Reunion

Reunion

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It was ten minutes to midnight and I was on my way to bed when the doorbell rang. I should have ignored it – no natural caller appears uninvited at that time of night – but curiosity got the better of me. I hadn’t forgotten the anniversary, how could I? But it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind or I might have acted differently.

When I opened the door a ghost stared back at me. I staggered backwards. ‘But ... you can’t be ... I thought you were –’

She responded with a coy little shimmy and a sly smile. ‘Dead?’

A chill trickled through my body, I blinked and blinked again. I wondered for a moment whether I was already in my bed having a nightmare.

I couldn’t see the scars because she was wearing long sleeves, but I never doubted that it was her. Ten years ago, this very day, I had stood looking down on her bloodstained body and watched her take her final dying breaths, yet here she was now, watching me, seemingly amused, awaiting my reaction. I glanced up and down the quiet avenue, there was no one about and the darkness and the silence in the empty street made the experience all the more dreamlike.

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. You should never have tried to force my hand, was what I wanted to say. She had understood that the relationship was clandestine due to her youth and my position of authority. She might not have been the first young girl to take a casual and expedient affair too seriously, but she knew that exposure would bring about my destruction. That meant it was me or her. She has to take some responsibility for that.

She had already entrusted me with the details of her teenage suicide attempts – not that I needed telling, I’d read the files – but it helped to hear how it played out. She had been eager to clarify that she never really intended to die, she simply craved attention from uncaring parents. It hadn’t produced the desired result. She had asked the hospital to contact her father – the man who’d hightailed it out of there before she was out of nappies – but he felt it was imprudent to get involved at such a late stage in her life, and referred them back to her mother. The mother’s reaction had been lukewarm at best, and when I encountered her and her daughter a few years later, she had as little interest in her child’s welfare as when the girl was trying to do away with herself.

 But the knowledge was invaluable, and it enabled me to recreate exactly what she’d done. Pills then wrists. In my job we get a lot of awareness training and one thing you often hear is that abusive men target vulnerable women because they are easier to manipulate and control, well it’s certainly true that they are easier to dispose of without anyone missing them or causing a fuss. Because here’s the thing about modern justice, after ten years of policing cuts, unless you’re very stupid, the only way to get caught is to commit a crime sufficiently interesting for someone to want to make a podcast about it. If you don’t believe me check out the crime stats.

I did it in Lenny’s flat while he was out at work then left him to clean up. The girl was a stranger and he didn’t even know I had a key, so that must have been quite the surprise. Meanwhile I’d lined up a transfer nearly three hundred miles away and I was long gone. It’s always a risk to involve someone else, but the loyalty of my brother was unquestioning. Of course I couldn’t entirely predict his reaction, the situation was unprecedented, but I’d covered all my bases. I relied on him to follow the instructions I’d provided after he called me that night in a frenzy of distress. If he ignored my orders and called emergency services, it was a safe bet they’d write it off as suicide, but if they did have any suspicions, the only person in the frame would be Lenny with his ridiculous story about finding a girl he’d never set eyes on in his locked apartment. When Lenny disappeared right afterwards and I heard nothing about her being found I assumed he’d buried her somewhere untraceable then done a runner. The girl herself had always been a runaway, living off-grid in squats or on the streets, so no one was going to search too hard for her.

My brother conveniently possessed the ideal characteristics for disposing of a body, big and strong but not too bright – that’s why I gave him the nickname Lenny, and it’s no surprise that it stuck. When he was seven, he was in the car crash that killed our dad and it left him with a childhood brain injury that caused emotional outbursts and high anxiety. His school and the psychologist who signed him off insisted that he didn’t have learning difficulties, but me and mum knew better, and let’s be honest he never achieved much. Next to my brother, I was the runt of the litter, but he’d been doing exactly what I told him since I’d practised the Korean prison of war techniques on him as a kid. You don’t need size or strength to control by fear. And sleep deprivation is a marvellous tool for destroying the mental health of an already defective mind.

My eyes lingered over her tanned, slimmed down form. She was wearing a thin cotton shirt and she’d opened the top two buttons so I could see the shadow of her cleavage. ‘You look ... er ... well,’ I said. She certainly hadn’t been well the last time I saw her, either before or after I put her out of her misery. She’d been developing a cocaine habit since the age of fifteen so even when I met her at the tender age of sixteen she wasn’t exactly love’s young dream.

She performed a little wiggle of embarrassment, but I could see she was pleased with the compliment. She was always a pushover for that kind of crap. ‘Me and Lenny are doing all right for ourselves,’ she said. ‘We’ve got our own bar in Pattaya now.’ She couldn’t hide her pride. Over a crappy little bar in a third world country. I was embarrassed for her. But I stifled a yawn and nodded solemnly as if I’d always believed she’d come good.

It was mum who’d told me that Lenny had gone to Thailand, he had disappeared without a by your leave to me, his one and only brother, and let me waste time and energy worrying about where he was. So I convinced mum he was up to something dodgy over there. Mum had always relied on me to explain the world to her, and she took it for granted that in my line of work we knew what was what, so they ended up losing touch. It was no loss, I had always been the favourite.

I checked the street again while she droned on about Lenny. ‘He’s looking after everything in Thailand. You wouldn’t believe how well he manages it, the staff love him.’ Staff? I doubted that very much. ‘Staff’ probably referred to some little native urchin whose parents had put him to work taking advantage of the foreigners. ‘He’ll probably be enjoying the break from me.’ She giggled as if that was meant to be funny, then she stopped and frowned. ‘Lenny says he never wants to come home. But you know, the thing is I just could not settle knowing you were still here.’ A coy little smile played at the corners of her lips. ‘Anyway, it was too risky for him, everyone knows he’s your brother, it’s different for me because our relationship was always a secret.’

‘I really don’t understand what –’

‘Did it never occur to you that I might survive?’ She said it with a mischievous smile and I was immediately struck by how incongruent her emotional response was with what I’d done to her. Did she even remember what happened? Then she met my eyes properly for the first time. ‘You thought you had Lenny under your thumb, you thought he couldn’t lie to you, but he saved my life.’ She paused and put a hand to her mouth as if a thought had suddenly occurred to her. ‘Though I suppose I have you to thank too – the drugs you used to knock me out slowed the bleeding, otherwise I’d have been dead before Lenny got back. So!' She smiled brightly and raised her hands as if she was offering up thanks. ‘Here I am, healthy and well, as you say.’ I wondered suddenly if she’d got religion over there. Had she come all this way to offer forgiveness? ‘I got clean in hospital,’ she went on, her face shiny with pride. ‘So everything turned out perfectly. And life is good.’ She looked directly into my eyes, then she smiled beatifically, and held the smile. And I thought yes, she’s got religion. That or she’s lost her mind completely. It was mental health problems that got her into the services in the first place, and her decision to self-medicate with cocaine was never going to fix the problem.

She shifted her handbag on her shoulder then looked up and met my gaze with eyes that were somehow still innocent. ‘In case you wondered, we never told anyone. You were right to think we wouldn’t report it. Me and Lenny aren’t as clever as you, but even we knew no one was going to take the word of a teenage addict over that of a Detective Sergeant.’

I responded with a bemused smile, my mind was elsewhere, planning. Again I scanned the empty street. I lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, so it was unlikely there would be anyone out there at that time of night, but it wasn’t worth taking any chances. I checked her over, she was no bigger now than she had been at sixteen, if this was a threat, it was one I could handle.

‘So, what brings you here?’ I drawled nonchalantly. ‘Did you come for vengeance? Or have you been missing me?’ I gave her the slow, lazy grin as I closed in, the one that used to drive her wild.

That was when she tasered me.