Bone Machine Read online

  Martyn Waites was born and raised in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has written nine novels under his own name and five under the name Tania Carver alongside his wife, Linda. His work has been selected as Guardian book of the year, he’s been nominated for every major British crime fiction award and is an international bestseller.

  Praise for Martyn Waites:

  ‘The leading light of a new generation of hard-hitting contemporary crime novelists’ – Daily Mirror

  ‘Grips, and squeezes, and won’t let go. Waites’ lean, exhilarating prose is from the heart and from the guts, and that’s exactly where it hits you’ – Mark Billingham

  ‘Brutal, mesmerising stuff’ – Ian Rankin

  ‘An ambitious, tautly-plotted thriller which offers a stark antidote to PD James’ cosy world of middle-class murder’ – Time Out

  ‘If you like your tales dark, brutal, realistic, with a pinch of Northern humour – don’t wait any longer – Waites is your man’ – Shots

  ‘Breathless, contemporary and credible, a thriller with a dark heart and guts to spare’ – Guardian

  ‘The book houses an audacious energy and if you’re in any way a fan of Ian Rankin or Stephen Booth, this mesmerising thriller will be right up your street’ – Accent

  ‘If you like gritty crime noir in the style of Ian Rankin, this is the book for you … Waites brings his characters to life with skill and verve, with more than a few nasty surprises. A riveting whodunit you really won’t be able to put down’ – Lifestyle

  ‘A reckless energy which demands attention and respect’ – Literary Review

  Also by Martyn Waites

  The Joe Donovan Series

  The Mercy Seat

  Bone Machine

  White Riot

  Speak No Evil

  The Stephen Larkin Series

  Mary’s Prayer

  Little Triggers

  Candleland

  Born Under Punches

  The White Room

  Also by Tania Carver

  The Surrogate

  The Creeper

  Cage of Bones

  Choked

  The Doll’s House

  Copyright

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 9780751554373

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Martyn Waites, 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Linda

  Contents

  Praise for Martyn Waites

  Also by Martyn Waites

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Acknowledgements

  People: Detective Inspector Paul Bentley; Ali Karim; Councillor Nick Kemp; Deb Kemp; Chris Myhill, Area Manager, Gateshead Libraries; Jane Shaw, Information Specialist, City Campus Library, Northumbria University; Penny Sumner; Kerry Ward, Marketing Services Manager, Port of Tyne; Kate Lyall Grant, Digby Halsby and Tara Wigley at Simon and Schuster; Jane Gregory, Claire Morris, Emma Dunford, Jemma McDonagh and Terry Bland at Gregory and Company; Linda Waites.

  Books: Mapping Murder, David Canter; The Shadow of the Gallows, Barry Redfern; Beyond the Grave: Newcastle’s Burial Grounds, Alan Morgan; Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Happy Like Murderers, Gordon Burn.

  Music: Calenture, The Triffids; I Am A Bird Now, Antony and the Johnstons; The Dirty South, Drive By Truckers; Winnemucca, Post To Wire, The Fitzgerald, Richmond Fontaine.

  1

  She could no longer tell whether her eyes were open or closed. All was darkness.

  She couldn’t open her mouth to scream. Or speak.

  Couldn’t move.

  She had to escape, had to run. She tried to pull her arms up. Move her legs. No good. He had tied them too tight. She moved around, pushing, wriggling against whatever it was she was tied to. Rough and cold. Sharp. It hurt when she moved.

  She lay back, breathing heavily. Forcing air through her closed lips. Her mum. Her dad. Her sister Catherine. Even her dog, Barney. She had never wanted them so much in her life.

  Her life. It seemed a thousand years away, something she had only dreamed.

  She could have cried. But she was beyond tears. Remembered the pain the last time she had tried to force her mouth open. Sighed a jagged sigh.

  If only.

  If only …

  Before this, she would have thought herself too young for regrets. Wrong. She played that moment over and over again in her head, each time with a different outcome. She wished she had ignored him. Wished she had never stopped to help. Not expecting him to … Not someone like that …

  They’d shown films at uni, first year, given them lectures. About rape. Strangers. Not making herself vulnerable, not walking home alone at night. She had attended, taken everything in. Not been worried. That wouldn’t happen to her. She was clever, sensible. Those kinds of things always happened to someone else. Not to her.

  Never her.

  Another wave of emotion built again within her, waiting to crash. Wave after wave of emotions had come smashing into her. Like a crumbling sea wall in an El Niño storm, she hadn’t been able to withstand them. Self-pity. Panic. Regret.

  Fear. She hadn’t really known what real fear was until she had found herself here. Then it had smashed into her like a runaway bus, leaving her screaming in pain, lying shattered, helpless. Anger.

  If only …

  She tried to scream again. Felt the pain in her face.

  Tried to pull her body upright. Felt only the restraints digging into her.

  And then, with a change in the air, a movement, a different smell – he was there. Speaking. His voice, how she hated it. Pouring over her like thick, rancid oil. Telling her things were all right. That they would soon be better. Telling her she was going on the most exciting journey of her
life.

  She had tried to talk to him at first, like they told her at uni. Reason. Make herself out to be a person. Get him interested in her, see she was another human being, worth something. She had tried. Her immobile mouth was his response.

  She tried to speak, shout at him, plead. That pain again.

  She felt him climb on top of her. Heard a ripping sound. Felt something cold, sharp, against her skin. Her clothes. He was cutting off her clothes.

  A fresh wave of panic ran through her. She pulled, pushed. Struggled. Couldn’t move. His voice, excited now, building up in pitch. Pouring over her, drowning her.

  His hands on her.

  She tried to scream. Couldn’t.

  She felt every sensation a body could feel; simultaneously, she felt nothing.

  Another attempted sigh.

  If only …

  2

  The night was cold, the winter wind carrying the threat of ice, the hardened slush on the ground showing the dirty reality.

  Katya was glad she was indoors. As much as she could be glad about anything. She wasn’t yet used to the northern climate. She wasn’t yet used to this life.

  She looked around: an anonymous bedroom, sparsely and poorly furnished. A single bulb with a dust-magnet shade threw weak, soul-sapping light over the bed and bedside table. The bed cover a cheap floral design, regularly turned and rotated to disguise any stains, the carpet old and nylon, a swirling vortex of threadbare blue, the curtains thin and unlined.

  The house was on a nondescript road in the west end of Newcastle. A street of poor families and slumming students. The kind of place that, if you didn’t live there, you needed a good reason for coming to. Men, she thought, must want sex badly to come here. Or not really want it at all.

  Katya adjusted her plastic miniskirt, pulled up her stockings. The bra was pinching under her arms. Her garments were cheap, nasty. She was told to wear them but hated them, tried to think of them as armour, something to put between her and the men. But that didn’t work. She often didn’t have them on long enough.

  She sat on the bed, sighed. Waited. The night shift. The worst of the lot once the pubs closed. Then out came the drunks, the losers. Slouching towards her room. Those with nowhere else to go or somewhere they couldn’t face going. The haters and hurters. Those who wanted to vent their failures and frustrations on her. It was beginning to make her hate in return. She hated this world. She hated herself in it. She hoped she would never accept herself in it.

  She listened. There was a new girl in the next room. Or at least a different girl. She had tried to engage Katya in conversation on the way in, all girls together. Blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, make-up garish and crude, like an Asian theatre mask. To hide the natural features and be seen from a distance. Must have just stopped working on the street, Katya thought, then chastised herself for that. She was starting to get used to it, think like one of them. The thought depressed her.

  The girl had kept talking, chattering about how cold the weather was, even digressing to mention the missing student who had been in all the newspapers for the last week or so. Katya just nodded, pretended she didn’t understand English. In fact, she thought she had a pretty good understanding of English. But that was before she had ended up in Newcastle. She found the locals, with their speedy, singsong dialect, harder to understand. She understood enough to know what they were calling her. Asylum seeker scum. Fuck off back to your own country. She didn’t need a great grasp of the language or the dialect to understand that.

  Katya had nodded, ignored the girl, just waited for the previous tenant to finish off her client, vacate the room. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to feel like one of them. It just reminded her how far she had fallen. So she had entered, the girl taking the room next to her. Katya listened. No sound came through the wall. Unusual, she thought. The other girl’s door had opened and closed a few times; she had heard it. Punters weren’t usually so silent. She shrugged, stood up. Not her concern.

  She missed her home. Her old country. The way it used to be, before the bombs started dropping, the soldiers started arriving. Before her neighbours used the war to legitimize long-pent-up hatreds for anyone they decided they could no longer tolerate. Before most of her family was killed, her home destroyed. She tried not to think of the past too much. It was another time. Another place.

  She sighed. Two. Only two punters so far for the night. The first bad enough, the second even worse. Sweaty, ugly, nondescript men. She had given them the talk, remembered the script, but they hadn’t been interested. Just unloaded their lust, paid and left. And with every punter she serviced, a little more of her died. Soon, she thought, she would be able to stick a knife through her hand and feel nothing. Her heart, even. Maybe she should; take a blade to her arms, cut. Just to see if she can still feel. Still hurt.

  She shook her head, stood up. Not wanting her thoughts to go down that route. She walked around the room, aware she was pacing like a caged animal at the zoo. A depressingly appropriate analogy, she thought.

  She pulled the curtains aside, looked out of the window. The black Peugeot 406 was still parked across the street where she knew it would be. She could just make out the two burly silhouettes in the front seats. Making sure she worked, didn’t run. Protecting their investment. Making sure she handed over every penny she made.

  Katya could feel them watching her. She shivered from more than the cold. She would have to go with a punter soon, repellent as that was to her. Because if she didn’t, the treatment she would receive later would be even worse.

  She looked up the street. A lone boy, a light-skinned black teenager, was practising stunts on his BMX. It was late for him to be out, and he seemed underdressed for the time of year, but then she doubted this was an area where they cared too much about things like that. Further down the street towards the city centre, a drunk was making his comically tortuous way up the road, his lack of progress heightened by the icy pavement. Her heart sank. He could be her next punter.

  As she was thinking this, a car pulled up in front of the house. She tried to identify the make and model. It was dark, a soft top; she could see that much. Maybe a Saab, or a Mercedes even. As she watched, a man got out of the driver’s side, locked the door and made his way to the house. Tall, his hair perhaps slightly longer than was fashionable, wearing a brown-leather jacket, jeans and boots. He was quite attractive, she thought. For a fraction of a second she found herself hoping he would come to visit her.

  She heard him knock on the door. Heard the door open, Lenny the landlord talk to the punter. She listened closely, imagined she heard Lenny, his snivelling little voice, his oily skin, pocketing the money, directing the punter upstairs. He was a creep. She had seen him peering around the door when she was working, getting his thrills from watching. She had been told about him, warned. Found the warnings accurate.

  The knock at the bedroom door made thoughts of Lenny dissipate.

  Her stomach lurched. Even if he was attractive, she didn’t want to have sex with him. That should be her decision.

  Katya felt bile rise from her stomach to her throat, swallowed it down again. She breathed deeply, tried to compose her features. She had no choice. Slowly, like an invalid who had just regained the power of movement, she made her way towards the door. Inwardly screaming, crying tears of rage, pain and loss, outwardly her face displaying all the emotions of a prison wall. She reached the door, opened it.

  He had kind eyes, she thought. A shy smile. He couldn’t keep eye contact with her. She stood aside, let him in. He walked slowly into the room, looked around. The first one to do that, she thought. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. He sat down on the bed. Katya stood, looking at him. He still hadn’t looked properly at her yet. He said nothing.

  Katya began to get nervous. Perhaps this man was a psychopath, a killer. Perhaps he was the one who had taken this student they were all talking about. Or, worse, perhaps he was police, immigration, ready to deport
her, stick her on the next plane back.

  She swallowed hard. Tried to talk. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Joe,’ he said after much deliberation.

  She nodded. ‘Good. So … Joe … what can I do for you?’ The words sounded hollow and false, like a serial adulterer’s promise.

  ‘Depends,’ Joe said eventually.

  He turned, looked at her. His eyes were kind – she was right – but there was something more in them. A sense of loss, a glimpse of darkness even.

  Katya looked at him, tried to smile. ‘On … what …?’ she asked haltingly.

  The man sighed, shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this.’ He put his hand into his inside jacket pocket.

  Katya felt her heart skip a beat. This was it, she thought. He was going to produce his warrant card. Or his knife.

  He looked at the door before speaking, checking no one was listening. ‘Is your name Katya?’ he asked, his voice low.

  Katya couldn’t get her breath. ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘it’s not. My name is Mandy. Mandy.’

  ‘Look,’ said Joe, a sense of urgency creeping into his voice, ‘I’m not police, I’m not immigration. I’m not here to harm you. Honestly. Now please. Is your name Katya?’

  She found herself nodding. It was as if he had read her mind.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something for you. From Dario.’

  ‘Dario?’ She started to stand, almost shouted.

  Joe quietened her down, putting his hands on her shoulders. Guiding her back to a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Don’t shout,’ he said, removing his hands once he knew she wouldn’t shout again. ‘Yes. Dario. But you have to come with me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  She almost laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. ‘I can’t. No. Impossible.’

  ‘It’s not impossible. You just have to come with me.’ Joe’s voice was calm, trustworthy even. ‘Just come downstairs with me. Get into the car and we’ll drive away.’

  ‘You make it sound so easy.’

  ‘It is.’