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.
‘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