Cold as Ice

Chapter 30

Ebony left Jeanie to drive straight home to spend some time with Christa whilst she got the bus home with her two bags of clothes. She stepped off the bus and was on her way to the local Spar shop to pick up something to eat. She’d been told by Carter to go home and make sure she had what she needed to prepare for going undercover. She had a new set of clothes, and had even had a lesson in putting on make-up from the woman in the Body Shop. Now she was going home to go over the details for the hundredth time. She was already beginning to think herself into another person’s skin, trying hard to imagine the sights and smells of the Caribbean and had listened to endless newsreels from the last few years to make sure she knew enough about what had been going on in the place she was supposed to have lived in. First she’d go to the Spar and get herself some comfort food to sustain her whilst she continued her studies.

A car was parked up across the street as she left the Spar with her shopping. Two men were sitting inside who she didn’t recognize. She could tell it was a police car – something about the way it was parked and where; its colour, the position of its number plate. She was mulling over what it could be: maybe a drugs bust, maybe a hit on illegal workers in the shop. She kept an eye on the men in the car as they stared straight ahead. Then, on some unseen signal, they switched on the engine and accelerated forward just as Ebony got close. Ebony turned to look behind her to see what they were headed for. She was beginning to feel like she might be accidentally about to get caught up in something. Her heart was racing – would they need her to assist? Was she in their way? The car seemed to be heading straight for her. They drew up just ahead of her and she saw the back passenger door swing open. Then her world went black as hands gripped her and she was pushed down headfirst and thrown into the car.

Ebony’s eyes were wide open as she sat in the back of the car, held firm. Her hands were behind her back, tied with a plastic tie. Nobody spoke to her. She could only smell the cloth of the inside of the bag she had over her head. She could hear her heart beating.

They drove for twenty minutes, around in so many circles that Ebony lost all sense of direction. They turned into a place that echoed, as if it were underground. They kept the engine running and she heard the car door being opened, felt the rush of cold air as she was hauled from the car. She heard the car drive away.

They marched her along an open space and she felt the presence of two men. She listened to their footsteps. Ebony felt the air around them. The smell of chemicals. They stopped and Ebony heard the clank of a chain being loosened, slipped out of its hold and dropped onto the ground. She was pushed forward and she tripped over, landing on concrete. A door was closed and her hood was removed. Two men stood looking down at her. They were both thick set in their mid-thirties to early forties, one taller than the other. Both bald. They were dressed the same, almost in a uniform of dark clothes. One of the men was taking his jacket off. Ebony felt herself beginning to shake. She was trying to keep the panic down and her wits about her. She had to stay sharp. She looked around her to assess the situation. It was a windowless room with a concrete floor and bare brick walls. There was strip lighting on overhead, hanging down from the ceiling. There were shackles on the floor, bloodstains on the concrete. There was a sink in one corner. The room was icy cold. Ebony’s breath was white. In another corner of the room was a metal tank up at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground. She knew what it was – a sensory deprivation tank. She had read about them. She knew that inside the tank a few hours was equal to weeks of solitary confinement in an ordinary cell.

The shorter of the two men hauled her to her feet and pinned her against the wall. He placed his hand in the middle of her chest and kicked her ankles back until she was touching the wall with her feet and then he came close to her face so that his nose was touching hers. It was many years since Ebony had been subjected to an attack like this. As a child she’d been assaulted many times in the power struggle that went on in kids’ homes. She had learnt to keep her head down, to comply, to wait for it to be over. It had been many years and countless blocked memories since she had felt so vulnerable.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ebony Wilson.’ Ebony’s voice came out with a Caribbean accent. She had known that the trial would happen but even so, it felt very real to her. She had to try to stay focused and remember it was not going to last for ever. They will not kill me, she said to herself. A small voice in her head added: they will try to and break you though.

‘Where’ve you been living for the last twelve years?’

‘Jamaica.’

‘Address?’

‘One hundred and seventy-three Manning Street, Trench Town, Kingston.’

‘Who did you live with?’

‘My grandparents.’

‘What was your grandfather’s middle name?’

‘Levi.’

‘You’re lying. What was the colour of your front door?’

‘Blue.’ Ebony heard the sound of metal grating against metal – the taller man was opening the tank in the corner of the room. The man talking to her grinned.

‘You’re rubbish at this. You must enjoy pain because that’s what you’re going to get.’ Ebony looked across at the other man. He seemed softer, more human. She thought about talking to him directly but then thought against it.

Ebony looked back at the other man. He was stockier, bigger. He watched her and the expression on his face was one of contempt mixed with pleasure in her pain. He looked like the type of man who tortured kittens.

‘What date did you leave there?’ The short man slapped a flat hand against her abdomen. It doubled Ebony in pain and she snorted white breath as she answered.

‘February the eighteenth 2012.’

‘What day was it?’

‘Monday.’ She breathed through the pain.

‘You’re police, aren’t you?’ He slapped her again.

She raised her head and looked him in the eyes.

‘No.’

He kicked her feet away from the wall. She fell backwards and banged her back as she bounced off it and landed on her side on the floor. She sat up quickly and flinched as he pulled out her legs and rested a heavy boot on her kneecap as he rocked it with his weight.

‘You’re police – I’m going to break your leg just to start with. Tell us and I’ll spare you the pain.’ He ground his boot into her thigh as she squirmed to get away. The other officer came forward and breathed into her face. His voice was soft.

‘Give us one good reason why we shouldn’t kill you here and now?’

‘Because I have a small child. A boy – Archie.’

‘What’s his date of birth? Which hospital was he born in?’ The shorter officer took over again.

‘Uh…’ Ebony couldn’t think. She knew this – she must remember. ‘Uhh… Queen Mary’s, Trenchtown.’

‘Wrong. You’re police, aren’t you? Do you think we’re stupid?’

‘No.’

Ebony was hauled over to the tank and her legs were tied and she was lowered inside the pitch black. The lid was placed on the tank and she could see nothing, feel nothing, no sound except blood pumping. Ebony closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

I can do this. She closed her eyes just to rest them. She tried to imagine herself on a beach. She was with her friend Micky. Camber Sands: a beach that stretched forever within warm sun and clouds that filled the sky. Lying on their backs they stared up at the sky, the hot sand beneath them and the salty breeze skimming their skin; they looked for shapes in the clouds.

‘There’s a croc.’ Micky had been right There was his tail, his eye. ‘Or maybe an alligator,’ Micky laughed. ‘How many people know the difference, do you think, Ebb?

She didn’t answer. She sighed and smiled. This was the happiest place in the world.

‘If the world ended now, Micky, we could just float up to heaven from this beach.’

‘Yeah, maybe a tidal wave as big as a mountain would just pick us up. We’d drown, and every single day for the rest of our lives would be like this.’

‘Not for the rest of our lives – we’d be dead.’

‘You know what I mean. For the rest of whatever it is afterwards.’

‘We’d be together,’ said Ebony, watching the world turn above her. ‘But do you think we’d fall out?’

‘We would, a bit. But then we could go to the other ends of the beach for a few hours and when we met again we’d be so happy to see each other.’

Two months after they visited Camber Sands Ebony was returned to her mother and she never saw Micky again.

Now in the tank she felt like she was drowning inside the tidal wave and all she could hear beneath the water was the sound of her own blood pumping around her body. Something held her in the darkness. She called out for her mother and heard her laugh and Ebony’s face was pressed against a wall and someone was touching her in the darkness. Someone was hurting her, trying to get her clothes off, and she was fighting so hard.

She gasped and opened her eyes at the sound of the tank being opened above her head, squinting as light and pain flashed across her eyes and skull. A voice breathed in her ear. She recognized it as that of the officer who had interrogated her. She couldn’t see him. He stood behind her with the lid still half on the tank.

‘You’ve been in here for five hours. Did it seem like longer?’ Ebony didn’t answer. It felt like days. ‘Want to talk to us before we go home to our families for a few days and forget all about you here? I want to explain something to you. Officially we were never here and neither were you. Eventually someone might find you – follow the stink. How does it feel to be dying in here?’ Ebony tried to answer but she couldn’t. The panic which had built up in the last five hours had left her speechless.

‘You ready to tell us who you really are?’

‘No.’ Ebony’s voice was barely audible.

‘Do you want to stay in this tank?’

‘No.’

‘You want us to take you home?’ He started to replace the lid of the tank.

Ebony found herself starting to scream. ‘Yes! Yes!’

‘Answer me truthfully and you can go – what’s your name?’

She paused. ‘Ebony Wilson.’

Ebony was dropped off at her home along with her shopping bags. She limped inside the house feeling like she was about to vomit. Her muscles ached from the confinement and cramp. Her stomach hurt. She stood in the hallway and listened. The house was quiet, everyone was at work. She left her food in the kitchen and then walked quickly up the stairs to her bedroom on the top floor. She threw the H&M bags down and drew the curtains and went back to lock the door. Then she got undressed quickly and got into bed, pulling the duvet over her head.

Robbo received the phone call from the undercover training team.

‘The two main attributes needed to make a good UC are acting ability and arrogance. I don’t see either of those in your candidate but… Willis passed, just, but there were several issues that, if we had more time, we would have worked on. This part of the course is normally three days. We had eight hours altogether.’

‘Is there one aspect we need to be particularly worried about? asked Robbo.

‘Yes. She can cope with physical and verbal abuse. She can handle pain. What she can’t handle is abandonment and there are some issues buried – she experienced something nasty in the isolation tank. Whatever she’s been through in her life it’s not finished with her yet. I can tell you, if we’d had longer, she would have cracked, definitely. And the biggest problem I can see is that she cannot read people’s personalities, can’t read the signs. She didn’t try and talk her way out of it. She stood there and took it. She waited for it to be over.’

Robbo called Carter.

‘She’s not ready.’

‘In what way?’

‘She stood there and took it without trying to talk her way out of it.’

‘If she were too slick, it wouldn’t work.’

‘We’re not talking about slick. She is not good at judging character, the team report says.’

‘As if we needed to be told that,’ scoffed Carter. ‘You know as well as I do that she has a lot to learn as a detective.’

‘Yes but she is likely to make fundamental misjudgement of character under stress.’ Robbo paused to see if Carter wanted to interrupt again but he didn’t. He continued: ‘She handled some things better than expected: pain, isolation. But we knew she would. Ebony has no trouble spending time on her own. She has a high pain threshold. She’s used to being hurt mentally and emotionally.’ He paused again. ‘You listening, Carter? I don’t want her put at risk like this. She was brought up to know only the barest affection from strangers, to know how to manage the mind of a madwoman like her mother.’

‘Yeah. I hear you. But when and if the time comes, when she meets Hawk, she won’t be with someone normal or balanced. She will be facing someone like her mother and she will be just the right person to be doing that.’

Carter gave Ebony a call.

‘You did well.’ She was coming around from her sleep. She took the phone from the side table and took it under the duvet with her. She smiled to herself. She knew he would lie.

‘I didn’t realize how hard it would be. I could have easily blown it. I forgot some key facts they asked me. My mind went blank when they asked me all about my grandparents, all about my Jamaican home, where Archie was born.’

‘Bound to, Ebb. You’re on a crash course here. You did fine. The boys on the undercover team said you nailed it.’ Ebony rolled her eyes, smiled. She was tempted to say ‘bullshit’ but resisted. ‘It starts tomorrow, then, Ebb. You won’t be able to come back into Fletcher house until it’s over. Everyone thinks you’ve gone off on a course to become a FLO.’

Ebony pushed the duvet away and lay on her back looking at the stained ceiling rose. She thought for a few seconds.

‘Ebb? I think you can do this.’

‘I hope so, Guv.’

‘You can still back out, Ebb.’

Ebony breathed in loudly through her nose, shut her eyes and rested the phone on her cheek.

‘No. I’m not backing out, Guv.’

When the phone rang that night Tracy heard it in her sleep. She had put it just outside the bedroom door. She leapt out of bed and ran for it, breathless, stumbling in the darkness. She saw it glow as it vibrated on the floor.

‘Hello?’ Tracy could not stop herself from shaking violently. She stood in the darkness of the lounge, listening. ‘Hello?’ she repeated.

‘TRACEEEEEE.’ She gasped as his voice boomed in her ear. ‘This is all your fault. You betrayed me today, Tracy… I thought we had a deal… an understanding.’ His voice, liquid and deep, was distorted by his breathing. He was breathing hard. She had to listen hard to understand what he was saying. ‘Danielle’s told me how you abandoned her.’

‘What? I didn’t. I had to give her up. I didn’t want to. Please let her go. She has her little boy Jackson.’

‘You make sure I don’t regret leaving him alive, Tracy. You make sure he forgets his mum fast. Now you tried to make a fool of me; you’re as guilty as I am for the killings. I want to play a game with you, Tracy. It’s called tighten the noose. How tight is up to you.’

Tracy shook her head; she clutched the phone tight. She wanted to throw it down but she couldn’t.

‘You abandoned your child and then you married Steve. How did that work out for you, Tracy? I’ve stood outside your house. I know where you work.’

Tracy gasped. Her heart raced. She thought she would pass out. She leant on the wall for support.

‘You fascinate me. You epitomize everything I hate. You plaster yourself in make-up and spend all your time talking nonsense about this and that product. It’s all lies. You wear a mask to trap men. You’re just a blow-up doll, Tracy – worthless. The one job you had in life – motherhood – you ran away from. The one thing nature made you for you turned your back on; not even the vilest of nature’s creatures do that. You abandoned your child and created a false life for yourself. You’re ugly inside. You’re festering under your skin. You should strip it off, all of it, get down to the muscle and bone and see what lies inside you. Skin and bone and bare flesh. Just liars, all of you.’

Tracy could hear him wheezing. She could hear him masturbating. She wanted to put the phone down but she had to keep him talking. She had to play along with him and give the team a chance to trace him.

In the background she thought she heard the sound of squealing.

‘Ahhh. There she goes. She’s turning blue now. It’s all your fault. Shall I describe her to you? Her eyes are starting to bulge. Her face is swelling. Her tongue is protruding. I think she’s ready for me.’ Tracy looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. Twenty more seconds to three minutes. ‘Are you ready, Tracy?’

The line went dead.

Robbo shuddered as he watched the line go dead on his screen. He had listened to the call. It came from a mile radius of the Angel Islington. A mile was a lot of ground in the middle of London. Now he knew that the press conference hadn’t worked and that Ebony was their only hope.