Extinction

by Carol Anne Davis

  All was quiet when he reached the psychologist’s, apart from a large cat which ran up to him, purring. He kicked out but its reflexes were faster than he expected and it sprung sideways, stared at him for a second before running off. In a fair world he would have mastery over the animal kingdom, over all of his inferiors. For now he’d settle for mastering this house.

  Angling his hook, he fed it through the letterbox and made several lunges at the key. On his fourth attempt, he knocked it off the nail and it fell to the floor with a tinny sound which echoed for a moment. He froze and listened intently, but no one stirred. It was easy, after that, to drag the key along the lino and towards the door, hook it and pull it carefully through the letterbox. Gotcha. Pleased at his own dexterity, he slid it silently into the lock.

  He tiptoed to the kitchen, took four slices of bread out of the bread bin and fetched cheese and a jar of sweet pickle from the fridge. He found a gleaming knife in the cutlery drawer and cut thick slices of Cheddar, making what his gran used to call doorsteps, her colloquialism for big sandwiches. He washed them down with a half pint of orange juice, the type that he preferred without fibrous bits in it. His stomach stopped rumbling and he felt even sharper than before.

  Now he had to pack lots of food to take home, but he’d forgotten to bring any carrier bags. He began searching through the many drawers and cupboards for some. As he did so, he saw foodstuffs that he liked – tins of baked beans, packets of noodles, cans of pineapple chunks – and began to stockpile them on the table. He also took dairy foods and beer from the fridge.

  Hearing a dull thud from upstairs, he grabbed the big knife that he’d used to cut the cheese. He hid behind the open kitchen door, holding the weapon ready in his right hand. His heartbeat quickened as he heard footsteps descending, getting closer all the time. He didn’t want to be disturbed, or given a pep talk. He wanted to remain free as the proverbial avian, to do his own thing.

  He watched, scarcely breathing now, as his therapist entered the room. The man took a few slow steps towards the table. Brandon slammed the door shut and stood in front of it, clutching the knife.

  Adam whirled around.

  ‘Brandon! Christ, you scared me!’ He must have belatedly noticed the blade as his eyes widened. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked in a gentler voice.

  Fuck off, leave me alone. Give me this house. Now, there was a thought – he could move in here rather than transport all of this food to his own place. If he lived at Adam’s he wouldn’t have to walk past the dying bushes every day, though he should probably go back every so often to water them and . . . well, whatever else his parents had done to keep social services at bay. He had a feeling that he’d have to pay a community charge but that you could do so at the local council office. It would be a steep learning curve but he was up for it.

  ‘Brandon?’

  The voice broke into his thoughts.

  ‘What?’ he asked, feeling irritable.

  ‘Is there anything that I can do for you?’

  ‘Like what?’

  The therapist indicated the tins of food. ‘Like cook you a meal.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Do you want to take these with you?’

  ‘No – I want to eat them here.’

  The older man looked confused. ‘OK. But not now?’

  ‘Over the next few days . . . you’ve got loads.’

  He watched as the man licked his lips. Was he hungry? Had he come down for a sandwich and would he be annoyed that his former patient had eaten so much of the cheese?

  ‘Will I make us a cup of tea?’

  ‘You said that I shouldn’t drink caffeine.’

  ‘Juice, then?’

  ‘I’ve already finished it.’

  ‘That’s alright, Brandon. I’ll go out now and get more.’

  ‘In your dressing gown?’ The therapist must think that he was stupid, must be planning on alerting the authorities. No chance – he wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Well, at this hour I could take the car to the garage shop in my dressing gown – very few people are going to see me!’

  Was it early? Nowadays he had no real concept of time.

  ‘Brandon? Shall I go and get you juice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything else, then?’

  ‘Your PIN number,’ he said. He’d forgotten to get his parents numbers before he bludgeoned them to death, wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  ‘Why would you want that?’ Adam asked in an even softer voice.

  Did he have a sore throat? Why was he edging towards the window?

  ‘Sit down or I’ll stab you,’ he warned.

  ‘OK.’ Adam sat down in the nearest wooden chair and turned it slowly until it – and he – was facing him. ‘Brandon, remember that I’m your friend.’

  ‘I need money.’

  ‘I’ve got some in my wallet and petty cash jar.’

  ‘Ongoing money.’

  ‘Have your mum and dad stopped your allowance? I can speak to them.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Brandon said, glad that, for once, he knew much more than the therapist. ‘They’re dead.’

  He watched Adam Neave pale.

  ‘Recently?’ he croaked.

  ‘A few days ago.’

  ‘Are they in the house?’

  ‘Not any more – I buried them in the garden and planted bushes on top.’

  He waited for Adam to say well done for showing forward planning, but the man said nothing, just looked quickly around the room.

  ‘I know that they used to upset you,’ the therapist said.

  ‘Past tense.’

  ‘Will your other relatives be worried?’

  ‘There’s just my auntie and she’s been hitting the booze even more since Ethan died.’

  He watched with a detached interest as Adam shuddered.

  ‘Should we dig a deeper hole together, Brandon? You know, make sure that you don’t get caught.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t get caught. Everyone thinks that they’ve gone abroad to live.’

  ‘But won’t your father’s employer start to worry?’

  ‘Not if I fake a resignation letter.’

  ‘I could help you write it. We could go out to the post office and get a stamp.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Brandon pulled one of the other wooden kitchen chairs over to the door and sat on it, holding the long, shiny knife in his lap. It was nice having someone to talk to, he admitted to himself, but, when he tired of the older man’s chatter, he’d have to die.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Who’d have thought that the quiet teenager would turn out to be a total psycho? Worse, a psycho who was now holding him hostage in his own kitchen and brandishing a knife. Adam had used that particular implement to cut large shanks of ham and roast beef, knew how sharp it was. If the kid slashed at his neck or lunged for the heart, he’d be a goner. He had to talk for his life . . .

  ‘Would you like a beer?’

  He had a small drinks cabinet in his study and some Rohypnol sellotaped to the cabinet roof. The teen would be comatose in ten minutes flat, and he could disarm him and alert the emergency services.

  ‘No, I’m not old enough.’

  ‘Hey, who’s going to know?’ Not his parents, at any rate. He belatedly remembered that Brandon’s little cousin – Ethan whom he’d referred to moments ago – had died in his presence. He must have killed him, too. But surely he, Adam, could talk his way out of this situation? He’d always prospered in difficult situations before.

  He realized that the boy hadn’t answered his last question, was staring at him manically. Damn, the kid must have stopped taking his meds. That made him unpredictable, and there was some anecdotal evidence that users sometimes became violent when they suddenly ceased the drugs.

  ‘Brandon, I’m on your side.’

  ‘No, you’re on Mum’s side. You and she spoke to the doc who put me on the tablets.’

  ‘Because we care about you and thoug
ht that they would make you feel better. Remember how well you were doing in school for a while?’

  ‘There’s no school, now.’

  ‘Maybe you haven’t been getting on with a particular teacher or classmate? Sometimes you can move up a level.’

  At this rate, the kid would be going straight to jail.

  ‘No, I mean there’s no school. Literally. I burned it down.’

  God, the teen really had lost it, big time. He was disappointed that he hadn’t recognized a fellow-psycho. The boy had fooled everyone, except that pesky shrink who’d kept phoning for a while.

  ‘Right, well that’s one way of ensuring that school’s out forever,’ he said and attempted a laugh, but it sounded hollow to his ears. He was stuck in this room with a triple murderer and arsonist.

  The silence deepened. He wondered if the boy would fall asleep, but, if anything, he looked wired, his eyes constantly searching the room, his movements jerky. He probably felt that he ruled the world at this moment, that no one could stand in his way.

  ‘Mind if I make myself a cup of tea?’ he asked casually, aware that he could throw boiling water in the kid’s face, tackle him when he put his hands up to shield his burning flesh.

  ‘I mind,’ Brandon said.

  ‘You know that we’re on the same side?’

  ‘We’re not.’

  He wasn’t going to argue.

  ‘So, what shall we talk about?’ he asked softly. He’d always thought that he was cool before but now he sounded like the boy’s dad. The kid had woken him from a deep sleep and now he craved coffee, was getting hungry and kept losing his train of thought.

  He realized that Brandon, too, had lost his train of thought as the teenager failed to answer him. How much longer would they have to sit here, eyeballing each other? It was lucky that he’d gone to the loo when he’d first got up. The downstairs noise had been sufficiently muffled that he’d half thought it was next door’s cat, Tilly, knocking over a plant pot in the garden or the paper boy being especially exuberant. He’d come down here in a half daze, had never expected this . . .

  Suddenly, there was an explosion of sound at the front door, the likes of which he’d never heard before. He jumped up instinctively and the boy jumped up too and screamed, ‘What have you done?’ and lunged at him. Adam felt nothing for a moment and then was struck by wave after wave of dizziness followed immediately by nausea. His legs turned weak and would no longer support his weight so he sank, on his knees, to the floor. It was only then that he saw the handle of the knife sticking out of his chest. Jesus, when had that happened? The blade was all the way in.

  His body wanted to fall forward but, with a Herculean effort, he forced himself to slide backwards so that the knife handle wasn’t also driven into his flesh. He lay there, completely unable to move, heard male and female voices in the hallway. Then a shocked-sounding voice said, ‘Jesus, son, what have you done?’ and another said something about fetching an ambulance and then he heard nothing more.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ‘Are you sure that it was him?’

  Beth sat in her lounge, facing the detectives. The therapist that she knew simply wasn’t capable of murder: he was a kind, community-minded man.

  ‘Well, we know that he put date rape drugs into various women’s drinks. We caught him in the act with an undercover policewoman and, after his death, his photo appeared in the newspapers. Since then, various females have come forward to say that they met him in bars and clubs, then everything went blank and when they woke up they were sore all over. They later had flashbacks of being sexually abused.’

  ‘And you think he drugged his wife and she died?’

  ‘No, we believe that he pushed her from a multi-storey car park because she was thinking about leaving him and he had to retain the upper hand. But we strongly suspect that he strangled Hannah Reid.’

  Could the man that she’d dined with, worked with, flirted with, really be a sex killer? What would his motivation be when he could attract women in the normal way?

  ‘But why . . .?’

  ‘Our psychologist thinks that killing his wife gave him an incredible buzz, that he wanted to repeat it. We know that Hannah was grieving for the loss of her relatives and probably visited the bereavement centre, got talking to him there. You’ve said yourself that, when you first saw her photo in the paper, you thought that you’d seen her before, just weren’t sure where.’

  Beth felt a chill run through her. ‘I thought little of it at the time as I meet so many people at the hospital.’

  Still, this was just conjecture. They hadn’t yet convinced her that he’d murdered Hannah or anyone else.

  She sought more information. ‘And you also think he killed that Bristol girl?’

  ‘Again, after we went public with his photo, a few clubbers came forward to say that they’d seen a guy matching his description talking to Kylie on the night she disappeared.’

  Hadn’t she read somewhere that people often wanted to help so put themselves at the centre of an inquiry when they hadn’t really been there?

  She cleared her throat. ‘But don’t some people imagine things?’

  ‘Some – but other women have come forward to say that Neave took them home from clubs, drugged and sexually assaulted them. One girl remembered part of his car number plate, whilst another described an unusual mole on his chest, near the nipple. And several of them remember him using the same phrases to them as they meandered in and out of consciousness.’

  So it was becoming clear that he had some kind of criminal history – and everyone knew that some people reacted badly to date rape drugs, had a potentially fatal reaction. Had her colleague really cared so little about other lives?

  ‘What about his lodger, John?’

  Beth remembered hugging Adam after the younger man had died, trying to console him. Had she really embraced a murderer?

  ‘We’ll never know for sure, but maybe John saw something and Adam Neave wanted him out of the way.’

  ‘And his little nephew?’

  ‘He might have killed him to get revenge on his brother, or it might have been one of those occasional inexplicable deaths. In hindsight, it’s suspicious, but we’ll never know for sure.’

  ‘And Adam’s definitely dead?’ Beth asked, with a shudder.

  Both detectives nodded forcibly and the oldest one said, ‘He’s dead all right – he was dying by the time we broke in to arrest him and he expired before the ambulance arrived.’

  ‘I trusted him. I feel really stupid now,’ she said, thinking out loud. She felt almost contaminated when she remembered how they’d talked and laughed, made eye contact for far longer than was strictly necessary. She’d looked at his lithe body and wondered what it would be like to go to bed with him.

  ‘Don’t feel bad. You’re not naive – there are thousands of people conned by psychopaths like Neave every year. Even people in the prison and probation services, who should know better, get taken in sometimes We’ve known of cases where a female prison psychologist married a sociopath serving a life sentence as he convinced her of his innocence.’

  ‘Did Adam have a prison record?’

  ‘No, he was too clever for us, had never been caught.’

  ‘Lots of the widows liked him,’ Beth admitted, remembering specifically how Olivia had flirted with the man. ‘And apparently he was equally popular with his private patients.’

  ‘That’s not so surprising – he told them what they wanted to hear.’

  He had indeed. He’d known how to flatter, how to soothe, how to make women feel better. He’d presented himself as a true professional or empathic friend.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Beth asked.

  ‘You’re eligible for counselling and help from Victim Support.’ One of the men handed her a card.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘And if you need time off work, we can explain . . .’

  ‘I don’t.’

/>   She wouldn’t let Adam turn her into another of his victims, she thought, as she got ready for her hospital job, just as she hadn’t let Matthew turn her into some clothes-obsessed bimbo. She was a strong woman, was worth more than that. She would return to her counselling work as a slightly more cautious and wiser individual, would bear in mind that people weren’t always what they seemed.

  She hadn’t really been foolish, Beth told herself. After all, numerous mental health medics, patients and even streetwise clubbers had fallen for Adam’s mask of sanity. He had looked and sounded caring and competent and hadn’t given any of them a reason to suspect that it was all an act. It had been a shocking period in her life – and in the town’s history – but it was, Beth reassured herself, thankfully over. Everything could go back to normal now.

  FORTY-NINE

  It had been a difficult few weeks, so she hadn’t been surprised to find her appetite reduced, to feel sleepier than usual. But now, for the first time, she felt strangely tremulous and had to sit down. Had the stress of the undercover work and Adam’s death caused her blood pressure to shoot up? Or was she more seriously ill?

  The sensation passed and Olivia went to the police canteen and bought a banana to keep her going till lunchtime, washing it down with an energy drink and a cup of black coffee. A couple of hours later, as she caught up with her paperwork – she’d returned to her desk job at the station – the odd, disorientated feeling swept over her again.

  Later that week, still feeling spaced, she went along to the doctor’s surgery. The woman checked her blood pressure, which was slightly on the high side, and also got the nurse to take a phial of her blood so that they could run a series of checks.

  ‘And how are your periods?’ she asked.

  ‘As variable as ever!’ Olivia admitted.

  ‘Could you be pregnant?’

  She was about to say no, that this was impossible, when she felt the first stirrings of doubt. She and Marc hadn’t used contraception for years in their quest to have a baby, but they’d both accepted long ago that a pregnancy wasn’t going to happen. Their relationship had been so poor that they hadn’t had sex for many months. But it was less than three months since she’d been with Adam and she hadn’t had a period since.