What She Saw (34 page)

He held up a colour copy of her brain scan.

‘This is it.' He pointed at what looked like a curled orange finger rising up from the base of her brain. ‘This is her hippocampus. It should be twice the size of this. It's the area of brain that deals with memory. It's typical of chronically abused children. She won't process what's she's done to her victims as memory but as a bad dream. Is she lethal? I wouldn't treat her as anything less.'

He stepped back.

‘Thank you, James. OK. Let's go!' said Rosen, glancing at the clock on the wall, wishing with the vainest hope that the hands would stop.

‘Where are you going, David?' asked Carol Bellwood.

‘Macy Conner's home.'

87

7.28 P.M.

R
osen listened at Macy Conner's front door, heard the sound of a person moving from one place to another, a TV playing in the background. Fresh cigarette smoke drifted from within the flat. He banged on the door and waited. Nothing.

‘Open the door now!' A neighbour appeared at her door, ready to pull him up. He flashed his warrant card at her and she disappeared back behind her own door. ‘Get here now, Ms Conner, and open the door. I'm not going away.'

The door flew back sharply. Macy's mother, unperturbed and with a fresh application of make-up, stood in the doorway.

‘Rosen, I don't know where she is.' Like she was someone else's problem in a different time and dimension.

He took a deep breath and said, ‘Let me in. We need to talk.'

He followed her inside. She closed the door of her room and, in the poverty of the living room, turned her back on Rosen.

‘The sooner you talk, Rosen, the sooner you can fuck off out of here.'

‘Why?' he asked, enigmatically.

‘Why what?' She turned around, breathed a smoke ring through pursed lips.

‘Why aren't you pulling your hair out? Why aren't you on the streets looking for your daughter—'

‘That's your job.'

‘—and pleading with people to help you?'

‘If I did that every time she wandered off for hours, I'd look like a real head case.'

‘Where else might she have gone to?'

‘I don't know.'

‘It was you, wasn't it?'

‘What was me?'

‘You punched her lights out on the night Thomas Glass got burned alive.'

‘That's a serious allegation.'

‘Why did you beat her up?'

‘I ought to report you.'

‘What did she do?'

‘I am going to report you.'

‘I'm all ears.'

‘I'm going to make a formal complaint.'

‘Just like you threw her down the stairs when she was four.'

She stopped.

‘How do you know? She fell!'

‘Macy's a lying bitch, is she?'

‘What's she been saying to you, Rosen?'

‘We've had a few interesting conversations.'

‘About her grandmother? You're an idiot.'

Her coldness was complete. She put him in mind of the father of a two-year-old girl who'd been tied to her bed for weeks. Rosen had carried her, a bag of running sores and bones, from filthy squalor back when he was a young PC in north London. There was no point in questioning her further about Macy. To her mother, she was less than nothing.

He changed the subject to one she was interested in: herself.

‘Why didn't you give her away when she was born? You'd had Paul,
that hadn't worked out for you. Why not give her away? Paul, too?'

She raised the cigarette to her mouth. ‘Well.' She looked around. ‘No kids, no benefits, no flat.'

‘What'll you do if. . . if I find her and bring her back safely?'

‘She'll have to be punished. She's caused an awful lot of shit, hasn't she? Yeah, she'll have to be punished, the little bitch. Fuck off, Rosen.'

Rosen walked from the flat, leaving the front door open. She listened as he made his way to the main stairs.

‘Bastard.' She cursed the space in which he'd stood and crossed over to close the front door.

As she walked back to her room, there was a knock on the door. ‘Oh, what now?' Annoyed, she threw the front door open and greeted the caller, ‘You? What do you want?'

88

7.37 P.M.

A
s Rosen walked downstairs, the door to the fourth floor opened and Chelsea stepped towards him.

‘I saw you walking in. I thought you were coming to tell me good news.'

‘Chelsea, I—'

‘Do you have some news for me? Have you found him yet?'

‘We're still looking. There are dozens of detectives and uniformed officers—'

‘Come on, Chelsea.' A voice came from around the corner: Sergeant Valerie McGuinness, Victim Liaison.

Rosen touched her on the shoulder, the slightest of contacts, and whispered, ‘Chelsea. I'll do everything in my power to bring him back to you.'

‘It's my fault, isn't it?'

Valerie McGuinness turned Chelsea to face her. ‘This is not your fault. You're a good mother.'

‘No. I'm an idiot. And my son's about to pay the price.'

89

8.20 P.M.

T
he moon was bright now, the sky folding swiftly into night. The North Star appeared.

Tucked behind three huge cylindrical bins, Macy Conner, Chester Adler and Luke Booth watched a car arrive at the side of their school, its headlights dipping and turning off as it stopped. A man got out.

Macy knew him. Corrigan. One of Rosen's men. He was talking on a mobile phone. ‘I've checked each side now, David. There's no sign of life and none of the neighbours at the front have seen a thing.'

Macy raised a thumb to Chester. ‘Hear that, Chester? No one saw a thing.'

‘Yeah, yeah, I'll take the guys back to square one and off we go again!' said DS Corrigan as he got back into his car, turned on the ignition and drove away.

‘Give him a minute to get away and then we'll break in to school,' she said.

*

T
HE SCHOOL HALL
was overlooked by a derelict office building. In the door leading to the hall at the back of the school were four panes of
glass. It was here that Macy led them. Picking up a jagged rock – one that Macy had concealed the previous day under a pile of leaf litter – she crouched down and set about smashing the lower left-hand glass panel.

‘Macy?' said Chester.

‘What?' Her patience was paper-thin.

‘The gerbil was already dead when I went into the classroom.'

‘So?'

‘So, who stuck the compass into him?' Chester looked at Macy and she smiled at him.

‘Su Li.' She held a finger to her lips. ‘Now hush!'

Macy worked on the jagged edges of the glass to create a hole large enough for the three of them to enter the school, one at a time. She reached an arm inside and, tucking her fist into her sleeve, swept the glass on the hall floor aside.

‘I'm going in first. When I go inside, the alarm will ring out. Don't worry. Pass the baby in to me and then you climb in, carefully.'

She paused, imagined she heard the sound of steps somewhere behind them, a foot snapping a twig and a shadow shifting across the grass near the hedges. She looked around, unsettled.

‘It's my imagination,' she said.

‘What is?'

‘Nothing.'

As soon as she made it inside, the alarm triggered. Chester lifted Luke through to her, and crawled inside after them.

‘The police'll come, the police, when they hear the burglar alarm.' Chester was lost between panic and hilarity.

‘No, that's not the way it works. We want the burglar alarm to ring.'

He looked completely confused, as if he'd just been born into the moment in which he existed, with no past, no knowledge, no context to fall back on.

‘Why?' he shouted above the painful clatter.

‘Because we want Mr Finn to open the school with his keys.'

Luke's lip wobbled and he threw his hands up to protect his ears from the sound.

‘Don't start crying, Luke!' said Macy sharply, thinking,
What do I do if Luke gets really upset when I'm in Chelsea's?
Remembering that Prue, the old lady next door to Chelsea's, wasn't there to fall back on, she felt like she was drowning. Luke's crying grew louder.

She picked up the stray rock with which she'd smashed in the glass panel and took Luke by the hand to the PE cupboard.

‘Open the door, Chester!'

Chester obeyed.

‘Turn on the light.' After some fumbling, he managed it. ‘Look, Luke, look at all these balls and hoops and bats and wickets.' Unaided, the toddler marched deeper inside. She shut the door behind the three of them. She turned to Chester. ‘Stay in here with Luke – it's quieter than the hall and corridors. Don't come out until I come back, or it won't work out. You want the bad guys to get you, Chester?' He shook his head. ‘Then do as I say.'

‘I won't come out. Where are you going?'

She took a paper tissue from her pocket and rolled up two balls, which she placed in Luke's ears.

‘Can I have some?' asked Chester.

‘No, you've got to listen. You've got to stay in here and listen.'

‘Where you going?'

‘I'm going to meet Mr Finn.'

She left the cupboard, closing the door carefully behind her. Through the skylights in the ceiling of the hall, the moon shone in her eyes and filled the large space with the kind of light she imagined shone in heaven. Softly, she whispered, ‘Grandma.' And beneath the harsh alarm, her voice seemed to echo gently from the walls. For a moment, in the corner, in a shimmering light, she saw the old woman. ‘Death is here, Macy. And you must say—?'

‘Yes.' The living light that was Grandma blossomed and silently exploded.

She was gone.

Macy smiled and spoke calmly to herself: ‘When Mr Finn's been, then we'll call the police.'

One hand opened and closed around the rock, the other around a mobile phone. She pictured Mr Finn's huge key ring. She knew where each key fitted. The key to the door in the wall opposite the PE cupboard that led to the stairs onto the roof, that key had a red fob on it, and it was next to the key for the boiler room, with the blue fob.

The sound of the school burglar alarm was textured: some beats painful and others extremely so. Macy rolled up two corners of another paper handkerchief and stuffed them into her own ears.

*

I
N THE
PE cupboard, Luke lay down on a small stack of rubber mats and curled himself into a ball. He closed his eyes and whispered, ‘Bobos, go to bo-bos now.'

‘Well, I'll turn off the light,' said Chester, plunging the cupboard into darkness.

Outside, in the hall, he heard a noise, a footstep crunching on glass and then silence. In the sheltering darkness, after thirty-six hours without sleep, tiredness hit him hard.

He lay down on the mats next to Luke and, closing his eyes, heard Macy walking away in the hall beyond the door.

90

8.31 P.M.

S
itting up in bed, next to the empty space where his wife had slept for thirty-two years, Alec Finn sipped a cup of tea and watched his beloved Arsenal get trashed away from home in the second leg of the UEFA Champions' League semi-final.

‘And the money they're on,' he said, without any real anger.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz
.

On his bedside table, his mobile phone vibrated against the wooden surface.

‘Shall I get it?' he asked the absence next to him. ‘What's the option?'

He squinted at the display: MARGE. He connected

‘Hi, Marge.' Number 22 Bream Street. One of the clutch of sympathetic residents of Bream Street, the ones who called him when the alarm in school went off, the ones he did odd jobs for in between his daily split work shift, the ones who fed him and plugged the gaps in his loneliness.

‘Hi, Alec. Guess what?' The school alarm ringing out registered as a tinkle in the background.

‘Sorry, love. I won't be long.'

His feet were on the floor, his eyes on tomorrow's shirt, trousers
and underwear folded neatly over the chair next to Alice's side of the bed.

As AC Milan netted their fourth goal, Alec started dressing as quickly as he could to go and deal with the chaos.

91

8.51 P.M.

F
our minutes after receiving an urgent call, Rosen arrived at the lock-up. DC Eleanor Willis, Scientific Support, had found a BlackBerry behind a loose brick in the back wall.

He dipped under the scene-of-crime tape. She was waiting for him with the phone in her hand.

‘David, it's belongs to Thomas Glass.'

‘Anything on it, Eleanor?'

‘Check out the video, the most recent.'

Rosen clicked through and pressed ‘play'.

Immediately, he recognized Jay Trent's bedroom. The footage was taken from an unusual angle, but the two bodies on the bed were clear to see.

As the sex unfolded on screen, Rosen thought back to Trent's bedroom and worked out that whoever had filmed this had hidden in the built-in wardrobe opposite Trent's bed.

Aggressively, Trent thrust himself in and out of another young man's anus, his hands gripping the subject's back. The young man's head dipped, his face concealed by long auburn hair.

‘You're a fucking queer!' growled Trent on screen, stuck somewhere between rage and ecstasy. Trent slapped his back hard and the young man cried out in pain. ‘Deserved that. The last. . . time. . . don't make me. . . do this. . . again.'

Trent cried out in vicious ecstasy. Then there was silence and stillness, and from that quiet Rosen heard a subdued snuffling, hidden tears from the closet, and a small voice.

‘Oh, Paul. . .'

‘Macy,' said Rosen, recognizing the voice in the closet. ‘Macy Conner.'