Big Sky Read online

  “Another transfusion of coffee?” Ronnie asked and Reggie sighed an assent. The hospital coffee machine was up for an award for the world’s worst coffee (quite a competitive field), but they had completely replaced their blood with it by now so one more paper cup wasn’t going to have much more effect.

  The girl had been half-naked when they spotted her cowering in a corner of the field last night. She was covered in bruises and had a badly swollen lip, but mostly she had just been terrified. She was muddy and scratched by thorns and brambles, and her appearance, not to mention her demeanor, gave the impression that she’d been hunted, running through fields and ditches and hedges to escape. Like prey. It was the kind of ghoulish plotline you got on something like Criminal Minds or Collier, not in real life. And yet here she was anyway, the one that got away.

  All thoughts of looking for Stephen Mellors went out of their heads when she appeared, not that there was any sign of him in that field anyway. There had been a couple of old trailers—total rust buckets—as well as a newer mobile home, but no one answered when they knocked on its door. All the blinds were drawn and it was impossible to tell what went on inside it. Stephen Mellors practicing mindfulness seemed unlikely.

  They had concluded that it was probably some kind of glitch in the GPS on Jamie Mellors’s phone and that Stephen Mellors was already en famille, chowing down on lasagne and chugging back his breathtaking red. Reggie had once located Sai in the middle of the English Channel, although he had turned out to be in a pub in Brighton when she phoned him to check. “Are you stalking me?” he laughed, but that was when they were together and he found the idea of stalking cute, not sinister, which was what it became later, apparently.

  They had gotten as far as a name with the girl—Maria—and had managed to ascertain that she was from the Philippines. It took much longer for it to dawn on them that the “Maria” she kept repeating so agitatedly wasn’t herself. Ronnie, reduced to pidgin English, pointed at herself and said, “Ronnie, I’m Ronnie,” and then pointed at Reggie and said, “Reggie,” and finally pointed at the girl and raised the questioning eyebrow.

  “Jasmine.”

  “Jasmine?” Ronnie repeated and the girl nodded vigorously.

  There was another name that she also kept repeating. They couldn’t decipher it properly but it could have been “Mr. Price.”

  “Did Mr. Price do this to you?” Reggie asked, pointing at the girl’s face.

  “Man,” she said, and raised her hand above her head.

  “Big man?” Ronnie said. More vigorous nodding, but then she started crying and talking about Maria again. She made an odd dumb show of tugging on something invisible around her neck. If they had been playing charades, Reggie might have guessed “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what Jasmine was miming. She and Sai had played charades a lot, just the two of them. There had been a lot of wholesome, innocent fun in their relationship, childish sometimes, even. Reggie missed that more than she missed all the other stuff. Or sex, as it was also known.

  They had put in a request for a translator but weren’t holding out much hope, certainly not until office hours kicked in. Ronnie went off to scour the hospital and came back with a Filipino woman, a cleaner—with a name badge that said “Angel”—and asked her to talk to Jasmine for them. As soon as they began to talk a torrent of words flowed from Jasmine, accompanied by a lot more crying. You didn’t need to speak Tagalog to know that it was a wretched tale she was telling.

  Unfortunately, before they were able to glean any real information, a dark presence chose that moment to darken the doorway of the side ward.

  “Hey up, it’s Cagney and Lacey.”

  “DI Marriot,” Reggie said brightly.

  Have you heard the news about your boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend?” Reggie echoed. Marriot couldn’t possibly mean Sai, could she?

  “Michael Carmody?” Ronnie hazarded.

  “And the prize goes to the girl in blue.”

  “What about him?” Reggie asked.

  “Dead,” Marriot said succinctly. “Last night.”

  “Murdered?” Reggie and Ronnie asked in unison, but the DI shrugged and said, “Heart attack, as far as anyone can make out. He won’t be missed. Is this your girl?” she asked, nodding at Jasmine. She sounded sympathetic, Reggie gave her Brownie points for that. Not that she’d ever been a Brownie, something she regretted now, she would have made a good one. (“You are a Brownie, Reggie,” Ronnie said. “Right down to your fingertips.”)

  “Where’s she from?” Marriot asked.

  “The Philippines,” Reggie said. “She speaks hardly any English.”

  “Fresh off the boat and straight into a massage parlor?”

  “I don’t know. This lady, Angel, is translating for us.”

  “Well, it so happens we’ve got another dead Asian lass on our hands,” Marriot said, ignoring Angel. “Found last night. Dumped at sea, I’m afraid. No ID. Looks like she was strangled, still waiting on the autopsy. It’s like buses, you wait ages for one dead foreign sex worker and then…”

  Reggie took back the Brownie points. “Ours isn’t dead,” she said, “and you don’t know she’s a sex worker.”

  “She’s a woman,” Ronnie added. “And she needs help.”

  “Yeah, hashtag MeToo,” Marriot said. “Anyway, dead or alive, she’s not yours anymore, we’re taking her. You can get back to your sleuthing.”

  They said goodbye to Jasmine. She clung on to Reggie’s hand and said something that Reggie thought must be goodbye in Tagalog, but Angel said, “No, she said thank you.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Ronnie said to Marriot as they were leaving the ward, “you might find your ‘dead Asian lass’ is called Maria.”

  “Wow. Gender and racial stereotyping all in one go,” Ronnie murmured as they left the ward.

  “Yeah, bonanza,” Reggie said.

  Just before Marriot had appeared and ejected them, Jasmine had paused for a drink of water. She had to sip it through a straw because of her split lip and they used the brief hiatus to ask Angel if Jasmine had said anything useful yet about what had happened to her.

  “She say same things again and again.”

  “I know,” Reggie said. “Maria and Mr. Price.”

  “Yes, and something else. I don’t know what. Sound like ‘sillerburtches.’”

  Angel,” Ronnie said.

  “It’s a popular name in the Philippines,” Reggie said. “It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if it wasn’t her name—if it was her job. Perhaps after you’ve earned your first angel badge you work your way up, rise through the nine ranks of angels and retire at the top of your profession as one of the seraphim. I like the idea of having a badge that says ‘Angel.’ Or a warrant card. ‘DC Ronnie Dibicki and Angel Reggie Chase. We’d just like to ask you a few questions. Nothing to worry about.’ Of course, you can be an angel as well. Angel Ronnie Dibicki.”

  “You’ve had too much coffee, sunshine. You need to lie down in a dark room. Hang on.” Ronnie put a hand on Reggie’s arm and held her back. “Look. Isn’t that the drag act from the Palace?”

  A man was standing at the reception desk filling out some paperwork. Dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt and a pair of moccasin shoes that had seen better days, he was virtually unrecognizable from the grotesque parody of a woman from yesterday. He looked as if he ought to be mowing his lawn and discussing the best route to Leeds over the garden fence.

  “Wonder what he’s doing here?”

  Sillerburtches? Silver birches, do you think?” Reggie puzzled as they made their way back to the car.

  “As in trees?”

  Ronnie trawled through the more abstruse outer circles of the internet on her iPhone. “All I can find is something in the Scarborough News from years ago. Silver Birches was a nursing home, closed after some kind of scandal—followed by a court case, I think. Mistreatment of residents, inadequate facilities, blah, blah, blah.
It had a long local history, apparently, started life as a mental hospital, a showcase of Victorian reform. There’s a suggestion that it was the model for the mental asylum where the character Renfield was incarcerated. Renfield?”

  “He’s a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Reggie said.

  “Oh, yeah, it says that next. ‘Bram Stoker’s visit to Whitby was the inspiration for…’ blah-blah-blahdy-blah. It’s not far from here—shall we swing by? Even though it’s absolutely nothing to do with us and Marriot would give us a right bollocking if she thought we’d gone rogue.”

  “No harm in a quick shufti, though,” Reggie said.

  “No, no harm at all. It’ll just take five minutes.”

  Be the Wolf

  Vince was dry-eyed with sleeplessness by the time the first light seeped through his thin curtains. The dawn chorus had cranked up before it was even dawn. Someone should have a word with the birds about their timing. It was a surprise to Vince to think that there even were birds where he was living. He wondered if they had to sing louder to hear each other above the racket of the amusement arcade. He wondered, too, if he would ever sleep properly again. Whenever he closed his eyes he could see her. The girl.

  Five minutes inside was all it had taken yesterday. There was an entrance foyer in which there was still evidence of Silver Birches’ former life as some kind of nursing facility—fire doors and exit signs and a couple of old Health and Safety notices about keeping doors locked and getting visitors to sign in. On the walls there lingered a limp piece of paper with a typewritten request for more volunteers to help with an outing to Peasholm Park, alongside a small, time-weathered poster announcing a Summer Fête, decorated with (badly) hand-drawn pictures of balloons, a tombola, a cake. The thought of confused, senile old people being jollied along like children with balloons and cake made Vince feel even more depressed than he already was. If that were possible. Better to go over a cliff than to live out the scrag end of your life in a place like this.

  He pushed his way through one of the wired-glass fire doors on the ground floor and found himself in a corridor. The corridor was lined with doors, all of which were closed except for one that stood wide open like an invitation. Inside the small room were two old hospital bed frames on which lay bare filthy mattresses.

  There was only one occupant of the room—a girl. A girl who lay crumpled and lifeless on the floor beneath one of the barred windows. There was a thin scarf around her neck, knotted tightly. The ends of the scarf had been cut just above the knot and the remainder of the scarf was still tied to one of the window bars. Her face was swollen and purple. It was a pretty self-explanatory scene.

  She was a speck of a thing, Thai or Chinese or something. She was wearing a cheap silver sequinned dress revealing legs covered with bruises and was quite obviously dead, but Vince crouched down and checked her pulse anyway. When he stood up he felt so dizzy he thought he might faint and he had to hold on to the doorjamb for a few seconds to steady himself.

  He left the room, backing out and closing the door quietly. It was the nearest he could get to a gesture of respect for the dead. In a daze, he tried the other doors in the corridor but they were all locked. He wasn’t sure—because his brain seemed suddenly untrustworthy—but he thought he could hear noises from behind the doors: a soft moan, a little sob, small scuffling, snuffling sounds as if mice were in the rooms. It was the kind of place that Vince thought of as existing in other countries, not this one. The kind of place you read about in the newspaper, not the kind of place that someone you had known most of your life had “business” in.

  He could hear a man’s voice coming from somewhere at the back of the building and he followed the thread of sound like a sleepwalker. It led him to the large back door. It was a double door, accessorized with all kinds of bolts and locks, but its wings were standing wide open to reveal the concreted backyard beyond. Tommy was framed in the diptych of light. Vince’s heart sank. Tommy. He was talking to his dog, the big Rottweiler, Brutus, that put the wind up Vince. He was being loaded by Tommy into his Nissan Navara. Sitting in the passenger seat was the Russian bloke who worked in Tommy’s yard. Vadim? Vasily? More of a brute than Brutus. The dog looked eager, as if it were about to set out on a hunt.

  Vince stepped into the yard. The bright sun dazzled after the chill of the darkness inside. He had forgotten what summer was. He had forgotten what daylight was. He had forgotten everything except for the girl’s discolored, swollen face. Tommy caught sight of him and said, “Vince?” He was staring at him as if he’d just met him and was trying to assess him as friend or enemy.

  Vince’s mouth was so dry that he didn’t think he could speak, but he managed to bleat, “There’s a girl back there.” His voice sounded odd to his ears, as if it was coming from a place far away, not from inside him. “She’s dead. I think she hung herself. Or hanged,” he corrected himself absently, although why he was worrying about grammar at a time like this was beyond him. He waited to hear Tommy give a reasonable explanation for the circumstances they found themselves in, but Tommy explained nothing, he just kept staring at Vince. He’d been a boxer once. Vince supposed he knew how to psych his opponent out before the fight began.

  Finally Tommy growled, “What the fuck are you doing here, Vince?”

  “I came with Steve,” he managed. That much was true. The sun was dazzling, like a spotlight aimed at him. He’d walked onstage and found himself in the wrong play, one he didn’t know the words to.

  “Steve!” Tommy yelled without looking around.

  Steve appeared from around the corner of an old outhouse or garage. The yard was surrounded by an assortment of semi-derelict buildings. Steve was in a hurry and didn’t spot Vince at first. “What is it?” he said. “Because you need to get a move on, Tommy, she’s going to be miles away by now. Have you phoned Andy?” In reply, Tommy silently tilted his head in Vince’s direction.

  “Vince!” Steve said, as if he’d forgotten about him. “Vince, Vince, Vince,” he repeated softly, smiling regretfully. He might have been talking to a child who had disappointed him. “I told you to stay in the car, didn’t I? You shouldn’t be here.” Where should I be if not here? Vince wondered.

  “What’s going on?” Tommy snapped at Steve.

  “I don’t know,” Steve said. “Why don’t we ask Vince?” He drew nearer to Vince and put his arm around his shoulder. Vince had to suppress the instinct to flinch. “Vince?” Steve prompted him.

  Time felt as if it was standing still. The bright sun fixed in the sky was never going to move again. Steve, Tommy, and Andy. The Three Musketeers. Everything fell into place. It wasn’t entertaining enough for the universe that he had lost his job and his house, or that he was under suspicion for murdering his wife, for God’s sake. No, now he had to discover that his friends (golfing friends, it was true) were involved in something that was—what were they involved in, exactly? Keeping sex slaves? Trafficking women? Were the three of them psychopathic serial killers who by chance had found they had the same taste for murdering women? At that moment all bets, however outlandish, were off to Vince.

  He hadn’t realized that he’d voiced any of these thoughts aloud until Steve said, “Traffic’s just another word for the buying and selling of commodities, Vince. It says so in the Oxford English Dictionary.” Vince was pretty sure the dictionary had other definitions of it too. “Profit with no loss,” Steve added. “Plenty of money in the bank and always more to come. Do you know what that feels like, Vince?”

  The sun was dazzling his brain. He closed his eyes and breathed in the heat. He was in a new world now.

  It was suddenly very clear to Vince. There was no meaning to anything. No morality. No truth. It was pointless for him to object if there was no longer any consensus about what was right or wrong. It was something you had to decide for yourself. Whichever side you chose, there would be no repercussions from divine authority. You were on your own.

  “Vince?” Steve prompted.


  “No, Steve,” Vince answered eventually. “I don’t know what that feels like. I imagine it feels pretty good, actually.”

  He laughed suddenly, startling Steve into removing his arm from Vince’s shoulder. “I knew you three were up to something!” Vince said triumphantly. “It all makes sense to me now. You secretive buggers, you might have let me in on it.” Vince grinned, first at Tommy and then at Steve. “Room for a fourth musketeer?”

  Steve clapped him on the back and said, “Good man. Great to have you on board, Vince. I knew you’d get here eventually.”

  The digital bedside clock said 5:00 a.m. He may as well get up. He had a lot to do today. It felt good to have a purpose for a change.

  Blood Poisoning

  “Kippers.”

  “What?”

  “Can you pop into Fortune’s this morning and pick up kippers?”

  “Kippers?”

  “Jesus, Andrew. Yes, kippers. I’m not speaking a foreign language.” (She may as well have been.) “For tomorrow’s breakfasts. The couple in Biscay asked especially for them.”

  Andy had gotten home just after five in the morning after being out all night with Tommy looking for Jasmine, their runaway. And failing to find her. Where was she? Picked up by the police and spilling the beans on them all? He was hoping to make a silent reentry, but the larkish Rhoda was already up.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked.

  “Went for an early-morning walk,” he bluffed.

  “Walk?” she said disbelievingly.

  “Yes, walk. I’ve decided to get fit.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me,” he said patiently. “Wendy’s death’s made me realize how precious life is.” He could tell that she didn’t buy any of it. He didn’t blame her. And anyway, what was precious about life? It was a throwaway thing, a bit of paper and rags. He thought of Maria, lifeless like a toy, broken beyond repair. Tiny as a bird that had fallen from the nest before its time. His first thought was that she must have overdosed. Or been slapped around too much. “Hung herself, the stupid bitch,” Tommy said.