Lock Me In Read online

  My phone rang, and I pulled off the gloves, my heart leaping as I recognized the first few of digits of the number on the screen. It was the hospital.

  ‘Matt?’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said an awkward voice, a man. Not Matt. ‘Ellie, right?’

  I let my eyes close. If someone at his work was calling me, that meant—

  ‘Listen, do you know where Matt is? Only, we were expecting him in, and he hasn’t shown up.’

  I told him – after swallowing the lump of lead in my throat – that I hadn’t. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Leon. From the hospital. The imaging lab?’

  ‘Oh, OK. Leon.’ Matt had mentioned Leon: they’d been working together for a couple of months now and he’d gone for a pint with him after work once or twice, though I didn’t get the sense they were particularly good friends.

  ‘Did you see him yesterday?’ Leon asked, concern in his voice. ‘Like, in the evening? Because I can’t get hold of him on the mobile, and the guy at his moorings says he’s not there, and with yesterday being a bit … you know.’

  ‘A bit what?’

  The wet sound of him opening and closing his mouth told me he was choosing his words. ‘No it’s … it’s nothing. But look, if you hear from him—’

  ‘It was a bit what, Leon?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, you know. Busy.’

  Matt hadn’t mentioned anything unusual. Had I even asked? I told Leon I’d call if I heard anything and hung up.

  I went to the window, pulling the net aside. The thick cloud of the early morning was gone now, swept clean to expose a sky of cold blue, scarred all over with sharp shards of white.

  Wherever Matt was, he wasn’t OK. He wasn’t OK at all.

  My eye was caught by movement. I recognized Mr Symanski’s son, Piotr. Maybe a little older than me, mid-twenties and already paunchy. He was a sullen figure, shuffling up the road. I watched him bend to scratch a passing cat behind the ears, and let it weave between his ankles a few times. When he stood, he saw me. Stock still, nothing on his face, staring straight at me for five seconds, ten. More. Then as if he’d suddenly come to his senses, he looked away, got out his keys, and went inside.

  I dropped the corner of the net curtain, and stood there blinking, thinking only of that stare. Did he know something? I thought again of going down, speaking to them. But before I could make a decision, I heard movement on our steps outside and the clatter of fumbled keys against concrete.

  5.

  Mae

  The Snoop Dogg was damaged worse than he’d thought, so he felt around in the side pocket for anything CD shaped and slipped it in. Turned out to be a demo from a mate of a mate, who Mae vaguely remembered wanting to punch. White guy, gangster lean, called everyone bruv. Mae gave it until after the first refrain, pressed eject, checked for witnesses, and windowed it.

  He took a little detour and got a coffee from a new Cuban place on the corner by Acton Central. He ordered short and black on the grounds that it would be fastest and bounced on the balls of his feet as the barista made it up, feeling the snip of unspent energy amassing in his blood. A muted newscast on the screen above the counter was wringing the final drops from an American school shooting, a week old and almost forgotten.

  After paying, he got out of there, and had emptied half the scalding caffeine into his mouth before he’d even pulled away. Needing the buzz, needing the lift, because there hadn’t been a chance for a run that morning, either.

  He tolerated the flack he got about his thing for exercise. If it made his colleagues feel better about themselves to call him vain, call him a poser, that was their business. But to Ben Mae, exercise had never been optional. Without a run in the morning, without an hour of circuits or weights or anything else in the evening, the noise in his head got too much and he knew where that ended. These days, he could trust himself to recognize that inevitable build-up of whatever-it-was and burn it off in the gym. But age as he might, those years after his dad died of finding himself prowling, angry without provocation, skulking around for a fight or a fuck never seemed that far behind him.

  Objectively, he thought, as he slowed for the barrier and flashed the fob at the reader, it was doubtful that coffee helped. Objectively, the right thing to do was to deal with the anger, understand it. Go right back to that dark six months when he changed from a normal teenage boy and into a thug, to the point where his life could have gone either way. Tear the thing out by the root.

  But who would he be then?

  Leaning back in his desk chair, Mae transferred the phone to the other ear, then rubbed the stubble on his head up and down hard with the palm of his hand. Around him, the office was already in the full throes of post-briefing activity.

  ‘But he’s still missing,’ the woman at the other end of the line was saying, her voice rising towards the inevitable crack. ‘He’s still gone. We can’t cope with this not knowing. My poor kids—’

  Her name was Charlotte, wife of Damien Hayes. Widow, almost certainly, of Damien Hayes. Mother of his four kids. Six months previously, Mr Hayes had left the final shift of his job at the vehicle plant just outside Uxbridge, driven his car half the way home, abandoned it, and disappeared. He left no note but, as it unravelled, it was a tale that told itself. The poor bastard had been in the red by almost forty grand, had defaulted on his last half a dozen mortgage payments and then, just to kick the man while he was down, the plant had laid him off. Mrs Hayes had only discovered in the weeks following his evaporation that he left behind no savings, no pension, and no insurance.

  ‘Mrs Hayes I promise you we’ve done everything we can—’

  ‘Done? Done?’

  Mae winced. ‘Doing. We’re doing everything—’

  ‘Are you? Like what? What have you done, since you made this call a month ago? On our last weed date,’ she said, bitterness curling at the term.

  He lifted the top sheet of the stack of paper in front of him and stifled a sigh. Four more calls exactly like this one, scheduled for today, but there was no news, no concrete developments in a single one of them. Thing was, in this business no news was bad news, even if – especially if – it wasn’t the kind of bad news that had an event attached, a clear and obvious trauma that could at least heal cleanly. In the majority of the cases he had the misfortune to head in his current role, the misper was there and then they were not. No stages of grief to work through, no ritual to mark the end of the life. The family around them remained in stasis until eventually, secretly and ashamedly, they started to long for news of a body being found.

  ‘I’m afraid without new information, there’s really not much else—’

  ‘So you’ve given up?’ And right on cue, the sob. ‘If you had any idea of what this is doing to us.’

  Mae pressed closed his eyes. They always said that. Every one of them, and not just in Missing but in everything he’d ever been assigned. Murders and rapes and robberies, beatings, the lot. Nearly always, they were right. No, he’d never been sexually assaulted. Hadn’t suffered the violent death of someone he loved. Since he’d been leading Missing, though, the accusation that he didn’t know how it felt had been harder to take. But he never let it out, never put them right, not even to McCulloch when she’d given him the gig. Especially not then.

  He was going to need that run, he decided.

  ‘Look, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Charlotte. I’ll put some calls in to the charities again, OK? See if there’s anything new there. Sometimes there are delays with them putting stuff through to our systems. I’ll see if I can extend the hospital checks a bit. I’m not promising anything,’ he added as he heard her intake of breath, but the hope had already returned to her voice.

  ‘Yes. Please.’ She paused to delicately blow her nose. ‘Anything you can do.’

  A red light started blinking on his desk phone. Mae straightened, dispatched Mrs Hayes as sensitively as he could, and answered it.

  ‘Should I send down a written invitation?’
The gentle Hebridean lilt of DCI Colleen McCulloch.

  Mae glanced at the time. Shit. ‘Sorry, ma’am. On my way.’

  He bombed it up the back steps and made McCulloch’s floor in about thirty seconds flat. He slowed to a stroll as he passed her glass-fronted office for the sake of some semblance of cool, then went in.

  ‘Sorry ma’am,’ he muttered, ‘difficult call to a—’

  ‘Spare me,’ she said, nodding over her glasses to the door, which he dutifully closed. Standing at ease the other side of the room was a statuesque, stony-faced uniform, a woman. He nodded an acknowledgement: he’d seen her swinging kettlebells around in the basement gym. She had cropped, bleach-blonde hair and had to be a good 180 lbs and rising six foot. The kind of woman who occupied every inch of herself. Lot of tattoos, he’d noticed: not that they were visible now.

  McCulloch cleared her throat. ‘How’s it been going downstairs these past few weeks, Ben? Haven’t seen you since I went to Egypt. Ooh, talking of which,’ she said, turning to dig something out of a drawer, ‘got you one of these. From the pyramids.’

  He caught the paper bag just before it struck him on the head – she was nothing if not a good shot – and opened it. Inside was a small, stuffed camel, made from some kind of felt. He closed the bag. ‘Uh, I’m honoured?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t be, it’s cursed. Paid the extra, thought why not.’

  The uniform bit back a grin.

  McCulloch had arrived on the force six months after Mae: they’d both started out in Sussex, albeit at very different levels of seniority. She’d been a hard sell to the whole department, straight in from civvy street to detective inspector, leapfrogging not only a whole generation of CID sergeants who’d been waiting in the wings – some of them – for literally years, but also sprinting past the two long years of uniform service. She was part of a new Philosophy of Recruitment, they’d been told, which recognized outside skills and combatted red tape. Translated: stuffed suit. Decoded: clueless leg-up wannabe. The entire team had been rooting for her to fuck up her first major job, but she’d steered the investigation to a solve with the cool, effortless ease of a seasoned skipper. Those who still remained unconvinced waited, hoping for a trip up to ratify their prejudices. It never came. Problem was, she might have come from some woolly sounding NGO background, but she was also bulletproof. She was bright as a supernova, knew her PACE back to front, her Murder Manual inside out and recited her CPS guidelines with her eyes closed. She bit only when antagonized, and she called every single decision with blistering speed and perfect judgement. What made all of that worse was that she was the most eminently likeable boss any of them had ever had.

  And after Brighton, when his immediate superior had been sacked and Mae himself had been given a month’s suspension, she’d moved to the Met to take the helm at Brentford and had been in the role ever since. It was McCulloch who’d encouraged him to relocate, to come and work in the capital with her, and with nothing on the coast to stay for, he’d eventually relented.

  McCulloch pushed aside the wireless keyboard to make room for her tailored-shirted forearms and took a sip from a steaming mug of her ubiquitous mint tea.

  ‘Detective. Ben.’ She gave him a broad smile that pushed the plump cheeks into freckled bulges and exposed the quarter-inch gap between her front teeth.

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘I have a job for you.’

  ‘That’s very kind, Ma’am, but I have seventeen open—’

  ‘Call it an expansion of your already impressive burden,’ she said, waving his reluctance away. ‘Tell me, how long have we been in the force?’

  She knew the answer to this. She knew everything. Where he’d been to school, his bench press PB, and the name of his first pet. Not for the first time, it occurred to him she probably even knew about the dark years after his mum disappeared, even though he’d always managed to keep a half-step ahead of the law.

  ‘Eight years, Ma’am.’

  She pulled the keyboard back over. ‘I’ve had some applications. Some of your colleagues putting themselves forwards for inspector.’ She was looking at her screen now, scrutinizing it for his benefit. ‘But I’m not seeing your name here.’

  ‘I’m happy where I am.’ He glanced at the uniform, wondering where this was going.

  Ignoring him, McCulloch folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, addressing the ceiling. ‘You see, Ben, when we rank people up, we like to see people proving themselves as leaders. Showing managerial qualities.’

  ‘I’m not looking to rank up. Sergeant suits me fine.’

  ‘I see. Well anyway. Detective Sergeant Mae, this,’ she said, gesturing at the mystery uniform, ‘is DC Catherine Ziegler.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And she,’ McCulloch went on with a twinkle of the eyes, ‘is going to be your new TI.’

  Mae took the hand extended towards him, met her eyes, and briefly returned a rough approximation of the broad, open smile she gave him. Thinking, shit. Trainee Investigator meant a shadow. Constant company.

  ‘Hate to say it, Ma’am—’ Mae started, but he was silenced with a finger held aloft.

  ‘Then don’t.’ McCulloch folded her arms across her chest, assessing the two of them like a mother at a playdate. ‘I understand that Catherine—’

  ‘Kit,’ the younger woman put in.

  ‘I understand that Kit passed her NIE with stand-out results,’ McCulloch was saying. ‘So when HR asked me for a mentor, I looked around the floor and I thought to myself, Colleen, who have you got with the kind of skills and characteristics to drive a talent like that? I thought, who’s willing to take the time to make opportunities for a new generation of detectives?’

  My arse you did, Mae thought. Try, who have I got who’s been coasting for getting on for half a decade, without a foot of movement in any direction? Who have I got spare? Not that he could begrudge it. If it had been DCI Anyone Else, this would have been a punitive move. But she’d called it right, he couldn’t deny it. Sure, he’d sat the exams and taken the promotion to sergeant when he came back from his absence, even though he was fairly sure she’d swung it for him. After that, he’d kept his head down. He’d gone where he was sent, done the courses, gone through the motions. But it didn’t take an HR review to see he’d been treading water since … since before … since before it had all gone wrong. He pumped his fists tight and loose, tight and loose at his sides, dispelling it.

  ‘I thought Missing would give Kit a nice easy start,’ McCulloch told him, ‘and you can get her used to the juggling.’ Turning, she added, ‘Ignore the grumpy exterior, Kit. They’re all the same: like to pretend they’re brooding mavericks but buy them a bacon roll and they’re anyone’s.’

  DC Catherine Ziegler glanced at him to gauge his reaction, and he conceded a reluctant twitch at the corners of his mouth. Might as well be decent, because he could see he wasn’t going to win this.

  ‘Squirt of HP and we can talk.’

  ‘Then that’s sorted,’ the boss said. ‘And don’t forget your camel.’

  McCulloch was already pulling the keyboard close, on to the next thing. She started typing, then looked up. ‘What are you waiting for, lollies? Run along.’

  But he could tell from the meaningful, encouraging look on his boss’s face as she shooed them out of the door that there was nothing malicious about this. He wasn’t despised, he was pitied. This was intended to aid his personal development. She thought this was what he needed.

  And as Mae left the office, with his new TI following behind like a rugby-shouldered Valkyrie, he hated McCulloch for always being right.

  6.

  Ellie

  Mum’s outline was distorted through the bumpy glass as she bent to retrieve the dropped key. She cursed, but it was the weakness in her voice that made me certain that something was not good.

  She came inside, her hair stuck across her face in muddy streaks as she unbuttoned her coat.

  I took it from h
er and asked, ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she said. ‘No luck.’

  ‘So where have you been?’

  ‘Just down to the boat, but he’s not there. I thought I’d get a run in on the way back.’ She started stripping off, moving quickly, her T-shirt slopping to the floor where she dropped it. Leggings going the same way; socks, the tube-bandage support she used on her dodgy knee. The bare wet flesh of her arms and torso was paling from the cold and stiffened with goosebumps, ropes of muscle tensing underneath as she moved.

  She found a plastic bag and shoved the clothes inside. ‘Don’t look so worried, love. He’ll be … I don’t know. Out for a walk? Or out taking pictures?’

  ‘He’s supposed to be at work. They called, Mum. He’s not there.’

  She was suddenly serious. ‘What did you tell them?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You didn’t say …’ she started, her eyes drifting down the hall, to my bedroom door.

  ‘That I smashed my way out of my room in the middle of the night and I don’t remember it, and I’ve woken up covered in bruises? No. I kept that to myself.’

  ‘OK. Stupid question. I’m sorry.’

  I followed her into her room. She unlocked the box beside her bed where she kept tools, matches, things she couldn’t leave lying around. She removed a pair of nail scissors and started cutting her nails down.

  ‘So where is he?’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know, Ellie.’ Finishing her own no-nonsense manicure, she gestured for my hand, which I gave her. ‘There’s nothing to say you had anything to do with it,’ she said, trimming the white from the tops of my nails.

  I tried to pull away. ‘Mum, if you found something—’

  ‘I didn’t. It’s nothing.’

  ‘But it’s not, is it?’ I said, disentangling. ‘What if Siggy … what if it’s happened again?’

  ‘Don’t. Please. Just don’t think about it.’ Mum took a deep breath, held it, as if bracing for something. ‘And even if something has happened. We should definitely sit tight,’ she said at last.