I Am Watching

by Emma Kavanagh

  Also by Emma Kavanagh

  The Missing Hours

  I AM

  WATCHING

  Emma

  Kavanagh

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  July 22, 1996

  Twenty Years Later: Friday, October 21

  The bogeyman – Isla

  To stay or to go – Ramsey

  The sense of being stared at – Mina

  Inside a killer – Isla

  Saturday, October 22

  “It’ll be okay” – Mina

  The body on the wall – Mina

  Beginning again – Isla

  Briganton below – Ramsey

  The price of fear – Mina

  A policy of murder – Mina

  Sunday, October 23

  An exercise in death – Isla

  The next step – Ramsey

  Family connections – Mina

  Another one? – Mina

  Monday, October 24

  Bringing in an expert – Isla

  The arrival of a letter – Ramsey

  The pen pal – Isla

  A cold case – Mina

  Those with experience – Isla

  An opportunity – Mina

  Tuesday, October 25

  The journey of the dead – Mina

  The victim – Ramsey

  Dying flowers – Mina

  Loose lips sink ships – Mina

  Wednesday, October 26

  Through the eyes of the victims – Isla

  The truth of it? – Isla

  Buried treasure – Mina

  And so it goes – Ramsey

  First the one – Mina

  The shadow within – Isla

  Where the evidence leads – Mina

  Thursday, October 27

  Someone to stop me – Isla

  The killing path – Mina

  Getting what you want – Ramsey

  Unmasked – Mina

  Making everything okay again – Isla

  Spin of the wheel – Mina

  An end and a beginning – Ramsey

  The right thing – Mina

  The missing one – Isla

  The wall – Mina

  The no longer great Eric Bell – Eric

  The killer on the wall

  The man beside me – Isla

  Thursday, November 3

  One week later – Mina

  Teaser chapter

  Praise

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Emma Kavanagh

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2018951506

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1374-2

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1376-6 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-1376-1 (e-book)

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

  —NIETZSCHE

  Do not be dismayed to learn there is a bit of the devil in you. There is a bit of the devil in us all.

  —ARTHUR BYRON COVER

  July 22, 1996

  It began with the bodies.

  They had been seated, backs propped against the tumbledown stones of Hadrian’s Wall, faces a bitter white. Their heads were tilted forward, their jaws grazing their sternums. You might have thought that they were sleeping. But there was the color of them, the rigid emptiness of them, the first shadowy scent of decomposition riding on the promising heat of the day to come.

  Fifteen-year-old Isla Bell felt the ground sway beneath her, the village and the moors retreating far, far away, so that it was just her and the dead. Her knees gave way. She sank down, her bare legs swallowed by wet grass. Her palms landed on an outcrop of rock, spikes of pain zinged through her hands, her stomach contracting, and she folded over, a dry heave, a merciless heat running through her.

  They had been murdered. Isla was only fifteen, knew little of death, and yet even she had no doubt. Three people did not wander from their homes in the early morning and line up alongside one another in order to die. Not unless they had no choice.

  A necklace of bruises ringed Kitty Lane’s neck. Her hands had been folded into her lap, a knotted network of veins stark against the gray of them. She wore a fuchsia housecoat, bootie slippers lined with fur, her legs bare against the damp grass. Her head had begun to slip sideways, had drifted downward so that her tightly permed curls rested gently against the cheek of the corpse beside her.

  Ben Flowers. Hadn’t he got married recently? Rhian, Rachel, something like that? There was a line of blood, dried, along the side of his forehead. His arms, too, had been folded into his lap, but the left hung at an odd angle, as if he had been given an additional elbow midway along the radius. His jaw, that looked wrong, too, out of position somehow. And if you looked very closely, you could see the dark red bruise of finger marks on his neck.

  And then there was Zach. Zach sat three seats across from her in English. Zach ate tuna sandwiches for lunch and hated spiders. Zach once broke his leg, trying to prove to his brothers that he was big enough to jump from a second-story window. Zach was quiet and kind and funny and, undeniably, dead.

  She allowed her head to sink downward, looking at the blades of grass, the ant that hurried up her bare knee, and told herself to breathe. It had been a run. That was all. A day like any other, in which her eyes flickered open as the clocks rolled on to 6:00 a.m., the sunlight breaking through the chink in the curtains and her body thrilling with the fizz of contained energy. Her mother said that she was like a springer spaniel, needed a couple of good runs a day to be bearable. She had let herself out of the house, the clock reading 6:09. Through the garden and out onto the moor, vast in its rolling bleakness. Had paused for a moment, the cool air lapping at her skin. A kestrel had cruised above the scrubby moorland, dipped low over the curve of the Whin Sill, followed the arch of it as it clambered up into the amber dawn sky. Then she had pushed off, the sole of her foot shoving away the uneven ground below. She ran for the wall, the cold sharp in her chest, the barrenness pushing her to run faster, harder. A pull to the left, her running shoes followed the arc up the Whin Sill, her calves straining against the incline, breath coming hard and fast as she reached the height of it, balancing on the narrow ledge that abutted the stones of Hadrian’s Wall. And then, after turning left, her feet worked to remain where they were on the slender pathway, running into the sunrise, so that its fingertips of red reached out to her, tugging her onward. The stones of the wall stretching out beside her like a column of marching ants.

  She ran with a long, loping gait, fighting to keep her balance on the sloping land, which seemed determined to tip her over. Perhaps that was why she ran it. Perhaps it was the bloodymindedness of being where the land itself did not seem to want you. Or perhaps it was the wall. Because Hadrian’s Wall was home to her. When she was a child and was asked where she lived, she would simply reply, “I live on the wall.” The wall was what protected her from the moor, from the wildness beyond. It was that line of organization that cut across the moorland, suggesting that even this could be tamed by some stones and an abundance
of will.

  Then, as her lungs were straining and her heart was hammering and the outskirts of the village came into sight, she descended from the peak, a headlong dash down a wild slope, turning away from the cresting sun and the early morning mist that sat low across the horizon. Into Briganton itself, an oasis of civilization in a desert of green. The stone-built houses huddled together, immensely proud of their age and their neatness, the gardens put together with an excess of care, flower beds lush and organized with a precision even the Romans would have been proud of. It was still as she ran through the empty streets, a town frozen as it waited for the day to begin. She ran through the village, along the narrow pavements that graced just as narrow roads. Up past the primary school, past the tree that she had once got stuck in, up to the church, its heavy wood doors shut tight. Then at Bowman’s Hill, the farthest reach of the village, once she had the Cheviot Hills in sight, looping left, back down and around until she reached the wall again. Running, her footsteps loud in her head; thinking of little things, like exams and school and boys and the kind of things that you thought of when you were fifteen and alone; and then, as the landscape shifted and the moor flattened out beneath her, seeing something off in the distance that her mind simply could not explain.

  Getting closer and closer and thinking that at any moment the scene would rearrange itself and then what was before her would make sense again. Because she was in Briganton, and in Briganton there were no dangers, and the world was small and orderly and safe. And so what she thought were dead bodies, well, that simply could not be.

  Isla stared at the sharp-edged stone beneath her fingers. She didn’t want to look anymore. She didn’t want to see.

  But then it was unlikely that Kitty or Ben or Zach wanted to be here either, so she forced her gaze upward, allowed it to rest on them. She needed to call for someone, needed to get help. Her father would be at home still, would not have left for his shift.

  Isla pushed herself upright. Dad. He would know what to do, would be able to fix this, make it whole. But even as the thought formed, she could feel the lie of it. Nothing would make this whole. In an instant the world about her had changed. Nothing would ever turn it back to how it used to be.

  That was when she heard the sound, a low moaning, like the wind that sometimes funneled its way down through the Cheviots, and a feeling of electrification raced across her skin, along with the knowledge that she was not alone.

  Isla whipped around, expecting to see . . . what? A killer waiting behind her? But there was nothing, just the moor and the sleepy village. And then again that sound. She wanted to run, could feel her entire body sparking with it, the need to escape. But she stayed, turning around, her gaze running along the clambering, dipping Whin Sill, past the stones of the ancient wall, the bodies before it, tracking past them even as they tried to stay her attention.

  Then a flash of something, an unexpected shadow falling in just the wrong place. The slightest suggestion of movement.

  He lay perhaps a hundred meters away, facedown in the grass. It looked as if he, too, had been positioned but had slumped down, the weight of his body tugging him down to the welcoming earth. Isla’s breath became short again, a new horror plucking her from what was already horrific enough. She moved slowly, cautiously, toward the fourth dead.

  The sound came again, and with the sound, the slightest twitch of movement.

  Isla ran then, threw herself carelessly down into the grass beside the fourth victim. His eyes were closed; the hair on the back of his head was densely matted with blood.

  “Oh God,” she said. “It’s okay, Ramsey. It’s going to be okay.”

  Twenty Years Later:

  Friday, October 21

  The bogeyman – Isla

  Monsters rarely look the way you expect. Isla watched Heath McGowan through the window. He lay prostrate, his head held in place with a cylindrical cage. He should have looked like the devil. And yet there he lay, all five feet nine inches of him, a thick frame supporting a square head, hair cut bluntly short, somehow smaller now than the last time she saw him. An ordinary man, a small pot of a belly beginning to form, nails bitten down to the quick. And yet it would be no lie to say that she had thought of him every night for twenty years, that every night, as her hand grazed the lamp switch, she had paused to drink in the last of the light and had thought of the killer on the wall. She was a thirty-five-year-old woman, and she was afraid of the dark. Heath McGowan was the reason.

  “You okay in there, Heath?” She leaned closer to the microphone, depressing the speaker button, keeping her voice light, friendly even. “We’re going to get started in just a minute.”

  She watched him on the monitor, his eyes darting upward as they dissected her words. What was he looking for in there?

  But Isla had done this kind of thing many times before, and she knew full well what Heath McGowan was hoping to find in her.

  Weakness.

  “You take your time, Professor.” His voice was calm, almost relaxed, as if somehow he had made the coffin of the MRI scanner, the guards, and the shackles that waited for him disappear, and he was lying on a beach.

  Isla released the button and glanced across at the prison guard. Steve? Stan? Attractive in an overmuscled way, he stood flush with the window that separated the control room from the scanner—separated him from his prisoner—his gaze locked on the machine and what could be seen of Heath McGowan’s body. It was a strange sensation. To know that the room had been swept, that anything that could, even in the wildest of imaginings, be transformed into a weapon had been removed, that there was a guard here, one outside the door, another outside the door beyond that, and yet still to feel that your safety relied on the good grace of a monster.

  “There’s coffee there.” Isla waved to the table beside her. “And cake. You should make yourself at home. This will take a while.”

  The guard nodded, risking the briefest of glances in her direction. “I’m good. Thanks.”

  “MRI is ready.” The radiographer was a small woman, neat and gray, unimpressed with the caliber of the patient. She drummed her fingernails on the desktop.

  Isla depressed the button. “Okay, Heath. We’re starting the structural scan now. This will take a few minutes.”

  “Yup.”

  It was a special kind of madness this, lunacy in the pursuit of science. To remove a man convicted of two or three or four or more murders from his prison cell, to place him into a transport, with guards who look at you like you have lost your mind. To bring him to a hospital, take him into a room in which you will have to remove his handcuffs, encourage him to lie down on a sliding table and be slotted into the clanging wildness of an MRI. All the while hoping against hope that whatever evil put him in prison can remain boxed away, at least for this little while.

  And yet here they were.

  “Lucky number thirteen.” Connor leaned against the back wall, cradling a chipped mug.

  “Lucky number thirteen,” Isla agreed.

  Thirteen serial killers. Thirteen times they had removed monsters from their cages, had peered into their brains, had felt their hot breath, their ice-cold smiles, and thirteen times, Isla had known that her survival depended on the good grace of the devil.

  Isla watched Heath’s feet, white sneakers slack against the table, and wondered what he was thinking. Of course, the real question was: Did any of the previous twelve count? Really, if she was being honest with herself, hadn’t it always been about this moment and this man?

  She had run across the moor on that July day twenty years ago, her heart beating hard, unsure whether she was running from or running to. Had flung herself through the back gate, past the goldfish pond, screaming for her father like she was the one being murdered. She didn’t know how she had made him understand, how she had put into words that which seemed so far beyond them, and yet somehow she had, and then she was running again, this time her father alongside her, pulling ahead of her, seeming to lead instead o
f follow. She had thought that Ramsey would be dead, that he couldn’t possibly have survived the hours, years that it had taken her to call for help. And yet, miraculously, he was not, remained clinging to life, still facedown in the sodden grass. She had thrown herself down beside him, had clung to his hands, muttering comfort that she did not believe, while her father had stood and stared at the dead. Then a drowning cascade of sound, wailing sirens, blue lights thrown up against the stone walls of the nearby cottages, and people, everywhere, it had seemed.

  More childhoods than hers had ended that day. Because it seemed now that all of Briganton had been experiencing a prolonged infancy, that it had been cradled by Hadrian’s Wall and the Cheviots and the ocean of moorland, that the world had been kept at bay for longer than should have been possible. And then, on that July day, all that had been kept back came crashing in, and the faces that had before been creased up only with petty concerns now wore the telltale signs of terror. It seemed clear that whoever had done this was one of them. No one could quite put their finger on why this must be so. Perhaps it was because that was the worst they could imagine, and the entire village had suddenly realized that they were not immune to the worst, after all. There was no talking on street corners, no evenings in the local pub. The summer fete held three days after the deaths was attended by, at most, a dozen hardy individuals. Briganton had experienced real fear for the first time. Its response was to lock itself away. Isla’s father vanished: Detective Sergeant Eric Bell was now needed far more elsewhere than he was in their little home. He became a ghost to them, a poltergeist leaving traces of bread crumbs on kitchen counters, creaking floorboards in the wee small hours as he returned for a few hours’ sleep before beginning again.