Wrong Place Read online

  WRONG PLACE

  Michelle Davies

  MACMILLAN

  To Mum and Dad, for everything

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  Acknowledgements

  GONE ASTRAY

  Prologue

  21 August 1999

  ‘Please stop, you’re taking this too far. We can’t just leave.’

  As the rest of them ignore her again and traipse on ahead, she wonders if she’s making sense. She knows her speech is slurred, the effect of a drinking session that began at three in the afternoon and lasted until just ten minutes ago, when the clock chimed midnight. The amount of alcohol she’s consumed has numbed her lips and thickened her tongue and it’s like she’s trying to talk under water. She inhales deeply in a futile attempt to sober up and when she exhales all she can smell is cheap white wine on her breath.

  ‘Niall, we have to go back,’ she says, more clearly this time.

  Niall does not react. He strides ahead, his back rigid and his pace brisk, leaving the rest of them stumbling in his wake, her trailing last. She calls to Ross and Kelvin to make them stop but neither does. It’s as though Niall is pulling them along by invisible thread, like puppets.

  ‘Why won’t anyone bloody well listen to me? We need to go back and unlock the . . . Ouch!’

  Her feet are bare and her right foot has landed on a thistle. She wants to stop, to bend down and rub away the sharp pain, but she is worried about being left behind. Staggering forward along the mossy path, braced for the next sting, she wishes she’d worn flat shoes instead of the platform sandals she’s now forced to carry in her right hand, the purple suede ankle straps curled round her fingers like maypole ribbons. In her left hand she grasps a black satin clutch bag.

  The moon is a sliver away from being full and patches of light are pushing through the branches bowing across the woodland path. The light expands and grows brighter as the canopy starts to thin and she realizes they are nearing the edge of the woods. Panic catches in her chest.

  ‘Stop!’ she screams.

  But Niall’s pace remains constant, his long, muscular legs propelling him forward. She forces herself into a run to catch up with him, barging past Ross and the others. She has to make Niall see sense. He is the orchestrator of this nightmare.

  Almost level with him, she forcibly jabs the heels of her shoes into his back. He spins round in fury.

  ‘We have to go back,’ she yells in his face, even though part of her is scared of what he might do to her for shouting at him, because she’s already seen how far he will go when provoked. Ross and Kelvin look apprehensive too, but they remain mute, happy for her to put herself in the firing line. For a second she hates them both.

  ‘No we fucking don’t,’ Niall hisses, spittle flying off his tongue and landing on her chin. His face is twisted in anger and she can’t believe she ever found him attractive. The sculpted cheekbones and thickly lashed brown eyes she had secretly lusted over earlier now make her stomach turn.

  ‘Niall. Please. I want to go back.’

  She’s crying now, she can’t help it. Unmoved, Niall grabs her hair at the crown and its coarse, mousse-enhanced volume affords him a generous handful. He yanks her along the path and she shrieks in pain, begging Kelvin and Ross to stop him, but they just trot behind like a pair of obedient dogs following their master.

  ‘Get in the van,’ Niall snarls as he finally lets go of her hair.

  She sees they’re back where they started, in the lay-by. Niall’s is still the only vehicle parked there and he wrenches open the rear door and orders her to get in. Her mind reverses to the journey there: there had been nowhere to sit but on the floor and they had laughed hysterically every time the van went round a corner and they were sent flying into each other. It already seems a lifetime ago.

  ‘No, I’m not leaving,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Don’t you care what you’ve done?’

  Before he can answer, she feels the whisper of warm breath on the back of her neck and hears Ross’s voice in her ear.

  ‘Do as he says,’ he mutters. ‘Don’t get yourself hurt.’

  Ross had boasted earlier that he knew Niall better than anyone, and his warning is enough to make her clamber into the back of the van. She’s wearing cut-off denim shorts and the metal floor is freezing against her bare legs as she sits down. Niall gestures for Ross and Kelvin to climb in beside her, then slams the door shut on them. The noise makes her flinch.

  As Niall starts the engine, she tries to catch Ross’s eye but he won’t look at her.

  ‘We’ve got to stop him—’

  ‘Just shut the fuck up,’ he whispers, casting a fearful glance towards the front of the van, where Niall is revving the engine. ‘Give him a minute and he’ll calm down. Then we’ll go back.’

  The speed at which the van pulls away sends her flying sideways and her right temple catches on the wheel arch. She tries to pull herself upright but they swing first to the left, then to the right, accelerating with every turn, tossing them around like buoys at sea.

  ‘Slow down!’ she screams, certain she’ll throw up. Ross pitches across the van and lands heavily on her legs; he too yells at Niall to slow down but the response from the driver’s seat is to go even faster.

  She’s crying uncontrollably now. She wants to go home. They should never have accepted Niall’s invitation to meet for drinks, much less agreed to go for the drive with him once they were all tanked up. But he had been so persuasive and charming . . . right up until the point he snapped.

  They hit a straight bit of road, giving Ross the chance to climb off her and help her sit up. There is no partition between the front and back so she reaches forward and grabs Niall’s shoulder over the top of his seat, clawing at his black T-shirt with her fingernails.

  ‘Stop the van!’ she shouts hoarsely.

  As he shrugs her hand off, Niall yanks the steering wheel to the right. The van veers across the road and blinding yellow light suddenly illuminates the windscreen. She falls backwards, dazzled. A second later the high-pitched squeal of tyres burning against tarmac fills the van, immediately followed by an almighty bang.

  The impact is violent and crushing and the next thing she knows their vehicle is rolling over and over. Pain slams through her body as she bounces off the c
eiling and off the sides and within seconds she loses track of which way is up. Her face crunches into metal and she screams in agony as she’s blinded by blood pouring down her forehead. Somewhere nearby Kelvin is screaming too.

  Then, just as suddenly, the rolling stops. She lands awkwardly and heavily, the bones in her lower legs splintering as easily as glass. She tries to cry out but shock has robbed her of speech. The pain is unlike anything she has ever experienced – her body feels like it’s been ripped in two. She shakily wipes the blood from her eyes and tries to stay calm but it hurts so much to breathe and her vision is blurring around the edges. As the blackness claims her sight, she manages to find her voice one last time. It is small, pitiful, barely a whisper. It doesn’t sound like her any more.

  ‘We have to go back.’

  1

  November, present day

  The carpet in the sitting room was a mishmash of brown, red, orange and purple swirls, a relic from a decade when taste was dubious at best. Years of footfall had worn it away in places and even though her ankle boots were shod in protective blue plastic and she was keeping to the metal plates of the common approach path laid down by forensics, Detective Constable Maggie Neville was still mindful to avoid the frayed white patches as she crossed the room.

  The rustle of her temporary footwear alerted the two men already there to her arrival. One of them, Paul, was from the Crime Scene Investigation Unit and he was crouched on all fours, peering into the gap between the bottom of the high-legged sofa and the carpet. The other man, whose name Maggie didn’t know, was from the Imaging Unit, the camera in his hands a giveaway. He was taking photographs of whatever it was Paul was pointing to. Both men looked up and nodded a greeting.

  ‘Is that where she was found?’ Maggie asked.

  Paul’s white coverall crackled as he shifted his sizeable bulk to standing. He pulled down the mask that covered the lower half of his face.

  ‘Yep. There are no blood traces anywhere else in the room, so she fell where she was hit.’

  ‘She’s the first victim to be attacked from behind,’ said Maggie. ‘The others were approached head on and pushed to the floor.’

  ‘Lucky for her she didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘Is there anything that does match the other break-ins?’

  ‘It looks like they got in the same way,’ Paul replied. ‘There’s a glass pane broken in the back door: presumably the girl knocked at the front again to distract the victim while the bloke smashed his way in the back. Did the little shits get much this time?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. The victim’s obviously not in a position to talk and the granddaughter who found her went to hospital with her. We’ll interview her as soon as we can to find out what’s missing.’

  ‘When you do, ask her about this.’

  Paul reached beneath the sofa with his gloved hand and pulled out an empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin. The bright blue glass glinted in the light being cast from the fringed brown lampshade in the centre of the ceiling. The overhead illumination was necessary, despite it being three in the afternoon, because a dense hedge growing outside the front-room window blocked natural light from getting in.

  ‘Judging by the blood on it I’d say it’s what was used to knock her granny out,’ said Paul, holding the bottle up so Maggie could inspect the dark stain smeared on the base.

  ‘Why didn’t the glass break?’

  ‘If it was full it might’ve done, as liquid puts pressure on glass at the point of impact,’ Paul explained. ‘But as there’s no trace of gin on the carpet I think we can safely assume it was empty. We’ll test it for prints and DNA – if they’re stupid enough, they might’ve drunk straight from the bottle.’

  ‘What makes you so sure they brought it with them when they broke in? It could be the victim’s,’ said Maggie.

  ‘I’ve had a scout around in here and in the kitchen and dining room and I haven’t found any other booze, not even a bottle of cooking sherry,’ said Paul. ‘If the victim didn’t keep any alcohol in the house, isn’t it less likely to be hers?’

  ‘I guess. How soon until we get the lab results back?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘How long’s a piece of string?’

  His nonchalance riled Maggie. She wished his boss Mal Matheson, the Chief Crime Scene Examiner for their force, was there instead, but he’d been called out to a more serious case in the north of Buckinghamshire. Matheson always grasped the need for urgency and Maggie knew he would’ve expedited the bottle for testing. This was the fifth distraction burglary in Mansell in three months and the most violent yet.

  ‘Is DS Renshaw out there?’ said Paul as he carefully placed the gin bottle in an evidence bag. ‘I should show her this.’

  ‘She’s taking a statement from the neighbour. I’ll see if she’s finished.’

  Maggie picked her way back across the carpet then stepped into the narrow hallway. It was dingy and cold – the hedge outside the front also buffered daylight coming through the two glass panels set in the front door. The asymmetric rows of framed photographs, decorative plates and brass hangings jostling for space on the walls again added to the sense of being closed in.

  Having to squint to see didn’t help the headache she was nursing. She wasn’t in the habit of coming to work with a hangover but the celebration last night that had precipitated it was worth the pain, as it had marked the end of the trial involving one of her previous cases, the abduction of a teenager called Rosie Kinnock. Easing her way down the hall towards the kitchen, she pondered Paul’s assessment that today’s attack was by the same young couple believed to have already robbed four elderly women in their homes in Mansell. Based on the accounts provided by those victims, the couple were in their late teens/early twenties and on each occasion had been dressed head to toe in black. The female, said to be well-spoken, used the same sob story each time about being mugged for her mobile phone and would ask to use the victim’s landline. Meanwhile, her partner broke in through the rear of the house. The descriptions became vague after that, as none of the victims had got a good look at the pair’s faces. The girl’s would be partly covered in what the police suspected was fake blood, presumably to make the mugging story seem more convincing, and the male accomplice always wore a baseball hat pulled down low so his face was half hidden.

  The previous victims were all in their eighties and lived alone on quiet streets. Another commonality was the appearance of their homes: the front doors of all were shielded by dense bushes, gifting the ‘Con Couple’ – as the local paper was now calling them – privacy in which to carry out the distraction break-ins. The raids took place in the daytime, before schools finished for the day, when fewer residents were around to take any notice. Maggie and her colleagues at Mansell Force CID were certain the girl wasn’t applying the fake blood to her face until she was partially hidden on each victim’s doorstep, as there had been no witness sightings of an injured young woman beforehand.

  Today’s victim was called Sadie Cardle. At seventy-one she had the distinction of being the youngest victim so far and Maggie wondered if her relative youth meant her attackers had overpowered her by more drastic means because she’d put up a fight. She’d sustained a severe blow to the back of the head and the paramedics who took her to hospital were concerned she might not survive the journey. The last word they’d received was that she was hanging in there – just.

  2

  Sadie Cardle’s home was on Frobisher Road, in the hilliest part of Mansell. As towns went there was little to distinguish Mansell from countless others in the south of England: it was an aesthetically mundane mix of former council estates and tightly packed new-builds with a struggling high street and far more supermarkets than were necessary for a population of 110,000. Although it was in a county renowned for its wealth – Buckinghamshire was also famed for being home to Pinewood Film Studios as well as the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers – there were pockets of deprivation spread across Mansell, nich
e areas notorious for the crimes and anti-social behaviour played out there. Frobisher Road was in one such pocket on the north side of the town.

  To reach it, visitors had to drive through an industrial estate full of empty units, the businesses that once filled them either departed for a better location or consigned to the scrapheap of failure. There wasn’t much in the way of manufacturing to be found in Mansell these days: the furniture industry for which the town was once acclaimed was now a rose-tinted reminiscence. The furniture giants had long moved out and their factories razed to make way for more estates; now the town was mostly lauded for its proximity to London – thirty miles as the crow flew – and those priced out of the capital found its abundance of housing a handily commutable alternative.

  The twenty-four homes that made up Frobisher Road were once council-owned but tenants had been encouraged to buy them decades earlier under the Thatcher government’s right-to-buy scheme. The police had already established that Sadie was one of only two householders in the street still renting, her landlord no longer the council but a housing association named Quadrant Homes.

  In the kitchen Maggie found Detective Sergeant Anna Renshaw talking to Sadie’s neighbour, Audrey Allen. Even though Mrs Allen had come only the short distance from next door, the biting November chill warranted the thick navy anorak that swaddled her down to her knees. As she spoke, she used a scrunched-up tissue to dab away the tears pooling in the deep creases beneath her eyes.

  ‘Sadie would never let in anyone she didn’t know,’ Mrs Allen was telling Renshaw, who was taking notes. ‘She’s very careful about that kind of thing.’

  Clocking Maggie in the doorway, Renshaw shot her a stern look and mouthed, ‘Wait outside.’

  Maggie’s face mottled as she backtracked into the hallway. She wasn’t adapting well to becoming Renshaw’s subordinate since her colleague’s promotion to DS two months ago. Perhaps if Maggie actually liked her she wouldn’t mind, but they’d never gelled in the three years they’d worked together and that barely concealed enmity had intensified since Renshaw had been put in charge of the team investigating the burglaries. She took every opportunity to make sure Maggie knew that she was the boss.