Eeny Meeny

36

The decorations were coming down and life was getting back to normal. There’s something peculiarly sad and depressing about an office still swathed in tinsel after the Christmas festivities have passed. Some people like to keep them up until well into January, but Helen wasn’t one of them and she’d tasked a pliant constable with removing every last bauble and streamer. Helen wanted her incident room back the way it should be. She wanted to refocus.

Predictably Whittaker wanted an update, so Helen headed straight to his office. The press coverage of Sam’s murder seemed to have calmed down a bit – a large seizure of cocaine at Portsmouth harbour had distracted the local crime reporters for now – and Whittaker was happy enough, so their catch-up was brief for once.

Returning to the incident room, Helen could tell immediately that something was up – there was a tension in the atmosphere, with no one quite daring to meet her eye. Charlie hurried over, then paused, unsure how to start. It was the first time Helen had ever seen her tongue-tied.

‘What’s happened?’ Helen demanded.

‘Sanderson just took a call from uniform.’

‘And?’

‘They’re down at Melbourne Tower.’

Oh God no.

‘A mother and daughter found dead in their flat. Marie and Anna Storey. I’m so sorry.’

Helen looked at her as if she was mad – as if she was playing a sick joke on her – but Charlie’s face was so solemn and pained that Helen knew immediately that she was telling the truth.

‘When?’

‘Call came in half an hour ago. But you were in with the Chief and -’

‘You should have interrupted. For God’s sake, Charlie, why didn’t you come and get me?’

‘I wanted more details first.’

‘What details? Why?’

‘I think… we think that this might be the third abduction.’

With the eyes of her team on her, Helen tried her damnedest to keep her composure. She instigated the usual procedures, but her mind was already halfway across town. She had to get down there to see for herself if it was really possible. Biking to Melbourne Tower she thought of all things – good and bad – that they’d been through together. Was this really the end that had been waiting for them all along? Was this their reward for the years of struggling through?

Some days life really kicked you in the throat. Helen had felt sick when Charlie told her the news. She desperately wanted it to be a mistake and wished with all her heart that she could turn back time and somehow make it untrue. But she couldn’t – Marie and Anna were dead. A team of demolition experts recceing the estate had spotted a weird SOS message, daubed on a bedsheet and hung from a fourth-floor window. They investigated but couldn’t raise anyone, despite the fact that the lights and TV were still on, so rang the police. The attending constables had been none too pleased – it had taken them ages to get the iron grille off and the front door was so dead-locked it took repeated attempts to barrel-charge it. They’d been convinced all along that the whole thing was a waste of time – that the inhabitants were deliberately hiding or high on drugs or some such. But on entering, they’d found a mother and daughter lying together on the living room floor.

Their first thought was suicide. Lock yourself in and do the deed. Except on further investigation they hadn’t found any keys – to the deadlocks or indeed to the padlocks that secured the grilles. Stranger still, the victims had a loaded gun. It was lying on the floor beside them, unused. There were no ligatures, no empty bottle of pills or bleach – no visible signs anywhere of suicide. An examination of the exterior showed no signs of forced entry and nothing seemed to have been taken. It was all very odd, they were just… dead. The flies that circled their bodies suggested they had been dead for some time.

Helen told uniform to search the block and surrounding grounds – ‘We’re looking for a mobile phone’ – whilst she joined forensics with the bodies. She’d never lost her cool in front of fellow officers but she did now. It was too appalling seeing the pair of them like that. They had been through so much, suffered so much and yet always the love had been there. There had always been smiles and laughter, even amidst the daily degradation and abuse. Helen was convinced this wasn’t suicide on these grounds alone and the presence of the gun put it beyond doubt.

Helen walked into the tiny kitchen to recover her composure. Idly, she flicked open the cupboards, the fridge. No food. Not even tinned or preserved food. The whole space had been cleared of anything edible and yet… the bin was empty. There were no wrappers or bottles lying around. As the thought started to lodge in her mind, Helen felt vomit rising. She forced it down and marched over to the sink. Turned on the tap. Nothing. As she’d expected. Picked up the phone. Dead. Helen sank down on to the nearest chair.

‘You think this is her doing?’ Mark had entered the room. Helen nodded, then:

‘She locked them in. Took their food, cut off the water, cut off the phone, left them the gun. We won’t find any keys to the deadlocks or the padlocks because she took them with her…’

Mother and daughter trapped in their own home, unable to escape, unable to rouse anyone who might be concerned about them. It was the most lonely way to die. If there was any consolation in the fact that ‘she’ hadn’t won, hadn’t succeeded in making Marie kill her own daughter, Helen didn’t feel it now.