Quieter Than Killing Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Sarah Hilary The right of Sarah Hilary to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook in 2017 by Headline Publishing Group All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library eISBN: 978 1 4722 2645 7

  Cover photograph © Silas Manhood HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Sarah Hilary

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Sarah Hilary has worked as a bookseller and with the Royal Navy. Her debut novel, Someone Else’s Skin, won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2015. It was the Observer’s Book of the Month, a Richard & Judy Book Club bestseller, and has been published worldwide. Her next two novels, No Other Darkness and Tastes Like Fear have been published to great critical acclaim. Quieter Than Killing is the fourth book in the DI Marnie Rome series.

  Sarah lives in Bath.

  Praise

  Praise for Quieter Than Killing:

  ‘Hilary is my drop-everything writer; always original, always bang-on psychologically, always gripping. I am a huge fan’ Alex Marwood ‘It’s dark, it’s brilliant, and it tightens like a noose. Sarah Hilary is downright dangerous’ Mick Herron ‘A compelling read, emotionally intense and intelligent. I love her fierce, flawed characters’ Cath Staincliffe ‘As tense, twisty, tremendous as ever, Sarah Hilary’s Quieter Than Killing nails it’ Angela Clarke ‘Hilary’s writing is as precise and deadly as a fine blade . . . by turns terrifying and tender, with a twisty, gripping plot . . . a fine addition to a superb series’ Jane Casey

  Praise for Tastes Like Fear:

  ‘Brilliant. I put everything else aside when I have one of her books in the house’ Alex Marwood ‘A tense, terrifying tale of obsession and possession . . . a writer at the top of her game’ Alison Graham, Radio Times ‘A truly chilling exploration of control, submission and the desire to step out of a normal life’ Eva Dolan ‘It is devious, dark, deliciously chilling. A formidable addition to an accomplished series that just keeps getting better and better’ neverimitate.wordpress.com

  Praise for No Other Darkness:

  ‘Riveting . . . Sarah Hilary delivers in this enthralling tale of a haunted detective, terrible crime, and the secrets all of us try to keep’ Lisa Gardner ‘At the centre is a queasily equivocal moral tone that forces the reader into a constant rejigging of their attitude to the characters. And did I mention the plotting? Hilary’s ace in the hole – as it is in the best crime thrillers’ Financial Times ‘Sarah Hilary cements her position as one of Britain’s most exciting and accomplished new writers. Complex, polished and utterly gripping, this is a book to make your heart pound’ Eva Dolan ‘The skill of the prose produces a deft and disturbing thriller’ Sunday Mirror

  By Sarah Hilary and available from Headline

  Someone Else’s Skin

  No Other Darkness

  Tastes Like Fear

  Quieter Than Killing

  About the Book

  A DI Marnie Rome novel

  ‘You only ever ask that. Why did I do it? You never ask what they did’

  The winter cold is biting, and a series of vigilante assaults pulls DI Marnie Rome and DS Noah Jake out into the frosty, mean streets of London. The attacks seem random, but when Marnie’s old family home is ransacked, there are signs that the burglary can have only been committed by someone who knows her. Suddenly, it’s personal.

  Then a child goes missing, and Marnie is horrified to discover no-one has reported it. Someone out there is playing games, putting a child’s life at risk, bringing events of the past into a chilling present. It is time for Marnie and Noah to face the truth about the creeping reaches of a troubled upbringing. Keeping quiet is a means of survival, but the effects can be as terrible as killing.

  Hugely compelling, intelligent and full of emotional impact, QUIETER THAN KILLING has all the twists and turns that have marked Sarah Hilary out as an award-winning crime writer to be savoured.

  For my sister, Penny

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not be in your hands but for the support and enthusiasm, the kindness and cleverness, and the gin and the tonic of the following people—

  Jane Gregory, Vicki Mellor, Mick Herron, Alison Graham, Alyson Shipley, Isabelle Gray, Susan Pola, Serena Mackesy, Jane Casey and the Killer Women, Julia Crouch, Anne Cater, Liz Barnsley, Tracy Fenton and The Book Clubbers, Pita and Becca, Lydia and Anna.

  All of my family, but most especially my mother.

  Thank you to Alex and Simon-Peter for the chems. And to Jacob Collins who won the Get in Character auction in support of the CLIC Sargent charity for children with cancer. I hope you approve of your role i
n the story.

  Six years ago

  He’s washing the car – slapping water, sloppy. She’s in the kitchen, cutting. Not meat and not bread, something that chunks under the knife. Carrots, or onions. The sounds soak up through the house to where Stephen is sitting in the room with the red wall.

  Her room. The shelf over the bed is full of her things. Books and pictures, and the dark blue box with its snarl of bracelets. His favourite is the horseshoe charm, silver, curved like a half-finished heart. He wears it under the sleeve of his pyjamas, in bed. They said they’d put her things away into the attic if he wanted but he said no, he didn’t mind. He likes looking at her things; it makes him feel safe. He sleeps with her books weighted around him like stones.

  She painted the red wall herself. He can see the places she had to stop and stand on a chair to finish, stretching her arm to reach the ceiling’s right angles. She was angry when she did it; the paint’s too thick and too thin and where it’s too thick it’s full of tiny holes where air bubbles burst.

  She’s not been here in years, but it’s her room.

  Marnie Rome’s room.

  He finds the shape of her in the bed at night and it’s his shape, narrow. He wriggles down into it, imagining a trench dug in the mattress, a place to lie low. Her eyes tracked these same shadows across the ceiling, and watched the sun crouch outside the cracked window.

  The crack’s at the top corner, in the shape of a hand. He measures it most weeks, to see if it’s grown. Stands on a chair and reaches until he’s touching the tips of his fingers to it. The last time, it drew blood. He climbed down and stood looking at his red fingers, like hers after she’d painted the wall. The fingers tasted rusty, old. He shut them up in a fist and set its side to the window, thinking about punching, thinking of the noise it would make and the feet that would come running, arms open, mouths lopsided, words worrying at him. Just thinking it makes him tired.

  He’s lonely. If it wasn’t for her here with him, he’d have gone crazy by now.

  ‘Marnie Rome.’

  He says her name when he’s held down by her books, the horseshoe charm biting at the inside of his wrist. They have the same wrists, thin and square. They’re the same shape, lying together in the narrow bed, counting the holes in the red wall, all the places pricked by her anger. Not just anger. Sadness, too. She was lonely here, like him. Hurting, the way he hurts.

  A slop of water from outside.

  He’s making the car shine.

  From the kitchen, the smell of onions frying in butter.

  She’s making a casserole.

  Stephen had never eaten a casserole until he came here, when he was eight years old. Now he’s fourteen, ‘a growing boy’. In the other place it was all scraps and mouldy sandwiches made with whatever was left in the fridge. Here, they won’t stop feeding him. Proper food, she calls it. ‘Let’s get a proper meal inside you,’ as if she can see his emptiness. He’s so empty it hurts.

  Food doesn’t help, stretching his stomach until he has to get rid of it to make more room for her, for Marnie. Food just gets in the way.

  He’s whistling as he washes the car.

  Stephen can hear water running onto the drive. He used to help when he first came here, when he was scared and wanting to please. He’s not scared now. Not of them, not of anything, thanks to her.

  ‘Marnie Rome.’

  He counts the holes in the red wall, starting over.

  From the kitchen—

  The yellow smell of onions frying, and the slow chunking of the knife.

  1

  Now

  ‘Upgrades . . . Another circle of hell successfully breached.’ Tim Welland gave up the struggle with his phone and set it aside. ‘DS Jake, take a seat.’

  Noah did as he was told, puzzling over what had prompted this meeting. First thing in the morning wasn’t Welland’s style any more than it was his, but here he was in the OCU Commander’s office at 7.55 a.m. without a cup of coffee in sight and Welland looking like a double espresso wouldn’t even scratch the surface of his mood.

  ‘You and DI Rome make a good team.’ He treated Noah to his heaviest stare. ‘That’s the station gossip. But the trouble with station gossip is I wouldn’t stuff my wet shoes with most of it. I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘We make a good team, sir.’

  An easy answer because it was the truth, but where was Welland going with this? Christ, he wasn’t about to hand out a secondment, was he? It was too early in the morning for dodging bullets and Noah liked his job, wanted to keep working with Marnie Rome and the major incident team. Ambition dictated that he took any leg-up on offer, but Welland’s face wasn’t saying leg-up.

  On his desk was a sheet of paper, an incident report. Noah wasn’t equal to the task of reading it upside down while maintaining eye contact.

  ‘She’s got your back, and you’ve got hers.’ Deep lines were scored either side of Welland’s nose, as if he’d paid to have censure tattooed in place. ‘You’ve found out things about her you didn’t know a year ago. Is that a fair statement?’

  ‘I . . . Yes, sir.’

  ‘From the station’s self-appointed agony aunt.’ Touching the taut skin under his eye. ‘DC Tanner.’

  This was a disciplinary? Debbie Tanner had pushed her luck, one piece of well-meaning gossip too many. ‘Not just from her.’

  ‘Remind me to dig out my thermal underwear.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If DI Rome’s sharing secrets then hell must be icing over.’

  ‘Not . . . secrets. But we did speak a little, about what happened six years ago. Not much, but—’

  ‘Enough for you to know why I don’t want her anywhere near a case involving this address.’ Welland put his thumb on the incident report and pushed it across the desk. ‘Yes?’

  At last. They were getting somewhere. Okay, maybe nowhere good, but—

  Noah read the report, his throat tightening. Definitely nowhere good. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Our victims are in the hospital, not the morgue. Robbery gone wrong. Not a major incident, and not homicide. So. We let Trident take this one.’

  ‘That makes sense.’ Noah kept his eyes on the paperwork.

  Six years ago, Welland had been the first officer on the scene. At Marnie’s old address, her family home. This new crime—

  Robbery and assault, two victims in hospital. Alan and Louise Kettridge. Her tenants, Noah guessed. The assault had taken place while he was sleeping with Dan curled at his back, around 1.30 a.m. It’d happened in the house where her parents were killed by her foster brother, Stephen Keele.

  ‘Trident have their eye on a local gang, kids. This has their thumbprints all over it, apparently.’ Welland sat back, rubbing at his face. ‘If we’re lucky, literally their thumbprints. But even without the kick-and-run gods smiling on us, we leave this to Trident. They’ve got the contacts, plus some private mediation outfit falling over itself to get the local community onside.’ When he dropped his hands, his face held the shadow of their shape. ‘DS Kennedy’s heading up the Trident team. He’ll keep me posted. And I’ll keep DI Rome posted, on a need-to-know basis.’

  How would he quantify that?

  This house, what had happened there six years ago . . .

  Marnie’s need to know wasn’t going to fit Trident’s boxes, or not neatly.

  Welland reached across the desk for the report. ‘You’ve got her back.’

  He nodded a dismissal at Noah. ‘I’m glad of it.’

  2

  Marnie was in the incident room when Noah returned. ‘Good,’ she smiled at him, ‘you can drink one of these.’ Two flat whites from their favourite coffee shop. ‘You heard, then.’

  ‘About—?’

  ‘The latest assault.’ She moved in the direction of her office, unwinding a green scarf from her throat. ‘No robbery. Just plenty of violence.’

  Noah had thought for a second that she knew the secrets Welland was keeping; she could be
uncanny like that. But she was talking about another assault. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Pimlico.’ She hung her coat and scarf on the back of the door, tidying her red curls away from her face. ‘Page Street.’

  ‘Our vigilante’s going up in the world. Who’s got the crime scene?’

  ‘DS Carling. We’ll go over there, but I wanted to check in here first. See what Forensics has for us, whether there’s a link yet.’

  For weeks they’d been seeing a pattern in the assaults, but what they needed was hard evidence. As it stood the attacks were random, the victims unknown to one another. No matching DNA at the scenes, no clear motive and no obvious modus operandi other than a savage beating.

  ‘Kyle Stratton,’ Marnie said, anticipating Noah’s next question. ‘Our new victim. Twenty-six years old. A management consultant. Works in Westminster, lives in Reigate. Right now he’s in St Thomas’s with multiple fractures.’

  ‘Weapon?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Blunt, heavy. A baseball bat, or similar.’ She was checking her emails. ‘Defensive wounds in the shape of two broken wrists and a broken elbow. A shattered eye socket too.’

  Noah winced. ‘Facial injuries again. Like Stuart Rawling.’

  ‘Not like Carole Linton, but yes. All the injuries are front-facing. Our assailant wants you to see what’s coming, and isn’t afraid of you fighting back.’

  ‘And yet neither of them could give us a clear description.’

  This reluctance to ID the assailant had prompted them to look more closely at the victims. Wondering about their lifestyles, whether they were making bad choices, courting chaos.

  In the incident room, Noah and Marnie stood shoulder to shoulder, studying the whiteboard.

  Two victims, each with two faces: before and after the assaults.

  Stuart Rawling wasn’t smiling in the first photograph. In the second, his mouth was forced into the mockery of a grin, thanks to a badly dislocated jaw. Carole Linton’s was the more disturbing face, despite all of her injuries being below the waist: knife wounds and bruises stamped by feet which had ruptured an ovary and her spleen. Burns too, where her skirt had been set alight. She’d aged twenty years after the attack, shoulders hunched, bleak terror in her stare.