Dark Spaces (29 page)

However in May 2006 the applicant was informed by Social Services that contact with her younger sisters had been suspended in order to facilitate their foster placement.

Since then she has not been allowed to see or speak to them despite the fact that the adoption placement in question has broken down, as did the subsequent foster placement and that the girls are now separated, with Mimi and Nathalia living in a placement in Wales, Arianne in a placement in Brighton and Phoebe currently in a specialist unit in the Bedford area.

It is the applicant’s contention that having no contact with her has not helped, that in fact it has hindered their ability to make proper attachments. Phoebe in particular has deteriorated to the point that she is now considered a danger to herself and others.

The applicant believes that the mental health of all concerned will benefit from regular contact and attaches the report of Dr Piper dated 28 December 2007.

Lilly drove Harry home, pulling up outside his apartment block.

‘Want to come in for a coffee?’ he asked.

The twinkle in his eye told Lilly he was suggesting more than a hot drink, and after his performance at the station she was tempted.

‘I think we both need some rest,’ she said.

‘We can drink it lying down,’ he said.

Lilly laughed and gave his shoulder a playful punch. ‘I have to get home to Sam and Alice,’ she said. ‘David has been a godsend but I can’t leave him in charge much longer.’

Harry smiled, opened the door and slid out into the snow. His breath turned the air white. ‘Sure?’

‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ she said.

He winked and headed off. When he reached the entrance, he turned and held his forefinger and pinky to his ear like a phone. Lilly nodded, waved and sped away.

It was idiotic at her age to be so excited that a man was going to call her. She should grow up. The trouble was, Harry was such an appealing man. The way he’d put Jack in his place. So calm and collected. A ripple of pleasure ran up her spine and she shivered. Bloody hell, she had got it bad. Time to get home and do some work on the case. That should cool off her jets.

Gem gives a massive yawn.

She’s properly knackered. Bill has already been this morning and said he’s coming back later. It ain’t like she has to do that much, but somehow it takes it out of her.

She yawns again and goes back to the washing up, scrubbing at a lipstick mark on the rim of one of the mugs.

‘You’d better start getting yourself ready, Gem,’ Feyza tells her.

See, that’s another thing. The getting ready for Bill. It don’t take two minutes to get all the gear on. Though she’s getting quicker with the slap that’s for sure. But it still takes time that she should be spending doing the sheets and bins and that. The girls like it all cleared up as soon as a punter’s gone and Gem don’t blame ’em. When Bill shuts the door behind him, she runs to the sink to wash him off.

‘I wish he’d only come once a day,’ she says.

Feyza frowns. ‘Be glad he keen.’

Gem don’t answer. She’s glad of the job, ’course she is. And the extra money Feyza gives her, Gem’s well glad of that. Another twenty quid every time. She don’t even have to since Bill ain’t paying, but Feyza says it’s only fair. She might be an old witch but she is fair.

‘What you spend your money on?’ Feyza asks. ‘Clothes?’

Gem scratches the mug with her thumbnail. She ain’t spent any of it yet. She’s hidden it inside a sock in her bedroom and ain’t even told Mum. She might start asking awkward questions. Well, she probably wouldn’t seeing as she really don’t even ask where Gem goes each day, but Gem ain’t chancing it. Anyway, she’ll only get it into her head that they need something: a new fridge or a bed for Tyler. To be fair, they do need a new fridge and a bed for Tyler, but not before Gem’s paid off the Slaughter brothers.

Gem plans to go see the bald bastards tonight. She’s gonna find out exactly how much Mum owes and if it’s a hundred quid she’s gonna give it to them then and there. Once that’s all squared, Mum’s nerves should get a bit better. Then they can sit down with some catalogues and look at fridges and beds.

‘You know Bill say to me that you are first girl he like in long time,’ says Feyza.

Gem nods and puts the mug on the draining board.

‘He say to me you are special,’ says Feyza.

‘Special needs more like,’ says Gem.

Feyza gives one of those freaky laughs and wags her finger. ‘Funny girl.’

It ain’t that funny, is it?

‘Serious, Gem.’ Feyza’s face drops. ‘You can make lot of money if you want?’

Gem frowns and wipes her hands on the tea towel. ‘How many times a day does he want to come over?’

‘Not just Bill,’ says Feyza. ‘He have lot of friends.’

Gem gulps. How many is Feyza talking about? Two or three? More?

‘I wouldn’t have time what with all the rooms to do and that,’ says Gem.

‘You give this up of course.’ Feyza waves a hand at the sink as if she can make it disappear by magic. ‘You work like other girls.’

Gem shakes her head. Letting Bill wank over her is one thing, but she ain’t ready to become a tart.

‘Good money.’ Feyza rubs her thumb and finger together. ‘Plenty of good money for girl like you.’

Gem shakes her head again and pushes her way out of the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to get ready,’ she mumbles.

Lilly needed socks and, like Sam that morning, she couldn’t locate a pair, but her feet were too cold to care. She eventually pulled on one red fluffy ankle sock and one orange and black number that came up to her knee. She pushed it down, noting that she looked like a reject from
Fame
.

Alice gurgled at her.

‘I know, I know,’ said Lilly. ‘Gok wouldn’t be impressed.’

To be honest Gok probably wouldn’t like her tracksuit bottoms either, with their ripped knee and pockets full of washed-in tissue rubble. Or her fleece for that matter. She’d bought it when she and David had taken Sam to Lapland. He’d been four years old.

‘Still, you know what they say,’ Lilly told her daughter. ‘It’s what’s on the inside that counts.’

Alice blew a spit bubble and rolled over to the corner of the room where she began biting the edge of the carpet. Lilly moved to stop her, but Alice gave a pre-emptive shriek.

‘Have it your way,’ Lilly said and prayed there was nothing toxic in the underlay.

Why did babies like to suck and chew stuff? True, most favoured hands, fingers and dummies, but Alice lived to be different. She was her mother’s daughter after all. Lilly wondered if she’d been awkward at Alice’s age and felt the familiar stab of sadness that her mother wasn’t around to share stories. How she would have loved to hear tales of how she used to rip up the Vinylay with her bare teeth.

The sound of canned TV laughter interrupted her thoughts as it seeped through the floorboards. David and Sam were watching back-to-back episodes of
Two and a Half Men
. Lilly had been tempted to join them but she needed to crack on with some work.

She opened an A5 notebook and began scribbling notes and thoughts in no particular order. First there was Lydia: a beautiful ball of self-destruction. Lilly could well believe that she would threaten to lift the lid on what was happening to the girls at the Grove with no thought for her own safety. Had she paid the ultimate price? It certainly looked that way. But who had killed her? Lilly had originally thought it must be someone with a link to the hospital: a worker, a visitor, a patient. But Chloe’s rape, as horrific as it was, had narrowed the field of suspects significantly.

Someone had got into Chloe’s room. Someone had got past Harry’s secret code. How many people could have managed that? Not many.

She reached for her mobile and called Harry.

‘Missing me already?’ He sounded sleepy.

‘No … I mean not … what I’m trying to say is …’

‘Lilly,’ he laughed. ‘I’m teasing you.’

Lilly laughed back. Of course he was teasing her.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘I was thinking about Chloe,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

‘And I was thinking about who could have got access to her room.’

There was a pause on the line and Lilly could hear Harry breathing.

‘You put a code on her room door, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘It was Alice’s birthday, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then one of the people who knew the code must have attacked Chloe.’

There was another silence, but this time no breathing.

‘How many people had the code?’ Lilly asked.

‘Three.’

Bloody hell. Lilly hadn’t realized it would be so few.

‘That’s great, Harry.’

‘Is it?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Lilly. ‘If there are only three possible suspects, that’s going to make it relatively easy to work out who did this.’

‘Actually, there are two,’ said Harry. ‘The three includes me and I’m pretty convinced that I didn’t do it.’

Two. Unbelievable.

‘Who are they, Harry?’

He let out a sigh full of misery.

‘Harry?’

‘You have to understand Lilly, that these are people I trusted implicitly,’ he said. ‘If I had had any doubts at all, I would never have given them the code.’

‘I know that,’ said Lilly.

‘I can’t believe it of either of them, even now.’ There was genuine pain in his voice. ‘I can’t even say their names.’

Lilly wished she were there to put her arms around him. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say their names. Just take a few minutes to yourself and then email me.’

Harry let out a noise somewhere between a cough and a sob. ‘Lilly Valentine, you are one in a million.’

Jack stood at the chief super’s desk. The office had been redecorated since he’d last been inside and the walls were now a quiet shade of duck-egg blue. The blinds were new too. Not the standard issue white plastic venetian tat that everyone else had to put up with, collecting dust on every slat, the strings broken and tangled so that half the rooms in the nick only ever got sunlight through a triangular-shaped gap to the bottom left-hand side.

There was a ban on uniformed overtime, but the chief needed his rattan blinds.

‘What the hell is going on, Jack?’

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t play silly buggers with me,’ said the chief. ‘I hear that the Morton-Daley case is going pear-shaped and that you’ve just arrested the most senior psychiatrist at the Grove.’

Jack licked his lips. The nick was half empty but someone had been telling tales out of the classroom.

‘Take a seat, Jack.’

The chief super pointed to a chair tucked into the corner of the office. Why couldn’t the man have it the other side of his desk like a normal human? It wasn’t that it was heavy or difficult to move, it was just that Jack felt an eejit dragging it across the room. A scenery mover at the theatre, not one of the players.

He spent longer than necessary getting the chair into position. He wanted to make a point, though he wasn’t sure what the point was. At last he sat down.

‘Tell me what’s going on, Jack.’

‘Just pursuing legitimate lines of inquiry, sir.’

The chief put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers at nose height. A movement Jack had seen a hundred times and recognized as a prelude to a bollocking.

‘You made an arrest on the Morton-Daley case, I hear,’ he said.

‘I did,’ said Jack. ‘Another patient at the Grove called Chloe Church.’

‘Solid evidence?’

‘Very solid,’ said Jack. ‘Morton-Daley’s body was mutilated and we found the knife used in Church’s room.’

‘Prints?’

‘All over it.’

‘So why haven’t you put this thing to bed?’ asked the chief. ‘Why isn’t this thing on its way to trial?’

‘We got delayed when the kid had some sort of an episode and had to be sedated,’ said Jack.

‘Sedation lasts twenty-four hours at the longest.’

The implication was clear.

‘Unfortunately we hit another stumbling block,’ said Jack.

‘It had better be a concrete block to hold up a murder job.’

‘The kid was raped,’ Jack told him.

‘What?’

‘Someone got into her room at the Grove and raped her.’

‘Was it a bad one?’ the chief asked.

Jack wondered if there could ever be a good one. ‘It was pretty bad, sir.’

The chief super exhaled, his breath making a slight whistle. ‘That’s rotten luck.’

Jack wasn’t sure if he meant for Chloe or the investigation.

‘And what about the psychiatrist?’ The chief peered down at a solitary Post-it note stuck to his desk. ‘Harry Piper?’

Someone had been telling very detailed tales out of school.