Dead Scared (51 page)

All four looked steadily down at me. None seemed even remotely moved by my threats. It wasn’t going to be that easy. I began casting my mind around the room, for any possible weapon, any place to hide.

‘Oh, we won’t kill you, Lacey,’ said Castell eventually. ‘You’ll do that yourself.’

‘You know, boys,’ said Talaith, ‘I’m not sure that scene we shot of you guys in the woods really came out that well. What do you say we go for a second take?’

‘Are you listening to me?’ I was yelling now. I could not go through that again and stay sane. ‘I told my senior officers about you lot at seven o’clock last night. They’ve had, what, twenty-four hours to put their plans in place. You psychos have got seconds, if that!’

‘Oh, I knew there was something we should have told her.’ Talaith clicked her fingers and looked up at Castell in mock annoyance before leaning over the guard rail at me again. ‘Sorry, love. That cute boyfriend of yours is dead.’

She was lying. She was an evil, manipulative bitch and lying was second nature. She had to be lying. And yet my ribcage was shrinking, squeezing everything inside it like a juicer crushes the flesh of an orange. Nick had called me earlier that day; he’d called a number that nobody knew but Joesbury. How had he done that?

‘He had an accident on the A10 last night,’ said Castell. ‘Tyres blew out. He left the road and cartwheeled down a bank.’

‘Oh, I’d love to have seen it,’ Talaith told him.

‘It was quite a sight,’ he agreed, before turning back to me. ‘He was taken to the Lister in Stevenage and pronounced dead on arrival.’

‘He phoned me last night,’ I told them, but I think I was really just reminding myself.

‘No, don’t tell lies now,’ said Thomas. ‘He sent you a text, saying he’d been delayed and that you were to sit tight and contact no one but him. I wanted to add a little personal message but John said that was going too far.’

Minutes earlier, Joesbury’s name had flashed on to the screen of the phone they’d left beside me. How could that have happened unless they had his phone? The only way they could have got my new number and given it to Nick was if they had Joesbury’s phone. I’d heard nothing from him since he’d left the evening before. Just text messages. He’d have called, surely, if he’d been OK. No. They could not be telling me the truth.

‘Would you like to reconsider the knife, Lacey?’ asked Castell.

HARRY SAT ON
Evi’s kitchen floor, occasionally running his hand down the long, slim flank of the dog lying beside him. He was vaguely aware that he was hungry. He’d lost track of time but hours had passed since he’d set off on his journey south. He had no idea what he was waiting for. Only that there was nothing else he could do, and nowhere else he wanted to go.

The uniformed police team who’d arrived shortly after the discovery of the dog had been fast and thorough. They’d probably known what they were looking for. Within minutes, they’d found hidden surveillance and broadcasting equipment in several rooms. Someone had been watching Evi in her own house.

‘Sir.’

The detective sergeant was in the kitchen doorway. In his right hand was a clear plastic wallet containing a single sheet of white paper.

‘Your name is Harry, is that right?’

Harry nodded. ‘Harry Laycock,’ he said, getting to his feet. The dog whimpered beside him, not wanting him to leave.

The sergeant held the wallet out. ‘I need you to read this, sir,’ he told him. ‘And then help me work out where she might have gone.’

Harry took the wallet as the dog got unsteadily to its feet. Evi’s handwriting was large and neat, with intricate loops on the tails.
She’d
used a fountain pen and violet-blue ink. The note was just five words long.

Gone to be with Harry
.

‘What does it mean, sir? Where would she go to look for you?’

‘She thinks I’m dead,’ said Harry. ‘This is a suicide note.’

Mark Joesbury watched the paramedics slide the unconscious Nick Bell into the ambulance. An oxygen mask covered his face to help him breathe, an IV line was already starting to replace some of the fluid he’d lost and shiny silver blankets were stopping his temperature from falling further.

As the ambulance set off, forced to go slowly along the unlit, potholed track, a liver and white pointer followed it a few paces before sitting in the middle of the track to watch it disappear. Joesbury felt the world around him slip further away.

He turned back to the house, more because standing still for any length of time made him dizzy than because he had any reason to go in there. In the harsh artificial lights the police team had brought with them he could see blood on the snow.

The first time he’d seen Lacey Flint she’d been covered in blood. She’d arrived at a murder scene just as the victim died. The victim’s blood had spattered across her face, stained a deep scarlet patch on her shirt. The paramedics she called had thought she was badly hurt too.

Over by his car, George, his back to Joesbury, was talking on a police radio. He flicked the radio to receive and spoke to the detective at his side. Joesbury caught the last few words as he approached.

‘Can’t tell me what?’ he asked.

George’s shoulders stiffened, and when he turned to face Joesbury his avuncular face had clenched itself into tight lines. ‘She’s not at the industrial unit,’ he said. ‘SOCs are going in now.’

Two things had struck him the instant he’d laid eyes on her. The first, that she was almost certainly the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The second, that she was probably a cold and calculating killer.

‘What can’t you tell me?’ he repeated.

George held out one hand, as though to keep Joesbury at arm’s length. ‘Guv, it’s too soon to know anything. We should get back. We can check her room again. We’ve got people searching her car. Come on, you know her as well as anyone. You’ll be in the best position to spot anything.’

Joesbury didn’t move. The two officers exchanged a look. The other detective dropped his eyes to the mud.

George sighed. ‘It’s pretty clear someone left in a hurry,’ he said. ‘They didn’t have time to clear up. There was a lot of serial-killer paraphernalia, apparently. Not difficult to see where they were going with that. And the team that went in found a pretty good mock-up of her room at St John’s. It’s possible something happened in there but it’s too soon …’

‘What did they find?’

‘A lot of blood, Mark. And body parts. Organs.’

She’d looked directly at him, with those hazel-blue eyes that could turn so cold, as if daring him to challenge her. She’d looked at him the way he’d only ever seen the guilty look.

‘And a knife, I’m afraid,’ continued George. ‘With her name on it.’

The dog was standing at the door of Evi’s kitchen, whining to go out.

‘I’ll take her,’ said Harry.

‘Stay near the back door,’ the constable who’d been waiting with him said. ‘We’ll need to search the garden before we’re done.’

Harry opened the door and kept his hand on the dog’s collar as it stepped outside, sniffed the rear step and climbed the small stone wall edging Evi’s patio. Harry went too. Light from the house reached about a quarter of the way across the lawn. Beyond it was the soft twilight that snow brings to the darkest of nights.

The garden was large, longer than it was wide, and flanked on either side by high stone walls. It sloped downwards to a much lower wall, with a central gate. Beyond the lower wall was a line of pollarded willow trees.

The dog began to whine at the exact moment that Harry spotted the footprints in the snow. He took his hand off her collar.

The footprints led across the lawn, around the cedar tree, to the gate. Small prints, made by small feet. Uneven footsteps, the one on the right much deeper and firmer than the one on the left, made by someone who walked with a pronounced limp. A few inches to the side of the left print were small indentations, left behind by a light, aluminium walking stick.

The dog made it to the gate a second before Harry did. She stood on her hind legs, barked once and then fell back on to all fours. As Harry pulled the gate open, she leapt the wall in a single bound.

Beyond the wall was a short stretch of snow-covered ground that sloped to the riverbank. A wooden pier leaned out across the water. On the bank beside it was a canoe that looked silver against the snow. Sitting close by the canoe, one arm wrapped around her knees, the other cradling the dog, was Evi. She looked round and her face was spectral pale.

‘Hello, Harry,’ she said.

They were approaching Cambridge again. Joesbury had a sense of tall old buildings rising up around them. He’d taken Lacey out for a meal that first night, practically forced her into going with him. She’d sat opposite him in a restaurant on the Wandsworth Road, in an orange jumpsuit, her face shiny-pink from the shower, and he’d thought, how can this be happening? How can I be falling for a killer?

‘Nothing in the St Clement’s address either,’ said George, who was at the wheel and seemed to have some idea where they were going. ‘Just a whole lot of computer gear. The hard drives appear to have been wiped but it looks as though most of the surveillance was done from there. The industrial unit was for the more advanced filming and the editing.’

‘They’re gone, aren’t they?’

Joesbury couldn’t summon the energy to turn his head. He couldn’t feel any pain, he realized. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and as though every second the real world was slipping further away from him, but no pain. Whatever they’d given him at the hospital was strong stuff. Perhaps they’d let him take it for the rest of his life.

‘Looks that way,’ agreed George. ‘But they can’t have gone far and
if
they’re in their own vehicles there’s a good chance traffic will pick ’em up.’

She’d been with him at one of the worst crime scenes he’d ever come across and hadn’t flinched. She’d calmly and quietly followed him round the corpse, done everything he’d asked her to, and then, even though she’d seen exactly what the killer did to women, she’d agreed instantly when he’d asked her to make herself bait. She’d walked off into the darkness without looking back and he’d told himself that he was never going to put her in danger again.

Attention all units, attention all units
.

George increased the volume on the police radio. They were almost back at the college.

Any cars in the vicinity of St John’s College, I need you to report there immediately. We’ve received a phone call about a potential suicide on the chapel tower. White female, early twenties. Believed to be a student called Laura Farrow
.

One of the porters appeared beyond the gates ready to open them. Joesbury didn’t wait. He jumped out of the car and sped across the short stretch of grass to the main student entrance. He raced past the porter on duty and was in First Court. The tower was immediately ahead of him.

‘Alice called you, didn’t she?’ said Evi. ‘I’m sorry I scared you.’

Harry slipped his jacket off and wrapped it round her. He’d forgotten how her hair gleamed in the dark, how it reminded him of polished walnut. He hadn’t forgotten how soft it was.

She reached up, maybe to pull the jacket more securely on to her shoulders, maybe to touch him. Her hand against his felt like the snow, damp and cold.

‘We need to get you inside,’ he said. As he sat down beside her, his foot caught the edge of the canoe. It slid a little further down the bank. Harry stretched forward to catch the rope.

‘Leave it,’ Evi told him.

There was a hammer on the ground in front of them, a fragment of pale-blue wood clinging to its claw foot.

Evi leaned a little closer to him, the side of her head resting lightly against his shoulder. ‘I knew you couldn’t be dead,’ she said.
‘I
worked it out, once the pain went away. If you’d died, Alice would have phoned me, not just sent a newspaper cutting. There would have been some mention of it on your Facebook page. I realized they were just messing with my head again.’

The canoe slid a little further towards the water. Evi put her hand on Harry’s arm, to stop him getting up. ‘Let it go,’ she said.

‘Who?’ he asked her. ‘Who’s been messing with your head?’