The Mismade Girl Read online

  THE

  MISMADE

  GIRL

  Mark Lock

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Mismade Girl

  Summer 1999

  Seventeen Years Later

  One

  Two

  Seventeen years earlier

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Seventeen years ago

  Six

  Chapter Seven

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Seventeen Years Ago

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Seventeen Years Ago

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Seventeen years ago

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Mark Lock

  The Black Path | Paul Burston

  The Road to Redemption Series | James Green

  PROLOGUE

  Shoot You Down

  Summer 1999

  Constable Jimmy Colgan always seemed to draw the short straw and luck was never, ever on his side. For years he’d done the pools and hadn’t won a thing and now the lads in the station had kicked him out of their lottery syndicate. Over two years they’d only won a poxy tenner which, between eighteen of them, didn’t exactly go far.

  ‘I think the balls can smell your involvement, Jim,’ Patterson had said to him just the other day. ‘I think they’re deliberately coming out wrong to spite you.’ And, to Unlucky Jim Colgan, they probably were. The last five years had not been kind to Jimmy. Wife leaving with their son and daughter, an uncontrollable house fire, several small car accidents, parents both dying within a month of each other, that incident of gross misconduct. It had all combined to give him the aura of a man with a curse on his head. So, that morning, when the sergeant handed him his first job of the day, he wasn’t fazed – he always ended up with the shittiest jobs going.

  ‘There’s a nonce – convicted nonce – over in Collier’s Wood. Bartholomew Kurtz. Phones his sister in Newcastle every week apparently. Only not this week. She’s worried, wants us to take a run out and check everything’s OK.’ The sergeant gave a dismissive little nod. ‘Won’t be much. Just tell him to give the old girl a ring if he’s there. OK?’

  Colgan had shrugged and shoved the piece of paper with the name and address into his jacket. He’d turned to go but the sergeant wasn’t finished.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, you’re taking the graduate.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Our new blood. Take him with you. Show him what a convicted nonce looks like. He’ll need to get used to nonces if he’s going to work for the Met.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Colgan huffed as he went back into the main office. ‘Lovely jubbly.’

  Colgan said nothing during the eight-minute drive to Boundary Road. He’d spent most of the time peering out of the corner of his eye at the graduate sat next to him. Bloody students, he thought. Think they can walk into a nice cushy little detective role, skipping all the pavement-pounding that makes you a proper copper. Colgan thought this one looked a bit too well-heeled. Hair and teeth a little too perfect. Kept grinning over at Colgan like he was on a bloody Sunday school trip. The one major consolation was that the uniform looked far too stiff and starched, like a block of cardboard squashed around him, and the graduate kept shifting in the seat, fidgeting with it.

  ‘You get used to it. In the end,’ Colgan eventually said, as he pulled the handbrake on hard and turned the engine off.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The uniform. It’s a bit itchy at first but you get used to it.’ Not that the student would ever have to get used to it. Fast-tracked onto the graduate scheme, this was nothing more than a couple of weeks’ work experience for him, before heading back up to Hendon to sit poncy exams. ‘The helmet, though. That’s a different matter.’ He picked the two helmets off the back seat and threw one of them over to the graduate. ‘Now keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.’

  They shoved the rusting garden gate aside and strolled up the path to the door. The smell of paint was overwhelming, as though somebody had only recently given the door an extra coat or ten of Postbox Red Dulux. Colgan pressed the doorbell and from somewhere in the house the first few jangly bars of The Blue Danube could be heard. After a few seconds, he banged on the glass with the side of his fist.

  ‘Police. Open up. Come on, Kurtz, open up.’

  The graduate shifted uncomfortably and gave Colgan a look from the corner of his eye.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hmm?’ The graduate stared down at his feet.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Look, son. When you’ve spent twenty years on the job like I have, you’ll find that all the social graces you learned at finishing school will have disappeared right up your arse. Kurtz!’ He banged on the glass one more time. ‘Come on, you nonce. Open up!’ Colgan looked at his watch. ‘He’s not here. Come on, let’s go.’ He started to move away from the door but the graduate stayed put.

  ‘Shouldn’t we ...’

  Colgan stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we, perhaps ... you know ...’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we go around the back and take a look?’

  Colgan sighed for the billionth time that morning. That was the problem with taking on overeducated kids. They were always so fucking keen and yet didn’t have a fucking clue.

  ‘What’s the point in going around the back? If he’s not there, he’s not there. Doesn’t matter what angle you take it from.’

  ‘But the sister – the sister was worried. Says he always phones her from the phone box. Every week, she says.’

  ‘Listen, kid. One of the things you need to understand is that nobody gives a flying toss about nonces – or paedophiles or pederasts or whatever bloody Latin-derived name you choose to call them. They’re the scum of the earth. The last thing you want to do is to break your back over a piece of shit like Kurtz here. The sister’s probably just a dotty old bint worried he’s off molesting again. Now come on, let’s go.’

  ‘No.’ The graduate stood his ground. ‘I mean ... I’d feel better if we went around the back. Just to check.’

  ‘Oh, you’d feel better, would you? Well, pardon me. I didn’t realise this was all about your peace of mind. For a minute or two there I thought you were simply showing concern for a fellow human being.’ Colgan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Well, in that case,’ he spat, ‘why don’t you go and have a look around the back. Set your mind at rest. I’ll stay out here and have a fag and a little think about other ways in which we can waste the day away. I know,’ he was digging the cigarette packet from out of his trouser pocket, ‘what about we go up west and count the number of “Golf Sale” signs on Oxford Street? Or shall we go find a bridge and play bloody pooh sticks?’ He lit up and sucked on his Lambert & Butler.

  ‘I’ll go on my own, then.’ The
student went through the gate and walked towards the lane leading around the back.

  ‘That’s it,’ Colgan muttered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Go and have fun.’

  Constable Harry Luchewski made his way along the rocky footpath at the rear of the houses. He was finding Colgan to be a total, platinum-plated, prize-winning tit. No wonder everybody else at the station avoided him like the plague. He was poison. The sort of colleague to make you want to fake a brain haemorrhage just to get a couple of weeks off on the sick. Vile. Still, he had to grin and bear it, even though he secretly wanted to smack the bloke on his stupid fat nose.

  Most of the back gates had numbers on, so it was easy for him to find Kurtz’s scrappy little yard. He let himself in. A few broken pots stood in one corner and a worn brush was propped up against a badly stained plastic bin. The paving stones were mossy and slippery and Luchewski nearly lost his footing more than once. He crossed the small yard and knocked on the back door of the house.

  ‘Mr Kurtz? Hello?’ No answer. ‘It’s the police, sir. We’re here to make sure you’re all right. Mr Kurtz?’ Still nothing. ‘Your sister contacted us. Says she’s worried.’ Silence.

  After pulling his uniform jacket into shape and running his finger under the strap of his helmet, Luchewski twisted the handle of the door and pushed. It opened. Bracing himself, he walked into the dimly lit kitchen.

  ‘Mr Kurtz? Hello, sir?’ Some unopened tins of Heinz tomato soup sat on the worktop; the sink was full of unwashed plates and dishes. ‘Mr Kurtz? Are you there?’ He made his way around the table and saw a man sitting on a dining chair in the middle of the room beyond.

  ‘Mr Kurtz?’

  The man looked at Luchewski and shook his head. He had heavy rings around his eyes and a face full of gritty stubble. ‘You’ve missed him.’

  He pointed directly in front of him and as Luchewski came into the room ...

  ‘Agh!’

  Harry felt his chest tighten and his feet superglue him to the spot. Lying face down on the floor in front of the man was a body. Its arms were extended and the wrists had been tied to pipes which led from either side of the radiator. The body was wearing nothing but a pair of greying underpants, and along the back and the legs were vicious red slashes. Puddles of blood had seeped out of the wounds onto the parquet flooring.

  ‘He died a couple of hours ago. I used that in the end.’ The man on the chair dangled a piece of cord from his hand. ‘Strangled him.’

  ‘Did ... er ...’

  ‘Lost my rag with him. Couldn’t take no more. He wasn’t saying nothing, so ... I just lost my rag with him.’ The man gave the cord another little shake.

  Luchewski nervously pointed at the body. ‘Kurtz?’

  The man on the chair nodded. ‘He wasn’t saying nothing. Refused to tell me where she was – what he’d done with her. Kept denying it all. Over and over again. He kept denying it all.’

  Luchewski could see that Kurtz had been gagged and that one of his legs had clearly been broken. The foot at the end of the leg had swollen up to the size of a small football, and as well as the cuts to the torso there was some major bruising and what looked like burn marks.

  It was the first dead body Luchewski had ever seen.

  ‘Nothing I could do would make him talk. Nothing. So. In the end ...’ The man rubbed his tired eyes with the back of his fists. His T-shirt was drenched with Kurtz’s blood. ‘You might want to bag this up. For evidence.’ He held out the piece of rope in his hands. ‘There’s stuff down there you might need to watch out for too.’ He gestured to an area on the floor next to the body. ‘Couple of knives. Blowtorch. All that stuff.’ Luchewski still couldn’t move from the spot. ‘My fingerprints are all over it all.’ The man lifted his fists and held them out towards Luchewski. ‘You might want to handcuff me. Take me in. I’m tired now.’

  ‘JESUS CHRIST!’

  Luchewski jumped out of his skin at the sound and spun around to see Colgan coming into the room behind him.

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK ...?’ Colgan stabbed his finger towards the man. ‘Stay there! STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE! Jesus Christ! DON’T YOU FUCKING MOVE!’ Colgan tried pulling out his radio from his belt but was jerking so quickly that he dropped it onto the floor. ‘Fuck! I’m calling for backup! YOU FUCKING STAY THERE!’ He scooped the radio up and held it to his face.

  The man on the chair looked at Luchewski. ‘He always like that?’

  Luchewski glanced back at Colgan. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Sorry about all this,’ the man whispered. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit pale.’

  ‘What? Oh. Yeah. Yeah.’ Luchewski found himself feeling oddly numb. ‘And you?’

  The man smiled sadly.

  ‘Been better, you know? Been better.’

  Seventeen Years Later

  It had been a long shift. Twenty hours straight with a couple of naps snatched here and there and the occasional bite of an increasingly stale sandwich. The daytime had been pretty quiet – a handful of broken bones, a detergent accident and one quite serious head injury – but the night was always so much busier in A&E. Especially after chucking out time. She never understood why young men felt the need to fight each other. It was as if the booze let out some sort of primeval urge to kill anything in sight. Alpha males, with nothing to be alpha about, latching on to some infinitesimal reason to be kingpin. A girl, a spilled drink, a funny look. None of it worth the pain and suffering that followed. It didn’t help that the young men that stumbled in drunk and dazed were always so obnoxious and leery. All the dirty comments and touching up that she had to endure. She and all the female nurses. Sometimes it could be very satisfying to apply a dressing just a little too tight.

  Exhausted, she drove out of the car park at St George’s onto Blackshaw Road. It always made her smile that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, had built a hospital – one of the major teaching hospitals in London – directly opposite a massive cemetery, as if to remind the public that sometimes there was nothing any doctor could do. She wondered how many patients went straight from the one to the other.

  The drive home was endless. It would normally take around forty minutes to get to Bromley, but tonight it seemed to drag on, with roadworks after roadworks and red light after red light. Learner drivers blocking up lanes with their stuttering and stalling, delivery lorries backing up streets not designed for delivery lorries to back up. Seething, she eventually found herself pulling onto Bromley Avenue more than an hour after setting off.

  The sun had all but disappeared as she unlocked the door and made her way up the stairs to her first-floor flat. She put on the television and poured herself an enormous glass of white wine, then stuck a frozen pizza in the oven. Waking the computer up, she checked her emails – just some rubbish about reclaiming PPI – and Facebook – a short message from her mum reminding her not to forget her dad’s birthday that weekend – before curling up on the sofa with the wine and pizza to watch the news, followed by Graham Norton.

  After running an extra-hot bath with plenty of Radox, she eased herself in and tried to forget the day, which was difficult when its events had been burned onto her retinas by too much artificial light. The blood was always there. Every day, gallons of blood and twisted limbs. The cries of pain and shrieks of horror. It all seeped into her psyche and was hard to shake off. Scalding hot baths helped, but not enough.

  She dried herself down and slipped on her pyjamas. One last flick through the channels told her that there was bugger all worth watching at this time of night, and she turned everything off before crawling under the duvet. Flicking on the bedside light, she tried reading the book she’d bought in the hospital shop last week – a trashy piece of nonsense filled with hormonal housewives and practically pornographic descriptions of how to eat chocolate – but her eyes were set against the idea and kept pulling down the shutters on the page. Giving up, she threw the book on the floor, switched off the light and snuggled down into the soft, warm blankets. She
tossed and turned, restless, for twenty minutes or so before finally succumbing to the irresistible fug of sleep.

  Seventeen minutes after she started snoring, the man who had been hiding in her wardrobe all evening silently pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

  PART ONE

  Elizabeth My Dear

  One

  Detective Inspector Hal Luchewski knew straight away. As soon as he saw the way her body was positioned, he knew, and a strange shivery sick feeling rushed up his chest and seemed to linger around his throat, clasping his Adam’s apple like a vice.

  ‘Been dead for about twenty hours now, I’d say – that’s a very rough guess of course. Little more than a random number picked out of the air to make myself sound impressive.’ Dr John Good smiled at both Luchewski and DI Burlock.

  Burlock grinned back at the forensics officer through his unkempt beard. ‘Who is she exactly?’

  DS Green heard the question and came into the doorway from the hallway beyond. ‘Guy downstairs owns the house. Rents it out ... rented it out to ...’ he pointed to the body on the floor. ‘Alice Seagrove,’ he read the name off a notebook. ‘Junior doctor in St George’s Hospital, Tooting. Says he saw her getting back around nine thirty last night.’

  ‘Sexual?’ Burlock frowned over at Good.

  ‘Doesn’t appear to be. No sign of any sexual assault. Underwear still intact.’

  ‘Then why’s she tied to the radiator pipes like that? And the gag. What’s that about?’

  ‘Bartholomew Kurtz.’ Luchewski spoke for the first time since he came into the bedroom.

  ‘Eh?’ Burlock looked up at him.

  ‘Bartholomew Kurtz,’ Luchewski repeated.

  ‘Who the hell’s Bartholomew Kurtz?’

  ‘You’ll find her left leg’s broken.’ Luchewski ignored Burlock. ‘And cause of death was strangulation.’

  Good gave Luchewski a bit of a look. He squatted next to the body. ‘I think you’re right. Left leg could well be broken – it’s certainly badly bruised. And there are definitely ligature marks around the neck. Also,’ he gestured at Luchewski to join him, ‘what was the name again? Bartholomew Kurtz?’