window. Two old guys were sat at the bar laughing and smoking, while a barman I didn't recognize polished a glass behind them. I'd known the landlord here once upon a time. I'd pop in on the occasional afternoon after I'd worked an early shift, and we'd have a few pints together and a chinwag in the welcoming half-light of the lounge bar. I wondered if he was still here and even thought about going in. Thought about it seriously for a couple of seconds. It looked warm and inviting.
It was also too close to the old stomping ground. Too risky. Even letting it cross my mind was a stupid idea. I could never go back in here. Not now. Not in a month. Not ever. It was the past and the past for me was a closed book.
But the past never truly lets you go, even the parts you wish to forget. In the three days since I'd returned to this city, the yawning chasm that had been the days, the months, the years away, had shrunk to nothing. Every step, every smell, every familiar street had dragged me backwards through time, and now, with Andrea's mention of Coleman House, the ghosts of my last bitter days here were rising to haunt me again: the innocent dead; the guilty dead; and, of course, the mysterious and beautiful Carla Graham, the woman who for a few fleeting moments I'd felt closer to than any other.
I stood there in the pale winter sunlight for longer than I should have done, until the cold began to seep beneath my skin. Finally, I turned and retraced my steps, pleased to be escaping from reminders of the old days. But as I walked, the ghosts of the dead shifted and swirled around me, reluctant, as always, to release me from their grip.
29
'Sonya Blacklip,' said Emma, telling me something I already knew.
She was sitting cross-legged on her orange sofa, dressed in a plain, loose-fitting white T-shirt and blue jeans. Her freshly washed hair fell loosely over her shoulders, and she was drinking one of the four-pack of Fosters I'd brought with me when I'd turned up at her place a few minutes earlier. She looked remarkably fragrant and relaxed, given the twenty-four hours she'd had. I was drinking from one of the other cans too and smoking a cigarette while I sat on the chair opposite, listening to what she had to say. It had just turned seven p.m., and I was feeling pretty relaxed myself.
'… Was the real name of Ann Taylor,' I added.
'That's right.' She then gave me a thorough rundown of what she had learnt about Ann, corroborating everything that Andrea and Grant had told me earlier.
'The course of psychotherapy that Ann was put on began in October of last year, and the doctor in charge of it was a woman called…' She paused while she consulted her notebook. '… Madeline Cheney, and from what I can gather she's an expert in her field. She's spent years studying the retrieval and reconstruction of memory. And after a number of one-to-one sessions with Ann, she managed to coax from her aspects of her past that Ann hadn't talked about to anyone else. What Dr Cheney found out made grim reading. I haven't been able to get all the details — most of it's not in the public domain — but she made a written submission to the court in which she testified that, in her opinion, Ann had suffered extensive sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her father, starting when she was as young as four, shortly after her mother died, and continuing until the age of eleven, at which point she finally ran away from home, and ended up here in London.' Emma paused for a moment and looked at me. 'The claims were pretty horrific. According to the testimony, it wasn't just her father who abused her, but his friends too, and there were other children who also suffered at the hands of the same group. However, when the police investigated, they never identified any of them, and the only person who faced any charges relating to the abuse was Ann's father, Richard. But he skipped bail, and ended up murdered in a hotel in Manila before the case ever came to trial.'
'I need to speak to Dr Cheney,' I said. 'Where does she practise? Do you know?'
'You don't ask for much, do you? I've got her number and address here.' She waved her notebook in my direction. 'But I'd like to know what this has got to do with the murders of Malik and Khan.'
I sipped my beer, thinking once again that I had a real soft spot for this girl. I told her about my question- and-answer session with Jamie Delly, including the situation I'd found him in, and the second session I'd had with Andrea and Grant.
Emma seemed more concerned about why Tyndall's men were torturing Delly than the actual torture itself. 'That suggests that Tyndall didn't actually have anything to do with the shooting of Malik and Khan, doesn't it? Because if he had, surely he'd have known what the two of them were meeting about?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'And if that's the case, then who sent me that doll with the blood on?'
'I don't know that either.'
'But there's something you're not telling me,' she stated firmly. 'Because nothing you've said so far points to Ann Taylor's mental state having anything to do with any of this. So what is it?'
'I think Andrea and Grant know more than they were letting on. They were very keen to avoid talking about Ann Taylor — particularly her psychotherapy.'
Emma shook her head. 'No, there's more to it than that. And I want to know what it is.'
There was no way I could avoid the question now. We'd reached a crux in our brief relationship. It's always been a habit of mine to absorb as much information as possible from the people I talk to, while giving out the absolute minimum. There's nothing to be gained from telling people your innermost secrets; doing that just makes you vulnerable. But this time I knew I was going to have to come clean. If I gave her any more grounds for suspicion, our partnership was finished.
'I got the names of the people whose numbers you gave me on Saturday,' she continued. 'The ones that supposedly came from Les Pope's mobile. One of the numbers on there also belongs to Les Pope. So what was he doing phoning himself? Unless, of course, you were bullshitting me and they didn't come from Pope's phone at all, but from someone else's. Which seems a lot more likely, don't you think?'
On the night I'd met her in the Ben Crouch Tavern, I'd observed that something in Emma's girlish demeanour invited people to underestimate her, and I'd made exactly that mistake. I suspected that I wasn't the first.
'All right. I'll tell you what I know and how I know it, but be prepared not to like what you hear.'
She gave a hollow laugh. 'You're a self-confessed mass murderer. Don't worry, I'm fully prepared on that front.'
So I told her. About Blacklip; about Slippery Billy West; about everything. The only things I kept from her were the locations of the killings, and where I'd been these past three years, but even that would have been fairly obvious, given where Blacklip's corpse had been found.
When I'd finished she didn't speak for a while. Instead she just sat there watching me. She gave no indication of how she felt, although it wasn't that hard to guess. I lit a cigarette and wondered if it was worth my while trying to justify what I'd done. In the end, I decided it wasn't. She knew that one of the men I'd killed had been a violent and long-standing child abuser, and that the other had been the hitman who'd slain Malik and Jason Khan. That should have been justification enough.
'Why didn't you tell me all this before?' she asked eventually.
'You didn't need to know. And it wouldn't have made you feel any better about me, would it?'
She started to say something, but I put up a hand to stop her. I could hear movement outside — the shuffling of feet.
We both listened.
The only sound in the room was the faint tinny chattering of the TV in the corner.
A loud knock on the door startled us both. We looked at each other.
The knock came again. 'Emma, are you there?' The voice was naturally loud — deep and authoritative. 'It's DCI Barron. I'm here with DS Boyd. We'd like a quick word, if we could.'
Emma looked alarmed. She glanced over at me for guidance and I motioned for her to let them in. I got up, picked up the ashtray I was using and my drink, and headed for the staircase, trying to keep as quiet as possible.
'Just coming,' I heard Emma call as I reached the third stair.
