Now the bed cradled her, coaxed her: Lie down. It’s okay. I will make everything better if you simply lie down and sleep. But Isla sat on the edge of it, still wrapped in the denseness of her bathrobe, and stared at her reflection in the dark window. With her wet hair, her face free of make-up, she had aged, had skated through a decade in the past day. She put her hand to her belly, or rather to the thick fabric that lay across it, and imagined that she could hear the heartbeat of the child within. Had she done this before? Probably not. Because, in truth, the four weeks that had followed that strangely empty day—when she had run back and forth to the toilet a myriad of times, waiting and waiting and thinking, This time, this time it will be there, and yet each time had come away balanced on a knife edge, fear on one side, elation the other—And for days after, the same. The waiting, telling herself that she was busy, she was under stress, that this would account for it. Knowing she could simply take a test and then she’d know, but not taking that test, because she was simply too frightened to see the results. The nausea gripping her—not in the morning, so where did that term come from?—but all day, every day, a relentless delirium that made the world uneven and jagged edged.
It was another three weeks before she finally took a test. In the bathroom at work. She had sat on the toilet, cradling the white stick in her hands, had stared at it and stared at it, as if staring could change the answer one way or another. Then, emerging from the mists, had come the single word. Pregnant.
From downstairs now came the sound of pans bumping hard against the counter, a cupboard door opening, closing, the beep of a timer. “You need to eat,” Ramsey had said. “You look done in. I’ll cook. You go and take a shower.”
Isla stared at her reflection in the window.
I’m not the killer on the wall.
Heath had delivered the words to her softly, the way one might pass on news of a death. Had kept his eyes trained on her, trying to read her reaction. The guard at the door had turned toward them, all pretense gone now.
What? He was lying. There was no other explanation. Isla had recoiled. He was a psychopath. They lied. That was what they did. They lied to get their own way. They lied to get out of trouble. They lied simply because it amused them to do so. Heath McGowan was lying. There was no other way to see it.
“You see,” he’d said, his voice dropping low and becoming urgent, “I had issues back then. Lots of issues, drugs and such. I needed money. Now, that Kitty, I’d seen her in the post office, collecting her pension money. And I figured that it wouldn’t be hard, go in there late one night, while she was asleep, and away we go, enough money to see me through a couple of days, have a bit of fun with. I was going to break in through the back door. I could get there over my grandmother’s back wall. We were only a couple of houses down. No one would see me. I’d be in and out. But the thing is, when I got there, the house was empty, and the back door wide open. I must have touched it. I don’t remember. I know I’d been drinking, so it wouldn’t really surprise me. But the handbag, it was lying right there. So I took the money, went through the house, just having a scout around, found some other bits and pieces, and then I left.”
Her face must have shown her blatant disbelief, because he reared back, raised one eyebrow. “See,” he said, “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Frankly, Heath, I don’t. It makes no sense to me that you would have taken the rap for something of this magnitude when all you had done was steal some money and some jewelry. Why let the world believe this for twenty years?”
He looked at her, and Isla felt a growing, shifting discomfort, like one who was being eyed up by a wolf. “But,” he said, “that wasn’t all I did. Was it?”
Then she remembered the small, curled-up figure of Lucy Tuckwell. He saw it, the realization in her, nodded slowly.
“You see, the shit hit the fan the next day. The old woman, that Flowers bloke”—he nodded at her—“your husband, and his brother, they were all found out by the wall, and I thought, Well, shit, they’re going to be looking at me. So you know what I did?”
“What?”
“I went out, and I got high. I’m telling you, you got a problem you want to stop worrying about, it’s the only way. I got high, and I pretty much stayed high for the next six weeks. Long enough for the two women to be murdered. And, to be honest, I wasn’t worried. I was high. But then my grandmother started acting weird around me, started asking why I’d been asking her about Kitty back before it happened, and I started to think . . . I’d been in the house. If I’d made a mistake, if I’d left prints . . . So I packed up, went out to Lucy’s.” Heath looked down at his fingers, folded tight together. “Thing is, what you’ve got to know is, I never wanted things to go the way they went. But then, when I got there . . . she could see that I was high. That was how it started. She was angry with me, had been begging me to quit ever since she found out she was pregnant. And, I mean, all I wanted to do was go to sleep. But she kept on at me and on at me. And then she said it.”
“Said what?”
“That I was no better than my own father.” He shook his head. “So, I killed her.”
There was no air left in the room.
“Afterward, when it was done . . . I sat there with her for a long time. I just sat with my hand on her big belly. I think I was waiting for the baby, for my baby, to move. See, I don’t think I really got it, that she was gone, that the baby was gone too. But, eventually, I started to sober up, started to think cleaner. And then I realized what I’d done.” He leaned in closer to Isla. “I didn’t mean it. It was just . . . she made me so angry. And she shouldn’t have said that. But I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt my baby.”
“What then?”
He shrugged. “What do you think? I found some money in her purse, and I went and scored with it. When they came for me, when your father came for me, I thought they were there about Lucy. Still away with the fairies, see. It was only later, when they were questioning me, that I got it. And”—he shrugged—“I don’t know. I just, I never said it. I never said anything.”
“Right,” said Isla, “so it never occurred to you to say, ‘I’m not the killer on the wall’?”
Heath looked down at his hands, frowning under the weight of the introspection. Finally, “The thing is . . . I . . . I think I almost wanted to be.”
“What?”
“I mean, this guy, he’s a predator, right? He’s like a lion, hunting for food. He’s looking for prey to fill this need. And that, I get that. He’s doing these things, but he’s doing them for a reason. But what happened with Lucy, well, there wasn’t really a reason for that, only I got angry. It felt better if people believed that I was him. That I killed people because I had to. And . . .” He looked up then, gave a grin that chilled Isla. “You get a lot of fan mail when you’re the killer on the wall. Lot of people want to talk to you. You get put on magazines, on newspapers. You get respect.” He jerked his chin toward the door. “Respect is important in here. The guys out there, they don’t fuck with me. Because they know what I’m capable of. What I’ve done.”
“So . . . why tell me now?”
Heath shrugged. “I like you.”
“Okay, so what about the evidence, the items they found on you from the other victims?”
At that, Heath merely looked up at her, gave her a slow, creeping smile, which hung in empty air for endless moments. Then he shook his head and said, “I’m tired. I think I’m done for today. But it was good to talk to you. Isla.”
The rain had begun again, the roar of it cutting through the wind. It bounced off the window, making Isla’s reflection shimmer, and she shivered, suddenly chilled. The day clung to her skin, even after the shower, as if she could not wash it off. She stared at her reflection and thought, He was lying. He is a psychopath. That is what they do. There is no other explanation for this. I attempted to play him, and instead I got played. He’s lying.
Isla pulled her gaze away fr
om her own reflection and looked across to the corner of the room where the thickly cushioned armchair and the coffee table stood. The box file was there, where she had left it. She stood slowly, carefully, as if she were on the deck of a bucking boat, and walked with bare feet over to the armchair. She sat carefully, tucking the dressing gown in around her, pulled the file toward her.
She had brought the fMRI results home, had thought that perhaps in a different environment, in a different frame of mind, she would find something there that she had missed before. Now she flipped the file open and pulled out the sheaf of glossy paper, studied the top image. The brain of a psychopath, with dark where there should be light, light where there should be dark. And beneath it another and another and another. Heath McGowan is a psychopath. His brain functions differently from mine. He is lying to me. He is lying to me simply because he can. Because I made myself vulnerable and I allowed him to. That is all that is happening here. She gazed at the colors, letting the shape soothe her. It’s a lie. That is all.
Then in the rain and the wind came footsteps on the stairs. Isla rested the brain scan pictures on her lap and set her hand back against her belly, felt her breath quicken. It was time. It had been time for ever so long. And so she was waiting when Ramsey entered the room, his mouth open to tell her dinner was ready. She was sitting with her hand upon her belly, and the words thick on her tongue.
“Isl – – ”
“I’m pregnant.”
Her husband stood in the doorway of their bedroom, and it seemed that he swayed. But it could simply have been the nausea, the spinning wrongness of the day. He opened his mouth, closed it again, took a step forward, one back.
“I . . . what?”
Isla smiled in spite of herself. “I’m pregnant.” The shape of the words felt strange in her mouth, and beneath them lay those old familiar jagged edges of fear. But it was too late for that now. Time and life were marching on, and she would have to hurry to catch up.
“You’re . . . oh my God. Oh my God.” Ramsey seemed to have forgotten himself. Seemed confused about whether to go or stay or stand or sit. “Are you sure?”
Isla nodded, took a breath. “I . . . I’ve known for a while. I should have told you. I know that. But I was . . .” What? “I was trying to get it straight in my own head before I could say it. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
But Ramsey was already at her side, waving away the words. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. This . . . it’s what I’ve always wanted. To be a real family. To be normal. We . . .” His face crumpled and then straightened out again, and he smiled, a smile that seemed to encompass the entire world. He pulled her into him, the brain scan images fluttering to the floor like so much confetti, and allowed her cheek to rest above his heart, and she could hear the thud of it, like the drum of a marching band. “Everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be just fine now.”
Isla breathed her husband in, could smell the garlic that clung to him, the cologne that always reminded her of their trip to Paris, the essential himness that lay beneath it all. And, for just a moment, she managed to push away Heath McGowan and his slow, deliberate smile and the body of the boy beneath the oak tree and was able to just be. They sat there for a lifetime. And then, finally, Ramsey drew back, stroking one hand along her cheek.
“Come on. You need to keep your strength up. Dinner!”
Isla smiled. “Yes.” She was suddenly hungry for the first time in days.
But around her feet there lay a puddle of brain scan images. “Let me just get these.” Isla crouched down, gathered the images together. The psychopaths, the controls . . . she was beginning to stack them together when one caught her eye. A psychopathy brain image had fallen farther than the others and become mixed together with the control group. Isla frowned, looking at the identity tag. There should only have been . . .
“What’s wrong?”
“No . . . I’m confused. I must have miscounted the psychopath scans. I . . . I don’t know where this one has come from.”
“Baby brain.” Ramsey grinned. “Is it labeled?”
“It . . . it has a number, but according to the number, this is a control-group scan.” Isla’s insides had begun to shimmy, whether from hunger or a sudden burst of fear, she couldn’t tell. “I haven’t had a chance to go through them yet. I don’t . . . Wait, I have a table. Let me just . . .” From the bottom of the box file, she pulled out a sheet and cross-referenced the number with the scan identifier. But her hands had begun to tremble, and now nothing made sense.
“Whose is it?”
Isla checked the number, holding the scan up next to the name. Was aware that she had begun to feel faint.
“Isla?”
Isla sank back into the chair, the scan held tight in her fingers. “It’s my father’s.”
Where the evidence leads – Mina
The tension in the room had become palpable. All conversations had ground to a stultifying halt. Two more dead. Two young men with their lives ahead of them. Chief Superintendent Clee had delivered the briefing, Superintendent Eric Bell standing to one side, his head down, gaze fixed firmly on his feet. The chief super had looked close to tears, whether from exhaustion or merely the overwhelming nature of what they were investigating. “There are search teams out at Vindolanda, attempting to find the body, but based on photographic evidence, it seems inevitable that the boy is dead. I’ll update you when I can.” Then he had spun on his heel with a hard look at Eric Bell, who followed behind him, the two of them marching from the room.
There had been little conversation in his wake, just a stunned sense of the world spinning out of control. Mina had pushed herself to her feet, the scrape of her chair dragging all eyes to her. “I just . . . I have to move,” she had said lamely.
How could she explain that she seemed to be crawling out of her skin? Drowning in the notion that it still was not over, that perhaps it would never be over. Mina walked slowly to the office window, watched wild rain lash against the footpath below, turning its grassy sides into bog.
How long had he waited? How long had he watched? Was this why he was now in a frenzy, attempting to kill as many as he could before he was stopped again?
“You okay?”
Entirely absorbed, she had not heard Owen come up behind her. She had been thinking about Rachel being bludgeoned once again by this monster, who seemed determined to destroy any sense of safety that she had built. And the fear that had begun to swell up with the announcement of the DNA results, and had grown and grown with each subsequent death, began to give way to anger. Fuck this man.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, aware that her voice was all but gone in the thunder of the relentless rain on the window. “You think people like this . . . I mean, what do you suppose happened to him in those twenty years?”
“You mean, assuming that this is the same guy.”
“Assuming that, yes. I mean, how does it work? Do they go cold turkey for twenty years and then just, I don’t know, snap?”
Owen had positioned himself beside her, looking out into the rain. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Or . . .”
“Or what?”
Mina looked at him, the cold of the window harsh against her cheek. “Or maybe he never did stop?” She spun on her heel and walked quickly to her computer terminal. Twenty years. Twenty years was an awfully long time to stop killing. If he was driven by it, if he needed it—as presumably he did, given the past few days—how had he survived that long without satiating that need?
She sat there for hours, which felt more like weeks. She was dimly aware of Owen every now and again looking at her, his mouth opening as if he would speak, and yet each time thinking better of it. The lines of text had become blurry, and Mina’s shoulders had begun to ache, and her mouth felt thick with cotton wool. There was an emptiness in the pit of her stomach that had little to do with hunger, but on and on she moved, from Briganton to Sheffield, to Edinburgh, to Lon
don and beyond.
At one point, perhaps about midnight, she became aware of the office door swinging open, of a breeze that tugged at the notepad on which she wrote, of a flurry of coats and heavy footsteps. The distant recognition of a name she knew—Toby Benedict.
Mina looked up. “What was that?”
Cain had the look of a drowned rat. He pulled off his raincoat—ineffective, from what Mina could see—wincing at the shucking sound it made, and eased it onto the back of a chair, where it proceeded to drip puddles on to the floor. “I went to interview Toby Benedict, Ben Flowers’s friend. Chief Super Clee is keen for us to look for any threads left hanging in the original investigation.”
“And?”
Cain shrugged. “Same as before, really. He was drunk. He left Ben not far from the pub, and they went their separate ways. Although,” he said and sank into the chair, wincing as his wet trousers pressed into his skin, “he did say that he remembers seeing some guy earlier in the evening, when they were on their way to the pub. Says he was across the street from them, that he didn’t really get much of a look at him and thought of it only years later, once McGowan was already on the inside. Says he remembers that he thought he was watching Ben. They had a bit of a laugh about it, apparently.”
“Okay,” said Mina. “So no description . . .”
Cain pulled a face. “Average height, average build.”
“Excellent,” grunted Mina.
“He did say he saw the guy walk away. That he thought he was limping.”
Mina turned her chair around to face him.
“I tracked down some of the other friends from that night. No one else saw him. No one else remembers anything other than what they’ve already said.” Cain leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. “Bloody hell.”
I Am Watching Page 22
