by Emmy Ellis
It must have taken courage for her to open up to him like this, reveal the chink in her armour. She’d never struck him as the confiding type, so he supposed he ought to feel pleased she’d chosen him. He wasn’t. Didn’t give a fuck how she felt. Her attitude had always rubbed him up the wrong way, so the shutters had come down where she was concerned. He’d keep her vulnerability to himself, though, as much as he was tempted to be an arsehole and tell someone she wasn’t such a hard cow after all. It wouldn’t do for anyone else to know she actually had a heart, was human, because, like she’d said, it meant they might not take her seriously. And, if she was thinking of becoming a detective, she’d need to retain her icy veneer.
“So, have you got anything dog-walkerish to wear?” he asked.
“Not here, no.”
He leant forward, pulling his wallet out of his back trouser pocket. Selecting two tenners, he handed them over. “Go out and buy something. Cheap joggers and a sweatshirt or something—there’s nothing like that in the spare clothes cupboard. Keep the receipts.” He took out another twenty. “Best get some training shoes as well.”
“What, training shoes for twenty quid?” she said, putting the money in her shirt pocket.
“We’re not talking Nikes, Villier.” He held back a smile. “Like I said, something cheap.”
“What if he’s a brand-name snob?” She raised her eyebrows.
“He isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Oliver sensed it with one of his info dump episodes. Casual dresser.”
“Oh. Right. So that’s that then. Oliver has spoken.” She stood and walked over to the door.
He slid his wallet into his pocket, thinking that he’d let her snarky comment about Oliver slide, but if she did it again, he’d fucking give her what for.
He sat in silence after she’d left, drank his coffee, emptying his mind and just enjoying the taste, the silence. Before long he’d be running around like a blue-arsed fly, no time to stop. He lifted the phone and dialled Oliver’s mobile.
“You coming to the press conference in a bit?” Langham asked.
“Yeah. I just got back from visiting Cheryl. Her parents are here. They looked knackered. Drove down through the night.”
“How is she?”
“Awake. Tearful.”
Langham nodded. “I think I’ll send Villier to see her this afternoon. Might help her for tonight.”
“What’s going on tonight?”
“Won’t say much until I see you, but she’s going out with a dog.”
“Christ.”
“It’s got to be done. Can’t let this go on the way it has been. If he gets another one…”
“But what if she doesn’t stand out to him? What if he picks someone else?”
“Then we’ll still be there, watching.”
“But for how long? He might take a break like he’s done in the past.”
“I don’t think he will after he sees what’ll be in the second edition of today’s paper.”
“Ah.”
“Listen, I’m going to have to go,” Langham said.
“I want to be there tonight.”
“Oliver, I don’t think—”
“I’ll keep out of it, stay out of the way. I want to see him get caught.”
“I understand. Right then. I’m off. Lots on. Careful with that kettle at work now. All those teas…”
“Fuck off.”
Langham ended the call, chuckling. The smile was wiped off his face, though, when he thought about all those women before Cheryl, what they’d been through. He had no idea what that was until Cheryl told them exactly what had happened to her.
He thought of The Stick and how he didn’t recall anyone updating him on a visit there. He frowned and stood, suddenly pissed off with himself for not asking at the meeting, annoyed at Fairbrother for not mentioning it in his summing up. Or had Langham just not heard that bit? He left his office, heading for the main room with thunder in his thoughts—just in case someone needed a bollocking.
Chapter Fourteen
David needed to force himself out of bed before depression got a hold on him. If he wasn’t careful, he’d slip back to how he used to be—a mess of uncertainty, the past swirling around in his head, none of it going down the drain because he couldn’t seem to pull the plug. But he’d managed it, hadn’t he? Focusing on the women meant he’d had other things to think about, and his past had faded away, only remaining on the peripheral of his mind. Cheryl had done something to him, though. He thought it might have been her saying he didn’t get on her nerves or whatever. She hadn’t said what the bogeywoman had always said. Or was it him leaving her at her final resting place that had been wrong? He’d made a mistake somewhere but couldn’t think what it was. That bad dream about his mother had muddled him up.
He couldn’t think now. Was better off just getting up, having a shower. The water would help clear the fog, and maybe he’d find where he’d fucked up—if he even had. See, that was what those dreams did to him—he second-guessed himself.
Under the water, each stream needle-like when it hit his skin, he thought over Cheryl’s transportation and delivery. Knew exactly what the problem was then. He hadn’t waited long enough, hadn’t checked that she’d actually drowned. But that rustle behind him, maybe of an animal, had… No, it hadn’t frightened him, it hadn’t.
“It did. Stop lying to yourself.”
“What should I do?” David turned the water off and reached for a towel. He stood on the bathmat, shivering despite the terry cloth swaddling him, and stared at his reflection in the mirror above the sink, seeing remnants of his dream in his mind and blatant fear in his eyes. Where had his self-confidence gone? It was Conrad’s fault. He’d started it—the insecurity, the questions. And his last comment, the one about that copper finding The Weirdo. Shit. That wouldn’t be very nice.
“It’s coming on for four o’clock. Second edition of the paper should be out by now. You ought to get dressed, go out for a walk, pick up a copy.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
He dressed hurriedly then glanced around his flat—he should clean but wanted to read the paper more. Would she even have been found yet, so far out as she was? He didn’t think so, didn’t reckon she’d be noticed for weeks.
Out on his street, he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and walked to the corner, glancing right and left, crossing the road and heading towards the little newsagents down the way a bit. The bloke behind the counter got on his nerves—nosy bastard, he was—and always asked what David had been up to, as though he knew. He stared at him oddly, too, his head tilted and a look in his eye that seemed to snake right under David’s skin.
“Fucking prick,” he said and entered the shop.
He walked straight to the paper stand, pleased a stack of second editions sat on the floor beside it but annoyed they still had the crisscross of tape over them where no one had bought a copy. If she’d been found and her story was on the front page and no one had seen it, what was the point in doing what he’d done? He took his keys out of his pocket, selected his penknife on the ring, and cut the tape. It sprang back, and he stared at the front page. He’d made the lower half again—only the lower fucking half—and he resisted the urge to kick that sodding paper pile and punch the shop owner in the face.
Instead, he calmly lifted a copy then strolled over to the counter.
“Nasty business, that,” the shop owner said, nodding sagely. “You’d think they’d have caught the bastard who’s doing it by now, wouldn’t you. I mean, he’s done it often enough for them to have found some sort of evidence, surely.”
David drew some change from his pocket and handed over a quid. Waited for the man to ring it up and give him his change.
Come on, tosser, hurry up.
“Got to be a right strange sort to do something like that, haven’t you,” Tosser said.
David shrugged. Don’t hurt me. I
didn’t mean to shrug.
“Who in their right mind would go about killing women, though, eh?” Tosser jabbed one porky finger at a button on his till. He paused. “Got to be a nutter.” He shook his head. “Got to be.”
David didn’t want to fully take in what he’d said—nutter, nutter, nutter—so blinked a few times and concentrated on the packets of mints on the shelf behind Tosser. He inhaled deeply, a big fuck-off suck of air, then blew it out, his breath raising one corner of the front page of his newspaper. Tosser finally finished ringing the sale up and gave David his change. David stared down at it, the money glinting from the strip lights above, then he thrust it in his pocket and picked up his paper. Left the shop while Tosser prattled on, knowing he’d be called all the names under the cloud-covered sun once the door closed after him.
He raced back to his flat. He never read the paper while he walked, preferring to browse it in the comfort of his own home, scanning the articles at rapid-fire speed the first time then slowing on the subsequent go through, savouring everything, reading between the lines—around the lines, behind the fucking lines—to see if there was some hidden message there. There never was. Just straight reporting. Boring reporting.
Home. He didn’t bother taking off his coat. He sat on his bed and positioned Sally next to him so she could see, too. He smoothed the paper on his knees and took in the size of the article. Full bottom half. The headline was larger than before, all in black caps.
ANOTHER VICTIM, ANOTHER ISLAND IN THE STREAM
They’d found her? Already? Jesus Christ!
He read fast, the words seeming to tumble over one another on the page, dancing, running away from where they were supposed to be and stopping somewhere else. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again to read at a slower pace.
Another body was found in the early hours of this morning by a farmer looking for one of his stray cows. Cheryl Witherspoon had been missing for two days, and it is estimated she was left at the stream—farther up from the other victims—between one and two a.m.
How did they know that? How did they always get it right?
As with the other victims, Miss Witherspoon had not been subjected to sexual abuse. However, she was drugged, but, unlike the others, she wasn’t killed before she was placed in the water.
Detective Langham, lead officer on this case, said, “I don’t feel the man responsible will have enough courage to approach another woman in the near future. From what we’ve seen, he needs time to recover between abductions, almost as though he’s weakened from dealing with what he’s done. A weak man, very weak.”
Why had Langham repeated himself? David wasn’t weak. No fucking way was he.
He clenched his teeth and read on.
“I suggest remaining vigilant, especially if you’re a female dog walker, but I wouldn’t change your day-to-day life. The man we’re looking for, despite coming across as frightening due to abducting women then killing them, is actually a weak-willed individual who possibly suffers from an inferiority complex.”
There it was again. Weak.
Bastard.
“Profilers have suggested he’s been made to feel useless in the past, therefore, him taking women is a form of control, something he can use to make himself feel better. What we’ll also probably discover when he’s caught—and he will be—is the fact that he lacks guts. He possibly thinks he’s brave, but I believe he’s far from it. If he was brave, he’d take another woman tonight, wouldn’t he, to prove me wrong.”
David’s face burned. Reading about himself like that was more than a little disturbing. How did they know so much just from the bodies and where he’d put them, when he’d taken them? How did his personality come into it? He rubbed his temple, unable to understand where they’d got their information from—it was so accurate, too. He did need time between selecting women. He had been weak-willed in the past, did have an inferiority complex, but what they didn’t know, the cocky bastards, was he was none of those things now. The women had seen to that.
“What do you think, Sally?” he whispered. “Shall I show them I’m brave? That I have the courage to bring another friend home tonight?”
He glanced at her, and his movement jostled the mattress, sending Sally sprawling backwards, her stiff legs sticking up in the air. Her dress lifted, exposing her naked, private garden, and he hurriedly covered her up, pleased she didn’t have that messy redness like the women did. Her eyelid clicked as it opened and closed. He sat her on his lap, her feet beneath the newspaper, and let her read the article for herself.
“You agree, don’t you, Sally?”
He thought she nodded, thought she gave him the thumbs-up, and that was good enough for him. A glance at his alarm clock on the bedside cabinet told him he had just enough time to clean before going out and making friends with another woman and her dog.
He polished and bleached, hoovered then mopped, and thought about how all those women looked like Mother after he’d bleached them. They changed right before his eyes from the minute he took them to the second he laid them in the stream water, and that was what Mother had done, hadn’t she? After Dad hadn’t woken up on the night of the Sally in the Fire Incident, Mother had become worse. After Dad had been taken away, Mother muttering about the cost of a funeral and how she’d been left with her useless prick of a son, she’d got worse.
Still, David had put her in the stream in the end. Sixteen years old, he’d been, but he’d managed it well enough. She’d tried to speak to him when he’d bleached her—his way of trying to remove the badness in her, on her, to make her clean so she’d be the nice woman she’d once been—but the medicine had slurred her words. He hadn’t intended to kill her. Not until she’d managed to speak coherently after he’d spent some time sanitising every part of her.
“You fucking piece of shit, David.” Her words had been slow, dragged out. “I hate you. Have always hated you. You…you should have been a girl. A clever girl. You’re a useless bastard with no spine. And now look at you, in that bra and those…knickers. And that doll. What the fuck…do you…think you—”
He hadn’t allowed her to finish. Had pressed his hand to the top of her head and kept her submerged. She’d flailed. She’d splashed him until he’d been soaked, but she’d given in eventually and had gone still.
“That’s enough thinking,” he muttered now. He walked around the flat to check it was sufficiently pristine for when his new guest arrived. “Time I add a bit to my diary, have something to eat, then go off out.”
He’d prove that Langham pig wrong.
Chapter Fifteen
Langham stood behind a wide oak in the forest, Oliver by his side. Fairbrother was behind, a few feet away with Hastings for company. Langham had questioned that—the kid might fuck things up due to his inexperience—but Fairbrother had countered that the young officer had to learn some time and that Fairbrother would take responsibility if something went wrong. Langham had continued arguing, saying they couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong, not with one of their own out there, vulnerable and ready to be picked up by some nutter, but Fairbrother had gone to the chief who had overridden Langham.
Villier had walked the perimeter of the field twice now, each rotation taking her twenty minutes. She didn’t rush, just like Langham had told her, and had her head bent most of the time, hands in her pockets, feet looking massive in the size eight trainers she’d bought—the only ones she could find in her rush after visiting Cheryl in hospital, she’d said. Langham had sighed, telling her how wearing footwear three sizes too big might be a hindrance tonight if she had to run, and she’d shrugged, saying she had the dog as backup, and running wasn’t something she planned on doing. Something she shouldn’t have to do, seeing as other officers would be on scene. Despite her brave words, she’d blinked, looking at him with a mixture of apprehension and uncertainty in her eyes.
She whistled the dog. It came running, its long stride and body movements a sight o
f beauty. The German Shepherd—black and tan—reached her side, and she took one hand out of her pocket to give him a treat. Great bastard of a dog, it was, his back level with the middle of her thigh. Langham wondered if they’d done the right thing choosing that breed. A smaller dog might have fared better—less menacing, less of a warning to the killer that he might want to keep away—but they needed the Shepherd’s strength in taking the man down.
Langham peered into the forest, just barely making out the buildings of the estate showing through the trees in the distance. Someone was parked down there, ready to tell them if anyone was on their way to the field from that direction. Langham didn’t think he’d choose that route, though. He reckoned he’d park up and walk around, entering the field from the Morrisons side. A man emerging from a forest and approaching you was more threatening than one just appearing as though he was using the field to cut across on his way through the woods to the estate.
At least, that was Langham’s take on it.
He pulled his gaze from Villier, making sure Fairbrother was watching her, then turned to Oliver. He was staring at the field as though terrified he’d miss something, miss seeing the killer being caught.
Langham gave the field his attention once more, Villier out of sight. She must have reached the far bottom corner again. The trees were too thick for him to see that far, the opening from the forest onto the field only a few metres wide, but Fairbrother and Hastings would be able to spot her. Langham glanced across and, with no expression of interest on either of the men’s faces, he surmised Villier was just walking. Just throwing the ball for the dog.
