by LJ Ross
One of the men jerked forward in his chair, sloshed wine in his glass.
“What? What did she say? Does she name anyone?”
“Calm yourself,” the third man said in mellow tones, casting a subtle glance around the room.
“I don’t know what it says, Ryan’s keeping it under lock and key while he goes through it but if anything comes to light, rest assured we will take the necessary action.”
“It was opportunistic, offering Megan without consulting with us first,” the quiet man said.
“It is not for you to question your High Priest,” the other snapped defensively, while the first stuffed more cheese in his mouth. “The Master demanded she be offered up to him.”
Considering the matter closed, he turned to the fourth man, sitting silently in his chair, unable to eat.
“Your actions have endangered all of us,” he said in whiplash tones which caused the other man to shiver. “Offering Lucy was selfish and unnecessary. Added to which, you had no right to take it upon yourself to implicate the coastguard.”
“I’m sorry, I – I wasn’t thinking –“
“It is not for you to take such decisions,” the High Priest said.
All three men watched the fourth in condemnation.
“It is fortunate for you that we were able to turn your actions to our advantage,” the High Priest continued after a significant pause.
The fourth man darted looks around the table.
“What – what do you mean?”
“The circle is indebted to you, despite your disobedience,” the first man sipped more wine. “There is a way for you to redeem yourself.”
The fourth man swallowed tears of relief. He knew what usually happened to the disobedient.
“H –How?”
The High Priest sat back in his chair, satisfied. Their thoughts turned to the future.
CHAPTER 22
Psychopaths are goal-oriented. Basic criminology training gave you the facts on paper, written in fat textbooks in clear, black-and-white print. Experience taught you that it was true.
Ryan settled himself to read. He wasn’t dealing with a disordered, unstructured individual who reacted without thought or planning. These crimes were premeditated, with some ritual added in for flavour. Underneath it all, you had someone entirely lacking in moral compass, capable of destroying life without conscience. It was interesting, Ryan thought, that the man had tried to create a moral code for himself where one did not exist, by surrounding himself in ceremony.
He didn’t know which was worse; hunting a killer who acted without moral boundaries, almost at his whim, or hunting one who acted under false pretences.
Digesting that, Ryan reached for a blue folder which contained a fat sheaf of papers listing the criminal background checks for many of the islanders, men, women and juveniles alike. For the most part, it made for uninteresting reading.
Alex Walker had a few speeding fines and had nearly lost his licence because of it a few years back. Ryan chalked that up to being a classic boy racer. His father, Walker Senior, had a clean sheet, as did his mother Yvonne.
It amused him to read that Liz Morgan had been prosecuted for a public order offence thirty years ago, for demonstrating against animal cruelty. He moved her into the ‘harmless activist’ category.
It came as a twin shock to find that Megan Taylor had a squeaky clean sheet, whereas her scholastic sister had received a formal caution for public indecency.
Public indecency?
His mind boggled and he wondered if there had been some sort of mix-up in the records office. He checked the name at the top and, sure enough, it read ‘Anna Marie Taylor’.
The description detailed finding her intoxicated and partially nude, frolicking on the beach which, the statement read, was not a designated nudist beach. His lips quirked as he thought of Anna, maybe wearing those secretary glasses he’d noticed sitting on top of her laptop upstairs. He almost gave in to the desire to shove the paperwork to one side and head upstairs to bed and to her.
He picked up the next piece of paper and took a long swig of wine.
* * *
Upstairs, Anna spent a few hours working on her laptop until she could stand the solitude no more. Following the soft strains of bluesy music, she padded downstairs and found Ryan sitting against the backdrop of a crackling fire, surrounded by paperwork. He had stripped down to jeans and a thin black sweater the same colour as his hair. His feet were bare and for the life of her she didn’t know why she found that so attractive.
“Why didn’t you come and find me?” she asked, stepping into the room.
He looked up, face shadowed but his hair gleaming blue-black against the firelight.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the time,” he said, rising to meet her and arching his back to ease out the kinks.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” she waved a hand at the papers and tried not to look at the photographs just visible underneath.
“No, not just now,” he said quietly, drawing her towards him.
He started to sway her in time to the music. With a gentle hand in the small of her back, he urged her closer against him until their bodies locked together; her head nestled under his chin. She could hear the strong thud of his heartbeat against the solid wall of his chest cloaked in the soft material and she was struck by the fact that it mirrored the man himself: good manners and well-spoken with a core of pure steel.
“You didn’t tell me that you had a criminal past,” he said softly, smiling over her head when she tensed.
“What do you mean?” she said defensively, trying to pull away.
“Just that I never knew you were so…liberal, until I read about your antics on the beach a few years ago.”
Anna didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry, I forgot all about it,” she began stiffly. “I was going through a bit of a funny phase back then –“
“Anna,” he interjected, “It makes you more human and, if possible, more attractive.”
“It does?” this man was a mystery, she thought.
“Sure, it does. I don’t want an effigy, Anna, a porcelain doll who looks angelic. I’d much rather know the real woman.” He lowered his lips to her ear and added, “Perhaps, one day, we can re-live the moment together.”
“Oh, well then…” she trailed off, thinking that he had a knack for jumbling her brain so that she couldn’t think clearly. She would still rather he hadn’t known that she had once danced naked on the beach. “I didn’t realise you’d been snooping into my past.”
He detected a slight huffiness to her tone and was even more amused.
“It’s my job, Anna.”
She said nothing for a while, but didn’t pull away.
“Who reported you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” her brow furrowed.
“There’s no police on the island. Somebody would need to make a report to the station at Budle or somewhere close. Who ratted you out?”
Amazingly, she had never thought of it, never wondered to ask.
“I have no idea,” she said honestly. “If I had to guess – and it hurts me to say it – I would have to say it’s exactly the kind of thing Megan would have done. Back then, especially, she would have done anything to cause trouble for me. If she had her sights on Alex, then she had to know that getting in trouble with the police would upset his family. There’s nothing more important to Alex than his family,” she added.
“What about your place at university?”
“Mark rang the Dean,” she remembered. “He explained that the whole thing had been blown up, gave me a glowing reference.”
“That was good of him,” Ryan said.
“He’s been like a father to me,” she said with affection.
Ryan smiled, but thought that, for an intelligent woman, she had no idea of the effect she had on the opposite sex. Perhaps that was the source of her charm. Either way, he would be adding Mark Bowe
rs to his mental list of people to look at. It wouldn’t be the first time that an older man had developed feelings for a much younger woman.
“What are you thinking?” he murmured against her hair.
“That there’s more to you than meets the eye,” came her muffled answer.
“It doesn’t seem to bother you,” he commented after ordering his body not to tense.
“Why should it? I’m not afraid of you, Ryan. We all have secrets.” But she wondered if she should be worried by the fact that, already, she felt so safe in his arms. She hardly knew him.
“I don’t have any secrets,” he said simply.
“You keep most of yourself hidden,” she argued.
Perhaps that was true, he acknowledged. In that moment, with the house empty of people but for himself and the woman he held, the past didn’t feel half as terrifying as it had done only a few days earlier.
“There was a woman,” he found himself saying quietly.
“There always is,” she replied lightly, preparing herself to hear about the trail of broken hearts he had left behind. She had known there would have been other women; he was a grown man, it was only natural. It was childish to expect otherwise, but still she felt an uncomfortable stab of jealousy for the other women he might have held in his arms, as he held her now.
Over her head, his lips twisted and he gently tugged her back to him. He knew her so well, after only a collection of hours spent together.
Should that frighten him? He wondered.
“It’s not what you think,” he said after a moment. Her head lifted from his chest and she looked up at where he stood, face still shadowed. When his eyes lowered to face her, she saw sadness hidden there.
“Tell me about it,” she said and led him to the sofa, drew him down into the circle of her arms.
He had never done this, he realised. He had never purged himself of the bleakness which filled him and the guilt which consumed him. He had turned away from family and friends. Although he had tried to say that the job had abandoned him, perhaps on reflection it had been the opposite.
“Six months ago, I was working on a long-running case. You heard me mention it the other day - ‘The Hacker’.”
“Yes, it was covered in the papers over the summer,” she nodded, trying to remember the details.
“Well, the ‘Hacker’ wasn’t a computer geek. He hacked his victims to pieces, bit by bit, over a number of days. He kept them alive by administering a mix of adrenaline and antibiotic. He had a ready supply, being a doctor working on the A & E department down at the RVI.” He referred to the largest hospital in the region.
“I remember,” Anna nodded, thinking back to the horrific stories reported across the local and national papers. “There were five victims.”
“It was my fault there were five.”
“How could it have been your fault?” She covered his hands with hers.
“Oh, I know that, logically-speaking, I couldn’t have stopped the first few. The case had been assigned to a different DCI, down in Newcastle. CID transferred it to me after the third. Still.”
He took a breath, letting the past come back.
“The man was careful and there wasn’t a pattern. He was snatching women from all over. The work spanned three separate CID divisions, took a shed-load of paperwork and bureaucracy.”
“I understand administrative crap better than most, working in a university,” she smiled.
“I bet,” he nodded. “Well, at first the only linking factor was physical type. They were all pretty young brunettes.”
He looked at her with a sad smile. “Yes, I know. Like Lucy, like Megan. Like you,” he said softly.
“It must have been so hard for you to see it happening again,” she said, feeling cold in the warm room.
He saw her shiver and drew her against him. He was pleased when she didn’t pull away or tense in his arms. Maybe he could get through the rest of it.
“Their bodies…” he swallowed. “I’d never seen anything like the destruction, Anna. I didn’t think that somebody would be capable of doing that to another human being, but I was wrong. He wasn’t a person; he was an animal.”
Anna closed her eyes briefly, felt his pain.
“The families were distraught; the press were ravenous for a story. They spread panic like wildfire, binned the department and all the man hours we had spent. I’m telling you, I saw every man and woman in CID work double shifts back-to-back over those months to try to close the case.
“What I didn’t account for was that he was tracking me.” Another pause before he could get out the rest. “Around that time, I had my sister staying with me.”
Anna felt her breath hitch in her chest and tears spring into her eyes because she already knew the next part.
“He killed her and I couldn’t stop him,” Ryan said flatly. “Natalie was five years younger than me. She was beautiful.”
He was quiet for several minutes and Anna didn’t interrupt him. She thought of a young woman with black hair and silvery eyes.
“She had only been with me for a few days. She was planning on spending a couple of weeks with me, because, as it turned out, my mother was worried that I was working too hard and needed company.” His voice threatened to break. “If she had stayed with our parents, it would never have happened.”
“You couldn’t have known that,” Anna said quietly.
“He was picking victims at random,” Ryan said. “He didn’t stalk them but he made an exception for Natalie. I should have considered the possibility.”
Anna opened her mouth to argue with him but he carried on.
“I came home after a long day,” Ryan remembered. “It must have been one or two in the morning. He had left pieces of her for me to find: two of her fingers were propped on the coffee table with instructions to catch him if I could.”
“You did catch him.”
“I was too late.” All the anger and grief spilled out with those four words. “He left his fingerprints all over, so he wanted to be found. I think he wanted to go out with a bang; maybe he expected that I would kill him and put him out of his fucking misery.”
“You didn’t,” she said softly.
“I would have killed him,” he corrected her. “Phillips dragged me off, but only after I’d smashed his face and broken three of his ribs. I had my hands around his neck when Frank came through the door.”
“Self-defence,” Anna said with a touch of desperation.
“That was what the department argued,” he agreed. “But he had put down his weapons. He killed her in front of me and then told me to take my revenge. I saw red, just a haze of red in front of my eyes, Anna. I would have killed him.”
“He murdered your sister,” Anna didn’t try to pretend that she understood how he must have felt. She had lost her own sister in a brutal murder but not in front of her eyes. She couldn’t say what she might have done if it had been.
“Yes. I tried to block the knife,” he remembered, fingering the long scar which ran along his upper arm. “He sprayed me with some sort of chemical, blinded me for long enough to smash a hammer into my knee. I went down, couldn’t get up again. He slashed her throat in the meantime.”
He remembered the hot gush of blood as it had rained down on him.
She had waited for Ryan to open up about this but nothing could have truly prepared her. Anna grasped his hand, linked her fingers with his.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated and her voice was thick with emotion.
His body shuddered, once.
“So many people have said that,” he said, calmer now. “But I’ll never believe it.”
“Where are your family?” she wondered. Why weren’t they here, to help him?
“I don’t want them,” he said flatly, discouraging any further discussion on the matter.
“It’s Christmas,” she said.
“Do you think my mother wants to visit an island where girls like my sister are
being killed off like flies? Do you think she wants to see the son who failed her?” He pushed away from the sofa and walked over to stand in front of the fireplace, rested a hand on the mantle for support.
Such a well of pain, Anna thought, her heart breaking for him. How he could face the investigation each day, she had no idea. The emotional cost must be enormous.
She walked over to him and tentatively wrapped her arms around his waist, rested her cheek against his back.
“Thank you for telling me,” was all she said.
“You needed to know,” he replied, staring into the flames. “I needed you to know.”
There was a long pause while both of them were lost in thought.
“I think you should leave the island, Anna,” he said eventually.
“I’m not leaving.”
He turned back to her and his face was hard.
“You’re in danger. I’m ordering you to leave the island, first thing tomorrow.”
Her eyes flashed.
“I’m not yours to order around. If I tell you I’m staying, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Swiftly, he turned her in his arms and yanked her up against him. His face was fierce.
“You are mine, Anna. I want you safe.”
She understood that, tonight, something had snapped inside him. He needed the comfort that she could give him; that they could give each other. She looked into dark grey eyes which were slightly wild.
He didn’t frighten her.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said quietly, then lifted her arms and let him strip the thin sweater from her body.
Much later, when Anna slept soundly in the curve of his arm, Ryan lay awake staring up at the ceiling. The demons had chased sleep away again but instead of awaking alone, he felt her warm body resting against him. He heard her even breathing and saw her hand resting against his heart.
Amazing, he thought. He hadn’t known that he had anything left inside him to share or to give but she had proven him wrong. His mind wanted to think of murder, of whether somebody else would lose their life that night, but fate was kind to him.
He turned into her and, for the first time in months, slept peacefully until morning.
