The Reckoning (49 page)

‘The bulb is dead.’ Liv flicked the wall switch up and down a couple of times, then moved to the worktop where a small jug kettle was standing. It sighed into action as soon as she turned it on. ‘Okay. So there is electricity. Just no light.’

‘Not bright in here, is it?’ I turned my torch on and spun around slowly, picking out the gas cooker complete with a frying pan on top of it, the base still filmy with grease. There was a cup on the side by the sink and I leaned over to look inside, seeing a brown tidemark. ‘Someone drinks tea. Or maybe coffee.’

‘Recently?’

‘It’s not mouldy.’ Nothing was, in fact. ‘This doesn’t make sense. Someone has been here, and recently, but the house is completely neglected.’

‘Well, we’re in now. Let’s have a look around.’

We were talking in low voices, even though we had made enough noise breaking into the place to get anyone’s attention. I found myself tiptoeing as I followed Liv into the hall and I made myself walk properly, confidently, as befitted a police officer on official business.

Liv went to one side of the hall and I took the other, opening doors and cupboards. Inside, the rooms looked even more pitiful, neglected and unused.

‘What do you think of this?’

I crossed the hall to see where Liv was looking and found a small, over-furnished sitting room. The walls looked like a jumble sale waiting to happen – random pictures and tapestries hung at odd heights. The shelves of a bamboo whatnot that lurked in one corner held a vast collection of ornaments and outright junk: old batteries, a hairbrush, a pair of glasses lying lens-down with the arms folded in like a dead beetle’s legs, a sheaf of envelopes, a few assorted keys, a metal bracket long-divorced from whatever it had held. An ancient television sat on a low table, a red light announcing that it was on stand-by. A blanket lay folded on the sofa in front of it, beside a half-eaten packet of crisps. The air smelled of cheese and onion. I picked up a crisp experimentally and found it was soft, giving a little as I pressed it between my finger and thumb. It suggested the packet had been open for a while. The sofa was cold, the cushions ridged in their positions.

‘It looks as if someone’s been using this room, but not for a few hours at least. Maybe yesterday or the day before.’

Liv nodded. ‘Upstairs?’

‘Yeah. I’ll go first.’ I really didn’t want to, which was all the more reason to force myself. Liv had taken the lead in getting into the house in the first place; I owed it to her to take my turn.

The stairs creaked, of course, and I went up them slowly, past the stained-glass window. The landing was square, shadowy and smelled of drains; I wrinkled my nose at Liv and saw her react as it hit her too.

‘Yuck.’

All of the doors were closed. I tried the one nearest me and discovered a bedroom, the walls decorated in bilious green paper, which was ripped. A splatter of something that might once have been soup decorated one wall. A wafer-thin pillow sagged at one end of the bed and a coverlet was thrown haphazardly over the foot. There was nothing on the nightstand beside it except for a dark-pink porcelain lamp with a tasselled shade.

‘Classy,’ Liv commented. I moved in far enough to open the wardrobe with a wary finger, seeing nothing but empty hangers. There was a smell of mothballs that I found oddly reassuring; better that than an infestation. The floorboards groaned under me as I turned to leave and I pulled a face as I made a long stride to reach the relative safety of the hall.

‘If I go through the floor, call an ambulance.’

‘I will if I have any reception.’ Liv took out her phone and thumbed it on to see. ‘Two bars. I’d probably get through. Where are we again?’

‘Bonamy Lodge, also known as Bancroft’s House of Horrors. Imagine what it must have been like ten years ago.’ I opened the next door to discover a dilapidated bathroom, the walls tiled in bleak white, the sink grey with dirt. ‘Not all that different, I’m guessing.’

Liv poked her head around the door beside the bathroom. ‘A loo. I’m not going near it.’

‘That must be where the smell is coming from.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’ She sniffed. ‘It’s by no means fresh in there, that’s for sure.’

I was laughing at the expression on her face as I tried the next door. The door stuck a little and I shoved it with my shoulder, stumbling into the room as it gave way. The curtains were drawn and it was hard to see much at first; I had a vague impression of a double bed, a chest of drawers, a dressing table with a three-fold mirror where I saw myself in triplicate recovering my balance. The coverlet had fallen off the bed, the sheets slipping sideways as if someone had jumped out of it in a hurry and left it in disarray. I turned and ran the torch over the furniture, picking up a reflection from silver-backed brushes and the glass in photo frames on top of the chest of drawers.

‘That’s Drew. That’s Lee.’ I went over for a closer look, seeing skinny and awkward juvenile versions of the confident men I’d met. Both had features too large for their faces in the pictures; it had taken them time to grow into their appearance. Lee looked uninterested, Drew was smiling widely. ‘This must be Michael’s room.’

When Liv responded, her voice was shaky. ‘Down there. There’s something … down there.’

I shone the torch where she was pointing and realised with a spasm of horror that the tumbling bedclothes were draped over a shape that lay on the floor beside the bed, not three feet from where I was standing. It was a long, thin shape that was somehow unmistakably human, even before I saw the waxy yellow hand reaching out under the bed, pleading for mercy that hadn’t been shown. I moved forward, holding my breath, and shone the torch down on the side of the body’s head. Michael Bancroft, I presumed, and there was no doubt that he was dead. Not recently, either.

‘There’s no smell of decomp.’

‘It’s dry in here and pretty cold.’ I leaned closer. ‘I don’t want to step on Glen Hanshaw’s toes, but it looks as if he’s mummified.’

‘Not much insect activity inside the house. Especially if it happened in winter.’

‘Yeah, and I wouldn’t even be too sure that it was this winter.’ I stepped back delicately, watching where I put my feet. ‘We’d better call it in. Godley will definitely want to make sure this isn’t murder.’

Liv was holding her phone, looking troubled. ‘If he hasn’t been drinking coffee and watching TV, who has?’

‘Good question.’ I left her standing in the hall, dialling 999, and carried on to the next room, also a bedroom, this one as untouched and unlovable as the first we’d found. One for Lee, one for Drew, and Uncle Michael dead in the middle. Happy families. Maybe the brothers liked to come back and stay. Maybe it was a home from home for them.

I had got back to the top of the stairs. I looked around the landing, wondering what I was missing. I ran through what I had seen room by room: the kitchen, the dining room, the small sitting room, the hall, the bedroom – the small sitting room. What was it about that? The keys. Everyone had old keys hanging around their house. The glasses. Upside down. You wouldn’t leave your own glasses like that: the lenses might scratch. Dumped was the word that occurred to me. Black arms, folded in. Dust on them. There a long time. Forgotten.

Liv was giving the dispatcher directions to the house. I waited until she rang off. ‘Did you see any outbuildings when you did your tour? Sheds?’

‘No. There’s nothing but fields behind the house. There was a garage on the left, but it was empty.’

I looked around again, seeing the unhelpfully blank doors, a bad landscape on one wall, an ugly opalescent light hanging down from the middle of the ceiling like a deformed Christmas bauble. My eye tracked upwards along the line of its chain, to the ceiling rose that was splintered, to the square hatch beside it that led to a loft.

‘Did you happen to notice a sturdy chair on your travels?’

Liv went into the third bedroom and came out with an upright wooden chair. ‘This do?’

‘Perfect.’ I positioned it under the hatch and hopped up, stretching as high as I could to push against the hatch with my fingertips. I could just reach it. Not for the first time I was glad to be tall. I tried all four sides, hoping it was a pressure-release catch, but nothing moved.

‘Try the middle. It might just lift up.’

I did as Liv suggested, pushing hard, and almost toppled off the chair when the hatch gave way. The smell of drains was instantly stronger and I coughed, but I still managed to push the hatch away from the hole and get hold of the ladder that was poking over the other edge. I drew it down and reached to get a foot on it.

‘Can you hold it steady for me?’

Liv grabbed hold of the bottom. ‘Be careful.’

I was looking up, at the grey daylight that was illuminating the room above. There had to be skylights, or dormer windows. The beams overhead looked as if the pitch of the roof allowed for a proper room, not just a loft space. I didn’t like going up the ladder, especially not when it meant that my head would be poking up through the hatch for a couple of seconds – I could feel myself tense at the thought of how vulnerable I would be to attack – but at least I wasn’t climbing into darkness. I stuck my torch in my pocket and went up the remaining steps fast, without giving myself time to think. I checked through 360 degrees as soon as I was clear of the hatch, seeing piled-up junk, boxes, old suitcases, the ordinary detritus of life. The light came from a window in each of the four walls. It was actually a nice space, I thought, with a vague memory of Brody’s flat overlaying the reality of the room in front of me. I levered myself out and straightened up, still wary of banging my head.

‘It’s okay,’ I began to say to Liv, who was climbing after me. ‘There’s nothing up here. There’s—’

The words died on my lips. Upright, I could see across the attic, over the tops of a dusty bookcase and a pair of tables stacked one on top of the other. Away in the far corner, by the window that looked out over the back of the house, there was a radiator. And by the radiator, there was a mattress. And on the mattress, there was a body, this time with long dark hair, a body dressed in a grey sweatshirt and black tracksuit bottoms, a body with bare dirty feet. She was lying curled up, huddled in a tight ball, a bit of an old blanket thrown over her shoulders. I saw the empty water bottle, the plastic containers empty of food, and I noticed the red plastic bucket that was the source of the smell. I heard Liv exclaim behind me, but I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. She was thin, painfully so, but I knew she was Patricia, even though I hadn’t seen her face, even though she had changed out of all recognition physically.

And I knew I was going to be making the phone call I had dreaded. She was not moving. She was limp. Lifeless.

As usual, we were just too late.

The spell broke at last as my brain started to function again. In the face of death, there was always professional duty to distract me, and I walked around the piled-up furniture to reach the huddled body, intent on securing the scene and getting a good look at Patricia before Liv called the dispatchers back. We would need another ambulance but otherwise we were ahead of the game. The scene-of-crime officers who were on their way to deal with Michael Bancroft could handle two scenes; Glen Hanshaw would be able to manage two dead bodies.

‘You’ll need to call Godley,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘He’ll want to know.’

‘Is she …’

‘Dead? I should think so.’ There wasn’t as much as a drop left in the water bottle. I wondered how long it had been empty, how long she had survived.
Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food
. That was the rule I had always believed, though Glen Hanshaw had scoffed at it when I mentioned it to him, on the grounds that the water and food requirements didn’t take into account the variables in environmental conditions, or the underlying health of the individual. Patricia’s underlying health was unlikely to have been great, all things considered.

I reached out to touch her neck, to check for a pulse, moving her hair to one side in order to do so. It reminded me all too much of the video I had seen, of Lee’s casual handling of Cheyenne, and I had to control the tremor in my fingers as best I could. Emotion was not helpful, I told myself sternly. The anger could wait.

I moved my hand, aiming for the hollow to one side of her windpipe, but just as my fingertips grazed her skin, without warning, she moved. Her eyes came open and she sat bolt upright in the same moment. I over-balanced as I flinched, sprawling back inelegantly. Behind me, Liv made a noise that was nearly a scream and I had enough spare mental capacity to be glad that I had been breathless with shock, too startled to cry out.

Patricia was looking at me with a dazed expression, as if she was drugged. I recognised her instantly, even though her skin was dull and drawn, her cheeks hollow. Her lovely eyes were shadowy and half-closed. She wasn’t quite in touch with reality, I thought. I doubted she knew Liv was even there and I stayed where I was, leaning back, almost afraid to move in case I startled her. She put a hand up to rub her eyes and I saw the medium-weight chain that snaked around her wrist. I followed it to the old-fashioned cast-iron radiator, to where the chain was wrapped around it and ended in a heavy padlock, and I felt anger twist deep within me. They had left her enough chain to reach the bucket, but no more. Her wrist was rubbed raw in places where the metal had dragged against her skin.

She looked at me then, and her eyebrows drew together in a frown.

‘It’s okay, Patricia. We’re police officers. You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be all right.’ I said it over and over again in a gentle tone, hoping the meaning would sink in. Behind me Liv moved away, towards the opening in the floor. She climbed down the ladder to the hall and I heard her on her phone, updating the control room in a matter-of-fact voice. I couldn’t hear the words and I was glad of her tact, glad that Patricia didn’t have to hear herself being discussed. She was swaying like a tired owl, her eyes glazed.

‘Can you talk, Patricia? Are you in pain?’