by Zoe Caldwell
‘And how long have you worked there?’
‘Around four years now.’
‘Like it?’
‘Yes, I love it,’ I reply, although now I’m starting to really sweat. If Wheelan starts poking his nose around at work, then I’m done for. If he talks to Jess, I’m fucked. ‘Is there anything else I can help with? I’m not the person you’re looking for. Clearly. I was at home that night and yet you’re accusing me of having killed someone? Or having been with someone who was killed? It’s ridiculous.’ I shake my head, exasperatedly.
‘We’re doing our job,’ Wheelan comments, unfazed.
‘I know, but I’ve told you what I was doing and I’m tired. As you can see, I just got home, and I was looking forward to winding down.’
‘Where were you?’
‘What?’
‘Where were you today, Camilla?’ he asks.
‘Is that relevant to your investigation?’ I retort.
Wheelan’s face is unmoving. He doesn’t answer, he just waits for me to respond.
‘I went to Suffolk for a break with my friend,’ I tell him.
That sounds good. Suffolk with a friend. That’s totally the kind of thing a wholesome, well-adjusted person would do.
‘A close friend?’
‘Yes, my friend Vanessa.’
‘Okay.’
Sergeant Porter jots that down.
‘It’s getting late. I need to get to bed,’ I tell them, glancing towards my bedroom.
‘Not ordering takeaway tonight?’ Wheelan asks, a little sardonically. There’s something in his dark eyes. Wryness? Mockery? Could it even be flirtation? He’s definitely not bad-looking, but I can’t even begin to think of him that way right now.
‘No, I’m not,’ I reply, coldly.
Wheelan glances at his colleague and gives him a near-imperceptible nod. ‘Okay, thanks for your time, Camilla.’
They get up to leave. I smile politely. I can’t help checking Wheelan out as he turns to my door. I know I shouldn’t be looking but he has got a really good body – muscular, large. I look away. The last thing I need to do is pursue the detective investigating me – that really would be playing with fire. I have lovers – Abay, Vanessa, Mr USA – it’s not like I need him. Wait. Abay. My heart lurches, my heart rate quickening. It was him. The witness was him. It must have been. The hooded figure loitering outside my flat the night I killed Julian…
Abay probably thought he’d swing by after the gym and see what I was up to. Maybe he buzzed the intercom and found I wasn’t in. He’s been acting quite keen lately, it wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if he’d shown up uninvited. But then he saw me with another man and scarpered. He probably didn’t think too much of it at the time. It’s not like we’re exclusive, after all. I can do what I want. But he must have pieced things together – the way I reacted when he showed me the article about Julian’s murder on his phone, the CCTV image in the paper. He must have recognised me, noting that Julian had been in Mayfair, that he’d been on a date. Abay must have realised I had something to do with Julian’s disappearance and called the police.
‘Lovely pictures,’ Wheelan comments, pausing at the framed photographs of the Bryces on my wall.
I fake a smile. ‘Thanks.’
‘Your parents?’
‘No, family friends,’ I reply tightly. I can get away with lying to my friends about my fake family, but I’m not sure it’s worth faking it with a detective.
‘Right.’ Wheelan frowns slightly as though trying to figure out why I have photos of family friends on my wall but none of my family.
I smile innocently back, silently urging him to leave. To not ask anything more. I feel acutely aware of the Bryces on the wall, their warm eyes turned shrewd, their wide smiles mocking, their arms around each other’s shoulders, grazing, clawing at the edges of the frames as though they want to break free. As though they’re sick of being part of my world, my lies.
Wheelan’s eyes are still on me, as if he’s seen something. But what? I look away, feeling uneasy. How is it that I can just about keep my cool when lying about a murder, but when it comes to my fake family, I start to lose my shit?
‘Here’s my card. If you think of anything that might help our investigation, please get in touch,’ Wheelan urges me.
I take the card. It’s white with blue lettering that matches the Metropolitan Police logo. Wheelan’s name is printed in bold, along with his mobile number, landline and email address. His station is the Met HQ in Victoria. His card is so different to the stylish ones I’m usually given at networking events, each one a cry for attention, a plea for taste or originality.
‘Thank you.’ I slide the card into the back pocket of my jeans, before walking to the front door, leading Detective Wheelan and Sergeant Porter out.
I say goodbye and close the door. It clicks shut. I take a step back. I stand there, listening. Listening to the sound of the lift doors sliding open, closing, the hum of the lift as it descends down the shaft. They’ve gone and yet I can still smell them – a cold, slightly sweaty smell. I swear I can see footprints on my rug. I look towards my sofa, the coffee table containing the key to all my secrets. I’ll have to move it somewhere much more obscure. Perhaps it’s time to get rid of my garage altogether. It’s too near the crime scene. The police are way too fucking close.
I walk over to the pictures of the Bryces.
‘Oh, fuck off.’ I sneer at their wide, guileless smiles, but the words don’t quite ring true.
I can’t even pretend to hate them. It feels wrong. The Bryces are nothing but pure. I’ve been building our imaginary world for years. They’ve always stood for everything that’s good in the world: loyalty, kindness, compassion, love, trust. I can’t hate my perfect family. The fantasy is too ingrained.
I sigh, walking over to the sofa instead. I sit back down in the armchair and eye the space on the sofa where Detective Wheelan sat.
I wonder how much he knows about me already. He called me Camilla multiple times, but does he know that’s not my real name? If he’s gone to the trouble of coming over, then he may well have gone to the effort of doing a background check. He might know that I changed my name by deed poll. And if he knows that, then he’ll have been able to look up the old me. He could know everything I went through.
I pull my legs up onto the chair, wrap my arms around my knees, curl up. Wheelan probably knows me better than anyone else in London right now and the thought is horrible. He’ll know I took my dad to court for all the horrific, unspeakable things he did to me. He might even have read the transcript of my evidence, and all the harrowing details it includes. He’ll have discovered that the jury let my dad walk despite everything, believing my dad’s lawyer’s stance that I was a wild child making things up. Will Wheelan understand that no teenager takes their dad to court on rape and assault charges for fun, or will the reality be too much for him, like it was for the jury? Will he find it easier to write me off as a liar, a troublemaker, a lunatic, because a wayward, delusional teenager is a far easier thought to stomach than the reality of what happened to me? The thought of Wheelan knowing anything about what I’ve been through makes me sick.
I take his card from my pocket and stare at his name: Detective Chief Inspector Glen Wheelan. I lean forward and place the card on the coffee table. I walk over to the window and look out over the city. I picture Wheelan driving back to the station, his police car one speck of light among many scattered across the London skyline. I take a deep breath, steadying myself. Gathering strength. I don’t know what he knows about me, but I won’t let him take me down. Just like I refused to let my dad take me down. I’ll rise from this investigation like I rose from my childhood – a phoenix. Not even a phoenix, a crow, shaking the dust from her wings before breaking into flight.
9
Glen Wheelan.
I double-check my encryption software is working, and then I set about finding out everything I possibly can about the
detective who’s after me. It’s pouring down outside and sheets of rain lash against my bedroom window. The London skyline glimmers in the distance as Google generates its results.
The first page is full of articles about Detective Wheelan having overseen a manhunt for notorious serial killer Duncan Renwick – a violent thug of a man whom I’m well aware of. I’d have liked to have hunted him down myself if I could have. A wheel clamper and security guard by day, killer by night. His modus operandi was to drive around in a van, prowling the streets until he found young, vulnerable girls walking alone or waiting at bus stops. He’d pull over, try and chat them up, and if they rejected him, he’d attack, manhandling them into the back of his van, where he’d rape them or kill them, battering them to death, slinging blows to their skulls with a hammer.
I open one of the articles. It praises Wheelan for his ‘dogged pursuit’ of Renwick. Dogged pursuit. That doesn’t bode well for me. The article describes him as ‘tenacious’, noting that he spent ten years heading up the murder team at Greater Manchester Police, where he was personally responsible for thirty murder convictions. Thirty. Not bad. Although it sounds better than it is. That’s only three a year. How many people get murdered in Greater Manchester each year? Or go missing? Surely way more than three. For every murder Wheelan has solved, plenty more must have gone unsolved.
I click out of the article and browse the next page on Google. There are a few links to a recent radio interview Wheelan has done. Even talk of a book deal. Hmm. Didn’t realise I had a minor celebrity in my home. I keep scrolling, but it’s just article upon article about crimes he’s solved, quotes he’s given about ‘horrific murders’ and ‘bringing justice to victims’, delivering ‘closure to the victim’s family’. Blah-blah-fucking-blah.
I click ‘play’ on Wheelan’s radio interview. The sound of the recording bleeds out of my laptop speakers into my bedroom. The interviewer is irritatingly sycophantic, clearly likes a man in uniform. She giggles at pretty much every comment Wheelan makes, even ones that aren’t remotely funny. It’s irritating to listen to, but I do pick up on a few interesting details: such as the fact that Wheelan moved from Greater Manchester Police to the Met last summer and he’s forty-two. Pretty young for someone of his rank, especially given that he’s headed up a homicide team for more than ten years. He’s clearly ambitious, which isn’t good news for me. I keep listening. He grew up in Lancashire. Bit of a leap to have gone from sleepy Lancashire to murder squads and the Met, but each to their own. The giggling presenter starts to really grate on me. Even when talking about the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, she’s giggling. Idiot. I turn it off.
I pick up Wheelan’s card and google his mobile number, but of course, it doesn’t deliver much, only a link to his profile on the Met site. I enter it into Facebook and Twitter, but he’s not stupid. He’s hardly going to have used his work mobile to set up social media profiles. No results. Unsurprising, but it was worth a try.
What next? I need some dirt on him. Some details. So far, I have nothing.
I try a few other searches: ‘Wheelan, London’. Nothing new comes up, just more of the same. ‘Glen, London’. A load of random Glens. Naturally. What else?
I want to hack him, but what can I hack? There’s a hacker on the dark web that I’ve used a few times. A fifteen-year-old tech whizz from Cumbria who likes to flirt with me. He’s a bit of a pain, but I don’t care. He’s good at what he does, and he’s managed to get me into a couple of people’s personal email and social media accounts a few times, when I’ve needed it. But I don’t have Detective Wheelan’s personal email address. I only have the details on this stupid card.
I type ‘[email protected]’ into Google, hoping something might come up. But there’s nothing. I try the same with Yahoo and Hotmail, trying different formations of his name, different email hosting sites, but still nothing. God…
I can’t hack his work mail. It’s way beyond my hacker friend’s abilities and even if it wasn’t, it would immediately set alarm bells ringing at the Met. It could incriminate me far more than help me.
I feel impotent. At a dead end. I need to do something, but what? I tip my head back against the headboard of my bed, the blueish light from my laptop pouring over my face. I close my eyes and think. Just think.
Then it hits me: newspapers.
Google only delivers so much news coverage, but what if there’s something on Wheelan dating back earlier? Something from his youth, back before newspapers had websites and everything was online. The internet’s only been around for thirty or so years and he is forty-two. Could I find something from his childhood? Gather some details about him or his family that I can’t find online. It’s worth a try. It’s not like I have any other ideas right now.
I paid thousands for a subscription to an online newspaper archive service. It’s a database of UK papers dating back a hundred years, the stories carefully tagged and as easy to search as Google. I had a flight of fancy a few years ago that the database would help me research victims. I thought I could hunt down abusers banged up years ago, stalk them down, see if they’ve changed their ways. I imagined wreaking vengeance on them, just when they thought they’d got away with everything, like a dark marauder appearing from nowhere, an angel of death. But I never really got around to it. The guy who sold me the subscription was a little surprised that a random woman would pay so much for a service, usually used by media companies or universities, for purely recreational purposes. If I recall correctly, I made up some bullshit excuse about researching a novel. Not that it was any of his business. If I want to spend thousands of pounds a year to browse historic news articles, that’s my prerogative.
I log into the portal. It takes me a few attempts, my grasp on my login details a bit rusty, but I get in eventually.
I search for Glen Wheelan.
No Results.
Damn.
I try ‘Wheelan, Lancashire’.
Twenty-nine results. What the hell?
I scan them, eyes widening. I sit up straighter.
Man stabbed wife in front of son 18 times
Croston man murdered wife in savage knife attack
‘Caring and kind’ mother slain in front of her son in vicious attack by estranged husband
I open the first article. A young mum – a pretty brunette – only twenty-five, attacked by a controlling husband she’d been running from. He’d showed up one night at her new home and stabbed her to oblivion, while the couple’s six-year-old son looked on. Horrible.
Surely the six-year-old son wasn’t Detective Wheelan? I check the date on the article and compare it to his age now. He would have been six.
I read the other articles, checking to see if any of them mention Wheelan by name – a tag the search function might have missed – but I can’t find the name Glen Wheelan in any of the reports. None include a picture of him either, not that he’s likely to look much like his six-year-old self now. I go through all twenty-nine of the articles, even though some aren’t about the murder. There are a couple from happier times. Detective Wheelan’s mum, Maria, pictured at a charity fundraiser, another of her taking part in a half marathon with her sister, Genevieve.
I google the name ‘Genevieve Wheelan’. Not much comes up.
I type it into Facebook. Two results appear. One is for a woman based in Texas. Unlikely to be a relative of Wheelan’s, but the other is for a woman, an attractive older lady with thick grey hair who looks mid-sixties, which would be about the right age – living in Surrey. I click onto her profile. She has 194 friends. I search her friends list for Glen’s name. Nothing. He’s a detective, I remind myself. He’s not dumb. If he were to use Facebook, he’d surely use a fake name for his profile. I scroll through Genevieve’s pictures. Her privacy settings are weak, and she has quite a few photos on show. Boring shots of weddings and barbeques and birthdays – the usual happy family bullshit. I’m about to click off, totally bored, when I suddenly land upon a picture of Genev
ieve with Wheelan. Detective fucking Wheelan. It’s him. It’s definitely him. He looks a few years younger, thicker hair, dressed down, in shorts and a T-shirt, grinning in someone’s back garden, his arm slung around Genevieve’s shoulders, but it’s him all right. Same eyes, same hair, same build. It’s him.
Wheelan, with his aunt. The son of a man who murdered his wife. A six-year-old boy who stood by and watched. Who took all of it in, and then grew up to work in the police, heading up the murder squad at the Met. Police officers don’t usually bother me much. They like to think of themselves as important, better than everyone else, but they’re just the same. They want to clock off at the end of the day, go home and watch TV, get their pay cheque at the end of the month. They claim to care, but most of them just want an easy life, and a job’s a job, we all grow numb after a while. But Wheelan isn’t like that. He’s not motivated by status or money or ego, he’s motivated by justice, and that scares me. I know what that feels like. I kill bad men because they deserve it. I kill bad men, because like Wheelan, when I was young, very young, one made a stark impression on me. An irreversible impression. Damage that can’t be undone. And ever since then, I’ve shown no mercy when it comes to hunting down men of that ilk and wiping them out. If Wheelan feels the same way about murderers that I feel about rapists, abusers, wife beaters, paedophiles and creeps, then nothing’s going to stand in the way of his pursuit of Julian’s killer. And I should be worried. Very worried.
And yet despite my fear and anxiety, my eyelids are dropping. I glance at the clock on my bedside table: 2.34am. I’m meant to be getting up for work in less than five hours. I want to go to Hayes and clear out my garage, in case Detective Wheelan finds it. It contains the crossbow. An arrow I pulled from Julian’s corpse as a memento. If Wheelan discovers my garage, I’m done for. If he finds my weapons, my mementoes, and all the press cuttings I’ve collected over the years about my kills, he’ll know everything. I want my things. I want my bag of red herrings, the gloves and scarves and hairs and fag butts and toenails, the bits of DNA-laden crap I’ve taken from creeps over the years. I want to take everything – my armchair, my chest of drawers, my camping lamp – everything that might hold traces of my victims’ DNA – and destroy it all. And yet I can’t. For all I know, the police are onto me. They might already know more than they let on earlier. They could still be outside, waiting, like they were when I arrived back from Suffolk. They could be tracking my car. The last thing I need to do is lead them directly to my deepest darkest place. The one place where I hide nothing, where the mask is nowhere to be seen.
