Dead Girls - Graeme Cameron MIRA

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your fault,’ she said, but I didn’t know what she meant, and had I done so, I probably wouldn’t have believed her anyway. I needed to press on.

      ‘No trace of Samantha?’

      ‘None. Nothing in the van, either. All we harvested from that was bleach.’

      I thought back to the first time I’d met That Man. I’d been there, right in the back of that Transit. It had smelled of sweat and peroxide. There’d been a box – a large one, large enough to hide in, and filled with thick grey woollen blankets. ‘Was there anything in the back when you recovered it?’ I wondered aloud.

      ‘No, I think it was empty. Why?’

      ‘If there’s a box of blankets in the inventory, they need swabbing.’

      She made a note.

      ‘Is there any connection between Samantha and Kerry,’ I asked, ‘besides their job?’

      ‘Not that we’ve established yet. But what we have got is footage that puts Reed, or whatever we’re calling him, close to where Kerry was last seen, and we’ve got her DNA in a dungeon under his property. That’s a done deal, Ali. Anything we find on Samantha is a bonus at this point.’

      ‘A bonus?’

      Jenny raised a defensive hand and said, ‘I know. I know what you’re about to say. But right now, we’ve got nothing on Samantha, and the only way we’re likely to get anything is if we find Reed and he talks to us, because no other fucker is.’

      I tried to take stock, to dismiss the feeling that it all made less sense now than it had when I’d walked in. What had Jenny said about Erica? That her DNA was all over That Man’s house? It didn’t fit with what I thought I knew about her, but what was that, really? That she was an innocent victim, an abductee? I couldn’t know that, could I? She’d come out of that house shooting, but at what? At whom? ‘Jenny,’ I said, almost afraid to ask the question that was playing on my mind. ‘You’re not entertaining the idea that Erica and that man could be collaborating, are you?’

      Jenny looked at me like I’d completely lost the plot. ‘I don’t know what the hell I think,’ she said. ‘But frankly, I hope they are on the run together because we’ve got about as much chance of tracking him down on his own as we have of catching Jack the Ripper. The man’s a ghost. We don’t know who we’re looking for. He could be anywhere, or nowhere, and everyone who’s seen his face is either dead, missing or in this room.’

      And I couldn’t remember it. ‘And Kevin,’ I reminded her. ‘Kevin’s seen it.’

      She dropped her eyes to the desk and heaved a deep sigh. ‘Yes, well, Kevin took a blow to the head too, didn’t he.’

      ‘So what you’re saying,’ I said, the dread tingle of hopelessness trickling through my veins, ‘is that we’re absolutely nowhere?’

      Jenny, expressionless, sipped her coffee. ‘We’ve got four missing women we think are connected,’ she said. ‘We’ve got one gunshot victim, two presumably dead detectives, a basement, a van, a shitload of keys and a man who doesn’t exist. So yeah, to all intents and purposes, we’ve got fuck all. We’re nowhere. Square one.’

      I looked back to the board, to a photograph of a collection of door keys arranged in a neat square on a table, all but one or two attached to hand-numbered yellow tags. ‘Christ,’ I thought aloud. ‘You said at least eight potential properties?’

      Jenny nodded, sniffed, frowned. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Meaning at least eight potential cages, and no way of tracking them down.’

      We shuddered in unison, and shared a moment’s silence. And then I was confused again, and feeling like I’d missed something. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Did we lose the witness as well?’

      She looked at me blankly for a second, and raised an eyebrow and shook her head and shrugged. ‘What witness?’

      ‘The witness John interviewed. Who was with him on the night Kerry disappeared. It was the first thing he told us when we questioned him.’

      A flash of panic passed across Jenny’s face, though she tried to hide it. She took a slow breath, and leaned forward across the desk, her brow furrowed deeply. ‘Ali,’ she said. ‘What are you on about?’

      I felt heat spread through me, shame and panic and frustration all tangled together as I tried to remember. ‘John,’ I repeated. ‘He talked to a woman. Anna? Annie? A witness. An alibi, I guess. Didn’t you know?’

      Jenny shook her head. ‘When was this?’

      ‘I wasn’t with him,’ I said. ‘It was after that first interview, though. Look it up. It’s in the file, right?’

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it isn’t. There’s no mention of any of it. What are you . . . Ali. Look at me.’

      I met her eye. It was emerald green, bright with adrenaline. I felt sleepy all of a sudden, and my leg hurt.

      ‘Ali,’ she said. ‘What witness?’

      Annie was drunk, just like yesterday, but just like yesterday, she wasn’t going to let that stop her. There was daylight left, hours of it, but it wasn’t enough. Between them, the plodding train, the circuitous bus and the overstretched minicab company would ensure that darkness was waiting when she got home.

      It had beaten her before, the sunset, two weeks ago, when she’d been late coming off shift. The village got dark too quickly; too many trees, not enough streetlamps. No light pollution out there, away from the city. Just shadow, and sky. She’d pulled up a few houses from home, main beams illuminating the road, the fence line, the hidden places between the hedgerows, and there she’d sat for a quarter of an hour until she was certain nothing was waiting for her. Or at least nothing that walked upright. Afterwards, she’d swung the car across the road and lit up the front of the house, aiming the lights through the windows, searching for silhouettes. By the time she’d made it inside and turned on all the house lights, her head had been throbbing from the tension in her shoulders. She hadn’t slept all night.

      It wasn’t going to happen today; she was confident of that as she stumbled against her fossil of a Renault and dropped her keys on the ground. She laughed hoarsely to herself and tried to focus on them steadily enough to pick them up; took a deep drag on her cigarette before bending adeptly at the waist and scooping them up on the end of her finger. ‘See?’ she said aloud, for the sake of the imagined company that comforted her when she was alone. ‘I’m not even actually drunk.’

      She carefully turned the keys over in her palm and selected the one for the car door. It slipped to an oblique angle between her fingers and she couldn’t quite slide it into the lock. The more she twisted her wrist to compensate, the more it rotated until the shaft was resting on the back of her hand. ‘Oh, for the . . .’ she sighed, and dropped them again.

      The hairs went up on the back of her neck then. She didn’t remember a lot, not lately, but the memory of all those films was clear in her head: panicking women with big 80s hair, fumbling their car keys to the ground as the killer bore down on them. Her pulse quickened in her throat, squeezing out her breaths. Her body chilled and prickled to high alert. Her mind raced. There was someone behind her.

      Annie spun around with a bark that first made her jump, and then, as she encountered no one, embarrassed her. She caught her breath as the adrenalin sparked out of her, and then she shook her head and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Annie,’ and bent to scoop up the keys again.

      She got one into the lock this time, but it was the wrong one, so she tried again, more successfully this time, albeit at the expense of a few more paint chips as she stabbed all around the door handle.

      Finally the door was open, and she took another look over her shoulder before she tossed her bag inside and her cigarette to

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