by C. J. Skuse
‘Kaisha, if I can turn to you. Tell us what you saw. It was lunchtime, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, we were getting some lunch and there was this girl and an old woman sitting on a table near us. I recognised her from somewhere but I couldn’t think where and I realised I’d seen her on a newspaper that morning in our hotel.’
Majors was practically creaming his chinos. ‘And it was Rhiannon Lewis?’
‘Yeah, it so was! She was with this older woman, and they were chatting like and then Mum turns to me and she says, “Hey look, Kaish, she looks like that girl in all the papers.” So she recognised her as well.’
The microphone switches to Lindsay. ‘Yeah, she had sunglasses on and a baseball cap but I had this, like, sixth sense that she didn’t want people to recognise her. And the longer I looked at her, like the shape of her lips and her nose and that, I remembered her face from the papers. And I got her picture up on me phone and I said to Kaish, “Eh that’s her, that’s the one the police are looking for.”’
Guy brings the mic back to him where it’s most at home. ‘But this was a couple of days ago that you say you saw her, why have you waited until now to tell the police?’
Lindsay’s turn again. ‘We didn’t know what to do, like. Cos I’d read about what she’d done and I thought, Christ, I don’t wanna run into her but when you look at it, she’d only killed a bunch of paedos and dirty old men.’
A man in blue-tinted sunglasses and a white England shirt has been gurning behind the two women throughout the interview. He has a bottle of lager in his hand and starts doing an Irish jig. The camera pans round so he is out of shot.
‘You were happy that she’d got away with it?’ said an appalled Majors.
‘Yeah,’ said Kaisha. ‘We were. We thought, live and let live, like. But we heard what she’d done to that cabbie and the guy she’d had a baby with and we thought we better say something in case she’d killed the baby or something.’
‘Lindsay and Kaisha Debenham, thank you for joining me.’ Guy turned back to camera with a definite jump of eyebrows. ‘What we know for sure is that Lewis got on a cruise ship at Southampton Docks. The vehicle she’d stolen from Craig Wilkins’ parents was found a few streets away and it has been impounded by forensics…’
Cut to footage of Jim and Elaine’s Ford Focus being lifted onto a low loader. When the footage cuts back, the England Shirt gurner is back behind Majors, making a wanking gesture. A mate in a red England shirt and shorts is laughing beside him.
‘…passenger lists are being trawled through in the hope of finding the route out of the UK Lewis took – the hope being that this will lead police to her exact location.’
Cut to Sandy in the studio. ‘The list of killings she mentions in her confession, Guy, they’re horrific, aren’t they? And they seem to escalate.’
‘Yes, Sandy. The full awfulness of what Lewis did is only now coming to light and if everything in the confession is true, they are looking for a highly dangerous predator.’ He consults his crib sheet. ‘We all know the story of the man in the canal, Daniel Wells, whose penis was severed, back at the beginning of last year, several other stabbings, a suffocation, and at least one dismemberment. If the confession is accurate, this is a sick and vicious individual.’ I think Majors had the hots for me.
‘Are police any closer to locating her, Guy?’
Cut to Guy again, stubby finger jammed in ear, smiling knowingly. ‘The police aren’t giving anything away as of this evening but I do know they’re putting extra powers behind this search and are keen to bring her to book as soon as possible. Members of the public are warned not to approach her if they see her and to call the police immediately if they have any information on her whereabouts.’
‘What about Rhiannon’s baby, Guy? Are police saying anything about what might have happened to it yet?’
‘Yes, I spoke to a senior officer today who intimated that the baby was born before Rhiannon left the UK and is in safe hands. That’s all they’re saying at this time.’
The England Shirts holler, ‘WE LOVE YOU, RHIANNON!’ behind the camera.
Guy clears his throat. ‘Back to the studio.’
Majors was all over my case in the UK. He popped up again on a search a couple of days later in a late-night topical news programme in the UK called Late Night Insight. He was interviewing DI Nnedi Géricault, the detective who’d been assigned to my case over a year before.
‘DI Géricault, you interviewed Lewis twice, is that correct?’ said Majors, stack of papers before him, pen poised.
‘That’s correct,’ said Géricault, all the warmth of an ice sculpture.
‘Once while she was under arrest for her part in the death of Lana Rowntree, her fiancé’s lover, and once when she was under suspicion herself.’
‘Yes.’
‘And on both occasions you suspected her of being more involved in the murders attributed to her fiancé, Craig Wilkins—’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
Majors’ tongue is poised inside his cheek. ‘Nearly a month since she skipped the country, you’re no further on in locating her. What’s gone wrong?’
‘Nothing has gone wrong as such—’
‘—but you haven’t found her, have you?’
‘—we are continuing to work with dedicated teams of law enforcement agencies both here and abroad—’
‘—but you still don’t have any idea where Rhiannon is, do you?’
‘The teams we are working with, here and abroad, are examining the possible routes she might have taken—’
‘—you had her in the palm of your hand, but didn’t connect the dots?’
‘She had a non-consistent MO. She’d killed various different people in different ways. It’s hard to track someone like this—’
‘—but you still didn’t charge her with anything? And not long after you interviewed her under caution, suspecting her of some involvement with Lana Rowntree’s death, she skipped the country on a false passport.’
‘Yes, she did but—’
‘—there’ve been sightings of her in Rome, Barcelona, Thailand and the Caribbean. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, isn’t it?’ Majors licked his upper lip, about ready to drop the mic.
Géricault barely raised an eyebrow. ‘There have been a lot of false sightings. This strange and disturbing fandom is growing up alongside the Rhiannon Lewis case where some people, I should stress, are doing everything in their power to keep her at large. And they seem to think they are doing some kind of public service in hindering our work.’
Majors’ left eyebrow rises. ‘Why is that, do you think?’
‘They think they love her,’ said Géricault. ‘They think they know her.’
‘And what would you say to those people?’
‘I would ask them to remember that this woman is a dangerous predator, capable of killing anyone who gets in her way.’
Majors ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek again, like he was trying to winkle out a stubborn bit of biscuit. ‘She’s making a fool of you, isn’t she? She’s got the public on-side and she’s giving you the run-around.’
‘Some people have ideas about Rhiannon Lewis being a sort of saviour of children and animals but this is simply not true—’
‘—but she does admit in her confession that she has a special predilection for sex offenders and paedophiles, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, but I must stress that she has also killed innocents. Julia Kidner, mother-of-three – kidnapped, held for three months, raped post-mortem to plant DNA and stabbed multiple times. Daniel Wells was mutilated and drowned. Dean Bishopston, father-of-three, stabbed to death. Lana Rowntree was drugged and groomed into taking her own life. AJ Thompson, 19, father of her child, was burned, stabbed and dismembered. I mean… need I go on? This is not a woman to be put on a pedestal, this is someone to be feared.’
Guy flicked a glance at the monitor. ‘What do you say to this – tonight’
s poll shows 92 per cent of our viewers think she should be left in peace.’
‘Ninety-two per cent… so that would be about 184,000 people. And assuming your current ratings are correct and that they’re all watching. That could be 92 per cent of ten people. There are 66 million people in this country, Guy.’
Clearly alarmed by Géricault’s fast maths, Guy changed tack. ‘But what about the others, DI Géricault? What about the convicted sex offender Gavin White? Convicted paedophile Derek Scudd? The two men who regularly patrolled country lanes looking for lone women drivers to kidnap and rape? Is it any wonder the public don’t have a lot of sympathy for Lewis’s victims?’
‘Is that true?’ Géricault frowned. ‘Have you met Sarah Bishopston? Or her fatherless children? Or AJ Thompson’s devastated family?’
Cue Guy’s serious look right down the barrel with his steely greys. ‘The consensus is that, right or wrong, Lewis killed more bad people than good.’
‘That’s simply inaccurate,’ said Géricault. ‘And I don’t know how you can arbitrarily differentiate good from bad.’
‘You have,’ scoffed Majors.
‘Yes, but how can you even begin to see the good in this woman?’
‘Well, if we look at what happened to Rhiannon at Priory Gardens—’
‘—no, sorry, I refuse to turn this into This Is Your Life: Rhiannon Lewis.’
‘Right, and this isn’t. This is about you, the British police, still not having a clue where this escaped serial murderer is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes but—’
‘—do you know where she is, right now, DI Géricault?’
‘We have a number of leads we are following up—’
‘—but you don’t know where she is.’
‘Look, there are several key factors that need to be in place before we send a task force into any given region. We have worked with our colleagues at Interpol, putting out an All Ports Warning—’
‘—but what if she’s in a country with no extradition treaty with the UK? Does she use the old Ronnie Biggs method and stay put, have surgery and live the life of Riley?’
‘Until we have reason to believe—’
‘—will it be a shoot-to-kill order if you do find out where she is?’
‘We want to bring Rhiannon Lewis to justice in the UK, that’s all we want to do for the families of her victims.’
‘So you don’t want her dead or alive?’
‘We want justice for her victims, Mr Majors.’
‘You’ve no idea where she is, have you?’
‘We’re undertaking a massive search—’
‘—but you still have no idea where she is?’
‘—no, we don’t but—’
‘—no, there is it, right there, no, the British police and their law enforcement partners here and abroad have no idea where Rhiannon Lewis is. Not reassuring for our viewers but at least we got an answer in the end.’
‘You didn’t let me finish, how can I get a word in—’
‘—we’ve got to leave it there. My thanks to DI Géricault for popping in today, stay tuned after the break as our syphilis test subjects return for their results, we have an appeal from the Love Island contestant whose pug was kidnapped and we’ll hear from the YouTubers who started the Set Fire To Your Head craze which has claimed its fourth victim. See you in three!’
So the police didn’t have a clue, any witnesses either weren’t coming forward or were too stupid to call them and there was a fandom growing up in my honour. How the hell had I done it – got out of Europe unchallenged? That damned elusive Rhiannon – she was me. Everyone was talking about me. ‘WE LOVE YOU, RHIANNON!’ that guy had shouted. I was adored. My back involuntarily arched like a cat’s when it was stroked. Preen preen.
But once the laptop lid was shut and I looked through the window at the dry, remote surroundings of the Hacienda where there was no other person but Tenoch for miles, I couldn’t help feeling ever so slightly lonely.
And that never ends well.
Monday, 21 January – Hacienda Santuario
People who look at their phone when you’re talking to them
People who tap their feet when they’re watching TV, even when there’s no music on
People who drink all but the dregs of a bottle of orange juice and put the carton back in the fridge
People who talk and eat loudly through a movie
People with body odour but who don’t know it
Tenoch – thanks to all of the above
I had settled in to the spacious en suite Bedroom 4 at the end of the upstairs corridor and into Tenoch’s routine. He kept himself fit with two or three workouts in his gym every day and when he wasn’t doing that he liked watching the news, The View and repeats of The Golden Girls. It was pretty funny, the first time I heard the jokes anyway. After the fifth watch of the same episode, I couldn’t find the joy in it like Tenoch could.
When he wasn’t watching that or pumping iron, Tenoch would be in his office ‘doing work’. I didn’t know what this ‘work’ was but I got the impression it had to be dodgy to account for the four dead men stacked in his pool house, the clandestine phone calls at odd hours and the shadowy man in the black BMW who kept coming to the gates to exchange packages through the bars. I got the impression that the less I knew about it all the better.
Besides which, I still had a fucking gigantic hole to dig.
One morning, a few days into the big dig, I was woken around 7.00 a.m. – I was having a dream in which a man was continually yelling at me. ‘Rhiannon! Come here! Come down here!’ It was my dad in the dream.
But in reality it was Tenoch. My eyes snapped open. And he kept calling.
‘Rhiannon! Where are you? Get down here!’
I scrambled into my hoody and ran downstairs, across the lounge and out onto the pool terrace. Tenoch stood at the entrance to the pool house. He snapped his head round and saw me, eyes wild. ‘What the fuck is this?’
‘What?’ I said, still creaking my eyes open to see what he was seeing. ‘What’s the matter?’
He gave me The Look – The Look people always give me the moment they find out how batshit I truly am. ‘Why have you done this?’
‘Done what?’ I tugged my sleeve down over my hand and shoved it against my mouth. The bodies smelled real bad now they’d begun to liquefy in the already-intense heat of the morning. ‘Oh, you mean the Sylvanians?’
‘Why you… got the TV on for them? Why is this one dressed up in my dead wife’s clothes?!’
‘I found the dress in one of the bedrooms. It’s moth-eaten so I figured it wasn’t a big deal. He’s experimenting with his gender. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘They are… posed.’
‘Yeah. The one with the maggots likes the baseball results, and the bloated one’s having a nap after reading the paper—’ Something had been nibbling at his exposed ankle. Probably a rock squirrel. ‘I call him Rodrigo, and that one… John.’
‘And the one on the toilet with his teeth on the floor?’
‘Dwayne? He’s… a binge eater. Always in the lav. I don’t know why his teeth have fallen out though.’
Tenoch rubbed one hand down the length of his face. ‘I don’t understand. They should have been buried. Or burned. You fucking loca.’
‘Well, yeah, obvs. I haven’t dug the hole deep enough for them yet.’
‘I see you coming in here. Do you… talk to them?’
‘A bit. If you don’t actually look at them, they could be alive. I mean, when I’m watching TV with them, it’s like sitting there with a family.’
He stared at me. He paced. He stared at me a bit more. Then he said, ‘Clean this up.’ And he went inside the house.
The next few days were all about stiffs and shovels and scratching itchy bumps all over, courtesy of the damn mosquitoes. After the first day’s dig, I could barely move for lower back ache and my fingernails were caked up with mud. But after a while, I paid neither muc
h mind. My back got stronger, my shovel technique improved and the hole finally expanded.
I was allowed to cut a gap in the chicken-wire fence behind the pool house and peel it back wide enough for me to drag through each of the dead men. Some afternoons, between workouts, Tenoch would sit on a poolside-lounger and watch me struggling, sweating and swearing.
‘You could help a bit, you know. They’re pretty heavy,’ I called out to him as one of the guy’s hands came away from its skeleton.
‘You shouldn’t rely on anyone, Rhiannon. If you worked on your upper body strength you wouldn’t need to.’
‘Why do you work out so much if you don’t use your muscles for anything other than showing off?’ I said, squinting in the baking heat.
‘I’m saving my strength for other things,’ he said, which I didn’t get but I couldn’t be arsed to have him clarify either.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I huffed, heaving the third man out of the Wendy House, across the terrace, round to the fence and yanking his feet through the gap, pushing him down into the shallow ditch at the bottom. I didn’t have the strength to heave each of the bodies into the wheelbarrow, let alone wheel them all down into the field, so instead I had to rely on the old drag, roll and heave technique, muttering all the while.
‘I’m supposed to be on my holidays. I’ve fucking paid to be here, why have I got to do this as well? Hmm? I mean, is that fair?’ I was directing my questions to the vacant expression of the fourth man as I dragged his sorry ass through the fence and rolled him down into the ditch.
I clambered down into the ditch and grabbed his wrists, pulling him up into the field. ‘I mean, shouldn’t he be waiting on me? I’ve paid an arm and a leg to be here. When I kill a guy, the least I do is bury him myself. Why doesn’t he do his own dirty work? What am I? Some kind of skivvy? Prick…’
I got back up to the pool house to find Tenoch waiting in the doorway. I yanked down my face mask.
‘Is that what you think this is? A holiday?’
‘No,’ I said, sweat trickling down my forehead into my already-stinging eyes. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what this is.’
