Dying for Christmas (27 page)

Martin is angry. Kim sees a red flush crawling around the side of his neck.

They are crowded around her computer screen – she, Martin and Paul Robertson – looking at the photograph of Jessica Gold on the hotel-room bed. Despite her stint on Vice, Kim feels oddly embarrassed and protective of Jessica and wishes they didn’t all have to see this.

‘So a bitter ex posts a private photograph online as a revenge tactic. It happens all the time.’

‘Yes, but as far as we know, Jessica didn’t have any bitter exes. She’s been with Travis Riley since university.’

‘Well, maybe she had an affair. Or maybe Travis did it himself. Stranger things happen in relationships.’

Kim knows Martin is fed up that she went to the TV archive without telling him.

The Super moves away from the computer screen, gesturing for Kim to close the file. He has a daughter around Jessica’s age, Kim remembers now. Perhaps this is making him feel uncomfortable.

‘It’s certainly a different side to Jessica that we haven’t seen before,’ he says. ‘Worth following up with her.’

‘The fake Facebook account was set up back in April.’ Martin is sulky, unwilling to concede anything. ‘That’s eight months before Jessica Gold was kidnapped. I really don’t see how this is going to be relevant.’

‘I’m inclined to agree,’ says Robertson. ‘But I still think it warrants checking out.’

Chapter Thirty-Five

I wonder if they can smell the fear wafting off me.

When she first handed me the photo, my heart started beating so fast I thought I would have a heart attack there and then in the living room of my parents’ house. How did they find that picture? Then I remembered the screen grab on my computer at work. That’s the thing about computers. You think you’re cleverer than them. You think you can bury things in them, but they bring them right back up to the surface, like the Thames giving up its dead. That got me thinking about the flat in Wapping and Execution Dock and the voices that blew in the wind over the river, and since then I’ve been too terrified to think of anything at all.

But they’re waiting – the policewoman with the brown bob and the younger male officer with the black pores on his nose like poppy seeds.

I put my hands over my face and my horror isn’t faked. I’m ashamed that they’ve looked at this picture, these police people with their polite smiles and their pink glowing winter skin. I’m ashamed they’ve seen who I am when I’m not being me.

‘We know it isn’t photoshopped, Jessica.’ She sounds kind but tired.

‘I’m so embarrassed! Please, please don’t tell my family, or Travis. It was three years ago, when Travis was in his final year at Manchester and I was already working in London. I didn’t hear from this bloke for ages. Then he rang a few months ago, out of the blue, wanting to meet, and I refused and things got a bit nasty, and the next thing I knew there was that Facebook account.’

‘What was his name?’

She has her notebook out and is waiting with a pencil held between her fingers.

‘I never knew his surname. He said his name was Ben and he was a civil engineer. We got talking to each other on the Tube. It was stuck in a tunnel. I get claustrophobic. He calmed me down. We got off at the next station and went to the pub for a drink. And then another. We ended up in a hotel in King’s Cross.’

Poppy-Seed Face doesn’t think much of this.

‘First him and then Dominic Lacey. You really need to think more carefully about going home with strange men.’

‘I know. I’m an idiot. Please tell me you’re not going to tell Travis! This has absolutely nothing to do with the case.

I never heard from him again after the account got taken down.’

I imagine how I must look to them. I’ve lost a lot of weight since Christmas Eve. Though my hair has started growing back, it’s still patchy. My skin is red and flaky. I’m pathetic.

‘You’re all right,’ says the man, and he looks pleased with his own largesse. ‘We all make mistakes from time to time. We see more and more of this kind of thing. Revenge porn, it’s called. It’s a criminal offence.’

The woman, Kim, is less quick to absolve me. ‘Of course, everything depends on what happens legally from here. Whether this ends up in court. There are cases where defence lawyers have jumped on this kind of thing to discredit a witness – or prosecutors to discredit a defendant.’

I stop listening when she says that word ‘court’. For 90 per cent of the time, I’m able to forget about Dominic being kept alive by machines in a hospital somewhere. But every so often I’ll be reminded, and this huge mass of dread forms like a tumour inside me. The thought of facing him again, feeling those blue eyes burning holes in the tissue of lies Natalie and I have spun makes me weak with fear.

For a wild moment, I imagine telling these two police officers everything. Surely they’ll understand if I explain that I never meant Dominic to be killed, or even attacked. That was all Natalie’s doing. I imagine shrugging off my guilt like a heavy rucksack. And then I snap back into the real world. I am in this too deep to go back.

* * *

‘Happens all the time,’ Martin is saying as he drives back through the stop-start traffic.

This part of London is lined with Turkish restaurants. Kim makes a mental note of them, wondering if she and Sean should come here one night, before remembering there is no she and Sean.

‘Girls let themselves be photographed like that thinking it’s romantic, and before they know it they’re on some porn site being wanked over by millions of strangers. Remember that case last year, Tara Flanagan?’

‘
Flannery
,’ Kim corrects him. A beautiful fifteen-year-old girl whose boyfriend filmed her on his phone giving him a blowjob and then sent the footage to his friends who all forwarded it, until it was everywhere. The police had got involved after the girl’s father went round to the boyfriend’s and beat the shit out of him. ‘She’s only a kid. She still wears braces, for god’s sake,’ the man said.

So Martin is right. It does happen all the time. But still there is something about Jessica Gold’s reaction that isn’t ringing true. Something she can’t quite put her finger on.

* * *

For half an hour after the police visit, I sat on the sofa rocking, but now the adrenalin is starting to subside. I go over what I said to them, looking for holes, but can’t find any. They seemed to believe me, particularly the man. Probably because it wasn’t a million miles from the truth. The photograph
was
the result of an ill-judged one-night stand, and the Facebook account
was
payback for me refusing a repeat encounter. But everything else was a lie. The man who took the photo was Dominic Lacey. And Dominic Lacey never gives up.

After the account was taken down, he sent me another message at work sounding totally contrite. He said I probably wanted the photograph back, and of course he’d give it to me. In return for just one more date. (He actually did call it a date – like what we did on that hotel bed had anything to do with romance.)

Of course, sitting here on the oatmeal sofa my parents bought in 1992, which used to be cream but was re-covered in 1995 after an incident involving me and a set of Sharpie pens, I can see what an idiot I was to even consider it. But he sounded so sorry. He said he’d set up the account when he was drunk and felt like a total shit about it. He really liked me, he said, that’s why he’d taken rejection so badly. Just one date, he pleaded. He’d give me back the photograph. I could personally delete it from his phone.

And even though I should have known better, I found myself listening to his charming voice, and remembering the dimple in his cheek and the delicious thrill of discovering that, like a Russian doll, I contained within me another self, capable of acting in ways I’d never imagined. I met him in a hotel on an industrial estate off the M1. All the way there I asked myself what I was doing, and when I arrived I rang him from the car park to say I’d changed my mind. But he was so very sorry, so full of promises, his voice so sexy. I went in the side entrance so that no one would see me. When I got to the room, he was already waiting. It was an hour or two later – after a bottle of champagne that left me feeling divorced from my own body, drowsy but compliant, that he got out his Pleasure Chest.

I was so naive I had no idea of the things people like Dominic did in the comfort of their own homes. The restraints, the harnesses, the whips, the clamps.

‘I’ll go to the police,’ I said when I realized my drink had been drugged.

‘And have to explain all this to your family and your boyfriend and all those people at work? And anyway, I’ll just say it was consensual. I already have the photograph to prove it’s not the first time. It’ll be your word against mine.

‘And let me tell you, sweetheart, I can be very persuasive.’

So afterwards I went away and I didn’t tell anyone, and I convinced myself it was something I dreamed up after eating too much cheese late at night. I didn’t let myself call it what it was. I didn’t think of myself as a victim. I didn’t think to wonder what that light was, blinking red on the hotel-room dressing table.

* * *

‘So when it comes to picking up men, Miss Gold doesn’t seem to have the best possible taste.’

‘You could say that, sir. Seems this was some slimeball geek who has problems with women.’

Martin is talking as if he himself is some kind of babe magnet, but Kim is pretty sure he hasn’t had a proper girlfriend in the three years she’s known him.

‘OK, let’s sit on that photograph then, for the time being anyway. The girl’s been through enough without dragging up indiscretions from her past as well. Something like that would just muddy the waters and we can do without that when we’re building such a convincing case against Lacey.’

‘Have you found out anything more, sir?’

Kim knows there’s a whole team working on digging through Dominic Lacey’s past. Martin is itching to join them, sure that’s where the glory lies, but Robertson thinks they should stick with the Jessica Gold side of things, especially in view of Kim being Family Liaison for the Golds.

The Super looks quietly pleased. ‘Plenty. I’m just amazed he’s been getting away with things for as long as he has. His school reports make for interesting reading – bullying, aggressive behaviour, a particularly nasty episode involving a young female teacher who ended up leaving the profession because of him. Suggestion of abuse at home, though that was never proven. A history of violence with girlfriends starting from when he was a teenager. Then the first marriage which ends with the wife taking out a restraining order, and then killing herself and their baby son. And then the second marriage with the wife who disappeared earlier this year.’

Martin is shaking his head, even though they’ve heard most of this before, some in official briefings, some through office tittle-tattle.

‘Some people are just born scum, aren’t they, sir?’

The Super isn’t so sure. ‘Sometimes people become scum. Nature versus nurture.’

As she makes her way back to Heather’s, Kim can’t stop thinking about that comment.
Nature versus nurture.
Was Dominic Lacey born bad, or made bad? Might her own children be so affected by her being away from them that it changes them in some way, hardens them, warps them, even?

The thought makes her chest hurt.

Chapter Thirty-Six

When Travis walks into the bedroom, it’s like he’s someone I don’t know. Someone else’s boyfriend. His hair has grown and his face seems older. I have seen him every day since I left hospital, but each time he seems more and more like a stranger. Did his bottom teeth always cross over like that? Was he always so slow to respond to my jokes, considering them carefully before chancing a smile?

‘I feel like David Beckham whenever I arrive here,’ he says. ‘All those reporters shouting out my name, taking my photograph.’

‘Perhaps you could bring out a range of underpants,’ I suggest. ‘Or have my name tattooed across your chest in Chinese.’

He hesitates for a moment before allowing himself to smile.

‘I’m thinking about moving back home.’

Until I say it, I have no idea I’ve been thinking about it, but now I find it makes sense. I’m bored here at my parents’ house. I need to get back to normality. Travis, it’s fair to say, doesn’t jump at the chance of having me home.

‘I’m working really long shifts at the hospital so you’d be on your own a lot, and you’re still not properly recovered. And what about the police?’

‘What about the police?’

‘Well, don’t they want you to stay put while they’re investigating what happened? You still can’t be sure they’re not going to charge you with anything.’

‘Thanks for reminding me that I could be up for attempted murder.’

‘Or murder, if he dies.’ He sits down in the chair by the window, giving nothing away. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.

His face, when he turns it to me, sags with concern, and I feel bad for doubting him just now. But Travis and I still haven’t discussed the elephant in the room. He has read the account I spent the night writing in the apartment while I waited for someone to read the SOS banner and tried to forget there was a bleeding man outside on the balcony. Though come to think of it I’d already written most of that account before I set foot in Dominic’s apartment that time. See what I mean about not being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction any more?