The Two

by Will Carver

  We continue to say exactly nothing until I pull up to the kerb outside her front door.

  I start to get out so that I can walk around and open her door, help her inside her home. But she stops me short.

  ‘It’s OK. I can handle it from here,’ she says, looking at me sullenly.

  ‘It’s no trouble. I can make sure …’

  She cuts me off.

  ‘Look, you’ve done enough already. It’s fine. I’ll go straight to bed and take these pills. There’s no need to worry.’ She opens her own door and stretches her left leg to the pavement.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I don’t want to push her either way; she is in a delicate frame of mind.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I just need to sleep this off.’ She lies and edges out further before my voice pulls her back.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the way this all ended. I’m sorry you saw those things. But I’m not sorry you got involved. You helped get to the bottom of this case. You helped me.’ I pause to give this last sentence some resonance. She just stares at me half-vacantly. ‘The case is over now but that doesn’t mean I am not here to help you. If you need me …’

  She jumps in again.

  ‘I think it’s probably best if we leave it be for a while, don’t you?’

  This is not really a question. I want to remind her of that night in her kitchen, I want to ask whether she can refute any connection we had, I just want her to say that it doesn’t have to stop here.

  ‘I need some time.’ And she kisses me on the cheek before fully exiting the car.

  It’s the last time I see her.

  Paulson greets me as I return to the office.

  ‘I wasn’t sure we were going to make it for a while there, Jan.’

  ‘By we do you mean me?’ I chip in, smiling. He opts to laugh too, instead of committing himself to any response, but I know that he was worried for the majority of the case; for me, for himself, his own career. And he was right to feel that way.

  ‘So what did you get from the neighbour?’ I get straight to work. I want this to be over.

  ‘Er, Sam. His name was Sam. Full name, Sammael Abbadon. He’d lived there for as long as she had rented her apartment. They’d just started seeing each other. He was some kind of fitness freak. He’d arranged for her to come over for cocktails this evening, but obviously things didn’t turn out that way.’

  ‘And what have you pulled up on this guy? Has he got a record? Is he some kind of deviant? Evangelical miscreant? Why was he out for these people?’

  ‘Well …’ he starts but Murphy walks in.

  ‘Did you tell him?’ he asks Paulson excitedly.

  ‘Tell me what?’ I join the conversation.

  ‘Oh my God. You haven’t told him yet.’ He shuts the door behind himself and starts to reel off information from the Brooke Derry interrogation. How she too had been fucking this Sammael Abbadon. How she would role-play with him. How he would bend her over and make her look at a picture of another woman while he took her from behind.

  ‘And get this. She reckons she never knew he was going to kill anybody.’ Murphy throws his arms up in cartoon disbelief.

  ‘So this was some kind of role-playing game for her? For them?’ I quiz.

  Brooke does not fully comprehend the severity of her situation.

  ‘And a bit of a stretch at sacrifice,’ Paulson weighs in. ‘Do any of these people actually understand their religion?’ He sighs heavily.

  Brooke Derry was never meant to die. She was used. Told that it was part of some ritual or sex game where she just had to tell the police that she saw a woman in her apartment. She would then describe the woman in the picture that Sammael Abbadon would make her look at while they screwed. A picture of the wife who left him. That spiritual Wiccan whose womb could not develop their son properly. Whose beliefs could not bring him back or save their marriage.

  Whose remains will be found under the same floorboards I pulled the last tobacco tin from and identified in the coming weeks.

  ‘Where’s the wife?’ I ask next, logically.

  ‘That’s what I was going to talk to you about, Jan.’ Paulson looks serious. ‘She’s gone. She doesn’t have any family left, really. The only person who knew her said she was trying to make things work with her husband and he was keeping her away from everyone. People just stopped seeing her around.’

  We all seem to take a pensive moment, threading together the final strands of the case.

  ‘I’ve asked Higgs if he can try to locate her but I’m not hopeful. Her name is Celeste Abbadon but, if she is still alive out there, she may be taking her maiden-name, Varrick.’

  I recall the killer talking to Alison as Celeste; she mentioned it at the hospital.

  And it starts to make more sense.

  With all the evidence at my disposal, I can now form an accurate psychological breakdown of the killer; it doesn’t matter that he is no longer alive.

  I empathise with the desperation he must have felt losing two people so close to him but it can either manifest itself into something positive or it can warp your sense of reality. For Sammael Abbadon he was left alone and delusional. He found solace in something that he felt could give him answers, could bring his son back to him. He treated it in the same way his wife would have treated her beliefs, the faith he so openly rejected and, judging from each crime scene, detested and abhorred.

  Celeste was not really with him, she was never there. She was at once the substantiation of his guilt and the reflection of his conscience; he would take a life but she would save a soul. He wasn’t really killing anybody, he was rescuing them. He was doing his Lord’s duty in order to gain a free pass back to the child he had never truly known.

  When he let the knife pierce between his ventricles, he was allowing himself to be sacrificed but he was killing Celeste a second time.

  ‘Thanks, Paulson. That’s great. And well done with Ms Derry, Murph.’ It sticks in my throat to say this to Murphy and he will use this success to claim a large portion of the credit for the case, but these things are out of my control.

  An hour later, in the office, I look at Paulson and Murphy getting a head-start on some of the paperwork, and they are less tense, relaxed even. Paulson will undoubtedly celebrate in his own unique and depraved way, while Murphy can gloat to his sponsor that he has completed his covert mission.

  I do not allow myself this luxury.

  Serial killers do not have consciences; they do not all wait for a three-month break between stories to begin their murderous sprees; they do not always give the lead investigator time to recover from the strains of such a case; they do not care about leaving enough of an interval for personal convalescence.

  It starts again tomorrow.

  And I will soon know that something else is coming.

  My intuition has not left me.

  But it has changed.

  I leave the station alone, heading back to my own car with its distinct odour and dented seat that tessellates perfectly with the contours of my body. I start the engine and lean across to the glove box.

  I deserve this.

  Not everything changes.

  I think about sleeping in a bed tonight and not allowing myself to just melt into a stupor on the lounge carpet. I think about going into work tomorrow, even though it is Saturday and I am not supposed to be there, just to refresh my memory on Cathy’s case, to look into the Lamont character that Mother mentioned in her journals. I want to catalogue the journals; I want to go through them with some chronology.

  I want to sort myself out.

  Get organised.

  Find Cathy.

  Move on.

  But life is not sequential.

  I pull into the drive and turn out the lights. Everything looks as it always does. But I feel something. Perhaps I am forcing intuition. Maybe I don’t want to stop.

  I just want to feel something.

  I turn the key and push the door open, noticing immediately tha
t I left the light on in the journal room. I can see a strip of white beneath the door, and I sigh. When I close the front door I have another foreign sensation. That I am being watched, that somebody is here with me.

  I move into the kitchen and flick on the light; prepared for anything my fist is clenched. But nobody is inside. I fix myself a glass of water because I don’t need any more alcohol today.

  Because I think I will sleep easy tonight.

  I know that the living room is still covered in pictures and scribbling from the Sammael Abbadon case, and I don’t want to be reminded of that.

  I don’t want to move backwards.

  I decide that I will go straight upstairs to the bedroom and rest, but the detective in me, the sceptic that is returning, the eternal cynic, has to look around the house.

  This feeling can’t be nothing.

  I’m right.

  There is somebody in my house.

  In my living room.

  A girl. A young girl.

  She is leaning with her hands over her eyes and her head resting against the wall. As if she is counting.

  I don’t need her to turn around, though.

  I know her face.

  It has been thirty-four years, but I know what my own sister looks like.

  ‘I was in the kitchen getting us some juice. Cathy was outside counting to thirty. When I went back out she wasn’t there. I was in the kitchen getting us some juice. Cathy was outside counting to thirty. When I went back out she wasn’t there.’ I repeat these words in my head just as I did to the police officer all those years ago. Stating the facts.

  Telling it exactly as I remember.

  But what is true is not always what is fact.

  What is genuine is not always what is real.

  But at this very moment, I believe.

  Acknowledgements

  CONTINUED GRATITUDE TO Random House for the chance to write every day and a job that never feels like work. Huge appreciation, once again, to everyone at Century and Arrow who have got behind January David, this book and the writing.

  Thanks, in particular, to Natalie Higgins for all your support since the first book and to my editor, Ben Dunn, who showed me that good is not good enough. We completed this journey together.

  To Sam Bulos, agent, friend, confidante and sounding board, thank you for your patience, belief and encouragement to write the stories I want to write in the style I want to write.

  Thanks to Brendan Patricks, whose very magic directly inspired so many aspects of Girl 4 that I could not acknowledge it until this book.

  Chuck Palahniuk, who started all this, who said, ‘I know this because Tyler knows this’, who unknowingly gives me something to aim for, thanks is not enough.

  Special thanks to my mother, who brought me into this world and hasn’t stopped supporting me from that moment. I am where I am because you are who you are.

  To Phoebe and Coen, my light and my courage.

  And to my wife, Francesca, my great inspiration, my hero. You make everything easier. You make me believe. But you can’t get me into an early-morning writing routine.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781409049517

  Published by Arrow Books 2012

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  Copyright © Will Carver, 2012

  Will Carver has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Arrow Books

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  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099551041