“He canceled, Isl. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”
She ran harder, thinking of her mother, of her sister. He wouldn’t. But he would, wouldn’t he? He had.
“Isl, come on. You cannot seriously believe that your husband would have killed all those people? He . . . I mean, his own brother? He was one of the original victims, for God’s sake.”
She had pushed herself up, hadn’t been able to stop moving, around and around the living room, with that god-awful heat pumping from that too-hot fire, as if she could outrun this if she kept moving. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
The trouble was, she knew it could.
“My father . . . ,” she’d said, her voice high and strange, “he always said it looked like the killer on the wall was interrupted, that he never got the chance to finish Ramsey off properly, and that’s why his head wound wasn’t so serious, why he wasn’t killed. But it wasn’t that, was it? It was that he did it to himself.”
“How? I mean, there was no weapon left—”
“The wall. He hit his own head on the wall. Just enough to make it bleed. Just enough to make us think . . .” She turned to Connor. “Just enough to create the persona of the victim.”
Connor’s knee was jumping; he, too, was unable to stay still. “Okay, then what about his arm? This guy, whoever he is, he is physically fit. I mean, he’s taking down men, women. He’s transporting the bodies across some distance. He would need to be physically capable of that. Ramsey has a bunch of torn ligaments in his shoulder. He couldn’t – – ”
But Isla was remembering that day, the coming home, her husband sitting on the sofa, holding his shoulder. I fell on my run. My shoulder really doesn’t feel good.
She remembered herself, car keys still in her hand, turning back around again. Come on. Let’s get you to A & E. Get that checked out.
No, it’ll be okay.
Ramsey, I really think . . .
It’s fine, okay? A cold snap that had come from nowhere. And Isla, tired from work, tired from too much thinking, too much chasing monsters, simply not having the energy to fight, shrugging her shoulders, walking away.
“He went to A & E without me the next day—said he needed to wear a sling. I’ve never seen any hospital papers or a prescription . . . I have no idea if he really went.”
“Jesus, Isl. This is mad.”
She grabbed her phone. Dialed Mina, once, twice, three times, got nothing in return but an empty ringing. She shuffled through her options, finally called police headquarters, asked to be put through to Owen Darby. And she was vaguely surprised when he came on the line. She tumbled out a quick explanation, albeit not the real one. Psychologist. Have an idea. Can you let me have a copy of the other murders, the ones that took place in the intervening twenty years? Well, I . . . Then, the name drop. I’m Superintendent Bell’s daughter. Which of course changed everything, as it always had. She listened as he read it to her, scratching locations and dates with quick, rough writing. Thank you. Great help. Hung up and burst into tears.
“Isla, please.” Connor pulled her into a hug. “Come on. You’re . . . This isn’t proof. None of this is proof. You’re tired. You’re frightened, and the hormones – – ”
“Would you fuck off! The hormones!” Isla waved the list in front of him. Jabbing at it with her pen. “Ramsey attended the University of Southhampton from nineteen ninety-six to nineteen ninety-nine. All the murders took place within a radius of sixty miles of there during that period. Then, for six years, there’s nothing.” She looked at him. “That’s when we met. Remember Ethan Charles in Albany? Killed two, then met his wife and stayed clean for ten years, before falling off the wagon and going after those four sorority girls.”
Six years. The honeymoon years, in which they’d been one another’s everything. Then things had shifted. She had begun her postdoctoral research, had plunged herself into it, so rarely surfacing for air. And Ramsey . . . That was when the baby stuff had begun, when he had begun suggesting, cajoling, at times begging, for them to have a child. And she had said no, that she wasn’t ready, that she was too busy with work. Was that it? That he had been looking for something to ground him, something to keep him clean?
“The killing begins again in two thousand five. Newcastle, Sunderland, Edinburgh.” She felt nausea rise and remembered the interview her husband had conducted in Sunderland, the stag weekend in Edinburgh, that receipt that she had found stuffed into the pocket of his jeans, had shrugged off as being nothing, a coffee shop in Newcastle.
It had been there, in front of her. There had been that trail of bread crumbs, hints that something wasn’t right. And yet she, like so many others before her, had chosen to look away. She was no better. In spite of all she had done, all the myriad ways in which she had fought to protect herself, she remained just as easy prey as the next person.
She ran through the Briganton streets now at a flat-out pace, could hear the footsteps behind her, Connor struggling to keep up, growing more and more distant, her name being called and flung into the wind. She ducked onto Dray Lane, running and running, footsteps uneven as pavement turned to moor, and then she saw him.
Ramsey stood beside the wall, as if he was waiting for her. Her breath caught in her chest. Knees waiting to buckle. And she slowed. But she did not stop. Isla walked slowly, could dimly make out a shape at his feet. The fear leapt in her belly. She walked on. Ramsey was no longer wearing his sling. He had no coat. His sleeves were rolled up. The expression on his face . . . It was as if her husband had left. As if he was gone and the man who stood before her was someone else, a different person inhabiting the same body.
“Ramsey?”
He looked at her for long moments and then slowly nodded, the acknowledgment of a stranger. Then he looked down toward the shape at his feet. Isla’s gaze followed his, and she gave a low moan. Her sister lay sprawled beneath him, her blond curls thrown carelessly above her head, the line of blood that traced its way from her forehead down to her chin and beyond, dark and bitter.
“She . . .”
“She’s not dead,” he said quietly.
Isla moved closer, three quick strides, dropped to her knees beside her husband, the prone form of her sister. And for dark moments, she thought that he was lying. That this was one final cruel twist of the knife. Then she felt a movement beneath her fingers, her sister’s chest rising and falling.
“I could have,” said Ramsey quietly, “but I didn’t. I thought about you. And”—he glanced away—“the baby. I thought about that too. So I didn’t. I mean, Emilia, she will be its auntie, after all.”
Isla pulled her gaze from her sister and looked up at him. It seemed that she did not recognize his features. That his eyes were farther apart, lips thinner, nose more crooked. “You killed Zach.” It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“The others. You killed them too.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The single word escaped her as a wail, shattering the silence. She stared at him, trying to find her beautiful, kind, gentle husband, but seeing only the blood on his hands, the emptiness in his face.
“I don’t know why. I just . . . I had to. That day . . . You don’t understand what it’s like. I had to know what it would be like to feel someone die, to put my fingers around their throat and squeeze and squeeze until they were . . . gone. It was just, it was all I thought about. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t eat. It was like this thing had invaded my head, and I just couldn’t shake it free.” He wasn’t looking at her, appeared to be talking to the inert form of her sister. “I wanted it to be my father. It was going to be my father. I had it all planned out. And then . . . I don’t know what happened. I saw Kitty leaving the church. I saw her go home. And I just knew how easily I could do it. I knew it would be nothing at all. I got in over the back fence. She’d left the back door wide open. I think she was feeding her cat. I don’t know that she ever saw me. I knocked her down, I think I knocked her out, and th
en . . . I did it.” He nodded toward the dark glass of the Prew house. “I hid her there. Remember that old bungalow? Every time I pass that house, I think about that old bungalow.”
Isla gripped hold of her sister’s hand and fought back a rising urge to vomit.
“Once I’d done it, I needed to do it again. You don’t get it. You don’t understand. It’s like the most amazing high . . . I hit Ben Flowers with a baseball bat. He was so drunk, I could probably have attacked him with a sponge and he’d have gone down. And the thing is, I kind of regretted it once I’d done it. He was a big lump of a guy, and for a while I didn’t think I’d be able to . . . but I did,” he finished quietly.
“And Zach,” added Isla.
“And Zach,” agreed Ramsey.
“Why?”
For a moment he seemed to be casting about for an answer. Then he shrugged. “He was there. I mean, I didn’t mind the kid. But it was so obvious that he was the favorite. The things my father, what he did to me, to Cain, he’d never think of doing to Zach. I don’t know. Maybe I was punishing my father by taking his favorite away from him.”
Isla tried to breathe, tried to focus. Best to forget where she was and whom she was talking to, because if she didn’t, then she would crack in two, right here on the moor. So, she sat up straighter, her voice shifted, so that it bore in it the soothing tones of the psychologist at work. As if in this persona, she could survive. “What did your father do to you, Ramsey?”
He looked away. “I don’t think you want to ask me that.” He glanced down at Emilia. “Or maybe, then again, you do. You are always the scientist.” He dropped his voice low. “He molested me. Time and time again.”
That nausea again, the heat racing through her.
“He never did it to Zach. Cain, he got it a couple of times, but never as bad as me. I always wondered why that was. Maybe he was punishing me for whatever evil he could see in me.” He looked down at her then. “I never told anyone before. But then,” he allowed, “there are lots of things no one knew about me before today. You know, Isl, I did try to stop. And I did for a really long time.”
“Six years,” said Isla softly.
“Six years,” Ramsey agreed. “Only, the need, it kept getting stronger and stronger. So in the end, I thought, Well, just one. One won’t hurt. It would get it out of my system. Would make it stop. But it didn’t.”
“Why come back to Briganton? Why not just carry on, under the radar?” She watched him, this man she used to know. “Was it me?” she asked quietly. “Was it because of my work with Heath?”
He gave a little laugh. “I don’t know . . . You were never there. You were always with him. And you were so determined you were going to get underneath the skin of the killer on the wall that I – – ”
“You were jealous?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe it was that this is who I’ve always been, and I just got tired of hiding it.”
“But Stephen Doyle?” Isla’s voice cracked. “He trusted you, Ramsey, and he was so sad.”
Ramsey looked at her with the empty blankness of one asked to describe the smell of purple. “He wanted to die. He said so, that day on the roof. And you were pregnant, and I thought it would be a chance for us, for me, to start again.”
“So, you killed him. And you framed him.”
He shrugged. “Yes. I thought it would make things better.”
Isla wanted to run, wanted to turn and bolt. But there was her sister, unconscious before her, and this was on her, wasn’t it? There was no running. She had lived with this. She had been blind. She had allowed this. She forced herself to breathe, to look at the man that had once been her husband, and there, in the corner of her vision, came the slightest impression of movement. Isla ignored it, kept her gaze fixed on her husband, on the killer on the wall.
“The photograph of us? The letters that came to the house?” she asked. “They were all you?”
He nodded slowly. “The camera was set on a timer. I put it in the hedge.”
“Why?”
“So you would be afraid. So you would want to leave. Because I thought, if we left, then I could stop it. I wouldn’t have this place, this bloody village, with its constant reminders. I thought if we went somewhere else, then things would be different. I’d be different.”
“Like you were in Southampton? Like you were in Scotland?” A fracture in the facade, the grief breaking through, and Isla was shouting now. But the sensation of movement was growing larger, and there, if you listened hard enough, was the sound of footsteps, so she no longer cared.
Ramsey stared at her and opened his mouth, as if there could possibly be any more to say. But the sound of footsteps had become clearer now and undeniable, even to him. Isla watched as he turned toward them, her gaze following his, the dim figures taking shape, of her father, of Mina, of Connor, of uniformed police officers she had never seen before.
Ramsey looked across at the approaching figures and back at Isla, and Isla moved, placed her hand flat across her belly, bracing for what would come. But he merely stood there, looking at her sadly. “Guess that’s the posse.” He smiled. “It’s okay, Isl. It needs to end. It’s time.” Then a low sigh. “It’s finally over.”
Isla looked down at her sister, at the flutter of her eyelashes, and pressed her hand against the movement in her own belly, and there she clung. Tears bubbled up and spilled over. She did not look up.
Then, her father’s voice rolling across the moor. He sounded like he was crying. “Ramsey Aiken, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder.”
Thursday, November 3
One week later – Mina
Mina ran her fingers across the stones of the wall as she walked, her steps slow, measured. The first sprinkling of snow had fallen. Nothing much, a light dusting. But sufficient to bathe the village in a pearlescent glow, to allow them to believe, however briefly, that everything could be made new again. She walked steadily, with no particular destination in mind, merely to be in this place, to bear witness. And yet, in spite of that, her feet took her where she was always going to go. To where it started.
There at the stretch of wall that ran behind Victoria Prew’s house stood Superintendent Bell. Although whether he would continue to be called that remained to be seen. Scuttlebutt abounded that he had handed in his resignation. Whether that would be sufficient to protect him from a criminal prosecution was doubtful. Eric Bell stood, looking out over the moor, his thick coat collar pulled up high around his chin. He turned with the sound of footsteps, and it seemed almost that he had been expecting her.
“Sir.”
Eric waved her away. “You don’t need to call me that anymore. Eric will do.”
Mina found herself smiling. “Eric, then. How are you?”
He shrugged, his gaze still off into the distance. “Have been better. Could have been worse.”
Mina tucked herself into position beside him, rested her arm against the cold old stones. “Emilia?”
“She’s fine.” Eric shrugged. “She had a concussion. They kept her in for a day or two but say she’s on the mend now.”
Mina, watching him, found herself smiling. “She’s fine?”
He turned, his gaze finding her, assessing. Then a low snort. “You sound like Bonnie. Okay, Bonnie says she’s far from fine. That what happened the first time, she never really got over that. And now this. To know that it was someone she trusted, loved as a brother . . .” He cast about, perhaps looking for the words, perhaps trying to pick his way through the emotions behind them. “Still, we could have been burying her, so there’s that.”
“And Isla? I wanted to call, wanted to see if she’s okay, but . . .”
Eric shifted his weight, gave a slight wince. “What can I say about Isla? You know she’s back at work, right? Bonnie’s worried about her, but I don’t know . . . Isla, she’s got more of me in her than she’d ever admit to. She’ll get past this, given time. And she’s got the baby.” His face took on a lig
htness that Mina had never seen before. “That’ll help.”
Mina nodded and scuffed at the snow beneath her feet with the toe of her boot. It was a strange sensation, that feeling that it had finally come to an end. It left the entire world feeling like the snow out on the moor, pristine and untouched, that anything could come next.
“Sir? Eric, I mean?”
“Yes?”
“How did we not see it?” She very carefully did not say, you, how did you not see it? “How did we pass by him every single day and still never know?”
Eric gave a low grunt. “Because, lass, he didn’t want us to know. We were his cover. Us and that whole victim thing he had created for himself. That boy, he was able to slip our impression of him on and off like an old overcoat. And the thing is, we’re people. Generally speaking, people are stupid. We look for whatever we expect to see. And not one of us here expected to see that boy as he really was. Isla says that his dad did terrible things to him. She says that if someone is vulnerable, if their brain isn’t working quite right, they may still not turn out to be evil. Just . . .” He coughed. “A little bit foolish. But if they have all that brain stuff working against them, and then you add in a bastard of a parent, someone who tortures you and hurts you, sometimes all that can add up to murder.”
Eric reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small metal hip flask. He raised it and took a long swallow, then handed it to Mina.
Mina took it, looked up at him, eyebrow raised.
“You’ve earned it.”
She raised the flask, took a pull. The liquid burned her throat, the heat spread along her limbs, and her head suddenly became a little lighter. Then she handed it back, tucked her hands inside her pockets, and turned to watch as the sun set beyond the wall.
More from Emma Kavanagh:
THE MISSING HOURS
“Murderers are rarely who you imagine them to be . . .”
I Am Watching Page 28
