A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  There had been hours of silence, long periods where they kept out of each other’s way, but inevitably something would cause the other to erupt—one of dad’s old trainers wedged under the foldaway table, or a tub of the ice cream he especially liked left in the freezer. And then, like splinters working their way under the skin, these little reminders of his absence—of what Heather had done—tore all the wounds open again.

  Reluctantly, Heather remembered bringing the injured bird home in her arms, still carefully wrapped in her t-shirt. She had hidden it in her room, finding an old shoe box and stuffing it with rags. She had filled up a little pot of water, stolen a handful of breakfast cereal, thinking it might eat that. Looking back, she was amazed she had done it—obviously she couldn’t have kept it hidden for long, and she hadn’t the faintest idea of how to look after animals; she had never been allowed any pets, after all.

  Even now, after life had supplied her with a number of terrible memories, the look on her dad’s face when he’d found the box was still one of the very worst. He’d snatched the box up from its place by the bed—the bird had looked dead then, Heather remembered, its head curled round to its breast and its eyes glassy—and a look of sheer terror had passed over his face. Then, slowly, anger had replaced it; a rage so unexpected and complete that thinking of it as an adult still frightened her.

  He had turned red in the face, and they had shouted at each other, a rising chorus of outrage. Even then, Heather had been taken aback by the heat of her own anger, a lot of it fueled by sheer surprise—in their little family dynamic, her dad was the soft touch, and mum was the rod of iron. And besides which, it was just a bird. A poorly bird. And he was acting as though she’d been out murdering babies.

  She had told him that, she remembered; had screamed it in his face. White blotches appeared on his red cheeks, his eyes wet and shining, and he had marched from her room, the bird box still in his hands. He had died around forty-five minutes later, a sudden and apocalyptic heart attack while he was in the park, putting the bird back where it had come from. It had been getting late, the sun going down, and there had been no one there to help him, or to phone for an ambulance, and that was that.

  Sitting alone in the spare room of her mother’s empty house, Heather looked down at her hands. She felt sick to her stomach and so tired she couldn’t keep her eyelids from slipping down every few seconds, yet her heart was skittering in her chest.

  “You know what you’ve done.” It was what her mother had hissed at her, a day or two after the funeral. She had never seen her mother drink before that, but she had been drinking then, taking small sips from a glass of vodka and coke, her eyes red and the skin around her mouth pinched. “You know what you’ve done.” It was the icy truth of it, the freezing water between them that could never be bridged again. And was it really so different from I know what you are? Heather found she could imagine her mother writing that note. Could imagine it very easily, her lips pinched together with hate and the hand holding the pen clenched so tightly her fingers were white.

  Abruptly, Heather leaned over the bed and was noisily sick, snatching up the bucket just in time. A hot curd of bread pudding and sour red wine splashed wetly against the plastic bottom, her stomach clenching and flexing until it was all out of her. After that, some vital energy seemed to leave her and she finally slept, despite the smell of sick and the brightly burning lights.

  She woke up at around 4 AM, sitting straight up in the bed. My toothbrush was in the cabinet, she thought wildly, with no idea why the information was important. It was only when she’d stepped out to turn the light off, then slipped back into bed, that she realized what it meant: if she’d put the toothbrush in the cabinet that morning, then why hadn’t the note and the feathers fallen out then?

  She lay awake for some time after that, until the rancid smell of vomit forced her out of the bedroom and onto the downstairs sofa.

  CHAPTER

  20

  “SORRY ABOUT THE mess.”

  Heather stepped around a stack of box files as DI Parker led her through the chaotic office. It was remarkably shabby for a police station, to her mind, mostly filled with people frowning at pieces of paper or eating Subway sandwiches, but it was at least very lively.

  “Like I said before, you’re busy, right?”

  Ben Parker gave her a quick smile over his shoulder. “Always. But as it happens, part of the ceiling collapsed in the east side of the building, so a lot of stuff that was over there is now being found a home over here,” he waved at the overloaded desks. “It’s also where we’d normally interview people, so you’ll have to make do with my office today.”

  At the far end of the open plan space they came to a row of small, closed off offices, the glass partitions dotted with Post-its and pale dots of old Blu Tack adhesive. Parker led them inside one and set down the two coffees he’d been carrying on a crowded desk. As Heather sat down, she found herself trying to see everything on the desk at once; there were handwritten reports there, printouts of emails, and a few large photographs of what looked like someone’s bedroom.

  “Is this an interview then? I mean, that sounds very official.”

  “Ah, no.” Parker sat down, the chair squeaking slightly. He ran a hand through his hair, also looking at the chaos on his desk. He seemed to have briefly forgotten why they were there. “Just a chat. The photograph you think might be Fiona Graham. You have it with you?”

  “Yeah, I …” Heather hauled her bag up onto her lap, ready to delve into it for the photograph, when something else on the desk caught her eye. It was a series of clear plastic evidence bags, each containing what appeared to be a cheery birthday card. On the far end one contained something else entirely: a smooth gray rock about the size of the palm of her hand. It was polished and shiny, with a rough heart shape scratched into the surface. Heather stopped, her own heart doing something like a somersault. “What is that?”

  Parker saw where she was looking, and grimaced. “Sorry. Like I said, everything is a mess here at the moment.” He stood up and moved around to the front of the desk. Heather, guessing he was about to put the evidence bags away, glared intently at the rock.

  “Evidence collected from the school Fiona Graham worked at. Works at.” He sighed, going to put the tray out of sight. “The forensics is faster down here, so we’re doing what we can to fast track everything.”

  “The rock, it’s— ”

  “This? One of the presents from her schoolchildren.”

  She wanted to snatch it up, to feel the weight of it. It was probably nothing. Hearts drawn on objects was hardly rare, but she couldn’t help thinking of the empty flowerpot in her mother’s garden. The crude renderings appearing on a murdered woman’s belongings. The note left in her bathroom. Hadn’t someone on the Internet claimed that the Red Wolf ate the hearts of his victims? A chill ran down her spine. Part of her wanted to point this out to Parker, to leap on something that smelt like a clue, but at the same time she couldn’t help seeing herself through his eyes: a recently bereaved woman, raving about her mother’s terracotta plant pots. She’d sound like a crazy person. And if he thought she was crazy, he might not let her talk to Michael Reave again, and with that would vanish any chance of her getting some answers about her mother.

  “Found anything? I mean,” Heather cleared her throat. “I mean, do you think the killer sent Fiona Graham a birthday card?”

  Parker shrugged. “Violent criminals have certainly done weirder things. And naturally, we have to check everything. Which is why …”

  He raised his eyebrows at her, and Heather remembered the bag on her lap.

  “Oh yeah. Well.” She pulled the photo from the front pocket, glancing at it quickly before she handed it over. On the way to the station she had started to worry that her hunch was ridiculous, that she was seeing things in the photo that just weren’t there, but the stone heart on Parker’s desk had changed all that.

  “Hmm. We have the photo of the ph
oto you sent, but as you can imagine, it’s better to see it in the flesh.” He smudged his thumb across the surface. “It certainly feels like a real photograph.”

  “You think I’d fake it?” Despite herself, Heather was slightly amused by the idea.

  Parker glanced up. “You’d be surprised at the weird stuff people do, Miss Evans, especially around cases like this. Do you know where this was taken?” Parker was frowning at the photo now, looking troubled. She had half expected him to immediately dismiss it, but he was turning it around in his hands, looking for a date that wasn’t there.

  “As best I can remember, a little summer fete somewhere outside of London.” Parker glanced up at her. “I know, but you can see how old I was. Having said that,” she tipped her head to one side slightly, trying to picture her infrequent childhood day trips. She couldn’t stop thinking about the roughly scratched shape of the heart. “We tended to go to Kent or Essex on days out. Southend maybe. Places like that.”

  “Fiona Graham’s family were from Manchester. What would they be doing down here?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve heard that even Northerners like to leave their icy lands occasionally.”

  That got a smile. “All right. And, this certainly looks like our girl to me.” Parker shuffled some papers on the desk and came up with an old school photo. It was a typical school portrait, still housed in its brown cardboard frame. In it, Fiona Graham looked a couple of years older than she had been at the fête, and she was grinning widely at the camera, wild corkscrews of ginger hair framing her face. She was wearing a school uniform—dark green cardigan, shirt with light green checks.

  “I’ll pass this on to Fiona’s parents, and see if they can confirm it.” Parker put the photos down and took a sip of his coffee. “This is your mother in the photo? And you say that your father took it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about that day; how her mother, normally so icy and distant, had suddenly broken down in tears, shaking and hiding her head in her hands. How her dad had herded them away from the happy picnic area, his own face oddly pale around the jowls.

  “Any idea if your parents knew Fiona Graham’s parents?”

  She shrugged and picked up her own coffee. It was vile, but it was a good distraction. “I’ve no clue.”

  “Still, quite a coincidence, isn’t it? A connection to Reave, a connection to Fiona Graham …”

  “You don’t even know yet that Fiona is a victim,” Heather pointed out quickly. “She might have just wandered off. People do that, sometimes—life gets a bit too much, or she’s in debt, or fallen out with her family.” She smiled. “I left home as soon as I could, didn’t think too closely about what I was doing. I’d just had enough of it all. Maybe she just had enough of it all, too.”

  Parker was nodding, but not smiling.

  After a moment he picked up one of the photographs she’d seen earlier—the one of an untidy bedroom. He passed it to her over the desk. It was clear immediately that something terrible had happened in the room. Shoes and bags were scattered on the floor, and there were dark patches of what was clearly blood on the carpet—not a huge amount, but enough to imply a certain level of violence.

  “This is Fiona Graham’s bedroom,” Parker said, somewhat unnecessarily. “There’s more blood on the landing, on the stairs. Pictures knocked off the wall, stuff like that. She didn’t leave under her own steam, Heather.”

  “No. No, I guess not.” Heather stared at the photo, trying to take in every detail. “Inspector, if there is a link between my parents and Fiona Graham … what would that mean? What if my mother was sitting on something, something she knew and felt she couldn’t tell anyone, not even me? I mean, my mother killed herself just as these murders started and now this?”

  The sad, scuffed trainers, the pile of dogeared paperbacks on the bedside table. It could be her room. There was a story here, the sort of story that could get her back onto any newspaper she wanted, but more and more it looked like writing that story would mean discovering a side to her mother she couldn’t have guessed.

  Parker stood up suddenly.

  “Listen, the coffee here is bloody awful. Do you want to go and, uh, get some lunch?”

  Looking up, she saw that there was a faint blush across the tops of his cheeks. Smiling, she put the photo down.

  “Let’s do that.”

  * * *

  They went to a place around the corner, a small cozy restaurant that Heather guessed wasn’t a regular police hangout. Parker ordered a kind of complicated sandwich that promptly fell apart when he tried to pick it up. Heather stuck to a pasta salad, from which she picked out all the bits of meat. To her surprise, he ordered a beer, and when she raised her eyebrows he just smiled.

  “So, what’s your history with Michael Reave?” she asked, when she was halfway through her demolished salad. “You’ve had to deal with him before, I’m guessing.”

  “I’m too young to have been involved in the original investigation—as my DCI keeps reminding me—but I had to talk to him about another case a few years ago.” He tapped his fingers against the neck of his beer bottle. They sat with their back to the large window at the front of the restaurant, and a shard of autumn daylight fell across the shoulder of his shirt. “It was relating to a cold case, a woman who went missing in 1979 that we had always thought he was responsible for. It turned out she had links with an old East End gang, and suddenly it seemed possible that she’d gone missing for entirely different reasons, so I went in there to talk to him about it. This was back when I had just moved up to CID. It was a small, probably pointless job, so they gave it to the newest recruit.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It was pointless. He barely said anything at all. But he did listen, he didn’t show off or shout. As these things are measured, that was almost a success in itself. So the case moved on. But I didn’t forget Reave.”

  “He made an impression?”

  “I’d read all about him during my degree. It was quite the thing, to meet him face to face. A serial killer as strange and as singular as him. He’s a real outlier, as strange as Bundy was, really.”

  He was warming up now, she realized, getting into the subject. She thought of the notebook in her bag, and with it came a pang of guilt. He was opening up to her, when she hadn’t been entirely honest with him—all those notes she’d been making all along were looking more and more like an article.

  “Bundy?”

  “Ted Bundy. They’re not similar, not really, but Bundy was remarkable in the way he was able to shut himself off from what he’d done. Like he was two different people, living in the same body. Right up until the end, he was trying to explain it all away, as though he wasn’t responsible.”

  “And Reave is the same?”

  “Reave is very certain he’s not responsible.” Parker smiled grimly. “But with him it’s the ritualization of what he did to the bodies, the care he took to lay them out. It’s hugely risky, what he did—spending so much time with them was only ever going to make it easier to find and convict him—but every victim we know of was arranged in these strange, I don’t know, displays. Tableaus. And there are so many other identifying marks of the Red Wolf. The flowers, often in the mouth. The item of clothing soaked with blood. And their hearts.”

  “Their hearts?” Heather felt her hand tighten around her fork, and she forced herself to relax. “What do you mean?”

  “None of them were ever found. He took them out, hid them somewhere or bloody ate them, I don’t know.” He stopped, glancing down at the remains of her lunch. “Sorry. Christ, sorry, this really isn’t appropriate lunch conversation is it?”

  Heather shrugged and took a sip of her drink. Hearts. Perhaps the article could examine the overall mythology of the Red Wolf. She could already see how it would hang together; pieces on his sketchy background, his time in the commune at Fiddler’s Mill, and sections on the details of the murders—people loved that stuff. And interspersed thr
oughout, her own impressions of the man himself, drawn from the interviews. Her mother wouldn’t even need to come into it. And it could wait—the papers would still be interested once this new killer was safely caught and behind bars. Even more so, perhaps. She could reach out to Diane, let her see some of her notes. For the first time in weeks she felt a little sliver of hope; a brightness in a long period of dark. She’d forgotten how much she had enjoyed her job.

  “It doesn’t bother me, honestly. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you? I know that’s a daft thing to think, but to be able to do something like that, you picture someone completely unhinged.”

  “You want to try talking to him again?”

  Heather blinked, surprised he had offered it so readily. “I want to help. And I think he knows more about my mum than he’s letting on.”

  On their way out, she pressed her hand to his sleeve; the arm underneath her fingers was firm and warm, and she fought against the urge to squeeze it.

  “Hey. Thanks for the lunch. It’s a grim subject but the company is good.”

  They paused in the doorway, and for a moment they stood close together. She looked at the collar of his shirt and the patch of tanned skin just above it, wondering what would happen next, when his phone made a shrill noise. Turning away slightly, he thumbed the screen.

  “I’d better get back,” he said. “But if you can make it tomorrow, we can try again with Michael Reave?”

  Heather nodded, faintly disappointed. “I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  By the time Heather was back at her mother’s house it was full dark, and the terracotta pot by the doorstep was almost completely lost in shadows. Trotting up the path, Heather was half convinced she had imagined the whole thing, but as she reached it, kneeling down in the dark to pick it up, her fingers brushed over the scratched surface and a tingle moved up her arms and across her back: the heart.