PROLOGUE They locked her in the cage when she started to bleed. Tom was already there. He’d been there for three days and had stopped crying now. He was still shivering, though. It was February, there was no heat in the cellar, and both of them were naked. There would be no food, either, she knew, not for a long time, not until she got so hungry that she felt as if she were being eaten from the inside. It wasn’t the first time she had been locked in the cage, but this time was different from the others. Before, it had always been because she’d done something wrong or hadn’t done what they wanted her to do. This time it was different; it was because of what she had become, and she was really scared. As soon as they had shut the door at the top of the stairs, the darkness wrapped itself around her like fur. She could feel it rubbing against her skin the way a cat rubs against your legs. She began to shiver. More than anything she hated the cage, more than the blows, more than the humiliations. But she wouldn’t cry. She never cried. She didn’t know how. The smell was terrible; they didn’t have a toilet to go to, only the bucket in the corner, which they would only be allowed to empty when they were let out. And who knew when that would be? But worse even than the smell were the little scratching sounds that started when she had been locked up only a few minutes. Soon, she knew, it would come, the tickle of sharp little feet across her legs or her stomach if she dare lie down. The first time, she had tried to keep moving and making noise all the time to keep them away, but in the end she had become exhausted and fallen asleep, not caring how many there were or what they did. She could tell in the dark, by the way they moved and their weight, whether they were rats or mice. The rats were the worst. One had even bitten her once. She held Tom and tried to comfort him, making them both a little warmer. If truth be told, she could have done with some comforting herself, but there was nobody to comfort her. Mice scuttled across her feet. Occasionally, she kicked out and heard one squeak as it hit the wall. She could hear music from upstairs, loud, with the bass making the bars of the cage rattle. She closed her eyes and tried to find a beautiful retreat deep inside her mind, a place where everything was warm and golden and the sea that washed up on the sands was deep blue, the water warm and lovely as sunlight when she jumped in. But she couldn’t find it, couldn’t find that sandy beach and blue sea, that garden full of bright flowers or that cool green forest in summer. When she closed her eyes, all she could find was darkness shot with red, distant mutterings, cries and an appalling sense of dread. She drifted in and out of sleep, becoming oblivious to the mice and rats. She didn’t know how long she’d been there before she heard noises upstairs. Different noises. The music had ended a long time ago and everything was silent apart from the scratching and Tom’s breathing. She thought she heard a car pull up outside. Voices. Another car. Then she heard someone walking across the floor upstairs. A curse. Suddenly all hell broke loose upstairs. It sounded as if someone was battering at the door with a tree trunk, then came a crunching sound followed by a loud bang as the front door caved in. Tom was awake now, whimpering in her arms. She heard shouting and what sounded like dozens of pairs of feet running around upstairs. After what seemed like an eternity, she heard someone prise open the lock to the cellar door. A little light spilled in, but not much, and there wasn’t a bulb down there. More voices. Then came the lances of bright torch light, coming closer, so close they hurt her eyes and she had to shield them with her hand. Then the beam held her and a strange voice cried, ‘Oh God! Oh, my God!’ 1 Maggie Forrest wasn’t sleeping well, so it didn’t surprise her when the voices woke her shortly before four o’clock one morning in early May, even though she had made sure before she went to bed that all the windows in the house were shut fast. If it hadn’t been the voices, it would have been something else: a car door slamming as someone set off for an early shift; the first train rattling across the bridge; the neighbour’s dog; old wood creaking somewhere in the house; the fridge clicking on and off; a pan or a glass shifting on the draining-board. Or perhaps one of the noises of the night, the kind that made her wake in a cold sweat with a thudding heart and gasp for breath as if she were drowning, not sleeping: the man she called Mr Bones clicking up and down The Hill with his cane; the scratching at the front door; the tortured child screaming in the distance. Or a nightmare. She was just too jumpy these days, she told herself, trying to laugh it off. But there they were again. Definitely voices. One loud and masculine. Maggie got out of bed and padded over to the window. The street called The Hill ran up the northern slope of the broad valley, and where Maggie lived, about halfway up, just above the railway bridge, the houses on the eastern side of the street stood atop a twenty-foot rise that sloped down to the pavement in a profusion of shrubs and small trees. Sometimes the undergrowth and foliage seemed so thick she could hardly find her way along the path to the pavement. Maggie’s bedroom window looked over the houses on the western side of The Hill and beyond, a patchwork landscape of housing estates, arterial roads, warehouses, factory chimneys and fields stretching through Bradford and Halifax all the way to the Pennines. Some days, Maggie would sit for hours and look at the view, thinking about the odd chain of events that had brought her here. Now, though, in the pre-dawn light, the distant necklaces and clusters of amber street lights took on a ghostly aspect, as if the city weren’t quite real yet. Maggie stood at her window and looked across the street. She could swear there was a hall light on directly opposite, in Lucy’s house, and when she heard the voice again she suddenly felt all her premonitions had been true. It was Terry’s voice, and he was shouting at Lucy. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then she heard a scream, the sound of glass breaking and a thud. Lucy. Maggie dragged herself out of her paralysis, and with trembling hands she picked up the bedside telephone and dialled 999. Probationary Police Constable Janet Taylor stood by her patrol car and watched the silver BMW burn, shielding her eyes from its glare, standing upwind of the foul-smelling smoke. Her partner, PC Dennis Morrisey, stood beside her. One or two spectators were peeping out of their bedroom windows, but nobody else seemed very interested. Burning cars weren’t exactly a novelty on this estate. Even at four o’clock in the morning. Orange and red flames, with deep inner hues of blue and green and occasional tentacles of violet, twisted into the darkness, sending up palls of thick black smoke. Even upwind, Janet could smell the burning rubber and plastic. It was giving her a headache, and she knew her uniform and her hair would reek of it for days. The leading firefighter, Gary Cullen, walked over to join them. It was Dennis he spoke to, of course; he always did. They were mates. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Joyriders.’ Dennis nodded towards the car. ‘We checked the number-plate. Stolen from a nice middle-class residential street in Heaton Moor, Manchester, earlier this evening.’ ‘Why here, then?’ ‘Dunno. Could be a connection, a grudge or something. Someone giving a little demonstration of his feelings. Drugs, even. But that’s for the lads upstairs to work out. They’re the ones paid to have brains. We’re done for now. Everything safe?’ ‘Under control. What if there’s a body in the boot?’ Dennis laughed. ‘It’ll be well done by now, won’t it? Hang on a minute, that’s our radio, isn’t it?’ Janet walked over to the car. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Control to 354. Come in please, 354. Over.’ Janet picked up the radio. ‘354 to Control. Over.’ ‘Domestic dispute reported taking place at number thirty-five, The Hill. Repeat. Three-five. The Hill. Can you respond? Over.’ Christ, thought Janet, a bloody domestic. No copper in her right mind liked domestics, especially at this time in the morning. ‘Will do,’ she sighed, looking at her watch. ‘ETA three minutes.’ She called over to Dennis, who held up his hand and spoke a few more words to Gary Cullen before responding. They were both laughing when Dennis returned to the car. ‘Tell him that joke, did you?’ Janet asked, settling behind the wheel. ‘Which one’s that?’ Dennis asked, all innocence. Janet started the car and sped to the main road. ‘You know, the one about the blonde giving her first blow job.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘Only I heard you telling it to that new PC back at the station, the lad who hasn’t started shaving yet. You ought to give the poor lad a chance to make his own mind up about women, Den, instead of poisoning him right off the bat.’ The centrifugal force almost threw them off the road as Janet took the roundabout at the top of The Hill too fast. Dennis grasped the dashboard and hung on for dear life. ‘Jesus Christ. Women drivers. It’s only a joke. Have you got no sense of humour?’ Janet smiled to herself as she slowed and kerb-crawled down The Hill looking for number thirty-five. ‘Anyway, I’m getting sick of this,’ Dennis said. ‘Sick of what? My driving?’ ‘That, too. Mostly, though, it’s your constant bitching. It’s got so a bloke can’t say what’s on his mind these days.’ ‘Not if he’s got a mind like a sewer. That’s pollution. Anyway, it’s changing times, Den. And we have to change with them or we’ll end up like the dinosaurs. By the way, about that mole.’ ‘What mole?’ ‘You know, the one on your cheek. Next to your nose. The one with all the hairs growing out of it.’ Dennis put his hand up to his cheek. ‘What about it?’ ‘I’d get it seen to quick, if I were you. It looks cancerous to me. Ah, number thirty-five. Here we are.’ She pulled over to the right side of the road and came to a halt a few yards past the house. It was a small detached residence built of redbrick and sandstone, between a plot of allotments and a row of shops. It wasn’t much bigger than a cottage, with a slate roof, low-walled garden and a modern garage attached at the right. At the moment, all was quiet. ‘There’s a light on in the hall,’ Janet said. ‘Shall we have a dekko?’ Still fingering his mole, Dennis sighed and muttered something she took to be assent. Janet got out of the car first and walked up the path, aware of him dragging his feet behind her. The garden was overgrown and she had to push twigs and shrubbery aside as she walked. A little adrenalin had leaked into her system, put her on super alert, as it always did with domestics. The reason most cops hated them was that you never knew what was going to happen. As likely as not you’d pull the husband off the wife and then the wife would take his side and start bashing you with a rolling pin. Janet paused by the door. All quiet, apart from Dennis’s stertorous breathing behind her. It was too early yet for people to be going to work, and most of the late-night revellers had passed out by now. Somewhere in the distance the first birds began to chatter. Sparrows, most likely, Janet thought. Mice with wings. Seeing no doorbell, Janet knocked on the door. No response came from inside. She knocked harder. The hammering seemed to echo up and down the street. Still no response. Next, Janet went down on her knees and looked through the letterbox. She could just make out a figure sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s figure. That was probably cause enough for forced entry. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. Dennis tried the handle. Locked. Then, gesturing for Janet to stand out of the way, he charged the door with his shoulder. Poor technique, she thought. She’d have reared back and used her foot. But Dennis was a second row rugby forward, she reminded herself, and his shoulders had been pushed up against so many arseholes in their time that they had to be strong. The door crashed open on first contact and Dennis can-nonballed into the hallway, grabbing hold of the bottom of the banister to stop himself from tripping over the still figure that lay there. Janet was right behind him, but she had the advantage of walking in at a more dignified pace. She closed the door as best she could, knelt beside the woman on the floor and felt for a pulse. Weak, but steady. One side of her face was bathed in blood. ‘My God,’ Janet muttered. ‘Den? You okay?’ ‘Fine. You take care of her. I’ll have a look around.’ Dennis headed upstairs. For once, Janet didn’t mind being told what to do. Nor did she mind that Dennis automatically assumed it was a woman’s work to tend the injured while the man went in search of heroic glory. Well, she minded, but she felt a real concern for the victim here, so she didn’t want to make an issue of it. Bastard, she thought. Whoever did this. ‘It’s okay, love,’ she said, even though she suspected the woman couldn’t hear her. ‘We’ll get you an ambulance. Just hold on.’ Most of the blood seemed to be coming from one deep cut just above her left ear, Janet noticed, though there was also a little smeared around the nose and lips. Punches, by the looks of it. There were also broken glass and daffodils scattered all around her, along with a damp patch on the carpet. Janet took her personal radio from her belt-hook and called for an ambulance. She was lucky it worked on The Hill; personal UHF radios had much less range than the VHF models fitted in cars, and were notoriously subject to black spots of patchy reception. Dennis came downstairs shaking his head. ‘Bastard’s not hiding up there,’ he said. He handed Janet a blanket, pillow and towel, nodding to the woman. ‘For her.’ Janet eased the pillow under the woman’s head, covered her gently with the blanket and applied the towel to the seeping wound on her temple. Well, I never, she thought, full of surprises, our Den. ‘Think he’s done a runner?’ she asked. ‘Dunno. I’ll have a look in the back. You stay with her till the ambulance arrives.’ Before Janet could say anything, Dennis headed off towards the back of the house. He hadn’t been gone more than a minute or so when she heard him call out, ‘Janet, come here and have a look at this. Hurry up. It could be important.’ Curious, Janet looked at the injured woman. The bleeding had stopped and there was nothing else she could do. Even so, she was reluctant to leave the poor woman alone. ‘Come on,’ Dennis called again. ‘Hurry up.’ Janet took one last look at the prone figure and walked towards the back of the house. The kitchen was in darkness. ‘Down here.’ She couldn’t see Dennis, but she knew that his voice came from downstairs. Through an open door to her right, three steps led down to a landing lit by a bare bulb. There was another door, most likely to the garage, she thought, and around the corner were the steps down to the cellar. Dennis was standing there, near the bottom, in front of a third door. On it was pinned a poster of a naked woman. She lay back on a brass bed with her legs wide open, fingers tugging at the edges of her vagina, smiling down over her large breasts at the viewer, inviting, beckoning him inside. Dennis stood before it, grinning. ‘Bastard,’ Janet hissed. ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ ‘It’s not funny.’ ‘What do you think it means?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Janet could see light under the door, faint and flickering, as if from a faulty bulb. She also noticed a peculiar odour. ‘What’s that smell?’ she asked. ‘How should I know? Rising damp? Drains?’ But it smelled like decay to Janet. Decay and sandalwood incense. She gave a little shudder. ‘Shall we go in?’ She was whispering without knowing why. ‘I think we’d better.’ Janet walked ahead of him, almost on tiptoe, down the final few steps. The adrenalin was really pumping in her veins now. Slowly, she reached out and tried the door. Locked. She moved aside, and Dennis used his foot this time. The lock splintered, and the door swung open. Dennis stood aside, bowed from the waist in a parody of gentlemanly courtesy, and said, ‘Ladies first.’ With Dennis only inches behind her, Janet stepped into the cellar. She barely had time to register her first impressions of the small room – mirrors, dozens of lit candles surrounding a mattress on the floor, a girl on the mattress, naked and bound, something yellow around her neck, the terrible smell stronger, despite the incense, like blocked drains and rotten meat, crude charcoal drawings on the whitewashed walls – before it happened. He came from somewhere behind them, from one of the cellar’s dark corners. Dennis turned to meet him, reaching for his baton, but he was too slow. The machete slashed first across his cheek, slicing it open from the eye to the lips. Before Dennis had time to put his hand up to staunch the blood or register the pain, the man slashed again, this time across the side of his throat. Dennis made a gurgling sound and went to his knees, eyes wide open. Warm blood gushed across Janet’s face and sprayed onto the whitewashed walls in swirling abstract patterns. The hot stink of it made her gag. She had no time to think. You never did when it really happened. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything for Dennis. Not yet. There was still the man with the knife to deal with. Hang on, Dennis, she pleaded silently. Hang on. The man still seemed intent on hacking at Dennis, not finished yet, and that gave Janet enough time to slip out her side-handled baton. She had just managed to grip the handle so that the baton ran protectively along the outside of her arm, when he made his first lunge at her. He seemed shocked and surprised when his blade didn’t sink into flesh and bone but was instead deflected by the hard baton. That gave Janet the opening she needed. Bugger technique and training. She swung out and caught him on the temple. His eyes rolled back and he slumped against the wall, but he didn’t go down. She moved in closer and cracked down on the wrist of his knife-hand. She heard something break. He cried out and the machete fell to the floor. Janet kicked it away into a far corner, then she took the fully extended baton with both hands, swung and caught him on the side of the head again. He tried to go after his machete, but she hit him again as hard as she could on the back of his head and then again on his cheek and once more at the base of his skull. He reared up, still on his knees, spouting obscenities at her, and she lashed out one more time, cracking his temple. He fell against the wall, where the back of his head left a long dark smear on the whitewash as he slid down, and rested there, legs extended. Pink foam bubbled at the side of his mouth, then stopped. Janet hit him once more, a two-handed blow on the top of his skull, then she took out her handcuffs and secured him to one of the pipes running along the bottom of the wall. He groaned and stirred, so she hit him again. When he fell silent, she went over to Dennis. He was still twitching, but the spurts of blood from his wound were getting weaker. Janet struggled to remember her first aid training. She made a compress from her handkerchief and pressed it tight against the severed artery, trying to nip the ends together. Next she tried to make the 10-9 call on her personal radio – officer in urgent need of assistance. But it was no good. All she got was static. A black spot. Nothing to do now but sit and wait for the ambulance to arrive. She could hardly move, go outside, not with Dennis like this. She couldn’t leave him. So Janet sat cross-legged and rested Dennis’s head on her lap, cradling him and muttering nonsense in his ear. The ambulance would come soon, she told him. He would be fine, just wait and see. But it seemed that no matter how tightly she held the compress, blood leaked through to her uniform. She could feel its warmth on her fingers, her belly and thighs. Please, Dennis, she prayed, please hang on. Above Lucy’s house, Maggie could see the crescent sliver of a new moon and the faint silver thread it drew around the old moon’s darkness. The old moon in the new moon’s arms. An ill omen. Sailors believed that the sight of it, especially through glass, presaged a storm and much loss of life. Maggie shivered. She wasn’t superstitious, but there was something chilling about the sight, something that reached out and touched her from way back in time when people paid more attention to cosmic events such as the cycles of the moon. She looked back down at the house and saw the police car arrive, heard the woman officer knock and call out, then saw her male partner charge the door. After that, Maggie heard nothing for a while – perhaps five or ten minutes – until she fancied she heard a heartrending, keening wail from deep inside the bowels of the house. But it could have been her imagination. The sky was a lighter blue now and the dawn chorus had struck up. Maybe it was a bird? But she knew that no bird sounded so desolate or godforsaken as that cry, not even the loon on a lake or the curlew up on the moors. Maggie rubbed the back of her neck and kept watching. Seconds later, an ambulance pulled up. Then another police car. Then paramedics. The ambulance attendants left the front door open, and Maggie could see them kneeling by someone in the hall. Someone covered with a fawn blanket. They lifted the figure onto a wheeled stretcher and pushed her down the path to the ambulance, back doors open and waiting. It all happened so quickly that Maggie couldn’t see clearly who it was, but she thought she glimpsed Lucy’s jet-black hair spread out against a white pillow. So it was as she had thought. She gnawed at her thumbnail. Should she have done something sooner? She had certainly had her suspicions, but could she somehow have prevented this? What could she have done? Next to arrive looked like a plainclothes police officer. He was soon followed by five or six men who put on disposable white overalls before they went inside the house. Someone also put up white and blue tape across the front gate and blocked off a long stretch of the pavement, including the nearest bus-stop, and the entire side of the road number thirty-five stood on, reducing The Hill to one lane of traffic in order to make room for police vehicles and ambulances. Maggie wondered what was going on. Surely they wouldn’t go to all this trouble unless it was something really serious? Was Lucy dead? Had Terry finally killed her? Perhaps that was it; that would make them pay attention. As daylight grew, the scene became even stranger. More police cars arrived, and another ambulance. As the attendants wheeled a second stretcher out, the first morning bus went down The Hill and obscured Maggie’s view. She could see the passengers turn their heads, the ones on her side of the road standing up to get a look at what was happening, but she couldn’t see who lay on the stretcher. Only that two policemen got in after it. Next, a hunched figure shrouded in a blanket stumbled down the path, supported on each side by uniformed policemen. At first Maggie had no idea who it was. A woman, she thought, from her general outline and the cut of her dark hair. Then she thought she glimpsed the dark blue uniform. The policewoman. Breath caught in her throat. What could have happened to change her so much so fast? By now there was far more activity than Maggie had ever thought the scene of a domestic argument could engender. At least half a dozen police cars had arrived, some of them unmarked. A wiry man with close-cropped dark hair got out of a blue Renault and walked into the house as if he owned the place. Another man who went in looked like a doctor. At least, he carried a black bag and had that self-important air about him. People up and down The Hill were going to work now, driving their cars out of their garages or waiting for the bus at the temporary bus-stop someone from the depot had put up. Little knots of them gathered by the house, watching, but the police came over and moved them on. Maggie looked at her watch. Half past six. She had been kneeling at the window for two and a half hours, yet she felt as if she had been watching a quick succession of events, as if it had been done by time-lapse photography. When she got to her feet she heard her knees crack, and the broadloom carpet had made deep red criss-cross marks on her skin. There was far less activity outside the house now, just the police guards and the detectives coming and going, standing on the pavement to smoke, shake their heads and talk in low voices. The group of haphazardly parked cars outside Lucy’s house were causing traffic back-ups. Weary and confused, Maggie threw on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and some toast. As she filled the kettle, she noticed that her hand was shaking. They would want to talk to her, no doubt about that. And when they did, what would she tell them?