The Girls In The Water
A completely gripping serial-killer thriller with a shocking twist
Victoria Jenkins
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
A Letter from Victoria
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The slap came from nowhere, sudden and sharp. Her nail caught the boy’s skin, slicing his cheek. He put a hand up, tracing the wet trail of dotted blood that bubbled to the surface of the wound. The boy looked at the magazine held outstretched in her other hand. Its opened pages, vivid in their accusations, showed an array of images: naked flesh, skin on skin; so many things he had heard about, but had never really seen this close up and in detail.
The child still in him wanted to laugh at the sight of bare bodies.
The child still in him remained scared of the ferocity of his mother’s tongue, fearing her verbal assaults almost as much as the physical force of her anger.
‘This is sick,’ his mother spat. ‘Why would you look at it? What’s the matter with you?’ She was shouting now. Her anger was visible in the red flare of her cheeks, in the fists that had formed at her sides and had turned her bony knuckles white. It was tangible in the venom with which her words were spoken.
The boy didn’t want to feel this kind of anger, but in that moment – in so many moments before and after it – he hated his mother. Even at such a young age he recognised her hypocrisy, and he hated it. He hated this life and everything she had made him.
‘Nothing to say, have you?’ she snapped, his silence heightening her anger.
She grabbed the boy by the hair and dragged him to the kitchen. The sink was filled with dirty water left from the last lot of dishes that had been washed. Lifeless bubbles lay flat on the surface of the water, the occasional few giving their last sad pops before disappearing.
‘Maybe we can clean your eyes out,’ she suggested.
He didn’t try to fight her, and later he would wonder why. He hadn’t struggled as she had tightened her grip on his hair, or fought when she had shoved his face into the murky water. He never had. His mind went momentarily blank, as he had worked so long to train it to do. When his mind was blank, he could be anywhere. He could be anyone.
Sometimes the boy was a pilot. He had always liked the idea of what being a pilot might be like: of being able to go anywhere, his own hands navigating his destiny. That freedom. He would imagine the roar of the engine, the surge of the wheels on the runway; the tsunami in his stomach that would rise and subside as the plane left the ground and took its first steep tilt skywards.
Other times he was an actor. He would imagine himself on a stage, dressed as someone else, speaking someone else’s words. He was someone else. His audience stretched in front of him, but he could never see them; they were shrouded in the darkness, the only lights focused upon him. He wanted to be someone else, anywhere else.
He held his breath under the water for as long as he could, snatching gulps of air when he was pulled back up. After what seemed for ever but was little longer than thirty seconds, his mother let go. He stood hunched over the sink, coughing and choking, his dark hair dripping water down his face.
That night, he lay in his single bed and imagined the most horrific images his young mind could conjure. When his mind was no longer blank it was filled with the purest kind of hate: a rage so intense that it sometimes scared him.
The boy hated his mother.
One day he would make her pay.
Chapter One
‘You’re in a good mood today.’
Detective Inspector Alex King glanced at her colleague, who was sitting in the passenger seat chewing on the corner of a thumbnail and watching her with a look that suggested good moods were something other people didn’t generally expect of her. She didn’t blame them. There hadn’t been much to smile about these past few months.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ DC Chloe Lane said, raising an eyebrow. She gave a slight smile whilst turning her blonde head to the window, presumably under the assumption that Alex would miss the look.
She didn’t.
‘You were singing,’ Chloe said, her attention drawn to a young man struggling outside an off-licence with a dog that was almost as big as he was.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were.’
‘When?’
‘Just then! Was that One Direction?’
Alex snorted. ‘No, it definitely wasn’t.’
It might have been, she thought. She hadn’t been able to get that bloody song out of her head all morning, not since she’d heard it drifting from the kitchen when Rob had gone downstairs to make a cup of tea. He had put on the radio. She hadn’t been sure how she’d felt about that: the tea making or the act of turning on the radio. It was all too familiar. They wer
e supposed to be beyond all that now.
They’d been divorced for nearly three years, yet here they were again.
The adult part of Alex’s brain knew she should have been sceptical about what was going on. Sex with an ex-husband, in the majority of cases, was destined to be problematic, yet, for whatever reason, Alex felt unwilling to expel him from her life for a second time. Didn’t she deserve a break, just this once? Didn’t she deserve a bit of fun?
You’re forty-four not nineteen, she reprimanded herself. And where an ex-husband was concerned, there was never likely to be a no-strings scenario.
She shook herself from the thought. ‘I think it might have been.’
She smiled. She turned up the car heaters. Chloe’s face was disappearing into the folds of her jacket in an attempt to get warm. She was so slim that Alex found it unsurprising she was so susceptible to the cold. It was a bitterly chilly morning, but Alex didn’t appear to feel the dip in temperature as keenly as her younger colleague clearly did. She’d often thought Chloe looked as though she could do with a couple of decent meals and some looking after, although her size didn’t seem to impact upon her apparently boundless energy.
The sky stretching across the town that lay spread before them was grey and heavy, the threat of rain increasingly present as they neared Pontypridd. As they approached the exit that would take them to the town centre, Alex found herself struggling to remember the last sunny day this part of South Wales had seen, no matter how cold. The festive season had been characterised by grey afternoons and a steady stream of relentless rainfall, yet in its own way this had seemed fitting.
‘Thanks for the lift, by the way,’ Chloe said, breaking Alex’s chain of thought.
‘No worries. Heard anything from the garage?’
Chloe pulled a face. She somehow managed to look pretty even when she was grimacing. ‘Yeah, got an email last night. Be cheaper for me to buy a new car. Third time it’s happened. I don’t really see the point in paying again.’
Alex cut across the roundabout that took them towards Trallwn. ‘Is this your way of hinting at another lift tomorrow?’
Chloe shot her a smile. ‘Would you mind?’
‘Suppose not. I mean, I’m going this way anyway.’
Chloe’s smile disappeared back into the folds of her jacket, and she turned her head to the window, watching the traffic slow to a crawl at the next approaching roundabout.
‘Busy day ahead?’ she asked, the words muffled.
Alex rolled her eyes. ‘When’s it not? Have you seen my office recently? There’s a backlog of paperwork a foot high on my desk. You know, before I got promoted I used to think South Wales was pretty quiet. Be careful what you wish for, right?’
Her promotion to detective inspector had happened a few years earlier and life was now moving so quickly, in such a relentless rush of activity, that Alex often found herself worrying about the things she feared she might be missing. Her divorce had helped push this fear into a full-blown panic, but rather than stop to let life catch up with her she had pushed ahead, intent on holding on to her workload as the last passenger on a sinking ship clings to the only lifeboat.
‘I think you’d get bored if things were too quiet,’ Chloe said. ‘But if you get a break and you fancy a drink, give me a shout. I’m usually designated driver, but I don’t have a car. We’ll have to bus it.’
Alex smiled. It was a nice thought. They’d managed a night out just after Christmas: one so wild she’d been back home by ten thirty. Chloe was sensible for her age, which suited Alex just fine. She didn’t need to be made to feel any older than she already did.
‘A break,’ Alex said. ‘Just imagine that.’
The station loomed ahead of them, as grey as the sky that formed the backdrop behind it. It stood on a corner in the middle of Pontypridd town centre as though keeping an eye on the local residents, and Alex had often wondered why they couldn’t do something to make the place look a little less hostile, although she imagined colour might have defeated the intended purpose of its existence. It appeared they weren’t there to be cheerful.
The thought of the day that stretched ahead of them pushed her reluctantly from the car. In truth, Chloe had got her right. Not having something to do or somewhere to be gave Alex too much time and space to think about the things that haunted the silent hours of the night when she would lie in her room and find them gathered at the bedside, ready to make sure she hadn’t forgotten them. Perhaps the thought of a pile of paperwork and an afternoon locked in the office wasn’t too unappealing, just for today. She presumed she should make the most of being confined to the realms of the station while she was given the rare opportunity.
Chapter Two
It was late January; the kind of January that holds everything still in its grip, its fingers embedded in the hard ground and its breath staining the air with shivers. She knew all about the cold, despite being indoors. She had been there for days – exactly how long, she couldn’t be too sure – and with every hour, and with every next humiliation inflicted on her, she grew colder in her bones, hoping for death to relieve her.
It occurred to her that no one might have realised she was missing. Moving from friend to friend, from sofa to sofa, had always seemed such a good idea; in fact, it had been her sole method of survival for the previous eighteen months. She couldn’t stay still, which now, bound to this chair, seemed sadly ironic. She could go weeks without speaking to what family she had left, and those ‘friends’ she had stayed with she now realised were nothing of the sort. She didn’t even know them, not really. She had used them; they had used her. She had got what she deserved in the end, she supposed.
Would anyone now notice she was gone?
The only person she had really spoken to about how she was feeling – the only person she had allowed herself to get remotely close to during the past few months – was here, and now there was no getting away from him.
The room was dark, the only window boarded up with thick wooden slats. There were drapes hanging from the walls, black and heavy, but she didn’t know why they were there or what they were hiding. Sometimes, she couldn’t see anything. Her eyelids felt weighed down and when he wasn’t there she would allow herself to close them, though she never slept. She didn’t think she’d slept for days. How long would it take before it sent her into madness?
She had cried at the start. When she’d woken to find herself in that unfamiliar place, tied to a chair by a man whose face she couldn’t see, she had cried, screamed; begged. She had offered him things that repulsed her, but he didn’t seem interested in any of it. He didn’t seem interested in her.
What did he want from her?
It was so difficult to try to piece together the events that had led up to her being here. There were things she remembered, but so many more that she didn’t. She had been to work, that much she remembered. She sometimes shared a taxi home with one of the girls she worked with, but she couldn’t remember anything about the journey home. She couldn’t remember that there’d been a journey.
She was tied to a chair, at her wrists and by her ankles. Her arms were pulled awkwardly behind her, cutting off her circulation. She had tried to squeeze her hands through the tight loops of the ties holding her in place, wear them down against the wooden slats of the seat, but her results had only left her with raw skin and broken hope.
She wasn’t getting out of here alive.
On the first day, the man had cut her nails. She had been left alone for what felt like for ever, her vision blurred by tears and her mind clogged with dark thoughts of the ways that this man might end her life. She tried to kick out, thrusting her hips forward to send the chair tipping to one side, but when she toppled with it she realised she had only made things worse, and she stayed there like that, tied to the chair with her right arm deadening beneath her until her captor made his silent return.
When he came back, he tilted the chair upright, moving it as though she was weightless.
She spoke to him, but he refused to reply. When he released her hands from the knotted cable ties, a surge of adrenalin rushed her and she swung an arm at the man, clawing at the dark mask he wore over his face. It was then she felt her life had ended, because it was then she saw him for the first time. Might things have been different had she never seen his face? She would never know.
The realisation of who he was had made her sick. She threw up down the front of her top, chunks of the slop he had fed her some time during the previous evening spattering the cotton and lacing the air with an acidic, rancid tang.
Then the evening came back to her. She remembered seeing him. She remembered how pleased she had been to see him.
Later, as her memory returned in fragments, she remembered accepting a lift from him.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him through tears. ‘I’ve never done anything to you.’
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 1
