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 her 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.
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.’
