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

by Victoria Jenkins

  As far as Alex could fathom, the part-time sideline in electrical work seemed the main way that he was earning money. There was no formal record of employment for the past nine months. He had been able to live under the radar for months, the nature of his income allowing his bank account activity to remain quiet. Tracing him through a transaction seemed unlikely.

  The pub where both men had worked was called The Bar on the Bridge and was situated on a roundabout just off the A470 between Caerphilly and Pontypridd. It had recently been turned into a gastro pub – she remembered the days when they had simply been known as pubs that served food. She had her fingers crossed that someone working there would remember Adam Edwards and might still know him. She spoke with a young woman working behind the bar who looked no older than twenty-one and asked if it would be possible to speak with the manager. When the manager arrived, Alex felt her hopes sink. He also looked too young to have worked there at the same time Adam Edwards might have. She had a brief chat with him, knowing her efforts here were futile.

  In the car park, Alex sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running. Where next? Adam Edwards had as good as disappeared. His landlord hadn’t seen him in weeks and he had no colleagues to have missed him or wondered why he hadn’t shown up for work. He had no family that he might have been staying with.

  Where the hell had he gone?

  She looked again at Edwards’s long list of former employments. Was it possible he was now staying with someone he had met through work? Was someone helping him conceal his whereabouts?

  Two young women were dead. With every wasted moment that passed, they might be risking the life of a third. Alex felt herself afflicted by a pressing sense of urgency.

  She scanned the employment history. She wasn’t that far from another of the places where Adam had once worked: a garden centre in Morganstown, just outside Cardiff.

  It took her less than ten minutes to get there. Thankfully, there were members of staff beyond their twenties, and one of them remembered Adam Edwards.

  ‘Worked here about seven, eight years ago,’ the woman told her. ‘Nice boy. Helpful. Don’t know where he ended up working after he left here though – I think he might have been one of those types to do a bit of travelling before he settled down. We used to have a lot of students working here around that time, I remember; a lot of them from the school down in Radyr. I think he was a bit older, mind you, probably…’

  Alex had stopped listening. A wedge of anxiety lodged in her chest. The conversation she’d had with Chloe at the young woman’s flat just days earlier played back through her mind, the lost details that had seemed so insignificant at the time now sounding through her brain like alarm bells. She had worked at a garden centre as a teenager trying to save enough money so that her brother could go and live with her once he was old enough to leave his parents’ home without their consent. There weren’t that many garden centres in the area any more, not since the big chain DIY stores had taken over. Chloe had mentioned Morganstown, Alex was sure of it. She had gone to school in Radyr.

  Seven, eight years ago, the woman had told her. About the same time Chloe might have worked there.

  ‘Chloe Lane,’ she said, interrupting the woman. ‘Griffiths,’ she corrected herself. ‘Do you know her?’

  The woman gave an apologetic shrug. Alex reached into her pocket for her mobile phone and scanned through her photos. There weren’t that many on there, but she hadn’t deleted the selfie Chloe had insisted they take to document the night out they’d had at Christmas. She held out her mobile to the woman.

  ‘She used to have dark hair. Do you recognise her?’

  The woman studied the photograph. ‘I remember her now. Lost a bit of weight since I last saw her, mind.’

  Alex felt sick. She left the garden centre hurriedly and tried Chloe’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail. She called Dan. ‘Where are you? Can you get yourself over to Taff’s Well? I’ll explain when I see you.’

  Chloe’s image had been splashed over the front of the local papers and it was now public knowledge she had been suspended. An old friend might have contacted her during this time, when she needed a friend the most.

  Alex pulled out of the car park and took the roundabout back onto the A470. She needed to reach Chloe before anyone else did.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  ‘You OK?’

  Chloe had lost track of time. After eating the food he had brought over, she and Adam had talked about where their lives had taken them since they had last seen one another. They tried to omit certain details – Chloe’s family, what had happened that week with her job and with the newspapers, Luke – but avoiding these subjects entirely left Chloe with little to talk about. These were the things that had come to characterise her entire existence. She still couldn’t bring herself to consider what she would be without her job and where her life might take her if her suspension was to lead to a permanent dismissal.

  They had talked about Adam and what he had been up to in the eight years that had passed. He had travelled for a while, admitting he’d had his own ghosts he’d needed to escape. When he didn’t elaborate, Chloe didn’t push him on the subject. She didn’t want to talk about the things that haunted her; she had no right to force him to do something that she wouldn’t.

  ‘You OK?’ he repeated. He was sitting in the chair opposite her, the coffee table separating them. He tilted his head, his eyes glazed with concern as he looked at her.

  She pressed her fingertips to the side of her head. She felt light-headed. ‘I just feel a bit funny.’ She could hear the slur in her words, although they sounded as though they were being spoken in another room, somewhere distant and remote, from another person’s mouth.

  Adam stood. ‘Shall I get you some paracetamol? Are there some in the kitchen?’

  She shook her head, though it hurt now to do so. It felt as though something was pulling at the sides of her brain; the same kind of feeling she’d experienced plenty of times, years earlier, when she’d had too much to drink. It had been that very feeling, along with the anxiety and guilt that had all too often inevitably followed, that had prompted Chloe to cut alcohol from her life several years earlier, around the same time she had signed up to join the police.

  But she hadn’t been drinking. They had shared the bottle of non-alcoholic fruit cocktail that Adam had brought over to the flat with him. Other than that, she’d had nothing but tea.

  ‘I’ll be OK in a minute,’ she said, not entirely convinced this was true. The room shifted slightly; she leaned forward and gripped the edges of the coffee table as though keeping herself from falling off the sofa. Her hair fell in front of her face. She left it there.

  Adam sat beside her. ‘Glass of water?’

  Chloe shook her head. What was wrong with her? One minute she’d been chatting – she had almost laughed a couple of times, which was something that just hours earlier she had thought she would never again be capable of – yet now her head felt soaked with sickness. Her eyelids felt heavy. Her body longed for sleep, yet her mind was trying to fight off the desire. Her limbs felt detached somehow. It was a horrible sensation, one that made her study her own skin as though she no longer recognised it.

  Adam reached for her hand and took it in his. He gently stroked the back of her knuckles with his thumb. She could barely feel his touch. She was watching it, but it looked as though it was someone else’s skin he was touching, someone else’s hand that rested beneath his. She didn’t feel really there. Why was her vision so blurry? Why did her jaw feel as though it was no longer capable of forming words?

  ‘Lola had such pretty hands. Small, pale, like yours. But everything that’s pretty on the outside is ugly when you scratch beneath the surface, isn’t it?’

  His words were pooled in a muffled cloudiness. Chloe watched his mouth moving, but the words seemed to be lost, slowed down. She tried to speak the other woman’s name, but her mouth refused to form the word and any sound she migh
t have made was caught in her throat and suffocated.

  His hand closed around her wrist, tightening. Then the room went black.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Alex was fraught with worry, and when she again tried Chloe’s mobile phone it went straight to answerphone. You’re worrying unnecessarily, Alex told herself. Chloe had wanted to shut herself from the world for a little while. That’s what she had done. She was fine.

  She wished she could believe it, but a nagging anxiety kept whispering in her ear, reminding her she couldn’t be so sure.

  Her thoughts had collided into a knot of facts and assumptions. If Chloe was there beside her now, sitting alongside her in the passenger seat, as was so frequently the case these days, she would have taken that knotted mess and unravelled it all as though dealing with a ball of Christmas lights of which Alex could no longer see either end. Or would she? The Chloe she had known just a few months earlier would have. She would have dragged the once messy bundle behind her, presenting it back in a neat line that would make perfect sense, stress free and rationalised. But recently… things hadn’t been quite the same recently. Under similar circumstances, Alex doubted anyone would have worked to their usual standards.

  Those emails had started it all off. Chloe hadn’t been quite herself after Christmas. It had been so easy to miss and Alex might have put it down to any number of things. Christmas wasn’t a time of fairy lights and anticipation for many people. For many it was a time of loneliness, regret and nostalgia, and Alex had been caught up sufficiently in her own problems to have easily missed the struggle of others. Had she noticed Chloe’s shift in mood at the time, she might easily have put it down to something ordinary brought about by the supposedly festive season.

  Those emails. Alex’s foot pushed further to the floor. Chloe had told her those emails came from an address she didn’t recognise: an address with the username ‘theserpent’. She had dismissed them so easily as somebody messing about – a prank undertaken by someone who had too few brain cells and too much free time – and now she wished she had done more to help her when she’d had the chance.

  Adam Edwards had a tattoo of a snake on his arm. When Simon Watts had been asked for any identifying features, this had been the first thing he had mentioned.

  She stopped the car to find Simon’s number in the notepad she had stashed in the glovebox. Connecting the call with the car’s Bluetooth system, she resumed her drive to the village where Chloe lived.

  ‘DI King,’ she told him, hearing the immediate sigh that escaped him at the sound of her name. ‘That tattoo you mentioned—’

  ‘The tattoo? Yeah. What about it?’

  ‘You said it was a snake?’

  ‘A snake, yeah.’

  ‘Do you know what Adam’s email address is?’

  ‘His email address?’

  Alex wondered whether Simon Watts was going to continue the conversation by simply repeating back everything she said to him. It would have been frustrating anyway, but with so little time in front of her Alex didn’t have the patience for it now.

  She ran a red light at a crossroads and swerved to avoid a taxi. The driver came to a screeching stop and slammed on the horn. ‘Yes,’ she snapped, ‘his email address. What is it?’

  ‘I live with him,’ Simon Watts said impatiently. ‘Why would I need to email him?’

  ‘Just check,’ Alex told him.

  Simon Watts sighed before moving from the phone, presumably checking the mail on his email account via his mobile: ‘adamedwards25@yahoo.com,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said through gritted teeth. ‘Not too difficult, was it?’ She cut the call and put through another call to DC Mason. Her mind was racing. Of course he hadn’t used his normal email account; that would have been far too risky. It was likely ‘theserpent’ had been set up just recently, in the past month or so: just before Chloe had received that first email.

  ‘I’m on my way to Chloe’s,’ Alex told Dan. ‘I’ve tried calling her. It’s going straight to answerphone.’

  ‘She could be anywhere.’

  Alex’s face tautened at the suggestion.

  As though somehow sensing her reaction, Dan was quick to correct himself. ‘I mean she could be shopping, or with a friend, or—’ He didn’t bother finishing his sentence. He had unwittingly spoken Alex’s worst fears.

  A silence fell. It allowed Alex time and space to think again, but her thoughts were leading to the darkest corners, each separate piece stretching itself and linking with the next in an attempt to create a whole.

  Lola Evans had been a young woman with an eating disorder, without parents and separated from the grandmother she had lived with on what seemed to have been very much a part-time basis. Sarah Taylor had been recovering from an abusive relationship that had left her hospitalised. Both victims had been taken at a time when they had been vulnerable, which went a long way to explaining Edwards’s choice of the support group as a place to meet the women upon whom he would come to prey.

  And then there was Chloe, a young woman whose twenty-six years on this earth had been blighted by more tragedy than most people would have to endure in a lifetime. Her vulnerabilities had lain with her brother. All Edwards had needed to do was resurrect Luke – bring his memory back so he dominated Chloe’s consciousness.

  Those images he must have stored – that footage he had kept in his possession all this time – had secured his hold over Chloe, making sure she was at her lowest ebb when he made his move. It must surely have been Edwards who had sent it.

  ‘I’m nearing Taff’s Well now,’ Alex told Dan. ‘Please be as quick as you can.’

  Her grip tightened around the steering wheel. She hated this bastard with an intensity she had never felt towards anyone. She needed to get to him before he got to Chloe first.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  When she woke, Chloe found herself still in her own flat. Her head felt woozy, as though nursing a particularly violent hangover, and though it was her flat everything around her looked different. Her hands had been pulled together in front of her, crossed and tied with gardening wire. The thin wire cut into her wrists painfully, pinching her skin and cutting off her circulation. Her ankles were shackled in the same way.

  Opposite her, Adam sat in the chair, his body tilted at an angle from Chloe’s prone position on the sofa.

  ‘Wakey wakey.’

  Her eyes stung. Their corners were gritty with sleep and her chin felt damp, as though she’d dribbled during her unconsciousness. The room seemed to move as she twisted her head against the seat of the sofa.

  Lola.

  The woman’s name rang in her mind like an alarm bell. He had mentioned Lola. Right before she’d blacked out, Adam had spoken Lola’s name.

  God, she felt sick. Whatever he had given her seemed to have soaked through to her core. Was it Rohypnol?

  She had predicted this. She had written it down, told DI King it would happen.

  She hadn’t once imagined it would be happening to her.

  Nothing made any sense.

  DI King. Alex had told her they had a suspect, but hadn’t been able to tell her his name. Was it Adam? Would they be looking for him, or would the investigation have led them to another false path, one that would direct them further and further from him, from her?

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  Adam smiled. That smile that had seemed so reassuring in its familiarity just hours earlier now made Chloe feel physically sick.

  ‘Because I can.’

  He sat forward in the chair and rested his forearms on his knees. He’d taken off the long-sleeved sweater he’d been wearing earlier and was now in a T-shirt, his arms bare. His exposed skin revealed a tattoo of a snake that looped up and around his elbow.

  Chloe moved her head, though the motion sent a painful ringing through her ears. There was something wrong. Something missing. She glanced over to the floor and saw it. Her hair… thick blonde chunks of it
lying on the laminate.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You killed Lola. You killed Sarah.’

  Just hours earlier, she had welcomed this man who had appeared on her doorstep. She had invited him there, to this place she called home but knew had never truly been and now would never be. She had welcomed that smile back into her life, believing him to be the man she had known all those years ago: the young man who had been so silently supportive and so predictably dependable when she had most needed it.

  Was that why this was happening to her? Had she taken him for granted? Did he feel used by her, betrayed in some way?

  Memories were surging back, mingled with the foggy cloud that the drug had left floating in her brain.

  That night, the night he had gone back to the flat with her. Luke had died a couple of weeks earlier, and Chloe had spent those weeks existing in a kind of half-slept haze that later made it difficult to recall the details of anything. She had drunk too much, argued with her parents, argued with the police. It was only months later that snapshots of those days would come back to her, seeping into her consciousness like unwanted visitors.

  She had gone out to get obliterated, by whatever means possible. Adam had seen her in town, arguing outside a pub with a bouncer who had refused her entry because she was already too drunk. Adam had coaxed her away from the man, put her in a taxi and taken her back to the flat. Then he stayed with her as she threw up, making her tea and toast afterwards.

  When the memories of that night began to resurrect themselves, the thing she would remember most about Adam was the fact that he had listened. She couldn’t really remember him doing much talking, or if he had she’d forgotten the things he had said. She had spoken to him about everything: about her parents, her childhood, Luke, Emily. It was as though everything she had carried with her was offloaded in one outpouring of grief and drunken confession, and Adam had listened without comment or judgement, allowing her to relieve herself of all the demons that were haunting her.