Lock Me In Page 4

  I broke free, stood up, went into my room.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she called.

  ‘I’m calling the police.’

  It took her about half a second to come after me. ‘No.’ She grabbed the phone out of my hand. ‘No. That’s not the right play. Not at all.’

  I stared at her. ‘Play? He could be—’ I stopped myself from saying it.

  ‘But he’s not. OK? He’ll be fine. There could be any number of explanations. He might have just gone on a trip.’

  I folded my arms. ‘Right. A trip.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted a break.’

  It took me a moment to process that. ‘From me?’

  She shrugged apologetically.

  ‘You’re saying this is just him breaking up with me?’

  ‘Men. They eat your pies and tell you lies,’ she offered. It was our joke, the phrase with which every conversation we’d ever had about my father would eventually end. But I wasn’t in the mood, and she saw it. ‘I’ve got to get to work, sweetheart.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve got a shift with the kids. What?’ I said, when she made a face.

  ‘Maybe best call in sick?’

  ‘What? Why?’

  She spread her hands but didn’t answer my question. Didn’t need to. She didn’t want me to go because she wanted to keep me out of sight.

  She thought I’d killed him.

  Had I killed him?

  After she left, I stood in the hall, taking in our dingy home. Nothing to mark it as ours. Our rent paid in cash – everything always paid in cash – so we could leave at a moment’s notice if anyone came knocking on the doors, asking questions about me, about Jodie. Mum used a different name, Christine Scott, wherever she could. She chose agency work over proper contracts because it meant wages in cash, and there were always agencies with a relaxed approach to background checks.

  Our whole existence, Mum’s jobs, everything we did, was built around Siggy. Everything in her life was about me: boyfriends had been dismissed when they started to ask too many questions, jobs abandoned when demands were made that took her away from her duty to me. She’d given up everything just to cover my tracks and keep me happy, or at least keep me safe. Even before Jodie, we’d never put down roots, but since? I’d lost count of the number of times we’d moved. Always in a hurry when someone recognized her. It made her curse herself for ever having had success: if she’d never been on TV, it wouldn’t be half this hard.

  I padded back to where the calendar hung on the wall: my shifts marked in pink highlighter.

  It’s not like it’s actually a job.

  I was coming up twenty years old. I was the same person I’d been at fourteen. Afraid of everyone and everything, locked into the bedroom in my mother’s flat every night for fear of what I might do if I was free. Whatever she said about my value in the world, I was jobless, dependent.

  But I had Matt. Loving, understanding Matt. Patient. Blindly at risk.

  I made a promise right there and then, that if Siggy had hurt him in any way, that I was ending it. I’d take her with me. I didn’t care.

  Nobody wins, Siggy. Do you hear me? This ends here.

  Siggy heard. Her black eyes flashed wide, but she shrank back, flattening into the shadows. Didn’t move, not a moment of a challenge. She’d been around me long enough to know when I meant what I said.

  7.

  Mae

  Mae arsed the access door open and climbed the steel steps, steep enough to make the toe of his size twelves clang on the underside of each one as he ascended. The fire door at the top swung open and banged against the wall. He squinted as he went out. Bright. Stretching his arms out, opening his chest, he made a circuit of the flat roof then leaned out across the suicide bars, looking down to the street below.

  He bit into his bacon roll. He’d lost DC Catherine Ziegler shortly after she’d handed it to him in the canteen. Or maybe not lost, exactly, more turned and walked away from, without checking she was behind him.

  He rarely ate in the canteen. The food was adequate, but the place was rammed full of cops. For him, up here was the place to be. He chewed slowly, felt the cold on his skin, had a stretch. Movement at the edge of the roof caught his eye: from the door of the shed-like block that housed the steps came his new TI. Striding out across the felt roof like an uncaged animal.

  ‘Sarge,’ she called, ‘got a sec?’ She carried a sheet of paper, the other hand visored across her forehead against the sharp November sunshine.

  Mae jerked his chin to greet her, then chased a dot of brown sauce from the corner of his mouth with his tongue.

  ‘Love it up here, too,’ she said, tilting her head back to the open sky and filling her lungs. An exchange of car horns sounded, and she glanced over the edge of the building.

  She laughed softly. ‘Funny little bastards.’

  ‘Who?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All of us.’

  Mae followed her eyeline, down to the stop-start of traffic by the junction of Boston Manor Road. Tiny faraway people pottering around, in and out of shops and cars and offices, fluid masses of them sloshing out of buses and onto the streets where they dispersed easily, innocuous as peas from a split bag. When he looked back at her, a smile had risen over her face.

  ‘Did you need something, Ziegler?’ he said, popping the last mouthful of the butty into his mouth and balling up the bag.

  ‘Please don’t call me by my surname, Sarge. Makes me feel like I’m at boarding school.’ She followed him back out towards the steps and passed him a printout. ‘Got a new one in. Misper.’

  Mae glanced at the sheet she was holding out, swept his eyes over the first couple of lines. Just a log from a triple-9. He handed it back, frowning.

  ‘Give it to uniform. If it’s already marked as low-risk they’ll do the work-up. They hand it over as and when.’

  ‘Usually, yeah. But I thought the name might be of interest,’ she said.

  He sighed, took the sheet back. They went down the metal steps into the blue-walled normality of the nick. ‘What was the name?’

  ‘Matthew Corsham,’ she said, peeling the top sheet off, handing it to him. ‘White male, twenty-six, some kind of technician at Hanwell Hospital. No history of missing, not a pisshead or a junkie.’

  He nearly choked. ‘I think that’s supposed to read, no history of drugs or alcohol abuse.’

  She shrugged and moved on. ‘The workmate who called it in said he’s worried because it was the guy’s last shift yesterday, dismissal was a bit out of the blue and he was distressed. Corsham promised to take his work computer back, and didn’t show, which is very out of character because he swore he’d be there and he’s very reliable. So the workmate calls, but it goes straight to voicemail, so goes round to his place – he lives on a boat, just up towards Isleworth – and he’s disappeared.’

  Mae scanned the text for dates. ‘What timescale we talking?’

  ‘It’s only half a day. Leon, the colleague, says he spoke to him yesterday and he was really agitated about having lost his job.’

  ‘Half a day? Give the bloke a chance, Christ! They never heard of a bender?’

  ‘I think that’s supposed to read, excessive period of alcohol consumption.’

  Mae gave her a look. ‘And anyway, I don’t know a Matthew Corsham. Am I supposed to?’

  ‘Not him. The girlfriend.’

  Mae returned his eyes to the document. And his heart skidded to a stop. Eleanor Power.

  Kit leaned against the doorframe. ‘Rings a bell, right?’

  It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it. He gave her a quick glance. ‘You like your homework, then?’

  He read the whole thing en route to his desk, walking on autopilot. Not taking his eyes from it until he was in his chair, screen on. A dull wince, the kind that sits there for years until it’s so familiar it almost goes unnoticed, tightened in his chest.

  Yeah. It rang a bell.

  Mae pulled
the keyboard over, put the name through the PNC. Fourteen Eleanor Powers in the country, three in London.

  Could it really be her?

  ‘I’ve run her already,’ Kit told him, reminding him of her presence behind his chair. ‘No records on her, DWP, electoral roll, nothing. Hasn’t had contact with a GP in five years.’

  It figured. Five years meant 2006. The year everything fell apart. Eleanor, Ellie, who had seen Jodie Arden getting into a car the night she went missing. Ellie Power, whose mother held her hand and finished her sentences for her when she was too upset to speak. Who was consumed with the irrational belief that her friend’s disappearance – her death, Ellie believed – was her fault. To the extent that, one afternoon, after the session of questioning that would end up being replayed and dissected in the tribunals that lost DS Heath his job and nearly destroyed Mae’s career, she decided that her imagined guilt was unbearable. She followed that conviction through with such brutal decisiveness that Mae was unable to hold it together at work the next day, or the day after that. He’d never gone back, not to his old job, not to any of the spots they’d offered him in Traffic or Custody. Not to anything in the Brighton and Hove district. Not to anything on the Sussex force at all.

  But there was one other tiny detail. One minor footnote that he hadn’t come across before or since and would happily never come across again, not least because it was this that discredited her in the eyes of the CPS and collapsed the entire case against Cox: Ellie Power suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. He felt the fine hairs on his arms lift as he recalled the specifics of it. How according to her own testimony, sometimes she did and said things, went places that she couldn’t remember. Stopped being Ellie Power at all and became – someone else.

  Siggy. The name sounded like a whisper in his head, crept like insects on his skin.

  He rubbed his palm over the stubble on his scalp and willed his heart to decelerate.

  Kit, oblivious, reached over for the mouse and clicked through the pages. ‘Coincidence she turned up here, on your patch. Nothing on her since your missing prostitute, and now—’

  ‘Jodie Arden was a fucking child.’

  She lowered eyes. ‘Sir.’

  Mae sighed. He leaned forward, started lifting the various notes and notices pinned to the blue hessian-fronted panel at the back of his desk. Under several sheets of stuff he’d been meaning to read, there was a photo. He pulled the rusting pin out.

  Kit leaned close. ‘Is that her?’

  It was a head-and-shoulders of a dark-blonde girl in a dress that fastened at the neck: Jodie Arden at her cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. It was the shot they’d used in the police press packs, but the media had rejected it in favour of a racier snapshot taken by a friend on a night out, that showed her in an altogether different light. The papers had treated her like an adult, which meant printing whatever they wanted. She’d missed the social media explosion by a hair’s breadth, but the hacks had got hold of everything, nonetheless. Including the drinking, including the drug use. And including the fact that she had been sleeping with a much older man, a psychotherapist by the name of Charles Cox, who just so happened to be treating her best friend Ellie. Worse still, Cox also just so happened to be dating Jodie’s own mum. It was this man who owned the car Ellie Power saw Jodie climbing into before she disappeared off the face of the planet. Her disappearance had been news for all of two days, after which another girl in another part of the country had gone missing. A nicer girl, Aryan and clean, a girl who’d volunteered in Uganda and had a place at Cambridge and played the oboe or whatever. With no new information, Jodie Arden had just become another statistic, one among thousands of almost-adult runaways who slipped through the cracks.

  ‘She was a week off eighteen when she disappeared,’ he said, carefully. ‘I don’t know what you were like, but I sure as hell wouldn’t fancy being judged for life at that age.’

  Kit put her hands up. She ventured a tentative laugh. ‘You always this heavy first thing on a Monday?’

  ‘You just wait till end of the week,’ he said, replacing the photo. ‘I’m an unstoppable gag machine by Thursday lunch.’

  ‘Right. Well, apologies.’ She gathered up the paper she’d delivered, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t interpret. ‘Just saw the name and thought you’d be interested. Given your involvement.’

  ‘Ancient history, to be honest.’ He stood up and straightened his shirt. ‘Come on.’

  ‘So we are looking at it?’

  ‘You’re the trainee, so I’m training you. Got to start somewhere.’ Good thing about rank was how you didn’t have to explain yourself to anyone under you. He swept his jacket off the back of his chair and felt in his drawer for a tie, then remembered something. ‘You got a change of clothes?’

  Kit frowned, shook her head. ‘Not apart from my gym stuff. Why?’

  ‘Best ditch the uniform. There’s a plain-clothes store down by the armoury, you can get the key from the guy in Evidence. Find something there, OK? Meet me in reception in five.’ He flipped the collar of his shirt up and gestured an after you.

  8.

  Ellie

  I stood back from the door, head on the side, to admire the result. Cosmetically at least, my doorframe was OK now. Between the tub of wood putty and a few scraps of sandpaper I’d found, I’d rebuilt the splintered section back up and shaped it to match the contour of the rest. There had been an inch of gloss paint left in the tin from last time it had needed repairing, and I’d done a fair job. I was proud of it. Mum would be pleased.

  I felt my shoulders drop as I thought how Matt would be proud, too. I’d managed to convince him I was pretty handy with repairs the first time I’d gone to his narrowboat. It was about a month after I’d first got talking to him at the hospital while I waited for Mum to finish her shift. For weeks, we’d accidentally-on-purpose bumped into each other before he properly asked me out. Our first real date was on a Saturday afternoon: a lazy lunch at a riverside pub. Matt invited me back to see the boat afterwards but had forgotten that he’d been halfway through laying new floorboards until we went inside.

  ‘Oh god, state of the place,’ he said, shoving the mess of cushions on the built-in sofa up to one end to clear a space for me. ‘Sorry, not a great start.’ He started lugging the new boards across from where they were propped by the log burner, roughly laying them into place to give us something to stand on.

  I sat where I was shown, but raised an eyebrow, flirty from the wine. ‘Start to what, exactly?’

  He glanced up, embarrassed, ‘I meant, I—’

  Nudging him with a toe, I put him out of his misery. ‘Kidding.’ And he laughed, and it felt good. Then, seized with the urge to show off, I got to my feet, rolled up my sleeves, and picked up a hammer from a pile of tools in the corner.

  ‘Let’s do it, then,’ I said, indicating the boards. ‘I’ll help you get this floor down.’

  He bit the corner off a wry smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the woodworking type.’

  ‘Stronger than I look.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He grinned, ran his eyes over me. I let him do it, my hands on hips, weighing the hammer in my hands. After that, it was a matter of pride to prove it.

  The memory of it split like a burning frame of celluloid the moment I heard the front door. I glanced at the time: Mum wasn’t due back for another half hour.

  She burst into my bedroom. ‘Has he rung?’

  ‘No. I’d have told you—’

  ‘OK. All right,’ she said, slumping slightly.

  ‘What’s happened? How come you’re early?’

  ‘I swapped cleaning sectors with Angie so I could leave early,’ she said, then she told me how she’d gone to the photographic lab where Matt worked, to see if Matt had been there. ‘There were two blokes talking outside his office, one of them said Matt’s name, so I hung around. He said he’d been to find Matt, hadn’t got anywhere, so he’d called the police.’

  It was proba
bly Leon, I thought, the friend who’d called me before. ‘But the police weren’t actually there.’

  ‘No, but—’ she made a gesture with her hands, flustered. ‘Look – I just – are we still OK here? I mean, you’ve been careful, even with Matt, right? They’re not going to find the address?’

  I tried to hold her eye, but I couldn’t.

  She gaped. ‘Oh no, Ellie. What did you do?’

  ‘I’d been meaning to tell you,’ I said weakly. ‘It was when we were applying for the volunteering.’

  ‘You gave them our address?’

  ‘No, he did it. He didn’t know not to. I could hardly tell him not to, could I? How would I explain it?’

  ‘Well, fuck!’ She threw her free hand up. ‘Great! Wonderful, good work!’

  I wanted to say sorry, but she hated me apologizing.

  ‘I said this would happen. I said, the first time you brought him round. It was too big a risk. Didn’t I say?’ She went into her bedroom and started to rush about, pulling off her tabard and stuffing it into the washing basket. Then as if remembering, she went out to the kitchen and returned with the bag containing the wet clothes from that morning.

  As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Mum. Tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing! I just want to be prepared.’ She roughly pulled a shirt on and went to the dressing table, plonked herself down and pulled out her make-up. ‘They’re going to come here, aren’t they? The police. And they’re going to ask questions.’

  ‘So we answer them.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She spun round, a blob of foundation balancing on fingertip halfway to her face. ‘With what?’

  ‘How about the truth?’

  ‘We don’t know what happened! We’ve got no fucking idea what the truth is, have we?’

  I bit into my cheek until I tasted blood. I wasn’t going to cry.

  Mum applied the make-up, sighed and got up. She went to the bed and patted the place beside her.