We left rather quickly after that. Santa gossiping with the appalled mothers—bitches who loved throwing insults at white trash like us. As we hurried past, I gave that mangy reindeer a belting right hook. Didn’t get to see the damage—we were out the door before security could catch us.
I’d expected Mum to hit me or at least shout. But she didn’t. She just wept. Sat down at the bus stop and wept. Pity, really—it’s one of my happiest memories.
29
Her visit was an unexpected pleasure. They hardly ever had visitors—who in their right mind would come here?—and those who did come were usually up to no good. Thieves or thugs. The police were seldom to be found here and you could forget about Social Services. What a joke they were.
Her mother had jumped when the doorbell rang. Marie was so engrossed inStrictly, she hadn’t heard the footsteps coming down the hall. But Anna had. Whenever Anna heard noises outside, her heart beat a little faster. None of the other flats were occupied, so unless it was junkies seeking an empty flat or Gypsies on the sniff, then it could only mean they were coming forthem. The footsteps slowed, then stopped outside their front door. She wanted to alert her mum and grunted as best she could, but Flavia was doing the fox-trot and Marie was hooked. Then the doorbell rang—clear and confident. Marie shot a look at Anna—a moment’s hesitation—then decided to ignore it.
Anna was glad. She didn’t like visitors. Didn’t like surprises. And yet she was curious. Because the footsteps down the corridor were light and clip-cloppy. Like someone was wearing heels. That made Anna chuckle inside. She hadn’t heard anything like that since the whores moved on.
The doorbell rang again. Just once—polite but insistent. And then they heard her voice, calling their names, asking if she could speak to them. Marie turned down the TV—perhaps if she couldn’t hear them, she’d think they were out and would go away. Pointless, really—the light and noise from their flat were like a beacon in the darkness. Then the doorbell rang for a third time and this time Marie got up and padded to the front door. Anna watched her go—she hated being left alone. What if something happened out there?
But then Marie came back, followed by a pretty woman clutching some plastic bags. She kind of looked like a social worker, except she wasn’t depressed and her clothes were all right. She looked around the room, then walked over to Anna and knelt down to her level.
“Hi, Anna. My name’s Ella.”
She had such a warm smile. Anna liked her instantly.
“I was just telling your mum that I work for an organization called Shooting Stars. You might have seen our ads in the local newspaper. I know your mum likes to read it to you.”
She smelled lovely. Like roses.
“Every year we bring Christmas hampers to families like yours that find it hard to get out and about. How does that sound? Good?”
“We don’t do pity in this house,” Marie interjected sharply.
“It’s not pity, Marie,” Ella said, rising. “It’s just a helping hand. And you don’t have to take it. There’s plenty of others who’d love to get their hands on these goodies, believe you me!”
The word “goodies” seemed to do the trick. Marie sat quietly as Ella took the tins and packets out of the bag. It was a real treasure trove—Turkish delight and chocolate ginger on top of all the usual stuff, plus soups and smoothies and liquid sherbet for Anna. A lot of thought had gone into it—Anna was surprised anyone cared enough to go to so much trouble. Ella couldn’t have been more attentive, asking Marie a load of questions about Anna: What did she like to have read to her? Was she a fan of Tracy Beaker? What did she watch on TV? Anna basked in the attention.
This year they’d got lucky. This year they were on someone’s radar. Marie was chuffed and the party spirit descended briefly as she went in search of the sherry. Anna looked at their visitor. She was smiling and nodding, but now she seemed tense. Anna thought that perhaps she was on a tight schedule, but she couldn’t have been, because when Marie came back Ella insisted on opening up the mince pies. She didn’t have one herself, but was keen for Marie to tuck in. They were freshly made—a bakery on St. Mary’s Road had cooked up dozens of them for free in a fit of Christmas spirit.
Ella seemed to relax after Marie had polished one off. And it was then that things started to go strange. Marie started to feel unwell—faint and nauseous. She tried to get up but couldn’t. Ella hurried over to help, but then suddenly and without warning pushed Marie down onto the floor. What was she doing? Anna wanted to yell and shout and fight, but could only grunt and cry. Now Ella was pinning her mother down on the floor. She was tying her hands roughly behind her back with nasty-looking wire.Stop, please, stop.She was shoving something in her mouth; she was shouting at her. Why? What had she done wrong? Then “Ella” looked at Anna. It was as if she were a different person. Her eyes were cold now, her smile even colder. She walked toward Anna. Anna struggled inside, but her useless body was frozen and helpless. Then the woman put a bag over the young girl’s head and everything went black.
30
Sandra Lawton. Age: 33. Stalker.
Helen scanned the file. Sandra Lawton was a romantic obsessive who when spurned turned nasty. She already had three convictions for putting a person in fear of violence by harassment. Safe to say her treatment didn’t seem to be working and her belief that smart, educated men in positions of authority secretly wanted to sleep with her was as strong as ever.
Helen scrolled on to the next one. Sandra was nuts, but she wasn’t violent.
Isobel Screed. Age: 18. Cyber stalker.Again, Helen rejected her. This girl was a slip of a thing who spent her life abusing soap actresses via text and Twitter. She threatened to cut their wombs out and so on, but by the looks of it never left her bedsit, so she could be ruled out. The classic cyber coward.
Alison Stedwell. Age: 37. Possession of an offensive weapon. Actual Bodily Harm. Multiple harassment charges. This was more promising. A serial, experienced offender who had attempted to fire a crossbow at a coworker she’d been stalking before she was arrested and later institutionalized. She was out in the community again now, under supervision apparently, and hadn’t offended for several months. Was she capable of putting something like this together? Helen slumped in her chair. Who was she kidding? Alison might be a nasty piece of work, but she wasn’t exactly subtle in her techniques—her stalking was visible and deliberately so—nor was she a looker. Peter Brightston’s description of a raven-haired beauty could in no way apply to the gappy-toothed blob that stared back at Helen from the screen. Another one to scratch off the list.
She’d been using HOLMES2 for hours now, searching out every British female stalker convicted in the last ten years. But it was fruitless. The individual they were hunting was exceptional, a far cry from the clumsy stalkers Helen was looking at now. Their stalker must have shadowed her victims for weeks, so as to discover Amy and Sam’s propensity for hitching, as well as the ins and outs of Ben and Peter’s weekly trips to Bournemouth. To have plotted their abductions in ways that allowed them to be executed on remote roads, in areas with no mobile phone reception, was impressive. But also to find locations to hold them in where they wouldn’t be found or heard, where they could go slowly mad with hunger and terror, was something else. Such an individual wouldn’t be buried away in the bowels of HOLMES2; she would be a living legend already, the regular subject of police seminars and literature.
After the discovery about Ben’s car, Helen and Charlie had reinterviewed Amy, Peter and their families, searching for any evidence of stalking. Amy and Sam were easygoing types, not watchful in the slightest, who lived on a busy student campus. Nothing—or nobody—had stood out as odd. Peter Brightston said he would have noticed an attractive woman following him, but it sounded like empty bluster—he had had no reason to be suspicious or on his guard. Ben was a different kettle of fish; he had been by nature cautious and careful, but he was not around to ask anymore and his fiancée insisted he hadn’t expressed any fears to her in the run-up to his abduction.
The one small break they did have came as a result of Ben’s car. The killer had had a very narrow window in which to punch a hole in Ben’s fuel tank. A matter of three to four hours at the most, as the group meeting at the Bournemouth office was shorter than usual that day. Ben usually parked in the office car park, but that was full because of a client lunch on-site, so he’d parked in a lot round the corner. Instinct told Helen that anything out of Ben’s normal routine could have posed his killer a problem and so was worth investigating. CCTV showed Ben and Peter parking on the fourth floor, not far from the lifts. They left, and five minutes later a female figure in a lime green Puffa and white Kappa cap walked past. Was she scouting the scene? Probably, because moments later a gloved hand suddenly appeared in front of the security camera, spray-painting out its view on the world. Helen had asked for the footage to be analyzed, enhanced if possible, and had set Sanderson the task of checking CCTV footage from the vicinity of the lot to work out the suspect’s route into the building, but for now they had to work with what they’d got. It wasn’t much, but it was a fleeting view of their killer and it seemed to confirm everything Amy and Peter had told them about her. Not least the fact that she was a she. There had been some in her team—Grounds and Bridges particularly—who’d questioned whether a woman was really behind all this. But they had their answer now.
Helen shut down HOLMES2 and headed out and round the corner to the Parrot and Two Chairmen pub. It was the station’s Christmas do today and despite the fact that Helen viewed the event as wholly inappropriate in the circumstances, she had to go. It wasn’t done for senior officers to duck it—crazy, really, as the last thing rank and file want when they’re letting their hair down is their bosses hanging around.
Helen saw her team and pushed her way through the crowd to find them. They were all uncomfortable at being off the case when there was still so much to do, but they were making the best of it. Mark especially was in good spirits, proudly sporting his diet tonic like a trophy of sobriety. Still, he looked well on it—his lean face had more color, his eyes more sparkle. He greeted Helen warmly and seemed keen to include her in the group banter about the nightmare of New Year’s, etc. He was laying it on a bit thick, she thought, and on more than one occasion Helen caught a knowing look from Charlie.
“So who fancies a kiss under the mistletoe?”
