Last Rites Read online

  ‘We talked about it before,’ he said. ‘Your future. What awaits you?’

  Sarah shook her head. She tried to see behind the torch but it was too bright. ‘I don't know, you tell me,’ she said, and then she started to cry. ‘I don't know what you want.’

  ‘Don't be scared,’ came the reply, followed by a low chuckle. He was enjoying this. ‘Consequences, Sarah,’ he said. ‘That's all you are interested in. Fear of them. They hold you back.’

  Sarah sank to her knees. ‘I don't know what you mean,’ she wailed, but then she scuttled backwards as she heard his steps in the dirt floor, coming towards her, slow and deliberate.

  ‘Your time is running out,’ he said as he got closer. ‘I am not your enemy. Fear is your enemy.’ And then he laughed again, this time low and mean.

  Her head hung down and she dug her hands into the mud, cold between her fingers. ‘Please, please, please,’ she sobbed. ‘Let me go. I won't say anything. Just let me go home. Please.’

  He paused, and then said, ‘That's a lie, and it's wrong to tell lies.’

  Sarah looked up, sucked in air, tried to calm herself down. ‘I can't do this,’ she said. ‘I don't know what game you are playing, but I don't want to play any more.’

  ‘It's no game,’ he said. ‘I want to see what you see, that's all, just that moment.’

  ‘What moment?’

  ‘The final moment,’ he answered, his voice turned into a growl. ‘It's unique, that glimpse, when you know what lies ahead, the answer to everything. The final look back on yourself, and that last look into the future. Is there life beyond what we know?’

  ‘So I'm going to die?’

  He laughed. ‘We're all going to die, Sarah.’

  Sarah put her face in her hands. ‘What about Luke?’ she said quietly. ‘He'll tell the police.’

  He laughed again, but louder.

  ‘What's so funny?’ asked Sarah, but she felt her stomach turn as she guessed what he'd done. She put her arms over her head and leaned forward, so that her forehead touched the soil. It was cold on her face, and images of Luke flashed through her mind. Smiles, laughs, good times, all rushing into her head. She started to tap her head lightly against the soil. Then she got faster, and her moans turned into screeches, the pain as she banged her head a distraction, until she was rocking up and down, her arms clasped around her body.

  She looked up at him. ‘You've killed him,’ she screamed. ‘You fucking monster!’

  He knelt down so that the hood was next to her face. ‘He didn't come to help you, did he?’ he mocked. ‘He stayed in bed as we took you to the car. What was it? Drunk? Or just not bothered?’

  Tears streamed down her face. She clutched her stomach, his words making her want to retch.

  ‘Maybe he thought it was you running up the stairs,’ he continued. ‘He was still under the sheets when I ran in there.’

  When Sarah didn't respond, he leaned into her ear and whispered, ‘Would you like to kill me? Right now, if you had the weapon, would you do it?’

  Sarah didn't answer.

  ‘You could do it, right now. Your hands around my neck. I would fall over, you would overpower me.’

  Sarah stayed silent, but as she felt his eyes on her, even through the cloth, she spat at him.

  He wiped off her spittle. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘there's not much that separates us. Just my courage, and your cowardice.’

  He stood up and left the room. And as the door slammed shut, the lights came back on, and the sound of the heartbeat returned, louder this time.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bobby was playing on the floor as I browsed the internet, looking for information on Sarah Goode. He was talking to himself, soft chirrups, all part of his game. I liked the distraction. I worked better with a background sound, much different to the hush of Blackley Library.

  The library had been my first stop after leaving Katie, to get copies of the stories written about Sarah. It was a long Victorian building, an old workhouse, with stained glass and arched doorways, incongruous among the glass shop-fronts further along the street, where bored sales assistants stared out of the windows and fiddled with their necklaces, the lunchtime rush long gone.

  I was able to spend an hour making copies of the articles that had been written about Sarah, and now they were spread across the table. They all had the same theme: a pretty young teacher had killed a boy and run away. It wasn't explicit, but all week long there had been tributes to Luke, about what a nice young man he had been, sporty, outgoing, good looking. The comments about Sarah were different, tinged with surprise, at how a popular young teacher, vibrant and pretty, could kill someone.

  I started to trawl through the Google hits once I'd read the newspaper articles, to find out more about Sarah, and it only took a few pages to start to build up a picture of her life. Sarah was listed on Friends Reunited, a jokey entry, saying how she had left school but then gone back, alongside her graduation picture, showing Sarah with a proud smile, her face dotted by freckles, her parents alongside. On other websites, I found news from her workplace, a state school on the edge of Blackley, not often a first choice when the applications went in. A school play. Ofsted reports. A charity event.

  I browsed Facebook for her, it was always good for a quote, and wasn't surprised when I found her. I couldn't access her page, though; Sarah would have to accept my ‘friend request’ for me to be able to do that. I sent a request anyway, it only took one click, and then I turned to look at Bobby. He had found the play dough made by Laura a couple of days before, just salt dough laced with food colouring. He was cutting into it with a plastic knife, his tongue darting onto his lip with concentration.

  ‘What have you got there?’ I asked.

  He looked up, distracted from his game, and then he beamed at me, the dimples he'd inherited from Laura flickering in his cheeks. ‘I've made you a pizza,’ he said, and held up a lump of green dough criss-crossed with lines.

  I found myself smiling back at him, but I felt a kick of guilt as well. He shouldn't be making things for me. He should be making it for his father. What was I doing, making him live up here, so far from everyone close to him?

  ‘That looks great,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to eat it now?’

  Bobby smiled proudly and brought over the lump of dough and placed it on the table in front of me. I sat him on my knee and tickled him, enjoyed his squirming and his giggling.

  ‘When's Mummy back?’ he asked between laughs.

  ‘I don't know. Soon.’

  ‘Do you like your pizza?’

  I mimicked some lip-smacking sounds. ‘The best one I've ever had.’

  When he looked pleased with himself, I asked him if he could make me a cake. Bobby hopped off my knee and went back to his place on the floor.

  I was about to pick up my papers when I heard a car crunch onto the gravel outside the front door. Bobby looked up and then ran to it. As he looked outside, he shouted, ‘Mummy's here.’

  I felt some of his excitement; I always did when Laura came home. While we hadn't been getting on recently, as soon as I heard the car I wanted to see her smile, wanted to feel that sense of excitement of us all being together. Her dimples, the hint of red to her brunette, the colour of the London Irish. And those private moments always came to me, of the Laura that only I knew: the feel of her skin under my hand, the way she kissed, soft and slow, those breathless whispers.

  But when Laura strode into the house I sensed the darkness of her mood. She threw her bag onto the table and smiled a hello, but it was perfunctory and brief. Bobby ran to her and wrapped his arms around her waist. Laura kissed him on the top of his head, then gently peeled his arms from her and marched towards the kitchen.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Why shouldn't it be?’ came the shout back, but I could hear the frustration in her voice.

  I joined her in the kitchen and found her browsing the wine we stored in a rack by the fridge.

>   ‘It must have been a bad day,’ I said.

  Laura picked out an Australian white, selected on price, not reputation, and put it in the freezer to cool.

  ‘Sometimes alcohol is the answer,’ she said.

  ‘What's wrong?’ I asked.

  Laura folded her arms and looked down. I didn't think she was going to say anything, but then she blurted out, ‘I went to the murder team and told them what you were doing.’

  ‘And how did it go?’

  She looked up at me and scoffed. ‘Oh, just fine, once they'd stopped laughing at me.’

  ‘Why would they laugh?’

  ‘Because they're pricks,’ Laura snarled. ‘I'm just the skirt who spends her life processing other people's arrests. They put them in a cell and go home, and then leave me to sort out the mess. I'm the one who works late when we need more evidence, not the person who brought them in.’

  ‘It's not for much longer,’ I said, cajoling. ‘The Court Welfare Officer is coming round the day after tomorrow, you know that, and then the hearing is after that. Once we have it formalised that Bobby stays with us, you can go back to a normal police job.’

  ‘I want my career to amount to something, Jack, but it seems like I'm the only one making sacrifices,’ she said, her voice getting angrier. ‘Geoff's job hasn't changed, and he doesn't have the day-to-day stuff like I do.’

  ‘Like we do,’ I corrected her. ‘It's both of us, not just you.’

  Laura stopped for a moment, and then she sighed. She stepped forward and put her arms around me. She put her head into my chest, and as I kissed her hair I could smell the cells, the scent of stale bodies and stress. I put my hands on her cheeks and lifted her head up. There were tears brimming onto her lashes.

  ‘Just be patient,’ I said softly. ‘We're nearly there.’

  She wiped her eyes. ‘Sometimes I just wonder at how much I want it, how there must be an easier way to live my life.’

  ‘What, go back to London?’ I queried, and then regretted voicing it, putting it out there for discussion. I felt my throat go dry as soon as the words came out.

  ‘Would you want me to?’ she asked.

  I pulled her closer, put her head tight into my chest. ‘You'll need to improve your interview technique if you're going to get on,’ I whispered, ‘because you can't ask stupid questions like that.’

  We stayed like that for a few minutes. When Laura pulled away from me, wiping her eyes, she asked, ‘How was your day? Is the story getting any better?’

  ‘It's getting interesting,’ I replied. ‘I spoke to Katie again, Sarah's lodger.’

  Laura raised her eyebrows. ‘You're getting keen. She'll think you're a stalker. Good looking, I presume.’

  I shrugged noncommittally There was no answer that would be the right one.

  Laura turned away, about to go back to Bobby, when I said, ‘Can I ask you something about the Sarah Goode case?’

  Laura stopped, and then turned back slowly. ‘Probably pointless. If I know the answer, I won't tell you anyway.’

  ‘Nothing about letters sent by Sarah Goode, after she went missing?’ I queried.

  Laura paused at that. ‘What kind of letters?’

  ‘Are there different types?’ I said. ‘Just normal letters. I've been looking at the newspapers and there is no mention of them, but Katie mentioned them.’

  ‘What if they are so significant that the rest of the press have agreed not to say anything about them?’

  ‘That's what Katie said to me,’ I said, ‘and that's why I'm interested.’

  Before Laura could respond I heard a ping from my laptop. It was an email arriving. I walked through, expecting an offer of fake Viagra, but what I saw made me gasp.

  Laura must have heard my reaction. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It's Sarah Goode,’ I said. ‘I guessed she would be on Facebook, and I found her. I sent a friend request, just so I could write up that there was no response.’

  ‘And?’ asked Laura, coming close.

  I clicked on the link in the email, just to make sure, and then I stood up and grinned.

  ‘She's accepted the request,’ I replied, pointing at the screen. ‘Now that makes an interesting angle.’

  Laura leaned forward, curious.

  ‘She looks happy,’ said Laura, looking at the profile picture.

  I clicked on Sarah's pictures, and there was a succession of family photos and ones of Sarah at play: at a party, a bottle of beer raised for the camera; on a fun run, her arm around some friends, their faces flushed. It was fun-loving young woman stuff, the story of a life she used to have that would never be the same again. She didn't update her page very often; perhaps she had joined on a whim – there were few friends in her profile. I noticed that she listed her status as single.

  ‘This means one thing,’ said Laura, ‘that she must be near a computer. I wonder if we can get the Facebook people to tell us where she is posting from.’

  I printed off the page and clicked the events section, where people listed their diary.

  ‘Shit!’ I exclaimed.

  Laura tapped me on the arm, pointing at Bobby. I held up my hand in apology and then tapped at the screen. From Laura's gasp, I realised that she had read it too.

  In the events section of Sarah's Facebook profile, for 31st October, were the words, ‘ I die.’

  I gave a slow whistle. ‘That's four days away,’ I said.

  Laura looked grim-faced. ‘It looks like I'm going to have to go to the murder squad again.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Morning already. Sarah guessed it from the way it seemed a little warmer, although not much. She reckoned it had been eight days now, but it was hard to mark time when days and nights seemed almost the same: the constant spotlights, the relentless, steady noise of thumping heartbeats.

  Sarah had shivered through the night so that every minute crawled by, her arms wrapped around her chest, no bed, no bedding, no clothes. She had paced around the room to generate heat, twelve paces in an oval pattern before she was back where she started, so she did twelve more, and then twelve more after that, the dirt getting stuck between her toes. She rolled in the mud on the floor, cold at first, but it was like an extra layer of skin once it set hard onto her body.

  Maybe the mud had saved her. The early hours were torture, but she knew time was the only cure, that soon the air would become warmer, just. She waited for the sounds of movement.

  But as she got warmer, Luke came back into her thoughts. Had they really killed him, or was that all part of the game? Maybe he was still alive and in a room just a few feet away? If she could get to him, maybe they could work together.

  She paced faster, but the view never changed. Just a stone wall, and then another after that, broken only by her shadow cast by the spotlights, shifting as she walked faster, more heat, more sound, her feet moving in time with the pulsing coming from the speakers.

  She had taken to chanting. As she paced, and then as she jumped on the spot, Sarah would say, ‘Keep strong, keep strong’, like saying it would make it come true.

  But it was easier to be strong when she was on her own. There was no one to hurt her, just her own thoughts and dark despair.

  Just then, the speakers went silent. Sarah heard someone outside the room. She froze, felt her stomach lurch. What was coming now?

  Her strength disappeared when she heard the lock turn in the door.

  Laura looked down at the arrest handover package in front of her. It was an A3 piece of paper, folded over, holding a print-out of the incident log and custody record, the former telling her how the job had been called in, the latter telling her what had happened to the prisoner since his arrival.

  Pete buzzed around her desk, trying to see what she had.

  ‘A scrapper,’ she said, her voice struggling to hide her contempt.

  ‘Todd Whitcroft?’ he asked.

  She checked the name on the front sheet. ‘Yeah, that's him. Do you know him?’<
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  Pete raised his eyebrows. ‘Blackley's premier-league scrapper. Feeds his kids by stripping the town's roofs of their lead and cashing it in at the scrap yard. He's moved on to cables now, because he thinks they're less traceable.’

  ‘Maybe he's got scared of heights,’ Laura said as she skim-read the front-sheet. ‘It looks like they caught him with a van full of them.’

  Pete sighed. ‘Oh great.’

  ‘What's wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Todd Whitcroft never admits anything. He will say he had permission, or else he will say nothing at all.’

  Laura sensed the day stretching ahead, and she was overtaken by a sense of gloom.

  ‘So we have to catalogue it all,’ she said, her voice weary, ‘just so that we can prove where it came from.’

  ‘That's about it,’ he said, as he hopped off the desk and headed for the door. ‘No time like the present.’

  Laura got to her feet wearily, and then followed Pete out of the room. As they walked along the corridor, Pete bouncing small talk off the walls, Laura heard conversation coming out of the Incident Room further along. Her cheeks turned red as she remembered the humiliation from the day before, but she couldn't help glancing in as she went past. It looked like most were working the phones, chasing down old leads just to check if they had missed something. Only one person looked up, the cop in the polo shirt with the crew cut from the day before. He was still casually dressed, much different to the suits around Carson, and he smiled a greeting to Laura as he noticed her, a nod of reassurance.

  Pete pressed the security button and they both went into the cobbled yard at the back of the station. Laura groaned as she saw the dirty cables spilling out of the back of a battered Transit van.

  Pete passed her the clipboard. ‘You make notes, and I'll get in the van and shout out what we have.’

  Laura was about to object that she wasn't his secretary, but then she looked at her hands, clean and scrubbed, and then at her suit. Maybe there was a time for chivalry.

  ‘Have you thought some more?’ the masked man asked Sarah as he walked into the room. He was still again, his arms by his sides.