Hold Your Tongue Read online

  Eve swallowed, conscious of her own tongue.

  ‘As I said at the hotel, everything was pointing towards the fact that she must’ve sat there and let it happen. No one does that unless there’s bugger all they can do about it.’

  ‘Paralysed?’ Eve whispered the word.

  ‘Yup. But there aren’t many things out there that can do that. I don’t know jack-shit about your guy, but I’m thinking he would’ve steered cleared of any anaesthetics, wanting her to be alive for the grand finale, not taking any chances on respiratory failure.’

  MacLean prepared Melanie for going back into the mortuary drawer, moving about the space as if he was at home in the kitchen getting ready to freeze leftovers. He carried on speaking as he worked.

  ‘The needle was inserted into the deltoid upper-arm muscle. You’re looking for something that causes paralysis, perhaps unconsciousness in high doses. What springs to mind is ketamine.’

  ‘The ravers’ drug?’

  ‘Bravo, Detective. Never had you down as being into that scene.’

  ‘Funny.’ Eve wasn’t smiling. ‘Arrested some folk in my day.’

  ‘I preferred imagining you in a fisherman’s hat.’ MacLean didn’t crack a smile. ‘Anyway, in high doses it can cause coma. Would be a slow return to consciousness, probably hallucinations, blurred vision, slurred speech. With the right amount – or wrong, however you want to look at it – paralysis. The only good thing is she probably didn’t feel any pain.’

  ‘He knew what he was doing?’

  ‘Not necessarily in the sense that he’s any kind of professional in the field. It wouldn’t take a genius. Google ketamine and you’ll find hundreds of folk willing to advise how to get the best hit on countless forums. Of course, there’s always the chance he could be supplying it professionally.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Ketamine’s commonly known as the “cat drug”. That’s the street name for it because it’s used in veterinary practices for operating on cats. Once upon a time it was regularly used in human operations too.’

  ‘You’re a mine of information.’

  ‘Mostly useless, I’ll give you that, but I surprise myself sometimes. Injected where it was, it would work within seconds and last half an hour to an hour. The side effects can last a few hours after that.’

  Eve thought back to where they’d found Melanie. Slumped against a bathroom wall. She would’ve been alive, unable to move. Terrified. Confused, seeing things, wondering if what was happening to her wasn’t all some kind of vivid nightmare. Eve wished more than anything that it had been.

  It wouldn’t be a surprise if they found that Ryan and his old flatmate Michael Forbes had dabbled in drugs. But was Ryan only out to get Melanie? Or was Forbes? Eve wanted to believe that, but she couldn’t shake the feeling Melanie wasn’t going to be the last victim. The way the scene had been staged. The newspaper headline pinned to her clothing. The drugs. Melanie’s murder had been planned. Her murderer wanted to say something. That fact nagged at Eve. She hadn’t been murdered in the throes of a rage or on the spur of the moment. So what was he trying to tell them? But most of all, was he finished?

  She stopped staring into space and looked at MacLean. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Cause of death was massive blood loss and the fact she choked on it. No defence wounds or tissue beneath her nails, which isn’t surprising as she wouldn’t have been able to fight back. And no sexual contact.’

  ‘Wish I could take some comfort from that.’

  ‘One of the worst I’ve seen, Eve. Murders, I mean. I see worse injuries every week coming in from traffic.’

  ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked. You do what you do and catch the bastard.’

  Eve nodded, wondering where the hell to go next.

  MacLean walked with Eve to the mortuary door, an out-of-place smile on the pathologist’s ruddy face. ‘Hey, look on the bright side. It’s rather apt, don’t you think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he should use ketamine.’

  Eve turned to him, frowning. ‘What’re you on about?’

  ‘It’s fair to say that the cat got her tongue.’ MacLean winked.

  Eve shook her head. ‘Even for you, that’s low.’

  MacLean placed a hand on Eve’s shoulder as she stepped out into the corridor. ‘That’s how I manage to do the job.’

  And he closed the door.

  It was late. Hard to believe Melanie had been found only two days ago. DC Jo Mearns stood and stepped out from behind her desk. She’d stayed even though Eve had told them to knock off earlier, keen to make a tiny show of defiance, nothing to do with showing dedication for the job to a woman she’d decided from the off she wasn’t going to like. Anyway, she didn’t need anyone to tell her she was dedicated and conscientious. Two attributes her boss didn’t possess.

  Mearns had been on the force here two months when everything blew up after the attack on Eve and Sanders. She’d completed the three-week residential Transferee Conversion course at the Police Scotland college in Tulliallan. She’d initially wondered whether the course would be open to her if she made the move from Bolton, England, to Aberdeen, Scotland, even with her five years’ continuous service. She needn’t have worried. Her exemplary record saw to that.

  During those first eight weeks at Queen Street, she hadn’t directly crossed paths with Eve or any of her team. But then came the incident, after which she was asked to replace Sanders. Asked to step into the shoes of someone who had not left through choice. A DC who was plastered all over the papers at that time, alongside Eve, a DI who was injured and off the job, the fodder for HQ gossip. It had been nerve-wracking, fretting over whether she was ready for such a move, scared of the pressure and expectation as she took someone else’s place, questioning whether she’d only landed lucky because of Sanders’ misfortune.

  What Eve had let happen to Sanders was an outrage. Ferguson had told her the DI was unreliable, impetuous. But she had a reputation for getting results and, regardless of some people’s opinion of her, she was still liked and supported by Hastings and others. Definitely before the incident and bizarrely afterwards. Why, she didn’t know. Mearns had to be careful of that.

  Whatever the reason, Eve Hunter was not going to ruin things for her. For the last six months, since working with the team under Cooper’s interim leadership, she’d given the role her all. It had been hard: a new city, a new job. Miles away from home. Away from what she’d known all her life. Alone.

  But it was the only way she’d wanted it, the only way she could thrive. By getting out from beneath the stifling blanket of her over-protective parents. Her father especially. To the other end of the country, no less. Getting used to a new way of life, to different ways of living. Feeling like a foreigner.

  She’d had to step outside her comfort zone, pressing herself on to others in order to get to know her surroundings. Thankfully only professionally, as a social life didn’t bother her. She’d made her mark, been accepted by the rest of the team in Sanders’ absence. It had boosted her confidence and self-belief. She might not have shown it to Eve, but she was kind, kick-ass when she needed to be, fair. She put in the hours when others rushed home, took the job home with her and never missed a shift. She’d slowly come to accept that maybe she did deserve the role. And she hated the possibility that it could be threatened in any way. That Eve might think she wasn’t up to the job.

  But what she detested even more since Eve’s return was how she was acting around her new boss. Like a snotty-nosed kid, attitude rolling off her in waves. No matter how shitty she was, Eve had tolerated it so far.

  The problem was that Eve was so different from the monster Mearns had built in her head. She was surprised to find that Eve came across as a conscientious detective, and one who clearly valued her team and took the job seriously. She felt a begrudging respect for how Eve had handled her return. But no one took Mearns for a mug. She knew i
t could all be an act on Eve’s part, a ploy to get back on the job and to stay on it. To be on her best behaviour while she was being observed and reported on. She felt sure her new boss would show her true self before long.

  She sighed as she stretched and pulled her hair free of the bun that was starting to make her hairline throb. Tiredness and thirst were getting to her. She shook out her limbs and made her way over to the water machine, rubbing at dry eyes as she walked – too many hours spent staring at the computer. Too many obsessing over her issues with her boss.

  She stared at the blank wall in the darkness, the only light the blue of her computer screen and the emerald-green emergency-exit sign above the door. The water glugged inside the plastic canister as it trickled into the cup.

  She forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. Going over all the statements from the hotel staff and anyone else who had thrown in their tuppence worth, doubtful any of it was going to help catch the man who had taken Melanie Ross’s tongue. In this job there was no hiding from how many crazy folk there were in this world. Crazy and dangerous.

  She jumped as her mobile phone rang in her pocket, the sound amplified in the empty office. She dug it out, saw ‘Dad’ lighting the screen. She sighed and put the phone to her ear as she answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Your mother asked me to call … see you’re not involved in that murder from today.’

  Typical of her father. Straight to the point, no attempt to conceal that he had been put up to calling, her mother always choosing to hide behind him the moment anything remotely difficult came her way. Regardless of her issues with her parents, or rather their issues full-stop, it was strangely nice to hear from home, the Boltonian accent that seemed to surprise people when she first met anyone here and made her different.

  ‘What if I am, Dad? It’s my job.’ She tried to soften at least a little of the defiance in her tone. She told herself it was concern, not control, that was driving the phone call, thinking all the time of Melanie’s parents, who no longer had a daughter to worry about. Silence stretched at the other end of the line.

  ‘So how are you and Mum doing anyway?’ Safe. Dutiful daughter.

  ‘Your mother would be doing a lot better if you were home.’

  Mearns bit the inside of her cheek. The guilt trip no longer surprised her, but her father’s habit of using her mother’s health as a way to berate her for her decisions in life hit a raw nerve every time. The fact her mother was forever willing to play the weak little wife irked her even more.

  ‘I’m sure Mother is just fine. I’m a big girl.’ She stopped herself from saying that her mother was too.

  ‘That may be so, but—’

  ‘Dad, I’m kind of busy right now. I have to go.’ She wasn’t in the mood for the usual lecture about being married to the job or the fact it was no job for a woman. She’d heard it a million times.

  ‘But—’ The indignation was clear in her father’s voice.

  ‘I’ll call you, OK?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer before she ended the call. Her father didn’t believe any job was for a woman. She pictured him standing there in the striped-wallpapered hallway that hadn’t been decorated since her teens, the phone probably still clasped in his hand as her mother looked on, twisting her hands round and round one another, her face creased with worry. She felt a stab of guilt but quickly buried it. She didn’t want to be her mother. Who would? A woman at some man’s beck and call, with two point four kids, numbed to who she once was, to who she might’ve become. Hiding behind a man who had, over the years, made her feel she needed him to survive. Well, that wouldn’t be her. That wasn’t survival; it was a slow painful death. No, what Mearns was doing was worthwhile.

  Sure, she’d sacrificed what her friends had settled for, losing them in the process before moving here from Bolton. But it had given her freedom, a way out from beneath her parents’ shadow, the chance to climb to where she needed to reach. Another reason she was determined she wasn’t going to let Eve ruin it for her. Eve had made it to where Mearns wanted to be, and Mearns wasn’t going to be stopped from getting there too. She wasn’t going to let some maverick threaten her job or her life, like Eve had done to Sanders.

  Mearns looked over at her desk. It seemed such a thankless task sifting through everything, but if it gave them one lead, however small, one that might help to give the Rosses answers, then it would be worth it. She sipped the cold liquid from the plastic cup, forced her mind back to Melanie. Thinking about all the chances she’d missed. Modelling, travelling, perhaps a man who would love her, maybe a family in time. Maybe not. The man Melanie had been thinking about was her family. Adoptive brother. But too close for comfort all the same. And it was looking like he was responsible for taking all those years and chances away from her.

  She walked to her desk. The silence of the office made her feel alone. The only thing waiting for her at home, a microwave meal for one.

  Chapter 13

  The hissing inhalation and exhalation of Sanders’ ventilator made Eve feel guilty with every breath she took. When she left the morgue earlier, leaving Melanie’s lifeless body behind on that sterile metal table, she knew that this was where she would be headed. A room that seemed as sterile, a body that seemed as lifeless, except that this one, the one sitting in front of her, still drew breath.

  The wheelchair seat lifted Sanders high off the ground. An air pipe was in front of her face, which she used to adjust the chair by blowing on it. Eve was small in the low, deep armchair, Sanders peering from a commanding height. It was where Eve chose to sit every time she visited.

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  Eve averted her eyes and tucked her hair behind her ear as Sanders spoke, focusing instead on the oak sideboard while Sanders’ husband crouched by her right foot. The dust-free wooden surface was crowded with framed pictures. All of them taken before.

  Eve coughed, masking the sound of trickling urine as Archie drained the tube hidden beneath Sanders’ trouser leg into a bottle. She didn’t look until Archie had stood and the bottle had been hidden away out of sight.

  Sanders smiled at her husband, a gesture that reached her blue eyes, reminding Eve of a thousand other smiles in a body that once worked.

  ‘Thirsty, Nic?’ Archie’s voice was tender as he held a straw to her lips.

  Eve baulked at the use of Sanders’ first name. Nicola? She was Sanders. Always would be. But Eve knew she would never again be the officer she once was. She looked at Sanders’ head, her neck hard against the padded support. Her husband caught a dribble of water from her mouth with a tissue.

  ‘Right. I’ll leave you to it.’ He turned from Sanders, face darkening as he glowered through horn-rimmed glasses towards Eve before leaving the room.

  Eve breathed deep, inhaling furniture polish mingled with disinfectant. She felt slapped again, having not long recovered from the same look when Archie answered the front door. The venom in his voice as he’d said ‘You again’ causing Eve to step back from the door. ‘Do you even stop to think how having you here makes her feel? Flaunting the life and job she used to have?’ Eve wanted to leave and would’ve if Sanders hadn’t called on Archie from the front room.

  Eve jumped when Sanders spoke. ‘You know, you don’t have to keep coming here out of some kind of sense of duty.’ Spoken in a deliberate, fully formed sentence, only occasionally gasping on a word as she breathed through the ventilator.

  Eve let go of her own breath, the sharpness in Sanders’ tone slicing into raw wounds, knowing that, under their stilted exchanges whenever she did visit, it was these moments she came for. It had taken weeks for Sanders to even acknowledge her when she’d first started visiting, the tortured silence doing little to mask the rage pulsing from the wheelchair.

  Sanders stared at her, waiting for a response. Those deep-set blue eyes, familiar laughter lines at their edges, the only part of her Eve truly recognized. Her hair was short and there was a clam
my look to the paper-thin skin covering limbs that never moved. As lifeless from the neck down as Melanie, except Sanders was still in there somewhere.

  Blood thundered in Eve’s ears. She answered the only way she knew how: ‘I’m here because I want to be.’

  Sanders scowled. ‘If that’s true, then at least have the guts to be the woman I knew.’

  Eve sat, stung, but she was happy to take it. Needed to take it. Better than the visits when they sat in silence or made clipped polite chit-chat. She swallowed. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘You need to ask?’ Sanders’ pupils widened, top lip curling as she spat the words at her.

  ‘I didn’t come here for this.’ Eve’s voice getting louder, forcing herself to stay seated, nails digging into her palms. Both of them knowing this is exactly what she came for.

  ‘That’s more like it, Eve. Some fire in your belly.’ Venom in her voice.

  Eve’s heart hammered, her fists clenched, at odds with the lump in her throat. ‘I came to see you. To be here for you.’ Her voice was a hiss, back teeth clamped like they’d been glued together.

  ‘See me for what? A reminder of who I was? You don’t need to be here for that. Or for me. Especially when you can’t even see it’s still me in here.’

  Eve’s head snapped round towards the closed door.

  ‘What? You scared Archie’ll hear?’

  Eve’s eyes narrowed, temple pulsing, pushing down the rising feeling of shame. This was more than Sanders had ever said. Moving further than she knew how to deal with. She needed to leave. She wasn’t ready.

  The room was silent but for the sound of breathing: hers as laboured as Sanders’.

  ‘I’ve never been any different with you.’ Eve whispered the words, not believing them herself.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Eve moved her heavy head from side to side, not able to deny it twice with words. She lowered her eyes to the floor, the carpet blurring. ‘What do you want from me?’ Feeling pathetic as her voice cracked.