The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  Adam’s hand is trembling as he picks up the knife again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he tells Jane. His voice is clogged, and he forces himself to swallow down as much of the loneliness and fear as possible. ‘I’m so sorry for what I’m going to do to you.’

  For a moment, it feels like he won’t actually be able to. Courage is required here, and he’s always been lacking in that. So he searches for his mother and father in his head, and after a few seconds, he finds them. You have to go in hard, his father says bluntly, and it hurts less. His mother is there too, of course. Shy boys, she tells him.

  Shy boys get no toys.

  Twenty-Eight

  My bedroom.

  Mine.

  Except it didn’t feel like it any more. I stood in the doorway, and for a few moments I was unable to process the state of the room in front of me.

  Adam Johnson’s body was half on the bed. He appeared to have collapsed – dropped like a stone, rather than slumped – and had landed awkwardly, so that his head was turned to the side, one fat cheek pressed intimately against the bottom of the bed. His knees and hands were out of sight on the floor. If it wasn’t for all the blood, it would have looked as though he’d been kneeling there praying and had just fallen asleep.

  From this angle, the wound to the side of his neck was clearly visible, wet and red in the light. The covers at the base of the bed were crimson, soaked through as thoroughly as tissue paper. The fabric glistened. A spray of blood had also landed on the wall, and there was a great deal on the floor, pooled over the bare boards and already clotting in the thin gaps between. On the bed, Johnson’s hair and beard were bedraggled with it. I could see enough of his face to make out a single eye, which was open, and pointed sightlessly off to one side of me.

  I moved as far into the bedroom as I could. There was a hush to the air here, like distant traffic heard from an open window, but it was more of a sensation than a sound. Just behind Johnson’s body, a kitchen knife lay half submerged in the blood. Was it one of mine? I couldn’t tell. Presumably he would have brought a weapon with him, but who knew?

  I stepped back.

  My head was a mess. The day had been intense – a wave of incident and adrenalin – and right now, a hundred thoughts and questions and threads of understanding were mingling together. The most immediate was a visceral reaction to how incongruous the whole scene was. It’s always a shock to see a body, of course, but the effect was enhanced here because this was my bedroom. The feeling of unreality was hard to deal with. Despite all the police work going on, the officers in the house around me, there was still a sense that this could not really be happening. That I might shortly wake to find myself lying in the bed rather than staring down at it.

  It’s going to be a fucker to clean up, too.

  The thought came unbidden, and the flippancy of it was almost welcome. But far from enough to settle me.

  Would I even want to sleep in here again anyway?

  It was bad enough knowing that Johnson had broken in and spent time in here – that he’d taken my things and spied on me. But he’d ended his life in here too. The whole house felt soiled by his presence in a way that would be hard, maybe impossible, to clean by conventional means. Everyone believes in ghosts a little in the middle of the night. How was it going to feel to wake up in the pitch-black and imagine him standing there at the foot of my bed? How was I going to deal with that?

  I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

  All those details would take care of themselves. Of course they would. Right now, the important thing to remember was that this was over. Adam Johnson wasn’t going to hurt anybody else, not the way he had in the past. The relief the knowledge brought was palpable, and it was that thought that I needed to focus on.

  I crouched down and peered under the bed, seeing Hazel and Willow in their usual place. There was a large carrier in the spare room, and they were both small enough to fit in it together. They always seemed to prefer that, in fact.

  ‘Going to be a pain getting you out from there, isn’t it?’

  They just blinked at me.

  ‘Have to do it, though.’

  But as I stood up, something else occurred to me, and I paused in the doorway, turning back to reassess the scene behind me. Because actually, something about it wasn’t incongruous, after all. It reminded me a little of what I’d found in the bedroom at Sally Vickers’ house: the closed curtains; the blood on the bed; the body on the floor. It wasn’t the same, but it was similar.

  I remembered how it had been to see her – how in some strange way it had felt different from other crime scenes I’d visited. Standing here now, at the end of the case, it was impossible to escape the idea that an echo had escaped from this moment right now, travelled back, and reached me then. An echo that had told me: this means something important to you.

  Rubbish, of course. But still.

  The feeling of strangeness was only amplified when I stepped outside, carrying the cats in the holder. The scene was both familiar and ridiculous at the same time. My street had been transformed into a circus, filled with police cars and vans, many with their lights flashing silently. There was an ambulance to one side, while officers were busy unrolling a yellow cordon around my property. What I presumed was Johnson’s car was parked outside, caught within that perimeter.

  There was no media presence yet, but that was going to change very shortly. Several of my neighbours were out on their doorsteps, and I felt their eyes on me as I walked down my path towards the cordon. A part of me actually felt like waving at them.

  Hi there. Yes. This is about me.

  Bit too busy to be sorry about that right now.

  I headed to the ambulance. Jane Webster was sitting in the open back, slightly hunched, with her hands gripping the edge of the vehicle and her feet only just reaching the tarmac. With a blanket draped over her shoulders, she looked like the world’s tiniest boxer recovering from the world’s hardest fight. Which I supposed was fair enough.

  Actually, Jane had surprised me. She had proved much tougher than I’d have given her credit for. When she first came in, I’d pegged her as a timid little creature who would skitter under furniture if you raised your voice. And then at Mayday, she’d been borderline pathetic, practically hugging herself at all the conflict going on around her. After everything that had happened today, I’d have expected her to crumble into pieces. And yet she hadn’t.

  We were still debating the best course of action to address the siege situation we were faced with when Jane had unlocked and unbolted the front door and simply let us in. She’d looked a little dazed, certainly, but not obviously in shock. Determined, more than anything. ‘He’s upstairs,’ she’d said, and walked down the path. For a second, nobody had even tried to stop her. Now she watched me approach the ambulance, and the gaze she kept on me seemed just as purposeful.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

  ‘I need to talk to you as well.’ I walked straight past where she was sitting and opened the door of the nearest empty cruiser. ‘Join me.’

  I put the cats on the passenger seat for now, and when both of us were ensconced in the back seat, I leaned through and pressed the button to dim the windows for privacy. As the glass grew slightly darker, I noticed Jane watching it with something close to relief. However brave she was being on the surface, that instinct to hide clearly hadn’t gone away completely.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘Now let’s quickly run through exactly what happened.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well … doesn’t it have to be recorded, or something?’

  ‘Eventually. We’ll do it officially later. In the meantime, I just want to get an idea of the chain of events today. Preliminaries, really, to help us out.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So let’s start with how you ended up here.’

  ‘He turned up at my house this morning,’ Jane said. ‘He
showed me his ID through the door – the security company he worked for. I was half thinking about calling someone anyway, but he told me you’d sent him.’

  ‘Me?’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘He said that you were concerned about my security.’

  I wished I’d had the foresight. For a second, I was quiet, wondering how on earth Johnson had found out where she lived. But then I shook my head. He had fixed the locks on my house after the burglary, and must have overheard the conversation between me and Chris. A coincidence, of course, but a fortuitous one for him. He’d taken items from my house, but I was a good ten years out of his age range, and hardly in the same league as the other women he’d gone after. No, he’d been interested in me because of my connection to the case, and just because he hadn’t taken covert photos of me didn’t mean he hadn’t been following me from time to time. One of those occasions must have been when Jane first reported the calls. He could have trailed us to Mayday, realised who she was, then switched to following her when we left.

  I said, ‘What happened after he got inside?’

  It was Jane’s turn to shake her head. ‘I’m not even sure. There was a moment when I realised it wasn’t right; that he was just off, somehow. And he must have seen that I knew, because one second I was thinking about what to do, and the next he had hold of me.’

  She’d fought, she told me, but that was always going to be futile against a man of Johnson’s size. He’d tied her up and carried her out of the house in plain daylight. At that point, presumably, he had known what he was going to do and didn’t care about being seen.

  ‘He put me on the back seat,’ Jane said. ‘He was apologising the whole time, but it was hard to listen. I was panicking. We drove for a while. Not long. Then he picked me up out of the car again, and carried me in there.’ She nodded back in the direction of my house. ‘I didn’t know where I was. He took me upstairs.’

  Even though on first glance it didn’t seem like Jane had been raped or assaulted like the other victims, I was still dreading the next question.

  ‘And then?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘He apologised again. He told me how sorry he was, and he promised that he wasn’t going to hurt me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I didn’t believe him. I thought I was going to die.’

  ‘I can imagine. Did he untie you?’

  ‘No. He left the tape on my mouth, too. He said he was sorry about that as well. But he told me he didn’t want me to scream, or even talk to him. He just wanted me to listen.’

  I frowned.

  ‘Just listen?’

  ‘Yes. Like when he rang Mayday.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Because he liked talking to you?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what he said.’

  ‘And that’s why he abducted you?’

  ‘I think so. He didn’t say it, but that was the impression I got: that confessing to me helped him a little – helped him to deal with what he’d done. When I got sacked, he didn’t have that outlet any more. It was like his safety valve had been taken away.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just talk to someone else there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a flash of anger from her at that. Another new experience. ‘I don’t know why he wanted me.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Actually, I could think of a couple of reasons why Johnson might have wanted her. For one thing, although I’d not been privy to the conversations, I imagined Jane would have been far less confrontational than another volunteer might have been. More to the point, it was becoming clear that Adam Johnson formed genuine relationships with the women he encountered – even if only in his head. Once he was fixated on someone, he concentrated on them, at least until it became clear that they were far from interested in him in return. Until reality intruded and drove him into a frenzy of rage and hate. It wasn’t so hard to believe that he felt he’d formed a bond with Jane, and that it would have distressed him to have it broken.

  ‘A safety valve,’ I said.

  Jane nodded. ‘Like I told you before. During the calls, it felt like he was unloading what he’d done. Passing the burden on to me. Without that, he couldn’t cope any more.’

  ‘And what about today?’

  ‘He killed himself in front of me.’

  Suddenly Jane looked like she was going to cry. Whatever else I’d seen during my career, I’d never seen what she’d had to witness today, and I almost reached out to put my hand on her shoulder. But she had already gathered herself together. Her hands were bunched into fists on her thighs. No. I have to get through this. It’s important.

  ‘Jane,’ I said. ‘I know. It’s okay.’

  ‘It is okay. Because I’m sure that was what he was planning all along. Which means it was his decision. He couldn’t deal with what he’d done, and needed to end it all. And before he did, he wanted to confess.’

  ‘Everything he’d done?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Everything he hadn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He never touched those women. It was the monster.’ Jane looked at me. Stared at me, to make sure I understood. ‘The phone calls he made, the things he said … none of it was true.’

  She looked away and took a deep breath.

  ‘The monster’s still out there.’

  Part Three

  Twenty-Nine

  Sitting on the rattly bus, her head resting at an angle to her own sunlit reflection in the window, Margaret realises she is smiling. In recent months, returning from the library has always made her slightly nervous. The outings are moments of freedom, whereas at home she has always felt slightly under siege. But that has changed, she realises.

  It’s changed.

  With the sun beating down on her, she makes her way steadily up the cul-de-sac, the bag of books growing heavy in her hand. As she approaches the end, she sees that Derek is out in his garden, wielding a hosepipe at waist height. Because of the weather, a ban is in force, but he clearly doesn’t believe it applies to him, or else he’s confident that nobody will say anything or report him. He is whistling to himself as he sprinkles water over his ornate flower beds.

  Margaret decides to ignore him. There has been no interaction between them since the argument over the bees, and if he is upset with her for not getting rid of them, at least he hasn’t pressed the issue. Most likely it was just as Karen said in the tea room that time, that he’s been taking things out on her, and that deep down he isn’t really bothered.

  She walks past the bottom of the neighbours’ garden and then turns up the footpath between their houses. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder what Derek is doing there at this time of day. She’s too busy concentrating on ignoring him as she steps on to her own path, and that’s when the first one crunches very softly beneath her shoe.

  Immediately, Margaret stops.

  And then she looks down. The path ahead is dotted with them. At first, the sight doesn’t make any sense, because it is like the ground has been scattered with the tiniest clumps of earth. But then she realises how quiet and still the warm air is. Nothing is flying. She looks at the hedge. Even when she stares through it, no movement appears.

  She steps back carefully, and then crouches down. The bumblebee she has trodden on is dead, but some of the others lying on the path are not. Here and there, a mandible or a leg is quivering slightly. One of the bees appears to be chewing hopelessly at the air. She looks upwards at the corner of the house, and there is no movement there at all.

  She stands up slowly, refusing to accept that it has happened. It is impossible. This is her house. Surely he wouldn’t dare.

  Behind her, Derek is still whistling happily to himself. When she turns to face him over the fence, he glances across, and with his free hand he throws her a mock salute.

  I can have someone come round if you don’t know how.

  I know people.

  Then, still whistli
ng, he goes back to watering his garden.

  Margaret stares at him for a few seconds more. She is trembling, but she doesn’t know whether it’s from anger or shock, the invasion of what he’s done, or simply the sheer meanness of it. Right now, it is so difficult for her to comprehend what has happened that she can’t believe it actually has.

  I have said it, and so it shall be done.

  After a few moments, she turns her back on the man and walks the rest of the way down the path, careful not to stand on any of the dead or dying bees. For some reason, that feels important. When she gets inside, she locks the door against the outside world, and something is snuffed out inside her. A feeling leaves. She leans down awkwardly on the kitchen counter and begins to cry.

  Thirty

  Detective Inspector Zoe Dolan

  Detective Inspector Chris Sands

  Ms Jane Webster

  ZD: But he never gave this woman’s full name?

  JW: No. He was rambling a bit. It was all jumbled the way he told it, and I think he kept forgetting bits and then having to go back. I would have asked him if I could have done, but he never took the tape off my mouth. I was just there to listen. That’s what he said. That’s all he wanted me to do.

  ZD: What about where she lived?

  JW: Not the area, no. I’ve already told you about her house, though, the way he described it. There was a field out front, and a back garden where she hung her clothes out to dry. And a security light, I guess, because he said he tripped it the night he went there.