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

by Victoria Jenkins

  The bathroom door was pushed open. He stood in the doorway, blocking Chloe’s only exit. His face spoke his surprise at seeing her out of the bath. He’d clearly thought the drugs more powerful, or he had underestimated her.

  ‘Clever girl,’ he said. He glanced down at her legs, at her freed ankles.

  She wanted to lunge at him, to attack him, yet at the same time she knew that doing so might mark the end of everything. He was stronger than her, faster than her; her judgement and balance had been so altered by the drugs that it would be easy for him to overpower her. She would get it wrong, and getting it wrong would cost her everything.

  ‘Stay away from me,’ she warned, jabbing the knife in his direction. She stepped sideways, moving back from him. ‘I swear to God, I will cut your throat. For Lola. For Sarah. An eye for an eye, what do you think?’

  Her words sounded brave, but inside Chloe could hear herself crying. Having the knife in her hands hadn’t put her ahead of him. She was still as isolated, still as vulnerable.

  ‘I don’t think you have it in you.’

  Chloe held his eye, knowing he saw straight through her attempts at heroics. This man had seen her at her weakest, at her most exposed. He knew her. He knew he still had her exactly where he wanted her.

  ‘Let me go,’ Chloe said, knowing the words would be pointless. ‘Let me go now and I can make sure you’re given mitigating circumstances. You’ll go to prison for what you’ve done, but I can make sure you get a lesser sentence.’ She caught her breath as the words tripped over one another. It still seemed so impossible that this man who she had known for so long and had trusted so unquestioningly was a murderer. He stepped further into the room, and she lashed across the air between them with the knife.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ she screamed, tears now betraying her fear.

  He studied her with dark eyes; eyes where she had once found comfort. How could she have got him so wrong? She had believed she could trust him with the things she had entrusted with no one else since Luke had died.

  ‘Or you’ll what?’ Adam said, raising his hands in mock surrender and taking a step backwards, away from her. ‘You’ll kill me?’ He took another step back and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet seat. ‘Go ahead. Only, then you’ll never find out the truth about what happened to Emily.’

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Alex ran an Internet search for the property to which Adam’s mobile had been traced. It was a small, one-bedroom cottage in the village of Colwinston, seven miles north of Marcross. It was advertised on just one website; not one of the more popular holiday home search sites but a page on a tourism site dedicated to the local area. The description of the property boasted beautiful rural scenery and an idyllic location free from any neighbours.

  She stopped reading and looked up from the iPad. The bastard had planned this, had probably been planning it for a while. He had chosen somewhere they wouldn’t be seen. Somewhere they wouldn’t be heard.

  They were just a few miles away now, but the distance seemed impossible and time felt as though it was dragging its feet, once again not on their side.

  She tried to make a map in her mind of the moves Adam might have taken to get Chloe into the van. It would have been so easy to do: the lane at the back of the building was accessible to vehicles and Chloe’s flat was on the ground floor of the last house on the row of terraces. The lane at the side was wide enough for a vehicle to access, and Chloe’s back gate was at the side of the house, giving it total privacy from the neighbours. All Adam had needed to do was carry her from the door to the van: a distance of only four metres. There wouldn’t have been time or opportunity for anyone to have seen him, especially not at that time of the evening.

  A voice on the radio alerted her attention. One of the other cars had already arrived there. Alex leaned forward, putting a hand on the side of the driver’s seat.

  ‘Do not approach the property,’ she said. ‘Wait for armed backup.’

  She turned and looked at Harry, who gave her a nod. She knew that, were she there alone, she would likely do the stupid thing and barge straight in, heedless of the possible consequences for both herself and Chloe. But she wasn’t there yet. One officer in danger was one too many. She wasn’t going to jeopardise anyone else’s safety, not unless it was her own.

  ‘There’s a vehicle outside the property,’ one of the voices on the end of the radio told them. ‘A white van. No plates.’

  Alex glanced again at Harry. She imagined his thoughts were in that moment a mirror of hers.

  Chloe was smart, Alex tried to reassure herself. She would keep him talking, try to stall him.

  Sitting back and pushing her head against the seat, Alex closed her eyes for a moment. She was fooling herself. Chloe was facing the worst kind of horror imaginable. She knew what that man had done to two other women. She knew everything he was capable of. Given what she knew – having had the images of Lola’s and Sarah’s bodies imprinted on her brain – any sense of rational thought, any former courage, was certain to escape her.

  Alex opened her eyes and focused on the darkened world outside the window. Don’t give up, she muttered to the glass, as though somewhere, wherever she was and whatever was happening to her, Chloe might hear her.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  The knife was shaking in her hands. His words echoed in the small room, bouncing off the stone walls and deafening her. She didn’t want to hear them. She didn’t want to believe them. Chloe had thought he had used her past to weaken her, to push her life off balance. She hadn’t once considered he actually knew something.

  He didn’t, she thought, holding his stare as he looked up at her. He didn’t know a thing. He was trying to put her off, trying to weaken her once more. The more she tried to believe that, the more she was able to stifle the sounds his words still made.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ he said. ‘You always knew your brother didn’t kill her.’

  A sob escaped Chloe’s throat, half-strangled. She felt tears coursing streaks down her cheeks, but she no longer cared if he was witness to them. Why was he doing this to her? What had she done to deserve any of this? What had Emily done?

  She moved her focus to the knife, willing it to steady. She would use it. If he moved now, she would use it. She wouldn’t think twice about what she was doing.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He gave her a sad smile. ‘Easier to believe that, isn’t it? A bit like poor Luke, really. He didn’t want to believe the truth either.’

  Chloe felt her jaw tighten, the drugs that had earlier rendered her face immobile now beginning to wear off. She clenched her teeth.

  ‘Emily didn’t want to be with him, did she? She told him, but poor little Luke didn’t want to believe it.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He was bluffing, she thought. It would have been so easy for him to gain the details surrounding the night of her death: they had been splashed across the papers and all over the Internet. Everyone had known that Emily had apparently tried to end her relationship with Luke that evening. It was the reason the police had decided him responsible for her murder.

  ‘She was so excited. She couldn’t wait to tell me that she’d dumped him. Couldn’t wait to tell me that we could be together.’

  Chloe felt the floor of the bathroom give way beneath her feet. Her body tilted to the side, as if drunk. The words seemed to circle her, tangling, making no sense.

  ‘No,’ she said, with a quick shake of the head.

  Adam nodded. ‘We only see what we choose to, don’t we, Chloe? She thought I actually wanted her. That little slag. Now why would I have wanted to go anywhere near that?’

  Chloe felt emptied. She wasn’t prepared for this – she could never have been prepared for this – and none of it made any sense.

  They had once met through her, she remembered. Chloe had moved from one shared house to another: Adam had helped her move her
things. Luke and Emily had popped over to see the new place. Adam had been there. As far as she knew, he and Emily hadn’t seen one another again after that.

  They would never have met if it hadn’t been for her. All of this was her fault.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said again. The words sounded pathetic. Feeble. Their lack of conviction gave all the evidence that proved she knew them to be incorrect.

  ‘She used to turn up at the garden centre quite a lot,’ he told her. ‘Always when you weren’t working. Wouldn’t have looked too good to be seen flirting with me in front of her boyfriend’s sister, I suppose.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she snapped.

  Adam raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? You don’t want to know what happened? All these years and now you don’t want to hear the truth?’

  He was right. She had wanted to know the truth about what had happened to Emily. She had always believed that knowing what had happened to Emily would lead her to the truth of her brother’s death. But not like this. Now the words were being spoken – now the truth was being aired in front of her – she no longer wanted to hear. Like a child, she wanted to put her fingers in her ears. She wanted to close her eyes in the hope that if she couldn’t see the monster, it couldn’t see her.

  ‘She tried it on with me so many times,’ he told her. ‘She was gagging for it. She was so easy to lure. A few cheap flowers. A few cheap words. I did the honourable thing, told her I wanted it to be more than sex, that she was special. Told her I wouldn’t do anything while she was seeing someone else. She stalled a bit. She said she felt guilty, said Luke was nice, she didn’t want to hurt him. But she still did. Women are all the same really, aren’t they?’

  She was sixteen, Chloe thought. Not a woman. Just a girl. In that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to hate Emily for the way she had behaved. It didn’t matter what she’d done, what any of them had done. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. None of them did.

  They had all paid for someone else’s choices.

  ‘Who are you, Adam?’

  His family had rarely come up in conversation, but she remembered him telling her once that his mother lived in North Wales with her second husband. He said he visited her a few times a year and that he’d never met his father and didn’t know anything about him. Now she didn’t know what to believe.

  All lies, she thought. She didn’t know the first thing about him. Everything had been a lie.

  ‘She threw herself at me,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘Tried to kiss me. Everything happened so quickly. I hadn’t planned it. Not that time.’

  ‘You let Luke take the blame.’

  Adam shrugged. ‘Sorry. Collateral damage.’

  All thoughts left her. Her mind went blank, a white sheet dropping behind her eyes, filling with a screaming tinnitus that threatened to deafen her. Her balance was lost again. She moved her feet, shifting back against the wall, steadying herself.

  He watched her, his expression fixed. No sign of remorse. No traces of anything she could recognise as human.

  He stood from the toilet seat. Chloe raised the knife, holding it poised. His hand moved to his pocket. She felt herself trembling. The cold had come back to her, her still-wet clothes clinging to her body like a second skin. There was a piece of cloth in his hand.

  ‘What use is that now?’ she asked, her words shaking as she studied the dampened cloth.

  ‘I came here to do a job. I never leave until the job’s done.’

  Chloe thrust the knife at him, but he was quicker than she was. He grabbed her bound wrists with one hand, twisting them so that the knife pointed away from him. She kicked out at him, her foot meeting with his shin, smashing into the bone. It knocked him off balance, momentarily, and she flailed as he faltered, redirecting the knife and yanking her wrists from his hands. She swung quickly. The knife met his side, embedding itself inside him.

  His eyes widened at the shock of the pain. ‘You fucking bitch.’

  She tried to pull the knife back out, but he hit her away. He grabbed her by the throat and pressed her against the wall, closing his hand over her mouth and nose. There was a sweet smell, sickly. She flailed helplessly, a fish out of water, but within moments there was nothing but darkness once more.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  ‘That’s it.’

  Alex saw the building at the end of the narrow lane they had turned on to. Backup vehicles were now on the road behind them. They pulled up alongside the car already there, parked behind Adam’s white van. Alex barely waited for the driver to come to a stop before getting out.

  The cottage was small, secluded from the neighbouring houses by an expanse of fields and a cluster of wide trees that formed the boundaries of the garden. There were no signs of any lights on, but if Adam and Chloe were where she feared they might be, then that particular room may not be visible from the front of the house.

  Armed officers got out of the van that had pulled into the lane behind them.

  ‘The bathroom,’ she told them. ‘Unless you see him or Chloe anywhere else, head straight upstairs.’

  She followed behind four armed officers. A lever was used to break open the wooden front door and the officers rushed inside, heading straight for the stairs. Alex ran after them. There was a man’s jacket hanging from the end of the stairs. She followed the officers up to the first floor. One of them called Edwards’s name. There was movement upstairs.

  The bathroom.

  The door was shoved open. Adam Edwards was on his knees on the carpet of the bathroom floor, his body straddling a limp and lifeless Chloe. His hands were closed around her throat. The first officer in the room hit Edwards with the butt end of his gun and sent him toppling sideways. Another two officers helped pin him to the ground as he struggled violently against the first. Alex rushed to Chloe. She was soaking wet, her sodden clothes clinging to her slight frame. There was dried blood on her face. She wasn’t moving. It seemed they were already too late.

  She pushed Chloe’s severed hair from her face and touched her fingertips to her throat, trying to find a pulse. Alex could feel and hear nothing but the pounding of blood in her own ears.

  Then the sound of Edwards’s voice ripped through it.

  ‘If you’d got here a bit earlier, you could have watched.’

  Alex turned to the officers restraining him. She refused to look at Edwards. She would face him in the interview room, on her grounds, her terms. Not here. ‘Get him in the van.’ She saw the blood for the first time then; saw the knife still embedded in his side. She wanted to grab the handle and push it deeper, give it a good twist. Finish what Chloe had started.

  She turned her attention back to Chloe as Adam Edwards was taken from the room. ‘Chloe. It’s me. It’s Alex. Come on, I know you’re with me.’

  Where was the bloody ambulance?

  Her fingers retraced the skin at Chloe’s throat, finding the place where a pulse would make itself known.

  ‘Get me something to cut this with,’ she said, speaking to the officers who remained in the room with her. She gestured to the wire still binding Chloe’s hands. ‘Chloe. Come on, sweetheart.’

  She glanced to the corner of the room. There was a rag lying on the carpet. She reached for it with her free hand. She brought it carefully to her nose before quickly throwing it back to the ground.

  Then she felt it. The pulse was slow, distant, but it was there.

  He hadn’t killed her. He had drugged her.

  Alex exhaled loudly. Her fingers slid from Chloe’s throat and moved to her still-bound hands. She took the young woman’s hand in hers, clutching on to her fingers as though scared she might lose her for a second time. She heard the scream of an approaching ambulance. An officer returned with scissors. Carefully, Alex cut Chloe’s wrists free. Her hands slumped to her sides.

  The paramedics arrived, filling the bathroom with their urgency. Their noise burst the awful silence that had fallen upon the room.

  Alex stepped
aside as one of the paramedics crouched beside Chloe, checking her vital signs. She left the bathroom, passing the waiting SOCOs who would retrieve the evidence that would be needed later. She walked back downstairs, past the super who was talking to one of the armed officers, and out of the building into the cold night air.

  It was only then, with the start of rain falling fresh on to her face, that Alex felt relief slump over her. She sat on the front step of the cottage and allowed herself to cry tears for what might so easily have been.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  She had never seen this woman. She had heard plenty about her during that difficult conversation at Chloe’s flat, but she had yet to meet her. As with so many other people, Susan Griffiths was nothing like Alex had expected. The woman’s face remained a blank until Alex explained who she was. Then Susan ushered her into the house, looking up and down the street as though checking that none of the neighbours had been witness to the police presence on her doorstep.

  It seemed typical, given what Chloe had told Alex about her parents.

  Alex hadn’t told Chloe she was going to visit her parents. Nor had she told her she intended to visit their church and sit in on one of the meetings. By ten that morning, events of the previous evening would be well broadcast on television and on social media, although it had been requested that, for the time being, the name of the officer involved remain withheld from the press. Alex wanted to get to Chloe’s parents before the media managed it first.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Susan asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  She seemed for ever concerned with her appearance, Alex noticed; forever touching her hair and searching out her reflection in the many mirrors that seemed to decorate the house. But Chloe had already told her this. For the Griffithses, appearances were everything.