by Ryan Casey
He zoned out of the room and the reality of the situation dawned on Brian. Yes, he’d killed the chief constable. He’d done it because he’d been convinced it was the right thing to do.
And there were times in the past where he’d pursued suspects even after a case was closed, all because he wasn’t satisfied. All because he was convinced there was more to it than everyone else thought.
More often than not, he was right.
He’d hunted down justice so many times.
He wasn’t going to give up on Elaine Schumer just yet.
“Michael Reed killed Elaine Schumer,” Brian said.
A few of the officers looked at one another and rolled their eyes.
Marlow squeezed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “McDone, we’ve discussed—”
“He confessed to the murder of Elaine Schumer. He said the words. Then he disappeared. Now I don’t know where the fuck he’s gone, and I don’t know how the fuck we’re gonna find him. But we are. We are because I’ve stood in this station so many fucking times before, and I’ve known there’s more to a case than meets the eye.”
“So you’re sticking with the whole Elaine being murdered line?”
“Yes,” Brian said. “Of course I fucking am. You’ve seen the CCTV. You’ve seen the rest of the evidence. And you’ve ignored it. Why? Because you want to ‘give the girl’s family peace.’ And because you’re more interested in piling our resources into hunting down the chief constable than you are one of the people he was supposed to be looking out for.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marlow asked.
Brian cleared his throat. He had to tone down the chief constable rhetoric, for now. “Look. I won’t pretend my methods are the best. I won’t pretend I’m perfect. And I won’t pretend I haven’t got it wrong before. But right now, it looks pretty clear to me that Elaine Schumer didn’t die of ‘accidental death,’ and she didn’t kill herself, either. Now maybe I’m wrong. And if I’m wrong, then I’m sorry for following my instincts. But you just have to trust me on this. I’ve been in this job enough damned years to know when something’s not worth giving up on. And right now, I’m telling you, this case is not worth giving up on.”
The office was silent. Brian wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing.
Then, Marlow broke the silence. “What do you want?”
Brian gulped. He looked at every single officer in this office, before settling his eyes back on Marlow.
“I want to go after Michael Reed. I want to get Elaine Schemer her justice.”
Forty-Two
Michael Reed looked at his phone and wondered whether he was going about all this the right way.
It was the middle of the afternoon and it was scorching. He was down in an apartment on Blackpool, one he’d found on AirBNB a few days back. It wasn’t the prettiest place, but the landlord accepted cash and it was within his budget. He knew it wouldn’t be a permanent setup. But he had greater plans for the future. It’d do for now.
He just wasn’t sure which road he was going to go down.
He lifted his head and looked over at the closed curtains. Outside, he heard cars driving past. Every single one that passed, he wondered if it might be the moment. The moment a police car turned up and arrested him for what he’d done.
Or at least, what they thought he’d done.
He leaned back against his squeaky single mattress and stared up at the ceiling. Flies crawled along above him. He felt sweaty, in dire need of a shower, but the shower in this place just shot scorching hot water and he wasn’t in a mood for that in this heat. His head ached. He was hungry. This was no life.
But it was a life he’d brought on himself, all because of his decisions.
He thought back to seven days ago when he’d stood on the roof of the BetterLives building and considered just jumping and giving up. After all, what else did he have to live for? He was a fuckup. He had no direction in life. He wasn’t going anywhere. And now he was on the run.
It didn’t help that he’d confessed to Elaine’s murder.
A bitter taste filled his mouth as he recalled that memory. He wasn’t sure why exactly he’d confessed to it. After all, he knew it would catch up with him eventually. But in that moment, he’d been convinced he was doing the right thing. He was going to jump anyway, so he might as well do whatever he could do to end the case. To stop the police in their tracks.
To protect those he loved.
And then the officer, McDone, he thought, had some weird kind of seizure. He’d seen two opportunities. Either jump or run.
And in that final moment of decision, he’d picked the same cowardly option he’d picked the rest of his cowardly life.
He’d run.
He’d been on the run ever since. He knew the police would catch up with him, eventually. But he was at peace with the idea of suicide, now. Sure, he didn’t want to die. But if he had to die, then so be it.
Unless…
He looked back at his phone. He knew he shouldn’t even have the footage he had. It was dangerous. But that footage also gave him a power. It left the ball in his court.
He’d have to destroy his phone. There was no doubt about that. Because if the police or anyone found it, they’d see the truth.
He opened his address book, scrolled down his recent contacts and dialled.
Then he cancelled the call. He couldn’t face the conversation. Not right now.
He opened up his texts instead. Any news? He typed.
No reply.
Just talk to me. Please. X
Again, nothing.
It’d been the same for a couple of days now. He wasn’t getting any response or answers at all. He started to worry that maybe the police had got to her.
But even worse than that, he started to worry that this was part of her plan all along…
Part of her revenge.
He closed his messages and opened up his video files. He didn’t like revisiting that awful moment. After all, it’d all gone so fucking wrong. How it played out wasn’t part of the plan. It was messed up. Every fucking thing was messed up. His whole life was messed up, and that moment on the roof of Baker’s Inn was the cherry on the fucking icing on the fucking messed up cake of his entire messed up existence.
He hovered a thumb over the video. Thought about hitting play.
Then his phone vibrated.
Adrenaline raced through his body. He rushed to open the message.
When he read the words, his stomach sank completely.
Can’t talk. Sorry. I love you. Xxx
Michael felt every muscle in his body tense. His pulse throbbed in his temples. She was throwing him to the wolves. That’s what this was. She was cutting him loose now the attention was on him. She was probably hoping he killed himself after all. Fuck. How had things got so fucking messed up?
He felt a tear roll down his cheek and wiped it away as memories of the good times filled his mind. The picnics they’d been on. The steamy sessions of fucking they’d had. Things had seemed so perfect. He’d had the best of both worlds, all his messed-up life.
Now it was all broken.
He closed the message and opened up his media library again.
He hovered his thumb over the video, all two minutes nineteen seconds of it.
He hit play.
He watched the footage unfold. He watched the panic, then the confusion.
He watched her splashing around in the water, begging for help.
He watched the moment it all went wrong.
When the lid to the water tank closed.
When he couldn’t budge it, couldn’t shift it, ripping his sleeve in the process.
He watched himself finally pull that tank aside and stare down into the dead eyes of the girl he loved so much.
Then he heard the voice in the background, and he felt like he was back there all over again, and that voice was right beside him.
“What have we done? What the fuc
k have we done?”
Forty-Three
“So if you don’t think Michael did it, then who the bloody hell do you think did it?”
Brian sat in the passenger seat of Annie’s courtesy car. Yeah. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t driving this time. But she seemed to have let him off the hook without giving him too much of an earful for what happened to her car. He’d paid her for it. She’d accepted the cash, called him a cunt, and that was the end of that matter. A line in the sand.
But shit. There were much more serious matters at stake now.
“I looked deeper into Elaine’s blogs. It seems like she was seeing someone.”
“Well, duh. She’s a twenty-one-year-old girl at uni. The chances she’s seeing someone are pretty high.”
“I looked closer at the blogs, though,” Brian said, turning to Annie as she accelerated towards the Tulketh Mill, Michael’s last known location five days ago. Unlikely they were going to find him there still, but they had to look. “The posts we thought pointed to Bobby Wisdom. The ones where she said she was worried about a stalker.”
“Which adds up. Bobby Wisdom was being a creep with her.”
“I dug deeper into those blogs. Well, Hannah did. She’s better at computer stuff than me. The bits about the stalking were added later. Much later.”
Annie narrowed her eyes, which, considering she was driving, didn’t fill Brian with optimism. “So someone edited those parts in later?”
“Much later. In fact, they edited them in on the 22nd May.”
“Wait. That’s two nights before Elaine was killed.”
“Yeah.”
“If someone wanted to edit in some crap and make it look like someone else was responsible for Elaine’s death, then why would they do it beforehand? They’d do it afterwards.”
“Unless they knew they were going to kill Elaine.”
“What?”
“Unless the person who killed Elaine was planning on killing her all along, and they wanted to make sure their tracks were covered.”
Annie shook her head as they got caught in traffic at the lights. “I still dunno, McDone. Seems like you’re acting on speculation.”
“We’re police officers. We speculate. It’s what we do.”
Brian unlocked his phone and scrolled through the screenshots. “The interesting thing about her blog posts is that they aren’t exactly written… articulately for an English student.”
“They’re off-the-cuff blog posts. She can write ’em however she wants.”
“No. I’m talking ‘theres’ and ‘theirs’. English students don’t make those kinds of mistakes. They aren’t the kind of mistakes you just make in the heat of the moment. Trust me. I’ve met enough grammar nazis to know.
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Bear with me,” Brian said. “But I think someone else wrote these blog posts. And I also don’t think the iPad they were written on belonged to Elaine at all.”
“But it was in her—”
“I took a closer look into Elaine’s home.”
“What? When did you do this?”
“I’ve been off. I called by.”
“You shouldn’t—”
“Anyway, I looked at all Elaine’s old electronics, that kind of thing. There’s no sign of any iPads or anything like that. Nothing Apple at all.”
“Again, you’re speculating. She probably couldn’t afford Apple before her tasty student loan. Student loans are basically Apple funds these days, right?”
“Maybe,” Brian said, tumbling to the side as Annie accelerated closer to the Mill. “But it gets interesting when you consider Michael Reed is an Apple fanatic.”
“How do you…”
“Again, I had some spare time. I took a look around his place. It’s Apple mad. He has like, four iPads, three Macs. So there’s every chance he could’ve just handed one of his products to Elaine. Or left it in her possession.”
“So Michael writes a load of blogs and then he leaves an iPad with Elaine. Then he kills her. I still don’t get where this is going.”
“Maybe Michael was obsessed with Elaine. Maybe he heard she was seeing someone and he got jealous. Or maybe he’s just fucked up and into that kind of shit. His search history wouldn’t contradict that too much.”
Annie shook her head as the mill got closer. “I get where you’re coming from. And I accept it’s pointing towards Michael. But if he wrote those blogs, then how did he know every little thing about what Elaine did at uni? How did he know the secrets Sammi and Elaine had? How did he know about the times they went out and ended up taking a train to Blackpool at 2 a.m.? How did he know about the guys they slept with? The good times? The bad times?”
“He must’ve been…”
Brian was about to suggest that Michael must’ve been stalking Elaine in some way.
But then his mouth went dry.
A realisation took hold of him.
A dark realisation that made his entire body freeze.
“Brian? You’re not going crazy on me again, are you?”
“Turn around,” Brian said.
“But the mill’s just—”
“Turn the fuck around.”
Annie sighed. “Fucking insane,” she said, as she spun the car around and started heading back in the direction they’d come from. “What’s up with you? I mean, what the hell’s up with you now?”
“Maybe Michael Reed didn’t write those blogs.”
Annie laughed. “Right, seriously Brian, you’ve lost it. You’re changing your mind over who’s the suspect again? Just listen to yourself—”
“You said it yourself. Who knows Elaine’s movements at uni, her whereabouts, her everyday life and secrets better than anyone else?”
Annie opened her mouth to protest.
Then Brian saw the realisation spread across her face.
“Shit,” she said.
“Put your foot down,” Brian said, the hairs on his neck standing on end. “I think we’ve just found the final piece of this fucked up puzzle.”
Forty-Four
Brian didn’t feel a sense of victory as he walked down the pathway towards the Reed household.
The afternoon had taken a turn for the cloudy. Bloody typical, really. Classic Britain to go balls up just when it was improving. There was a real sense of quiet down Richmond Avenue, where the Reads lived. It was as if the whole street had paused, waiting for this moment, for Brian to make the momentous discovery. The discovery that was so subtle, so easy to miss, but the discovery that meant so much.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Annie asked.
Brian looked back at her. He took a deep breath of the humid air. “It’s okay. I’ve got this.”
Annie shuffled her feet either side. “Are you sure you—”
“Respectfully, Annie, you haven’t believed in me this entire case. Neither has anyone else in the police. Nobody’s supported me. Nobody’s backed me. I’ve done this on my own. So I’ll finish it on my own.”
Annie opened her mouth like she was getting ready to argue.
Then she just closed her lips and nodded. “Don’t hold it against me. I was only working with what I had.”
“And so was I.”
“Respectfully, you fucked my car up. So I’d say we’re about even.”
Brian chuckled a little. “Yeah. Yeah I guess we are.”
He turned around to the front door, and he had a horrible flashback to the Eye Snatcher case. He’d turned his back on Brad. He’d made him wait in the car. And look what’d happened to Brad.
He couldn’t let the same thing happen to Annie.
But he was pretty confident this entire case was completely different.
He walked up to the front door, held his breath, and knocked.
When nobody answered, Brian’s worries started to intensify. When nobody answered on the second and the third time, he was in full-blown suspicion mode. He looked back at the car. Annie sat there, shrugging. He loo
ked around the street for a car, some sign of a runaway, but there was nothing. Total silence.
“Screw it,” Brian said. “Bloody screw it.”
He turned the handle to the front door.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t budge.
He sighed and started to walk away.
Then he saw movement upstairs.
He froze. Squinted. Had he really seen movement? Or was he just imagining things?
No. There it was. The cream curtains twitched again.
“Sammi,” he called. “I just want to talk. That’s all.”
The curtains didn’t budge again.
“Sammi, please! I just need to—”
The front door opened.
But Sammi wasn’t standing there.
It was her brother, Michael.
Brian’s stomach turned. The last time he’d stood opposite Michael, Michael had been leaning outside the window of the ruined BetterLives building and readying to jump. He’d put a knife to his neck just minutes before that. Then he’d gone missing.
Now, he was back.
And he didn’t just have a knife. Not this time.
He had a gun.
“Come inside,” he said.
Brian shook his head. “Michael, this doesn’t have to—”
“Get the fuck inside this house right now. Make it look like you’re just walking in here willingly. No signals to the officer in the car out there. None of that. Just get the fuck in here.”
Brian wanted to look back at Annie. He wanted so desperately to give her a signal. But he knew he was alone right now. He’d said it himself. He’d started this whole investigation, and he’d be the one to end it all, too.
If the investigation didn’t end him.
“There’s backup on their way,” Brian said.
A smile twitched at the corners of Michael’s mouth. “I’ve been keeping a close eye on you, ‘Brian McDone.’ I think we both know there’s no backup coming for you. And I think we both know there aren’t many people that’ll be too surprised if you top yourself.”
Brian’s skin tingled. “How could you know that?”
“Trust me,” Michael said. “I’ve done my homework.”
