Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

Normally a predator focuses on the weak, but Ellis wanted a challenge. He chose someone adventurous and outgoing, a risk taker. He took a bright, vibrant young teenager and bent her, broke her, remade her and then broke her again.

Ruiz has returned. He puts a mug of tea in front of me and begins spooning sugar.

‘I don’t take any.’

‘You do today.’

He wants to hear the story. I start at the beginning and tell him about the funeral and visiting Sienna. As the details emerge, so do the questions. Ellis has a caravan somewhere down the coast. It could be the same caravan he had in Scotland when his wife disappeared. The police could never find it.

Sienna couldn’t remember where they went. She said that she slept most of the weekend and Gordon told her that she had food poisoning. Most likely he drugged her. He could also have drugged Natasha when he had sex with Sienna in their house. Sedatives, barbiturates, date-rape drugs, what did he use?

Ellis covered his tracks. He didn’t leave notes or send text messages or emails. When he picked Sienna up after school she had to hide beneath a blanket on the back seat and turn off her mobile. He dropped her off at her therapy sessions with Robin Blaxland and picked her up again afterwards.

Helen Hegarty appears in the canteen. She’s wearing a beige jumper and slacks. Leaving Ruiz, I make my way between the tables, standing uncomfortably as she searches her handbag for tissues.

‘How is she?’

Helen’s eyes focus past me. The skin around her mouth twitches. ‘They put her in a coma. They say it’s going to help her.’

Lance Hegarty comes out of a nearby men’s room. He shoves me into a table. Obscenities and spittle roll off his tongue. ‘Are you satisfied? You won’t be happy until she’s dead.’

Ruiz moves swiftly to intercept, stepping between us.

Lance’s lips pull back from his teeth. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

Ruiz speaks softly. ‘Lower your voice, son, and show people some respect. I’m asking you nicely.’

‘Fuck you!’

Lance swings a punch from his waist but Ruiz has been expecting it. Knocking it aside with his left arm he sinks a short sharp jab into the softness of the younger man’s belly. The anger in Lance’s eyes changes to surprise. He doubles over, winded, and Ruiz lowers him into a chair, apologising to Helen.

‘Maybe you should go,’ she says helplessly.

Lance squeaks, still trying to suck in a breath.

We retreat, leaving mother and son in the empty cafeteria. I can hear them arguing as the lift door closes behind us.

‘Other people’s families,’ mutters Ruiz.

‘What about them?’

‘They should serve as a warning.’

Ronnie Cray closes the barn door and drops a plank of wood into place. She’s dressed in jeans, a checked shirt and Wellingtons that are caked in mud. I hear horses inside. Smell them.

‘So this is what you do in your spare time?’

‘Yeah, I shovel horseshit.’

She wipes her hands on her jeans and then eyes Ruiz, who has never been top of her dance card.

‘Mr Ruiz.’

She’s calling him ‘mister’ for a reason - letting him know that he no longer has a police rank.

‘DCI.’

‘You’re looking older,’ she comments.

‘And you’re looking great. That’s the benefit of going braless - it pulls all the wrinkles out of your face.’

‘Now, now, children, play nice,’ I tell them.

‘I’ll be nicer if he tries to be smarter,’ says Cray.

The DCI lights a cigarette, cupping her hands around the flame. The lighter clinks shut and I catch a whiff of petrol.

‘The place is looking good,’ says Ruiz, trying not to be sarcastic.

Cray looks around. ‘It’s a dump.’

‘Yeah, but you’re doing it up.’

‘That’s one of the great traps of buying a place like this. You see all the space and get excited, imagining beautiful lawns and gardens, but then you spend every weekend removing tree stumps and rocks.’

‘When you’re not shovelling shit,’ says Ruiz.

‘Exactly.’

Cray pushes a wheelbarrow to the side of the barn and tosses a bucket of vegetable scraps to the chickens.

‘On my mother’s side I have several generations of women shaped to pull ploughs. My father’s side was a family of pen pushers - delicate as Asians. In the genetic roll of the dice, I got the agricultural build.’

She carries the bucket towards the house. ‘I guess you gentlemen better come inside.’

Scraping mud from her boots and kicking them off, she ducks through a doorway as though imagining herself to be two feet taller. The kitchen is full of French provincial furniture and has copper-bottom pots hanging from the ceiling. A tan cat stretches, circles and resettles on a shelf above the stove. This is the champion ratter that Cray told me about, Strawberry’s mother.

‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she says, washing her hands. ‘This had better be a social call. It’s Saturday and I’m off-duty.’

Neither of us answers.

‘You want a drink?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ says Ruiz, eyeing the row of liquor bottles on top of the cupboard. ‘Scotch and a splash of water.’

‘I’m offering wine.’

The DCI pulls an open bottle from a shelf and cleans two wine-glasses with a paper towel.

‘How about you, Professor?’

‘I’m OK.’

Ronnie is not the most social of women, which could have something to do with her low regard for people and even lower expectations. Most of her life is a mystery to me, although I know she was married briefly and has a grown-up son. She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s gay, but neither is it open for discussion. I suspect there have been women in her life who got under her skin and into her heart, but now she seems to be closed off, anchored to her memories like a lone sailor who looks out of place on dry land and is only happy on her own.

Lighting another cigarette, she sucks hard into her lungs as if concerned that fresh air without tobacco smoke might damage her health.

‘Sienna Hegarty overdosed yesterday afternoon,’ I tell her.

‘Where did she get the pills?’

‘She stole them from the meds trolley at Oakham House.’

Cray glances at my left hand. My thumb and forefinger are brushing together, rolling an imaginary pill between them.

‘That’s not why you’re here.’

‘I talked to Sienna. She admitted sleeping with Gordon Ellis when she was only thirteen. She was pregnant with his child.’

‘Will she make a statement?’

‘Yes, I think so. There’s something else: Gordon Ellis organised to meet Sienna on the afternoon Ray Hegarty died.’

‘Natasha Ellis gave him an alibi.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘No, but it means that we have to prove otherwise.’

‘Danny Gardiner dropped Sienna on a corner on the Lower Bristol Road, near a minicab office. From there she was taken to an address - she can’t remember the location - and Ellis gave her instructions.’

‘What sort of instructions?’

‘She had to sleep with someone.’

Cray looks at me incredulously. ‘He pimped her!’

‘Gordon Ellis told her it was the final proof that she loved him.’

Cray wipes her face with her sleeve and wrinkles her nose as though smelling an odour rising from her armpit. ‘Who was the john?’

‘She doesn’t remember the address and she didn’t get a name.’

‘So we just have her word for it?’

I borrow a piece of paper and a pen and begin jotting down names and drawing lines between them. Sienna, Gordon Ellis, Caro Regan, Novak Brennan and the Crying Man - all of them can be linked by one or more acts of extreme violence.