I Am Watching

by Emma Kavanagh

  “Are you okay?” asked Mina, suddenly aware that Zachary Aiken had had more than one brother. That it wasn’t just Ramsey who had suffered in this.

  Cain made a noise, a cross between a laugh and a sob. “Aye. Just keeping on keeping on.”

  Mina felt a weight settle on her, of an inevitable reckoning coming, then shook her head, turning back to the monitor. That was not the problem of this moment.

  It was 1:30 a.m. by the time she finished. Her eyes were heavy; her hand was shaped into a claw from writing. Mina stopped, laid down the pen, and stared at the list she had compiled. She stared at it, then stared some more. “Fuck.”

  “What?” asked Owen.

  Mina simply shook her head and handed the notepad across to him. “It’s the unsolved murders nationwide. I’ve compiled a list of those that seem to relate to our killer’s MO—attack pattern, use of manual strangulation, tendency to display the bodies in a naturalistic manner . . .”

  Owen scanned the list, his mouth dropping open. “You are shitting me.”

  Mina said thickly, “Fourteen murders in twenty years. A series spread across the South of England—Poole, Southampton, Portsmouth—in the nineties, then a gap of six years, then seven spread across the North. There were murders in Sheffield, Newcastle, Sunderland, Edinburgh. Those ones were prostitutes mostly, and one young man who was known to be homeless. They match the MO. The bodies were, for the most part, positioned, although the display element was less obvious than we’re seeing here.” She leaned forward, put her head in her hands. “Maybe I’m wrong. Please God, I’m wrong. But if I’m not . . .”

  “If you’re not,” said Cain, looking over Owen’s shoulder, “then he has spent the past twenty years killing freely.”

  “Okay,” said Owen. He sounded dazed or drunk or both. “Okay,” he repeated, “so . . . so why now? If he transitioned to prostitutes in the North, he was clearly trying to keep things on the down low. He was trying to hide it. But here . . . there’s been no hiding here. This is murder. In your face, ‘Look what I just did’ murder.”

  Mina looked up. “Maybe he just got sick of hiding.”

  The sound of footsteps, the bang of a door. Chief Superintendent Clee’s steps were slower than normal; he was battered down by the exhaustion plaguing them all. “Right, guys, go home. Get some sleep.” His voice sounded thick and unwieldy.

  “Sir,” said Mina, “I think you should see this.”

  Owen handed him the sheet of paper. His face turned pale.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  Mina shrugged. “I don’t know that I can be sure, sir. Not yet. I wanted your permission to approach the various forces involved and have any forensic evidence forwarded to us.”

  The chief super pulled out a chair, sat down heavily. “Shit. Okay . . . this . . . Yeah, this just got a whole hell of a lot more complicated. We’re going to have to bring these forces in. Bugger.” He looked at his watch, scrubbed his hand across his face. “Okay, I’ll have to tell the chief constable. Mina, well done. Now go home. Get a couple of hours’ sleep.” He stood quickly, was gone in a flurry of coat.

  Mina sat. She had moved into a place far past exhaustion, where her need for sleep was all consuming. She watched as the others began to shrug coats on.

  “You coming?” asked Owen.

  “Yeah, you go on. Just one more thing I want to take care of.”

  She watched as they filed out, with their heads down and their shoulders pulled up tight against the weather. Then she turned back to the computer. Because something didn’t feel right, something no longer worked in the story of the killer on the wall. What the hell was Heath McGowan’s involvement? Was he merely a shadow, following along in the wake of a harder, darker man? The evidence against McGowan remained as it ever was—damning. The fingerprints on Kitty’s door, and then the items, the mementos. Kitty’s necklace and Zach’s key chain and Leila’s wedding ring, all found in his possession.

  Mina logged back in to the evidence log. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, perhaps it was that she had spent too long on the computer, but it seemed that her actions were conducted by someone far, far away, and she scrolled through the lists with an uncomfortable sense of premonition.

  There were three items in all that had been definitively proven to have belonged to the victims and were subsequently found in the possession of Heath McGowan.

  And each of those three items was entered into evidence by Eric Bell.

  Thursday, October 27

  Someone to stop me – Isla

  Isla closed the door behind her. She stood in their front garden, the wind whipping at her coat, her gaze fighting to move to the hedge through which the photograph had been taken, every survival instinct in revolt. But still Isla stood there beneath the gray sky.

  “So what does this brain scan mean? I don’t get it.” Ramsey had stood in their study, examining the brain scan, turning it about in his hands, as if that way he would make sense of it.

  “It means . . .” Isla had felt the words sticking, her mouth clumsy with the effort of creating them. “My father is showing a pattern of brain function that one would normally see in a psychopathic brain.” She had leaned over her husband’s shoulder, had allowed her fingers to trace the shadowed image of the brain. “See? Here and here and here, this means that there’s a deficit in the brain’s functioning.” She’d shaken her head. “His entire paralimbic system is compromised.”

  Ramsey had looked at her, as if he was trying to read her thoughts so that she wouldn’t have to say them. “So . . . your father, he’s a psychopath?”

  On her front doorstep, Isla let her toes bounce in empty air and lifted her chin so that the wind that swept down from the Cheviots scored across her cheeks. She had slept little, two hours, maybe three. The accumulated exhaustion was weighing down her limbs, making her brain sluggish.

  “Why don’t you go back to bed?” Ramsey had asked, up early, dressed in suit and tie. “I have to go and meet the Journal editor. I’d put it off, but . . .”

  “Don’t put it off. Go. I’m going to try to get more sleep.”

  Ramsey had leaned in, kissed her, letting his hand rest on the shallow curve of her stomach. “Make sure you lock the door behind me, okay, Mama?”

  Isla stepped away from the door now and walked with steady steps along the front path, through the low gate, onto the pavement. Allowed herself one moment of mercy, to scan from left to right, to check the hedge, to look for cars. There was nothing but a heady silence. The village had gone into hiding. Blitz spirit gone. Fear had taken hold now, driving all of Briganton indoors, behind chains and alarms and dead bolts. Isla walked down the hill, her footsteps unnaturally loud.

  So . . . your father, he’s a psychopath?

  No. Because her life had pirouetted around this point and this man. And hadn’t everyone always known that if you had a problem, you went to Eric Bell? Eric would sort it, would put the bad people away, would make all right again. Her entire childhood, a collage of images of one sort of heroism or another. That time when the Mackenzie house burned, a fry pan catching alight, and most of the family making it out, but Libby, blond hair, blue eyes, the year below her in school, trapped in the rear bedroom. And her father, breaching the flames as if they were nothing, somehow, and no one knew quite how, getting to Libby, dragging her out, limp and smoke damaged. It had been on the news. He’d got an award for that one, not to mention a three-day stay in the hospital. That fight at the Dog & Bone where the fists had become knives, the pub emptying, her father wading in regardless, in spite of orders to stay back, receiving for his trouble a stab wound to the shoulder. Her father was a hero. The great Eric Bell.

  She crossed the road, careful on the carpet of slick leaves. A police car had been parked on the corner, and another was just visible over the crest of the hill. A flash of yellow against the dull sky, PCSOs on patrol.

  Her father was a hero. And yet our physiology does not lie. So she turned the recolle
ctions, shifting them so as to see them from new angles. Courage to the point of recklessness. A disdain for orders and for following rules. The village looking at him with an adoration that verged on the sycophantic. So charm, then, the kind that can manipulate and control.

  She passed the church, the large wooden doors shut tight. Her father, missing her sixth birthday, her seventh, her eighth, until in the end it had become a long-running family joke. But that was how the world looked when your father was a hero—you had to accept that tragedy came before cake. And then a new memory—of Isla crying when, on her ninth birthday, her father had once again failed to return home, had missed the party and the balloons, had drifted in some time after midnight. Why are you crying? It’s your birthday. You had a party.

  Yes, Isla had sniffed, but you weren’t there. And her father looking at her with that curiously blank expression.

  She knew that expression. The emptiness of it. Like when you asked a psychopath what guilt felt like, and their brain cast this way and that, trying to grip the tail of a concept they knew only in principle.

  She pulled up outside the deathly quiet school and stared down the hill toward the wall and the moor beyond. Her father was a psychopath.

  She slipped out of the car, tucking her handbag beneath her arm. Her steps quicker now, a few hundred meters to where the houses were smaller, lined up in the neatest of rows, with their small square windows making them look slightly surprised. She knocked hard on the door of number twelve. Waited. Knocked hard again.

  She was just beginning to think that it was empty and her trip had been in vain when a sound came from within. The creak of stairs, shuffling footsteps on wood floors. Mina opened the door cautiously, her eyes heavy with sleep.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Isla. I . . . No.”

  Yes.

  Mina pushed the door open wider. Her hair stood up, wild and bouffant; beneath her eyes were the black remains of the previous day’s mascara. She wore pajamas with ducks on them. “Come in. I was . . . I was just making coffee. You want one?”

  Isla closed the door firmly behind her, followed along in Mina’s barefooted wake. “Sure. Thanks.”

  The living room was small, contained far more furniture than it should. Isla hung there as from the kitchen came the sounds of a kettle being filled, a yawn suppressed. What Isla took to be yesterday’s clothes had been slung haphazardly across the sofa’s arm. There was the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

  “So . . . you okay?” Mina pushed a cup of instant coffee into Isla’s hand, waved her toward the sofa. She had made an attempt to tidy her hair, had dragged it back into a high ponytail, which served only to emphasize her exhaustion.

  “Yes. I’m so sorry I woke you.”

  Mina shrugged and drank her own coffee with a gulp. “Had to get up, anyway.” A ping sounded from the coffee table, and Mina sighed, leaned over to pick up her phone, a lightening of her expression, an almost smile. She glanced at Isla. “Sorry. It’s Owen. You know Owen Darby? From work? He grew up here too. Anyway.” She shook herself slightly. “You didn’t come here to talk about any of this. What’s up?”

  “Are you investigating my father?”

  The cup froze in midair, Mina’s eyes large behind it. “Am I . . .”

  “You see,” said Isla, “a detective, Eve, I think her name was, came to see us last night. Was asking Ramsey about the time he was attacked. She did her best to be discreet, but I got the distinct impression that the powers that be think there was a problem with the original killer on the wall investigation. Eve mentioned she’d seen you, so I thought . . . You are, aren’t you? You’re investigating my father.”

  Mina sat silent for a moment, gathering herself. “No. Well, not strictly . . . Chief Superintendent Clee, he’s ordered us to open up the investigation, to expand it to see what was missed in your father’s original one. I know that sounds bad . . .”

  Isla opened her handbag, pulled out the image of Eric’s brain scan, and handed it to Mina. “This is my father’s brain. His fMRI scan shows indications of psychopathic brain function.”

  One beat. Two.

  “I genuinely have no idea what you just said.” Mina cocked her head, frowning at her. “Isla, what are you asking me?”

  Isla stared at her coffee. “Psychopaths often have trouble following the rules. They can be impulsive, do things that are extraordinarily self-serving. They can do things that they shouldn’t do to meet their own ends. In their worldview, the ends will always justify the means. I . . . I know it’s not fair to ask you this, but . . . in the original investigation, did my father do something that he shouldn’t have done?”

  Mina bit her lip. Then sighed heavily. “Isla, look . . .” She glanced at Isla. “We got the DNA back. From some of the original victims. It wasn’t a match for Heath McGowan.”

  The coffee cup swayed in Isla’s hands. I’m not the killer on the wall.

  “Your father, I think, may have planted the evidence on McGowan, the pieces that connected him to the killings on the wall.” Mina looked close to tears. She pulled at her long ponytail, tugged at the ends of it. “I . . . I found more. There have been more murders. The killings, they didn’t stop after McGowan was arrested. They just moved. Whoever is doing this, they’ve been moving about the country, killing with impunity.”

  Isla wanted to get up, to run from this house and these words and Briganton itself. But following close behind the nausea came something else, a flutter low in her belly, as if a butterfly had gotten trapped there. Then the world collapsed into that minuscule movement, that tiny spark of electricity across her abdomen. She placed her hand on her stomach and waited for the flutter of her baby’s heart. It came again, more certain this time. And Isla felt the fear moving backward, something else sliding into its place, harder and softer both. Because it wasn’t about her or Ramsey or her father. Now it was about this child and the world that would surround it.

  “How many?” Isla asked quietly.

  “Fourteen. Not counting the Briganton ones. For the past ten years, he appears to have been targeting prostitutes.”

  “Staying under the radar.”

  “Yes.”

  Isla set the coffee cup down on the table and allowed her head to sink into her hands. “It’s because of my father. It’s all because of him. If he hadn’t planted the evidence . . . they would have kept looking. They would have found the actual murderer. And why? Why would he do that? What would be the point?”

  “This case made him, Isla. He solved it single-handedly. He was on TV, for God’s sakey,” said Mina. “Okay, you want my theory? I think that Eric genuinely believed McGowan was guilty. I mean, you know yourself, McGowan is no angel. He was absolutely responsible for the murder of Lucy Tuckwell. I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that he did a lot of things that, to your father’s mind, must have made him look pretty damn guilty.” Mina shrugged. “I’m betting your father figured the odds of there being more than one murderer in a village like Briganton had to be pretty slim.”

  “So he shored up his case,” said Isla softly.

  “I think so. I think he took a gamble on it being McGowan. And that he made damn sure the rest of the world would bet the same way.” She blew out a sigh. “Only trouble is, he was wrong. There was another killer all along,” said Mina. “Isl, let me ask you something. Whoever this is, he’s been killing for years. Quietly, discreetly. Why the change?”

  Isla wrapped her arms around her knees and considered. “It seems that the killer’s motives are different now. These other murders, they were just enough to satisfy him. To satiate his need. But now the killing isn’t enough. He needs the attention, the thrill that comes from people knowing what he’s doing. He wants Briganton to know that he’s hunting. He’s looking for the fear.”

  “Why?” asked Mina.

  Isla thought of Ramsey. Of him staring at her father’s brain scan. “Why do they do it, Isla?” he’d asked. “Why would some
one do this? Kill people the way he has?”

  She had chosen her words carefully. “We don’t fully understand it yet. The brain dysfunction, that’s likely to be a part of it. Sometimes you see that people who do these things have a certain gene others don’t. We call it the warrior gene. But whether they are born like that or whether it’s created by the environment, we can’t really say yet. Most serial killers, they’ve generally suffered extreme abuse as children. My money is on it being a combination of the two—genes and upbringing. Say, a genetic vulnerability to do terrible things, which can be avoided by a good childhood. But, once those two factors combine . . .”

  “So, what are you saying?” Ramsey had asked, his voice almost fearful. “It’s not their fault?”

  Isla had looked at the scan, had considered. “These people may have urges—weaknesses that other people wouldn’t have. But still, they know that they are wrong. They understand that much. And, in giving in to those urges, they are still making a choice.”

  Ramsey had held the brain scan tight and had slowly nodded.

  Isla picked up her coffee again now and took a sip, the granules gritty in her mouth. Then she looked at Mina. “Perhaps the killer has experienced some kind of change in his life. Perhaps he feels that he’s vanishing in some way, that he is no longer important or seen. This coming back here, killing so publicly, it may be a way for him to regain that sense of importance.”

  “But . . . why so many?” asked Mina. “So close together. It’s like he’s lost all control now.”

  Isla studied her. “Perhaps he is hoping someone will stop him.”

  The killing path – Mina

  “He has killed two young men within the space of the past twenty-four hours.” Superintendent Bell stood, his hands upon his hips, his expression grim.

  Mina watched Eric Bell as his gaze swept the room, then settled finally on her. She felt herself color. It seemed inevitable to her that he knew—about her digging, about what she had found, about all of it.