The Doll's House - [16]

Finishing, she tugged up her knickers and headed swiftly back towards the bed.

‘Come here.’

He had been watching her silently for a long time, as if plucking up the courage to say something, so she was startled by this sudden instruction. She paused, flicking a glance up at him, afraid of what he might want.

‘Come,’ he repeated.

She walked slowly over to him.

‘Sit.’

She did as she was told, sitting next to him by the battered dining table.

‘Roll up your right sleeve. Higher. I want to see your shoulder. Good, now put your elbow on the table. Like that. Grip the top of my chair with your right hand, keep your arm steady.’

‘Please…’

‘It may sting a bit at first, but it won’t do you any permanent damage.’

He reached down now and brought out a leather case, which he opened and unfolded on the table. Needles, inks, designs – a tattoo artist’s instruments.

‘Please don’t do this. I don’t want you to do this.’

Ruby was begging now. She had always had a massive thing about needles – she had fainted several times when faced with injections – and she was sickened by the thought of him taking a needle to her bare flesh. In response, he gripped the underside of her arm, pinching and turning her skin so fiercely that it brought tears to Ruby’s eyes.

‘Don’t fight me, Summer,’ he said calmly, twisting the skin round still further.

Ruby screamed and cried, but it made no difference. He refused to release his grip. Through tears, she saw the fierce intent in his eyes and the long needles that lay on the table before her. Though the thought of what was about to happen horrified her, she knew that there was no point resisting. She hung her head, whimpering quietly.

‘That’s better.’

Releasing his grip, he set about his work. Carefully, he opened the jar of black dye. Slipping the steel tip and barrel on to the body of the tattoo gun, he chose a needle, dipped it in the dark ink and readied himself to begin.

Ruby shut her eyes, tensing herself against the inevitable pain. As the needle punctured her skin, she swallowed down a yelp. He moved it over the surface of her skin and the pain immediately increased – it felt like a cat’s claw dragging across her flesh. Despite her obvious discomfort, he didn’t hesitate, his concentration never wavering, as he meticulously carved out the outline of his design. After ten minutes’ patient work he paused, smiling briefly at Ruby, before moving on to the blue ink. Ruby’s respite was brief and he applied himself again, the same sharp pain jagging through her as he worked.

Ruby closed her eyes, hoping that it would be over quicker if she didn’t focus on it. The worst was over – she had consented to be decorated – now there was nothing to be done but see it through.

‘You can look now.’

When she opened her eyes, she found he was holding up a small mirror for her to admire his handiwork. For a brief second, she stared straight into his eyes, defiant, refusing to look in the mirror. But his intense gaze was too strong and, defeated, she dropped her eyes to the mirror. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but the result still surprised her.

Her pale skin looked sore, a wide red circle of irritation adorned her shoulder. And in the centre of the circle, innocent and strangely at odds with its unhappy surroundings, was a small bluebird.

27

DC Sanderson sat across the desk in Helen’s office, files spread out in front of her. The door was firmly shut, the blinds down – this was not a conversation for public consumption. In some ways Helen’s desire for privacy was pointless – several officers in the team knew that Nathan Price was a person of interest in the Ruby Sprackling case and had no doubt made the connection themselves, but Helen didn’t want anyone speculating about a possible link between the two investigations until they were sure there was a connection. The lowered blinds and closed door made this point eloquently.

‘I need exact times,’ Helen said, as Sanderson skimmed Ruby Sprackling’s phone records.

‘Ruby sent her first goodbye tweet yesterday at around one p.m.,’ Sanderson replied.

‘Where was it sent from?’

‘Still trying to pin the exact location down, but it’s somewhere on the eastern fringes of the New Forest.’

Helen kept her expression neutral, despite the fear rising inside her.

‘And the second?’

‘Sent this morning at around ten a.m., Southampton city centre.’

There it was. An exact match to the times and locations when Pippa Briers had texted and tweeted her latest offerings. The relative briefness of the messages and the generalized, anodyne contact were concerning, as was the fact that both phone signals were on only briefly before vanishing again, presumably having been switched off. It looked very much like a third party was keeping the girls’ digital presence alive. The killer obviously didn’t know that Pippa’s body had been found and identified. Helen was glad that this discovery had been kept away from the press, as it now gave the lie to these fake tweets and texts.

‘I want this link kept quiet for now,’ Helen continued, after she’d filled Sanderson in on her thinking. ‘But Nathan Price is now our number one suspect in both cases and I want him found. Give his photo to uniform, get people back to his house, circulate his van registration details to traffic – and get Stevens down to Pippa Briers’ flat in Merry Oak. There may still be tenants in the building who remember Pippa and Nathan. We need as much info as we can, as fast as we can.’