So she turned up at his hotel room, dressed as he wanted, following the script. And something clicked. She knew it from the way he looked at her as soon as she entered the room. As soon as he touched her. She felt that thrill of electricity shoot through her. He did too. She knew it. She could tell.
She stayed the night. He did exactly what he had said he would do with her. And she loved it. She would have done it for nothing. She told him that.
‘Never say that,’ he said. ‘Never sell yourself short.’
And that was the start of it. He always asked for her when he was in Manchester on business. And he seemed to be on business an awful lot. Sometimes he just came up to see her. They talked. Got to know each other. He was rich but unhappy. Lonely. His partner — that was how he always referred to her, his partner — was ill. Mentally and physically. And it was an enormous strain on him. He felt responsible for it, and in a way he was. He had everything he had always wanted. But it didn’t seem to be enough.
She had heard similar things before. Rich businessmen who claimed to be unhappy with their wives and families. Who wanted the excitement of someone like her. She thought he was just another one of those.
She was wrong.
Because one day he made her a proposition.
‘Are you happy as you are?’
‘I’m fine,’ she had said. This wasn’t the first such request she had fielded away. She had the answers prepared. ‘I make a good living. I have freedom. I’m independent.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I meant. Are you happy being the person you are? Or would you like to be someone else?’
And then he told her what he wanted. Live with him. Let him remake her in the image he desired. Answer to a different name. Get a different face. A new body. Become a different person.
‘Why not get someone else? Someone who looks like that already?’
‘Because it’s you I want. You’re perfect. On the inside. I just want the outside to match.’
That had made sense to her.
‘And you’ll still have your freedom,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be the freedom to do what I tell you.’
She had smiled. And agreed.
And she had become Dee Sloane.
Slowly at first. Painstakingly so at times. But worth it in the long run. She had asked questions, naturally. Who was the real Dee? What had happened to her? And he had told her.
‘She … was involved in an accident. A shooting accident. I did what I could for her, tried to rescue her, rebuild her … I did what I could.’
‘And she’s dead?’
‘She’s … no longer with us.’
She knew what he meant.
And the more she became what he wanted her to be, the more he told her. Dee had been his sister. Did she have anything to say about that? She didn’t. In fact it just gave her an added frisson. The shooting wasn’t accidental. It had been planned. She had guessed as much. And did she mind? Why would she mind?
‘Perfect,’ he said.
And they were.
Now she wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of their relationship. No matter what it took.
She stepped into the house. It stank of decay, neglect. Corruption. The air felt cold and damp. Things darted away out of the corners of her eyes. She moved forward to where Michael had told her to go. Into the main living room.
She would be there, he had said. After what had happened, she wouldn’t be anywhere else.
She stepped into the living room. Something moved at the far end, over by the wall. Something bigger than a rat. Dee fought the urge to turn, to run away. Stood her ground.
‘So.’ A cracked voice came out of the darkness. ‘The second wife meets the first wife. At last.’
A light went on. Sharp, blinding after such darkness. Dee screwed her eyes tight shut. Opened them again slowly. The figure before her was holding a gun on her. She looked at that, felt fear. Then looked at the figure itself.
And her stomach churned.
103
‘DI May.’ The handshake was firm, strong. Balding, grey-haired and bearded, DI May seemed like an old-school copper. His accent was rough, working-class Essex tempered by learning and experience.
Mickey gave his own name. Anni did likewise. ‘Right,’ Mickey said. ‘What have we got?’
‘We believe DS James and DC Shah were working the same street as you two,’ May said.
‘Yeah,’ confirmed Mickey. ‘Couple of murders, missing person, kidnapped child and the Sloane family involved somehow.’
‘Ah,’ said May, smiling, ‘Suffolk’s Howard Hughes. Local royalty. The untouchables.’
‘So we believe,’ said Anni.
They were standing at the gates to the freight port at Harwich. The mist had returned, and with it the cold. Mickey and Anni were shivering. The parking bays were virtually empty, the lorries and trucks all loaded and left. Ahead of them stood berthed cargo ships and tankers. The floodlights ringing the walls shone down hard, making the scene look bleak and desolate.
May was bundled up inside a quilted jacket, but he still looked cold. ‘And you … what?’ he said to Mickey. ‘What happened exactly?’
Mickey told him about the phone call. The message. May nodded.
‘Well we’ve pinpointed DC Shah’s GPS signal. That’s a bonus. Weak. So we’d better get a move on.’
‘Whereabouts is it?’ asked Mickey.
May pointed at one of the cargo ships. ‘Over there, apparently.’
‘The ship?’ asked Anni. ‘That one there?’
May nodded. ‘Far as we can make out. Had our experts in analysing it. Wanted to get it checked as quickly as possible before his battery went.’
‘Who’s the ship registered to?’ asked Mickey.
May smiled. ‘Good question. Sloane Holdings.’
‘I think that confirms it, then. Do we need a warrant?’
‘Acting on information received, DS Philips.’ May looked round. There were another three officers with him. Both looking as thrilled as Mickey and Anni to have been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.
‘You ready?’ he said.
They were.
‘Let’s go, then.’
104
‘Where is he, then?’
The woman was speaking, but Dee wasn’t hearing her. She was staring, open-mouthed. The woman before her, the one who used to be Dee Sloane, was completely naked.
‘Where is he?’ Screaming now.
Dee managed to recover enough from the sight in front of her to force some words out. ‘He’s … busy. He sent me.’
‘Busy? Busy?’ Body vibrating in anger. ‘Too busy to see me? Bastard … ’ The words were spat out. She moved closer to Dee. ‘Too busy.’ She smiled. ‘Like what you see? Do you?’
Dee was trying not to look, wanted to turn her head away, close her eyes. Anything. But she kept on staring, eyes drawn to the sight before her as to a car crash. Wanting to see the mutilation, the destruction. Wanting to say, thank God that’s not me there.
‘This is what it looks like. When you’ve been brought back from the dead … ’
Her body had once been female. There was only one breast, and even that looked mangled. In place of the other one was a collection of grafted skin and scar tissue, by turns smooth and ridged, in varying shades of red. The scars stretched down the side of her body, creating a swirling vortex of flesh on her side.
But it was her face that was the worst. Her face and her head.
She was bald but for a few odd tufts of hair sprouting in between healed scars and grafts. Her skull was uneven, misshapen, covered in crests and craters, like a shattered egg that had been put together again without the instruction manual. Without make-up, the lines on her patchwork skin were vivid and throbbing. She had taken out the partial palate that held her false teeth, letting her mouth collapse in on itself on one side. One ear was just a curled stub.