ONE
31st December 1999
Fireworks pop and fizzle in the dark sky above the city, hours before the new millennium, and Maureen watches them for a second before she pushes the window open and closes the curtains. Sarah has already lit the candles, and hands her one as she sits back down.
Eight faces are illuminated, ghastly and sunken-eyed in the flickering light. Seven women sit in a semicircle, their bodies pointing toward a kind of altar in the middle of the room. They all look at him, some of them just glancing now and then, some of them staring, unable to avert their gaze. Only one of them knew he would be here; the others are in varying states of horror at the sight of him. Even the one who brought him is horrified, maybe more so than the rest.
A woman called Ana gets up and kneels in front of him. She hasn’t prayed for years, not since she was fresh from Brazil, but the words slip out of her mouth as if they have been waiting for her, the Portuguese fast and slick, almost inaudible over the noise of the party below. Sarah lights a cigarette with the flame of her candle.
“I think it’s a bit late for that,” she says to Ana, but does not get a response. Sarah leans back in her chair and crosses her knees, looks around at the other women, but no one pays her any attention.
Kaysha Jackson—the journalist—lurches out of her seat and into the en-suite, where they all hear a retch and a splatter. She comes back a few minutes later, pale, splashes of vomit down her jumper. Sarah takes her hand, and their fingers lace together, brown skin and white almost indistinguishable in the gloom.
Josie, who is the youngest, and is pregnant, is crying. Her pallid face is blotchy and swollen.
“Where’s the rest of him?” she asks, her voice cracking.
“We don’t know, love,” Maureen says, reaching across to lay a hand on Josie’s arm.
“Someone does,” Sarah says, flicking her finished cigarette onto the floor and grinding it into the carpet with her boot. She looks at him again, meeting his eyes. It’s been a long time since she saw him, even longer since they were in this room together. He looks different now, and she feels different now. She loved him then.
His hair is longer than it was, and it’s standing on end, as if he’s been dragged by it. She supposes that he might have been. His face looks thinner than it did, and his nose looks flat and broken, and dried blood is smeared over the bottom half of his face. She imagines how it must have burst from his mouth, maybe as he tried to say one last clever thing. He was always clean-shaven when she knew him, but he has a short beard now, thick around his mouth and chin, petering out down his throat and stopping abruptly where his neck does.
The rest of him is missing.
* * *
The women are in a top-floor suite in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city, one of the best rooms once but now just a place to store broken things. Boxes of long-lost property disintegrate under the window and a mattress slumps against a wall.
“Is anyone going to own up?” Sarah asks.
No one speaks.
“We weren’t ready,” she continues.
“Ready?” asks Kaysha. “We hadn’t even decided.”
“I never would have agreed to this,” Olive spits. She is a white woman in her fifties. She has gray hair, cut close around her neck, which she smooths and tucks behind her ears every few minutes. She crosses herself with her fingertips and closes her eyes for a second.
“We know, Olive,” Sarah says. Sarah is in her midtwenties, unusually pale with a mass of unbrushed black hair. She has a rose tattooed on her throat and wears a leather jacket. Her accent is local, but less natural than some of the others, her vowels less flat, as if she is trying to hide where she is from.
“Well, I think we all know who we suspect,” Olive says, her eyes lingering on Sarah.
“You did suggest it,” Maureen says to Sarah, dabbing her watery eyes with a handkerchief.
“I know what I said,” Sarah says. She pulls a hip flask from her boot and takes a mouthful.
Olive nods at Sarah’s flask. “Suppose you did it while you were drunk. You mightn’t even remember.”
Sarah opens her mouth to retort.
“Stop it,” Sadia says, cutting Sarah off. “We don’t need a shouting match. We were lucky no one came before.”
When the women had arrived fifteen minutes earlier, the head was covered by a pillowcase. They’d all taken their usual seats, all frowned at the makeshift altar in the center of the room, all wrinkled their nose at the smell of rot and pennies. There was no small talk, but Josie had asked what was under the pillowcase. When no one answered, Sarah stood and pulled the pillowcase off with a flourish, rolling her eyes, only for them to widen when she revealed what was underneath. Some of the women had screamed.
“It must have been you,” Sadia continues, tipping her head toward Kaysha. Sadia is holding a baby monitor and she drums her fingers on the plastic, letting anger and impatience mask her horror. Sadia has deep brown skin and even features, straight teeth and long eyelashes. In a different life, she’d have been a model or a movie star, not the widow of a dead scientist. “You arranged all of this. You’re the only one who has everyone’s phone number.”
“I know how it must look,” Kaysha says. “But I didn’t do it.”
Earlier in the evening, each of the women had received a message from an unknown number: Meet in the usual place, tonight, 7 p.m. Emergency. This followed the usual format of Kaysha’s messages, though she’d never called an emergency meeting before.
“How could someone have had all our numbers then? Someone else must know about us,” Maureen says. She is fanning herself with a leaflet from her handbag.
“You said that our information was safe with you,” says Sadia, looking at Kaysha. Kaysha frowns.
“It is, look,” she says, and unzips a pocket on the inside of her jacket, feeling around for the scrap of paper where she’d jotted down everyone’s phone numbers months earlier. The list is no longer there, and she can’t hide the confusion on her face. She glances at Sarah, who she lives with. Sarah shrugs.
“You’ve lost them?” Olive asks.
Ana, still kneeling, crosses herself and stands. She is tall and classically beautiful, with dark hair and golden-brown skin.
“There are ways to find out phone numbers,” she says, sinking into an armchair beside Sadia.
There is silence for a few minutes. The baby monitor crackles.
“I can’t believe you brought the bairn,” Sarah says to Sadia, finishing whatever is in the flask and slipping it back into her boot. She lights another cigarette.
“I didn’t know what I was walking into.”
“Where is she?”
“Next door. She’s been awake since four this morning; she’ll be asleep for a while.”
“Some mother.”
“Don’t start, Sarah,” Kaysha says. She is in her early thirties but looks younger, and is dressed in a black suit. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for something to focus on other than the head.
“Can we cover him up, please?” Josie asks, looking at the floor. A sequined dress is stretched across her rounded belly and the glitter on her cheeks sparkles in the candlelight. She was on her way out to celebrate with friends when she got the text.
Sarah picks the pillowcase off the floor and drapes it back over the head. It doesn’t cover him completely, but she makes sure she at least blocks him from Josie’s view. When Sarah sits back down, an eyeball stares at her through a gap in the fabric.
“Does anyone else think that it’s about time we rang the police?” Olive asks, jutting out her chin and glancing around at the others. A silky whisper drifts around the room at the word police.
“If you were going to ring them you’d have done it by now,” Sarah says.
“I think we should ring them too,” Maureen says. A bead of sweat rolls from the hair at her temple down the side of her face and under her soft jawline.
“And get done for conspiracy to murder?” Sarah asks. “Good plan, aye.”
Kaysha rubs her forehead with her fingertips. “We can handle this, we just need to be clever about it.”
“What are we going to do then?” asks Sarah.
“Pick those up, for a start,” Ana says, pointing to the cigarette butts by Sarah’s feet. “Evidence.”
“How on earth would they link that to me?”
“We’re not in a position to take chances,” says Ana. “We need some bleach.”
TWO Kaysha
31st December 1999
Sarah Smith’s house is way out of the city, past the suburbs and the smaller towns and villages, alone in the nowhere land between places. When darkness falls there it falls thick and fast, and it clings like treacle to the grass and the trees to make way for the moon, which is a bright crescent as Kaysha parks by the front door in the last minutes of the old millennium.
They sit in the car for a long time and watch the stars. Sarah traces constellations on the fogged windscreen with her fingertip. Kaysha follows her girlfriend’s fingernail, thinking about the blood that is caked underneath it.
“Makes it seem like almost nothing, doesn’t it, when you think how big the universe is,” Sarah says.
“No,” Kaysha says.
“Who do you think did it?” Sarah asks. Kaysha gives her a long look, and Sarah cocks her head to one side. “It wasn’t me.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Bet it was the wife. It’s always the wife.”
“Maybe,” Kaysha says. Sadia would have had good reason to kill him, but then, they all would.
“If it’s her, what’ll happen to the bairn?” Sarah asks.
Kaysha says nothing, but reaches out and squeezes Sarah’s arm. Sarah turns back to look at the stars.
“I hope it wasn’t Sadia,” Sarah says quietly, and then takes off her boots and goes into the house. She comes back out minutes later with a bottle of whiskey and a blanket, and they both strip. They pile their clothes onto the grille of a barbecue that has been standing by the front door since their first week together, scorched fat still caked onto the metal. It is beginning to rust. Sarah pours whiskey over the bleach-streaked clothes and sets them alight. The women press themselves together under the blanket, skin on skin, passing the whiskey back and forth as the flames warm their hands. The cold night numbs them, and they let it.
Fireworks pop against the horizon, and Kaysha’s phone rings. Her mother wishes her a happy New Year and hears in Kaysha’s voice that something is wrong, even though Kaysha is trying to sound cheery. Kaysha tells her that she will explain when she sees her, says goodnight, and they go inside, where Sarah drinks, and Kaysha begins to build a timeline in her head.
THREE Nova
3rd January 2000
It’s a Monday but the city is quiet as the sun begins to rise. Adults pull heavy blankets tighter around their bodies, enjoying the last long sleep of Christmas break while children finish off tins of sweets for breakfast. Light yawns into a sky the same color as a peach skin and the river reflects it, yellow-red lapping the muddy banks. The six iconic bridges are lit, one by one, and their shadows sharpen and stretch across the water. The night’s frost glitters and begins to melt on the breeze blocks and abandoned cranes of construction sites along the quay, where they are preparing for the arrival of the seventh bridge.
Detective Inspector Nova Stokoe is woken by a phone call about a body and pulls her Escort into a car park near the docks half an hour later. The three floors of midsixties brick look odd against the warehouses that have grown around it. Tufts of grass poke through cracks in the tarmac and empty flower baskets hang along the length of the conservatory that fronts the building. A faded sign reads Towneley Arms Hotel.
There are two police cars and a CSI van there already, and Nova glances at herself in the rearview mirror. Ginger curls frame her jaw, messy from the night before, and she spends a few seconds trying to neaten up before abandoning the effort. Her freckles stand out more than usual against her pale skin. She spent the evening in one of the underground pubs off the high street, didn’t get home until four, and definitely shouldn’t have driven this morning. She swallows two paracetamols to ward off the hangover and gets out of the car.
A man with a serving trolley stacked with boxes clatters across the car park as she approaches the hotel. He grins and a gold tooth gleams in the sunlight.
“Going in here?” she asks, holding the door open for him, and he winks as he passes.
“Morning,” he says to the old man at reception, and then disappears through an archway at the far end of the room without waiting for a response. Nova flashes her badge at the man at reception, and he ignores her for a second while he tops his coffee up with whiskey. His hands are shaking.
“Upstairs, hinny,” he says, tipping his head toward a set of stairs to the right. “Top floor. It’s gruesome, mind.”
“Stomach of steel, me, man,” Nova tells him, and goes up. The top floor is cordoned off with police tape and she can smell the corpse from down the hall. She wonders how long it has lain there.
PC Ella McDonald is standing beside an open door with her hat in her hands and a look on her face that Nova knows too well.
“Nice of you to turn up last night,” says Ella quietly, but not quietly enough. Nova looks over Ella’s shoulder.
“Have you taken any statements from the staff?”
“Were you with someone else?”
“What about the guests? Any statements from them?”
“Dick!” whispers Ella. She brushes past Nova, who watches her go down the stairs, too tired to feel guilty.
There are baubles scattered across the corridor, and she nudges a couple out of the way with her shoe as she enters the room. Three white bodysuits are moving around, dusting for prints. A floodlight illuminates their workspace. A man’s head is on a table. Nova can see no sign of his body. The room is ripe with bleach and decay, and she holds a finger over her nostrils before moving closer.
“Has the body been taken?” she asks one of the CSIs, glancing around for a chalk outline.
“Doesn’t look like it was ever here,” he shrugs.
The head is balanced on top of an open book that rests atop a pile of hotel bibles on a bedside table in the middle of the room. Fluids have seeped out of the neck and onto the book so she can only make out a few words around the edges of the page, but by the brown leather cover she can see that it’s a bible too.
“When you move it, can you make a note of the page number?”
“Aye, I’ll put it in the report,” he says. “I have had a look though, and I think … just based on where the book is opened and the few words I could make out, I think it’s the page with Leviticus 24:19 on it.”
Nova lifts her shoulders and the CSI smirks.
“Didn’t go to Catholic school, did you?” he says, not really asking, and she shakes her head. “You’ll know the passage. Leviticus 24:19 is an eye for an eye. I’ll double check it all when they move him, but I’m fairly sure. My dad used to like that one.”
“Revenge,” she says. The page could be random, she supposes, but it seems unlikely. It looks like a revenge killing. She wonders what he did to deserve this.
“I’d imagine so,” the CSI says.
“You’re an ugly fucker, aren’t you?” she says, turning to the head, leaning close to it. She’s seen bodies that were more decomposed, but she hasn’t seen one as interesting as this before. His mouth is a little open and maggots slither inside. His eyes and nostrils have started to ooze brown foam, but other than that his skin is gray, as if all of the color has leaked out of him. There’s nothing particularly distinctive about him—white man, dirty blond hair, short beard, no tattoos, no scars. Not even a pierced ear. His nose looks broken, but other than that it doesn’t seem like he’s been beaten up prior to his beheading. She crouches and inspects his neck. Dried-out threads of flesh are twisted and decaying across the book’s pages. Certainly not sliced off in one clean sweep. “How long do you think he’s been here?”
The CSI shrugs. “Hard to tell. The window was open and it’s been frosty, so that’s probably slowed everything down a bit. Forty-eight hours if I had to guess.”
Copyright © 2023 by Rose Wilding
