Perfect Silence. Helen Fields

Spurr is excellent,’ Callanach said. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

      They drove their cars in convoy to the city mortuary. Dr Spurr met them in the reception area, already gowned and gloved. Ava and Callanach suited up, handing the bagged doll to Jonty, who peered at it with undisguised revulsion.

      Without exchanging a word, they filed into the autopsy suite, where Zoey was waiting for them, sheet pulled back to reveal her skinned abdomen. Jonty took the doll from the bag, laid it on a sterile tray and photographed every aspect of it, recording each measurement and dimension as he went. With immaculate care, and making sure he preserved the knotted parts of the thread, he opened the stitching and separated the two sections of material.

      Holding the material up to the light, he turned it over and around. ‘That’s human skin, without a doubt,’ he said. ‘I can clearly see the follicles, lines and pores.’

      He walked slowly to Zoey, holding the front section of the doll by the ends of each arm. A sheet of plastic had been placed over Zoey’s abdominal wound, and he placed the first section of skin flat over the top of it, smoothing out the parts that had been folded over at the edges. It almost perfectly filled the shape that had been stolen from Zoey’s body.

      ‘It’s shrunk as it’s dried out,’ Jonty said, ‘which accounts for the size difference, but you can see where there are tiny imperfections in the cuts. They match both the wound edges on Zoey’s body and on the doll. There is no doubt at all that what you’ve found was made from Zoey’s skin.’

      ‘Thank you, Dr Spurr,’ Ava said, talking a step forward and gripping Zoey’s cold hand for a few moments. When she walked away, Luc could see tears in her eyes. She dumped her gloves in the bin and left.

      ‘When Ava finds the person who did this, I think she might be serious about killing them,’ Luc said.

      ‘I believe you might be right,’ Jonty said. ‘You’d better just make sure you get there first.’

       Chapter Nine

      Lorna

      True terror was exhausting. That sliver of knowledge was just one step on the steepest learning curve of her life. Twenty-four hours earlier, she had woken at 6.45 a.m. with her baby in a cot at her bedside, and wondered what to cook for breakfast. Now she knew how it felt to sleep strapped to a table in the dark, smelling dirt and rotting leaves. Lorna lifted her head, but the immobility of her arms and legs made it pointless. Through dirty, green-stained glass, a waning moon cast cold shadows. The blanket over her naked body was making her itch, but it kept off the insects that buzzed and flapped through the dark. Beneath her, the table stretched longer than her frame head to toe, and was a foot wider at either side, as if it had been taken from the dining room of some grand old house. What she couldn’t believe was that she had slept. How was it possible to fear for your life and still fall into dreamless sleep? Lorna remembered crying. Being made to eat and drink. Screaming uselessly for as long as her voice held out. Then nothing. At some point she had simply burned out.

      Beyond the creaking walls of her prison, she could hear the rustle of leaves and the movement of branches in the wind. It was a cruel parody of the few holidays she had enjoyed as a child, before drugs had reduced her mother to a silent, shadowy creature. They had borrowed a tent and trekked out with friends or family to sleep in a field and toast marshmallows for a night or two in the summer. It had been all her mother could ever afford, and it was uncomfortable – usually freezing cold – but Lorna had loved it. So much adventure could be found just by stepping beyond the walls of their tiny flat, even if they did have to pee behind trees and wash in a cold stream each morning.

      Pins and needles prickled her skin from inactivity as she flexed her legs. With ankles tied fast to the table legs, the best she could do was slowly clench then relax each muscle to get some blood flowing. Her breasts throbbed. It was two in the morning then. Like a farmyard cockerel, baby Tansy awoke hungry at the same time each night. This would have been the moment when Lorna would have plucked the baby gently from her cot, quickly enough so that the crying didn’t wake the other mothers who were grabbing precious hours of sleep, and held her to a breast. Tansy’s warm snuffling as she grabbed Lorna’s hair would have been worth the lack of rest. For a moment, she could actually smell her baby. Milk, talcum powder, a fresh Babygro after her bath, and the slight acidity of a nappy as yet unchanged after six hours’ wear. Lorna was determined not to cry for her. If she started crying, then it was as good as an admission that she would never hold her girl again. And she would. She would escape, get help, and find her way back to the mother and baby unit. If she could get clean of drugs and persuade a judge not to take her baby from her, then she could do this. The bastard who had abducted her had no idea what he was up against.

      Tansy – her pride and joy – had also been her Achilles heel. The man had seemed harmless enough, following her through the lanes from the unit to the shops, whistling and texting on his phone. As he’d got nearer to her, he’d said a cheery good morning, stopping to peer into the pram and exclaim at the bonniness of the wee girl. Lorna had been delighted. No matter how many times she heard it, a compliment about the baby was affirmation that finally she had done something right. Her first selfless act, she often thought. She had given life to another human, and giving up her vices for the baby had made it even sweeter.

      There had been bad times before that. Smoking the odd joint at school had matured into taking the occasional ecstasy tablet at a party. Those ecstasy tablets had introduced her to cocaine, and that had seemed so grown up and glamorous, and God knew it really did make you feel good. But there were bigger highs out there. More explosive ups and more mellow downs, with nothing in between but floating and colours and warmth. She had taken heroin for the first time while she was coming down from crack. It had seemed almost harmless, just smoking it. She had never taken a drug that had controlled her, and she managed to convince herself for a few ignorant weeks that heroin wouldn’t either. Her mother had done nothing about it. After all, it was her boyfriend who had sold her the crack in the first place, and one of his colleagues who had promoted her into the narcotics big league. Addiction was swift, and a casual modern-day tragedy had followed. Drugs were expensive. Her need for them ruled her world and rendered her unfit for work. The lack of money had been met with suggestions that she could offer her body to her dealers and others for cash, favours and freebies. And the need to forget that she was effectively prostituting herself had required ever-increasing doses of drugs. Then she had fallen pregnant. It was give up the drugs or give up the baby. There were no other options. Lorna wished the decision had been easier than it was. She would have been more proud of herself if she could claim a revelation, and a magical new start. Fortunately for her, the lure of motherhood and the sense of a growing bond with the wriggling, churning thing inside her won out. Methadone was easier than cold turkey, and not getting screwed every night to pay for her drugs was a positive blessing. Tansy had literally saved her life.

      Which was why, when the happy, whistling man had held a knife to the baby’s throat as they’d walked together down a side street, she hadn’t had to think twice about saving her baby’s life in return. She had climbed into his vehicle, followed his instructions to clip on handcuffs and watched as he pushed the pram into the nearest alleyway to await a kind passer-by who would figure out that something was wrong. Lorna stared up at the moon. Her baby was safe. The man hadn’t wanted Tansy. Someone would have found her and returned her to the unit where she was now being looked after. The bargain had not been unfair. Looking back, she wondered why she hadn’t screamed and run, protested and fought him. The truth was that she would have done anything – anything at all – to have secured her baby’s safety, and heroics had been just another risk. Seeing the blade pressed into the chubby flesh beneath her baby’s face had been enough to drain the fight from her. It had been enough to make her realise that whatever was coming – rape, mutilation, death – was preferable to the prospect of living with the memory of her baby dying in her arms.

      Lorna tugged a few more times at the restraints around her wrists. There wasn’t even enough movement to try scraping the twine against the