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

by Victoria Jenkins

  She wondered if he’d done the same for Lola. For Sarah.

  She had tried to kiss him that night. The memory of that moment made itself much clearer than the others, returning to mock her. He had gently pushed her away. He had said something, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

  Had Lola made advances on him? Had Sarah? Did Adam reject them too?

  ‘Whores,’ Adam said, as though he had somehow been capable of reading her thoughts. ‘All of you.’

  He reached to the opened laptop on the coffee table and ran a finger across the mousepad, sparking the screen into life. There was a still on the screen: the image that had seared itself into Chloe’s mind all that week.

  Sickness lodged in her throat. She tried to speak, but she choked on the words, on the realisation that sprang from the laptop screen to assault her. When he pressed play, a strangled sob escaped her.

  ‘Please turn it off.’

  He sat back, ignoring the request. The tattoo on his arm flashed black and green at her.

  The serpent.

  Another sob burst from her. Those emails, she thought. It was him. The video clip had been sent to the papers and the superintendent by him. He had set out to ruin her, and he had succeeded. He had been there all those years ago, on the other side of that computer screen, typing his instructions, filming her. Could he possibly have imagined all those years ago that he would be able to use that footage to such devastating effect?

  ‘Please.’ The word was now barely audible.

  ‘Lola begged, as well. And Sarah. Do you know what they offered? They said they’d do anything I wanted, both of them. Do you want to make me an offer, Chloe? What do you want to give me? Remember I’ve already seen everything, so it’ll have to be something pretty special.’

  Where was the boy who had held her hair back whilst she’d been sick: the one who had rubbed her shoulders and told her everything was going to be OK? How could he be this same man, a man who had tortured and killed?

  Alex had been convinced early on in the investigation that Lola and Sarah had known their killer. Had they been fooled by him in the same way she had, lured by the kindness of his smile and by the reassuring comfort of his false words?

  Her thoughts strayed to her father’s visit. Good men could do bad things.

  Bad men were capable of doing good things.

  She was going to die here.

  The sound of her voice, lowered in mock seduction, ridiculous, played out in the background. ‘I’m not going to offer you anything,’ she managed, her voice regaining some of its strength. ‘You repulse me.’

  Adam leaned back to the laptop and paused the footage. He got up from the chair and went to Chloe, crouching beside her.

  His presence, so close, made her body stiffen.

  ‘You repulse me, Chloe Griffiths. I liked you, you know that? But you’re just the same as all the others. Just a whore.’ He wound a finger in a short length of her hair. ‘Look at you,’ he said, gesturing to the image paused on the screen of the laptop. ‘Like Lola. Like Sarah. Like every other woman I’ve been unlucky enough to know.’

  She could have told him that she’d done the webcam work because she’d had to – that there was nothing else she could have done that would have paid the kind of money she had thought at the time she desperately needed – but what would be the sense? She didn’t have to justify herself to him. She had to justify herself to Scott, but not to him. Thoughts of Scott filled her with a momentary despair. He had called her. He had been there, at the other end of a phone call, but she had been too cowardly to speak to him. If she had just answered that call it might have been him here with her now, not Adam. Her thoughts were filled with things she wished she’d done and hadn’t. Scott. DI King. She had to justify herself to Alex; to her more than anyone. She had let her down repeatedly, though DI King had persisted in standing by her, supporting her when most others would have walked away. She had been so focused on Luke, so distracted by the secrets of the dead, she had forgotten the living.

  The thought of never seeing either Scott or Alex again filled Chloe with a renewed energy. She dug her wrists into the sofa, trying to force enough pressure to push herself up into a sitting position.

  Adam watched, his eyes unmoving and his expression dispassionate.

  ‘You going somewhere? I was just thinking the same, actually.’

  His hand reached for her neck and closed around her throat. She tried to scream, but he was too quick for her. He punched her in the face. She heard the crack as her nose broke and felt the pain flood through her just moments later. Blood trickled on to her top lip. Adam was on top of her, his hand pressed down, covering her mouth.

  There was something in his hand: something damp pressed over her mouth and nose. She writhed beneath him, but the room began to blur again, its corners melting one by one.

  When the world went black for a second time, all the thoughts that had rushed through Chloe’s mind just moments earlier dispersed, leaving her head empty. All the courage she had felt just fleetingly, all the promises she had managed to make to herself in just those few brief moments, were swept into the darkness that awaited her.

  When the world went black for that second time, Chloe could have sworn she heard her brother’s voice calling to her.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  They stood outside Chloe’s flat and waited for her to answer the ring of the doorbell. When she didn’t – and when Alex called her mobile to be greeted by the answerphone for a fourth time – her worries began to morph into a fear that gripped in her chest. As far as she knew, Chloe hadn’t left the flat since being suspended over the pictures that had appeared in the newspapers. To her knowledge, Chloe had been intent on hiding away from the world for a while. That might have explained why her mobile phone was turned off, but where was she?

  The curtains in the downstairs window were shut. She lifted the flap of the letter box and spoke into the gap.

  ‘Chloe. Chloe, it’s Alex. Please answer the door.’

  Nothing. Even if Chloe was hell-bent on shutting herself away from the world, Alex felt sure she would answer the door. She imagined that Chloe would keep herself in touch with the case somehow – whether by watching TV, listening to the radio news, or looking for updates on the Internet – and sheer curiosity alone should be enough to send her to the front door once she realised Alex was there on the other side. She had told her they had a suspect.

  She would want to know what was going on.

  Something was very wrong.

  ‘Radio for backup,’ she told Dan. ‘We need to get this door down.’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘What if she’s in the bath?’

  ‘I’ll pass her a towel.’ Alex pressed a hand to the outer wall of the building and closed her eyes. Adam Edwards had a distinctive tattoo on his arm. A snake. Chloe had received emails from a Hotmail account with the username ‘theserpent’. They had known one another years earlier.

  She felt a surge of sickness race up through her stomach and into her chest. Chloe should have been at work, not here at home. Alex had also accessed files without permission. She was as guilty as Chloe, yet she hadn’t admitted so to the superintendent. A change of heart and a panic for her own position had snapped Alex into a temporary silence. She had refused to give Chloe the name of their suspect. She had refused to offer any clue as to the person under suspicion.

  She had left her unprotected. Chloe had no idea how dangerous this man was.

  ‘Can you break the door through?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Dan had finished putting a call through for backup. He struck Alex as an officer more likely to be able to hack into an email account than break down a front door, but she wasn’t prepared to wait for the others to turn up. The unsettling uncertainty she had felt for Chloe’s safety had quickly morphed into a full-blown fear.

  ‘I
think she’s in danger.’

  He hesitated. ‘You sure?’

  Alex’s top lip curled.

  ‘OK.’ Dan raised his hands. He tested the door handle again, as though the threat to force entry might have somehow willed it unlocked. Then he stepped back before slamming his shoulder into the door. His face contorted into a fixed expression of determination and he tried for a second time, achieving little more than a rattle of the uPVC.

  ‘Christ,’ Alex muttered. She went around to the back of the building, along the narrow pathway shared with the house next door. There was a gate in a wall at the back. The downstairs window at the back of Chloe’s ground floor flat was obscured by a roller blind. ‘I need something to smash the window with,’ she said to Dan, who had followed her around to the back of the building.

  He might have argued with her, but DC Mason appeared to have resigned himself to Alex’s headstrong will. He disappeared, briefly, and returned with a brick salvaged from a crumbling front wall a few houses down. Alex took it from him and threw it through the glass pane of Chloe’s back door. Against Dan’s protestations, she thrust a hand through the space of shattered glass and grappled with the key that was hanging from the lock of the back door. When she next saw her, Alex was going to have a little chat with Chloe about leaving keys in doors. For someone so smart, the young woman was guilty of some serious lapses in common sense.

  Alex stepped into the kitchen. In front of her, pulled shut, was the door that led through to the bathroom. Water. The bathroom. The bath.

  She crossed the room to the door, holding on to her plans for a security talk. Time surrounded her, casting her in shadow, goading her as it so often did. Alex placed a hand on the door handle and shoved it open, not allowing time for hesitation and further unwanted thoughts.

  There was no one there. There was no bathtub. A glass shower cubicle stood in the corner of the room, a towel flung over its partially opened front screen. Alex exhaled loudly. Behind her, Dan attempted reassurance.

  ‘I’m sure wherever she is, she’s fine.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ She turned to her colleague. ‘But where the hell is she? Why isn’t she answering her phone?’

  Alex left the bathroom, sidestepping Dan to get back into the kitchen so she could go down to the living room. There were two glasses on the coffee table; two plates that held the remnants of what had been dinner. Dinner for two.

  ‘Shit.’

  Chloe’s laptop lay opened beside the plates. Alex passed a finger across the keypad, sparking the screen to life. It asked for a password. She cursed again. Her focus fell to the floor. Chloe’s hair. She crouched and gathered the chunks in her hands, her body almost teetering beneath the weight of her fear.

  ‘Boss.’

  Alex stood and turned to Dan, who was standing in the living room doorway. He was holding Chloe’s mobile phone. ‘In the kitchen.’

  ‘1707,’ she told him.

  ‘Her passcode? How do you know it?’

  ‘I’ve sat beside her on plenty of car journeys.’

  1707. The date and month of Luke’s birthday. She had seen it whilst reading one of the files relating to Emily’s case.

  She watched as Dan tapped the passcode into the phone. Then she dragged her attention back to the used plates and glasses on Chloe’s coffee table. She didn’t want to touch anything else for fear of disturbing what might become evidence. There was no doubt in Alex’s mind as to who had been here with Chloe. Sick bastard, she thought. He had sent those emails, sent that video clip, made Chloe vulnerable and then preyed on her when he had known she would be at her weakest.

  Alex was snapped from her thoughts by a noise at the front of the building. She pushed aside the curtains. Backup was here.

  Where the bloody hell was she supposed to send them now?

  She turned back to the room, planning to leave the flat via the back door. It was then she saw it. The small smear of blood on the sofa cushion. Her fear morphed into panic.

  ‘Boss.’

  Alex looked away from the sofa and up at Dan.

  ‘Chloe’s Facebook messenger app. You might want to read this.’

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  She awoke to a square of mottled ceiling, yellowing and riddled with patches of damp. The ceiling shifted, swaying from side to side until coming to rest above her. She was cold. Her head felt heavy, tumbled, as though it had been through a washing machine and was still resting at the bottom of the drum, waterlogged and ready to be wrung out.

  She was so cold. Her clothes were cold, her skin was cold; the bones that held her body as one were frozen stiff.

  It took a few moments of blurry consciousness to realise that her hands were still tied in front of her, the wire cutting into her skin. The same at her ankles. She couldn’t feel her feet. They were so cold that it was as though they were no longer attached to the rest of her. She felt drugged by her own heaviness, yet somehow weightless. The leggings and shirt she was wearing clung to her body like a second skin.

  Tilting her head, Chloe looked at the shallow water surrounding her. She was lying in water. She was lying in a bath.

  She pushed her head up from the cold porcelain. It took all her effort. The dizziness she had experienced moments earlier returned with the sudden movement, giving the false sensation of falling. She was in a roll top bath, in a room painted a pale, watercolour pink. The lines of the old stonework could be traced up to the ceiling; the cracks in each stone creeping upwards, as fine and delicate as spiders’ webs. She might, in another life, have thought this room beautiful.

  With that thought, a tsunami of others crashed over her. It was him, she thought. She had written it down for Alex – she had described the man they had been looking for – but the pieces of the puzzle had never quite slotted into place to make one complete picture. Not until now.

  Amidst her despair there was a flicker of hope. DI King had told her they had a suspect. She had said that something Chloe had written had led them to him.

  Had she meant Adam? Were they looking for the right man?

  As though sensing his name in her thoughts, the door was pushed open. Adam entered the room. He was wearing a jacket now, the serpent tattoo concealed.

  ‘You won’t get away with this,’ Chloe managed.

  Adam studied her. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and rested his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. ‘But I already am. Come on. You know how easy it is to live a double life, don’t you, Chloe? Change your name. Pretend it makes you someone else. Only it doesn’t, does it? You can change the outside, but you can never really change what lies underneath. You’re just keeping it hidden from everyone else for a while.’

  ‘Those women… they’d never done anything to you.’

  Adam’s mouth tilted into a wry smile. He leaned forward and turned on the nearest tap. ‘I know you don’t really see things that simply, Chloe. Life’s not that straightforward. You’re better than that.’ He sat back, his eyes still fixed on her.

  ‘Please don’t do this,’ Chloe begged, watching the water hit toes she could no longer feel. ‘We were friends, weren’t we? Please.’

  ‘You are my friend. That’s why I need your help. I didn’t want to kill them. I wanted them to suffer, but once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I want to make it stop. I don’t want to do it, any of it. It isn’t me. It’s like this voice in my head, it won’t go away; I try to hide it somewhere, try to drown it out, but it keeps coming back. It’s louder than me. It’s stronger than I am. You believe me, don’t you?’

  Chloe’s eyes widened as the freezing water continued to fill the bath around her. She felt her spine numb as though submerged in ice. Pain throbbed through her face. Her nose, she thought. She only now remembered that her nose had been broken. The ties at her wrists cut off her circulation as she struggled and writhed, too tired and too desperate to do anything but flop at the bottom of the bathtub like a fish put too late back into water.

 
‘Tell me you believe me.’

  She nodded, the words half-choked in her painfully dry throat. ‘I believe you.’

  Adam moved towards her. He reached for the tap and slowly turned it off. Then he smiled. ‘You bitches really will say anything just to get your own way.’

  Chloe looked helplessly around the room. She had no idea where she was. She didn’t want to die there, in a stranger’s home.

  She didn’t want to die.

  There had been so many moments during those past eight years when the thought of death had come to rest beside her, settling at her side with a silent persistence. It hadn’t seemed to look as frightening as it once had. Its silence seemed almost comforting, in contrast with the noise and the chaos of everything else that had surrounded her.

  Now she understood how wrong she had been. She didn’t want to die.

  Her thoughts returned to Scott and to that bloody phone call she hadn’t answered. She wished she’d just picked up. If she had, she wouldn’t be here now.

  Adam sat on the closed lid of the toilet. ‘Lola Evans made some very tempting offers. Bit like you once. Remember?’

  She remembered, but she didn’t want to. Two weeks after Luke died, Chloe had confided in Adam. He had gone to her flat, sat with her in her room as she’d cried over her brother, and after finishing the second bottle of wine she’d seen off by herself, she had tried to kiss him. The night had come back later in snapshots, blurry and unordered, and she knew Adam had refused her, pushed back, said something about not taking advantage.

  Now she realised that wasn’t why he had turned her down.