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Gone in the Night
Gone in the Night
MARY-JANE RILEY
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KillerReads
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www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Mary-Jane Riley 2019
Cover design Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Mary-Jane Riley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008340254
Version: 2019-03-27
For my parents, who did so much to encourage my love of books
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Day One: Morning
Chapter Two
Day One: Evening
Chapter Three
Day One: Evening
Chapter Four
Day One: Late Evening
Chapter Five
Day One: Late Evening
Chapter Six
Day One: Late Evening
Chapter Seven
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Eight
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Nine
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Ten
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Eleven
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Twelve
Day Two: Morning
Chapter Thirteen
Day Two: Late Afternoon
Chapter Fourteen
Day Two: Late Afternoon
Chapter Fifteen
Day Two: Late Afternoon
Chapter Sixteen
Day Three: Early Morning
Chapter Seventeen
Day Three: Morning
Chapter Eighteen
Day Three: Morning
Chapter Nineteen
Day Three: Late Morning
Chapter Twenty
Day Three: Late Morning
Chapter Twenty-One
Day Three: Evening
Chapter Twenty-Two
Day Four: Morning
Chapter Twenty-Three
Day Four: Late Morning
Chapter Twenty-Four
Day Four: Late Morning
Chapter Twenty-Five
Day Four: Evening
Chapter Twenty-Six
Day Four: Evening
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Day Five: Morning
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Day Five: Morning
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Day Five: Morning
Chapter Thirty
Day Five: Afternoon
Chapter Thirty-One
Day Five: Afternoon
Chapter Thirty-Two
Day Five: Evening
Chapter Thirty-Three
Day Six: Late Morning
Chapter Thirty-Four
Day Six: Afternoon
Chapter Thirty-Five
Day Six: Late
Chapter Thirty-Six
Day Six: Late
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Day Six: Late
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day Seven: Early Morning
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Day Seven: Early Morning
Chapter Forty
Day Seven: Early Morning
Chapter Forty-One
Day Seven: Early Morning
Chapter Forty-Two
Day Seven: Early Morning
Chapter Forty-Three
Three Weeks Later
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Mary Jane Riley
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
He watched them kill her. Not a needle in her arm, not a quick bullet in the brain, but blows to the head with a large, heavy rock – one blow to each temple. Then they rolled her over on the plastic sheeting they had laid on the floor and stove in the back of her head. The iron, meaty smell of her blood mingled with the sweat of her killers.
He tried to remember her name.
They would throw her into the sea and let the water and the rocks cover up their dirty work. She might never be found – after all, the sea doesn’t always deliver the dead back to the living.
Or maybe they would take her to one of the many out of the way foot crossings on the Norwich to London railway line. He didn’t have the strength or the will to intervene. Not yet. All he could do was watch and commit it to his memory. Commit that last look she gave him, that last sad, defeated look, to his memory.
By the time her body was found, there would be no evidence that she had been murdered.
DAY ONE: MORNING
Cora Winterton dabbed concealer under her eyes and applied shocking pink lipstick to her lips. She peered at herself in the mirror, then grimaced. She looked terrible. Nothing a few good nights’ sleep and some decent meals wouldn’t cure, but she wasn’t going to get those any time soon. Working nights was a bitch. Especially when she didn’t get much sleep during the day. Couldn’t do it. Even after all these years her body clock wouldn’t adjust to hospital shifts. But she wasn’t going to put it off any longer. She couldn’t pretend any more that Rick had moved sites or was staying in a hostel. Besides, she had been around all the obvious places, and plenty of the not so obvious ones and there was still no sign of him. But she had to check once more, there were still some people she hadn’t talked to.
Where was he?
Her head began to swim. She leaned forward and grabbed the sides of the washbasin, trying to breathe deeply and evenly. Lack of food, lack of sleep, worry about her landlord putting up her rent – all of that. More deep breaths and her head felt better.
Two cups of coffee, one cigarette and another application of lipstick later and Cora emerged into the misty gloom of the early morning. It was a good time to see the people she wanted to talk to – before they moved on to start their begging in shop doorways, or to find breakfast at one of the hostels in the city. She hurried down the steps and out onto the pavement, striding along to the underpass, glad she’d brought her umbrella.
With its walls of graffiti and stench of urine, the underpass linking her end of town with the shopping area was a favourite spot for the dispossessed and the vulnerable. Often it was littered with cardboard, empty drinks cans and bottles, old bits of clothing used as bedding, sometimes used needles. Although there had been an attempt to make the bare concrete walls more cheerful by covering them with paintings of Picasso-like figures in lurid colours, Cora often thought someone could die down here and never be noticed. Today it was the rowdy crowd, drinking cheap cider and knock-off spirits, leaning, or in some cases sagging, against the wall.
‘Corrrrrra.’
‘Hey, Tiger, how are you?’ She smiled at the man who had pushed himself away from the wall and staggered towards her, ignoring the catcalls from the other men and women. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Keepin’ warm,’ he said, holding a can aloft. ‘Pissin’ freezin’. Coppers moved us on this mornin’. Honestly, no bleedin’ hearts in them.’
‘Can I get you a coffee?’ she said. ‘A bit of breakfast?’
‘Nah you’re all right. Bit of cash’d be nice.’
‘Tiger—’ She shook her head.
‘I know, I know, I’d piss it up against the wall.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘Are you still lookin’ for Ricky-boy?’
‘Yes. Why, have you see him?’ Her heart leapt.
He shook his head. ‘Nah. We miss him though, don’t we?’ he shouted out to the others.
A general rumble of noise floated around the underpass. Tiger shrugged. ‘Sorry. Can’t help you. He’s a good mate, though. Find him soon, yeah?’
‘It’s okay,’ said Cora, ‘there are plenty of other places I can look.’ The familiar darkness settled around her head. She was never going to find him, but she had to keep looking.
And that was the depressing thing, she thought, as she tramped around the city in the drizzle that was getting harder and colder by the minute, there were plenty of other places to look, even in a city like Norwich which never used to have a homelessness problem. Now it seemed to be everywhere. People sleeping in shop doorways, in car parks, alleyways, even by the traffic lights outside the station.
And it was Martin, outside the railway station, bundled up in his sleeping bag, covered with old tinfoil, and lying on a bed of newspaper and used pizza boxes with his beloved dog, Ethel, who gave her the first bit of hope since Rick went missing.
‘Yeah,’ said Martin, sitting up and accepting a cigarette and a takeaway coffee from her with trembling fingers. ‘I saw Rick ’bout two weeks ago. Before I went to Yarmouth. Piss poor place that. Two weeks was enough.’ He hunched his shoulders against the wet.
Cora nodded. That was the last time she’d seen her brother, when she had tried to persuade him to spend at least one of the freezing nights in a homelessness shelter.
‘He had a smoke with me. Told me ’bout some men who’d come calling.’
‘What sort of men?’
Martin tugged the sleeping bag around his neck trying to stop the rain trickling down. He shivered. ‘You know, well-dressed, well-fed types. One of them wearing a suit, for fuck’s sake. Looked like Mormons. Wanted to know about him.’
Cora frowned. God-botherers? Do-gooders? Or the men they were expecting to see? ‘And what did he tell them?’
An early morning commuter tossed a few coins in the bowl that was always by Martin’s side. Ethel sniffed the bowl, but turned away when she saw there were no tasty biscuits in it for her.
Martin looked down, focused on the ground. ‘He said he told them he had nobody and he didn’t want no help from no one, unless they had a job to offer him.’
There it was. The guilt that squeezed her, that had made her search frantically for her brother whenever she could these past few days, that had interrupted what little sleep she had managed to grab for herself. The argument she’d had with Rick the day before he disappeared. When she’d told him she was done with helping him. It was time to call it off. She was frightened about what might happen.
It had started out as nothing really, as many arguments do. She had sought him out at his usual spot behind the solicitors off Unthank Road. Two of the lawyers looked after him occasionally, giving him food and coffee. Cora was forever grateful to them. That day she had gone to find him, determined to persuade him to have his hair cut – had offered to pay. There was a new Turkish barbers that had opened, she told him. They would do the lot. A wash, a cut, even a beard trim. Why would he want that, he’d said, he was perfectly happy with how he looked. It was necessary now, she knew that, he told her, shaking his head.
Cora had wanted to cry. Rick’s hair and beard were long and matted. Grimy. She hated that ratty beard. It symbolized how far they had fallen. He looked uncared for, unkempt. And she told him so.
‘I live on the streets, Cora. That’s what happens,’ he told her. ‘This is what I wanted. And now it’s perfect.’
She wanted to stamp her foot. ‘But you don’t have to. We can stop this. You can come home with me.’ She’d had enough.
‘No.’ He had that steely look in his eyes.
She knew she ought to stop, but she couldn’t. ‘Rick, I don’t want to do this anymore.’
‘Well, tough. Because I do.’
‘I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to see you on the streets with no one to care for you and no one to love you. I want you with me.’ She dashed away the tears that were trickling down her cheeks.
‘I thought you understood, Cora.’ His voice was hard. ‘This has to be done. This is my life now.’
‘I don’t know why you’re punishing yourself,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Please, Rick. Come home with me. Or at least let me find you a place in a shelter for a few nights.’
‘Stop it.’ He sighed. ‘Cora, this is exactly what you do. You come here offering to pay for me to have my hair cut, trim my beard, probably put pomade or whatever that stuff is on it, but it would make a nonsense of everything. It would make a nonsense of my life. Of our lives. Of what I need to do. I have a purpose. Leave it, Cora, leave me alone, let me get on with it, like we agreed.’
‘I want us to be together. I’m not strong enough without you,’ she whispered.
‘You are. You’re stronger than anyone. Now, leave it, Cora, for fuck’s sake.’
And she had seen that anger in his face, the anger that could spill over into something altogether more frightening, and she had turned and left. Almost running in her haste.
‘That’s right, Cora,’ he shouted after her. ‘Run away. Just like you always do.’
She stopped and turned. ‘You know what, Rick? You’re a loser. You think you’re making life easier for me? Well you’re not. You’re bloody not.’
And since then she hadn’t been able to find him. And how she bitterly regretted the words she had flung at him so carelessly, so thoughtlessly.
‘Rick didn’t tell you about a job, then?’ she asked Martin now.
‘Nah.’ He smiled at her. ‘He didn’t say anything.’ He stroked Ethel, who snuggled up even closer to him.
‘But it was after he spoke to them that he disappeared?’
‘Well, couldn’t rightly say the two things were, like, connected, but—’ Another shrug of his shoulders.
Cora wanted to know. She wanted to know right now whether the two things were connected, who the men were, what they had wanted with Rick. Whether he had done something really stupid.
‘They haven’t spoken to you then, Martin? These men?’
‘No, I ain’t seen them. Rick told me to be careful of ’em though. Come to think of it—’
‘What?’
‘Nobby said he’d been spoke to by some blokes.’ He sniffed, hard. Ethel moved away for a moment, then came back to his side.
‘Nobby?’
‘Yeah. He used to hang out in the doorway of the old bank. Said it was the nearest he’d ever get to any moolah.’
‘Okay.’ Cora tried not to show her impatience.
‘I haven’t seen him for a while. Or Lindy.’
‘Lindy?’
‘Lives in the grounds of St Peter Mancroft. By the hedge.’
‘Thanks, I’ll go and check it out.’
Cora could see Martin’s eyes beginning to close. ‘Martin, how about a night in the shelter?’ she said softly, reaching into her pocket for a biscuit for Ethel, who took it from her with careful teeth and a fair amount of slobber.
‘Nah. Thanks, Cora.’
She put her umbrella down by his side.
DAY ONE: EVENING
He was shivering, his teeth chattering, water dripping off his hair as he crawled out of the river and onto the shingle. The tee-shirt and boxer shorts he was wearing were sodden, clinging to his skin. He paused on his hands and knees, panting, exhausted, and looked around. There were lights in the distance, but not at this point of the harbour. Not here. Surely no one would have seen him?
The night was dark, there was neither moon nor stars, for which he was grateful. Less chance of being spotted.
Had he been missed yet?
He couldn’t stay here. He had to get moving. Get up. Get up.
His body was too heavy. He tried to unfurl, to stand.
So much effort.
He could do this. He’d been fit once. Muscle memory, that’s what he needed.
He gritted his teeth.
His head was pounding, there was a sickness in his stomach. He mustn’t think of what he’d had to leave behind. All that work, all those chances he’d taken and he’d had to get rid of it when he realized they were on to him. When he knew he had to escape. Right away. And he’d left her behind too. He’d wanted her to go with him, but she wouldn’t. Said she would slow him down. She would have done, and they could have made it together. Until it was too late for her.
Come on, come on.
Almost up. He stayed for a minute, back hunched, hands on the top of his knees, still shivering, always shivering. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt warm, when his head was clear, when he felt well. He couldn’t remember.
A car. He needed a car.
Shapes grew out of the shadows. A shed, boathouses made of timber, two fishing boats resting on the concrete. The smell of fish and diesel in the swirling air.
He listened.
All he heard was the wind whistling around the edges of the buildings, then he became aware of the wind drying his body, his clothes, making him shiver more deeply, right down to his bones, to the damaged organs in his body.
Cold.
Cold was a killer.
He took a deep breath and staggered towards an old shed. Hugging its perimeter, he peered around the corner.
Nothing. Nobody.
Lights, though. On the car park. Not many, but enough. Had to keep away from those.
He set off in a crab-like run, fear giving an edge to his strides. He was better now, had to be better, had to get to freedom, had to leave this place behind.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, back at the island. Lights twinkled in the distance, making the buildings look benign. There were no signs that someone – him – had escaped. No floodlights, no shouting. But then there wouldn’t have been, would there? Too risky, even for them. He tried to listen, to see if he could hear the sound of a boat, a speedboat perhaps, coming to find him.
Nothing, even the wind had stopped its moaning.
Either he hadn’t been missed or—
The alternative was too awful to contemplate. He couldn’t have come this far for them to be waiting for him, just around some corner.
He ran. Past houses towards the road. Down the road. And there. An explosion of relief. Lights. A pub. Perhaps he could get a car. Out here, in the country, they could be careless with their security. He began to pray he was right as his breaths became ever more shallow, the kicking he’d received in his ribs making itself known.
There were cars in the car park. Swish cars, nothing old, nothing he could hot-wire. Frantic, breath coming too hard now, he looked around. A BMW. A Mazda. A Land Rover. A couple of Fords. Which one? Which one?
He limped over to the Land Rover, his muscles seizing up more with every step.
It was dirty, mud-splattered. The windows were open halfway. He peered inside. The floor was littered with empty sandwich packets, beer cans, tissues. There was an old, hairy blanket on the passenger seat. It smelled of damp and dog.
He pulled on the driver’s door. His hand bloody hurt. It opened. He leaned across and pulled down the sun visor. A bunch of keys fell onto the floor. He thanked fuck country people were so trusting.
As he jammed the key into the ignition, something made him stop. Listen. He clamped his lips together so he wasn’t hearing the chattering of his teeth. He slowed his breathing, told himself to be calm. There it was. A faint sound. Was it a motorboat? Coming from the island perhaps? His heart began to jump in his chest, and he turned the key in the ignition.
A noise like a giant clearing his throat came from the engine.
He turned the key again – so hard it could have broken off.
The engine turned over once, twice.
Cold sweat was dripping into his eyes.
It fired. He said a thank you to a god he hadn’t believed in for a very long time.
Without waiting to listen, or even to look to see if anyone was coming for him, he released the handbrake and pushed his foot hard on the accelerator.
He hadn’t turned the lights on, and the corner came up too quickly. He turned, hard. Made it round on two wheels, tyres screeching. The Land Rover bounced back onto four, he was thrown out of his seat, then back down. He breathed again.
Where were the lights? Where were the fucking lights? It was so dark. No moon. No stars. No street lights. No more comforting lights from the pub.
He looked down for a likely looking switch.
Where the fuck was it? Where the—
There. Light.
He looked up to see a pair of eyes in front of the windscreen reflected in the headlights.