Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

She can’t finish the statement, but the memory shudders through her shoulders.

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘Mummy didn’t believe me. She said I was making it up, but later I heard them arguing. She was screaming at him and throwing things. She broke the frame of their wedding photograph. It’s still on her dresser. You can see where she’s patched it up with tape.

‘Later that night, Daddy came to my room, put his hand over my mouth and nose so I couldn’t breathe. He held it there, looking into my eyes. “That’s how easy it is,” he said. “Remember that.”

‘From then on I knew I wouldn’t be believed, so I stopped saying anything and started trying to find ways of avoiding him. I got pretty good at it - making sure I was never alone in the house with him, or in the car. I stopped playing netball. I never asked to be picked up from a friend’s house or the cinema.’

‘Did you ever tell anyone else - a teacher, a school counsellor?’

‘I told my Auntie Meaghan. She and Mum had the biggest fight. Mum told her that I made up stories to get attention. Later she made me call Auntie Meaghan on the phone and apologise to her for telling lies.’

I feel my breath catching. I don’t want to hear any more.

‘When I was thirteen, I said no to him. I had a knife in my hand. He stopped touching me after that.’

‘Where is your Auntie Meaghan now?’

‘She died of cancer last July.’

Zoe lights another cigarette. She smokes quickly. Nervously.

‘Did your father ever touch Sienna?’

She closes the lighter and looks at her hands.

‘When I came out of hospital after the attack, Daddy wouldn’t look at me. He pushed my wheelchair up to the car door and lifted me out, but turned his face away. They set up a room for me downstairs. They had to widen the doors and build ramps. They pushed me into the room and expected me to be all excited, but I just looked at Daddy.

‘Before, when I was upstairs, I shared a room with Sienna. We had bunk-beds. I was on the bottom and she was on top. We were safe there because there were always two of us. Sienna thought it was so exciting, having her own room, but I had to teach her to look after herself, how to stay out of his way.’

‘Did he ever touch you again?’

‘No. I was a wheelchair girl. A cripple. Not even he was that sick.’

‘What about Sienna?’

‘I think she was old enough by then. He might have tried, but I think she would have fought back.’

The cigarette glows as she inhales. ‘I sometimes wonder why people like him have children. I think my mother wanted someone else to love - other than my father. He was always a bully, bossing her around, making her fetch and carry for him. A beer from the fridge. A sandwich. A newspaper. Whenever he shouted her name she dropped everything and ran to him like a dog wanting to please her master. And all she got in return was ridicule and scraps of affection, yet she kept coming back. Surely you must get sick of being treated like a dog?’

The air has grown colder around us.

Zoe crushes her cigarette against the brickwork. Raising her elbows, she rests her hands on the wheels of her chair, rocking back and forth.

‘I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.’

‘You have to make a statement - tell the police about your father.’

Zoe shakes her head. ‘That’d just kill Mum.’

‘What about Sienna?’

‘She loved Daddy and she hated him, but she didn’t kill him.’

My phone is ringing. It’s Ronnie Cray.

‘Busy?’

‘I’m lecturing today.’

‘This is more important.’

‘That’s as may be, but it doesn’t pay my rent.’

The DCI sounds annoyed, but she doesn’t raise her voice. Her tone barely alters as she suggests that my Volvo might find itself clamped in the university car park should I turn up at the campus.

‘I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.’

‘You could explain that to the clamping crew,’ she replies. ‘Those guys love a good story. They’re born listeners.’

Why are detectives so droll?

I consider my options.

‘Since we’re calling in favours here, I have a small issue you might be able to help me with.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Charlie had an altercation with a cab driver yesterday. Didn’t have the full fare. Got into a fight.’

‘ Princess Charlie?’

‘That’s the one. She was interviewed at Bath Police Station. The driver wants to press charges.’

Cray doesn’t need the rest spelled out. She’ll make a call.

The living and the dead are greeted by stainless steel: benches, basins, scalpels and scales, disinfected and polished to a dull gleam under the halogen lights.

Located in the basement of the new coroner’s court, the mortuary at Flax Bourton smells like a hospital and looks like an office block. A ramp leads down from the road to an underground parking area where Home Office ‘meat wagons’ are parked in bays.

Pushing through swing doors, Ronnie Cray walks like a sailor in search of a fight. A white coat leads the way along brightly lit corridors. The place seems deserted until a cleaning lady appears wearing elbow-length rubber gloves. I don’t want to contemplate what she’s been cleaning.

Another door opens. Louis Preston has his hands deep inside a butterflied ribcage. Half a dozen students are gathered around him, dressed in matching surgical scrubs and cloth caps.

‘You see that?’ Preston asks, adjusting a lamp on a retractable metal arm above his head.

Nobody answers. They’re staring at the disembowelled body with a mixture of awe and disgust.

Preston points and raises his eyes to theirs. Still no response.

‘What are we looking for, sir?’ one of them asks.

‘Evidence of a heart attack or otherwise.’

He waits.

Silence.

‘I swear you’re all blind. Right there! Damaged heart tissue. You don’t always find the clot, but cardiac arrhythmia can still be the likeliest cause of death.’

‘He suffered a heart attack,’ says one of the students.

‘You think ?’

Preston’s sarcasm is lost on them.

‘Sew him up,’ he says, peeling off surgical gloves. He tosses them overhead like he’s shooting a basketball. Rattles the bin. Scores.

‘You had something to show me,’ says DCI Cray.

‘Absolutely.’

The pathologist leads us to a glass-walled office with a desk and filing cabinets. Having collected a manila folder, he waves it above his head like a tour leader and we follow him down another corridor until he stops before a large steel door. Pulling down on the handle, he opens the door, breaking the airtight seal with a soft hiss. Lights are triggered automatically. I feel a breath of frigid air. Four cadavers are on trolleys beneath white sheets. Three walls of the room have metal drawers. Bodies lie within.

Preston checks a nameplate and tugs a handle. Another hiss as the seal breaks. Ray Hegarty slides into view on metal runners. His joints are stiff with rigor mortis and his skin marbled by lividity.

Preston pulls on latex gloves.

‘He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head. The bruising and depression on the skull match the heel of a hockey stick. The blow was delivered in a chopping motion.’ He puts his fists together and pretends to swing an axe.

‘Ray Hegarty fell forward. The killer stood over him, grasped his hair, raised his head and sliced left to right. The weapon was most likely a Stanley knife, extended about an inch, which was drawn across his neck, severing his carotid artery and jugular vein. He bled to death within twenty or thirty seconds.’

I gaze at the wound, a slash of crimson that begins just below his left earlobe, cutting through muscle and cartilage.