A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  “Heather?”

  “I don’t know what to say to that, Ben. Of course, I don’t think she was picking these women. I can’t believe my mother was involved at all. But what if the link is my family? My mother?” She bit her lip. “I don’t want to think that way, but that photo, and my mum’s suicide …”

  He turned slightly toward her, looking concerned. “If there is a link, Heather, we’ll find it.”

  “I know, you’re right. I just …” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, thinking hard. What if this was a story for the paper? What questions would you ask? “All right, what else? What other things can we reasonably assume about this new killer?”

  “He takes them away somewhere to kill them, he doesn’t kill them at their homes or in any sort of public space. He likes to be in control. I … I don’t think he kills in a frenzy. It’s about power, about exercising power over them, and the presentation of the bodies is all about that, too.”

  Heather nodded.

  “I thought that,” she said absently. “That he cares about the bodies. He cares about them beyond death.”

  Parker looked at her sharply. “Cares isn’t quite the way I would put it.”

  “No, but …” Heather tapped her fingers against the marble top. “Does he care about the way they’re displayed because he wants them to look as much like the original Red Wolf murders as possible? Or because he himself needs them to be that way?”

  “That’s the big question isn’t it?” Parker sighed. “Does he know Reave, or is he just a very enthusiastic fan?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry that my chats with Reave haven’t helped much.”

  “They do help, though.” Parker turned toward her. “We might not see how yet, but I’m certain —”

  A noise outside made them both turn to the window. It was dark, the glass reflecting back the image of the two of them stood closely together, when a sudden streak of movement made them both jump.

  “Was that a fox?”

  Heather laughed nervously, her heart suddenly racing. “A dog, maybe?” Something in her voice must have been off, as Parker touched a hand to the small of her back.

  “Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Yeah, I …” She took a breath, embarrassed at how jumpy she was. “God I’m all over the place at the moment. Sorry, I’m probably terrible bloody company.”

  “I think you’re pretty great company, actually.”

  Again, she had the powerful sense that she didn’t want him to leave. As if he had heard her thoughts, he bent his head toward her, an uncertain expression on his face mixed with something else. Without thinking too closely about what she was doing, Heather took hold of the front of his shirt and, pulling him toward her, kissed him.

  There was a second where he didn’t move—Heather could almost hear him questioning his own judgement—and then his arms were around her, his mouth pressed firmly to hers. He tasted of wine and something else she couldn’t place, and his hands as they slid up the back of her shirt were pleasantly calloused. Together they bumped against the kitchen table, and as she kicked off her trousers, her hands busy at his belt, she briefly wondered what her mum would think.

  All things considered, I think me fucking a policeman on your kitchen table is fairly small beans, Mum.

  “Are you … Is this okay?”

  Heather looked up into Ben’s flushed face and realized she’d laughed out loud.

  “God, yes. Don’t bloody stop.”

  * * *

  Afterward, they stumbled upstairs, laughing quietly, and had a slower second round in the guest room. When they were lying together in the dark, finally exhausted, Heather found herself listening to his breathing, slow and steady and somehow comforting. It would be easy to lie here, listen to him go to sleep, let tonight become a pleasant memory, eased and turned fuzzy around the edges by too much wine and sleep—but the images of the bodies he had described, the words he had used to describe the killer, were floating in her head like buzzing neon signs.

  “Hey,” she nudged him with her foot, and he gave a delicate sort of grunt. “Ben?”

  “Mhm?”

  “I hate to say this, especially after … But you can’t sleep here. I have to go to my mum’s funeral in the morning.”

  He grew very still in the bed, and then turned over. In the half light from the hallway, she could see the firm muscles of his stomach and the soft thatch of hair on his chest, slightly darker than that on his head. It was tempting suddenly to see if she could get him to stay for longer after all, but it was clear from the way he sat up that the word “funeral” had scattered all chances of that.

  “Ah. Shit. You didn’t say anything.”

  “What is there to say?” She sat up, too, her arms around the tops of her knees as she watched him climb out of bed, looking for his pants. “They’re by the door. Sorry, it’s just … I doubt I’m going to be good company in the morning. You know?”

  “Do you have someone to be here with you?” He turned toward her in the doorway, enough light on him that she could see the genuine expression of concern on his face, and abruptly Heather felt dirty, ashamed and more painfully attracted to him than ever. It was too easy to imagine what her mother would say if she were still alive, the “disappointed but not surprised” tone of voice.

  “My friend Nikki is going to go with me, and half her family, I think. I’ll be fine.”

  “I can come. I …”

  She made herself face him and tried a smile. “But thank you, anyway. I mean. For being here tonight.”

  * * *

  When he was gone, Heather put on a dressing gown and went back down to the living room. It was very late, and her body ached in a number of different ways, but even so she fired up her laptop and began typing. The story was coming together.

  CHAPTER

  28

  THE DAY OF the funeral dawned bright and sunny, although the house was still chilly and saturated with shadows. Heather, who had been up for hours, found herself caught in a state somewhere between exhausted and wired, repeatedly washing her face and drinking strong black coffee in an attempt to focus.

  She chose a pair of jeans that could still charitably be called black rather than gray, and a simple black blouse, laying them out on the bed and then avoiding them all morning. Over and over she found herself going to the windows and looking out at the row of dark trees at the edges of her mother’s lawn, half expecting to see someone waiting there, and her mind kept returning to the note: I know what you are, and I think you do too. She told herself that it was important she go to the funeral. It was closure, a way of putting her mother and her spiteful notes behind her. But when she returned to the windows, she got the sense that she was missing something; that there was a message, kind or otherwise, that she was failing to get. In an attempt to take her mind off it, she emailed Diane the notes she had so far, along with the comment “this is a very ROUGH DRAFT, so don’t judge me too harshly.”

  By the time Nikki called for her, she was desperate to get out of the house, and squeezed herself into the back of Nikki’s aunt’s car gladly. Nikki’s mother was there, too, sitting in the passenger seat, and she reached over the headrest to pull Heather into an alarmingly fierce hug.

  “How are you, Heather? How you doing?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs Appiah, honestly. Will be glad to get this out of the way, though.”

  There was a larger group at the crematorium than Heather had honestly been expecting—more neighbors like Nikki’s aunt, a couple of very distant second cousins that she only recognized from old photographs. Lillian was there, too, wearing a very smart black dress suit and a small black hat with a crisp flourish of black lace. Seeing her, Heather felt a flush of shame; someone who had lived down the road from her mother had made more of an effort than her own daughter.

  “Come on, Hev,” Nikki took her elbow lightly. “We’re going inside now.”

  Slowly, the tiny group of
people shuffled into the little red brick chapel, their heads down, their eyes dry. As they passed under the arch and moved down the pews, Heather felt a shiver of dread move through her—there was a large wooden cross on the far wall, dominating everything else, and her mother’s coffin lay in front of it, a spray of white flowers draping the warm toffee colored wood.

  For a long moment, she felt herself almost pulled backwards, as though the room itself was repelling her, and then she remembered; of course, this was the same chapel where they had said goodbye to her dad. How could she have forgotten that? Except that in some weird automatic act of desperate self-preservation, she had forgotten most of it. Her father’s funeral now only existed in her memory as a series of painful images and impressions. The smell of leather from the coat she was wearing; the sound of her mother’s painful sobs; and her own grief and guilt, a bright shard of glass lodged so deep in her throat she had spent the ceremony in a kind of stunned silence.

  Nikki looked up at her, concern creasing a line in between her eyebrows.

  “Hev?”

  She nodded rapidly, forcing herself to smile.

  “Come on,” Mrs Appiah slipped her meaty arm around her waist. “We’re sitting with you.”

  Nikki’s family ushered her to the front pew and sat around her, fussing and handing out handkerchiefs. They were at home in churches, completely unfazed by the smell of old flowers and the looming cross, and Heather felt a surge of gratitude for them that threatened to make her cry before the service had even started. However, when the vicar stood and cleared her throat, she found herself oddly calm. She glanced around once, and spotted Lillian sitting at the back by herself, her hands folded over her large handbag and her eyes focused intently on the coffin.

  “Thank you all for coming here today to celebrate the life of Colleen Evans.” The vicar smiled around at them, and Heather wondered what she thought—about the small turn out, about the circumstances of her mother’s death. There had been an awkward conversation over the phone where the vicar had asked lots of questions about Colleen, clearly trying to glean enough information to be able to talk about her confidently at the service, but Heather had found she had had very little to tell her. If her mother had had hobbies in her later life, she hadn’t known about them, and most of her memories concerned a distant and uneasy childhood. At one point she had been seized with the compulsion to tell her about Michael Reave. My mother used to knock around with a murderer of women. Can you get that in somehow? Perhaps mention how she wrote to him for decades and never mentioned it to anyone. Or you could talk about how she used to live on a hippy commune and probably took loads of drugs. That makes a good anecdote, doesn’t it? In the end she had cut the whole thing short, and now she could see the vicar struggling to build an image of someone she had known nothing about.

  “Happily married to her husband Barry for many years, Colleen was also extremely proud of her daughter Heather …”

  She made a small noise in her throat at that. Thinking that she was crying, Mrs. Appiah patted her knee gently.

  Heather found herself staring at the coffin, inevitably remembering her conversations with the people at the morgue, when her mother’s body had been retrieved and identified. They had been kind people, solemn and attentive, and they had explained to her that it would not be possible for her to see Colleen—the damage, when someone falls from a great height (jumps, Heather had added silently, jumps) was too extensive. Instead they had introduced her to a police officer who had given her Colleen’s handbag. Inside it had been her mother’s battered purse, her bus pass, and handfuls of rose hips, as though she had picked them and shoved them in her bag on her walk to the cliffs. It had also contained her suicide note.

  “The rose hips, are they important?” The officer had asked. She had been very young and earnest, with big brown eyes, and she had put two large sugars into Heather’s tea even though she had asked for it without. For the shock. “We didn’t throw them away, just in case you wanted to keep them.”

  Heather hadn’t known what to say to that, so in the end she had just taken the handbag, rose hips and all, and emptied the thing out into the bushes outside the mortuary. Were they important? She had no idea. That was the problem that was becoming more and more obvious: she knew barely anything about Colleen Evans and everything she’d found out since her death suggested she never would.

  “Colleen loved her family, and she was a very giving woman. Very generous with her time …”

  So generous, thought Heather, the misery inside her suddenly flaring into anger. Generous to a bloody fault, really.

  With a start she saw all the heads in her pew turn to her, and she realized she had spoken out loud. Turning scarlet, she bowed her head, but it was like a dam had opened up; unwanted images and thoughts tumbled through her mind, pressing in on all sides. Sitting in this same chapel as a teenager, numb with pain and guilt; the look of fear that had passed over her dad’s face when he’d found the bird in her bedroom; her mother stepping over the edge of the cliff, perhaps regretting it at the last moment and feeling terrified on the long drop down, before her head was smashed and her bones turned to powder … She thought of Michael Reave and his infuriatingly steady voice, of all the women whose lives he had cut short.

  Before she knew what she was doing, she was on her feet. The vicar’s words dried up in her throat, and they all looked at her expectantly. Someone just behind her coughed.

  “Hev!” Nikki’s voice was an urgent whisper. “It’s all right, sit down. Please.”

  It was impossible. Impossible to stay here a moment longer, just yards away from the box containing the broken pieces of her mother. She shook her head, and shuffled down the pew, gently brushing off the hands of Mrs. Appiah and her sister.

  “Please, carry on,” she said, trying to make her voice sound as normal as possible. “Carry on, I just need some air.”

  She left through the side door, stepping out into the small remembrance garden beyond. A long section of it was paved over, with small areas filled with white gravel and small succulent plants, and on a low wall someone had thoughtfully arranged all the floral tributes. She spotted her own immediately, a wreath of white and yellow lilies, and she made herself go and look at it, staring at the long smooth petals until her heart had stopped pounding in her chest.

  For all I know, she might have hated this. Heather took a long, slow breath. Perhaps she would have hated all these flowers. Christ, maybe I should have brought rose hips.

  She waited, and eventually she heard the thin and wavering sound of a small group of people singing “Morning Has Broken,” the hymn she had chosen to end the service. Shortly afterward, the crematorium doors opened and the vicar began ushering people out.

  “Hev, are you all right?” Nikki came straight over to her, while her mother and auntie hovered anxiously behind. The small handful of mourners were moving out into the garden, pausing to thank the vicar as they did, but Heather couldn’t help noticing that they were all taking little peeks at her.

  “Sorry,” she lifted her eyes to Mrs. Appiah and her sister so the apology took them in, too. “I just couldn’t face it. I kept remembering dad’s funeral, and the shock of everything …”

  “It’s understandable, honey,” Mrs. Appiah waved her explanations away. “Your mother’s at peace now, time for you to try and get some, too. Now, look at these beautiful flowers everyone sent. Colleen would have been very touched, I’m sure.”

  Heather nodded and obediently went back to the flowers, deciding that she would read each card and thank all the mourners personally. After all, they didn’t know about her fraught relationship with her mother, and they had taken the time to come—it was the least she could do when she’d already caused such a spectacle. As she was bending to read the card on a posy of pale yellow flowers—the florist’s handwriting was atrocious—Lillian appeared next to her, gloved hands folded around the handle of her handbag.

  “A lovely service, just wha
t Colleen would have wanted.” Heather turned at the sound of her voice—was that a note of sarcasm? But Lillian looked as composed as ever. “Are you having a wake, dear?”

  “At the King’s Arms. I’ve rented the back room. I should have done it at the house I suppose, but …” She stopped. In truth there was no good reason. She just couldn’t bear the idea of other people there, seeing where the dust had built up and peering into the fridge.

  “No need to explain, I quite understand. It takes some of the pressure off, I imagine.”

  “And we’ve made some food.” This was Nikki’s aunt, who had appeared at Heather’s elbow. “Sandwiches, cold cuts, sausage rolls. Plenty enough for everyone and more besides. I’ll put some in a pot for you to take back, Heather.”

  Save me from the old women and their Tupperware, thought Heather, before noticing that Nikki’s aunt was peering with curiosity at Lillian.

  “Oh sorry. Shanice, this is Lillian. I guess you must know each other? Lillian is also, uh, was also a neighbor of Mum’s.”

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” said Auntie Shanice, holding out one plump hand. “Whereabouts are you on the road, Lillian?”

  “Up toward the school,” said Lillian, before turning to Heather again. “Forgive me dear, but I must go—it really was a lovely service. I’ll pop by later and bring you some of the butternut stew I’m making.”

  And with that she was gone. Shanice raised an eyebrow a touch, which Heather recognized as an extremely damning judgement on Lillian and the likes of Lillian, before heading back to her sister to make her report. Heather, her eyes caught by an unusually colorful bouquet, wandered down the far end to read the card. To her surprise, most of the flowers were familiar to her, because they were the sort you saw growing wild—violets, dog roses, daisies, foxgloves—and they were all carefully bound together in the shape of a wreath. She knelt and touched her fingers to the card—this handwriting at least was legible.