Blindsided

‘He was an addict?’

‘For a while, yes, but he refused any help. Once, we got him into the rehab place in Panfield, but he walked out after a couple of days.’ Holly was drifting through her thoughts. They stabbed sharply, needles in her heart, and the helpless frustration she had felt then was bubbling back up in her belly. ‘Like I said, when he vanished the first time, it was almost a relief. We were worried, of course, that he might have got into worse trouble, or wound up dead. But we knew Mason and his heavies hadn’t found him, because we had the whole Balinta family on our backs wanting money to settle debts Jayden had run up when he was meant to be dealing for them. Lydia didn’t tell me at the time, but Jayden sent her an occasional text to say he was safe. And my dad, well, he gave out that he didn’t give a shit but I reckon he was glad Jayden had gone, so he didn’t embarrass him anymore. It was tough for us all after Mum died. I was thirteen when she was killed, and Jay was fifteen. It was the worst thing ever, and Jayden never got over it. I thought he’d OD or something, it was that bad for a while. He couldn’t think of anything except his next hit.’

‘And Jayden had been in a relationship with Cathryn Davies?’ DS Harlow queried.

‘Yeah. He had the twins with Cath: Ronnie and Sean. I’d hoped being a dad would have straightened Jayden out. But they were too young, and they were never going to last as a couple, even though Cath was sure they could make a go of it. She was in bits when he started ghosting her, and then when he just left without another word it nearly destroyed her. That was another reason I was glad when Jayden didn’t come back. He trashed everything, caused all this shit, left debts and stressed everyone. It was better that he wasn’t around.’

‘According to your original statement, this time when you refused to give him the cash, he then stole money from your aunt.’

Holly nodded. ‘After he met me and I said no, he tried Lydia. He went round to visit her, and managed to get on and off the Seaview without anyone spotting him. Bloody luck of the devil he always had, my dad said. Anyway, Lydia said she could only give him part of the money, but he took her card and emptied her bank account.’

‘And when did you next hear from him?’ DS Harlow took a sip of tea, making quick notes on a pad whilst Holly talked.

‘A week later. He rang me and said he was really sorry he took Lydia’s money, but he still needed an extra twelve hundred to clear the debt. Lydia always forgave him, but she told me this time he had taken everything from her savings account. She’d worked her backside off for a lifetime and he had stolen it all. And then he had the nerve to ask me for more money.’ Holly knew what was coming and she needed to be careful. The anger was still threading through her voice, even after all these years and everything that had happened since.

‘You were a boxer, weren’t you? DI Harper said you were really good.’

Holly glanced up from her tea, surprised. She supposed it just reinforced her impression that DI Harper had always been obsessed with her family. ‘Yeah, I loved it. I was modelling quite a lot by then too, because I’d won a lot of competitions. The last one was at the National Championships.’ She smiled, oddly nostalgic, wistful even. ‘My life was crazy good, and I had an agent and everything. She got me a sports magazine cover and it just went from there.’

‘It must have been tough to give all that up,’ DC Marriot said gently.

‘Yeah. When I look back, I think it started to go wrong again when Jay came back. You know, I felt like here was my brother, dragging me down again. That sounds really bad, doesn’t it? He was … he was crying down the phone. Anyway, he told me to take the extra money in cash to an address …’ She paused, keeping her face a careful mask of concentration, as if she was just trying to remember what had happened. ‘Jayden told me to meet him at the address at eleven that night with the extra money. He said it had to be cash because it needed to be untraceable.’

‘Why did you agree to give him the money when you knew he had just stolen from your aunt?’ DS Harlow’s voice was colourless, but her chin was still proper on her elbow, eyes raking Holly’s face.

Holly met her gaze. ‘He promised that if I gave him the money he would just go this time, really go right away. I asked where he’d been, what the hell he’d been doing and all that, but he just ignored the questions and went on about how this was going to save his life. He never at any point mentioned a girlfriend or any kids.’ She felt it was important to hammer this home.

‘But why did you believe him this time? You’ve just told me he was a habitual offender, and a liar.’ DC Marriot was flicking through notes on her screen. ‘Was there a particular reason, something he said that made you believe he had changed?’ She pushed back a stray wisp of hair. As she leant forward Holly could smell her perfume. It was unexpected, light and floral and didn’t seem to suit her icy persona.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t really believe him, but I had sorted my own life and just wanted him to go away again. I just assumed he was back on drugs. When we were talking, I even had ideas about making him take me to his dealer and giving them the money myself, sorting it all out … How stupid is that? I was furious, and … I don’t know what I was thinking. Probably the same as all the other times – but also what if this time it was true and he really was in danger?’ She said this carefully, remembering almost too late she needed to be cautious, not honest. It hadn’t been that at all. She had been so angry, so furious with him for invading their lives again, for taking Lydia’s money that pity had been the last thing on her mind.

‘You never thought of calling the police?’ DS Harlow asked doubtfully. She was tapping the pen against her teeth, eyes narrowing as they rested on Holly’s face. Her round cheeks were stained red in the warm kitchen, and time and lifestyle had scored harsh lines around her eyes and mouth.

‘Of course not. Look, DS Harlow …’

‘Make it Steph,’ the other woman said helpfully. She made a few more quiet notes, watching the other two women.

DC Marriot continued, ‘We know how the estate worked, and how it works now, and yes we’re on first-name terms with most of the Nicholls family. Not to mention Mason Balinta.’

Holly flashed her a sharp glance, but she smiled. ‘I’m being honest with you. We know we aren’t welcome on Seaview and never have been, but that doesn’t mean we have to let people like the Nicholls family run wild. Returning to that night – you eventually went to meet Jayden to give him the money?’

‘Yes. I was half an hour early. The bus stop was right next to the estate he was living on. It was so close, only in Panfield, that I felt like he had been laughing at us all along. Christ, we’d all looked for him, and he’d been holed up in that rabbit warren only a stone’s throw from us. I found the right block of flats, and went up to the eighth floor. The door to 101 was open, just a bit …’ She was lost in the past, walking through that door into the hell that lay beyond. Her heart sped up, and she clung to the side of the chair, hearing her own voice from miles away …

She was used to replaying these memories. But this time there was a difference. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. Why had nobody picked up that there had been another kid? There had only been one cot in the flat, surely.

‘Jayden?’ She stepped nervously through the door, glancing from left to right, phone out in one hand, the cash safely stashed in her pocket. She’d been freaked walking around here with a wad of banknotes, but she’d made it.

The sour smell hit the back of her throat, and she fumbled for a light switch in the narrow hallway, hand shaking. The flat was tiny, just a big room with a kitchen area at one end. Two mattresses were laid next to each other on the threadbare carpet, and sprawled across both, on her front, arms outstretched, was a woman.

The blood was soaking into the carpet, splashed across the wall in a horror-film arc, and smeared on the side of the kitchen units. The place was torn apart, with paper, magazines, clothes and toys strewn around the body.

‘Jayden?’ It was a whisper. There were two doorways leading off the main room, and Holly instinctively stepped back towards the front door, looking over her shoulder, terrified that the attacker was still here, waiting, watching her. But her voice echoed around the flat, and after a while she plucked up the courage to walk towards the second doorway. A tiny bathroom, and beyond, a small bedroom with peeling wallpaper. In the corner stood a cot piled high with blankets. Jayden had a baby? A girlfriend?

The place was empty now. Whoever had done this had gone, and she could hardly leave without doing anything. Shoving away the thought of an intruder jumping her from behind, she knelt next to the woman. Her first thought was that she was dead, but her skin was warm. She had no obvious wounds, which was puzzling given the amount of blood in the flat. Her dark hair spread across the floor and her head, turned sideways, showed her eyes were shut. Around her neck, also caught in the material, she wore a gold-coloured necklace, letters twisted around a chain, which formed the name Larissa.

There was no sign of breathing, and in the silence of the flat Holly could hear nothing but her own gasping breath, feel nothing but terror in her own drumming heartbeat. She fumbled to press the right buttons on her phone.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_e390fa39-2e79-58a8-9b00-d910f341a5db)

‘Do you want a glass of water?’

She could hear someone running a tap, an arm around her shoulders, but she was still miles away, years away, crouched alone in the flat with a dead woman. It wasn’t until the emergency services arrived that the other body had been discovered. A three-month-old baby girl had been suffocated where she lay, and hidden under the pile of blankets. At last she sat up, blinking away tears. ‘Sorry. I tried not to think about it and I’ve managed to shut it all away. But now …’

‘It’s all right, you’re doing well. I’m sorry to have to ask and upset you, but this could be really important.’ DC Marriot leant across the kitchen table again. ‘Can you manage to finish for us, do you think?’

Holly took a gulp of water and nodded. The shame flooded her, as she had known it would. But she had admitted all this in court, there was no point in denying it now. ‘The ambulance call handler told me to start CPR, and I … I told her I was doing compressions, but I wasn’t. I just froze, and I couldn’t bring myself to press down on her chest. I just stared at her all that time …’

‘I read the coroner’s report, Holly, and you must know what it said. Larissa died of strangulation. Going by the estimated time of death, by the time you arrived there was probably nothing anyone could have done. She was dead already,’ DS Harlow told her.

‘I know …’ But there might have been a chance, a chance she could have saved her, and nothing anybody said – then or now – could convince her otherwise. Holly bit her lip, and continued slowly, ‘I was terrified they would find Jayden outside somewhere, dead too, but later the police said he was a suspect. There was so much blood, I was sure it had to be at least partly his. There was never anything mentioned about another child, though. There wasn’t!’

‘No, we reviewed the files, and it appears that Larissa was never officially registered at any doctor’s surgery or hospital, and her child, or children, weren’t either. In fact, legally her baby didn’t exist. I’ve double-checked, and it looks like – if I had to hypothesise – perhaps if they had another child, they slept on the sofa-bed? It does seem odd that there was no evidence at all of a boy.’

‘They would have been so near in age that perhaps any baby clothes, supplies and toys would have been assumed to be the dead girl’s.’ DS Harlow shrugged. ‘If this boy was living there with his parents and sister there was nothing obvious to suggest his existence. In fact, the few possessions they owned were already packed up, as though a move was imminent.’

The other woman nodded. ‘It was assumed that once he had the money, your brother and his family were going to run. But after Larissa’s murder, Jayden never got back in contact at all? Not even to collect the money you were bringing him?’ DC Marriot was tapping the table idly with one hand now. Her fingernails were short and colourless.

‘No. The money he took from Lydia wasn’t in the flat, and his bank account hadn’t been used for months.’ Holly looked directly at both police officers. Her voice flat, she said, ‘The investigation was pure hell for my family, with police interviews and then dealers from the Seaview being arrested. The other families blamed us for bringing police onto the estate; my dad had a fight with DI Harper …’

There was a glimmer of amusement, quickly hidden, in DC Marriot’s glacial eyes, and even Holly, torn between emotions and fighting hysteria, felt her lips quirk.

Steph continued, ‘But the evidence showed the blood in the flat belonged to Alexi and Roman Balinta, the men who eventually confessed to killing Larissa and her baby girl. There was no sign that Jayden had harmed either his baby or his girlfriend. Yet both men denied seeing your brother. It was Larissa who attacked both men with a knife, obviously defending her children.’

Holly nodded, fiddling with her phone. ‘Yes. I still remember how in court they said Larissa fought back.’ Her voice shook precariously but she carried on, ‘But Jayden was gone again, and then just before Christmas, the police came round to say that some random dealer, a real small-time player, had confessed to helping get rid of Jayden’s body. He said he dumped it off Rydden Bay soon after Larissa was murdered, and that he did it on Roman’s instructions.’

Holly choked a bit. ‘As you know, his body has never been found, and Roman wouldn’t say anything at all about the dealer’s claim. As far as I remember he just kept saying no comment. I suppose I almost hoped Jay was dead by then. The waiting for the court case and seeing Lydia and my dad struggling to get by … It was all in the papers about Jayden’s past, and our family got dragged through the dirt. They made it sound like we were pure evil. It was a really shit time, but we just about got through it.’

‘Larissa was one of the girls trafficked by Joey and Gareth Nicholls, wasn’t she? I saw on the files that Gareth was charged with several offences, but he only served three years because of a technicality. There’s been nothing on him since.’

Again, that change of tone when the Nicholls brothers were mentioned. Nicholls Transport were still doing their thing, all these years later, and the police still couldn’t touch them. ‘Yes. It came out that Larissa originally thought she was engaged to some bloke up in Yorkshire – that’s where she came from – but she was only fourteen, and he turned out to be part of a scheme to round up girls arranged by Joey. Larissa’s mum was a junkie and Larissa had been skipping school, hanging around the town. I suppose she was an easy target, and when you lot looked for her, she’d just vanished. She apparently told her mum she was moving away with her fiancé.’

‘They call it the “lover boy” sting, or the “Romeo game”,’ Steph volunteered. ‘These men find vulnerable girls, sadly often those who have fallen through cracks in the care system, and present themselves as romantic interests. Once the girl is hooked, they slowly draw her away from any friends or family, and then when she runs off to “get married” it comes out that girl is a frequent runaway, skips school, maybe has a history of petty crime already … In reality of course she is then sucked into a system of abuse and is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to trace. We do our best, and naturally missing children are a priority, but I’ve worked on cases where a teenager has been missing for weeks before anyone starts to take notice.’

‘I never could understand why Jayden didn’t mention Larissa and the baby when he asked for money,’ Holly said. ‘We never even found out how they originally met, but I suppose it might have been when he was dealing. The boys used to deliver to the clients at these special houses, and then eye up the girls who were working there. But if Jay had fallen for Larissa so much that they’d not just had a baby, but had two children, why didn’t he tell me?’

‘Your brother knew you were friends with Cathryn Davies, so perhaps he thought you might be angry he had left her, and his other children, for Larissa,’ DC Marriot suggested. In her mind’s eye Holly could see the boy, Jayden’s boy, lying helpless and unconscious under his white shroud of hospital sheets. Another child.

‘Yeah, maybe. Roman and Alexi were high, weren’t they, when they went to collect Jay’s debt? Mason was always bigging up his sons, even Niko, the baby of the family, saying they were going to inherit the business, going to be millionaires … But they were always losers, and violent with it. They didn’t have to kill Larissa, or her baby.’ Holly felt empty now, hollow and sick. She still had nightmares about the baby, even though she hadn’t discovered the tiny body.