Alex turned off the television as the newsreader moved to the next story. Harry was taking precautions by advising people to remain vigilant, but they didn’t believe that Lola had been taken at random. If it had been a mugging or a sexually motivated attack, her injuries would have been more frenzied and less methodical.
And Sarah Taylor could be anywhere. She might have visited a friend, stayed out and got so drunk she’d ended up somewhere she hadn’t planned; there was no reason to believe she was in any danger.
She went back to the kitchen and to her task of making tea. The file she had left on the kitchen table still lay opened, its front page waiting to be turned. She felt a surge of guilt. She had made a promise to Harry and she had broken it. She had known that if she didn’t, it was likely Chloe would get there first.
Alex finished making the sandwich she’d been midway through preparing when she’d heard the superintendent’s voice coming from the living room. At the table, she pulled the file closer to her.
Post-mortem Report: Emily Phillips
A 16-year-old female was found deceased secondary to what was claimed to be a staged suicide in the family home. The body displayed signs of primary flaccidity. Attempts at resuscitation had been made.
Reporting Party Initial Statement
At approximately 00.32 on the morning of the 3rd April 2009 I was requested to attend the scene of an apparent suicide. I arrived at the residence at approximately 01.13 and was met there by Detective Constable Thomas McKenna, Detective Sergeant Alex King, and Chief Inspector Harry Blake. I was briefed by Chief Inspector Blake who provided the following information:
The subject was a teenage girl, Emily Phillips, who lived with her mother, Jane Phillips. Ms Phillips was away for the weekend with her partner. Present at the scene when the responding officers King and McKenna had arrived had been Emily’s boyfriend, Luke Griffiths. DS King found Mr Griffiths on the stairs, holding the deceased body of his girlfriend. She checked for a pulse but there was none. There was a ligature attached to the subject’s neck, in the form of a belt. DS King described Luke Griffiths as ‘distressed and incoherent’, but managed to glean that he had found her hanging from the top of the staircase. He claimed to have taken a chair from the kitchen and used it to stand on in order to release her body. He then called 999. Dispatchers logged the call at 23.41. Paramedics were at the scene at 00.04 and determined the subject’s death at 00.07.
Death Scene Investigation
An assessment of the scene took place at around 01.25.
Alex scanned the next two paragraphs of the report, which included a long and detailed description of the hallway of the Phillips’s house. She took another bite of her sandwich before focusing her attention on the description of Emily.
The subject was on the floor at the foot of the staircase. She was wearing a black dress and no shoes. There was purple colouring to her lips and her skin had reddened above the place of strangulation. Clear ligature marks were seen around the subject’s neck. The belt from which the subject was said to have been found hanging had been placed on the stairs by Luke Griffiths after removal from the girl’s neck.
Alex scanned ahead, knowing what was coming. So much had flooded back to her upon reading the report. Though she had not worked directly on the case after that night, it had received so much press coverage and garnered so much talk at the station that it was impossible to not have known what had been going on.
During post-mortem, marks found to the front of the subject’s neck are consistent with the belt found at the scene of death, identical in width and pattern. The placement of the markings at the back of the neck indicates that the subject suffered asphyxia caused by the pressure of the belt around the neck. However—
Alex looked up from the report. It was here that everything came back. This was why no one had believed the death was suicide: it had been impossible. According to the pathologist and to the report, the buckle of the belt used to strangle Emily would have had to have come into contact with her neck, if she had in fact committed suicide in this way. But it didn’t. There was a clear ligature line straight around her throat, devoid of any markings that would have been left by the metal of the buckle.
Emily hadn’t killed herself. Someone else had held that belt around her throat and had tightened it until the last breath of life had escaped her.
There was another detail that made her suicide increasingly unlikely and, according to the pathologist, impossible:
Fibres found beneath the subject’s fingernails match that of the belt, suggesting a struggle to free herself of the noose.
The only fingerprints found at the scene were Emily’s, her mother’s and Luke’s. Luke had been arrested, but the evidence was circumstantial. Of course his fingerprints were to be found at the house: Luke was her boyfriend. He had been to the house countless times, having sometimes stayed there overnight. It hadn’t been sufficient evidence with which to charge Luke, but it had been enough for everybody to assume him guilty of Emily’s death.
Alex sat back on the sofa and closed her eyes. She wanted to help Chloe, but she had no idea where she was going to start.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
During the previous few months, things had got even worse. His mother seemed to loathe him more than ever – so much more now he was the only child still around on which to offload her anger.
He had seen the way she looked at him. There was so much hatred in her face sometimes and yet she managed to look through him as though he wasn’t there at all.
When he was younger, it had confused the boy. Later, he came to understand her anger, if only in part. Her bitterness had been explained to him in ways his teenage mind would never have fathomed alone. His sister had tried to comprehend their mother’s behaviour, despite all the ways their parents had so unfairly treated her.
There were times he found himself almost feeling sorry for his mother.
And then there were all the other times.
That day, he got home earlier than expected. He hadn’t been to college that afternoon, though he would tell his mother that his classes finished early. He had been somewhere she wouldn’t approve of, with someone she didn’t like. He told his mother anything he thought she might want to hear. He had found that life was safer that way.
He came in through the side door that led into the kitchen. On the table, his mother’s laptop was opened. She wasn’t there. He glanced at the screen and saw a part-written email. Saw who it was addressed to. Curiosity told him to take a closer look, and he would have managed to overrule the urge if he hadn’t seen the name at the start of the message.
He wasn’t really sure what to make of what he read.
‘What are you doing?’
He hadn’t heard his mother come back down the hallway and into the kitchen. She stood at the doorway, hands fixed to her hips; her face frozen in a look that was part indignation, part panic.
The boy felt a shift in control, one so subtle yet so empowering. What he’d read was incriminating. They both knew it.
‘I could ask you the same.’
It was only in the past few months his confidence had started to develop. Despite his mother’s growing anger, he felt stronger than he ever had. He had been shown a different way of doing things and he wanted to emulate it. He hated this life. He wasn’t allowed to question; he wasn’t allowed to disagree. There were so many rules, and none of them seemed fair or even logical. He hated his every move being watched; his parents seemed able to do as they pleased; his father, at least. If he stayed there, they would suffocate him. He wanted out.
‘I thought you weren’t supposed to contact her now?’
‘Get away from my things.’
Despite the growing confidence, he obeyed his mother. She hurried to the table and flipped shut the lid of the laptop. ‘You say nothing,’ she said. ‘Understand? Nothing.’
In that moment, all his previous suspicions were confirmed. He saw what she feared most and w
here her priorities lay. The child still in him wanted to scream at her, to beg her to stop this. Didn’t she care what she was doing to her family?
The young man in him knew that doing either would be pointless.
He swallowed the words he wanted to say and went upstairs to his room. Thoughts of revenge continued to plague him, though he fought so hard to push them to one side.
He didn’t know then that just weeks later he would find a way to put that email to good use.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The boy sitting in interview room two had a string of snot sliding from his left nostril. His face was red and his cheeks puffy from an assault of prolonged tears. Beside him, his mother sat with the back of her hand pressed firmly to her mouth. She too looked as though she’d been crying.
DC Mason had filled Alex in on what had been said by the woman when she’d come into the station with her son ten minutes earlier. With a rising sense of disheartenment, Alex closed the interview room door behind her and sat at the table opposite the mother and son.
‘It’s Jake, isn’t it?’ Alex said, tilting her head in an attempt to get the boy to make eye contact with her. Jake lowered his head further, trying to conceal the evidence of his tears. He was about eleven years old, Alex guessed – last year of primary school or maybe first of secondary – and the partly shaved scalp might have given him the misleading look of a boy who wouldn’t be seen crying anywhere, least of all in front of his mother.
‘You’re not in any trouble,’ Alex told Jake, looking to his mother. ‘I just need you to tell me what your mum told the man down at reception.’
The boy turned to his mother, managing to avoid eye contact with Alex. He elbowed her gently in the ribs, prompting her to do the talking for him.
‘I really need this to come from you, Jake,’ Alex said, stopping the boy’s mother before she could begin. Had the boy seen what he had claimed to, or had his child’s imagination and the tricks of the dark made him see things that weren’t truly there? ‘It was the night before last, is that right? Can you tell me exactly what happened, from the beginning?’
The boy looked at Alex for the first time, his dark eyes still glassy with tears. When the words came they came shakily, tripping over one another. ‘We shouldn’t have been in there,’ he stammered.
‘It’s OK, Jake, you’re not in any trouble. It doesn’t matter if you were somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, OK. I just need to know what you saw. Start from the beginning. Where did you meet your friend?’
‘At his house,’ Jake said, the stammer easing slightly. ‘He lives just round the corner.’
‘And you were on your bikes?’
Jake nodded. Alex raised her eyebrows slightly, gently prompting him to continue.
‘Come on, Jake,’ his mother said impatiently.
Alex kept her focus on the boy, but from the corner of her eye she could see his mother anxiously shifting in the chair beside him. Alex felt a sinking weight drop inside her. The boy’s mother had seen the news. They were both thinking the same thing.
‘Jake,’ Alex said, putting her hands on the table. She felt a sense of urgency now, an inescapable feeling that they were wasting valuable time. ‘You are not in trouble, but it is really important that you tell me what happened. Where, when, what, OK? Everything exactly as it happened.’
The boy gave a loud sniff and dragged his sleeve across his running nose. ‘We found this place a few days ago,’ he said, looking awkwardly at his mother. ‘It’s all boarded up, but we got in around the back; we found a place we could climb up and get in. We just wanted to explore. We didn’t take anything or break anything, I swear. There was a room, upstairs. We went in and there—’
The boy’s words broke on his tears. ‘He made me promise I wouldn’t tell.’
‘For God’s sake, Jacob,’ his mother snapped. ‘That doesn’t matter. The detective told you you’re not in trouble – this isn’t about you.’
The boy’s sobs grew louder.
‘Jake,’ Alex said calmly. ‘Tell me what you saw in that room.’
Between gulps of air, Jake began his account. ‘It was dark. There were things everywhere, like bits of old furniture and stuff. It was really dusty in there. We didn’t go in – we only pushed open the door and just poked our heads round to have a look. Riley had a look first. He told me to follow him.’
He stopped. What neither Jake nor his mother knew was that officers were already on their way to the building. Jake and his friend Riley might have been mistaken in what they thought they’d seen, but Alex wasn’t going to take any chances.
‘Go on, Jake.’
The boy took a deep breath. ‘There was someone in there. I think there was anyway. She was sitting in a chair. We ran when we saw her. I don’t know if she saw us. I think she might have been sleeping.’
Alex looked away from the boy and to the table, hoping that Jake’s naive assumption might have been right but knowing it probably wasn’t.
‘You didn’t tell your mum straight away?’
Jake shook his head. ‘Riley said we’d get into shit. Sorry,’ he said, his hand moving to his mouth and his young face flaring red. ‘Trouble. He said we’d get into loads of trouble and made me promise not to tell.’
‘But you did decide to tell?’
Jake’s mother caught Alex’s eye. ‘That woman on TV,’ she said. ‘The one they showed a picture of last night…’ She left the unfinished sentence dangling in the air between them.
‘Was the woman you saw the same woman in the picture on TV?’ Alex asked Jake, wondering why the boy had been allowed to stay up so late the previous evening. She was thankful that for whatever reason he had been. ‘Is that when you told your mum?’
The boy sobbed loudly and turned to his mother, hiding his face in the curve of her arm. His tears answered Alex’s question for him.
She was distracted from her thoughts by one of the DCs entering the room.
‘Sorry to interrupt you, boss. Have you got a minute?’
Alex followed him into the corridor, about to reprimand him for his abrupt intrusion.
‘We’ve just had a call in,’ he told her, before she had the chance. ‘Lola Evans. Turns out she was a stripper.’
Chapter Thirty
The pub was in Groeswen, a tiny village that sat between Caerphilly and Pontypridd. It was on a lonely path that although just a few hundred metres from the main road – the main road itself being little more than a narrow country lane – managed to seem as though it was far out in the countryside, isolated from the rest of civilisation by high trees and overgrown wasteland. Alex pulled her car up to the front of the building and parked alongside the couple of other vehicles already there. She could see the appeal of the place for any curious child of an adventurous and risk-taking persuasion. A stretch of land surrounded the building, now thick with bracken but still showing evidence of its former life: a broken picnic table upturned and partially burned, abandoned signage growing moss and left to decompose on the shadow of a path; broken glass still littering the ground like some haunting reminder of a party that was long since over.
Scene of crime officers were already present, having been alerted by the original officers who attended to check the place over. There was no one inside the building when they’d got there, although it quickly became clear that there had been.
Chloe stepped from the passenger side of Alex’s car and looked up at the building that stood tall and imposing before her. Its main doors had been boarded, but had been broken through by officers. The windows on both the ground and upper floors were boarded up and the roof was in a state of disrepair with large sections of tiles missing.
‘Place gives me the creeps,’ she said, pulling her jacket closer around her to stave off the bite of afternoon air.
She followed Alex through the gap of broken boards that allowed them entry into the former pub. Inside, time had been frozen. The bar stood in front of them, thick with grime and d
ust. The majority of the furniture was gone, but a few old, red-cushioned benches remained lining the walls, pictures still hanging against the flaking paintwork behind them.
Chloe took her phone from her pocket and the officers stood in the glow of its torchlight. Cobwebs hung like curtains from the ceiling and relics of the pub’s past – empty glasses, beer mats and beer bottles – lay scattered on the few tables that remained. Beneath them, their shoes clung to the sticky carpet.
‘Boss.’
A male constable appeared in a darkened doorway to the right, beckoning Alex and Chloe with a nod of the head. They followed him into a short narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs.
‘There’s a flat upstairs,’ the officer said. ‘We’ve found where the boys got in. Climbed up on to a fire escape at the back.’
‘What else has been found?’ Alex said, already fearful of the answer. If only Jake had spoken up sooner. If only his friend had said something. If only—
She stopped her trail of thoughts. Where had ‘if only’ ever got anyone?
Alex followed the officer through another door that led into a small square kitchen. The place was dark and dank, the damp spreading up the walls in a blackened rash and the stale smell of age and abandonment clogging the air. Other than old cupboard units and a cooker that looked as though it had never been cleaned, the room was empty. The remains of a smashed light bulb hung from the fitting at the centre of the ceiling.
‘You’d better come through,’ the officer said, nodding to the next doorway.
They followed him through an empty space that might once have been a living room. The door that led to the room where scene of crime officers now worked had been at some time padlocked, the lock found on the floor of the kitchen when the first officers had entered the building.
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 11
