Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

‘Why did she say that?’

Sienna reaches towards the table and runs her finger through the ring of condensation left by her soft drink.

‘She was looking out for me.’

‘In what way?’

‘She told me the places that were safe and weren’t safe.’

‘What places weren’t safe?’

‘In the bathroom unless the door was locked, in the car at night, in the shed, on the sofa and even in my new room if I found myself alone.’

Cray straightens, steeling herself, knowing she has to ask the obvious question.

‘Why weren’t they safe?’

Sienna lays her forehead on her arms and closes her eyes. ‘What did Zoe say?’

‘I’m asking you. Did your father ever touch you inappropriately?’

Her voice is muffled. ‘Not for a long time.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

The DCI looks at her silently, her face tired and poached-looking under the halogen lights.

‘Why did you stab your father?’

Sienna’s forehead rolls back and forth on her forearms. Her eyes are closed.

‘He looked like he was asleep. I thought he was trying to scare me by pretending.’

‘Pretending?’

‘To be dead.’

‘Why did you think he was dead?’

‘He was lying on the floor.’

‘Did he try to attack you?’

‘No.’

‘So why did you hit him?’

Sienna’s mind suddenly switches.

‘I should be sad. I’ve tried to cry. I rubbed my eyes really hard to make them go red. I poked them to make them water. I want to be able to cry, but I can’t feel anything.’

‘Tell me about the knife,’ continues Cray.

Sienna doesn’t seem to be listening.

‘Do you think Daddy is in Heaven? I used to talk to Reverend Malouf. He told me God had all the answers, but I couldn’t get my head around Jesus rising from the dead. If he came back, why didn’t he hang around and take his show on the road? Instead he went back to Heaven and let people forget.

‘Daddy used to tell people he was an agnostic, which isn’t the same thing as an atheist but I don’t understand the difference. Reverend Malouf tried to explain it to me once. He said an agnostic is someone who can’t make up his mind and get off the fence.’

‘You’ll have to talk to us eventually. It’s for your own good,’ says Cray.

‘Why do people say things are for my own good?’ answers Sienna, fixing her gaze on the detective. There is something in her voice, so old and so tired, that takes Cray by surprise.

Sienna continues, ‘Mum is crying, Lance is angry, Zoe isn’t here and Daddy is dead. What I do or say doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does. We’re giving you a chance to explain.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘You’re avoiding my questions.’

‘I’m avoiding the answers. There’s a difference. You want me to remember things, but I can’t.’

Sienna pulls her knees up towards her, holding her shins tightly. She lets her hair tumble over her face. After a long silence, she finds a voice, small and haunted, belonging to a younger child.

‘Do you know something? When Zoe got crippled she said she was lucky because Daddy stopped trying to touch her. She was his favourite, you know. The sporty one. He was proud of her.’

A groan gets trapped in her throat. Her chest convulses in a flutter of short breaths.

‘I sometimes think that if Daddy’d had a choice, he would have wished it was me in the wheelchair and not Zoe.’

Tears hover and her mouth opens and closes wordlessly. Suddenly she raises her hands and presses them hard against her ears.

‘Can you hear something, Sienna?’ I ask.

‘The rushing sound.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I can’t make it go away.’

She rocks back and forth, digging her nails into her scalp. She’s thinking about the blade. Bleeding. Clearing her mind. Finally she whispers something. I have to lean close to hear the words. It’s a rhyme that she repeats over and over.

‘ When I was a little girl about so high,

Momma took a big stick and made me cry.

Now I’m a big girl and Momma can’t do it,

Daddy takes a big stick and gets right to it. ’

The team of detectives has gathered upstairs. Jackets hang on chairs and shirtsleeves are rolled to half-mast. It’s not a big task force - a dozen at most - mostly men, mid-thirties, ageing rapidly.

‘Twelve is a Biblical number,’ Cray tells me, when I comment on the number. ‘The twelve days of Christmas, the twelve tribes of Israel.’

‘What about the twelve apostles?’

‘I wasn’t going to be that presumptuous.’

She picks up her notes and motions me to follow. ‘I’m lucky to have this many.’

‘Why?’

‘Half my team is babysitting witnesses for the Novak Brennan trial.’

That name again.

‘Has someone threatened the witnesses?’

‘Precautionary measure. It’s a bloody circus - we’ve got the right-wing extremists on the one side and refugee groups on the other. I don’t know who’s worse.’

‘I think you do.’

She grunts. ‘Look, I’m no fan of neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists, but we have a race problem in this country. We have home-grown terrorists blowing themselves up. We have gangs of teenagers killing each other with knives, Asians, blacks, whites . . .’

‘Maybe that’s a social problem, not a race problem.’

‘Makes no difference to me. I’m just sick of putting good officers in situations where every scrote and teenage scumbag on the street has a knife and a grudge.’

‘So where does Novak Brennan come into it?’

‘He’s a politician in search of a crowd. The ignorant, the uneducated, the unemployable; they listen because they want to believe their miserable lives are someone else’s fault. Novak Brennan tells them what they want to hear.’

‘He incites hatred.’

‘He lances the boil.’

The detectives are waiting, mostly pale and hung over. Ronnie Cray introduces me. Suddenly, my left leg stops moving and I’m stuck in front of the whiteboard. Staring at my feet, I concentrate on making my leg lift. It looks like I’m stepping over a tripwire. They are all staring at me with solemn expressions, pitying the poor bastard.

Cray takes over, beginning the briefing. I find a chair and feel their eyes leave me. The DCI outlines developments in the investigation. Sienna’s boyfriend has been interviewed. Danny Gardiner claims that he dropped Sienna on a corner in Bath just before 7 p.m. but he hasn’t given police an alibi for later that night when Ray Hegarty was murdered.

Lance and Zoe Hegarty have also been interviewed. Zoe was in Leeds, but Lance is a possible suspect. He works as a motorcycle mechanic in Bristol. On Tuesday afternoon he left the workshop at five, went to the pub for an hour and then went home by himself. His flatmate was out.

‘We’re bringing Lance in again today,’ says Monk. ‘He’s an aggressive little shit, but I don’t think he’s lying. He couldn’t hide a hard-on in baggy jeans.’

Two hours are still missing from Ray Hegarty’s afternoon and telecom engineers are trying to pinpoint his whereabouts using his mobile phone. The door-to-door inquiries have thrown up several unknown vehicles in the village in the previous few days. Two motorists also reported seeing a blonde-haired girl in a short dress walking down Hinton Hill at about 10.15 p.m. That’s about a mile from Wellow. It could have been Sienna.

Monk picks up a spiral notebook and flips a page.

‘A month ago Helen Hegarty claims she saw someone peering into the downstairs window, but they ran off before she could get a good look at them. A while later she found rocks organised in a circle in the garden bed beneath the kitchen window. The soil was compressed like someone had been crouching there. Says she told her husband. He suspected local kids.’