‘I’m not happy with the way you went about things in there.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Alex said, her voice laced with sarcasm. ‘Next time I’ll try to be a bit more sensitive to people’s emotions. I’m sure that’ll do Sarah Taylor the world of good.’
Tim Cole had the decency to look away.
‘The records we asked for earlier,’ she said. ‘Have you got them for us?’
Tim looked back to her, his expression altered now. ‘That’s what I needed to tell you. I went to get them earlier, when I arrived at the hall. They’re gone.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
‘Where the hell are those records?’ Alex asked, giving voice to her thoughts. She gripped the steering wheel between tightened hands. She felt so frustrated by the lack of progress. Every minute that passed was another minute lost to Sarah.
‘Tim seemed pretty surprised they weren’t there,’ Chloe said. ‘Unless he’s a good actor, I reckon he was genuine. If the only other person who had a key to that filing cabinet is Connor, looks as though we’ve got even more to go on.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Alex said, her voice betraying her frustrations. ‘It still doesn’t give us any real proof of anything.’
The Twitter account Tim Cole used as an emergency contact for group members had thrown up no results. Other than tweets with details of meeting times, there was nothing. No one had used it to contact him privately. It seemed an hour a week’s contact with Tim Cole was enough for anybody.
They were going to have to release Connor Price from custody. They had held him for as long as they could, and in that time no concrete evidence against him had come to light. They couldn’t keep him at the station for being a liar and an adulterer.
‘He could get away with this,’ she said, once again thinking out loud.
Chloe’s head was turned away from her, facing the window. ‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ she muttered.
Alex cast her a sideways glance. ‘You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself, Chloe. You’re torturing yourself.’
‘I have to find out what happened.’ Chloe turned to face her, her expression defiant.
Alex looked at the young woman incredulously. ‘Were you not there in Blake’s office the other day?’
‘You expected me to just turn it off at his say-so?’
‘You need to wait until we’ve found Lola’s murderer before you do anything more about Luke, OK? You managed years without pursuing this – why is it so difficult now?’
‘I tried to pursue it,’ Chloe snapped defensively. ‘I tried years ago and no one would listen to me, no one would take me seriously. I was just a kid back then. Things are different now.’
Those emails, Alex thought. Who the hell had sent them? Without them everything would have been different. Those emails seem to have prompted an accusation: she hadn’t done enough. It was this guilt that was driving Chloe to behave the way she was now: so erratically; so completely out of character.
Perhaps it would have been better for Chloe if she’d stayed in London and not come back to Cardiff. Old wounds were bound to be reopened eventually, although maybe that’s what Chloe had been hoping for.
‘Promise me.’
Alex looked sideways at Chloe. The young woman’s head was turned to the window, her face obscured by shadow.
‘Chloe.’
‘OK,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I know.’
Alex sighed. Chloe was bright, astute, intelligent, but here was her weakness. Given the wrong opportunities, she would throw her career away over a truth that might never see the light of day. Luke was gone: nothing would change that. Alex felt a responsibility to stop Chloe throwing her own life away.
‘Your brother wouldn’t want you to jeopardise your career.’
Chloe’s head snapped towards her, her face stained with an uncharacteristic anger. ‘What would you know about it? Luke wanted the truth. He would still want the truth, whatever it takes.’
‘Ruining your life?’ Alex challenged.
Chloe turned her head back to the window. ‘This is my life. Some of us put our families before our careers.’
The words cut through Alex’s reserve. They were all the more painful for their unexpectedness. This was a side to her colleague she had never seen before, and one she didn’t want to make a habit of seeing.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Alex pulled the car to the kerbside, the engine still running. ‘Clearly not nothing. What are you suggesting?’ She didn’t have a family. That ship had long since sailed. Was Chloe referring to her marriage breakdown?
Could she really be that cruel, to use it against her?
Of course she could. When someone hurt enough, the cruellest of things could pass their tongues.
Chloe reached for the handle and opened the car door. A blast of chilly evening air greeted them.
‘Chloe, don’t—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Chloe said, cutting her short as she stepped out the car.
‘Don’t be silly, Chloe, you don’t—’
The car door was slammed shut. Alex sighed, unlocked her seatbelt and got out of the driver’s side, calling to Chloe’s back as the young woman walked the pavement of the main road that led towards the station.
What was happening to her? Just a few months ago, Chloe had been one of the most resilient young women Alex had ever known. She had seemed so grounded, so focused. But perhaps she hadn’t really known her at all.
Alex stood by the car and watched as the distance between them grew. She wanted to believe in the young woman she had championed these past few months; the young woman she had requested to have work alongside her. Was her judgement of character so poor that she hadn’t seen what had really been there all along?
Try as she might to push the notion loose, Alex was beginning to feel she had made a terrible mistake. DC Lane wasn’t who she had thought she was. She was fragile, vulnerable: distracted. She wanted to help her, but she was restricted by professional boundaries. Without looking at the case files, they had nothing more to work from other than Chloe’s suspicions.
Chloe knew it.
And now Alex was watching her unravel.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chloe was tired and hungry and the thought of her bed was a momentary distraction from the scene she had created in DI King’s car. She was wracked with shame at her behaviour and guilt at what she’d said. She hadn’t meant it. She was angry with the world, but mostly just angry with herself. There were things she knew she should do now; things that had been put off and delayed because there hadn’t been a right time. She knew now there was never going to be a right time, yet she was filled with a sense of urgency that begged that time should be now.
She stripped off in the bedroom and went to the shower, standing beneath a jet of water that was too hot and made her pale skin flare red. Each sting felt like a punishment, as though she deserved to feel this pain. She couldn’t prove Luke’s innocence. She had let Alex down. All the people she cared about were the very people she was letting down.
Her thoughts roamed to Scott, a momentary, welcome distraction, yet one that brought with it a sense of hopelessness. The thought of him made the sting of the hot water more acute. She wished she could stop herself from holding back. The old Chloe, a Chloe she hadn’t seen for years, would have let him know exactly what she was thinking, regardless of the consequences. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt the touch of a man’s skin against her own. She carried too much shame to ever let anyone get that close.
She turned off the shower, stepped out on to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and wrapped herself in a towel. In the bedroom, she put on underwear and an oversized T-shirt before sitting on the edge of the bed to blow-dry her hair. She ran a finger over the mousepad on her laptop, prompting the screen into life. She had several tabs on the Internet open and she clicked on to her emails as her other hand ran a
hairbrush across her scalp.
She would usually delete emails from addresses or names she didn’t recognise, but this particular one was titled ‘FAO DC Lane’. She felt her heart rate slow as her finger hovered over the mousepad. No one contacted her about work via her personal email. The past couple of months had taught her not to be so hasty with her use of the delete button. She had spoken to DC Mason about wanting to get an ID on an email address, telling him she had received anonymous written abuse. He was the station’s resident IT geek: if anyone would know how to gain information from the address, he would. Chloe had made him promise not to mention the emails to anyone else at the station. If Dan had been suspicious of this, his face had failed to betray the fact.
Chloe had given him the email address, but Dan had come quickly back to her with the news that the IP address had been masked. There were ways of gaining further information on the sender, he’d told her, but they would involve needing a warrant.
Chloe had thanked him and told him not to worry about it.
She put the hairbrush down and opened the email. There was no message, only a link to a video file. She clicked on the link, knowing she shouldn’t, but unable to resist. As the opening image appeared on the screen, Chloe felt nausea spread through her chest. Unable to watch, she closed the link and sat further back on her bed, her heart thumping beneath the towel she still wore wrapped around her.
She couldn’t make sense of what she had just seen, yet the sight had chilled her to the bone.
Chapter Forty
Alex got the call at ten to seven that morning, not long after getting out of the shower. She pinned her wet hair back hurriedly and dressed in the clothes she’d already laid out at the end of the bed. She called Chloe, who sounded so awake that Alex wondered whether she had been to sleep at all. Having agreed to pick her up on her way, Alex headed in her black Audi to the village of Taff’s Well, from where she would head to the M4 motorway.
Neither woman mentioned what had happened the previous evening, but it had lingered, unsaid, during the call.
Chloe lived alone in the downstairs flat of an end-terraced house in Taff’s Well. The street was tucked behind the main road, close to the rugby club. The noise of the A470 could be heard from the street, but other than that the area was peaceful. As Alex approached, she saw Chloe waiting on the pavement. She usually looked immaculate – something that never failed to make Alex feel comparatively frumpy – but that morning she looked nothing like the Chloe Alex was so used to seeing. Her hair was dishevelled, piled into a messy bun on the top of her head. She was without make-up. When she got into the car, Alex could see dark shadows circling her eyes.
‘Is it Sarah Taylor?’ Chloe asked, pulling the seatbelt around her.
‘I hope not.’
Alex pulled back out on to the main road. It was early, but the morning’s rush hour traffic was already starting to build. Chloe was uncharacteristically silent, her head turned away from Alex as she watched the houses slowly pass them by.
‘Everything OK?’
‘Fine.’
Alex knew enough to know that ‘fine’ invariably meant anything but.
‘If it’s what happened last night, it’s forgotten.’
‘I said I’m fine.’
The clipped tone was so unlike Chloe that it put an abrupt end to any further questions Alex might have had. She couldn’t even bring herself to make small talk. She had wanted to discuss what had happened – make sure that Chloe knew what had been said had been forgiven (if she was completely honest, Alex didn’t forget much) – and it smarted to have the olive branch she had offered snapped back in her face like that. Biting her tongue, Alex turned the radio on low, letting the sound of the morning’s national news headlines fill the car’s uncomfortable silence.
She didn’t want to think about what might face them when they reached Penarth. She knew Cosmeston Lakes well. It was a beauty spot just over a half an hour drive from Alex’s home town of Caerphilly that was popular with families who liked to spend lazy summer afternoons enjoying picnics on the grass that sloped down to the main lake, and with walkers who liked to venture further amidst the paths that intertwined amongst the other, smaller lakes.
The area was affluent. House prices were high and the locals prided themselves on being one of the most respectable and successful areas in Wales. Crime rates were low. Sarah Taylor – if she was in fact to be discovered there – had lived in Pontypridd, miles from Cosmeston Lakes. If she was there now, why had she been taken to a different borough?
And why there?
They slowed to a crawl as they neared the city. Chloe hadn’t spoken and Alex was too distracted by her thoughts to attempt a conversation about the weather or the state of the economy as bemoaned by the politician whose voice was the only sound to break the quiet purr of Alex’s Audi. She did her best to ignore the frostiness in the car, making no further attempt to question Chloe.
Cosmeston Lakes was a beautiful spot during the spring and summer months, but like anywhere else it looked considerably bleaker in the grey half-light of a cold January morning. There were few other cars in the car park when they arrived; the only others belonging to the pathologist and officers who had first responded to the call. The man who had made the call was sitting on a far wall at the side of the car park, near the closed-up café. He was dressed in running gear: neon trainers, full-length Lycra leggings, a skintight Lycra top and a thin beanie hat. Alex wondered why anyone would want to go out running at any time of year, but running on a January morning baffled her.
The man was talking with a uniformed officer. As they approached, the two stopped talking and the runner stood from the wall.
‘DI King,’ she introduced herself. ‘This is DC Chloe Lane. You found the body?’
The man nodded. ‘I almost missed it. There was something sticking up from the water, just slightly. I stopped to take a closer look.’
The ‘something’ the man had seen had later transpired to be Sarah Taylor’s elbow. She had been in the water for considerably less time than Lola Evans, meaning there had been minimal damage to her body. Helen, the pathologist, estimated around two days, which made Connor Price’s involvement impossible. Two days earlier, he had been in custody at the police station. Unless he was capable of being in two places at once, Connor Price hadn’t put Sarah Taylor in the water.
Sarah was instantly recognisable. Her clothes had been removed, as Lola’s had, leaving Sarah in only her underwear. Grace had told them the last time she’d seen Sarah she’d been wearing a dress, ready to go out for the evening. The dark thoughts that Alex had tried to keep at bay returned.
Like Lola, Sarah’s hair had been cut. Yet there were considerable differences between the two victims. Lola had been tortured before she had been killed. Other than the very early effects of water to the body and some slight bruising to the face, Sarah Taylor showed no signs of physical injury.
Alex stood at the side of the wooden bridge and looked sadly at the body of Sarah Taylor. She had been brought to the lake’s edge and laid on the damp grass. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs tethered together at the knees. As with Lola, plastic bags had been attached to the ropes that held her bound.
‘Unbroken,’ Alex said, gesturing to the bags. ‘Not enough time in the water? The river moves, but it’s far more peaceful here at the lakes. Well…’ she added, acknowledging the irony of her words.
‘If those bags had been filled, would the body have resurfaced so soon?’ Chloe mused.
‘There’s something else,’ Helen said, crouching beside the body and placing a gloved hand to the girl’s arm. ‘Here.’
She lifted Sarah Taylor’s arms and gently pushed aside one of the coils of rope that held her wrists bound. Angry tears to the young woman’s skin showed an obvious attempt to free her arms. She looked up at Alex. ‘I can’t say anything for certain yet. The post-mortem will tell.’
She didn’t need to explain what she mea
nt: it was obvious to both Alex and Chloe what the pathologist was suggesting.
Sarah Taylor was still alive when she’d been put into the water.
Chapter Forty-One
The team was gathered in the incident room. On the evidence board were photographs of Lola Evans and Sarah Taylor, both posing with smiles for the camera; both beautifully ignorant of what a near-fate held in store for them. Their faces filled Alex with a desperate sadness that was almost tangible. The older she grew, the deeper her mistrust in life became. Illness, disease, betrayal, death. Murder. It was so often all too easy to forget that there was any good in the world.
Alex had expected the superintendent to be present at the meeting that morning, but she hadn’t seen him since she’d arrived at the station. It would be down to her to relay the details to him later, and she was determined to seek him out armed with something more than vague progress. At the current rate the case was moving that possibility seemed something still in too-distant reach.
Connor Price had been released from custody. The two other men from the support group – Sean Pugh and Carl Henderson – were due to attend the station that day for blood testing. The best possible outcome would be that one of them would prove a match for the second, unidentified, blood sample found at The Black Lion, bringing an end to their search for the killer. Should one of the men fail to show up that day, it would surely suggest an indication of his guilt.
‘The records of people who attended the support group have conveniently gone AWOL,’ Alex told the team. ‘According to Tim Cole, the only two people who had access to them were him and Connor Price. The records are only kept for emergency purposes and the last time they were checked was May last year, when Sean Pugh had a panic attack. It seems the rest of the group thought he was having a heart attack, so Tim accessed the files to contact his mother after an ambulance had been called. The files were there then, so I’ve asked Tim Cole for a list of people who’ve attended the group between then and now.’
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 15
