Secrets of a Serial Killer: An absolutely gripping serial killer thriller that will keep you up all night!

by Rosie Walker

  ‘We’ve got to look like we’re leaving,’ Tony says. ‘There’s something off about that guy, and he can’t know we’re still here. A normal human would be sympathetic when two parents arrive, searching for their missing daughter. They’d ask if we’re okay, make a cup of tea, ask her name. I was in the police for decades, Helen, I know what typical reactions look like, what innocent looks like, and guilty. That man is not normal. His reactions were cold, defensive.’

  Helen nods. ‘So we’re leaving? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Suspects like him … we need to give him space to act. He’ll incriminate himself if he thinks we’re not looking. But as long as he thinks we’re sniffing around, he’ll behave like the model citizen.’

  As Tony slows to mount a speed bump, Helen glances behind them at the hospital peeping through the trees. A dark shape streaks across the driveway.

  She shrieks. ‘Stop the car!’

  Tony slams on the brakes and Alfie catapults forward, his claws catching on Helen’s arm and rending a deep, red welt along her skin. ‘Shit!’ She pushes him into the back seat.

  ‘What?’ shouts Tony, looking around frantically, trying to see the danger that caused Helen to shout.

  ‘Sorry sorry sorry, I know you said we had to leave and everything. But I saw something,’ she says.

  ‘Saw what? What is it?’

  Helen gets out of the car and Alfie scrambles across the passenger seat after her. She slams the car door and starts running back up to the building, Alfie close behind her holding his tail high like a flag.

  ‘What, Helen? We can’t just leave the car here. And you can’t just shout like that and not tell me what’s going on. I thought I’d hit something. Now tell me what you saw. Jesus.’

  She jogs ahead, back up the hill. She darts into the trees, away from the path so they can’t be seen returning. Tony stumbles after her, rustling the undergrowth like a bear running through a forest. Her heart is pumping and her breath coming in short gasps. ‘The guy – Paul. I saw him running, across the top of the drive.’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  Helen picks up her pace and shouts over her shoulder. ‘He was really running. Like he was chasing something.’

  Tony starts a slow jog, just as a huge group of rooks burst out of the forest to their left, up by the main building. The rooks caw and call to almost deafening levels, a deep shriek through the trees.

  ‘Come on,’ she shouts, ‘let’s go this way,’ and sprints up the hill towards the hospital.

  ***

  The hill up to the hospital is steeper than it seemed while they were in the car, and the woods much more overgrown. The drive looked almost flat when they were driving up and down it.

  Helen’s not used to running, and the burning in her lungs reminds her of an abandoned new year’s resolution to join a gym and stick with it. Even so, she’s doing better than Tony, who keeps stopping, pretending he needs to cough even though Helen’s pretty sure that’s a ruse.

  ‘We should have just turned the car around,’ gasps Tony.

  She lets her breath dictate the rhythm of her feet as they pound through the bracken and twigs, chanting a mantra in her head with every in breath and out breath: Find Zoe. Find Zoe.

  She reaches the top of the hill, where the trees thin out into open space in front of the Hospital’s main entrance. She stands with her hands on her hips, breathing heavily through her nose. Alfie skips around her, excited for the sudden burst of activity and scanning the ground for a stick or a ball she might throw. He has no idea.

  She shakes her head at him. ‘Not now.’

  The sky is tinted orange towards the horizon as the sun begins to emerge over the landscape, but in the opposite direction over the hospital, the sky is still almost night.

  Tony’s footsteps and gasps get louder as he climbs the last few metres of the hill to join her, and in the distance the occasional caw of crows from inside the trees. Everything else is silent.

  ‘Well, which direction did he go?’ Tony asks, his hands on his knees as he bends over to gather his energy.

  She points into the trees that surround the hospital building, but now she’s not sure. The grounds are massive: nearly forty acres. She knows that from the plans. And this security guard knows every inch of them, better than anyone.

  ‘Let’s go back to the security office …’ Helen strides towards the old gatehouse. ‘We’ll be able to see the CCTV,’ she calls back over her shoulder.

  The door to the security office stands open, swinging in the slight breeze. The lights are off, but the room is lit by the strange grey light of the three monitors, which flick through different views at regular intervals.

  Helen steps into the room, which smells of stale men: sweat, feet and the hamstery odour of unwashed laundry. Now that she’s here without that creepy security guard, she looks around in more detail, noticing the mess and the dirt ingrained on every surface, clearly not cleaned for years. It’s grim in here.

  There’s a metal sink in the corner, unwashed bowls and mugs floating in grey water. Above the sink, an electric water heater drips steadily onto the draining board. On the wall behind the door there’s a ‘Nuts’ calendar from a couple of years ago, open to October. Someone has drawn a moustache on the topless model in the picture. ‘Nice,’ she mumbles.

  Alfie whines from the doorway and steps from foot to foot. He won’t come in the office, standing with his front paws just inside the door and the rest of his body outside. He sniffs the air, his tail low.

  ‘Find anything?’ asks Tony, nudging Alfie out of the way to get inside. He crosses the room to the screens, watching the feeds cycle through their displays.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s crap everywhere,’ says Helen, using two fingers to pick up an old sock from the armchair. She wrinkles her nose and drops it to the floor.

  Tony lowers himself into the same chair he sat in earlier, when they were in here with that security guard. But this time he swivels around to face the screens. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ he says, after a minute or two of watching the camera feeds cycle through their various views around the asylum. ‘The guy’s either inside the building or in the woods.’

  Helen pokes around the office, opening the cupboards to find empty food packets and cereal boxes and stacks of smutty magazines. She picks up a black backpack and opens the zip to glance inside: an old lunch box containing an orange peel and sandwich crust, a wallet, a pair of leather gloves and a piece of rope. She holds up the piece of rope and raises her eyebrows at Tony. It’s about a metre of blue rope, the type that leaves splinters embedded in your skin.

  Tony shrugs. ‘Could be anything,’ he says, and turns back to the CCTV feeds. Frowning, he reaches down the side of the armchair and pulls a crumpled tie from the crevice, pinched between finger and thumb. It’s maroon with green stripes, a uniform tie from the local secondary school.

  Gooseflesh prickles Helen’s cheeks and arms. ‘That is too creepy. I can’t even think about why that’s here.’ She opens the wallet, but this is even weirder: it’s almost empty, with no drivers’ licence, about £70 in cash, and an unsigned debit card belonging to ‘Bertha Caul’.

  Her phone buzzes against her leg.

  ‘Some credit card fraud going on here, I think. I can’t imagine anyone who works in this room being called Bertha.’ Helen drops the bag behind the armchair and reaches into her pocket for her phone. There’s very little signal, but the little envelope blinks at the top of the screen: a text. She clicks.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Her heart’s thumping hard. ‘This is crazy.’

  Tony looks up. ‘Everything OK?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It’s Janet, the journalist next door. Her son’s missing, and his cousin too. She went to wake them for school and their beds are stuffed with pillows.’ Tears prick at her eyes; she knows exactly the panic that Janet must feel, her own feelings of fear magnified even more knowing that someone else is going through the same thing.


  Tony glances to the CCTV screens, and then back to Helen. ‘Sounds like two kids messing around to me. The classic pillow trick.’

  Helen tries to text back, but the message won’t send. Her phone signal has dropped to zero. ‘Poor Janet. This is such a nightmare.’

  ‘Unlikely to be connected, they’re not the demographic,’ Tony mumbles a reply, his gaze fixed on the feeds. ‘I think I see something,’ he says.

  Helen crouches in front of the monitors, her face so close that the image is almost unintelligible.

  ‘There’s some movement,’ says Tony, squinting. ‘I didn’t bring my glasses.’

  She leans back. There’s a shape streaking across the driveway, towards the woods.

  ‘What is that?’ she asks.

  The faint noise of a dog bark floats through the open door. Helen turns quickly; Alfie is no longer in the doorway. She jumps to her feet and runs to the door.

  ‘It’s Alfie,’ she shouts, bringing both hands to her mouth to whistle as loud as she can. But she can tell from how fast she saw him running on the CCTV that he’s not coming back. No way. He’s on a mission.

  ‘He’s gone into the trees,’ says Tony, his gaze still on the televisions.

  ‘Come on. We’ve got to get him back. There must be something in the woods.’

  Thomas

  His hand is bleeding again. It pulsates with pain every time his heart beats, and blood oozes from the now sodden cloth Maggie tied around it.

  Zoe’s steps are slow; her weight pulls heavy on Thomas’s shoulder. There’s a thin trail of blood from her left nostril, a nosebleed from landing face first after tripping on a tree root.

  Maggie sounds out of breath. They’re pushing through trees in a thicker part of the wood, and although the sun has almost risen it’s too dark to see far through the forest.

  ‘How much further to the caravan?’ he pants, asking Maggie.

  Maggie just shakes her head, too exhausted to speak.

  ‘Maggie?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t know. A couple of minutes maybe,’ she manages to whisper.

  Zoe groans, her head lolling about like a puppet’s on a string.

  ‘I want to stop for a rest,’ says Maggie.

  Thomas’s throat clenches. ‘He’s probably right behind us.’

  But Maggie’s already started slowing down, and starts to lift Zoe’s arm from around her shoulders.

  ‘No, Maggie, please don’t let go. She’ll fall again and I can’t carry her on my own.’ Tears prickle his eyes. Their footsteps have slowed and they’re almost stopped.

  ‘He’s not even chasing us,’ she says. ‘He’s probably given up by now.’ She starts lowering Zoe to the ground.

  Thomas braces his legs and struggles to keep Zoe upright on her feet. ‘No, Maggie, don’t—’

  A bird caws from the trees above their heads, and a gust of wind roars through the treetops, bare branches screeching as they grind together. Tears threaten to spill from Thomas’s eyes.

  As the wind dies down, he hears a rustling back from where they came, the sound of someone pushing through the undergrowth. He turns his head in the direction of the noise, and his glasses slide from his sweaty face, into the grass and leaves of the forest floor.

  Maggie bends to try to pick them up while still propping up Zoe, but Thomas stops her with a hand on her shoulder. The rustling gets louder.

  ‘Leave my glasses. Come on Maggie, let’s go,’ he hisses, and finding a reserve of strength he didn’t know he had, he almost lifts Zoe’s full weight on his shoulder and starts to half-run through the wood, with Maggie right alongside taking her share of the weight.

  Zoe also seems to have dredged up an extra store of strength, because although she doesn’t open her eyes, she moves her feet and takes a bit of weight back onto her legs, helping to propel them forward. The rustling behind them fades beneath the sound of their own frantic footsteps, and soon they emerge into the clearing and there’s the caravan, its door standing open, waiting to take them inside and protect them.

  That caravan looked so sinister when they first visited, a lopsided lair containing who-knows-what. But compared with the danger of a psycho killer man chasing them through the woods, Thomas’s relief is huge at seeing the haven of the caravan. A tear rolls down his cheek. He tries to gather one more push of energy now that he can see their goal.

  They run as fast as they can into the caravan, and Maggie rushes towards the sofa to sit Zoe in it. They lay Zoe carefully on the sofa.

  ‘Here, Mag. We need to block the door.’

  There’s a lock on the inside of the caravan, but it’s not strong enough to keep the man out for long. They heave the rusted oven in front of the door, scraping long grooves into the lino. Thomas’s hand throbs with every tug, but he grits his teeth and pulls. They’re just in time: as soon as they slump their weight against the oven, a huge thump comes from outside as the man throws himself against the door with all his weight.

  Maggie shrieks. Zoe whimpers, curling herself into a ball.

  Thomas resists the urge to cover his ears and close his eyes to make everything go away. He knows that won’t work. He presses his whole weight against the oven, holding the door closed to keep the man out. Maggie follows his lead and leans alongside him, her eyes screwed up in fear.

  He makes his hand into a fist, trying to stop it from bleeding. The cloth is soaked through, his whole hand is hot. But he will push against this door for as long as it takes; they must protect themselves from the monster outside. He has to protect Maggie and Zoe and they’ll wait here until help comes.

  ‘But no one knows we’re here,’ he whispers to himself and fists away more tears from his face.

  No one knows the caravan exists.

  No one is coming to rescue them.

  Alexander

  He’s found them, tracked them through the forest like a true predator. At one point he thought he’d lost them but a small pair of glasses and a streak of fresh blood on the grass confirmed he was headed in the right direction.

  They’re even more stupid than he thought, and he didn’t have high hopes for their intellect before. All this open space, places to hide, trees behind which to cower, and they’ve trapped themselves in the very place where he started all this: in his caravan. His holding pen. A patch of woods he knows like the back of his hand, and a flimsy, plastic box he can break into at any moment, smashing through the thin door like it is made of paper.

  It’s like he planned it this way.

  At least they locked the door. Shows some drive for survival, even if they’re the lowest of the food chain, they’re not quite lemmings doing a mythical cliff-jump. Yet.

  He grabs the handle and shoulder-charges the door. It splinters and bows but doesn’t open. Inside the caravan there’s squeaking and a sob, and then the noises muffle again.

  ‘There’s no need to be quiet,’ he says. ‘I know you’re in there.’

  ‘Leave us alone!’ a girl’s voice says.

  He laughs, impressed with her. ‘Nice try. Not very persuasive though, kid.’ He shoves his shoulder against the door, and once again it buckles but doesn’t open. They must have barricaded themselves in; he could have broken the weak lock by now with just his shoulder.

  Truly, it’s not necessary to get in and finish them, not really. It’s two kids and a girl who’s half-dead who thinks he’s called Paul Herbert. Everything is in place. He could just leave, abandon this life and move on without a trace, as his mother taught him.

  But then he remembers his mother’s crumpled body lying on the floor of that room, in the dark. She raised him, guided him, taught him to fight, to love, to hate, to capture, torture and kill. Everything he is, he owes to her. But she never allowed him to fulfil his potential.

  So yes, he could leave right now. He could abandon this building, this life and his mother’s body. He’s lucky: there’s no official record of him anywhere, the product of a relationship between two patients in a lunat
ic asylum. The hospital administrators were very happy to pretend that didn’t happen.

  He could run away, start somewhere new all alone. Free to take control of his own future, capture and kill whoever he likes instead of to someone else’s order.

  Or he could burst through the door, and tear apart these children with his bare hands, finally take what is rightfully his: his turn to continue the legacy of destruction.

  And right now, this is almost sport, like shooting pheasants or hunting foxes. There’s a reason why the hunted creatures are called ‘game’. He’s having fun. When he stops having fun, he’ll stop hunting.

  He crawls under the caravan and thumps his fists up into the base, listening with glee as they skitter around inside the caravan trying to get away from his advances. The ground under here is bare and damp, with woodlice crawling through the soil. It hasn’t seen sun in years. He thumps again, but this is purely a scare tactic; he can’t get enough force behind his arm from this angle.

  He shuffles out and gets to his feet, throwing his whole weight against the door once more. It cracks and he feels a buckling that suggests he’s nearly in. Another: and this time the plastic cracks beneath his force.

  There’s a squeal of horror from within the caravan, and Alexander grins to himself. He creates the fear.

  Zoe

  This is it. She gets to seventeen years old and no further.

  For a while, earlier, she really thought she might get away from this terrible, dark place where so many people once lived troubled lives. For some moments she had hope and could see a future ahead of her. She thought they were on their way home.

  Even when they were running through the forest and she could hear his footsteps behind them, there was a chance. But now, to her utter despair, they’re back in the caravan, the place where all of this started, the place where she woke up yesterday morning with her hands bound behind her back and the door locked. Even the smell of the place is the same, making her feel sick with dread and fear.