The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1)

by Victoria Jenkins

  There were things she couldn’t make better – circumstances she was unable to change.

  A young woman was dead, and nothing she or anyone else could do would be able to reverse that. But she could try stopping whoever was responsible before that person decided to end someone else’s life.

  She looked out on to the dark stretch of garden that lay beyond the kitchen window. It occurred to her that she should think herself lucky: she lived in a nice area at the top of the town just off the mountain road, in a large semi-detached house that had a generous stretch of garden behind it. Years before, these had been the things she had aspired to and worked for. Now none of it seemed to mean anything.

  Alex was dragged from her thoughts by the sound of her phone ringing. She glanced at the screen. Rob.

  Half an hour later, her ex-husband rang the doorbell. Until a couple of months ago, he’d still had a key to the house. He refused to use it, even now when they were sleeping with each other again. Alex had taken it back from him, careful to conceal the relief she’d felt at the gesture when he’d offered its return. They might be having sex, but Rob letting himself into the house using his own key would take things a step further than Alex was comfortable with.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  She leaned in and kissed him. They went upstairs to what had once been their bedroom and had wordless sex, the type that had formed a pattern during the previous months. It had started as exciting – there had been something dangerous in the unexpectedness of it all – but what had been thrilling in its spontaneity was increasingly becoming a routine, albeit one that, at that time, Alex felt her life needed.

  Not for the first time, Alex realised that it wasn’t Rob she had missed. She just missed someone being there. The house had become too big for her; too silent. The memories of it had become too noisy.

  She wasn’t even sure she had missed the sex. It was just good to feel his skin against hers, to have some element of physical closeness back, to be able, for those moments, to switch off from the rest of the world. She had always been physically attracted to Rob, even when she had become turned off by elements of his personality.

  She didn’t want to be with him. She hadn’t wanted to be with him in a long time.

  She realised she was using him.

  She knew she should feel guilty at the thought, but she didn’t. For reasons that she couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it.

  ‘What’s happening here, Alex?’

  ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?’

  Rob put out an arm and reached for hers to stop her leaving the bed. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

  Her back turned to him, Alex closed her eyes. She didn’t want to have this conversation, not now. Not ever. They had stopped living in the moment years ago. Hadn’t that been what had eventually driven them apart? Why had they always needed to know what would be happening in the future: tomorrow, the next week; the next year? The need to plan for the perfect family home: a building that had become filled with material things yet empty of anything with purpose or meaning. The need to know why nature, science, something was preventing them from becoming a family. The need to know whether they would ever be parents; the need to plan for the what ifs and the maybes, the maybe nots.

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’

  ‘Just tell me the truth.’

  Alex found this ironic. Telling the truth had been their downfall, the reason for their divorce; telling the truth had caused such irreversible damage that Alex had begun to reconsider the mantra that honesty was always the best policy. Sometimes it wasn’t. Telling her husband the truth – that a childless future was a future that scared her, and that, no, she was sorry, but she didn’t believe they alone were enough – had been the final nail driven into the coffin in which their marriage had been buried.

  But he wasn’t her husband any more.

  ‘It just is what it is,’ she said, aware that if someone else had said the same to her she would have been tempted to throw the nearest available object at them.

  Rob moved from the bed. She heard him reach for his clothes and put them back on.

  ‘Is that all I get? That’s what I’m worth?’

  ‘No, of course not, it’s just—’

  ‘It’s not really normal, is it,’ he cut her off, moving to her side of the room and facing her so that she could no longer avoid looking at him. ‘This.’

  What was normal any more? Alex wasn’t sure.

  ‘I still don’t know what you want me to say.’

  Rob looked exasperated. There was something more. He looked hurt. The look made Alex feel even guiltier than she already did.

  ‘Neither of us wants to go backwards, Rob, not really. That’s never been what this was about.’

  His jaw tensed. His mouth moved as though about to say something, but changing his mind he reached for his jacket from where it was slung over the end of the bed and headed to the door.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said, turning back to face her.

  She said nothing. The truth of it was, she didn’t understand herself either.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When she woke, she found herself in darkness. She couldn’t move. She tried to free her arms from behind her back, but they were tied to the chair on which she was sitting. Something was shoved into her mouth, something like clothing, the cotton absorbing all the moisture so that her tongue, squashed against the roof of her mouth, felt dry. She panicked, tried to free herself, but her arms were tied back and her legs were fixed fast to the legs of the chair. She tried to scream, but only a muffled gurgle escaped her.

  She tried to remember what had happened, but those past few hours were a tangle of blurred recollections. They had been talking, catching up, and then… she didn’t know what had happened next. The room was cold and dark. Her head ached so badly. It was like every hangover she’d ever had all rolled into one, fierce and unforgiving. She was supposed to be going out with Grace, she thought. Was she late? What time was it?

  Grace would be wondering where she was.

  They’d had a drink together, she remembered. She had popped to the supermarket; she was only going to be twenty minutes. He had seen her there and they had gone to the pub just around the corner. Grace always took ages getting ready, so Sarah figured she wouldn’t miss her for an extra half an hour. He’d offered her a lift home with the bags she had been carrying. As always, she had only gone in for a couple of things – a bottle of wine that she and Grace could share before they headed out – but she had got carried away and ended up with more than she could comfortably manage. She was appreciative of the offer – she’d decided not to take the car, having planned on not buying much and figuring she needed the exercise.

  Now she wished more than anything that she’d taken it.

  Tears coursed her cheeks, hot and fast. This couldn’t be him, she thought. It couldn’t be.

  Why would he do this to her?

  She tried to remember what they had talked about, but so much of the time after leaving the supermarket had become little more than a blur, and her head felt heavy, dragged down with the weight of something unknown. Had she had that much to drink? She was certain she wouldn’t have, not when she had planned to go out later on with Grace.

  There was a creaking somewhere in the darkness, on the other side of the wall to her left. Her eyes had adjusted slightly to the dark – enough to make out the heavy drapes and the wooden furniture – but whatever he had given her was making a double of everything, like an old photograph taken out of focus. At the sound of his footsteps in the next room, she felt her body freeze. She didn’t know whether she hoped it was him or not. If it was him then everything she had thought she had known had been wrong. She had trusted this man. She’d had no reason not to.

  Perhaps she could talk to him, find out why he was doing this to her. Maybe, somehow, if she could get him to free her mouth, free her word
s, he might allow her the time to change his mind.

  She had never done anything to him.

  If it wasn’t him… she couldn’t bring herself to think that far ahead. If the man who had brought her here, wherever here was, was a stranger, she had no idea what had happened during the past few hours. Did she hope it was him? She really wasn’t sure which outcome would be worse.

  Her heart faltered at the sound of the door handle, the heavy door creaking on its hinges as it was pushed open. A thin shard of light stretched across the dirty carpet, highlighting the dust-filled air of the room.

  She tried to speak, but the words were muffled by the material filling her mouth. A low groan broke free from her, animal-like and desperate. He filled the path of what little light had existed, blocking it and sending her once again into a half-darkness where all her worst fears became imagined and played out in front of her. She was going to die here, she thought.

  She was going to die and she had no idea why.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chloe sat in Alex’s office discussing Emily Phillips’s death in even greater detail. Alex didn’t want to be found away from her duties in the middle of a murder investigation, but at the same time she didn’t want Chloe to land herself in trouble. Unless she could keep her talking about it, Chloe might take matters into her own hands by trying to access the closed case files. Chloe Lane was bright and astute, but Alex was worried that where her brother was concerned the young woman was unable to see the bigger picture. She seemed blinded by loyalty, as Alex supposed any good sister might be.

  Alex hadn’t said she believed there was a chance Luke hadn’t been involved in his girlfriend’s death, yet Chloe had assumed that she was with her in her doubt. She acknowledged the grey areas surrounding the closing of the case, but that didn’t mean she thought Luke innocent. Alex hadn’t been directly involved in the case, despite having been the first officer to arrive at the scene following Luke’s call. She had been assigned to another case, so her knowledge of what had followed was for the moment limited to what the newspapers had told her at the time, station gossip, and what Chloe had told her the night before. Everything she knew was therefore clouded in media sensationalism, hearsay or bias.

  If she was going to help, she was going to have to access the case files, but when was she going to have the time to do that?

  And how was she going to do it without getting them both into serious trouble? It couldn’t be done, not without major repercussions. It wouldn’t be worth it. If the evidence to clear Luke’s name hadn’t existed at the time, it wouldn’t be discovered now. She was going to have to deter Chloe in her efforts, but how she was going to go about it Alex wasn’t sure. The young woman’s determination seemed unshakeable.

  ‘Matthew Mitchell,’ Chloe said, reaching into one of the documents she seemed to now carry with her at all times. She put a photograph in front of Alex, who looked at her incredulously.

  ‘You’ve got photos?’

  ‘Of course. This is Emily’s half-brother,’ she said, tapping the image of a sullen-faced young man, aged early twenties at the time the photograph was taken. ‘Same father, different mothers. He had an argument with Luke the afternoon of the day Emily died. Emily had been upset about something – Matthew thought Luke was responsible.’

  ‘And was he?’

  Chloe shook her head. ‘According to Luke, they’d been getting on fine. There’d been no argument. He didn’t know what had upset her.’

  ‘So you’re assuming if Luke hadn’t upset her, someone else must have?’

  Chloe shrugged.

  She must realise that all this is just ‘he said, she said’, Alex thought; nothing more than teenage drama that didn’t amount to anything substantial when it came to looking at the facts.

  ‘Matthew might have argued with Luke, but why would that have made him want to hurt his own sister?’

  Chloe’s face tightened. She pulled her long blonde hair back from her face and knotted it up in a messy bun. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted quietly. She reached for the file again and removed another photograph. ‘Emily’s ex-boyfriend,’ she said, putting his photograph beside Matthew’s. ‘Callum Ware. My God, did this boy love himself.’

  The picture showed a teenage boy in a beanie hat, flicking his fingers in a V-sign and smirking smugly for the camera.

  ‘In what way?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Take your pick.’

  ‘Why have you got him down as a suspect?’

  Chloe sat back in her seat, taking her eyes from the photograph of Callum.

  ‘Emily had finished with him not long before she started seeing Luke. I don’t think Callum was used to girls dumping him; he did the dumping. It didn’t go down too well, I don’t think.’

  Alex found herself wishing that this conversation had followed the pattern of the previous discussion she and Chloe had had about Luke and Emily, and that wine had formed an element of proceedings. It might be earlier than most people’s breakfast time, but normal hours no longer applied to Alex. Last time, the wine had been enough to just about blur the edges of Chloe’s irrational thought processes, but now, in the stark sobriety of the morning, Alex was unable to avoid the desperation in the young woman’s face. Alex realised this was no longer just about seeking justice for Luke. For Chloe, proving her brother’s innocence had become an obsession.

  But she didn’t want to be the one to shatter Chloe’s dream of finding an impossible truth. It was nice to believe that all mysteries would finally be resolved one way or another, but Alex was experienced enough and old enough to have accepted the sad truth that sometimes, no matter how much will and good intention were involved, some secrets were never exposed.

  And sometimes it wasn’t necessarily a sad thing. Sometimes the truth was painful. Destructive. Sometimes it was better to remain ignorant of the thing you had always felt you needed to know.

  ‘Chloe, none of this is evidence, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Patrick Sibley,’ Chloe said, ignoring Alex and reaching into the file for a third photograph. ‘He had a thing for Emily; everyone knew about it. He sent her flowers a couple of weeks before she died.’

  ‘Where have you got all these photographs from?’ Alex asked, glancing at the picture. Chloe’s documentation of other people’s details was beginning to look like borderline stalking.

  ‘The Internet. People put them up because they want them to be looked at. There’d be no reason otherwise.’

  The defensive tone with which Chloe’s words were spoken cut a chill through Alex’s office.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  She must have realised how irrational this all seemed, or else Alex’s questions wouldn’t have prompted such a reaction.

  ‘I believe that you think Luke is innocent,’ Alex said, trying to pacify her. ‘I believe that you want the truth, but I also think you know deep down how difficult that truth might be to find. There was an investigation, Chloe.’

  Chloe gave a bitter laugh. ‘It lasted less than a fortnight. It was full of holes. Look at it. Please. I know I’m asking a lot, but if you won’t help me no one will.’

  Alex sighed and sat back in her seat. ‘Have you already looked at it? Or are you too scared of what it might reveal?’

  As soon as the words left her mouth, Alex regretted them. She heard them in the way Chloe had heard them, laced with a severity Alex had never intended. The reaction on Chloe’s face was enough to reveal their impact. She reached for the photographs, gathering them quickly and shoving them back into their file.

  ‘Chloe, I—’

  ‘Forget it, please,’ Chloe stopped her. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I should never have mentioned it. Please forget I ever told you.’

  Without making further eye contact, Chloe left the office. Alex cursed herself, wondering how many more people she was going to drive away before the week was out. She pitied Chloe, but resurrecting this case now was inviting trouble. They had
a murder investigation on their hands, a current case that needed their full focus.

  Outside the office, Chloe stopped at the end of the corridor, her heart pounding against her ribcage. No one was going to believe her. Without evidence, people would just think she was crazy. Alex had probably already started. She had seen the DI’s face as she’d talked her through each of the men she thought might have had an involvement in Emily’s death; she had seen the scepticism and the doubt in the other woman’s eyes.

  Until someone believed her, Chloe knew she was on her own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the computer screen beside Detective Constable Daniel Mason there was a still of Lola Evans and Ethan Thompson entering Nando’s at just gone quarter to seven on the Saturday night: the last known sighting they had of her.

  ‘Can’t really miss them, can you?’ Dan said.

  Alex knew what he meant. The young couple were easily identifiable: Ethan with his unconventional dress sense and Lola, rake thin and lost-looking.

  ‘How long were they at the restaurant?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Just over an hour.’

  Alex nodded. This matched the information Ethan Thompson had given her.

  ‘What sort of waitressing job had Lola been working that started so late?’ Dan wondered aloud.

  Alex shrugged. ‘I suppose plenty of restaurants in the city wouldn’t start to get busy until late.’

  ‘Just goes to show how out of touch I am,’ Dan said with a half-smile. ‘I’m ready for bed by ten thirty these days.’

  Alex studied the still on the screen. ‘Did she even make it to work?’ she pondered. ‘Did she meet with someone before she reached there? We need to find out where “work” was.’