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

by Victoria Jenkins

  Sent to us by an anonymous user of the webcam site ‘GirlsOnline’, the two and a half minute footage shows DC Lane responding to requests she receives via the site’s chatroom. The recording – in which Chloe Lane appears more like a member of the cast of Geordie Shore than one of Her Majesty’s serving officers – sees the young woman accepting instruction from a paying member of the site. Some of the images that appear later in the footage are too graphic to be printed here. Using the alias Belle90, Chloe Lane’s profile cites her vital statistics as 32-26-34 (bra size C).

  It was everything Alex hated about the modern press and about this publication in particular. She’d previously been pestered by journalists from the same paper. This wasn’t about professional conduct or public interest – it was merely about scandal and sex. No doubt the newspaper’s website article on the ‘story’ would feature countless different images from the footage in an attempt to exploit as much cheap titillation from the recording as possible; yet another excuse to flaunt naked flesh amidst the real headlines of the day.

  Alex sat back and let the rest of the article swim on the page in front of her as she tried to arrange her thoughts. Had Chloe known this was going to happen? Yesterday morning she had been acting strangely, and though Alex realised she was bearing the weight of her brother’s death on her shoulders, she had talked about him over a week earlier without her mood being so suddenly affected. The footage had turned up in the superintendent’s email account the previous morning.

  Did Chloe know he had received it?

  She couldn’t make sense of anything the article reported. Chloe would never have done that, surely. And yet, it so clearly was her. A younger her, a different her, but undoubtedly her. Revenge porn; sadly, Alex could comprehend that. But this? Webcam sites. Payment. This was all too much for her to get her head around.

  She started the engine back up and flung the paper on to the passenger seat, flipping it over so she would no longer have to be subjected to the sight of Chloe in her underwear.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The tension in the room was tangible; it snagged at the edges of Superintendent Harry Blake’s office desk and caught on every inhalation Chloe took, suffocating her. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, she felt herself choking. She had known this was going to happen, but knowing was never going to be enough to help her prepare for it. How could she possibly have prepared? No matter what she said, she knew what was coming.

  The superintendent had asked her to take a seat, which did little to calm Chloe’s anxieties. It was embarrassing enough to know what he had seen – to know what the entire station had no doubt by now seen – and now his awkwardness was making everything worse. She could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead, glistening on his pale grey skin.

  What was he so panicked about, Chloe wondered? None of the papers had published pictures of him in his underwear.

  ‘Do you want to explain it?’

  Of course she didn’t. She didn’t want to explain it any more than she wanted to be sitting in that office right there and then, burning beneath the heat of the office strip lighting. She could explain it, but what would that achieve? The outcome was going to be the same.

  ‘The money was good.’

  It wasn’t a lie: the money had been great. More than she had ever earned before. More than she could make as a police officer in a month.

  Her flippancy wasn’t well received. Harry Blake pursed his lips. His cheeks reddened slightly. ‘That’s it. That’s your explanation?’

  ‘It was years ago, sir, before I joined the police. I didn’t break any laws. I needed money. I got a job.’

  Blake’s left eyebrow rose at the word ‘job’. ‘We are in the middle of a major investigation, one that has gained a lot of public interest over the past couple of days. The last thing we need is…’ he gestured at the newspaper on his desk, as if unable to find the right words, ‘this.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The superintendent looked at her incredulously. ‘Sorry? That’s it?’

  ‘I don’t know what else I can say, sir. I can’t undo it, no matter how much I’d like to be able to.’

  Blake rubbed his forehead and sighed. ‘Tell me what you’ve copied from the database.’

  Chloe felt her stomach double over. Whatever she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that. How did he know?

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘DC Lane, please. Don’t waste my time.’

  Dan Mason, she thought. He hadn’t seen her yesterday, but the day before that he had interrupted her as she’d tried to download the files. Clearly he had seen more than she realised. Had she even logged out after being interrupted by him? She’d been panicked; she couldn’t remember.

  How much had Dan seen?

  ‘Have you accessed files relating to your brother?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘Bloody hell, Lane. I told you to leave this alone. This,’ he said, pushing the newspaper across the desk towards her, as though she needed reminding of its front page, ‘is exactly the kind of publicity we could do without. And now this.’

  His voice was shaking with anger. She didn’t blame him. He was bound by his duties as superintendent just as she had been bound by her own set of responsibilities at the time that video footage had been taken.

  She wished she’d waited to access those files, but like so many other things in her life it was now too late to go back and change it.

  ‘I gave you an instruction to wait with regards to your brother’s case and you ignored it. You accessed files you had no right to. Have you taken copies?’

  She shook her head.

  Blake raised an eyebrow, trying to prompt an admission from her.

  ‘I haven’t, sir.’ The lie came so easily.

  He sighed loudly. ‘I need everyone on this team to be focused and, at the moment, Lane, you are not. First the complaint made by Patrick Sibley, then the papers, now this. I’m going to have to suspend you from duties—’

  ‘Sir, no—’

  ‘Until our current case is completed. DC Lane, I’m sorry, I am, but you’ve not left me with much choice. Accessing closed case files like that is a disciplinary offence, you understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Sir, I… yes. I understand that.’ She gripped the arms of her seat and forced back tears. No man had ever seen her cry; she wasn’t going to change that now.

  Why now? She watched the superintendent’s focus shift uncomfortably from her before settling itself on the desk in front of him. Who had sent that clip to the station? Who had sent it to the papers – and why had they chosen to do so now? First the emails, then this. This was no coincidence. Someone seemed intent on revisiting her past, and wasn’t that what she herself had wanted all these years?

  But not like this.

  She stood from her chair. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said again, knowing her words would be met with derision. He looked away from her, down at his desk but somehow managing to avoid the front of the newspaper.

  In the corridor, Chloe headed straight for the toilets, moving quickly to avoid colleagues. She flung the door to the ladies open and stood at one of the sinks, the palms of her hands pressed against the cold porcelain. Heat coursed through her, her heart racing and her head pounding. She couldn’t bring herself to look at her own reflection.

  She had done it for Luke. All of it. And now she would be able to do nothing.

  Chloe stayed in the toilets longer than was necessary, once again trying to avoid seeing anyone. She left at the wrong time; as she emerged from the ladies, a group of uniformed officers was heading along the corridor in her direction. Chloe hurried for the stairs, but wasn’t fast enough to miss the wolf-whistle thrown back in her direction. On any other day she would have turned back to see which one of them it was – would have confronted it head on – but that day she couldn’t bring herself to face him. She just wanted to be as far away from the place as possible.

  Alex had wanted to stay
at the station that morning to check through the list of support group member names Tim Cole had emailed across, but an early call from Helen Collier saw her heading to Cardiff to the University Hospital of Wales. She had asked DC Mason to look into the names Tim Cole had provided, and to check for them on the Niche database: a record of every person who had ever made contact with South Wales Police. Under normal circumstances, she would have taken DC Lane to the hospital with her. She sometimes wondered whether anything was going to be ‘normal’ again, or whether in fact normal had ever existed.

  Now she found herself standing in the pathology lab, knowing it probably hadn’t.

  Sarah Taylor’s naked body was laid out on an examination table. The condition of the examination meant that it was now impossible to see her as the smiling young woman whose face still adorned the board of the incident room. She was a drowning victim. A lost girl. Everything that had been a part of her – all the things that had made her the person her family and friends had loved – was gone, leaving a shell so grotesque that Alex’s attention was unable to stay fixed for more than seconds at a time.

  ‘She was alive when she went into the water,’ Helen confirmed.

  Alex nodded. They had suspected so – feared so – and now she couldn’t help but linger over thoughts of Sarah’s final moments. Drowning wasn’t a peaceful death. It was torturous, violent; desperate. The torn skin on her legs and wrists showed a valiant struggle to free herself, presumably both in the water and before.

  ‘There’s rupturing to the muscles in the neck and shoulders, suggesting a struggle for air. The water was so cold that given any further time it might have induced cardiac arrest, but she was likely to have been dead within minutes of entering the water.’

  Minutes. She made it sound like such a brief space of time; so inconsequential. When you were facing your own death, Alex imagined it was its very own lifetime.

  ‘There was vomit found in her throat,’ Helen continued, sparing Alex none of the grim details. ‘Vomiting is common in cases of drowning, usually occurring soon before loss of consciousness. It seems in this case that the vomit was trapped. It was likely her mouth had been blocked with something, meaning she drowned through inhalation of water through her nose.’

  Alex looked down at the table, her eyes fixing on the cool length of steel that ran beneath the young woman’s body. Once again, she couldn’t quite bring herself to look at the greying skin of the body that had once been a living being, young and beautiful.

  ‘Her body didn’t sink,’ she said, thinking out loud.

  Helen shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t have resurfaced that quickly. Given the temperature, that would have taken longer than a week. She was probably visible the duration she was there. Not many people passing this time of year, obviously.’

  Lola Evans had sunk to the bottom of the River Taff, resurfacing when the effects of the water had begun to bloat her body. She had been in the water for anything from ten to fourteen days and obvious attempts had been made to keep her body submerged. It didn’t seem logical that the killer’s efforts to hide his crime would be better first time around than the second. Either he had panicked when he’d put Sarah Taylor in the lake, or—

  ‘The bags.’

  Helen looked at her questioningly.

  ‘The bags on her wrist weren’t broken, were they?’

  Helen gestured to the worktop that lined the left side of the lab. ‘They’re over there. All intact.’

  Lola’s body had been weighed down by the plastic carrier bags tethered to the ropes at her wrists. The bags had been ripped and torn: maybe by the force of the water that had swept her downstream; maybe by whatever had been placed into the bag to hold her body under. Perhaps by both. Either way, they had been little more than scraps of plastic by the time her body had resurfaced.

  Alex glanced back at Sarah Taylor’s corpse. What if those bags hadn’t been used to weigh her down, to keep her submerged?

  What if they were merely a sign?

  It’s me again.

  I was here.

  Alex allowed her focus to linger on the body of Sarah Taylor.

  Whatever happened next, she couldn’t let yet another woman to fall victim to the killer.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Clive Beckett’s son was a handsome man in his thirties. He was dressed in a suit, having come straight from work. Alex had already found out that he worked in a bank and that he was married, with a newborn baby who he cited as the reason for his permanent sleep-starved state. He sat opposite Alex and drank an Americano in record speed, getting up and leaving her while he went to the café’s counter to order a second.

  ‘Sorry,’ he apologised, as he returned and sat back down. ‘I’m all over the place today.’

  ‘You wanted to speak to me about your father,’ she prompted.

  At the mention of the man, Martin Beckett’s expression altered. ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve spoken with one of his colleagues. We’re waiting for your father to get back to us.’

  ‘Right. Good luck with that.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Martin Beckett gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Doesn’t really put himself out for other people. He’ll get round to it in his own time, when it suits him.’

  The animosity Martin felt towards his father was in no way subtle. Alex wondered whether any information he had would be reliable.

  ‘Why do you want to speak with him?’

  ‘Routine, that’s all. I’m afraid I can’t say too much. While a case is ongoing, everything is confidential, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry.’ Martin sat forward in his seat and looked across to the counter as though checking that his coffee was on its way. ‘Something’s happened at the pub though, hasn’t it? A few people have mentioned the police cordon. A young woman’s body was found there, wasn’t it? Was it that missing woman who’s been on the news? There are all sorts of rumours flying about.’

  Alex’s thoughts flitted once more to DC Lane. How many more rumours would be circulating in the aftermath of the paper’s actions? One of the duties of the police was to reassure the public. Scandal, in whatever form, was unlikely to help them achieve that. Though none of this was directly Chloe’s fault, she knew that blame would inevitably be placed at her door.

  She hadn’t yet had a chance to speak with Chloe, though she knew that Superintendent Blake had temporarily suspended her from duties. Alex realised he’d had little choice, yet the knowledge hadn’t been enough to suppress the anger she felt. There were too many questions that needed to be answered; there were too many things that needed to be explained. Until she knew the facts Alex wasn’t prepared to assume the worst. Chloe deserved a chance to tell her side of the story.

  Alex’s lip curled in response to Martin’s comment, and he raised a hand in apology.

  ‘Sorry. I get it. I’m not supposed to ask. The place has been empty for years though, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Issues with the freehold?’

  ‘My father’s given up on it. Tried to fight the authorities, but stopped trying in the end. He doesn’t need the money – it became more a matter of principle, I think. He’s a man who doesn’t like to lose. It’s a listed building, you see, so there’s no knocking it down and no converting it. Stupid really. Gets to stand there empty. Not that anyone would want it, I wouldn’t have thought.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, not the nicest history.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, there was a death there, years ago. Woman who lived in the flat above the pub. You know about this, do you?’

  Alex’s face made it obvious that she knew little of the pub’s history. Over his second coffee, Martin Beckett filled her in on some of the details. He told Alex that his family had never lived in the pub, but had had a house on the outskirts of Cardiff, in Lisvane, as DC Mason had already found out. His father h
ad rented out the flat above the pub. The woman who had lived there had drowned in the bathtub – an accident whilst she was drunk.

  Alex wracked her brain for a memory of the case, but she couldn’t recall one. She would look into it later.

  ‘That woman split my family apart.’

  Alex sat back in her chair, studying Martin curiously. She said nothing, allowing him to continue.

  ‘Mind you, if she hadn’t, someone else would have. My father – he probably won’t tell you this bit when you speak to him, if you get to speak to him – he had a bit of a problem with keeping it in his pants, shall we say. He was sleeping with the woman who lived in the flat. Seems that’s how she kept up with her rent.’

  Alex tried to guess at Martin’s age, working out how long ago all this had taken place.

  ‘Your mother found out?’

  ‘I think she might have known for a while, but she stayed with him for me.’

  Alex wondered if a chat with the former Mrs Beckett might be necessary. For now, she couldn’t see how any of this would be relevant to the cases they were currently investigating. Whoever had taken Lola and Sarah had needed somewhere secluded, secure. Their killer might not have chosen the best of places, but perhaps it had been his only option at the time. But clearly he had known the flat was there.

  ‘I’d like to take your details please, Mr Beckett. Just in case we need anything later on.’ She took a small notebook and a pen from her bag, turned to a clean page and passed both to Martin Beckett. He wrote down his name and number and passed them back to her.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Alex had never seen Chloe like this. She was without make-up and dark circles shadowed her usually bright eyes. She looked as though she’d been crying. Chloe was usually so strong, so in control. What was all this doing to her?

  Chloe held the door aside for Alex, though she refused at first to meet her eye. Despite her frustration with Chloe’s breaking of the rules, Alex knew she was in no position to judge. She should have admitted to her own taking of Emily Phillips’s post-mortem report, but she couldn’t while their current case was still ongoing. She felt sympathy for Chloe; she felt a loyalty towards her, but she also had a commitment to catching Lola Evans’s and Sarah Taylor’s killer.