‘I don’t fancy it,’ he responds.
I redirect my gaze to the framed Africa map. The shape of it reminds me of the outline of his tattoo, the time I spent tracing my fingers over the little Adrinka symbols, questioning him about them. This hasn’t exactly gone the right way. I was meant to forge some kind of truce between us before I asked for his help. The Macy Factor has blown that out of the water. I may as well just ask.
I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket and pull out two of the buccal sample tubes I have left of Craig Ackerman’s DNA. I’ve kept one back, just in case. ‘I don’t quite know how it works, but I need you to take this to your mates in the crime lab and get it analysed for me. And then run it though the police databases to see if it matches any crimes on there. Or missing persons reports. Or anything, really.’
Zach glares at what I am holding out to him as though it has insulted him, and then he looks up at me. ‘It doesn’t work like that, Nell. This isn’t even my district. Since they found out I was here things have blown up, all kinds of hassle has come raining down because we were carrying out an investigation in their area without telling them. And it looks like we’ve been essentially accusing them of being involved in something because we kept it quiet. I can’t just waltz in and start demanding DNA analysis and database searches.’
‘Do it through your London station, then, I don’t care. You need to make this work for me. Please.’ I can feel tears building up behind my face, stinging my eyes. ‘Please .’
‘No, Nell, I really can’t. I have no idea whose DNA that is. I put it into the system and, despite what they say, it could very well end up staying there. Someone innocent could be irreparably damaged by me doing that, or it could allow someone to walk away because their DNA shouldn’t have been entered by other means into the system in the first place.’
The tears start and I’m not able to stop them. ‘Someone’s trying to hurt me, Zach, possibly even kill me and if you don’t help me, they may very well succeed.’
Nell
Friday, 1 June
It took a bit more to convince Zach to help me. He took me into the living room of his flat, let me cry for a bit and then asked me to tell him everything.
I eventually did tell him everything, even about Aaron and his work on the computers, the not-so-legal parts too, before Zach would agree to see what he could do.
‘I need to see you,’ he said when he called me this morning.
The urgency in his voice scared me and elated me at the same time. I was right, about Craig Ackerman, which made me relieved that I wasn’t going crazy. I was right about Craig Ackerman, which made me scared that I’d brought this man into my life.
We’ve arranged to meet at the Peace Statue on the seafront. I like this statue, probably more than any other in Brighton and Hove. She was erected around 1912 and she stands on a globe, holding another globe in one hand, an olive branch in the other, her beautiful wings fully extended. There is something calming and hopeful about the Angel of Peace, the way she sits on the border of Brighton and Hove, almost as though refereeing the differences between the two towns, while holding them together by reminding them that without the other they wouldn’t be a city at all.
I suppose I suggested it because it’s a fitting place to meet. When we were little, Macy and I would run here, leaving our parents behind, the first one to touch the plinth on which she stood the winner of the imaginary prize of Most Important Girl in the Okorie home. I was older, bigger and faster, and I was supposed to let Macy win, spare her feelings and prove I was the more mature sister. Most of the time I did just that – held back, gave her the chance to get there first. Most of the time. Sometimes pride, competitiveness, sheer bloody-mindedness would take over and I would beat her by a mile. I would use my height, my strength to leave her far behind. To be fair to Macy, before all the stuff that happened, she was always secure enough in herself to never question her wins or losses, she just took it as part of the consequences of playing a game with me. That’s what I miss about Macy from before the first arrest: she never seemed to worry too much about anything, she was able to throw herself into life and took whatever happened – good or bad – as part of what living was all about. The Peace Statue is part of our shared history that I can look back on fondly.
Meeting Zach here is fitting because I want peace with him.
I haven’t told Aaron yet about this. I can’t, because he went back to his dad the other night and I couldn’t risk him blowing it by confessing all to Pope in an attempt to curry favour with him.
I’m here early so I stand in the queue and buy myself a cup of coffee from the café beside the Peace Statue. Summer is here and with that, with the warmer, longer days, and fragrant air, and beautiful seascape, comes more people. More people who want to soak up Brighton, who want to immerse themselves in Hove, who start to convince themselves that they could actually live here.
You can tell the people who live here and those who have come on a day trip, or who come for a few days but now consider themselves one of us. They wear too many layers and carry bulging bags; they think their small, foldable umbrellas will be enough to match the wind on the seafront when it gets itself even a little riled up; they stop and take pictures every few seconds with a camera or simply with their eyes.
The people who are visiting see and notice what us who grew up here very often take for granted.
I stare at my coffee for a long time before I decide to go back, queue up, get a number and then wait for it to be called to get Zach a coffee, too. I’ve just finished stirring in a second sugar when he arrives. He stands at the base of the statue, a handsome man with a look of dread on his face.
‘Here,’ I say to him in lieu of hello and hold out his coffee.
His face registers surprise. ‘For me?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Two sugars.’ I wonder if he realises that the coffee is actually my way of saying, ‘I miss you .’
I wonder if I should take his pointed ‘Thank you’ as ‘I miss you, too ’?
‘So, what was so important you couldn’t say it on the phone?’ I ask him to stop him staring at me. I don’t mind it, so much as realise it’s highly inappropriate to be going off on any type of tangent at the moment. Someone is trying to harm me – kill me, as I said to Zach – I shouldn’t get distracted.
Zach seems disappointed, and looks away. ‘Let’s walk,’ he says.
‘You’ve got something awful to tell me, haven’t you?’ I say as we set off towards Brighton.
‘Look, I shouldn’t have done this. Don’t ask me how I got it done, but quite a few people could be in serious hot water if anyone finds out. Which kind of makes what I found even more contentious.’
‘I don’t get you. Did you find Craig Ackerman has something to do with the death of the Brighton Mermaid?’ I’ve been going over and over this. How the two are connected. If his date of birth is accurate, then Craig Ackerman would only have been twenty-six or so when she died. Was he really a killer that young? That doesn’t seem possible to me.
‘No,’ Zach says after a sip of his coffee. ‘Well, there was no match, nothing to connect him to that case or to your friend Jude. In fact, we have nothing at all about him in any of the police crime databases.’
‘What? Nothing? Nothing at all? That’s not possible. I’m sure there must be something. Anything.’
Zach shakes his head, avoiding eye contact while he does so. ‘Honestly, Nell, he doesn’t even have a parking ticket. He’s a model citizen.’
‘I was so sure …’ I can’t believe this. Why would whoever broke in take his files along with Jude’s and the Mermaid’s? ‘You could have told me that on the phone,’ I say. ‘Why the need to meet up?’
Zach takes a huge gulp of his coffee and clearly, from the way his face contracts, it scorches his tongue. He’s obviously trying to avoid saying something.
‘You know DNA, how it works, don’t you?’ he finally says.
‘Yes.’
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‘Look …’ Zach sighs. ‘There was nothing in the databases about him. But when we ran his DNA through all the systems, something was thrown up. We found a link on the Y-chromosome line, a high incidence of short tandem repeat polymorphisms, with someone else on the criminal database; the number of matching centimorgans and alleles suggested a half-sibling connection.’
Time is starting to slow down. I can feel it. The blood in my veins is dawdling on its journey around my body, the breath in my chest is taking ages to go in and out, my heart is taking an age to contract and expand for every single beat. I know what he’s going to say.
‘Craig Ackerman’s half-brother is called Shane Merrill.’
I have to stop walking. Like time, my whole body has slowed down and slowed down until it is now at a standstill.
‘Why?’ I manage. My brain has slowed down, too, and I’m finding it almost impossible to function. Why is Shane in the database? Why would he lie to me about who Ackerman is? Why would he try to harm me?
‘Why is Shane Merrill in the database?’ Zach rubs his hand over his lash-free eyes and then runs it over his hairless head. He looks absolutely agonised at what he’s having to say. ‘He’s a … he’s a convicted rapist. He was convicted on DNA evidence.’
My body is trembling and I feel my knees wanting to give way. This can’t be happening.
‘I haven’t told Macy yet. Technically I shouldn’t even know.’
I’m quivering. Like I do after I’ve drunk too much and my body can’t physically take it any more; I’m shaking like I did when John Pope interrogated me in a police station and called me names.
Zach still looks uncomfortable, troubled, though. Now he’s unburdened himself he shouldn’t look so … burdened . He comes to stand in front of me. ‘Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but I did some checking and I’m so sorry. Macy told me about you and him and … a couple of the accusations that weren’t pursued by the CPS were around the time you and he were together.’
Macy
Friday, 1 June
From: Macenna Okorie
Sent: 01 June 2018 10:53
To: Clyde Higgson
Subject: Divorce
Clyde,
I’d like a divorce, please.
Can I have your address – a work one will do – to send you the petition? It can be very quick as we haven’t lived together for more than five years and were never really financially linked.
The children are fine, by the way.
Macy
Nell
Friday, 1 June
I’ve always felt fortunate that the first time I had sex I had an orgasm. Two. It wasn’t painful, he was nice to me, he told me he loved me. My first time had been as ideal as you could get, I thought. And now I am finding out the first man I slept with was, at that time, a convicted rapist.
I can’t move for the horror of that.
Zach has helped me to a nearby bench.
‘I’m so sorry, Nell,’ he says when many minutes have elapsed and I have sat with my face in my hands thinking about how fortunate I have always believed I’ve been to have a positive first sexual experience. And how that is now sullied and disgusting because of who he is and what he has done to another woman. Women . More than one. He has raped more than one woman. ‘I really wish I didn’t have to tell you.’
When I take my hands away and look down at them, I’m shaking again. ‘There has to be some mistake,’ I say. ‘It has to be some other Shane Merrill. That’s the only thing I think it could be.’
Zach stays silent. He stares into his cup and waits for me to get a grip. Of course it’s Shane, of course it is.
‘After the burglary, after the dead rat, after poor Sadie, I didn’t think it could get much worse,’ I state.
‘Is it really a surprise, Nell? Think back over your relationship – is this really a surprise?’
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It is. He was nice to me. Lovely to me, even. He didn’t treat me badly. That’s why a part of me is still wondering if this is all some huge mistake.’
It’s plain on Zach’s face that he doesn’t believe me, and if I wasn’t there, if I hadn’t dated Shane, I wouldn’t believe me, either. ‘I swear, he treated me really well. He was nice to me, he was gentle, he never raised his voice, never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do.’ I shake my head. ‘And anyway, do you really think I would have let him near my sister and her children if I had any clue about this? Or if he’d ever forced himself on me? He treated me really well.’
‘Did you ever say no, though?’ Zach asks. ‘I know you say he never forced you, but at any point did you actually turn him down when he wanted sex, or go against anything he didn’t want you to do?’
I feel like he’s interrogating me. Not overtly, not even subtly, but the conversation has definitely shifted to something that you wouldn’t discuss with a boyfriend – ex or otherwise – or even a friend. It feels like I am being made to account for my connection with a suspect.
‘I suppose not,’ I reply carefully now that it feels like I’m talking to a policeman, a detective sergeant, no less. For all I know, they may be building a case against Shane for something and I’ve unwittingly helped, while screwing myself over as I’ll never know who is out to get me and why.
‘You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to,’ Zach says. ‘But I’m just asking, really, because you were very young when you and he were together. A lot of young people, girls particularly, don’t often say no to their partners. They only really see what the man they love is like when they say no to him. You say he was nice to you, he treated you well, but did you ever have occasion to say no to him or to go against what he wanted? Because that’s generally when the real him comes out.’
When I went to college , I think but don’t say. He turned nasty when I decided to still go to college. He called me names, said vicious things, implied that I was gagging to go out there and shag around, that I was a dirty girl, a dirty little slut, just like Pope had called me. I was devastated, but then I twisted it in my own head, I made myself understand: he was upset, he loved me and I was leaving him, of course he was going to act out. That’s how you respond when someone you love hurts you. That’s what I told myself at the time. That’s what I tell myself today. Except it always felt like it was beyond normal hurt and upset; he wasn’t just expressing his feelings, he was trying to hurt me, diminish me, make me do what he wanted by any means possible .
It’s my turn to stare into my coffee. I never did say no to Shane, if I think about it now. Not about anything.
Mainly, though, because we never argued, never had a cross word. I was so enamoured with him and how he had transformed my life by being someone I could spend time with now that Jude had left. That aside, I adored him. He told me all the time how much he loved me. He held me like I was something precious; he looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck.
And, if I am honest, truly honest, all of those things made sure I never went against him. I had no voice, no power to be normal with him. I was young, naïve, desperate to never be alone.
Now I have to look at our relationship through the prism of what he was doing to other women at the same time. I can admit that I saw him whenever he wanted – not once did I ever ask to see him because I would never dream of making a demand on his time in that way. If he didn’t suggest the time to meet up next, I would just leave it and try to get on with schoolwork until he showed up again.
Shane was my first and he controlled everything – everything – about our sex life … about my sex life. It was beyond having the sex he wanted whenever he wanted. I was never allowed to decide when or how I orgasmed. That was always down to Shane to decide, Shane to provide.
If I tried to touch myself during sex, he would always take my hand away and keep it away. I wasn’t allowed to do that, that was something for him to do. If I wanted to have straight sex with no oral sex from him to me first, he would make sure that he finishe
d first without me orgasming, almost as though I had lost my chance because I said no to how he wanted me to come. My trip into ecstasy was always something he ‘gave’ to me. I remember him telling me more than once that it made him unhappy to think I might be masturbating alone because he loved to see my pleasure and so my doing it without him there felt like I didn’t need him. He didn’t actually tell me not to do it, but he made sure I – young, naïve, desperate to not be alone I – would comply and never masturbate without him.
Shane was lovely to me … and everything I did, especially when it came to sex, had to be centred around him. But really, is that on the same spectrum as what Zach is saying he is accused of ? No, not accused of – convicted of.
‘What did he do?’ I ask Zach.
When he’s silent and seems to seek solace in his coffee for far longer than is necessary I know it’s bad. It’s the kind of bad that will feel like someone has graffitied the inside of my mind. Eventually, he turns his head to look at me because I am staring at him, watching the burden settle onto his features again.
I thought I was going to fall in love with you , I think as we stare at each other. I thought we had a future. The future . Zach observes me like he thought the same about me, hoped our futures would intertwine enough for us to have a shared life together.
He clears his throat and then focuses over my shoulder at some point in the distance. ‘Do you really want to know, Nell? Really? ’
‘No, I do not want to know. But I have to know for my sanity.’
‘All right. Again, I shouldn’t be telling you this, it’s not something I should know. He was first accused in 1991.’
‘But he must have been only twenty then,’ I cut in.
‘I know. He denied it at first, but the DNA evidence said otherwise. So he then said it was consensual. The jury didn’t believe him, but the judge took pity on him as he was a studious young man with a bright future ahead of him and handed him a very light sentence. With good behaviour and time served, he did less than a year. I’m getting all of this from the records, so this is my take on what I’ve read and heard.’