‘No,’ she said, horrified. ‘What have I done?’
‘I don’t fucking know, do I? Get the fucking thing out.’
She crouched, fumbling for his leg, trying to find where the wound was, but the blood seemed to be everywhere, mushrooming up like a spring. On Wednesday when Steve had nailed himself to the wall she’d been completely calm. Now her body was seized up in panic. She seemed to move in creaky slow motion, pushing herself upright and stumbling to the front of the car to get her jacket. She came back, threw it on to the wound and groped around helplessly, trying to tighten it.
‘Call an ambulance.’
To Sally’s horror she saw his lips had gone blue. His hands were flailing, trying to grab her wrist. They kept slipping in the blood and losing their grip.
‘Get me back to the house.’
‘Keep still,’ she panted. ‘Keep still.’
He lay there for a moment, breathing hard, while she wrapped the jacket around his thigh. But even before she could tie it at the back she saw it was useless – the blood had soaked through the fabric, pushing through the herringbone stitch as if it was squeezing through a grid. And then that awful pulsing fountain of red again.
‘God God God.’ She glanced frantically up at the house. Jake? No – he was long gone. ‘What do I do? Tell me what to do now!’
‘I don’t know.’
She leaped up and grabbed her bag, tipped out the contents and snatched up her mobile. With shaking fingers she began to dial, but before she’d got to the second nine, David let out an odd whine. He half sat up – his mouth open in a grimace as if he wanted to bite her. He froze like that for a moment then fell back, jerking and spasming, as if an electric current was going through him. His legs kicked involuntarily, making him circle like a broken Catherine wheel. Then his back arched, his head twisted painfully, as if he was trying to look over his shoulder at the wheel of the car, and he went limp, lying on his back, one arm trapped under him, the other stretched out to the side.
There was silence. She stood, the phone forgotten in her hand, staring at him. He wasn’t breathing. Or moving. A smell of urine and blood rose up off him.
‘David?’ she whispered. ‘David?’
Silence.
Shaking, she fell to her knees in the spreading pool of blood, her heart beating like thunder. His eyes were open, his mouth too, as if he was shouting. It was like seeing a machine stopped in mid-action. She sat back on her heels. Numb. No, she thought. Christ, no. Not this on top of everything else.
The evening sun shone warm on the back of her head, and a sudden gust sent a swirl of blossom dancing past her gently, as though this was just another late-spring evening. Nothing unusual about it – nothing unusual about a small woman in her thirties killing a man, quite unabashedly, out in the open air.
Chapter 37
It took all of Zoë’s reserves, that day of work. It took going into the sort of places she’d hoped for years she’d never have to see again. The club she’d worked at in the nineties was closed now – it had turned into a betting shop – but driving round the streets of Bristol that day, the list Holden had given her taped to the dashboard, the sheer misery of it came back to her like a slap. Nightclub after nightclub after nightclub, all across the city. Most of them were just opening in the afternoon, and from some the cleaners were coming out, dragging their heels, knowing their lot in life was to wash floors that had had every kind of bodily fluid spilled on them. The places smelt of bleach, stale perfume and stomach acid. The majority of the girls were East European. They were generally open and pleasant, unobstructive, but none of them had ever seen Lorne Wood, except on the front page of the newspapers. When Zoë mentioned there was a chance Lorne had wandered into topless modelling, maybe into the clubs, one or two of the girls had given her a look as if to say, was she nuts? Someone like Lorne ending up in a place like this?
By nine that evening, when she’d got to the end of the list, she was starting to think the girls were right, that Holden’s agency really was where Lorne’s trail had run cold. She was coming to the end of the day – the end of her promise to Lorne. Just one more knock and she’d admit defeat. Go home and watch TV. Go to a movie. Call one of the biker friends she sometimes met up with for a beer and sit in a bar planning her week’s bike ride.
Jacqui Sereno’s was the last name. She lived in Frome and had cropped up in a conversation with a bouncer at one of the clubs. Zoë drove the old Mondeo out there, both hands on the steering-wheel, her eyes fixed doggedly on the road. The address was a private house – and for a moment she thought she’d got the wrong place. But she checked the list and it was right. Apparently Jacqui operated a webcam service, letting out rooms, computer equipment and bandwidth, from this small, ordinary house, only distinguishable from all the others on the estate by its tattiness. The door of the gas meter hung open at an angle, broken on the hinges, and a dustbin overflowed on the front path. The windows hadn’t been cleaned in years. With a deep sigh, Zoë swung her legs out of the car and walked up the path.
The woman who opened the door was in her fifties, small, thin and bitter, with a dark suntan and an old-fashioned beehive she had decorated with plastic flowers. She wore tight black leggings, a T-shirt and red high-heeled mules. She was sucking at a cigarette, as if she needed the nicotine so much she’d like to swallow the thing whole.
‘Jacqui?’
‘Yeah? What?’
‘Police.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Have you got a few moments?’
‘S’pose.’
Jacqui kicked aside a fluffy pink draught-excluder and opened the door. Zoë stepped inside. It was hot – the central heating was on high although it was spring. She followed the woman into the kitchen at the back of the house. It was neater inside than out – there were lace curtains in the windows, with a mug tree, matching tea-towels, and biscuit tins piled in a pyramid on top of the fridge. The only thing out of place was a yellow and black sharps bin on the work-surface.
‘Insulin,’ Jacqui said. ‘I’m a diabetic.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Now, make yourself comfortable, pet, and I’ll put on the kettle because you’ll be here a while.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re going to sit here and threaten me, pet, and I’m going to come back at you over and again, explaining how I’m not running a brothel. How what I’m doing here is not illegal. How you have to define what the girls are doing as lewd or likely to cause offence. You’re police but you’re out of your depth.’ She smiled and plugged the kettle in. Threw a couple of teabags into mugs. ‘I mean no personal offence, pet, but since they’ve got rid of the specialized cops – the street-offences crew – I’ve been able to run rings around you CID muppets. Shame, I had a lot of friends in that team.’
Zoë didn’t want to get into the small print of the Sexual Offences Act. From her own experiences, she knew the earlier legislation – a lot of it was written in stone on her heart – but over the years her knowledge had slipped. A lot of the stuff relating to lap-dancing clubs was governed by local bylaws, and a huge Act had been passed in 2003 that overturned a lot of what she’d learned. The only part of the new Act she could quote for sure was the bit about assault by penetration with an object – and she only knew that from the discussions in the incident room over what Act they might charge Lorne’s killer under. She’d be no match for the hard-bitten Jacqui.
‘I’ve been over and over this. The point is that no sexual gratification actually takes place on the premises.’ She dug a wrinkled finger at the table. ‘I can promise you that. If there is any sexual gratification occurring it ain’t here. It’s happening in New York or Peru or bleeding Dunstable, for all I know.’