Alex stood in the superintendent’s office deliberating over the words that were perched on the tip of her tongue. She had gone over it in her head countless times, weighing up the pros and cons of requesting permission to access the files relating to Emily Phillips’s case. Although she remained adamant that this wasn’t the right time to go over old ground and reinvestigate anything relating to either Emily’s or Luke’s cases, Alex was convinced that if she could reassure Chloe that they would get permission to do so once Lola Evans’s killer had been caught then Chloe would resume normal practice and devote her full attention to the case she was supposed to be working on.
She fully expected the request to receive a less than warm response, but for Chloe’s sake it was a reception she was prepared to face.
‘Hypothetically speaking, how averse would you be to the idea of having a closed case reopened?’
Superintendent Harry Blake studied Alex cautiously. He still looked so tired, Alex thought. He had been off work for almost a year and, although his treatment had been deemed a success by doctors, the general consensus was that he had returned to work too soon. In his absence, Alex had acted as investigating officer in a couple of key cases, one of which had drawn closer to home than anyone had been comfortable with. The experience had taught Alex a lot, but she hadn’t been ready to park herself in the firing line on a permanent basis. She was happiest and, as far as she was concerned, most efficient when she was working amongst the team.
She was glad to have Harry back, but she wasn’t happy to see him looking so exhausted so soon upon his return.
‘How’s the search into Lola Evans’s murder going?’
Alex’s lip curled slightly. She wondered, briefly, if she had in fact spoken her own question aloud or merely run it through her brain one final time before airing it.
‘I… we’re following up a couple of leads and trying to establish Lola’s final few hours.’
‘“Trying”,’ the superintendent repeated. ‘As in, you’ve not got very far? So why are you asking me, hypothetically or not, about closed cases when we’ve got an open and very much ongoing one already on our hands?’
Alex made a conscious effort to uncurl her top lip. She knew it was a habit, a reaction that occurred when she found herself annoyed or angered by something, and often she could feel herself slipping into the gesture. Other times, she remained oblivious to it.
‘The investigation into Lola Evans’s murder is moving forward, and the case I’m referring to won’t impact upon it.’
‘So there’s nothing hypothetical about this “case” then?’
The inverted commas were audible. Alex’s brain exhaled an expletive at her careless turn of phrasing.
‘It was just a question.’
‘And I’m just giving you an answer. Until Lola Evans’s murderer is found, everyone’s attention remains on him. Or her,’ he added. ‘What case is this, anyway?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters enough for you to have come to me about it.’
‘And I shouldn’t have,’ Alex told him. Never a truer word spoken, she thought. She realised now why Chloe had been so adamant that the super’s attention not be drawn to it in any way. She regretted the decision she’d made, and she hoped it wouldn’t find its way back to Chloe.
His stern expression relaxed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered. ‘Coming back to all this… it wasn’t quite what I’d anticipated. How are you?’
As though he should be asking me that, thought Alex. She shrugged. ‘Things can always be worse, can’t they?’
He gave her a smile that was tinged with sadness. ‘True enough.’
‘Things are as they are.’ She knew exactly what he was referring to. Harry knew plenty of the details of her marriage breakdown, as well as the events that had led up to it. It now seemed little in comparison to what he’d been through during the past eighteen months.
‘Look,’ he said, shifting the focus of conversation from Alex’s personal life, ‘if you want to go back to something, make sure you find me a convincing reason for doing so. But not now, OK? We’ve all got plenty to be getting on with.’
Alex gave him a nod and left the office. She hoped she hadn’t just made a mistake, for both her own and Chloe’s sakes.
She went back down the corridor and into the main office, having barely a moment to breathe before one of the DCs called her over.
‘Boss. We’ve had a young woman reported missing.’
Alex felt a knot tighten in her stomach. Instinct told her that their caseload was about to get even more complicated.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She didn’t know what time it was, but beyond the boarded windows, through a narrow gap that was uncovered by the drapes that had been hung there, Sarah was sure she could see daylight. Her head felt heavy, like the onset of a migraine. She didn’t bother trying to move, knowing her efforts would be futile. She was too tired to do anything other than sit and wait. Whatever he had given her, she felt as though it was still flooding her system.
Her mouth was dry and her tongue was stuck to whatever had been crammed into her mouth. She thought about crying again, but realised her tears had all been wasted. Crying had worsened the headache and they hadn’t got her anywhere. She was still in this room, still bound to this chair, still not knowing who had brought her here and done this to her.
Of course, she did know, but she still couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it was him.
Sarah narrowed her eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the darkness of the room. She had thought there were only floorboards beneath her – she had heard his footsteps pacing across them hours earlier – but now she was able to see a patch of carpet further away in the room, frayed and dirty. It might have been a deep red colour, but in the darkness she couldn’t be sure.
The smell of blood was everywhere, filling her nose. She could taste it in the dryness of her mouth; she could feel it on the coldness of her skin. She didn’t know who it belonged to. She felt pain everywhere: it was impossible to pinpoint where she might have been injured. Closing her eyes, she tried to focus on the source of her pain. Concentrating made the screaming in her head louder, more profound, so she quickly stopped and tried to empty her thoughts.
It was impossible.
She looked down at her legs. They were bare, though she had been wearing tights the previous evening when she had left the flat to go to the supermarket. It was so cold that her skin was almost glowing white in the darkness. Not for the first time, she tried to push back thoughts of what had happened to her when she’d been unconscious, between the times she had accepted a lift home from him and woken up hours later. The thoughts brought with them fresh tears, hot and fast against her icy skin.
If he didn’t kill her, the cold was going to finish the job for him.
Sarah shifted, pushing the dress she was wearing further up her thighs. Then she felt them, smoother than the dress against her skin. Her underwear was still on. Crying with relief, Sarah allowed her head to loll backwards. She looked up at the ceiling, at the strange artexed patterns that in the darkness took the forms of all kinds of strange and alien images.
It was then she heard him. His footsteps sounded distant at first; she could hear him on a flight of stairs. She wasn’t on a ground floor, she thought. Where had he taken her?
Moments later, the door to the room creaked noisily as he pushed it open. She saw his face lit by the light that poured through the windows in the next room, and at the sight of him Sarah began to sob again.
She had thought she had known him. Why was he doing this to her?
He was carrying a large bottle of water and a plastic cup in his hands. With his hip, he shoved the door closed behind him, leaving only a narrow stream of light to enter the room.
She tried to scream at him, but the noise was muted, pathetic. Her eyes sought out his, forcing him to look at her. When he neared her, Sarah’s body froze. He put a hand towards her, his fingertips resti
ng on the cloth that filled her mouth.
‘You must be thirsty,’ he said. ‘You can scream if you want to, but there’s no one to hear you. You won’t get a drink if you do.’
He yanked the cloth from her mouth and Sarah gasped for air, though it tasted thick and dirty. She swallowed it in, desperate to fill her lungs.
‘Why are you doing this?’
She barely recognised her own voice. It sounded feeble, weak; all the things she had feared she’d always been, but had never wanted to show.
Ignoring her, he poured a cup of water and held it to her lips. She kept her mouth shut, refusing the offer.
‘It’s just water.’ To prove the point, he took two long gulps of the drink.
When he held the cup to her lips for a second time, Sarah took a mouthful of water. She held it in her mouth before spitting it back at him, soaking the bottom half of his face. As soon as she’d done it, she had no idea why she had. In that briefest of moments it had felt empowering, but she instantly realised she wasn’t empowered, she was trapped, and now she had made things worse for herself.
With a single shove, he sent her and the chair crashing to the floor. Sarah felt a surge of pain through her spine as the chair fell back on to the wooden floorboards, and she screamed as he straddled her and placed a hand over her face.
With her nose pressed tightly between his fingers, Sarah had little choice than to open her mouth for air. He was sitting on her chest now, crushing the air from her body. She gasped for breath, but it was cut short when he held the bottle of water above her face and poured it in a steady stream over her opened mouth.
She felt the water fill her mouth and run down into her throat. She couldn’t swallow it fast enough; within seconds she was choking on it. She closed her eyes in an effort to block the sight of him. He was still there when she opened them, his impassive face still mocking her.
She heard herself choking.
She could feel herself drowning.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alex and Chloe sat in the office of the care home. It was chaotic, Alex noticed: files and paperwork stacked on every available surface; half-finished mugs of tea and coffee abandoned by the desktop computers. There seemed to be few staff members present, and the buzzer in the corridor had been sounding since they’d got there.
‘Do you think something’s happened to Sarah?’ the care home manager asked. She had been unsettled by the appearance of police. She had ushered them quickly through to the office, trying to keep them invisible from the cleaner at the end of the corridor and a resident who was wheeling himself from the day room, his slight frame bent forward and his bony fingers clutching the tops of the wheels of his chair.
The man had caught Chloe’s eye, his gaze vacant, and Alex had noticed her colleague staring. It wasn’t like Chloe; she was usually so sensitive and discreet. Alex understood how unsettling these places were to someone who’d had no previous experience of them. She imagined Chloe had never been inside a care home before. She knew Chloe had fallen out with her parents and had subsequently changed her surname, but Alex didn’t know what their disagreement had been over. Until that week, she hadn’t known Chloe had a brother. All she knew of Chloe’s life prior to the last six months was that she had trained with the Met in London after graduating with a degree in Psychology. Her teenage years and childhood were something Chloe had never spoken of.
The wailing sound that came from the end of the corridor evidently upset Chloe. She cast Alex a look that said why aren’t they doing something?
A reminder of her own mortality and the fragility of time were the things Alex realised had confronted Chloe as they’d stepped inside the building, as she too had once experienced.
‘We don’t know,’ Alex said, ‘but by all accounts it seems out of character for Sarah to not let anyone know her whereabouts. Has she done this before, just failed to turn up to work?’
The manager shook her head. ‘She’s always been pretty reliable.’
‘“Pretty reliable”?’ Chloe repeated.
‘Look,’ the manager said with a sigh. ‘There has been the odd time when she’s not come into work, and we know she’s had her fair share of problems over the years. But if she wasn’t coming in she’d always let us know beforehand, even if it was at the last minute.’
‘What problems has she had?’ Alex asked. They’d already heard plenty from Sarah’s flatmate, Grace, but hearing the details from someone else would corroborate the account.
‘Sarah had some problems with an ex-partner,’ the manager said, seeming to select her words with caution. She looked anxiously at both women. ‘You know this already, I suppose?’
‘We know about the violent ex-boyfriend, yes.’
The manager nodded. ‘He turned up here once, while she was working. The place is obviously secure so he couldn’t gain access, but we had to call the police. He was waiting just around the corner for her, refusing to leave. Sarah was pretty shaken up by it. I wish we’d done more.’
‘In what way? What more could you have done?’
‘I don’t know. Anything. Two weeks after that, Sarah ended up hospitalised.’
The manager’s eyes were glassy. She clearly felt a responsibility for what had happened to Sarah on the day of the attack. ‘She’s in some sort of trouble, isn’t she?’
‘We don’t think her ex-partner is in any way connected, but it’s helpful to know as much about Sarah as we possibly can.’
‘I wish I could tell you something more, but I really don’t know much of Sarah beyond this place. You might like to talk to some of the other girls here – she seems quite friendly with a few of them.’
Alex nodded and noted the names the manager provided. ‘If we could speak with whoever’s here now, that would be really useful.’
The manager left and came back moments later with a lady wearing a green tabard and a hairnet.
‘Marianne has some information for you.’
She gave the woman what may have been intended as an encouraging smile but managed to make her look even more anxious. ‘I’ll give you some time,’ the manager added, closing the door as Marianne stepped into the office.
‘Sarah,’ the woman began, ‘is she OK?’
‘She’s missing. We want to find her as soon as possible.’
‘I saw her arguing with someone. In the car park. It was a man.’
Marianne sat beside Alex and gave her the details: which day, what time, and a description of the man that was as detailed as she was able to recall. Either the woman’s powers of observation were finely honed, or she’d had years of experience in being generally nosy.
Alex shot Chloe a look. The woman had just described Connor Price, the man with whom Sarah Taylor’s flatmate had claimed her friend was having an affair.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Connor Price drummed his fingers on the desk in a way Chloe assumed was intended to be annoying. Since the man had arrived at the station, he’d said little. His body language was stiff, defensive, and every time he was spoken to by one of the officers he would flinch slightly as though bracing himself for an attack.
They knew very little about him, but enough to know he was ex-army, married and had children. Enough to know that his alleged affair with Sarah Taylor was something he was unlikely to have wanted made public knowledge.
‘When was the last time you saw Sarah?’ Chloe asked.
Alex was sitting by her side, pen poised in her hand. She was taking notes despite the fact that the interview was being recorded. It was a force of habit, something she insisted on doing as though she couldn’t trust technology in the way she could trust herself.
‘A few days ago. Thursday,’ Connor said, translating Chloe’s raised eyebrows as a need to be more specific.
‘Where did you see her?’
Connor sighed. The police knew where he’d seen her; they’d already been told he’d been to see her at her workplace, thanks to the nosy cow who had spotted
them arguing in the car park.
‘At her work.’
‘Is that something you do often?’ Alex asked. ‘Go to see her at work?’
‘I didn’t see her at work,’ Connor snapped, unable to hide his frustration. ‘I saw her in the car park. I just wanted to talk to her about something.’
He sighed again at the second rise of Chloe’s eyebrows. ‘Here.’ He reached into his pocket and retrieved his mobile phone. He unlocked the screen and searched for the message he’d received. ‘There.’ He held the mobile phone out across the table and waited as DC Lane and DI King read the brief message.
‘But that’s not Sarah’s mobile number?’ Alex clarified. ‘So why did you think she’d sent it?’
Connor sat back in his seat and returned his mobile to his pocket. ‘No one else is supposed to know… about us.’
‘Where did you meet Sarah?’ Alex asked.
‘At the support group I run. She started coming about nine months ago. She’s had problems with depression, anxiety; her ex-boyfriend beat her up pretty badly.’
His eye met Chloe’s and she held his stare. ‘She knows how to pick them then.’
Connor’s jaw tightened. ‘Look, we had a fling, all right? It was no big deal.’
‘Did Sarah see it that way?’
‘Yes. We agreed to finish things and she didn’t make a fuss about it. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since Thursday. I don’t know where she is.’
‘That message you received,’ Alex said. ‘Have you tried calling the number?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘And?’
‘And no reply.’
‘Could you give us the number please?’
Connor took his mobile back out from his pocket, found the message and passed the phone to Alex. She copied out the number into her notebook.
‘Was Sarah upset by the end of the affair, Mr Price?’
‘She didn’t seem it, no.’
‘You don’t think she seemed upset? You said she suffered with depression. You don’t think she’d have done anything to hurt herself though?’
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 9
