Michael Robotham - The Wreckage

The detective quotes from her file. A history lesson. The foster homes, the past arrests, her alcohol and drug abuse. Her mind slips back over some of these events, but most have been forgotten or blocked out.

She has decided that she does not like DS Thompson, who is no longer polite or respectful. He has an undertaker’s face and dandruff on his shoulders.

In Holly’s experience, people tend to talk at her and not to her. They preach or they browbeat and they hear what they want to hear. But that’s not the reason she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t trust the truth. The truth can be a lethal thing.

Her mother used to work nights as a nurse. Her father, Reece, would go to the pub every evening, dressed in his best jacket, smelling of aftershave, whistling as he walked up the street. He left Holly in charge. Aged seven. Her brother Albie was five, epileptic, small for his age. One night Albie left the taps running when he filled the bath. It overflowed and flooded downstairs, coming through the ceiling in a torrent of plaster and dust.

When their father came home, Holly had tried to clean up but the wet plaster dust was like glue and she couldn’t hide the hole in the ceiling. Albie lay mute and fearful in his bed. His cat was under the covers with him.

“It was my fault,” she said. “I should have been paying attention.”

She watched her father’s large callused hand go up in the air and come down hard on the side of her face: harder than Zac had ever hit her. It knocked her across the room.

Albie lay transfixed, holding the cat against his chest.

The skin of Reece’s face was tight against the bone. He dragged Albie out of bed by the neck and took him to the bathroom.

“You want to be clean? I’ll show you clean.”

He pushed Albie’s head into the toilet bowl. Flushed. Did it again. Albie’s socked feet scrabbled on the tiles. He couldn’t breathe. Reece pulled his head from the bowl and bounced it off the cistern before flushing it again. He left Albie lying on the floor, toilet water dripping from his face.

That’s when it happened. Albie’s eyes began to flicker and roll back in his head. He was stuttering and his limbs were jerking like a fish pulled from the water. After a while he stopped moving. He had a blue ring around his mouth.

Holly thought time had stopped. It was like watching a DVD and someone had pressed pause, freezing the frame in a blurred snapshot. Reece tried to shake Albie awake. Gave him mouth to mouth. CPR. Called 999.

The ambulance took Albie to hospital but he was DOA. “What does that mean?” Holly asked, but nobody answered her.

Her mother came running down the corridor. Reece caught her. Held her. “He just collapsed, babe. He had one of his turns.”

He was stroking her hair, whispering, muffling her sobs. Then he looked at Holly and there was a moment of chilling certainty that registered in her mind.

“Ask Holly, she’ll tell you.”

Holly remained motionless. Reece rolled his jaw like he was chewing on something hard.

“He killed Albie,” she whispered. “He put his head down the toilet.”

Her father’s eyes narrowed like he was looking at her down the barrel of a gun.

“The little bitch is lying. It was an accident, babe, I promise you. I tried to save him. Gave him CPR, just like you taught me…”

“No, Mama, Albie overflowed the bath. Daddy got angry.”

“You shut your mouth!” he warned.

“It’s the truth.”

Her mother had pushed Reece away.

“She’s lying, babe, I’d never do anything to hurt Albie. He had one of his turns. Ask the doctors.”

“Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she flooded the bathroom. You know what she’s like-always blaming Albie for things.”

Holly’s eyes grew hot and bright. She rocked from foot to foot.

This time her mother knelt in front of her, holding on to her shoulders. “This is really important, sweetie, you have to tell me the truth.”

“I am telling the truth.”

There was no fight. No more harsh words. That night Holly and her mother stayed at a women’s refuge in Battersea. They shared a bed and Holly fell asleep listening to her mother’s sobs.

It took Reece three weeks to find them. He came to the door of the refuge in his blue suit. Sober. Freshly shaven. He carried a bunch of carnations for her mother that he’d bought at the train station. He also had a present for Holly-a cheap pink Barbie rip-off with straw-colored hair. Her mother and father drove off together-just to talk things over, Reece said. Holly knew he was lying.

Later that night, Reece parked in a quiet street and put his hands around her mother’s throat. They found her body next morning lying in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. Reece left a suicide note in his flat. He hung himself from a beam in his lockup garage.

A brother, a mother, a father, her entire family broken by the truth-she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Holly dreamed that night of Albie waving to her from Heaven, signaling her to come.

DS Thompson is shouting in her face. She can feel the flecks of spit land on her eyelids and lips. She wipes them away with her sleeve.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he says.

“There is no easy way,” she replies.

“What?”

“People say there’s an easy way, but there never is.”

DS Thompson slaps the folder closed and mutters something to a colleague about her being “retarded.” He leaves her alone for a few minutes. It might be longer.

Then he comes back into the room.

“Get up.”

She’s taken outside, along a corridor, down the stairs to a parking area. A police car is waiting. The doors open.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To identify a body.”

Ruiz splashes water on his face and tries to wash the coppery taste from his mouth. Leaning over the gutter, he empties the rest of the plastic bottle over his head. The police released him at three in the morning. Instead of going home, he drove to Westminster Public Mortuary in Horseferry Road.

Now it’s just gone seven. The morning is bathed in a faint glow.

He’s listening to the radio. Stories about Iraq and Afghanistan. A US Senate hearing into Goldman Sachs. Accusations of reckless greed. Claims and counter-claims.

A swinging door opens and a pale figure emerges. Gerard Noonan is in his sixties with short-cropped blond hair and no discernible eyebrows. His skin is so pale he seems to glow in the shadows, hence his nickname, “The Albino.”

When Ruiz was heading the Serious Crime Squad he worked more than a dozen cases with Noonan, a veteran Home Office pathologist, who enjoyed far better relationships with the dead than the living. Unmarried. Childless. Noonan has always struck Ruiz as being borderline autistic because of his social ineptness. The only sentient creatures that he relates to are horses-the thoroughbred variety that run round in circles carrying brightly colored leprechauns.

Ruiz falls in step.

“Gerard.”

“Vincent.”

“All-nighter?”

“People don’t die to a timetable.”

“How thoughtless of them. Had breakfast?”

“Not hungry.”

“Coffee then?”

“Are you going to follow me all the way home?”

“Depends.”

The cafe is a family business run by Italians with an endless supply of “cousins” working the tables and a barista who seems to have four arms. There are paintings on the walls of fat little nymphs playing in a forest.

Noonan orders a coffee. Ruiz wants the full English with everything fried, including the bread.

“I do autopsies on guys like you.”