Into the dark, p.8
Into the Dark, page 8
14
Tuesday evening
The day the Holdens disappeared
The branches of the oak tree in Julianne’s front garden were moving so wildly she feared they might break apart in the wind.
As she watched them submit to the weather from an upstairs window, rain spitting against the glass, Quiller’s car pulled into the driveway. Instead of waving to her husband, Julianne ducked beneath the sill, crawled across the carpet and bolted down the stairs. By the time she heard his key in the lock, the radio was playing and she was chopping spring onions for their stir fry.
It was a while before he came to find her. He hung up his coat, placed his keys in the drawer and dumped his bag in the study. She heard him climb the stairs and the creak of the floorboards told her he’d gone into their bedroom to get changed. Back down the stairs and into the study. He put on a record, turning up the volume, and the sound drowned out the news programme she was listening to. By the time he appeared in the kitchen, she’d chopped all the vegetables and was cubing chicken breasts.
‘Where’s your car?’
No hello or how was your day? No kiss or embrace. Julianne turned to face him, pasting on a smile. Her husband hated moodiness. And dull-wittedness. But this time, he didn’t wait for her answer, instead rolling on to his next question.
‘Where are the children?’
‘Music practice and Debating Society.’
Quiller grunted and poured himself a glass of orange juice without offering her one.
‘You’re home early. Good day?’ She wanted to ask if he’d sold any houses but feared a thirty-minute monologue on indecisive vendors. He grunted again and opened his mouth to say something more, but the doorbell rang and he went to answer it.
When he returned, he was flanked by two men. Julianne recognized them as the police officers from Piper’s house. They’d turned up as she was being sent home because Seawings was now a crime scene. Those two words had made her shudder.
‘We’ve come to take your statement,’ said the older one. The younger officer stared at her with serious eyes.
‘What’s this about?’ said Quiller, looking from the police officers to Julianne and back again.
‘The Holdens,’ she said quickly. ‘I told you, remember?’
Quiller settled himself in a chair at the kitchen table and cupped his chin in his palm, as if preparing to watch an interesting film. ‘Bloody hell, I didn’t realize it was this serious.’ And then, as an afterthought, he flapped his other hand at the detectives. ‘Sit down, sit down.’
Julianne willed him to leave the room. She couldn’t speak as frankly as she might with Quiller listening in but she knew it would irk him to the point of sulkiness if she asked him to go away.
‘Would you prefer to make a statement on your own?’ said the white-blond detective, his eyes trapping and holding hers, a pin in a butterfly’s thorax. When he’d introduced himself as Detective Constable Anguish, she’d thought how well his name suited the sorrowful tilt of his mouth. But his eyes held a darker knowledge. He was clever, she realized. Watchful. She would have to be careful.
‘Julianne won’t mind.’ Quiller was dismissive. ‘We don’t have secrets in this house.’
‘Righto,’ said the older officer, DC Williams. ‘Let’s get cracking, shall we?’ He pulled out a chair and settled himself at the kitchen table. ‘Any chance of a brew?’ he said to Quiller with a pointed glance.
‘Julianne makes the best tea in this house,’ said Quiller with a laugh. ‘Don’t you?’
It was a standing joke between them. Quiller was hopeless at making tea. And coffee. He was also hopeless at cooking and loading the dishwasher and putting the laundry away. Now she came to think about it, there was nothing funny in that at all.
But it was easier for her to fill the kettle and warm the pot and lay out biscuits, so she did.
When she was finished, she sat opposite the detectives and sipped the hot liquid. She pressed her middle finger against the bridge of her nose and rubbed it in a circular motion. The vodka she’d drunk earlier was giving her a headache.
‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ said DC Williams, dipping a biscuit into his tea. ‘You raised the alarm when you realized the Holdens were missing, is that right?’
DC Anguish’s pen was poised over his notepad. His junior status meant he’d drawn the short straw.
‘Yes,’ said Julianne. ‘I usually meet Piper for a run on Tuesdays but she wasn’t answering the door, which was very unusual. Their cleaner arrived and she had a key, so we let ourselves in, and when it was clear something untoward had happened, we called you.’
DC Williams fired off many questions. What was Piper’s usual routine? What about the rest of the family? How long had they lived here? Did they have other properties elsewhere? What about extended family? Had Piper – or any of the Holdens – mentioned the possibility of leaving town? What kind of work did they do? Had they ever disappeared before? To the best of her knowledge, did the family have any enemies? What about the state of Piper and Gray Holden’s marriage? The children?
While he waited for Julianne to answer his last question, the older detective helped himself to another biscuit, slopping it into his almost-empty mug and then into his colleague’s full one.
DC Anguish had not touched his tea. He was watching her. Despite her efforts to maintain a neutral expression, she couldn’t hide the indecision that flickered across her face. She knew he’d noticed it when he said, ‘Is there something you’d like to tell us?’
Quiller, who until now had stayed mostly silent, looked up from his own tea with interest.
Julianne closed her eyes. Bit the inside of her cheek. Drew in a breath until it filled her lungs and calmed her. ‘Actually, that’s why I came back to Seawings this afternoon. I wanted to speak to you.’
‘After the funeral?’ DC Anguish’s voice was encouraging but he was looking at her intently.
‘Whose funeral?’ said Quiller.
‘I told you,’ said Julianne, irritation edging her tone. ‘Anoushka Thornton’s.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘We were at school together.’
‘Not another bloody school friend. They’re dropping like flies.’ He sounded outraged, as if dying prematurely was somehow the fault of the women themselves. He flicked his gaze to the detectives, seeking validation. DC Williams smirked, then remembered himself. Quiller slurped his tea. ‘Is that where your car is then? Still at the pub or something?’
Julianne stilled. Williams and Quiller watched her. A silence settled over the room.
DC Anguish did not look at any of them but made a note in his pad and urged Julianne to continue, unable to disguise his frustration at the interruption. ‘Let’s not worry about that now. Please go on.’
‘Piper was frightened.’ Her eyes were fixed on her lap. ‘Gray had moved some large sums of money out of their accounts. She called me late last night to say she was scared he was going to hurt her.’
DC Williams looked up sharply. ‘Has he been violent before?’
Julianne gave a helpless shrug. ‘Not that she’s mentioned to me, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. It’s not the sort of thing she’d necessarily want to talk about, even to her best friend. From the outside her life is pretty enviable, I think she’d be embarrassed.’
‘Gray wouldn’t hurt Piper,’ said Quiller. ‘That’s not his style. He can be a sanctimonious bastard at times, but I don’t think he’d hit her.’
A rush of anger, fierce and sudden and hot as a burn, spread through her. Shut up. She wanted to shake it into him. Shut up. Shut up. But she didn’t. Instead she quietly disagreed.
‘He’s got a temper,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to cross him.’
DC Williams was interested by this revelation, she could tell. More than interested. Excited. Buzzing with an energy that had been absent when he’d arrived. DC Anguish was different. He was sizing her up, weighing her truths. His scrutiny made her feel exposed.
‘Can you think of anywhere the Holdens might have gone? Do they have a holiday home, for example?’
Julianne frowned, concentrating hard. ‘They’ve got an apartment in New York, but their passports are still at Seawings. There’s family in Northumberland, but Mila rang them this morning and they haven’t seen them. Her mother lived a couple of hours from here but the farm was sold when she died.’ In truth, she had no idea where her friend might be.
‘Did Piper Holden ever have any unexplained bruises or injuries?’ DC Williams was alert now, poised, his whole demeanour changed.
Julianne was at a crossroads. But which path to take? A memory of a video of Piper at university – reading aloud from a script, stunning her tutor into a rare silence and mesmerizing her classmates – popped into her head. Gray had played it to her one drunken night a few years ago, all of them laughing at the dated camcorder footage and Piper’s crimped hair. A second recollection hit her sideways. Last week, when she’d bumped into her friend on the high street, Piper was wearing a silk scarf around her neck. ‘Very Audrey Hepburn,’ she’d said, reaching up to touch her fingers to the fabric, and Piper had smiled and then winced. But she never usually wore scarves, silk or otherwise.
Julianne reached a decision and dropped her words like a series of tiny bombs.
‘I’m afraid so. She always brushed it off as being clumsy but she seemed to have a lot of accidents. When we were late home from a shopping trip a few months ago – horrendous traffic – Gray was furious because he was hosting a client that night, and he practically dragged her from the car. When I saw her for a run the next morning, he’d left bruises on her forearm in the shape of finger marks.’
‘Really?’ said Quiller, surprised. ‘I would never have expected that of Gray.’ He looked at his wife. ‘You didn’t mention it.’
‘None of us knows what goes on behind closed doors, Mr Hillier,’ said DC Williams.
The three men sat around the kitchen table, watching her. Julianne was used to male attention – craved it, even – but she was uncomfortable with their scrutiny and got up abruptly from the table.
‘There’s something else you should probably hear,’ she said. She grabbed her mobile from the worktop and scrolled through it, searching for the voicemail that had come in from Piper’s home telephone number at 3.37 a.m., a few short hours ago. She hadn’t told the officers about it yet – she hadn’t told anyone, even though she should have done so by now – but from the moment they’d stepped through her front door, the interview had been building towards this and she was relieved to share the burden of it at last.
She placed the handset on the table, unexploded ordnance resting amongst the floral plates and biscuit crumbs, put it on speakerphone and pressed play.
The kitchen was silent apart from the angry song of the wind, drumming against the windows and walls.
Julianne had listened to the message several times now but, watching the expression on the faces of the men opposite her, it felt like she was hearing it for the first time.
For the first couple of seconds, the recording was quiet, like the calm before the storm. And then the storm made landfall.
A sound – not a scream, more guttural than that, but not a shout either – made them all jump and was over so quickly it was impossible to tell if it came from a man or a woman. A muffled voice – rising in volume but not clarity – was followed by a crash, like the sound of furniture being turned over. Quiller opened his mouth to speak but DC Williams held his hand up to silence him. The noises grew louder, as if this microcosm of violence – the eye of the storm – was moving closer to the telephone. Julianne imagined the receiver lying on its side, on a table in the sitting room or the nightstand by Piper’s bed, listening and recording the secrets of Seawings.
Then, even though she knew it was coming, a wet sound that made the blood run hard and fast through her veins. The thud of something heavy hitting something tender and vulnerable, and a woman’s scream, as cold as the stars that squatted in the clouded darkness above the Holden house.
And Piper’s cracked voice pressed up to the mouthpiece, ‘God help us all,’ before the call cut out and the sound of dead air filled the room.
15
Two months before the Holdens disappeared
When their English class had finished, Riva lingered by her seat until the room emptied. She wanted to catch Mr Moran before the after-school auditions began but she didn’t want her classmates to know.
He was sitting at his desk behind a pile of exercise books, head bent, intent on marking, and didn’t look up until she cleared her throat. Students moved through the corridors, their footsteps a percussion of dozens of individual drum beats. He peered at her over his glasses.
‘What can I do for you? Do you need a copy of the homework sheet?’
‘No, thanks, sir. I’ve got one.’
‘Spit it out then. What’s on your mind?’
She adopted her most anxious expression, eyes wide, a sincere yet tremulous grin. ‘It’s a bit of an awkward one and I don’t want it to go any further, if that’s OK.’
‘Go on.’ He put down his pen.
‘It’s about Emelie Hillier.’
Mr Moran gathered the exercise books into a pile and shoved them into his work satchel. ‘Your friend?’
Riva nodded. ‘She said you’d encouraged her to try out for the show.’
‘That’s right.’ Mr Moran checked his watch and smiled at her. ‘And thank you for reminding me. The auditions start in ten minutes.’
‘The thing is, she feels a bit pressured into it. She doesn’t want to let you down but she doesn’t want to audition. She’d prefer to work on the set design. But she doesn’t want a big drama about it. She’s too embarrassed to talk to you, so I said I’d do it for her.’
Mr Moran got up from his desk and slung his bag over his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. As it happens, I think she’s got a lot of talent but we haven’t had a chance to see it yet.’
Riva swallowed down the bitter rise of jealousy. ‘I agree. I tried to persuade her to have a rethink but she’s made up her mind. She feels bad for not telling you herself but you know what she’s like.’
‘It’s a shame she didn’t feel able to approach me herself though. I’m not that terrifying.’
‘Not at all, sir. But she’s always avoided confrontation, ever since we were little. You won’t tell her about this, will you?’
‘Thank you for telling me. I don’t want to push her into anything she doesn’t want to do. But I hope you’re not planning to bail on me too, Riva.’
She gave him one of her most dazzling smiles in return. ‘Of course not. You can count on me, sir.’
16
Tuesday evening
The day the Holdens disappeared
‘But there were no signs of a struggle,’ said Saul to DC Williams as they walked back to Seawings through Midtown-on-Sea’s early evening streets. ‘Apart from the blood on the chandelier.’
‘And the mirror. Don’t forget that.’
‘Even so.’
‘Gray Holden tidied up before he left,’ said Williams. ‘Kicked the shit out of her, cleaned up his mess, did a runner – the oldest trick in the book.’
‘But what about the children?’ said Saul. ‘Are you suggesting he killed them too?’
‘It’s been known.’
‘But they’re not little, are they? They’re teenagers. Big enough to put up some kind of fight.’
‘Not if he killed them while they were sleeping in their beds.’
‘So why leave the message on Riva Holden’s mirror? What’s the point of that?’
DC Williams didn’t seem bothered by it. ‘She might have been messing about. You know what teenagers are like. We don’t how long it’s been there until forensics tell us.’ He glanced sideways at Saul. ‘Was it my imagination or was it hot in there? Julianne Hillier is—’ He blew out a breath and fanned himself, seemingly oblivious to Saul’s distaste at his misjudged attempt at sexualized banter.
‘Don’t be grim,’ said Saul, risking his mentor’s ire but unable to let it pass without comment. He swerved the conversation back to the investigation. ‘You think Piper Holden’s dead, don’t you?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said Williams, taking a flat metallic water bottle from inside his pocket and drinking deeply, ‘but if I was a betting man, I’d say yes.’
A police cordon had been put in place at Seawings by the time the two men arrived back at the house and DI Angus O’Neill was standing on the entrance steps, staring up at a wall-mounted camera above the front door.
Saul ducked under the blue-and-white tape that had been pulled so taut it snapped in the wind. ‘Put on some fucking shoe covers,’ said the detective inspector, pointing to a plastic box inside the cordon that Saul hadn’t noticed. He blushed. Rookie mistake.
‘They’ve got closed circuit television cameras trained on the front and back,’ said O’Neill in lieu of a greeting. He turned, grinned unexpectedly at them. ‘This is going to change everything.’
His boss crackled with energy and purpose in the same way Williams had when Julianne Hillier had hinted at Gray Holden’s predilection for violence an hour or so earlier. But as far as Saul was concerned, nothing much had changed. The Holdens were still missing.
Williams and O’Neill were deep in conversation, exchanging intelligence gathered so far. ‘I’m just going inside,’ said Saul. ‘There’s something I’d like to check in Riva Holden’s room.’
His two superiors barely acknowledged him. They wandered off together, heads bowed, towards the end of the front garden, leaving Saul standing by himself. As an afterthought, Williams called out to him, not bothering to glance back at his young colleague. ‘Don’t take too long, Anguish. We’ve got a lot of work to do.’
