Her face was slack. It always held this slack look when she was waiting for an answer. He’d heard some of the guys from the other end of the office joking that this might also be her sex face. Darryl gulped back a laugh.
‘Nothing much. A night of telly. We’ve just got Netflix,’ he said. In truth he would be spending the evening with Ella.
Her last evening.
Her last breath.
‘We?’ asked Bryony, suddenly very interested.
‘Me, my mum and dad. I still live at home.’
‘So no girlfriend?’
The slack look had left her face, and she shifted her large bulk to the other leg.
‘No girlfriend,’ he said. She hung around for a moment longer, but he had turned away from her to shut down his computer.
* * *
Darry made it home just before four thirty, and as he pulled in at the farm gates he noticed that it was only just getting dark. He was greeted by Grendel when he came into the boot room; he gave her a hug and crouched down so she could lick his face, then he went through to the kitchen. It was very hot, and his mother was red in the face after baking a batch of rock cakes.
‘Alright, love, you want a cuppa?’ she said, as he leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. He smelt gin on her breath, but just nodded. ‘I’ll bring it through with a couple of cakes.’
Darryl went to the living room. He switched on the fake flame fire and the television, and settled down in the red threadbare armchair. He was flicking through channels when Mary came through, a full teacup rattling in her hand.
‘I’ll want to watch Eggheads at six,’ she said setting it down beside him with a plate of warm rock cakes.
‘Where are the kid’s programmes?’ he said.
‘They moved them a few years back onto Children’s BBC… You want to watch Blue Peter?’
‘Course I don’t want to watch bloody Blue Peter. I was just asking,’ he snapped. He took the cup and saw that she’d slopped tea into the saucer.
‘It doesn’t seem like yesterday that you and Joe would come home and sit in here… Remember you used to fight over who got the armchair?’
‘Not anymore,’ said Darryl, slurping tea from the saucer.
Mary’s eyes welled up, and she left the room.
She came back later, worse for wear and weaving unsteadily, and they watched the quiz show Eggheads.
* * *
Just as it was finishing, at six thirty, Darryl’s father came into the living room. He stank of Old Spice and wore his best shirt and trousers; his white hair was neatly combed.
‘Right then, I’m just off to see a man about a dog,’ he said.
Darryl looked over at his mother whose glazed eyes stared at the credits rolling on the television screen. ‘Say hi to the dog, give her a pat on the head from us,’ he said.
His father narrowed his eyes, but left without a word. The dog in question was Deirdre Masters, a married woman who lived on a neighbouring farm. His father’s affair with her had been going on for years. As a child, he had often wondered why his father stayed out all night when last orders were called at 10.45 p.m. Then one day, Joe had said he’d overheard Dad on the phone to Deirdre.
‘Dad goes to hers, and they fuck all night,’ Joe had said. ‘Do you know about fucking?’
Darryl had said he didn’t. And when Joe had explained, he’d had to rush to the toilet in the boot room to throw up.
His mother never let on that she knew about his father’s Monday nights with Deirdre – she must have done because over the years people had talked – and when he’d left she would cook Darryl and Joe a telly supper consisting of fish fingers, chips and beans, which they would eat off trays in the living room.
This Monday was the same as in years gone by. But just as Darryl and Mary were settling down with their trays of food, the Channel 4 News came on, with a police appeal for witnesses to the murders of Lacey Greene and Janelle Robinson.
Darryl dropped his fork, spilling food over the carpet. He’d kept it all secret for so long that it was surreal to see a tall policewoman with short blonde hair sitting at a long table, flanked by Lacey Greene’s parents. He saw her name was Detective Chief Inspector Erika Foster.
‘The Met police would like to appeal for any witnesses into these brutal murders,’ she was saying, as the Met Police logo flashed up on a screen behind her.
Darryl’s heart began to hammer as he saw they had grainy CCTV footage of his car approaching Tooley Street when he’d abducted Janelle, and the Blue Boar pub when he’d taken Lacey. His ears started to roar with blood and his legs began to tremble. He couldn’t keep his feet flat on the carpet. Vomit rose in his throat and he struggled with it, then gulped it back down. He reached out a shaking hand and took a drink of the orange juice on his tray.
The sound came back to his ears and he could hear his mother saying: ‘They spend all our tax money on CCTV cameras to watch us, but they can’t even read the number plate… It could be your car for all they know.’ She looked at him for a moment and then heaved herself up off the sofa and moved to the bar.
‘What?’ he said.
Back on the screen, Lacey’s mother was crying, and her father was reading out from a prepared statement, the bright lights caught in the lenses of his glasses.
‘Lacey was a happy girl, with no enemies. She had her whole life ahead of her. There are two key dates where we want to appeal for witnesses. On Wednesday the fourth of January, Lacey was taken by the driver of a red Citro?n outside the Blue Boar pub in Southgate, at around 8 p.m. Her body was found on Monday the ninth of January in Tattersall Road in New Cross. We believe she was…’ At this point his voice faltered and he looked down. His wife squeezed his arm. He swallowed and went on: ‘She was dumped in these rubbish bins in the early hours on the morning of Monday the ninth. If you have any information, please can you call the helpline number. Any information, however small, could help us find who did this.’
The CCTV images played again of his car driving up to the pub, and shortly after, Lacey walking along the street with her long dark hair flowing after her. Still images were also shown of the two locations where the bodies were dumped. An artist’s e-fit then popped up on the screen. It was of Nico, the fake profile picture he’d used. It was a crude likeness. The forehead was wrong, it was too high and there were crease lines, and the nose was a little too wide.
The blonde police officer was now saying that their suspect had assumed the identity of a dead man called Sonny Sarmiento, a dead nineteen-year-old from Ecuador. ‘We ask that the public are vigilant. We believe this man is targeting young women in the London area, using fake profiles on social media. He establishes trust through online friendships, before asking to meet,’ she said.
Darryl’s mind was racing… He looked over to his mother as she plucked ice cubes from the ice bucket with a little pair of tongs and dropped them into her glass with a clink. She was watching him. No, studying him.
‘Horrible business,’ he said.