Black Heart: A totally gripping serial-killer thriller

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  ‘I need you on the storage unit,’ I tell Delaney, ‘I think Davis ought to talk to the husband, seeing as though he has such respect for women.’ I say this tongue-in-cheek of course. I don’t look to see his response, but I can pretty much imagine it. ‘Good going gang,’ I finish up, ‘talk to everyone, as many people as you can, but it’s Harper we need to get to, and quickly.’

  ‘The estate agents knew her as Danni-Jo,’ Harding says, ‘but can’t shed any light as to her whereabouts, said she told them she was going away on business for a while and to lease her apartment on a short-let basis. They’ve provided us with her details, her phone number, but it’s already been disconnected.’

  I roll my eyes. Another dead end.

  ‘We did get a description of her though boss: blonde, striking, around 5ft 5in, early thirties, well-dressed, slim. She fits the bill. They’ve agreed to meet us at the property – they’ve squared it with the tenant. We need to have a look around, search the place. Forensics found unknown DNA in Karen’s apartment and if we’re lucky we’ll get some from her apartment and a potential match. She could even already be on the system.’

  ‘Well then,’ I say, looking at Harding, ‘what are you doing sitting here – check it!’

  * * *

  Before I leave, I take the opportunity to call Fiona Li but first, on a complete whim, I decide to send Florence a text message. It says just one word: ‘Sorry.’ I hope it’s enough.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  PC Burns, a friendly-faced middle-aged woman who strikes me as a solid, hard-working copper is briefing me on the house call she and PC Choudrhi made after Karen put in a complaint. She’s referring back to her notes with precision.

  ‘Karen seemed distressed’, she tells me, ‘when we arrived at her apartment she appeared nervous – and she also appeared a little paranoid. She was convinced that her ex-husband had poisoned her cat, Esmerelda, after the vet had claimed it was likely she had ingested poison and needed to be put down. Karen’s ex-husband, Richard Marks, is known to us. Delightful bloke who liked to give her a good battering on the not-so-odd occasion, apparently.’

  ‘Yeah, so I hear,’ I say flatly.

  ‘Yes, well Karen looked much older than forty-eight,’ Burns says sadly, ‘that’s what abuse does to you… I’ve seen it so many times.’

  It almost fractures my heart to hear about Karen’s miserable, wretched life, of all the adversity she had faced and struggled so fiercely to overcome, only to be met with such a grizzly, horrific end. No fucking justice to any of it. Anger rushes like blood to the surface of my skin, making it prickle.

  PC Choudrhi strikes me as the still-waters type so I ask him a few questions. Silent types, in my experience, sometimes have unbelievable observational skills. While others are busy engaging, their brains are operating on another level, watching and absorbing the minutiae of life around them. I turn to him.

  ‘What impression did you get from the suspect?’

  ‘I didn’t like her,’ he says, no window dressing. ‘There was something disingenuous about her.’

  I like this word, disingenuous.

  ‘Disingenuous, how?’

  He shrugs almost subconsciously, pausing as he thinks. ‘She seemed… she chose her words carefully, at least in my opinion, placing ideas and thoughts into the conversation.’

  ‘Like what exactly?’

  He pauses again, I can see he’s struggling to explain and I understand, I understand better than most. ‘It’s not really what she said… not even what she didn’t say… It’s just, I don’t know, intuition,’ he explains. ‘Sorry Sir,’ he apologises, ‘not much help I realise.’

  But I smile and nod.

  ‘She was a dark blonde,’ Burns says, ‘slim, around 5ft 5in or 5ft 6in maybe, late twenties or early thirties, said she was a student…’ She flicks through her note pad, scanning the pages, ‘performing arts… ULC I’ve written here.’

  Burns tells me that the blonde had a key to Karen’s apartment, she’d been given it after she’d locked herself out a few weeks’ prior – she had seemed like a caring, concerned neighbour. She told Burns they were friends, explained that she occasionally stopped by for a cup of tea or a glass of wine. Burns talks about the apartment, how beautiful and tasteful it was and how Danni-Jo had said her father had left it to her in his will. She was chatty and helpful, expressing sympathy for her neighbour, and said that she was glad to have established a relationship with her.

  ‘She was very pretty,’ Burns says, almost as an afterthought.

  Suddenly I get a chill. One of those icy numbers that makes you shudder a little involuntarily, like someone’s just walked over your grave.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  George is a delightful child. He’s smiley and even-tempered. He doesn’t cry much, except for when he’s hungry or needs his nappy changing, and he sleeps like a dream – for hours on end without waking – and even then, when he wakes, he’s usually in a good mood, making contented gurgling noises and cooing.

  She watches him in his cot as he stirs himself awake, pulling his knees up to his chest and grabbing hold of his tiny toes. His face is a library of expressions as though he’s testing out every muscle. She dresses him beautifully; he has a wardrobe stuffed with exquisite designer outfits, stripy Petit Bateau rompers and matching Ralph Lauren two-pieces, corduroy shorts and miniature shirts, dungarees and tiny leather jackets, soft pram shoes and Converse chucks, and Gucci loafers for special occasions. Nothing but the best and finest for George.

  He’s taken to her like most men do – easily, though perhaps, even she admits, that this is more to do with George’s sunny disposition than anything else. He loves being cuddled and held, tickled and attended to, yet he’s also quite happy being left on his little mat to play independently, kicking his legs and rolling over onto his belly, something he’s only just started to do, she’s noticed. Watching George is her new favourite pastime. Every day there’s something new to marvel at: a noise, a movement, a facial expression, a milestone. His selfish bitch of a mother couldn’t seem to care less. She goes out to ‘work’ so she says, but secretly Rachel believes she’s off shopping, drinking, at the gym, socialising with friends and attending to her myriad beauty needs. She doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in little George and his progress; she’s too busy preening, getting herself in shape so she can snare herself another rich business man to rinse dry and pretend to love while she impresses the neighbours.

  There’s something so fickle about babies she thinks as she picks up his warm, strong little body and pulls him into her, as long as they’re getting what they want they’re happy. ‘Shall we have breakfast, George?’ she asks him, examining his fluffy head, his tiny ears and perfectly shaped nose, a real button of a nose. ‘Some pureed pear perhaps, you like that don’t you? Not too tart.’ George gurgles and coos, making little high-pitched sounds of what she thinks are appreciation, as if he’s really trying to talk to her. ‘Then we’ll go for a walk in Langley Park, see the swans and the ducks, the duckies, yeah, duckie wuks… quack, quack… We can go on the swings and the slide too, hmm? Yes, good boy,’ she sings to him in babyspeak as she places him back on the mat and begins the process of preparing breakfast, peeling, coring and pureeing the soft pears with care and warming his formula, enjoying the responsibility of her new role. This motherhood business has really given her a new sense of purpose. So much so that she thinks she may even want to do it herself one day, one day soon in fact. Having someone so small and helpless dependent upon you for everything: sustenance, love, cuddles, cleanliness, stimulation. It’s a powerful, omnipotent feeling that she likes. She doesn’t understand why so many women bitch and moan about how difficult it is, how emotionally taxing, draining, exhausting, compromising… They must be just weak and selfish, the lot of them. She has an image then, of George’s mother bending over his tiny graveside, the grief-stricken mother in black, bereft and inconsolable yet somewhere within her a tiny slither
of relief lingers. She has her life back.

  She thinks about Daniel then. Not so much the man himself but what he’d had the potential to represent to her and the outside world. A hard-working, loving husband and father, solidity, a unit; something she has never been part of or fully understood. All her points of reference have been garnered from listening to others, or from TV, films and books. She tries to really feel these feelings, conjure them up inside of herself, but she simply has no benchmark to go by, just a beautiful fantasy of a reality she isn’t familiar with. Daniel. She’d tried to excite and intrigue him, but it had failed. That he’d snubbed her open invitation to have sex with her had threatened her very existence at a deep core level, although she had ensured he would not know this. Instead, she’d asked him about Rachel, the woman he so obviously deeply loved and missed, a woman who had been cruelly taken from him suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving him broken, damaged and unable to recover. How beautifully he had spoken of Rachel and his love for her, of their love for each other. And with each word she came closer to the truth that no one, no one ever had or would feel the same things about her. She thought of all the times she had given herself to men; hundreds, possibly thousands of times, the feelings she had experienced in those moments, of being desired and special, however fleeting and ephemeral, however transient, they had existed, she had felt them, even with the paying clients. She didn’t mind the rough ones, in fact, she had always felt more at ease with the ones who wanted to debase her, hurt her physically and degrade her, there was comfort in familiarity. Because after the degradation came the love, just like it had with her father. She could still feel him now, bearing down upon her tiny frame, the weight of his protruding stomach on her small pelvis… His power, crushing her, weighing her down. She still felt the sharp pain of him inside her sometimes, and with other men, the well-endowed ones, the pain seamlessly blending into pleasure. Afterwards he would hold her close to him, stroke her hair and arms until she fell asleep against his stomach, cradled in is arms. Daddy Bear. But Daniel had been different somehow, was different. Or perhaps she felt differently with him, a kinship, an understanding of what it was to be broken and bleeding inside. Whatever it was, lying there on that bed together in that quirky little hotel room above the restaurant had made her feel human, hopeful, that perhaps there could be redemption for her after all, at least once all of this was over.

  She wondered, as she maneuvered George into his high chair, his legs kicking in all directions, if she would ever have a child of her own. The doctors had told her that it was highly unlikely, that the damage to her insides would prevent it. But there were other ways, IVF, adoption, even surrogacy. There is more than one way to skin a cat. The saying makes her think of Esmerelda and in turn, Kizzy. She wonders if they’ve found her yet. She’d be starting to smell bad by now.

  She began to feed George his pear, scooping little blobs of puree into his open mouth like a baby bird in a nest. He liked his food, did George. In fact, George seemed to like just about everything really.

  ‘There’s a good Baby Bear,’ she said as he swallowed greedily.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I put the lights on as we make our way down to Rebecca Harper’s apartment block. And I feel every justification in doing so because as far as emergencies go this is pretty high up there. As much as I don’t want to conceive of the idea that there’s a human being on the planet that would want to harm a baby, I know that there’s a very real possibility, even probability, that this is Harper’s intention, or worse, that she’s already completed her twisted fairy tale.

  My phone rings as I tear through West End streets thick with traffic and tourism, bypassing them all in a flurry of blurred colour like a watercolour painting. There’s an urgency inside me now, a shift in adrenaline, because I know we’re getting closer and the situation is critical. I imagine Rebecca Harper with a child in her arms, I see her in my mind, pretty, blonde, pushing a pram, or holding a young child’s hand. Slipping unnoticed through society, another young mum out and about with her child; her dark intentions never suspected… It’s as dark as a thought can get really.

  It’s Harding. ‘Rebecca Harper, boss, it turns out that she was in a young offender’s institute for quite a while when she was a kid… then transferred to Greene Parks, the psychiatric unit for minors. She spent eight years there, boss, for allegedly killing her own mother – when she was nine years old.’

  I close my eyes and draw breath. We’re dealing with a psychopath. I’d suspected this but it makes the impact no less disturbing. She’s a child killer – in every sense. I ask myself how a nine-year-old child comes to kill their own mother.

  ‘Okay. You’ve been on to them, Greene Parks?’

  ‘Yes boss, we’ve requested the file. She was under the care of a Dr Elizabeth Magnesson. Apparently Magnesson continued to see Harper and counsel her up until quite recently, two years ago in fact.’

  ‘Call Greene Parks and tell them we’re coming down to see Magnesson as soon as we’re finished at the apartment. Make sure she’s available. This is urgent, Harding. Don’t be fobbed off. Any photo ID yet?’

  ‘No Boss, but it’s imminent.’

  I nod, but of course she can’t see this. ‘Well done Harding,’ I say before I hang up.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I don’t much like estate agents. I remember the estate agent who showed me and Rach around our apartment for the first time, some jumped-up little upstart in a Burton suit with a Gucci belt (that was probably snide) called Miles. His affability betrayed his insincerity with such transparency that it made us both feel a bit queasy. The cheap suit coupled with the pseudo-expensive belt summed up the disparity he was clearly grappling within himself: what he really was and what he hoped to become.

  Lana Jones, however, appears efficient and helpful. And terribly posh.

  ‘Such a dreadful business.’ Her blonde bob wobbles as she shakes her head in something resembling concern, ‘the woman opposite…’

  I nod, and ask her if she can let us into the apartment. She duly obliges. I can see she’s dying to ask questions, to know more about the ‘terrible business’ at number seven. It’s human nature of course. There’s police tape covering Karen’s front door and she looks at it, visibly shudders.

  ‘Gives me the heebie-jeebies thinking of that poor woman left in there… It was definitely murder then, Detective, not suicide? I read it the paper… same thing happened to that man didn’t it? Nigel someone, in the hotel room – at Le Reymond, beautiful hotel that, the suites are something else – have you been? So you’re looking for the girl… the one who lived here, Danni-Jo? Do you think she has something to do with it, that she could be the killer?’ Her eyes light up.

  I’m half expecting her to jump up and down and start clapping her hands together like a seal. I haven’t seen the papers yet, but I hope Touchy has done me proud. We didn’t have any ID on Danni-Jo, or Rebecca Harper or whoever the hell she really is, so I told Touchy to use the CCTV footage from the hotel, maybe jog a few memories that way. It was the best I could give her. All I could give her.

  ‘Chills my blood really, to think I’ve come face-to-face with a serial killer, well, a potential one anyway, such a pretty girl too, well, woman I suppose, but thinking back there was something quite childlike about her really.’ She pauses, as though this recollection has only just struck her. ‘But to think… well, you’d never have thought by looking at her that she was a psychopath, I mean, she slit their wrists open…’ Lana visibly shudders again.

  I’m tempted to tell her that psychopaths tend not to advertise their psychopathic tendencies, but it’s not my job to educate her. You’d think, by her accent, that her private school might’ve done that.

  ‘We’d appreciate it if you could let us have a look around the apartment, Miss Jones,’ Davis gives her a thin smile and she rolls her eyes apologetically as though she realises she has forgotten herself.

  ‘God, yes of course, of co
urse.’

  I ask her what they had talked about, she and Danni-Jo, and to give me her overall impression of her. This request seems to make her day.

  ‘She seemed very pleasant all in all, quite chatty and friendly, but it was a while back now you understand, so forgive me if I can’t recall the conversation verbatim, I talk to a lot of people day in, day out, you know, the job… must be the same for you… All the boys in the office were quite taken with her though, that much I do remember, couldn’t keep their tongues inside their heads when she walked in… like dogs on heat.’ She laughs and I nod mandatorily – nothing of note then. ‘Of course I remember her not just because she was rather pretty but also because she bought this place clean outright. Cash buyer. It’s not highly unusual, given that we’re Winterton’s and we deal with a certain calibre of clientele, but still.’

  She’s adjusting the lapel on her sharp and expensive yet ill-fitting suit, and I can’t help imagining that she attends slimming classes and doesn’t include the pricey wine she drinks every night on her intake sheet. Sins for the seven glasses of wine!

  ‘So you definitely think it was her then, this Danni-Jo, the same girl?’ She has one of those shrill voices that cut through you like nails on a blackboard.