HE WILL KILL YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist

by Charlie Gallagher

  Twenty more minutes passed. Her arm had numbed a little and her breathing was back under control. She sat with her back straight and her right hand laid out on the arm of the chair, mirroring her left. She had to sit as straight as she could to limit her movement. Sitting in the chair for any length of time was exhausting. She was getting more desperate to urinate, too. She tried to block that from her mind. She looked up at the clock. It was nearly 9:30 a.m. Time to make a start.

  She moved her right hand into her lap, shifting her weight a little so she could plunge down the gap in the chair on her right side. She leant a little, half an inch to the left. The pain was immediate. She screwed her eyes tightly closed. Her fingers found the gap and she pushed them down between the cushion and the arm. She felt the top of her diary almost immediately. Her fingers hooked over the top. She tugged it out in a smooth movement and trapped it on the right arm of the chair. She was back in her starting position with both arms out, her back as straight as she could get it, her breathing long and deep. She could feel her pulse beating in her injured arm and the pain was dropping away. She needed to be still for just a little longer.

  It subsided enough for her to consider her next movement. She realised she was gritting her teeth. Sweat ran off her forehead and gathered in her eyebrows. It was cold enough to make her shiver. She suddenly felt cold in general. Craig didn’t like the heating on during the day and she was just in her nightie. It made her need for the toilet worse, too. She breathed in deeply. This was it. She needed that phone. It was everything now. It was towards the back and centre of the chair. She would need to bend forward to reach under. She would need to put pressure on her arm. This was going to hurt.

  She pushed her right hand under the front of the cushion this time. Leaning forward was excruciating and she had to stop. She let out a little whimper.

  Her eyes squeezed shut as she shifted again, her hand pushing further to the back. She was more aggressive. The pain was worse but she gritted her teeth and pushed on. There was no other option. Her hand curled underneath the cushion, she could feel it under her buttocks. She shifted her weight forwards as best she could. She managed to reach the back of the chair; she needed to push just another couple of inches. She whimpered again, her head developed an involuntary shake, side to side, as if her body was telling her to stop. She pushed on regardless. Her fingertips brushed the wood of the shelf at the back and she could feel where she had unpicked the seam. With her eyes still tightly shut she leant further and her shoulder nudged something. She opened her eyes to the sound of her diary clattering to the floor where it had been knocked from the arm. She gave one last push and her fingers bumped against something solid — the side of the phone! She held her breath; she was nearly there. She needed to be careful. Her left arm was under more pressure than ever, her whimper was now a full-throated cry of pain. She wrapped her fingers over the top of the phone. She felt it budge. It shifted just a few millimetres — but it was pushing away. She stopped instantly. She couldn’t bear this position much longer but she couldn’t rush it and risk knocking the phone off its shelf. If it fell down the back, all would be lost. She edged forward again.

  Suddenly her left arm was shot through with agony and she flinched. She must have reached a critical point; the angle was too sharp. Her right hand fidgeted — only slightly, but it was enough. Her hand nudged the phone. She heard it fall. It clattered against the wood then scraped against coarse material as it settled in the bottom of the sofa.

  Grace froze. She was still leaning forward with her left arm so firmly held; everything was twisted at an unnatural angle. She moved to sit back up but took it slowly. The pain made her want to cry out again. She didn’t. She got back to sitting up straight with her right arm mirroring her left. The pain wasn’t going away this time; there would be no waiting for it to numb down.

  She was losing her internal battle and was starting to panic. She dared to peer over the right side of the chair. Her diary had slid to the floor and bounced — well out of her reach, just like the phone. Craig would come home in a few hours and he would see the diary laid out in front of him. He would read the pages. He would realise that she had documented everything he had done to her and he would know that she planned to hand the whole thing over to a police officer named Maddie Ives. And while he read those words, she would be held captive in front of him by an iron vice — utterly helpless.

  She tried to stay calm. Her breathing was getting quicker. She sucked in air. She told herself everything was going to be okay, that she just needed some time to think. There was still time. She still had a good few hours until Craig was due home. Today was still going to be her day of freedom. But now, despite months of planning, she didn’t know how.

  Chapter 17

  Maddie huffed for the umpteenth time. She was staring at a load of numbers — crime stats, she’d been told. She’d been asked to make sense of them in the form of a report. She couldn’t make sense of them in any form at that point, and when she lifted her eyes to find something better to be doing with her time, she saw Rhiannon.

  ‘Oh! I didn’t see you there!’

  ‘I’ve been lingering. You looked busy. I didn’t want to interrupt.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how much I am desperate to be interrupted right now. What’s the matter? You look confused!’ Maddie’s desk was cluttered. Her notes and workings littered the side where Rhiannon stood. Her young colleague took her question as an invitation to swoop the paperwork out of her way, bunching them up and losing Maddie’s place in the process. ‘That’s only an hour or two you’ve put me back, there, Rhiannon — nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Sorry. I need you to look at something.’ Rhiannon opened a file, took out two A4 photographs and put them down in the space she had just cleared. They were in high resolution and labelled the way a CSI photographer would. Maddie could make out someone’s personal belongings, but they were laid out in two distinct lines on the scarred concrete of what looked like the floor of a garage or lock-up.

  ‘Okay, so what am I looking at?’ Maddie said.

  ‘This is from the warrant this morning. This is Toby Routledge’s garage, the one he gave up in interview.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’ She remembered how Toby had told them that they would find stolen property in a garage linked to his mum’s flat. She looked again at the items. The first row of property had the fewer items: a couple of old-looking mobile phones and a Volkswagen logo key fob with a yellow cardboard tag tied to it. The second was longer: an Xbox with a pile of matching games and a couple of computer tablets; some headphones; items of jewellery — at least four necklaces and some rings. In both were scruffy-looking envelopes.

  Maddie was feeling a little jaded. She hadn’t slept well and so had given up trying and gone out early for a run for the second day in a row. She assumed the layout was something the CSIs were doing now. She couldn’t see why. ‘He wasn’t lying then.’

  ‘He wasn’t. But what do you make of it?’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it, really. It matches up with what we know was stolen from number 21.’

  ‘It does — the Haines address. Toby would have needed a car too, I reckon, so he probably had help. But what about how it’s displayed? It’s like he laid it out. That’s weird, right.’

  ‘What, this was how it was found?’ Maddie was suddenly confused. She reached out to pick up one of the photos so she could study it closer.

  ‘Exactly like that. They did pictures in situ first off. All the stuff is laid in two rows. And can you see the envelopes at the bottom of each row?’

  Maddie nodded.

  ‘We think that’s mail from the two different addresses he burgled. Certainly, that row has post for number 21. He must have scooped it up from wherever people stack their mail while he was in there. It was like he’s making sure we know where it’s all from.’

  ‘It’s an investigator’s dream!’ Maddie said, but she was still scowling.

  ‘It
is. The other address was number 17 — Grace Hughes’s place. You asked her about the burglaries didn’t you?’

  ‘I did. She said they hadn’t been burgled there. I’ll need to ask her again but, looking at what he got, it might be stuff you wouldn’t miss. He said the back door was unlocked. It’s plausible they don’t even know.’

  ‘It is. The fact that he didn’t get much, though . . . that’s odd, too, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. Maybe Toby got spooked — or there just wasn’t anything easy. We know he’s not one for taking too many risks once he’s in.’

  ‘True, but if he was spooked, then they probably knew he was there.’ Rhiannon pointed at the photo Maddie was holding. ‘This piece of card here has a registration number on it that matches the car registered to the address — some Volkswagen estate thing.’

  ‘Has the key been accounted for?’

  ‘Again, it hasn’t been reported, and you would certainly miss your car key being stolen. This looks like the keying it came with and they’ve taken it off. No one keeps the original key fob attached do they?’

  ‘So why would you steal just a key fob?’ Maddie said.

  ‘VW keys are just a block of plastic these days. They look similar to this. Maybe he thought it was the actual key. I doubt he was turning too many lights on in there.’

  Maddie considered this for a second. ‘So what are we saying? Our serial burglar, Toby Routledge, goes out on the rob and by the looks of it has a reasonable night at one of the places he visits. Then he takes it to a garage and lays it all out so we would know exactly what he had nicked and from where. Then he tells us exactly where his little display is — in interview no less? The whole thing just doesn’t make any sense at all.’

  ‘Not with what we know about Toby, no.’

  ‘I don’t get it. It’s not right.’

  ‘He’s determined to go to prison, that’s for sure,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I guess the only person who can explain why is Toby Routledge. I planned on going round to ask him about that again, maybe he’ll talk a bit more freely outside of the custody block.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Maddie stood up; the figures could wait. ‘I assume you mean now?’

  ‘Wait! I’m not finished . . . I remembered that Toby had conditions to sign on. He was due here this morning at ten a.m. I called down to Front Counter and they told me he didn’t make it. They’ve got my number in case he turns up late but they haven’t called yet.’

  ‘So he’s wanted?’

  ‘Signing on is a court condition. He’s arrestable with a transfer straight to court. He might even get his wish and get sent straight to prison.’

  ‘Excellent. That’s one wish I’ll be very happy to grant.’

  * * *

  ‘Déjà vu!’ Maddie referred to the climb up the stairs towards Toby’s flat for the second time in just a few days. Maddie was ahead, Rhiannon just a few steps behind. There wasn’t the room to be side by side. There still wasn’t the room when Maddie got to the tiny landing that met directly with Toby’s front door. She took a few moments to take it in. She was slightly out of breath and her thighs burned. Even the twenty-year-old Rhiannon was puffing out her cheeks.

  Maddie lifted her finger to her lips to request quiet. She could still hear music from the ground-floor flat they had passed on the way in. The music was a sort of sped-up reggae — not to her taste and, she imagined, so niche that the chances of the neighbours enjoying it were slim to none. Besides that she could hear nothing else. There was a dusty mat outside Toby’s door that she reckoned had been there some time and had probably outlasted a number of tenants. Places like this tended to have a high turnover of occupants. The mat was skewed at an angle as if it was taken for granted. The door itself was a solid slab of dirty white wood with only a flaked and tarnished chrome letterbox to relieve its plain though scuff-marked surface. The worst of the marks grouped together at a height that suggesting the door had been repeatedly kicked. They didn’t look fresh. The sort of lifestyle Toby lived she reckoned someone kicking at his door would be a fairly regular occurrence. There was a folded-up buggy over to the left side, leaning tentatively against the wall with its filthy wheels pointed towards them.

  Maddie had waited long enough. She pounded on the door. The letterbox rattled with each hit. She left it just a few seconds for an answer and when there was none, she hit it again. She also pushed the door at the top, middle and bottom. From how it flexed she could tell it was only locked in the middle.

  ‘It’s cardable,’ she said. Her voice was low.

  ‘Can we do that?’ Rhiannon said. Maddie turned back to the door. She couldn’t really, not lawfully. Police could force entry to arrest people if the circumstances were right, but they had to believe their target to be in there in the first place. Right now all she had was a solid door with silence behind it. There was nothing for her to believe he was in there at all. But this whole thing just didn’t seem right: Toby’s demeanour in custody was so far removed from what she had come to know of him it had actually caught her out; the photographs of his stolen property with direct references to where it had come from wasn’t right either. And now he had missed signing on for his bail conditions. If the running theory was that he was ignoring court-imposed conditions so he could get sent to prison then he should have answered on the first knock with a bag packed — or even be sat on the front step with a cigarette on the go. But no answer? That really didn’t make sense. Maddie couldn’t stop her mind from conjuring up the worst.

  ‘I’m going in,’ she said. Rhiannon didn’t argue. Maddie reached to her back pocket. This was where she kept her ‘cards’, which were actually A5-sized sheets of plastic cut in two and with well-worn edges. The design of some door locks meant they were susceptible to something strong, thin and malleable being pushed between the lock and its housing. If you got the movement right, you could part the two enough to open the door. This wasn’t possible on modern doors, but on old wooden ones like this, it often would be.

  She slid the card down the crack in the door until she felt it bump against the lock. She wriggled the plastic. It took a little manipulation and some whispered cussing, but finally she felt the lock move and then the door pushed in. Its squeaking hinges seemed as loud as a roar. Rhiannon had moved so close to Maddie that they were almost touching.

  ‘POLICE!’ Maddie paused for a response. ‘THE DOOR HAS BEEN OPENED AND I AM COMING IN. POLICE OFFICER!’ She followed her words through the door. She remembered the layout from their last visit, turned left into the living room and stopped to take it in. There was no one there. A dirty curtain pulled across the window was the only difference she could see. The open pizza box was still on the low, cluttered table. Disturbed from its feast, a fly lifted off the crust. The clothes dryer was still propped against the wall, the same baby clothes lying underneath it.

  ‘MADDIE!’ Rhiannon’s voice from the other end of the flat sounded urgent.

  Maddie turned and made for it. The front door still hung open and she stepped around it. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in here. I found him!’ Rhiannon’s voice came from the bathroom.

  Maddie swept in. It was compact. A small, frosted window was directly in front of her, a sink to her left, the bath tucked behind the door with a shower head hanging limply over it. The bath was full of water. Toby was laid out naked inside it, his head closest to the door. His wide eyes looked up from the bottom, his face entirely submerged. The water level was so high that the slightest movement would have spilt it over the side. There was no movement. Toby was as still as a stone.

  ‘Shit,’ Maddie exclaimed. ‘Stand back!’ She moved her arm across to stop Rhiannon getting closer. Maddie had seen an electrocution in a bath before and the water had been still very much charged when they had arrived. She cast her eyes round the room. There was no sign of any electrical source thrown in the water. No other obvious hazards either. She risked plunging her own hands in and water immediately cascaded ove
r the sides. She felt her knees and feet soak through as she leaned over to try and get a grip. The water was freezing. Toby’s skin was too — and slippery. She scrabbled to get her hands underneath him so she could try and lift him. He was a dead weight. His eyes were still open and they seemed morose as they looked up at her, like she had disturbed his peace. He slipped out of her hands and his head bobbed back to the bottom. She knew the air was out of his lungs and that he had been there a while. She knew it was hopeless.

  ‘We need to call it in!’ Maddie said. Rhiannon had taken a step away and was already barking into her radio. Maddie’s mind was shutting out the din, she could only focus on those eyes staring out from the under the water. Just a few key words from Rhiannon’s update registered: . . . seventeen-year-old male . . . in the bath . . . not breathing . . . Toby Routledge . . .

  Maddie shook her head to clear it. She tried to take hold of him again. She positioned herself so she was stood behind his head. She took a better grip this time, hooking her hands under his shoulders and wrenched backwards. Now his slippery skin was assisting, as it met no resistance from the smooth edge of the plastic tub. Toby moved up and over the side, his weight shifted suddenly and his pale body banged into the door as she lost control and had to step out of the way. He fell to the floor and the bathroom door was pushed shut, his hip resting against it. Her eyes fell to the court-imposed tag displayed prominently around his ankle. She stepped back and gasped for breath. Toby had come to a rest on his shoulders with bent legs angled towards the ceiling. His upper body was straight, his posture unnatural — like a toppled mannequin. Rigor mortis. She had known from the first instant that Toby Routledge was dead; rigor mortis confirmed that he had been gone a while. Four hours was the rough figure they were taught for the muscles to start stiffening up. The water had slid off him in a crescendo at first but now it drummed on the floor in multiple drips. His expression looked sadder now and she could hardly tear her eyes from his.