The Backs (2013) Read online

  THE BACKS

  Also by Alison Bruce

  Cambridge Blue

  The Siren

  The Calling

  The Silence

  THE BACKS

  Alison Bruce

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55-56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by C&R Crime,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Alison Bruce 2013

  The right of Alison Bruce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-47210-211-9 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-215-7 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Jacket design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk; Jacket images: © Derek Langley

  Iakona,

  Aloha Aku No, Aloha Mai No,

  Alekona x

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to Krystyna Green, Peter Lavery, Sophie Brewer, Saskia Angenent, Jo Stansall and the entire team at Constable & Robinson; I am very grateful for the support you have given the Goodhew series and I love the new cover designs . . . especially this one!

  And to my agent Broo Doherty, I truly appreciate all the support and advice you have given me, as always. Thank you so much, Broo.

  And also thank you to my lovely sister Stella, to Genevieve Pease, Jane Martin, Claire Tombs, Sue Gully, Gary Goodhew, Justin and Chris Lansdowne, Charlotte Hockin, Ayo Onatade, Cath Staincliffe, Kelly Kelday, Kirsty Forsyth, Cressi Downing, Jon and Gabrielle Breakfield, Jayne-Marie Barker, Edith Welter and Joyce Reeves, James Linsell-Clark, Christine Bartram, Dave Sivers, David Prestidge, Lisa Hall, Barbara and Graeme Key, Jim and Anne Cross, Brenda Mead. And thanks to the Goodhew series I’m delighted to be back in touch with old friends Beris Cumming, Emily Merrick and Ali DiMaggio.

  Special thanks: to Steve Mosby and Richard Reynolds for their generosity. To the Royal Literary Fund for their support and also the privilege of being appointed as an RLF Fellow. To Dr William Holstein for specialist advice and entertaining emails, and to Kimberly Jackson for creating a jaunty but sinister three-word phrase. To Miles Orchard: I wrote you a sentence; it’s to make you smile, Chadwick!

  Thanks to everyone who’s emailed me about the books, Goodhew and my music choices. I’m on Twitter@Alison_ Bruce and can also be contacted via my website, www.alisonbruce.com. Once again the readers I’ve met libraries, bookshops and reading groups have made it a very special year. Thank you all.

  Finally, and most importantly, I have to say a big thank you to Jacen, Natalie, Lana and Dean, my fantastic family who make home a happy and creative place to be xxxx

  PROLOGUE

  Guilt.

  When Genevieve Barnes was eight years old, her uncle had dropped dead in front of her. No cry of pain, clutching at the chest or desperate gasps for breath. One moment he was laughing with her mother and the next collapsing to the floor with so little resistance that afterwards she imagined that she’d seen him deflate slightly on impact.

  His eyes rolled up into his head, and for one second his gaze seemed to sweep over her. Then he was gone.

  His death had been as unexpected and almost as instant as it was possible to be, yet she relived his last minutes over and over. Imagining she knew about CPR. Thinking she should have known enough to spot a warning sign sometime earlier in the day. Rerunning the entire scenario and thinking of a hundred different ways of changing the outcome.

  From then on she developed a new awareness of the world around her. She carried her little burden of guilt quietly and learnt first aid at school, then later trained in nursing, and after that as a paramedic.

  Now, at thirty-four, she had already faced the challenge of saving lives more times than she could count. She understood that sometimes it would be impossible, but even that realization still hadn’t shaken off the shadow of helplessness and unjustified guilt that had followed her since that day in her childhood.

  Guilt had become the architect of so many of her subsequent decisions.

  Except, ironically, on the one day in each year when she thought of her uncle again as the real person, rather than just a watermark in the vaguest corner of her memory.

  His name was Eric, and there had been no greater passions in his life than his twin loves of DIY and real ale. Genevieve still didn’t understand how anyone could be so enamoured with bookshelves and tiling, but the rugged charm of real-ale pubs and Cambridge’s annual beer festival did appeal.

  And so, each year, like today, she’d arrange to meet her husband in the beer tent, pick the three most obscurely named beers, and enjoy a half pint of each. Cheers, Eric.

  Genevieve cut through the back streets, and then the back alleys of other back streets. As she came closer to Jesus Green there would be others, like her, heading for an after-work drink, and an almost equal number coming away. The bursts of heavy rain wouldn’t deter many; it certainly wasn’t going to put her off.

  The sun had broken through, drying big patches of pavement, but leaving anything in the shade untouched. The surrounding buildings were affected similarly, the grey and cream of rain-sodden brickwork having darkened to the colours of pewter and damp sand. The sun was hitting them again, restoring them to their natural shades. Even the air now smelt clean, and Genevieve slowed down a little to enjoy its warmth.

  She crossed Alpha Road and turned down the narrow track running behind the houses on Searle Street. This short-cut saved her from walking the long way to Carlyle Road. The garden fences here were too high to look over but she could still see the upper-floor windows, many of them children’s bedrooms with a toy on the windowsill or a bunk-bed just visible through the glass. A skinny tortoiseshell cat watched her from the top of one fence.

  She stopped to stroke it. It pushed its head into the palm of Genevieve’s hand, then jumped down and nudged against her ankles until it was ready to walk on.

  Genevieve bent down and the animal immediately flopped on to her side and then rolled over. ‘Are you still a kitten?’ Genevieve asked out loud.

  Her voice sounded out of place here in the silence of the alleyway. Suddenly it felt as though every house around her stood empty, and that she’d slipped into a completely abandoned corner of town. The only sound came from the distant main road, but the noise of passing cars had all but evaporated by the time it reached her.

  She made herself talk to the cat again, ‘Good girl, good girl.’

  The animal tried wrapping its front paws around Genevieve’s fingers but, although she continued to pet her, Genevieve’s attention had moved away. The cat stood up again, disappointed. Genevieve straightened, too, listening hard.

  She tried to rewind what she thought she’d heard: a yelp, definitely a yelp. Human, not canine. She wasn’t sure which direction it had come from, or how close.

  ‘Hello?�
� She made sure she uttered it with confidence but noticed that her voice sounded small and thin in any case.

  She felt for her mobile in her pocket. She could phone Jimmy but, even if he could hear his phone inside the rowdy beer tent, what would he do? Most likely tell her to walk away, tell her she’d overheard nothing more sinister than a couple of shagging teenagers.

  She stayed still and replayed the sound in her head once more. It had been small. Small but desperate. It had sounded female, she thought.

  How would she feel if that had been a cry for help? What if the shagging was actually rape? Or the woman had fallen, and lay injured? Genevieve’s own working day was filled with such incidents, and often worse.

  ‘Hello!’ She said it with more force this time, and not as a question but more as a demand for a reply. No response came back.

  The yelp hadn’t been loud, so she guessed it must’ve come from one of the gardens nearby. Probably just ahead of her and to the right.

  She pushed at the nearest gate but it was locked. The second swung open by four or five inches before snagging on the uneven concrete underneath. She pushed it harder, and it gave a little. She squeezed through, shoulder first, and found herself in a small back yard, plain and tidy apart from four old tea chests piled beside the three-foot wall separating this property from the garden with the locked gate. The wall was the same height on both sides, so she could check out three gardens at once.

  Both the neighbouring yards turned out to be empty apart from a bird feeder in one and a rotary drier in the other.

  She patted her mobile again, glad she hadn’t bothered Jimmy with her over-anxiousness. She’d scanned the beer festival programme and now decided that her first half had better be Wild Goose – unless one called Looking for Trouble had since been added to the list.

  She smiled, and was still smiling, as one of the back gates, two houses along and on the other side of the alley opened.

  The gate was newly constructed from untreated wood panels, and it fitted badly. As it opened, a gap appeared between the hinges and, from the angle at which she stood Genevieve could see more clearly through that than through the gate itself. She saw a young woman beyond, half-sitting, half-slumped against a fence post. Genevieve swiftly pulled the mobile from her pocket just as a man stepped through the gateway. He wore a dark woollen overcoat and his hands were thrust deep into his pockets.

  He didn’t speak, just stared at her.

  ‘I’m a paramedic, what’s happened there?’

  He took a step forward and she wondered if he’d been hurt too. ‘Help her,’ he breathed. He reached out to the nearby fence for support. ‘Help her,’ he repeated.

  Genevieve pushed past him and headed into the back garden. She’d already dialled 999 and it was connecting by the time she knelt beside the young woman. She held the phone between her ear and shoulder while feeling for a pulse. ‘Ambulance,’ she said, ‘and police.’

  She gave their location: ‘The back of Searle Street, the alleyway that joins Alpha Road and Carlyle Road. I don’t know the house number.’ She began to manoeuvre the woman on to her back, still speaking as she worked. ‘Early twenties, female. There’s a faint pulse. I’m putting down the phone now, trying resus.’

  The woman lay at the edge of a paved area, the weight of her body forcing a large clump of Spanish bluebells to splay out around her. Genevieve slid her hand from behind the woman’s back, expecting the damp there to be from sodden leaves. Instead she recognized blood, diluted from the wet foliage, glistening on her palms in semi-transparent smears.

  She wiped her hand clean on her thigh and pinched the woman’s nose, leaning forward to breathe regularly into her mouth. It was then, like previously, she heard a strange noise, not a yelp this time but a harsher grating sound – followed by a grunt.

  She looked into the other woman’s face, stupidly intent on carrying on even though she knew that the grunt had emerged from herself, and that at any moment the pain would follow.

  The other woman’s lips were pale, and without Genevieve she’d be gone in a minute. It was Genevieve who was hurting now.

  She felt her strength fading and she slumped forward, the world contracting to encompass her left hand lying limply amid the flattened bluebell leaves. She spoke again, hoping her voice was loud enough to reach the phone. ‘I’ve been hurt.’ The words seemed just clear enough. ‘Help me,’ she breathed, then realized that helping them to catch him might be all she could achieve here. Only one other item came within her shrinking field of vision. ‘There’s something, a card on the ground, it’s . . .’

  And her fingers twitched, as if there was a point in reaching out for it.

  There was none.

  She was dying, and the other woman would be dead too.

  The thought hit Genevieve hard, in a final moment of clarity: the revelation that her entire life had been driven by her obsessional avoidance of guilt. What had that achieved today except leaving Jimmy to face bereavement? She should have thought of the pair of them first and stayed away. She should have learnt that guilt is just an evil little gremlin masquerading as something virtuous. It had needed flushing down the toilet like the toxic little shit it truly was.

  Some lessons in life are learnt the really hard way.

  And some lessons are learnt too late.

  ONE

  11 August

  The call had come in at 11.47 p.m. A car burning out on the Gogs.

  Burnt-out cars belonged to Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, or summer holidays, not Sundays. Usually it would be something easier to steal than this one, typically a mid-size saloon in the last few years of its life, and too often taken by kids who didn’t understand the dangers lurking on the apparently flat and straight Fen roads.

  PC Sue Gully had attended too many of those incidents but, then, so had they all.

  The ones that crashed them, and survived well enough to walk away, often burnt out the car in the process; the ones that didn’t crash often torched the vehicle in any case.

  But this clearly wasn’t like that.

  The vehicle itself was about a hundred yards behind her and, since she was facing towards Cambridge, she should have been able to recognize the amber smudges of the city’s lights tinting the sky. Instead she faced the oncoming traffic, diverting it back up the Babraham Road, the headlights dazzling her as they approached. Then, as each vehicle turned, she saw the occupants’ faces staring beyond her, oval with curiosity. And momentarily she would see the burning car reflected in their window glass, looking only about the size of an incinerating match. The next car swung round, and she caught sight of someone else in the window’s reflection.

  She didn’t turn to look, but waited until he was almost at her elbow and had addressed her first. ‘So, what do you know, Sue?’

  She glanced at him finally. As far as she knew, DC Goodhew had no reason to be there, but equally she wasn’t surprised to see him. ‘About the same as you, I suspect. Less, actually, since you’ve been up there. You wouldn’t know what’s happening, would you?’

  ‘It’s a car on the central reservation. But it doesn’t look like it crashed first.’

  ‘Gary, that’s not exactly illuminating. It’s a Lotus Evora.’

  Goodhew half nodded, half shrugged, as though that name vaguely rang a bell.

  ‘Someone’s pride and joy. Not an easy steal, so the assessors will be looking closely at it if he tries to claim.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Yeah, they have the name of the owner, but no trace of him yet.’ She’d heard it over the radio, so was a little surprised Goodhew hadn’t as well.

  ‘He’s not inside the car, then?’

  Gully shook her head, ‘Obviously not one hundred per cent sure at this stage, but they don’t think so.’

  Two fire engines were already on the scene, therefore soon it would be just a smoking and blackened shell, but the intensity of such an inferno could soon turn a human being to ash. Forensics would b
e testing the debris, just to be certain.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘You’re not even on duty, are you?’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘Paul Marshall, thirty-eight. Married with two kids and a big detached house out in Linton.’

  ‘Heading home then?’

  ‘Unlike you, clearly. Rubbernecking an RTA isn’t your thing, Gary, so why are you here?’

  ‘Curious about something else,’ he muttered. And, although he’d answered her question, the tone of his voice told her that something had just distracted him. He stood in the inside lane of the road, gazing at the burning car.

  ‘Curious about what?’

  There was a long pause before he answered. ‘Nothing . . . just a different case. Nothing, really.’ His response was monotone, not actually ignoring her, but intended to push the conversation aside. He was asking for space to think.

  She took the hint but, following his gaze, tried to read his mind.

  The Gog Magog Downs were a series of low chalk hills that would have been unremarkable in another landscape but here, lying alongside the resolute flatness of Cambridgeshire, they became surprisingly dramatic.

  Daniel Defoe had referred to them as mountains. Legend suggested they might be sleeping giants, and long dead university students had been warned to stay away.

  Goodhew stared at the dying blaze, then moved about thirty yards closer, towards the grassy strip that ran under the central crash barrier. Further along, this strip widened and the out-of-town carriageway took a higher route up the hill, with a band of trees and shrubs between it and the two lanes that guided traffic back into the city. He climbed the barrier, looking up at the wreck from this new angle, then clambered back down and stared in the other direction, across the adjoining farm land. After a few seconds, he moved further towards the fire site again.

  Yes, Gully was already trying to read his mind, but of course she failed; nothing new, then. And she had no idea why he’d now turned on his mobile phone’s torch, before easing himself through the hedge and into the field beyond.