Damaged Goods. Helen Black

to tea.’

      Penny pushed her hair behind tiny ears.

      ‘I’m sure it’s too little notice for you,’ said Lilly.

      ‘Not at all. I’m sure he’d love it. I was just wondering what day it was,’ said Penny.

      Lilly was puzzled. ‘It’s Friday.’

      ‘I mean is it a ballet, tennis or piano day,’ said Penny with a musical laugh.

      Lilly held strong views on the middle-class obsession with extracurricular activities. ‘Ah,’ she said.

      ‘But it’s not. So by all means take him with you.’

      Lilly got Toby safely belted into the car. He looked disconcerted by the muddy seats and the debris in the footwells.

      ‘Are you hungry?’ asked Lilly.

      ‘We usually have some fruit on the way home,’ the boy whispered.

      Sam brandished two bags of Hula Hoops. ‘We always eat these.’

      A smile broke across Toby’s face like a wave. ‘Awesome.’

      The boys wolfed down their tea and headed off to play football in the garden. Lilly could hear their laughter through the open door as she logged onto the internet. If she were to help Kelsey she would have to give the police something on Max. Something concrete. Jack had confirmed he was a pimp and a pornographer and Lilly wondered if there would be anything about him on the net.

      She entered ‘Max Harding’ and ‘sex’ into the search engine. Nothing exact came up, but the nearest hit was a site called ‘Maximum Hard On’. She checked the boys were still outside and entered the site.

      The pixels began to coagulate to reveal a voluptuous blonde sucking a green lollipop. She gave a wave of welcome. Lilly waved back and travelled through the site. Further in, it became more explicit, but there was nothing to link it with her suspect. In any event it was both pedestrian and legal, bog-standard fucking and sucking.

      ‘Hello there.’

      Lilly looked up and was shocked to see Luella next to her desk, looking over her shoulder at the large breasts that filled the screen.

      ‘You left your key in the door,’ said Luella.

      Lilly had been so horrified to see her she hadn’t given a thought to how she had got in.

      ‘Penny’s stuck at the doctor’s with the baby so I said I’d collect Toby,’ Luella told her.

      Lilly looked from Luella to her computer. The blonde was now on all fours, lollipop still in place, while another woman inserted an unfeasibly large dildo into her arse.

      Lilly scrabbled to exit the site. ‘Research.’

      Luella’s terse smile said it all.

      * * *

      William Barrows felt his sap rising. The girl – his girl, as he was already thinking of her – was taking over. He imagined how she would feel and how she would smell. He could concentrate on nothing else, and it was painfully exquisite.

      Then the black man had left a message. The idiot had ‘experienced some difficulties’ so the meeting with the girl was postponed.

      It infuriated Barrows that he was reliant upon such an imbecile, but he had no choice. It was too dangerous to do the grooming himself. He had done it in the past and enjoyed the process, but he no longer had the access or the patience and sought instead only the thrill of action.

      He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted the iron tang of blood. These days, if he encountered any impediment to his ultimate satisfaction he was no longer able to steer himself to a safer path, but instead felt overcome with rage. A rage he needed to satiate.

      When the woman answered the door her smell almost knocked him off balance. The foul stench of a thousand fucks and used condoms, drowning in perfume. Oddly, the woman used the old-fashioned kind that came in a glass bottle, which his grandmother had called ‘scent’. Violets and sugar. Barrows gagged.

      ‘Put it in the usual place, darling,’ she said, and pointed to the dusty bedside table covered in bangles, rings and a snakes’ nest of cheap gold chains.

      He opened the heart-shaped box, inlaid with small white shells, and placed eighty pounds inside. The woman was leaning against a chair to remove her baggy leggings, the legs beneath as flabby and shapeless as the trousers. She saw that he was watching, grinned, and ran a hand over her vast backside, as white and pitted as the surface of the moon.

      The contents of Barrows’ stomach, a goat’s cheese and vine-ripened-tomato salad, rose in his throat at the thought of even touching this monster.

      He inhaled deeply, fingered the damp cloth in his pocket, and reminded himself that he had not come for sex.

       CHAPTER SIX

       Saturday, 12 September

      The glare through the windscreen was painful. Lilly pulled at the broken sun-shield and admonished herself yet again for failing to have her prescription put in some sunglasses. It was not yet 10 a.m. but the temperature was already past seventy degrees. Lilly felt the prickle of sweat in her armpits as she pulled into a parking space, and wondered if autumn was ever going to arrive.

      She turned to her passengers. ‘Everyone okay?’

      Miriam nodded, Kelsey hid her face under a sheet of lank hair, and the three of them made their way into the police station.

      The air-conditioning in the custody suite was broken and the desk sergeant was trying to keep the area cool with three rotating fans. As the one on his right swivelled towards him a raft of papers blew to the floor. Cursing, he picked them up and secured them with a cup of cold coffee, which sloshed gently over the rim.

      ‘What have you got for me, McNally?’ the sergeant asked as Jack came in.

      Jack motioned to Kelsey, who was flanked by Lilly and Miriam, and sat on a wooden bench to the left.

      ‘CID want to interview the girl on an SAO.’

      The sergeant sighed. A Serious Arrestable Offence always meant extra bloody paperwork. ‘Nobody bothered to tell me. Will you need the video room?’

      Jack nodded.

      ‘God help you, it’s like an oven in there,’ said the sergeant.

      Lilly glared at Jack as he arrested and searched Kelsey. ‘Got you doing the dirty work, have they?’

      He ignored her and completed the paperwork.

      ‘I’ll need your details, Miss Valentine,’ said the desk sergeant. He pointed to the relevant space on the custody sheet and offered her a chewed biro.

      Lilly ignored the pen and slapped her card into his hand so he could copy out the necessary information himself. It was a petty gesture that she instantly regretted.

      ‘I’m sorry if I seem curt, but I object most strongly to this course of action.’

      The sergeant turned to Jack for enlightenment.

      ‘Li— Miss Valentine is of the opinion that Kelsey isn’t fit to be interviewed, given that she recently tried to harm herself.’

      ‘Given that she swallowed a bottle of bleach only two weeks ago,’ Lilly interjected, ‘and shortly afterwards found out her mother was brutally murdered, it is my professional opinion that dragging her here for questioning is entirely wrong, and Miriam Zander, the appropriate adult, is of exactly the same opinion.’

      The sergeant looked close to sixty and was probably only months from retirement. Lilly guessed he would have no desire to be cited in a case for wrongful imprisonment of a minor.

      He