‘Something’s wrong.’
Detective Sergeant Eli Diaz, formerly of Thetford CID, latterly seconded to the Major Investigation Team at Police Headquarters, and until today engaged in the search for a number of young women missing from across the county, took a moment to consider the redundancy of his statement.
He was standing at the foot of a metal-framed single bed, bolted into the ground through the black rubber floor. The bed was in a steel mesh cage some twenty feet across, the cage in a basement, the basement concealed beneath a garage, the garage nestled beside a stone cottage in a twenty-acre clearing in the forest.
It belonged to a man largely suspected, at least until that moment, of harbouring Erica Shaw, formerly a missing young woman, latterly upgraded to the status of fugitive, and last seen in front of the garage an hour ago, shooting one person dead and attempting to kill two of Eli’s fellow detectives before effecting her escape.
And now one of those detectives, Sergeant Ali Green, formerly of Norwich CID, latterly of the aforementioned Major Investigation Team, and currently somewhere up there alone with that man, was not answering her phone.
Diaz snatched up his own phone from the floor where he’d thrown it and made for the door of the cage, throwing an afterthought of a wave at a constable who was about to feel very alone and decidedly uneasy. ‘Keep trying to call her,’ he barked.
He took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the splintering pain in his skull from misjudging the height of the false cupboard as he burst through into the garage.
‘Green,’ he snapped, seizing on the first pair of eyes to meet his own; one of the DCs from Norwich Road, he thought. Winters or Winterbourne or something. ‘Have you seen Ali Green?’
A shrug. A confused shake of the head. A voice from somewhere behind him: ‘She’s with the owner. They were heading to the house.’
‘Fuck.’ Less a word than a grunt, choked by panic. Diaz bolted from the garage into chaos and driving rain, shouldering aside the crime scene techs struggling to erect a white tent over the body on the drive, forgetting his breathing, legs out of sync, staggering at full tilt toward the house, nothing like the machine he imagined himself on his morning run, as though the absence of lycra and trainers and a Fitbit reduced him to a gangly, stumbling foal.
He knew before he got there that he was out of control and wasn’t going to stop, that if the door didn’t break when he hit it, then this was going to hurt.
It was ajar. He wasn’t expecting that. It cannoned back on its hinges, barely slowing his progress, and his feet found a bundle of coats and an overturned hat stand and then he was sliding on his face across the hallway, breath punched out of his lungs, skin peeling from his nose and elbows and knees.
He didn’t notice the pain. Fear had him on his feet and pushing off from the wall that had further dented his head and he whirled around from door to door, from kitchen to stairs to living room.
He stopped dead still and held his breath; strained his ears over the roar of the rain and the chatter of radios and uniforms and diesel engines.
Silence.
He gambled on the kitchen, sliding to the edge of the door frame and peering inside. Empty. Chair upturned. A slippery crimson mess on the splintered oak floor. His stomach flipped and he tasted bile in his throat. Christ no, what did he do to her?
Opposite the kitchen, the living room. The door open. A sense of something inside. A sofa. A spray of dark hair. Stillness.
Diaz panted three painful breaths and, with one eye on the top of the stairs, edged to the door, darting his head just far enough inside to get a snapshot of the room.
Empty, except for her.
‘Shit,’ he muttered. His back to the hallway. His ears wide open. ‘Green?’
No reply.
‘Ali?’ he snapped, loud enough to startle himself.
Nothing.
He blew out the adrenaline from his lungs. Checked the stairs again. Winced at the pain in his head. Squeezed his fingers into his palms and nodded some kind of vain self-encouragement. Then he said, ‘It’s okay, I’m here,’ and stepped inside the room.
It was cold. Cold, and still, and quiet. The television was on, but it wasn’t regular programming, it was something else, and Diaz knew what from a single glance. It was a high-definition feed from inside the cage, where the constable he’d just left behind was still poking at his phone, presumably searching for a number he didn’t have.
It was dark, too. The curtains were drawn across both of the windows, one to the front and one to the side, and the lamps were off and the fire unlit and everything was shadow; the hulking bookcases overstuffed with books and trinkets and paperwork, the corner tables with their strange disfigurines, the long, low couch and the wingback chairs and the coffee table with the two full mugs and the solitary mobile phone – everything but the TV screen and the dome of light that it cast, unflickering but dancing with particles of dust, and reflected as two tiny pinpricks of silver in Ali Green’s eyes.
They were open, but vague, unfocused. Her legs had fallen open and her hands lay at her sides, fingers curled into her upturned palms, and her hair was splayed roughly over the back of the sofa where she’d slumped down in her seat. Her mouth was open and as Diaz knelt, cursing, between her knees, he could see the pool of saliva around her tongue and hear it bubbling in her throat as she took each shallow, unsteady breath.
‘Ali,’ he whispered, suddenly painfully aware of the silence and the need to preserve it, to hear whatever small sound she might make, should it be her last. ‘Can you hear me?’ He placed a hand on her arm and could feel a trembling that he couldn’t see, a vibration almost, from deep inside her somewhere, but she didn’t respond, didn’t so much as blink.
He leaned in closer then, moved to put his lips to her ear, but the blood stopped him. A thin trail, trickling through the neat channel between her ear – such delicate ears, he noted, and pointed sweetly at the top, like pixie ears – and the back of her jaw, and down the side of her neck and onto the collar of her shirt, to bloom inside her jacket.
He painfully swallowed his breath and rocked back on his haunches and pulled out his phone from his pocket and said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, Ali, you’re going to be okay,’ as calmly as he could, as though he believed it. And he punched in the code to unlock the phone, and keyed in the number to summon help, and he looked up into her eyes and was startled to see that she was looking right back at him in piercing focus, and her lips were moving as though she were trying to speak, and he let the phone drift away from his ear as he nodded and said, ‘You’re okay,’ and placed