She had thought that changing her name, dyeing her hair, moving away, would be enough to shed her old life as Chloe Griffiths. As Belle90. How naive that had been, she thought. You couldn’t escape the past. It stayed with you, there, in your shadow. It lurked at your shoulder, breathing on your neck like a ghost. Running away hadn’t worked. Confronting it might, but there were other things she had to do first.
Casting thoughts of her own problems aside, Chloe turned on her laptop. She had wanted to avoid it, but there were things she needed to do: things she owed Detective Inspector King. She had let her down. She had been too wrapped up in herself – in Luke, in Emily, and now this – and she had let her own priorities take precedence over their current case. She may have been suspended, but that needn’t mean she had to be completely useless. She didn’t matter any more. All that mattered now was Lola Evans. Sarah Taylor.
She finished the last of her barely warm coffee and pulled the laptop on to a cushion on her lap. There was so much she had wanted to say during the last meeting she’d attended, but her thoughts had been interlocked amongst others and she had allowed them to become lost.
She opened the Word document on the desktop and began to write.
He hates women. The injuries inflicted on Lola’s body suggests some sort of punishment, although there is nothing in his behaviour to suggest that he gains anything sexual from his actions. Why does he hate women? Who has harmed him? He preys on women who are vulnerable: women who put their trust in him. They know him. For now, it seems likely they know him from the support group. He lures them, makes them feel safe then traps them.
There were no signs of a struggle in the downstairs of the pub, or on the stairs or in any other room of the upstairs flat other than the room where the victims were held. In order to get them into the pub, he must have incapacitated them somehow. Were the women drunk? Even drunk, it seems likely they would have put up some sort of a struggle against him. There was no evidence of any drugs in the post-mortem of either woman, but it might be worth considering the use of Rohypnol. It is tasteless, odourless, and a person’s system is cleared of any evidence of its consumption within twenty-four hours.
The victims would have been incapacitated long enough for him to transport them to the pub and get them into the upstairs flat. Neither victim was heavy – both were easy enough for a man of only average strength to move. The other implication here is that he owns or at least has access to a vehicle, possibly one that might allow him to conceal the women easily. What job does this man have, if any? Is he using his own vehicle, or someone else’s?
His taking of items from the victims’ bodies, as well as his apparently specific selection of his victims, is conducive with the pattern of a serial killer. He has found, wooed, lured, killed and collected from his victims and is likely to now be in what is known as the Depression Phase. I fear this man may kill again – in fact, it is likely he has already identified his next victim. It may well be another woman from the support group. If he fails in his attempt to trap and kill this woman, it is likely to result in a bitter disappointment that fuels his anger and he may attack at random in response to this. He is likely already upset – we have found his base, disrupted his plans; he will be anxious and angry and will therefore regard himself as forced to behave in ways that may not follow the pattern of his two previous crimes.
Chloe saved the document under the file name ‘EVANSTAYLOR’ before closing it. She logged into her email account and found Alex’s email address. She attached the saved document and clicked send just as the doorbell sounded.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Alex had been back at the house for less than ten minutes when she was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. She had been upstairs changing from her work clothes into a pair of pyjamas, too tired to be bothered to take a shower before bed. It had been such a long and eventful day and she felt exhausted by it. The last thing she needed was to see Rob on the doorstep, waiting with the look of someone who wasn’t going to leave without much persuasion. She knew it was him through the frosted panes of glass, and she considered how easy it might be to ignore him and leave him standing there. Facing what was bound to come next was something Alex would have preferably avoided, although she knew that not facing it now meant leaving it for another day.
‘Can I come in? Please.’
Alex looked at him incredulously. She felt conscious of the pyjamas she had chosen, realising she was dressed like a lazy teenager. Yet again, she reprimanded herself for fickle thoughts of her appearance.
‘Who is she?’
‘Alex, please—’
‘“Alex, please,” what? I’m not allowed to ask?’
Rob glanced at the house next door, as though expecting to find the neighbours hanging out of the living room window and listening in on what was guaranteed to be an awkward conversation. ‘Can we do this inside?’
‘“This”? What is “this”?’
Rob sighed. ‘Five minutes, that’s all I’m asking.’
Reluctantly, Alex stepped aside and let him into the house. She didn’t want him there – it was past ten o’clock and the only place she wanted to be was tucked up in bed – but neither did she want their dirty laundry aired on the doorstep for all to see. If she’d allowed herself the time to consider it, she might have had a chance to think about what she would say to him when she next saw him, but as always she had distracted herself with her work, ignoring the things that, if given a chance, might tip her over the edge.
‘How long have you been with her?’
Rob said nothing, his guilty face revealing everything he didn’t want to say. At least he had the decency to look ashamed. Alex didn’t need him to tell her that he’d been seeing this woman – she still didn’t even know her name – for some time. The boy sitting on Rob’s shoulders had seemed to know him pretty well: well enough to laugh with him, to keep his small hands clamped to Rob’s neck to stop himself slipping; well enough for the four of them to appear as any other family out together to do their weekly shop.
Family.
The word struck Alex, momentarily stalling every other thought.
She had lain naked with Rob, had let his hands undo all the bad things that lurked elsewhere in her life. She had showered with him, returning to his body for second helpings with the kind of thoughtless abandon she hadn’t experienced since their early days together; the kind of physical need that had kept her returning to him long after they had both known the emotional element of their relationship to be over. The very thought of it now filled her with shame and anger.
If he and that woman, that woman’s children, were in fact a family – if they had welcomed and accepted him as part of theirs – what did that make her?
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘It’s everything I think,’ she snapped. ‘What was your plan – you’d keep a nice little boil-in-the-bag family to go home to after shagging the ex-wife who couldn’t give you kids?’
The look on Rob’s face said she may as well have slapped him. A part of her wanted to.
‘That’s not fair, Alex. None of this is to do with—’
Her anger spilled into tears, hot and unexpected. They were rare, and Rob turned away from them as though embarrassed. Alex dragged the sleeve of her pyjama top across her face in a vain attempt to conceal the evidence of her frustrations.
What was she even crying for? She didn’t love Rob any more; she hadn’t been in love with Rob for years, not in any way more than the kind of love borne of mutual respect for the shared time that keeps couples together far longer than their expiry dates. Her tears were for her own wounded pride. They were for everything she might once have had, but would now never know. They were for everything she had no control over.
They were for Lola Evans and Sarah Taylor. They were for Chloe.
‘It’s always been you, Alex.’
She was glad he said it: the laugh it prompted helped to get rid of the embarrassing te
ars. He sounded like some bad male lead in a two-star romantic comedy, doling out clichés with all the sincerity of a double glazing salesman.
‘Please. Don’t make things worse than they already are.’
‘It’s true. I know you won’t believe me; I know I don’t deserve it. But you’ve pushed and pushed and now everything is on your terms, and is that fair, really?’
‘Fair?’
‘What have the last couple of months been all about, Alex? I’ve just been convenient, haven’t I? A distraction to take your mind off other things.’
He seemed to know as soon as he’d said it that his words were a mistake.
‘Meaning?’
Rob raised his hands in surrender. ‘Meaning nothing. I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry’ just made Alex angry. She could feel her face growing hot. He’d done enough damage at the supermarket, and now this.
‘I’m right though, aren’t I?’ he continued, not ready to take the warning that he’d already said too much. ‘It’s you calling all the shots, as usual. You just craving control to make up for all the things that have slipped from your grip, and once again I’m just collateral damage.’
‘I thought you were sorry? You can stop now.’
Rob shoved his hands into his pockets and lowered his head. He looked pathetic, she thought.
‘How long have you been with her?’
He shrugged. ‘A few months.’
Alex’s lip curled. It was insulting, being lied to in her own home by the man she had once shared it with. Rob would never have met the kids of someone he’d only been seeing for a matter of months – it just wasn’t like him. But then, she thought, there were so many other things she had believed ‘weren’t like him’ which now apparently were.
‘That night I called you,’ she said, ‘months ago, when you came to fix the window. You were with her then?’
That night had been the first of many. She wished now she could go back in time and deal with that broken window herself. Letting him back into her life had been an invitation for trouble and now here it was, welcomed into her home by her own stupidity, her own desire to feel a way she had thought was long behind her. She was too tired to be dealing with this.
He couldn’t even bring himself to nod in response. He didn’t need to say anything: the answer was in his face, in the way he lowered his head and looked at the hallway carpet like some unruly child receiving a reprimand.
What now? She could kick him out, stand on the doorstep yelling and screaming like some woman scorned, but where would that get her? There was a reason they had separated. She was not meant to be with him.
‘Just go, Rob.’
‘But…’
‘Please.’
He put a hand on the handle of the front door. ‘I assume I’m expected to apologise. I can’t. You’ve picked me up and put me down when it’s suited you. We’re really not that different.’
He waited for a reply and pushed down the handle of the door when he didn’t get one. There were a hundred things Alex wanted to say to him – spiteful, vicious things that would relieve her momentarily of the bitter taste they were creating in her mouth – but she managed to hold them back. Voicing her anger wasn’t going to make it go away.
Rob closed the door behind him, leaving Alex standing in the hallway. She wasn’t sure which hurt the most: the humiliation of having been the other woman, or the fact that too many of the things he’d said had been disconcertingly accurate. She had never before considered seeking control a negative thing, but perhaps that’s what it was.
She looked around the empty house, breathing in its silence.
Perhaps in her case it was destructive.
She heard her phone ping with a message and went to the living room to retrieve it from her bag. The message was from Chloe.
Check your emails. I’m so sorry for everything. Please catch this bastard.
Chapter Fifty
The following day, Alex took DC Mason to visit Cardiff Council’s office buildings to gain details of both ex and current employees within their grounds maintenance departments. Alex realised it was a long shot. The maintenance of the stretch of river running through the grounds at Bute Park involved external services, meaning plenty of people beyond the council’s staff would have been able to gain access to the area of land where the pathologist seemed sure Lola Evans’s body would have been placed in the river.
‘Would someone working in the grounds of either park be brazen enough to abandon the body of a woman he had killed there?’ Alex wondered as they walked back to the car.
‘Seems crazy to us,’ Dan agreed, ‘but it takes all sorts. Whoever’s done this wasn’t right in the head to start with.’
Alex unlocked the car and they got in.
Dan’s summary was a simple one, but there was perhaps more to it than he’d intended. To what extent could a criminal mind ever be understood? In cases like this the mind was damaged, perverse, and it seemed to Alex that although no rational human being ever wanted to fully comprehend the workings of a mind that had planned, executed and then lived with the memories of killings such as Lola Evans’s and Sarah Taylor’s, it was her job to think like a criminal.
‘Nice little job for someone,’ Alex said, gesturing the pile of paperwork that rested on Dan’s lap. It was details of staff members obtained from the council. A lack of physical evidence was making things complicated. Short of arresting every member of staff in turn, DNA testing each and hoping for a match with the second blood sample found at The Black Lion, all Alex could see were dead ends.
‘Can you have a quick check through those names, check for a Christian Cooper or a Joseph Black?’
Dan flipped through the paperwork and scanned the list of staff names.
‘Connor Price’s wife was in again this morning,’ he told her. ‘She’s claiming police harassment. Apparently, his post-traumatic stress disorder is making him an easy target for victimisation.’
Alex rolled her eyes and started the engine. ‘I’ll give her a detailed description of Lola Evans’s corpse, if she likes. Then she can talk victimisation.’
Connor’s wife now knew – had seemingly known for a while – of her husband’s infidelities, but if she was happy to turn a blind eye to it then Alex figured that was her problem. She had bigger things to worry about than other people’s marriages.
‘Anything?’ she asked.
Dan looked up from the paperwork. ‘No.’
It was hard for Alex to ignore the pessimism consuming her. She realised that events of the previous evening hadn’t helped her mood, and thoughts of Chloe ate into her. She wished it was Chloe rather than Dan who sat beside her now. Dan was nice enough and proving good at his work, but things just weren’t the same. Alex needed some of Chloe’s enthusiasm, even if it was now apparent that her enthusiasm was likely to have all been a brilliantly performed charade. But her focus and energy hadn’t been.
How had she been able to maintain such pretence amidst everything she had carried with her all that time?
‘I got an email from Chloe. Don’t mention it to the super. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it might get his back up.’
Alex talked through some of the ideas Chloe had considered in the email she had sent the previous evening. The psychological stages of a serial killer dictated the man would plan, hunt; kill. There would be a period of euphoria following the initial execution of his crime. Then a stage of depression. He would crave the feelings he had experienced in those moments that had followed the death of his victim. He would long to feel it once again.
‘You think he’ll kill again?’
Alex nodded. It seemed a given now. ‘We don’t even know whether Lola was the first.’
It occurred to Alex that the most notorious perpetrators of history’s most horrific crimes were people who blended into their communities, whose desires and compulsions went unnoticed by even those closest to them. It was tho
ught that Jack the Ripper had been a timid man on the surface, a man who would easily have been overlooked as a suspect. Yet the brutal and macabre nature of his crimes demonstrated a violent nature that was anything but timid. Similarly, Ted Bundy was said to have been handsome, charismatic: someone his victims had initially trusted and didn’t feel threatened by. It was frighteningly easily for a psychopath to blend into his surroundings. Was this the kind of man they were hunting?
A pressing sense of time crept upon Alex’s shoulders, weighing them down. Killers such as this – if this man was, in fact, or would become, a serial killer – often had cooling periods between victims, but that didn’t mean they could afford to become complacent. Time could mean the difference between life and death for yet another victim. A lack of physical evidence was making their job complicated. He was managing to outsmart them.
If they couldn’t trace him, they were going to have to try to understand him.
‘Penny for them.’ Dan raised both eyebrows and Alex realised how deep in thought she had been. It was worrying that she was able to drive these roads without focusing on the route she was taking; that she knew these streets so well her mind was able to switch off to the routine of it all. ‘Should probably be a bit more now, what with inflation. Fiver for them, at least.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Penny for them. Your thoughts. I was just going to say that—’
He stopped. Alex clearly wasn’t listening. Her mind was somewhere else; judging by the look on her face, it seemed to be somewhere she might have preferred it wasn’t.
She suddenly pulled off the main road and parked up outside one of a row of terraced houses. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘What do we know about Julia Edwards?’
‘What we discussed in the briefing. Forties, alcoholic, unemployed. There’s everything Martin Beckett told you about her and his father, but whether it’s true or not’s another thing.’
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 19
