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

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘I haven’t forgotten Luke, by the way.’ She moved her hand from Chloe’s arm. She wasn’t sure whether or not telling her she had been to her parents’ house was a good idea. Chloe was still in recovery. Her physical injuries would heal quickly enough, but the things that lay beneath the surface were going to take far longer. She didn’t need any additional stresses. But she had always wanted to know the truth about her brother’s death. Alex wanted her to know she hadn’t forgotten that.

  ‘I need a bit of time now,’ Chloe told her. In truth, she was beginning to wonder if what Alex had said the previous week had been right. Perhaps she would never know the truth. Perhaps not knowing wouldn’t be such a terrible thing after all.

  Alex nodded. ‘Of course you do.’ She stood from the bed. ‘By the way, there’s someone waiting in the corridor to see you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he’s very good-looking, he’s got lovely manners, and unless he belongs to one of the nurses I’d suggest you snap him up.’

  Chloe smiled. Scott.

  ‘If you need anything, you know where I am. Is he giving you a lift home?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘You’re going back to the flat?’

  She shrugged. ‘Can’t let him beat me, can I? Scott offered his place, but I don’t think it’s really appropriate that I stay there. We’re not even together. He’s been so nice. I don’t deserve it.’

  Alex pulled a face. ‘Don’t deserve to be happy? Well if you don’t, no one else is entitled either.’ She paused. She didn’t really believe Chloe wanted to go back to that flat, not after everything that had happened there.

  She thought about the deafening silence that filled her house.

  ‘Why don’t you come and stay at mine?’

  Chloe looked up at her, surprised by the offer. ‘Really?’ she said, the single word soaked with scepticism.

  ‘Really. I have a four-bedroom house I can’t really afford alone. You can help me pay the mortgage.’

  Chloe rolled her eyes. ‘Thank you. I’ll think about it.’

  Neither of them suspected she would need too long to make a decision.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  She found Harry Blake in his office. He was at the window, staring out at a rainy February morning. A mug of tea had gone untouched on the desk beside a pile of paperwork that looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed in quite a while.

  ‘Sir.’

  He turned to greet her, his daydream broken. ‘How are you, Alex?’

  She exhaled loudly. It seemed a sufficient answer.

  ‘I second that.’ He took his seat and gestured for her to sit opposite him at the desk. ‘Seen Chloe?’

  ‘I went this morning. She’s going home today.’

  He nodded. ‘You want to talk to me about her, don’t you?’

  It was disconcerting how transparent her thoughts were. But she had made no secret of the fact she championed Chloe as an officer. Even from a distance, DC Lane had proven her merit once more. They may have eventually reached the link to Julia Edwards’s son, but Chloe’s email had got Alex there quicker than if she’d been left to her own devices. Chloe was sharp, perceptive. She had been knocked off focus by the resurrection of her brother’s memory and an unsolved mystery which she no longer wanted to remain in the dark, but once the truth of Luke’s death was uncovered Alex was confident Chloe would be able, some time, to return to her true form.

  And she was now determined that the truth would be uncovered, somehow.

  ‘I know this is out of your hands to a certain extent,’ Alex told Harry, ‘but help me persuade professional standards she has to come back.’

  Harry moved his hands to the desk, interlocking his fingers. ‘What’s happened in the past few days will go in her favour, strange though that sounds.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, it’s a lot to ask them to overlook.’

  ‘I know. But they can’t afford to lose both of us.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this. I doubt Chloe’s going to mention your involvement, and I certainly won’t.’

  Officers had been allowed to stay in the job following worse offences than Chloe’s, but Alex also knew of those who’d been dismissed from duty for far less. There were mitigating circumstances. She had to believe that Chloe would be allowed a second chance. Admitting her own involvement was the right thing to do.

  ‘A while back you were talked out of handing in your resignation.’

  Alex sighed and sat back in her chair. ‘There was a lot going on. I had some difficult choices to make.’

  ‘I know how that feels,’ Harry muttered. He looked away from her, his eyes drifting to the photograph on his desk.

  It was turned away from Alex, but she knew what the image depicted. Harry’s children: two boys standing on a sandy beach, clutching surfboards, wide smiles stretched across their young, sun-kissed faces.

  ‘I’m glad you changed your mind. You’re a great detective, Alex. And you’ve been a good friend over the years.’

  She didn’t like where this was going, but supposed it had been inevitable. Harry had never really returned to the station, not fully. Now his absence of spirit made sense. She had suspected weeks earlier that he no longer wanted to be there.

  ‘Why the past tense?’

  ‘I’m standing down. The past eighteen months have changed my priorities. This job has given me a lot over the years, but it’s taken a hell of a lot more. I want to see my kids grow up.’

  He looked away once more, uncomfortable by his own words. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She waved away the apology. She didn’t expect other people not to talk about their own children because of her situation. It wasn’t something she wanted either. She’d had years of pitying looks and awkward platitudes. She was beyond all that now. Harry had supported her in the past. She knew she should now offer him the same.

  ‘You’ve got to do whatever you think is right for you and your family.’

  They were interrupted by a knock at the door. A uniformed officer entered the room. ‘DI King, there’s a woman asking for you in reception.’

  Alex gave him a nod and turned back to Harry. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

  She headed downstairs to reception.

  Sitting on one of the plastic seats of the waiting area, her hands clasped together in her lap, was Chloe’s mother.

  ‘Mrs Griffiths.’

  Susan Griffiths stood hurriedly and reached for her bag from the chair beside her. She clutched it to her chest as though using it as a barrier between her and Alex. There was a shadow to the side of her face, a blur of muted purple that looked like the beginnings of a bruise.

  ‘I need to talk to you about Luke.’

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Alex took a seat opposite Susan Griffiths in one of the interview rooms. Chloe’s mother glanced at the tape recorder on the desk to the side of them, but she looked calm and composed, as though she had accepted what was to come. ‘I wasn’t entirely honest with you when you asked why we’d been excommunicated. I suppose you already know that.’

  Alex nodded. The elder she had spoken to – an obnoxious, arrogant man who held the Griffiths couple in contempt even after all these years – had filled her in on the details that Susan would later choose to omit.

  ‘You maintained contact with Chloe after she’d been disfellowshipped; that’s what it’s known as, isn’t it?’

  ‘They had no choice but to let Chloe go – she’d already been given so many chances. We begged for them to give her another chance, but she refused to acknowledge any of our teachings. She was so headstrong, so defiant.’

  ‘She had a mind of her own, you mean?’

  Susan’s jaw tensed. ‘She was still my daughter, despite everything. I wanted to know she was OK.’

  Alex sat back in her chair and eyed Susan with an anger she was struggling to keep hidden. Susan might have thought that keeping contact demonstrated loyalty to her daughter, bu
t when it had come to a choice between her family and her religion, her commitments to her children had been pushed to one side.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to maintain any contact with Chloe?’

  Susan shook her head. ‘It’s for the best, I know. Isolation is meant to teach people where they’ve gone wrong. I thought that given time to think about the choices she’d made, she would realise her sins and come back to us.’

  ‘“Her sins”?’ Alex repeated, incredulous. Susan Griffiths was indoctrinated. She knew she was supposed to be without bias, but this concerned Chloe and that made everything different. ‘What were “her sins”?’

  ‘She disobeyed us; she told lies; she drank; she got tattoos – she did everything she could possibly do to defy us.’

  ‘She was a teenager, you mean.’ Alex couldn’t bite her tongue. Somewhere amidst the indoctrination her religion had been responsible for, Alex was certain Susan realised it wasn’t Chloe who was the real sinner. She wouldn’t have been there otherwise. ‘How did the elders come to find out about the emails you’d sent Chloe?’

  ‘Luke.’

  Alex’s eyes widened, surprised by the answer. It hadn’t been what she was expecting. The elder she had spoken with told her Chloe had sent copies of emails that had shown Susan Griffiths was continuing communication with her wayward and excommunicated daughter.

  ‘The emails were forwarded from Chloe’s address, but it was Luke who sent them. He took great delight in telling me what he’d done.’

  She cast her eyes to the hands she held clasped on the desktop. ‘I lied to the police on the day Luke’s body was found. I told them the last time I’d seen Luke was the previous afternoon. I told them he’d been upset and had confessed to me that he had killed Emily.’

  Susan stopped and glanced up at Alex. The bruising on her face seemed to have deepened in colour since they had left reception and gone to the interview room. Her husband’s doing, Alex assumed. Chloe had told her what a bully her father had been. Luke and Chloe hadn’t been spared his violence. Why would it be any different for his wife?

  ‘I did see him that afternoon,’ she continued. ‘We argued at the house, about the emails. He told me he’d sent them. He said now I’d know how it felt to have everybody turn against me. He was still refusing to admit to us that he’d killed Emily.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Malcolm and me.’

  Alex nodded. She thought she knew what was coming next. ‘You thought Luke had killed Emily? Why?’

  ‘The same reason the police thought he had. She’d tried to end the relationship and Luke hadn’t been able to accept it. He’d been obsessed with her, wanting to see her all the time and spend all his time with her. It wasn’t healthy. She wasn’t a good influence on him. We tried to keep them away from one another, but he was pretty deceitful.’

  One interpretation of his character, Alex thought. Either he had been deceitful, or desperate to escape the suffocating clutches of his controlling parents. Desperate to be loved. Alex decided to opt with Chloe’s version of events.

  ‘So you argued about it?’

  Susan nodded. ‘I told him to tell the truth. I told him that if it was an accident, if he hadn’t meant to do it, he should tell the police.’ She stopped. Her face was fixed, emotionless. It was as though she was reciting a rehearsed script. She’d had plenty of time to learn the words, Alex thought. Tell the truth. Surely the woman could hear the irony in her own words?

  ‘Tell me about the argument.’

  ‘Luke lost his temper. He said he couldn’t believe his own mother didn’t believe him. Then he told me he’d found a way to make me pay for what we’d done.’

  ‘The emails?’

  Susan nodded. She looked angry – resentful at her son’s betrayal – yet Alex believed that something else must have once existed where that anger lay. At some point, there must have been love. Maintaining contact with her daughter had once, if even for the briefest moment, been more important to Susan than their church. If only she had acknowledged this moment and clung to that notion a little longer, all their lives might have been so different.

  ‘Where in the house were you?’

  ‘In the kitchen. I’d been making dinner. He told me what he’d done and I just saw red. I wasn’t myself for a moment. Everything we’d already been put through – Chloe’s behaviour, Emily’s death, and now this. We were shunned by everyone important, everyone that mattered to us. The church had already given us so many chances. They didn’t want to be associated with our family, not in the state it was. Chloe’s behaviour had already condemned us all. Sending those emails was the worst thing Luke could have done. I was branded a traitor. I had a tart for a daughter and a murderer for a son, and the emails made them decide I couldn’t be trusted either.’

  Alex’s hands had tightened into fists in her lap. She knew what was coming next, though she wished she was able to somehow change it.

  There was silence.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  Susan’s gaze remained on Alex, her expression still devoid of all emotion. ‘I hit him.’

  ‘Was your husband there when this happened?’

  Susan shook her head.

  Alex felt a shiver pass through her. Luke had died because his parents had always expected the worst of him. He had died because the police had assumed him guilty and had failed to look elsewhere. His mother had chosen her church over her children and her decision had proven fatal.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Susan’s hands slid from the table and rested in her lap. ‘I hit him just once, with a glass vase. It was standing upside down on the draining board, drying. I just lashed out. Everything happened so quickly.’

  Alex closed her eyes. She was going to have to tell Chloe all of this, and then what? The poor girl had already been through so much. She had wanted the truth, but surely not this.

  ‘He fell to the floor. I thought he was trying to scare me at first, trying to punish me again for not believing him, but when I said his name he didn’t move. There wasn’t even much blood, just a trickle on the tiles. It was so quiet. I called my husband on the phone. He said not to touch anything until he came home, so I waited in the kitchen with Luke.

  ‘Malcolm was very calm when he got there. He made me see sense. I told him I wanted to tell the police, but he said we couldn’t. We’d lose everything.’

  Alex’s jaw tensed.

  ‘Did your husband move Luke’s body, Mrs Griffiths?’

  Susan nodded. ‘He told me that when the police asked, we should tell them that we thought Luke had killed Emily. We agreed to say he’d been acting strangely all week, that he hadn’t seemed himself, and that he’d taken my husband’s car and we hadn’t seen him after that.

  ‘Malcolm moved Luke’s body to the car in the garage. I stayed at home and cleaned the kitchen. We arranged where and when I would go in my own car to collect him. I didn’t intend to kill my son, but I did believe he had killed that girl. It seemed justice had been served in a way, through God’s hands. Malcolm helped convince me of that.’

  Alex eyed the woman with disbelief. It seemed impossible that she was so indoctrinated by her religion – by her husband – she could allow herself to believe this. She wondered how long it had taken for Susan Griffiths to become convinced by the lie. Eventually, the guilt must have subsided and acceptance taken its place. An eye for an eye: so simple when she thought of it like that.

  Yet now it wasn’t. She now knew her son hadn’t killed Emily, and that changed everything. Enough for her to be there now, finally confessing to her crime. Enough for her to have confronted her husband, prepared for the repercussions she would face.

  Driven by her loyalty to her colleague, Alex felt contempt for the couple. How Chloe had managed to become the woman she was now showed that miracles existed in some form.

  God’s hands, she thought. The only hands that had been responsible for Luke’s death had been Susan’s own. Was
this really how she’d managed to convince herself for all these years that she had done no wrong?

  ‘“That girl”,’ Alex repeated slowly. ‘“That girl” was someone’s daughter. Someone’s child. In the same way Luke was your child. Innocent. But of course you know that now, don’t you? Your son wasn’t a murderer. He was a victim. Why have you waited until now to tell the truth?’

  ‘You won’t understand. You have independence; our lives are very different. I made a promise to my husband and I had to stand by it, even though he’s hated me since the day Luke died. He misses the church. He hates the stigma that comes with having been disfellowshipped, and he’s been punishing me for my disloyalty for the past eight years. I’ve lived in fear of my husband, Inspector King, but I feared prison even more. Now I don’t. Now I think prison will be an escape.’

  Alex paused the interview and left the room, leaving Susan Griffiths alone with whatever thoughts filled her head. She couldn’t escape the thought that Luke’s revenge had cost him his life. But was it really that simple? Chloe had spoken in such detail about her brother. None of what she’d said reflected a malicious boy who’d have sent those emails purely based on spite.

  Alex turned back to the door and looked through the glass at Susan Griffiths. Only a certain type of person could carry a secret of that enormity for all those years; one Alex knew she would never understand. She would never want to.

  Even now, the woman wasn’t sorry for what she’d done to her son and to her family. She was sorry she’d been banished from the church. She was sorry she was being punished for it and she was confessing to free herself.

  In the corridor, Alex leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.

  Just as Chloe was beginning to mend, this was going to break her.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Scott carried the last of Chloe’s things upstairs to the bedroom Alex had made ready for her. She had given her the back room, the one with the view of the garden, and had made up the bed with new sheets she had bought the previous evening. She put fresh flowers in a ceramic jug on the window sill. Alex knew enough to realise the flat Chloe was leaving behind had never been a home. In so many ways, a home was something Chloe had never known.