full brightness. It had been on, of course; she never slept in the dark. There were too many ghosts.

‘How was she killed?’ Rachael’s voice sounded thick, her tongue feeling too large for her mouth. Vague images from old newspaper stories and documentaries ran through her head. Serial killers, torture, sadistic bastards preying on the most vulnerable of society. Deirdra’s next words were almost a relief.

‘They’re saying a blow to the head, dunno what with. Jacob found the body, or his dog did.’ Rachael’s stomach roiled over at that, even as she wondered who Jacob was, before she caught the change in Deirdra’s tone. Now the woman sounded sharper, at once entirely sober.

‘That’s weird, isn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’ None of this was exactly commonplace. A sudden unbidden image of Kitty the last time she had seen her, giving Rachael that impish wink from under her fringe, sent a stab of grief to her chest. Deirdra continued, her voice urgent.

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a freaky punter or anything, does it? It sounds more like someone she knew.’

A cold hand gripped Rachael’s guts even as her mouth formed the words to tell Deirdra to leave such matters to the police, that she didn’t yet know the full story. Instead, different words emerged, ones that lingered in the air long after she spoke them.

‘What do you know, Deirdra?’

There was a sharp intake of breath from the other woman, then only the incessant hum of the dialling tone. Cursing, Rachael attempted to ring her back, only to be met by Deirdra’s answering-machine message, offering her a personal service in smoky tones. She stood up, phone in hand, and went to the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. The knowledge of Kitty’s death sat like a stone in her stomach, a weight she couldn’t digest; one that might crush her if she tried.

It was personal, of course it was. No matter how hard she tried not to get attached to ‘the girls’ it was always personal. Every overdose, every disappearance, every beating by a rival or a pimp or a frustrated ‘client’ left another scar. After ten years of working in the field, this wasn’t the first time a service user had been murdered. In fact, Rachael’s first year, back when she had been a volunteer and still doing her Open University degree, had coincided with a few local sex workers falling prey to a serial killer. It had been terrifying for all concerned. And over the years there had been others. Retaliation for drug debts, ‘domestics’ at the hands of a boyfriend stroke pimp. Rachael had known when she had chosen this line of work that for every woman she managed to help get out and turn her life around, there would be a hundred she couldn’t. Kitty shouldn’t be any different. Even her young age wasn’t a rarity. This one shouldn’t hurt any more than any of the others.

Rachael walked back into the bedroom and stood by the window, staring out at nothing. Tabs jumped up beside her, gave her spine a leisurely stretch and then joined Rachael in staring out of the window. The street was quiet, was always quiet at this time of night. Usually when she couldn’t sleep, which was more and more often lately, the quiet was a comfort, suspending her in a comforting limbo between the days. Tonight it just felt ominous. As if it was waiting for something. For her.

*****

Matt threw his jacket over the back of the settee and then as good as threw himself onto the cushions. He felt exhausted. The pathologist’s report had been pretty much as expected. Single blow to the head with a heavy, blunt instrument. She had been dead less than twenty-four hours when found. The placement of the body was a puzzle; it would appear the killer was attempting to put her into the communal bin she had been found underneath, but had been interrupted. No witnesses had come forward, and Matt doubted they would. He shook his head, letting his breath out in a dense sigh. He had been doing the job long enough not to be surprised that the world was callous enough to let the broken and dumped body of a teenage girl go unreported, but he personally thought there was a simpler, and very good, reason why the body hadn’t ended up in its intended place.

It had been too heavy. Lifting a dead body up to shoulder height was no mean feat even for a strong, fit guy used to lifting heavy weights.

Contrary to popular opinion, a dead body didn’t become heavier after death, but weighed exactly the same as it did when alive. The loss of any responsiveness on the part of the individual whose life had just been extinguished, however, made them feel a lot heavier than they would when alive; hence the term ‘dead weight’. Another gory but often useful piece of information Matt had acquired during his term as a detective. An experienced killer, of course, would have known this. Which meant he wasn’t looking for an experienced killer, or even a typical thug. Who else would have killed Kitty, if not a pimp or a particularly sick client? One of the other girls, in a fight that had got out of hand? It could be that simple. Lives on the street were often short, deaths futile and without rhyme or reason. There was no need to overcomplicate the death of a street prostitute no one cared about.

No, he thought, turning as he heard a foot on the stair, that wasn’t quite right. Someone had cared enough about her to kill her, with a violent blow that spoke of a very definite intention to silence her.

‘You okay, boss?’

Matt allowed a weak but genuine smile as Ricky appeared in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. His stepson – or former stepson, really – had taken to calling him that recently, a teenage affectation born out of a respect that had been grudging for a long time but was now given freely.

‘It’s been a rough night.’ He filled Ricky in on the details as he watched him move round the kitchen, making coffee. Ricky shook his head in disgust as he handed a cup to Matt and sat opposite him.

‘I’ll ask around at work tomorrow. Someone probably knew her.’

Now nineteen, Ricky worked in the local Youth Centre, just a few streets away from where Kitty had been unceremoniously dumped. After doing a stint there a few years ago as part of his probation terms he had continued to volunteer and then taken on paid work, which complemented the degree he was currently studying for. Matt couldn’t have been more proud. He had come into Ricky’s life nearly five years ago when the lad was a sullen, hostile boy, an ASBO waiting to happen, and seen him develop into a great kid. After an initial bout of defensiveness – no teenage boy wanted to see a man come into his mother’s life, least of all a copper – Ricky had quickly come to see Matt as a father figure. The feeling was reciprocated. Matt loved Ricky like his own, seeing in the boy an almost carbon copy of his own surly teenage self. Now older and with most of his surliness thankfully gone, he was a lot like his mother, Lucy, which pained Matt as much as it warmed him. Lucy was gone.

Not in the finite sense, of course; Lucy was still very much alive, recently married, newly pregnant and living in Kent with her wealthy and successful architect husband. She had given Matt three and a half years of her life and he didn’t regret a single one of them. Their parting had been amicable enough, although it had left him with a raw grief that still seemed no closer to healing. They had originally met twelve years ago when her young son had been murdered and Matt had worked the case, a fact that had both brought them together and ultimately driven them apart.

It had been the biggest case of Matt’s career thus far, and the one that had haunted his dreams for years after; not least because the killer had turned out to be little more than a child himself. There had been nothing between Matt and Lucy, not then, but eight years after her son Jack’s murder they had been reunited when the killer’s release coincided with her older son, Ricky, going off the rails. Events had thrown them together in such an intense fashion that Matt, never a man given to believing in such things, had felt that their relationship was, in some way, destined to happen.