The Stranger Within

by Tara Lyons

  ‘In her note, Murphy made it quite clear that she wanted revenge. She wants to play with me, with all of us, for arresting her. She’s bloody well driven right past this very station, knowing that eventually we’d look at the cameras. Covent Garden, Hyde Park and Soho are places where she has killed before. And the fact that she’s taken Fraser tells me she’s not about to skip town.’

  ‘Okay … so where does that leave us?’ PC Shand bellowed in a monotonous tone. ‘What are we supposed to do, run around London hoping we’ll bump into this crazy woman?’

  Hamilton narrowed his eyes, staring at Shand until the officer finally looked away, and sucked the air between his teeth. ‘As I was about to say. Rocky, the sighting of the car in Covent Garden, when was that?’

  Rocky’s finger trailed over a piece of paper in his hand. ‘This morning, one of the first sightings, so—’

  ‘So that’s exactly where Murphy is. The London Theatre in Covent Garden, to be exact. It’s where Grace Murphy worked before we arrested her.’ He thumped the desk, cursing himself for not thinking of it sooner. ‘She felt comfortable at the theatre, safe even, it was like a second home to her. Of course, that was until we arrested the manager for murder …’ he trailed off, fearing at the moment he could muddle the prospect of finding Fraser with insignificant details of the previous investigation. ‘I want to know what’s been happening with that building in the past twelve months, who owns it and if we can get eyes on it immediately.’ Then, facing the room, Hamilton advised the officers to prepare for a raid.

  17

  A swift kick to Fraser’s lower back sent her rolling across the wooden floor, but she didn’t care. Instead, she welcomed the crouching position and sucked in the cold air as if she was drinking through a straw. Dizziness took over and forced Fraser to sit with her back against the wall and her knees tucked up under her chin.

  It was dark; the stage lit only by a few church candles surrounding them in a circle, as though she was about to be offered up as a human sacrifice. Finally, Fraser made out Grace Murphy’s figure when the woman took a step towards her. The woman’s body was a shadow, an outline with her hands behind her back, and the face dark and contorted. Fraser wanted to utilise her training, entice a conversation between herself and her attacker, but the goosebumps spreading over her skin as well as her chattering teeth made her realise her mind was as frozen as her body.

  Murphy plunged forward, wrapping thick and battered bell rope around Fraser’s wrists and then her ankles. Within a matter of minutes she was hog-tied and hating herself. Why hadn’t she kicked out? Why wasn’t the adrenaline coursing through her veins, urging her to fight? Had her job taught her nothing about these situations? No, she answered herself, thinking of how her training had focused on her rescuing the gagged and bound victims, and always with a team behind her.

  While wondering if she should actually say something, Murphy stood and looked down at her like a piece of shit she’d walked in and dragged through the house. A gun hanging limply in her hand.

  ‘I thought a knife was your weapon of choice.’ Fraser heard her own voice but frowned at the hint of sarcasm staining it — what am I thinking, antagonising her further?

  Murphy cackled, reached her arm around her waist and untucked a large blade from the waistband of her trousers. The woman’s dark eyes flicked from one weapon to the other, as her hands bobbed slowly up and down, before flashing her evil glare at Fraser again. ‘For you, I haven’t decided which is best to use.’

  Fraser looked away while Murphy bent over and lowered the tip of the knife into one of the candle’s flames. The woman was toying with her, and she couldn’t yet decide which emotion had taken control of her senses: fear or anger.

  Murphy roared laughing again, twirling the handle of the poker-hot blade in her hand, and paced around the stage. Dramatically weaving around the candles with large steps and swaying near the naked flame, Murphy hummed a tune.

  ‘How did you know where I lived?’ Fraser blurted, again not recognising her own voice.

  The figure stopped prancing around the stage and stood right in front of her, making Fraser strain her neck to look up, the rope pulling tighter on her wrists as she did. Murphy’s eyes were as black as coal and she had dropped her head to one side. Fraser’s mind couldn’t persuade her throat to swallow the thick saliva.

  ‘I was watching you,’ Murphy replied. ‘Well, not me personally, of course … you made sure that wasn’t possible, didn’t you? But, this time, I wasn’t working alone.’

  Unsure if it was the question she had asked, Fraser wondered what had made Murphy purse her lips together so tightly that they turned white with fury, and why she had contorted her face into a scowl after finishing her sentence. Regardless of her expression, the woman was talking, and Fraser tried to keep the flow going.

  ‘Why me?’ she continued.

  ‘Because it’s your fucking fault I was arrested. Your fucking fault I was sent to that hell hole. Your fucking fault that I had to—’ Murphy stopped abruptly and scratched her scalp with the tip of the knife.

  The grating sound sent a shiver down Fraser’s spine.

  ‘I really had you wrong, lady,’ Murphy continued with a snarl.

  ‘How … how do you mean?’

  Murphy leaned back slightly and ran her eyes of stone over Fraser. ‘Well, you’re pretty and obviously good at your fucking job, yet … yet you’re so lonely. You work and you go home. All alone. You have no one to go home to, except that daft cat.’ Murphy paused and smiled deviously. ‘Well, you did have a cat to go home to.’

  An image of a shadowed figure on her dining room table, before she was knocked out in her kitchen, flashed through her mind — only this time, her mind allowed the shadows to clear, and she saw the blood and fur. She gagged, the saliva mixing with bile as it made its return up from her stomach, the manic woman’s laughter echoing in her ears the entire time.

  Fraser suppressed her screams of rage and anger and sadness. Though the coarse ropes chaffed against her skin, the dizziness skated on the edge of taking control and her heart ached when she thought of her fur baby Felix, she refused to let Murphy feel victorious. She pulled a deep breath in through her nose, pushed back her shoulders and looked her captor square in the eyes.

  ‘Perhaps I should feel honoured.’

  Murphy flinched. ‘What?’

  ‘All this …’ Fraser looked around with wide eyes … ‘This theatrical performance, risking your life to escape from the hospital and taking another victim’s life because of me. Your desperate need for revenge has brought us here, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Victim,’ Murphy screeched. ‘Far from it, he …’ she trailed off, her attention unfocused as she paced back and forth and scratched the back of the hand which gripped the gun. ‘And yes, if it wasn’t for you, I’d be in Spain now, enjoying my life and … and I’ve said all this. Why are you making me repeat myself?’

  ‘You can’t keep running away from what you’ve done, Grace …’ Fraser cringed, shook her head slightly and tried to correct herself. ‘…Carly, the crimes you’ve committed—’

  ‘Why did you come to the hospital to visit me?’

  Fraser paused at the interruption and found Murphy’s eyes glaring at her. ‘My mother suffered from bipolar—’

  ‘I don’t have bipolar.’

  Fraser shook her head again. ‘No, I know … I thought maybe I could help—’

  ‘Help? Help? You fucking put me back into my nightmare.’

  Fraser sighed, the constant cutting in and wandering around from Murphy made her feel nauseous. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a sip of water, or a bite to eat, and manoeuvred her tongue around her mouth and teeth to unlock an ounce of spittle.

  ‘Carly, listen to me, what you’re doing is wrong and you need help. You’re hurting the wrong people. I’m not the source of your pain.’

  Murphy bared her teeth like a dog. ‘I was less safe in that hospital than anywhere I
’ve ever been in the last twenty years. You condemned me to that. My body was imprisoned as well as my mind. I just want to be free.’ The last word hung in the air, like the sombre note at the end of a heart-wrenching ballad, and the woman’s head fell back.

  Fraser, terrified about the uncertainty of Murphy’s character, soothed her voice. ‘I spoke with your doctor … Emine, I think her name was, and she told me how well you were doing.’

  ‘And I bet you believed everything the good doctor told you.’ Murphy fell to her knees and shoved her face into Fraser’s. She sniffed a few times before whispering, ‘You smell of sex. Are you shagging your boss?’

  Fraser recoiled, remembering Murphy’s accusations when she and Hamilton had arrested her at Luton airport. Back then, Murphy had seemed hooked on the idea that the pair were having an affair because Hamilton had brought her, instead of Clarke, with him. She saw now that Murphy used this as a distraction to not answer the vital questions. Murphy licked Fraser’s cheek and swiftly jumped back onto her feet.

  ‘Stop this,’ Fraser shouted. ‘I know what you’re trying to do, but I won’t stop. I’m not the person you’re mad at. Your pain runs deeper than this. Something happened to you, and you need to open up and accept the help before it’s too late.’

  Murphy’s head tilted from one side to the other. ‘Too late for you, you mean?’

  Fraser gritted her teeth, determined to get through to Murphy. ‘Grace, I know you’re in there, just listen to my voice. Yes, I arrest criminals and help send them to prison, but I truly want to help you. I want to get to the root of why you’re angry, why these murders had to happen. If we can do that together, no one else needs to be hurt and we have a chance of ending all of this. You can see your family and—’

  Murphy’s fist connected with Fraser’s cheek, causing her to topple over onto her side, a gush of blood fired from her mouth.

  ‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!’ Murphy screamed. ‘You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. You’re—’

  Murphy spun around as if she had heard something and Fraser used the disturbance to try to pull herself back up into a sitting position. The angle of the body wrapped in rope made it impossible. Suddenly, the woman was behind her, the knife against her throat, whispering in her ear to stay quiet.

  ‘Who hurt you?’ Fraser whispered back, wanting to make a connection with Murphy. But a forceful reply came in the form of Fraser’s hair being yanked back. The pressure it caused on her interlocking wrists and ankles made her whimper. The blade pushed further into her skin and she silently nodded.

  ‘We need to leave,’ Murphy said before lowering the weapon.

  ‘Where are we going?’ A strip of duct tape passed Fraser’s eyes and her heartbeat doubled.

  ‘No more fucking questions from you.’ Murphy kneeled in front of her; her breath once again warming Fraser’s face. The woman sat back on her hunches, stared at Fraser and dug her nails into the palm of her own hand, scratching until she drew blood. After letting out a long sigh, she said, ‘If there’s so much as a peep from you, the next person’s blood you see will be on your hands.’

  18

  As the convoy of police cars and vans drove along Victoria Embankment from New Scotland Yard, Hamilton glanced back out of the window at the sixteen-storey Gothic clocktower surrounded by scaffolding. Both hands on Big Ben’s illumined face ticked along to midnight and yet despite the bell’s silence, due to renovation work until 2021, the familiar bongs sounded out of habit in Hamilton’s ears. As Clarke navigated along the Thames towards Covent Garden, and the night-time view of London sped by, the imaginary sound vibrated deep within Hamilton’s mind. He frowned, the tension squashing his head down as he turned back around in his seat, the bells ringing just for him, reminding him of precious time slipping away.

  The bongs bounced from flashback to flashback: Hamilton meeting Fraser for the first time over three years ago as a young and eager sergeant; she had told him swapping Kent for London was something she needed to do for personal reasons — no more was said, and Hamilton didn’t pry; he fully understood the need for privacy. Natural blonde hair, usually swinging in a long pony-tail, and the little, if any, make-up on her porcelain face always made her appear younger than her twenty-nine years. Fraser glued to the computer in the morning, the afternoon and well into the evening during most of the team’s cases; her patience for research, attention to detail and the ability to pick out a suspicious transaction on a bank statement in under thirty seconds. The man stepping over Fraser’s body in the street. Her dead cat on the dining table. The note.

  Screeching tyres shook Hamilton from his thoughts and he automatically flew into action with the rest of the officers. Deploying the Police Firearms Unit had been a necessity after Hamilton’s own team had been unable to get their sights inside The London Theatre. The venue had been closed and the front entrance barricaded for over a year. However, with the location being their only lead for a possible whereabouts of Grace Murphy — and potentially Fraser — Hamilton took a step back after the armed officers gave the team a briefing.

  While different teams scattered themselves outside the theatre to disrupt any escape plan Murphy may have and protect any pedestrians that could pass by — despite being midnight, the streets were never fully empty — Hamilton and his team followed a group of armed officers down a side alley which led to a back entrance of the theatre. Utilising earpieces as their method of communication with the officer leading the raid, Hamilton hand-signalled for Clarke, Rocky and Dixon to stay crouched behind him.

  With an order finally shouted into their ears, the officers sprung forward, smashing through the back door and into the darkness of the building. Hamilton and team filed behind the armed officers, their torch beams leading the way along what Hamilton knew to be the corridors leading to the theatre’s offices, green room and costume area. He strained his ear through the noise of doors opening and closing, boots thudding on the floor and the repetition of the word ‘clear’ being shouted. Frustration bubbled inside Hamilton’s gut, he desperately wanted to run around the armed officer and check the next room, wanting to move things on faster, his eyes finally adjusting to the dimness.

  ‘Activity on stage … main arena,’ a voice echoed through the earpiece.

  A beam of light spread out in front of him and Hamilton identified the hallway that would lead him to the backstage area. He hot-footed along the corridor, aware of feet following him, but the commotion and chaos making him unsure who it actually was. The area in front of him glowed brightly for a few moments and smoke snaked up his nostrils.

  ‘Blaze extinguished,’ the voice came again in his ear. ‘Theatre is clear.’

  Hamilton stepped out onto the stage and his eyes scanned the open space — an officer releasing a fire extinguisher next to the burnt ends of the huge black curtains; large church candles dotted around the stage, their fiery wicks coming to an end; helmeted colleagues checking each row of seats. He turned to thump the wall, but instead landed his fist into a stage prop, and his hand punched directly through the brick-effect cardboard.

  ‘How the hell have we missed her again?’ Hamilton yelled.

  ‘Guv,’ Clarke called out from his hunched over position at the front of the stage. ‘There’s traces of blood here. It’s fresh.’

  Hamilton clicked his fingers, preparing to give an order to call SOCO immediately, but found Dixon reaching for her phone and giving him the thumbs up as she walked away from the thudding footsteps of officers still checking the dress circle and upper circle seats. Hamilton looked over at them and shook his head.

  ‘What are you thinking, guv?’ Clarke asked, stepping up next to him. The deep frown lines in his partner’s forehead looked as though they had been carved by the Egyptians; stubble grew wild and patchy over Clarke’s usually clean-shaven face and his skin looked tinged with a dull greyness.

  ‘I’m wondering why Murphy would come here,’ Hamilton replied, and released a long sigh, as
suming he himself looked as disheartened as his partner.

  ‘Well, she worked here.’

  ‘No, Grace did.’

  Clarke’s furrows etched further into his skin and he made a noise, a grumble or a sigh, Hamilton could not decipher. ‘Yes, guv, but Grace and Carly are the same person. So, effectively, it’s the same thing. This was their place of work.’

  ‘No, it’s not the same thing at all.’ Hamilton rubbed a hand back and forth over his head. ‘I’m with you, Clarke. I don’t get this whole split personality thing, but the fact of the matter is, we need to get our heads around it.’

  ‘It’s weird—’

  ‘It’s real and we need to deal with it,’ he lashed out. ‘I just can’t help but think that this place was important to Grace and not her alter personality Carly … so why come here?’

  Clarke shrugged his shoulders. ‘In that case, perhaps she was hoping we wouldn’t connect this place to her.’

  ‘Or maybe she actually did want us to find her,’ Rocky interjected. ‘Think about it, today she’s driven that car all around our vicinity. Look here.’ He pointed to the blood staining the wooden floor. ‘If that’s Fraser’s, there’s a chance she’s been within a ten-minute walking distance of us the whole bloody day.’

  Before he could sympathise with Rocky’s frustration, a uniformed officer interrupted them by calling Hamilton’s name from the last row of seats in the stalls. He dashed down the sides steps with both men, and now Dixon too, hot on his trial.

  ‘Sir, we discovered a letter addressed to you here.’ PC Goldberg pointed to the end chair and handed the envelope to Hamilton.

  He snatched the paper and ripped the envelope opening. His team continued to discuss the whys and maybes of Murphy’s plan, but Hamilton zoned out from their voices as his eyes once again hungrily read the hand-written note. A shiver corkscrewed up his back.