Michael Robotham - Shatter

‘Give me a leg-up,’ says Ruiz, before stepping into Monk’s cupped hands and being hoisted upwards until his forearms are braced along the white painted capping.

‘It’s a garden,’ he says. ‘There’s a house further along.’

‘Can you see the bridge?’

‘Not from here, but you might be able to see it from the top of the house. There’s a turret room.’

He jumps down and we follow the wall, looking for a gate. Monk is now ahead. I can’t match his stride and have to run every few yards to catch up.

Stone pillars mark the entrance to a driveway. The gates are open. Tyres have crushed leaves into the puddles. A car has been here recently.

The house is large and from another age. Overgrown with ivy on one side, it has small dark windows poking through the leaves. The roof is steep with an octagonal turret on the western corner.

The place looks empty. Closed up. Curtains are drawn and leaves have collected on the main steps and entrance portico. I follow Monk up the steps. He rings the doorbell. Nobody answers. I call Charlie’s name and then Julianne’s, pressing my face against a slender pane of frosted glass, trying to catch the tiny vibrations of a reply. Imagining it.

Ruiz has gone to check out a garage at the side of the house, beneath the trees. He disappears through a side door and then appears again immediately.

‘It’s Tyler’s van,’ he yells. ‘It’s empty.’

My head fills with tumbling and leaping emotions. Hope.

Monk is on the phone to DI Cray. ‘Tell her to get an ambulance,’ I say.

He relays the message and snaps the phone shut. Then he raises his elbow and drives it hard against the glass pane, which shatters and falls inward. Reaching gingerly inside, he unlocks the door and swings it open.

The hall is wide and paved with black and white tiles. It has a mirror and an umbrella stand, as well as a side table with a Chinese takeaway menu and list of emergency numbers.

The lights are working, but the switches seem to be camouflaged against the floral wallpaper. The place has been closed up for the winter, with sheets and rugs covering the furniture and the fire grates swept clean. I imagine figures lurking unseen, hiding in corners trying not to make a sound.

Behind us a trio of police cars streams through the gates and up the gravel driveway. Doors open. DI Cray leads them up the front steps.

Gideon said Julianne and Charlie were buried in a box, breathing the same air. I don’t want to believe him. So much of what he said to people was designed to wound and to break them.

I stand swaying in the dining room, watching a spill of light from the patio doors. There are muddy footprints on the parquetry squares.

Ruiz has climbed the stairs. He calls to me. I mount the stairs two at a time, gripping the banister and dragging myself upwards. My cane falls from my hand and clatters down the steps to the black and white tiles.

‘In here,’ he yells.

I pause at the door. Ruiz is kneeling beside a narrow cast iron bed. A child is curled on a mattress, her eyes and mouth taped shut. I do not remember uttering a sound, but Charlie’s head rises and turns to my voice and she lets out a muffled sob. Her head rocks from side to side. I have to hold her still while Ruiz finds a pair of dressmaking scissors lying on a thin mattress in another corner of the bedroom.

His hands are shaking. So are mine. The blades of the scissors open and close gently and I peel back the tape. I am staring at her with a kind of wonderment, mouth open, still not able to believe it’s her. I meet Charlie’s blue eyes. I am seeing her through a shining fluid that will not be blinked away.

She is dirty. Her hair has been hacked to her skull. Her skin is torn. Her wrists are bleeding. She is the most beautiful creature to ever draw breath.

I crush her to my chest. I rock her in my arms. I want to hold her until she stops crying, until she forgets everything. I want to hold her until she remembers only the warmth of my embrace and my words in her ears and my tears on her forehead.

Charlie is wearing a bathrobe. Her jeans are on a chair.

‘Did he…?’ The words get caught in my throat. ‘Did he touch you?’

She blinks at me, not understanding.

‘Did he make you do things? You can tell me. It’s OK.’

She shakes her head and wipes her nose with her sleeve.

‘Where’s your mum?’ I ask.

She frowns at me.

‘Have you seen her?’

‘No. Where is she?’

I look at Monk and Ruiz. They’re already moving. The house is being searched. I can hear doors being opened, cupboards explored, heavy boots sound from the attic and the turret room. Silence. It lasts half a dozen heartbeats. The boots start moving again.

Charlie puts her head back on my chest. Monk comes back with a set of 24” bolt cutters. I hold her ankles still as he eases the jaws around the shackles, pushing the arms together until the metal breaks and the chain snakes to the floor.

An ambulance has arrived. The paramedics are outside the bedroom door. One of them is young and blonde, carrying a first aid box.

‘I want to get dressed,’ says Charlie, suddenly self-conscious.

‘Sure. Just let these officers take a look at you. Just to be sure.’

I tear myself away from her and go downstairs. Ruiz is in the kitchen with Veronica Cray. The house has been searched. Now detectives are scouring the garden and the garage, poking at dead leaves with heavy boots, squatting to peer at the compost heap.

The trees along the northern border are skeletal and the shed has a derelict forsaken look. A wrought iron table and matching chairs are rusting under an elm tree, where colonies of toadstools have sprung up after the rains.

I walk out the back door, past the laundry and across the sodden lawn. I have the uncanny sense of the birds falling silent and the ground sucking at my shoes. My cane sinks into the earth as I walk between flowerbeds and past lemon trees in enormous stone pots. An incinerator built from breezeblocks is against the back fence, alongside a pile of old railway-sleepers meant for garden edging.

Veronica Cray is alongside me.

‘We can have ground-penetrating radar here within the hour. There are cadaver dogs in Wiltshire.’

I stop at the shed. The lock has been smashed open in the search and the door sags on rusting hinges. Inside smells of diesel, fertiliser and earth. A large sit-on lawnmower squats in the centre of the floor. There are metal shelves along two walls and garden tools propped in the corner. The blade of the shovel is clean and dry.

Come on, Gideon, talk to me. Tell me what you’ve done with her. You were talking half-truths. You said you’d bury her so deep I’d never find her. You said she and Charlie were sharing the same air. Everything you did was practiced. Planned. Your lies contained elements of the truth, which made them easier to maintain.

Leaning on my cane, I reach down and pick up the padlock and broken latch, brushing away mud. Tiny silver scratches are visible against the tarnished metal.

Then I look back into the shed. The wheels of the mower have been turned, wiping away the dust. My eyes study the shelves, the seed trays, aphid sprays and weedkiller. A garden hose is looped on a metal hook. I follow the coils, growing dizzy. One end of the hose droops downward against the upright frame of the shelf.

‘Help me move the mower,’ I say.

The DI grabs the seat and I push from the front, steering it out the door. The floor is compacted dirt. I try to move the shelf. It’s too heavy. Monk pushes me aside and wraps his arms either end, rocking it from one side to the other, walking it towards the door. Seed trays and bottles topple to the floor.

Dropping to my knees, I crawl forward. The compacted earth becomes softer near the wall where the shelf used to stand. A large piece of plywood has been screwed into place. The hosepipe hangs down the plywood and seems to disappear inside it.