The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  ZD: Which is when he saw the man in the kitchen window?

  JW: Yes. He presumed she must have got herself a boyfriend he hadn’t known about. She was single when they met, he thought, but I got the impression he’d been stalking her for a while. So at first he just thought he’d ‘missed his chance’ with her.

  ZD: Can I just clarify? Those were his words?

  JW: That was how he put it. I remember, because he was so upset. It was obvious that he’d barely even spoken to this woman, but the way he talked about it, it was as though he’d just waited too long to ask her out. That he just hadn’t moved quickly enough, and so he’d lost her to someone else.

  ZD: But then he changed his mind about that.

  JW: He read about it in the newspaper a couple of days afterwards. That was the evening the man came round to his house to see him.

  ZD: This is the man he alleges he saw in the window of the property? The supposed real attacker?

  JW: Yes. ‘The monster.’ That’s what he kept calling him.

  ZD: How would that man have known who Johnson was, or where to find him?

  JW: I don’t think Johnson knew. He guessed that the security light would have given the man a good view of him, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. As far as he knew, he’d never met the man before. And he asked him, but never got an explanation.

  ZD: Why did the man go and see him? It seems to me like that would be pretty risky behaviour, if what Johnson was telling you was true. He could have placed him at the scene.

  JW: Yes, but I don’t think the man saw it that way. The impression I got was that he thought of Johnson as some kind of kindred spirit almost. Johnson said the man just invited himself in, and that he saw some things in the house that made him think they were alike. Or at least that he could use Johnson.

  ZD: Why didn’t Johnson go to the police?

  JW: He didn’t say. I presume he was scared about his own involvement. But the way he talked about this man, I think he was also very scared of him. That he felt incredibly intimidated by him. When he was speaking about him, he always called him ‘the monster’.

  ZD: And ‘the monster’ came round more than once?

  JW: Yes. He kept coming back. It sounded to me like he was trying to groom Johnson for a while, but then he was disappointed because Johnson wasn’t really like him at all. He was a bit, obviously. I mean, he did stalk those women, and he did go into their houses when they weren’t there. But I don’t think he could ever let himself go through with actually hurting them. It was always the other man who did that. Johnson was really upset about it, and he had to listen to it every time the man came round, but he was too scared of the man to do anything. And so he had to keep doing what he was doing.

  ZD: Which was?

  JW: Listening to everything he’d done. And giving him the keys.

  ‘Ten pages of this.’

  DCI Drake slapped Jane Webster’s signed interview statement down on the desk between us.

  ‘If it wasn’t so thick, do you know what I’d do? I’d make it into a paper aeroplane and throw it out of the fucking window.’

  He shook his head in disgust, then stared at the window to the side of him, as though he was actively considering it.

  I could sympathise with him, but only to an extent. Our commanding officer had been somewhat overeager to position himself in front of the media outside my house that day, and had managed to give the impression the case was closing – that the creeper had been identified and was now deceased. Jane’s statement, if true, had the potential to embarrass not only the department, but Drake specifically.

  At the same time, and being as charitable as I could manage, I knew it wasn’t only image he was concerned about. All of us had breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the investigation had reached a conclusion. None of us wanted to believe the man responsible might still be out there.

  ‘I’m sure Webster’s telling the truth, sir.’

  Drake turned to look at me.

  ‘You believe a single word of this?’

  Sitting beside me, I could feel Chris sinking down in his chair. Drake’s office had that effect on him. He seemed to anticipate the fairly regular verbal beatings with a slightly pathetic sense of resignation. I made an effort to sit up straight. Neither of us had done anything wrong, and neither had Jane Webster.

  ‘That’s not what I said, sir. I said Webster was telling the truth. Which is to say, I believe that this is an accurate enough account of what happened in my house. This is what Johnson really told her.’

  ‘And what do you make of that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’ I shrugged. ‘Not a paper aeroplane.’

  That got me lasers. ‘Well, let’s run through it, shall we? Johnson claims that a mysterious stranger – a monster – shouldered his way into his house and began helping himself to his collection of stalking memorabilia? Is that basically about the size of it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And kept coming back. Every time he did, he told Johnson the details of what he’d done.’

  ‘Why would someone do that?’

  I shrugged again. ‘Maybe it’s like Webster thinks, and he was trying to groom Johnson to be more like him. Or perhaps it was a kind of safety valve for him.’

  ‘A safety valve?’

  ‘That’s why Johnson phoned the helpline. We’ve seen an increase in the violence during the assaults, so it’s obvious the perpetrator is escalating. It often reaches a boiling point for this kind of individual. Maybe this was a way of letting off steam. Sharing the responsibility.’

  ‘I notice the present tense there,’ Drake said.

  ‘Just keeping all options open, sir.’

  He snorted. ‘A monster. Tell me, why would Johnson be that scared of someone? He wasn’t exactly small.’

  ‘As hard as it might be to understand, sir, some men are intimidated by overly aggressive males.’ Out of sight, under the desk, I kicked Chris’s foot. ‘But maybe this man was doing what Johnson wanted to, deep down. On one level, he was disgusted, but on another, it excited him. So he was living through it vicariously.’

  Drake stared at me, as though wondering if, like Jane Webster’s statement, I was too big to fold.

  ‘But that’s supposition,’ I added.

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  He rested his knotty forearms on the desk, one on either side of the statement.

  ‘All right. We’ll come back to all that in a moment. I had the pleasure of visiting Mr Johnson’s former address yesterday afternoon, and I’ve never seen a more disturbing house in my entire career. Please tell me everything you know about it and him.’

  I turned to Chris, to let him know it was time for him to do something in here other than shrivel. He lifted himself up in his seat and began running it through for Drake, although there wasn’t a great deal to tell. We’d already known that Adam Johnson had no convictions on record, and further digging had failed to turn up a single instance of him crossing our path in any way at all. The cottage, as I’d suspected, had belonged to his parents, both of whom had been deceased for several years. It appeared that the front room had been left untouched in their absence, and Johnson’s existence in the house had been limited mainly to his bedroom – another time capsule, in its own arrested way – along with what had once been his parents’ bedroom.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Drake said. ‘His key room. Now tell me about everything that’s been found in there.’

  ‘One wall was divided into a grid,’ Chris said. ‘It was covered with details of all the women he’d been following, along with photographs, personal items, things like that.’

  When Chris said personal items, Drake’s eyes flicked to me, and I hated him a little more. We kept our gazes on each other as he said:

  ‘Evidence, then, of his connection to all six victims?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And other women too,’ I said. ‘Including me.’

  ‘These are all the women he’d presumably been stalking? Ha
ve you cross-checked—’

  ‘Yes,’ Chris said. ‘Every woman listed on the grid had at some point been a customer of SSL, and Johnson was down as the attending locksmith.’

  There had been nineteen in total. It was obvious that he’d paid more attention to some than to others, the victims especially. We’d been in contact with the rest of them, and none of them had known anything or reported concerns. It was as though this other man, assuming he existed, had taken a perverse delight in targeting the women Johnson was particularly attracted to.

  ‘They’ve all been informed,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m sure that brightened up their day. Let’s concentrate on the six actual victims for a moment. We have a link between Johnson and all of them, don’t we? He changed the locks at their houses, and had the opportunity to keep copies of the new keys. We know he went into their houses and stole their possessions. We know he followed them and obsessed over them. Yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We also know that he called this Webster woman on more than one occasion and confessed to the crimes over the phone. In fact, that’s how we caught him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which brings us back to this.’ He tapped Jane Webster’s statement. ‘Assuming this is even close to verbatim, what evidence do we have, exactly, that this mysterious second man ever existed?’

  ‘None,’ I said. ‘Only Johnson’s word.’

  ‘And do you know how highly I rate this man’s word, especially when it’s placed against all that other evidence you just described to me?’ He held his index finger and thumb a millimetre apart. ‘Not even that much. Not even that.’

  He was right, of course. The possibility that Adam Johnson had told the truth was exceedingly slim: it was far more likely that Jane Webster had been listening to the ramblings of a madman trying desperately to minimise what he’d done in the final moments of a self-destructing life. Johnson couldn’t deny parts of his involvement – the stalking; the keys; the stolen possessions – and the mystery second man was an invention that slotted conveniently in between them. Even the language he had used fitted. A monster. Not a separate individual at all, but a part of himself that frightened and upset him, its visits symbolic ones.

  Not only was there no evidence that a second man existed, there was no evidence that he needed to. Everything we had pointed to Johnson acting alone: we simply didn’t need to conjure up a mysterious partner to make sense of what had happened.

  I knew all this. But even so.

  ‘We don’t want to end up with egg on our faces. Sir.’

  Drake stared at me for a long time, considering that, then finally looked away.

  ‘Oh, I’m well aware of that, Detective. And I’m not saying for one second that we should simply discount the possibility that this other man exists. So you tell me. Who is he?’

  ‘We don’t know, sir.’

  ‘And what about the victim? Who is she?’

  ‘Again, we don’t know. As I said, all the women on Johnson’s wall have been accounted for. They’re either victims we already knew about, or else they’ve never been attacked.’

  ‘But if he’d been stalking her, surely she would have been there as well.’

  ‘Unless he erased her details. She was the first victim of this other man – let’s say – so he might have been upset enough to remove her.’

  ‘Christ.’ Drake rubbed his eyes. ‘We don’t know when this incident took place. We don’t know where. We don’t even know if it was a rape.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think we know it wasn’t. We looked at other rapes, and I’ve looked at them again. There aren’t any that match the description Johnson gave. But there was a huge pile of borderline cases we went through at the time. If the attacker didn’t have the keys back then, and if he was interrupted, we wouldn’t necessarily have connected the MO.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. Into the hundreds, probably, but I don’t know how many would fit.’

  Drake stopped rubbing his eyes and stared at me for what felt like an age. Then he sighed.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go over them again.’

  Thirty-One

  I’m sorry.

  I’m so sorry for what I’m going to do to you.

  It kept coming back to Jane at odd times, what Adam Johnson had done to her. She had expected to revisit it in nightmares, but for the last couple of days her sleep had been sound. Perhaps the memories weren’t deep enough down for that yet. Instead, it emerged during the day. She would be sitting on the settee, or preparing a meal, or trying to work, and she would find her body was suddenly still, and she was reliving the events in her mind.

  I’m sorry.

  When it was obvious that Adam Johnson had finished talking to her, she’d been terrified, convinced that he was going to kill her. He’d stood up, sobbing to himself, then moved to the head of the bed beside her, holding the knife. She’d tried to roll over, but he’d put his free hand on her – gently – and stopped her. She could still feel the pressure there.

  Hold still.

  His voice had been so soft that she’d done what she was told. Johnson had leaned down again, and carefully cut the tape holding her ankles together.

  Roll over.

  A second later, her hands were free.

  As he stepped away, Jane had scrabbled back into a sitting position by the headboard, then stared at him, wide-eyed, as he walked to the base of the bed.

  Thank you.

  He’d stood there for a long time, with his eyes clenched shut, before suddenly raising the knife to his throat and violently cutting it. His body had dropped instantly. As he lay there, half on the bed, half off it, Jane had listened to the hideous noise of the blood leaving his body, like tap water gurgling down the sink, and thought: oh God, oh God, oh God.

  She heard it again now, then flinched, brought back into the present by the sound of the doorbell.

  She shook the memories away and checked her watch. It was a little after twelve, and whoever was downstairs was her first visitor of the day. God, she’d actually started to imagine it might be over. The last forty-eight hours had been a gradually diminishing scrum of press attention that had kept her constantly on edge. The phone rang endlessly, though she’d stopped answering it on the first day; she had no idea how they’d got her number. And the last time she’d opened the front door, she’d been confronted by a man with a camera for a face, angling back across the pavement to get a shot of her. For a second, she’d been taken back to that day, when Adam Johnson had attacked her at the bottom of the stairs. She’d closed the door quickly, and ignored it ever since. A trimmed-down photo of her had appeared in the papers anyway.

  The doorbell again.

  Leave me alone.

  And yet she got off the settee and moved to the top of the stairs.

  The thought had been building: perhaps she should talk to the press. Because it was clear the police weren’t taking her seriously. After everything she’d been through, and all the details she’d given, there had been no follow-up calls, and nothing in the papers about the man Johnson had told her about. The monster. The implication was clear enough. They didn’t believe her – or him, at least. They were probably just glad to have the case closed.

  It wasn’t that easy for her, though. Just as with his calls to Mayday, Adam Johnson had passed knowledge to her, and it sat like a stone in her chest. She had tried to give it to the police, but they wouldn’t take it from her. What was she supposed to do? It was a desperate feeling. As much as she might have wanted to leave it alone, she knew that she couldn’t. If she did, the knowledge would only ever get more and more uncomfortable.

  The front doorbell rang again.

  What are you going to do?

  Jane hesitated.

  And then she decided.

  I’m going to go downstairs. I’m going to open the door wide. And I’m going to tell the media exactly what Adam Johnson told me
.

  Perhaps it would spur the police into acting. The press would demand answers, and wouldn’t be fobbed off as easily as she’d been. The idea of making herself the focus of attention was terrifying, and it would be the most confrontational thing she’d ever done in her life, but it needed to happen.

  You can’t do this.

  Yes I can, she told her father’s voice. Because I have to.

  Jane began trotting down the stairs. Go quickly; don’t hesitate. She was halfway to the door when the letter box clicked open, and she saw a couple of fingers protruding in between the brushes.

  ‘Jane?’ The voice was muffled. ‘It’s me. It’s Rachel. Are you there?’

  Despite her decision, relief flooded through her. The press could wait.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Hang on.’

  It was only early afternoon, but Rachel had brought a bottle of red wine with her.

  ‘I thought you could maybe do with it,’ she said.

  Jane surprised herself by not even pausing, never mind arguing. An hour later, sitting at her kitchen table, they’d got through most of the bottle, and she had told Rachel everything.

  ‘Shit.’ Rachel sat back in her chair. ‘I’ve been following the news. Obviously I have. But there’s been nothing about this. I mean, the police haven’t said anything.’

  Jane shook her head. They’d drunk the same amount of wine, but whereas Rachel seemed relatively untouched by the alcohol, Jane could feel herself getting more than a little fuzzy. Midday drinking. Maybe it wasn’t for her after all. She pushed the current glass slightly away from herself.

  ‘The police don’t believe me.’