Page 6 of 56 Days
She knows damn well who it is before a glance at the phone’s screen confirms it: KARLY.
Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly. She’d added the “Y” to annoy him and it had worked a treat.
The message says:
BTA?
Lee doesn’t pick up the phone. She takes another long, slow sip of her coffee. But when her phone beeps for a second time, she curses, shoves the coffee into the cup holder between the front seats, and climbs out of the car.
The house looks exactly as it did the only other time she was here. A narrow,two-storyredbrick terrace that, were it in mint condition, would easily sell for half a million around these parts. But this one is crumbling. The bricks need cleaning and the roof tiles repairing. The window frames are wooden and rotting in the corners. Paint is enthusiastically peeling off the front door. A skip is parked in the driveway,half-fullwith seventies furniture and broken things.
It was there the last time, too. Lee distinctly remembers seeing the crackedsalmon-coloredbathroom sink because her parents had one just like it. This house was awork-in-progress without much progress, and now, like everything else, its renovation is on pause.
She should ring the doorbell, announce her presence.Should. But she isn’t in a charitable mood this morning. Instead, she goes to the front window and touches her fingers to the underside of its cement sill, feeling for the hollow she’s been told is there. She quickly finds it—and the pointy end of the key that’s inside.
Stealthily, she lets herself in through the front door.
The house is still, the air a little musty, stale. There are no carpets on the ground floor—only bare, dusty floorboards—but a heinous swirl ofshit-brownandbright-orangeclings to the staircase. She starts up it, moving slowly and carefully, testing her weight on each step so as to avoid a telltale creak.
There’s no noise in the house, no sounds from upstairs, but the quiet has a deliberateness to it.
Someone ismaintainingit.
He’s not asleep, then, but awake and waiting for her.
Maybe he even heard her come in.
Lee reaches the landing. Four doors lead off it. One is open onto a room filled with building materials: a workbench, some sort of sanding machine with its electrical cord wrapped around itself, boxes marked “Crackled White 7.5 × 4.” Another is showing her a bathroom that appears to be inmid-update. A third looks like it can only be hiding a boiler. The fourth then, to the front of the house, is the master bedroom.
That door has been pulled closed but isn’t fully shut.
She pauses outside, then kicks it open with such force that it opens all the way, hitting the wall behind it with a thunderclap.
The first thing she sees is the wallpaper. It must have been bought on the same shopping trip that found thediarrhea-after-carrots-carpet on the stairs. It’s an acid trip ofbright-bluepaisley, and it hurts her eyes.
Then the smell hits: sweat and sex and alcohol, trapped and cooking in the room’s warm air.
She should’ve worn a mask, she thinks now. God onlyknowswhat’s floating around in here.
“Well,” she says, “what seems to be the problem?”
Karl is lying on the bed, presumably naked under the fitted sheet that he’s somehow managed to lift off the bottom corners of the mattress and drape across his lower half.
This must have taken some doing seeing as both his arms are outstretched, hands higher than his shoulders, like Christ on the cross.
Only Karl’s wrists aren’t nailed to the headboard, but handcuffed to it.
“Twosets?” Lee frowns. “Where’d you get the second lot?”
“Go on,” Karl groans. “Lap it up.”
“Oh, I fully intend to.”
“You know, I could’ve sworn I heard you pull up outside five minutes ago.”
“How long have you been like this?” Lee asks.
“All bloody night.”
