by M K Farrar
He cut the engine and climbed out, and one of the officers approached to greet him.
“Sergent Parret,” the police officer introduced himself. “We’ve been able to send a drone over the property in question and can confirm that the vehicle registered to Clara Reed is parked outside the cabin. There’s been no sign of any people, however, but we assume they’re inside.”
“That’s good to know,” Ryan said. “Getting confirmation of the vehicle means we’re definitely in the right place.”
Ryan raised his voice to address everyone. “Can I get your attention, please. Clara Reed is wanted in connection with the murders of three men, and the possible abduction of a fourth, who we currently only know as ‘Joe.’ She’s considered dangerous. We also believe she may have mental health issues, possibly even have had a psychotic break. It’s unknown yet if the man she is with is also a victim or even a possible accomplice, so if he’s unhurt, I want him apprehended as well. We need to get the cabin surrounded. Clara Reed knows these woods. She grew up here. If she sees us coming and runs, we may lose her.” He looked around at all the serious faces. “Any questions?” None came. “Let’s do this then.”
They divided off into different teams. Command One were taking the back of the property, Command Two, his team, together with Mallory, would go in the front. They had an ambulance on standby in case anyone was hurt.
In their two teams, the officers moved at a brisk pace up the dirt track, avoiding the ruts—the last thing that anyone needed right now was a twisted ankle. Wind in the treetops rustled leaves around them. Insects darted back and forth. The sun beat down on Ryan’s head and shoulders, and he was grateful when the branches met overhead and provided some shade.
“Vehicle up ahead,” a uniformed officer called back to them. “Identified as the one belonging to Clara Reed.”
Ryan hoped the noise of the wind in the trees between them and the property would have disguised the sound of their voices, but there were no guarantees.
Beyond the red Ford Focus, the property came into view. It was a single-storey wooden structure with a slate roof, but it wasn’t totally lacking in mod cons. Solar panels were attached to the roof, as was what appeared to be a wind turbine. Separate from the house was a second structure. This was also built from wood but had a tin roof. The building was where Clara’s father had worked on his furniture business, and also possibly the location where the victims had been dismembered to allow for easier disposal. He’d get forensics onto the place the moment they had Clara Reed in custody.
Ryan raised a hand to tell them all to pause and then beckoned his teams forward. The front door was shut, and he hoped it wasn’t locked. Kicking down a door was much harder than they made it look in the films. They needed to cover the workshop as well. They didn’t have confirmation that Clara was in the actual house.
A sudden crash of movement came from inside, followed by a yell of pain.
The slow and steady tactic he’d been planning on was going to have to wait. “Go, go, go.”
Ryan ran to the front door. To his surprise, it opened.
“Police,” he shouted. “Stay where you are. Hands in the air.”
The front door opened onto the main living space, but no one was in view.
“The bedroom,” he said to Mallory as sounds of a scuffle continued. There was clearly more than one person inside the property.
“Help!” a male voice shouted. “In here.”
Ryan moved fast, throwing open the bedroom door then quickly stepping back to protect himself. It was unlikely she was armed, but still possible.
It took him a moment to piece together what he was seeing. Clara Reed was lying on the floor underneath what appeared to be a set of metal bars, and on top of that was the man they’d only identified as Joe. His wrists were cuffed, and he was lying naked on his back on top of the metal bars Ryan now realised was a metal headboard, and apparently doing everything he could to keep her crushed beneath him.
“Jesus Christ. We need an ambulance!”
From Ryan’s position, it didn’t look as though this Joe was an accomplice in any way. The stink of urine in the room made it apparent that he’d been held in here against his will, that together with the fact that he’d been cuffed to the headboard.
Two of his officers hurried over to help Joe up. One of them used their handcuff keys to unlock him from the headboard bars. He let out a groan and pulled his hands to the front of his body, clenching and unclenching his fists.
The moment Joe was lifted off Clara, she twisted onto her stomach and attempted to commando crawl away. Ryan put that to a stop by dropping down and placing a knee into her lower back and pulling her hands behind her back. She cried out and struggled beneath him. She was strong, but he was stronger, and he clicked the cuffs on both her wrists.
“Clara Reed, you are under arrest for the murders of Jacob Tater, Matthew Gordon, and Luke Braun, and the unlawful abduction and false imprisonment of a fourth man...” Ryan realised he still didn’t know the man’s real name. “What’s your full name?”
“Joseph Lorton,” he croaked.
“False imprisonment of Joseph Lorton,” Ryan continued. “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”
“Let me go.” She thrashed beneath him. “They all leave me. I was only stopping them from leaving me.”
“I’m afraid that’s also against the law, Clara.” Ryan climbed off her and hauled her to her feet. He glanced over to where Joe looked on the verge of collapse. “Can anyone get those cuffs off the victim? And get him some water.”
Joe Lorton was showing some obvious signs of dehydration—his lips were chapped and pale, his eyes sunken. Someone had given Joe his jacket to hide his nakedness.
“Here, sit down.” One of the uniformed officers tried to guide him to sit on the edge of the bed, but he jerked away.
“No, I’m not ever going near that bed again. Not even for a second.”
Fear was bright in Joe’s eyes. He must have thought he was going to die there. He almost had.
Instead, they helped him into a wooden chair in the corner. Someone held a bottle of water up to Joe’s lips, and he gulped it down, water spilling from the sides of his mouth and down his shirt. His wrists were black, green, and red, a combination of dried and fresh blood, and bruising from where he’d tried to escape. He was going to be in a fair amount of pain from bruising and torn and strained muscles, plus the dehydration, but otherwise he’d managed to escape his ordeal without any lasting physical damage. How what had happened would affect him mentally was a whole other thing.
“Take her back to the car,” he told Mallory, handing over a cuffed Clara Reed. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Joe put his head in his hands. “I didn’t think I was going to make it.”
“Hang in there,” Ryan said. “We’ve got paramedics on their way.”
“I’m okay.” A tear spilled down his cheek. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Ryan got the feeling he was trying to remind himself of that as much as he was trying to tell them.
“I thought she was a good person. I didn’t know she was like this. I never would have... I never—” He burst into tears.
Ryan dropped to a knee in front of him. “My name is DI Ryan Chase. I’ve been investigating your case. It’s all right now, Mr Lorton. Everything is going to be okay. She can’t harm anyone else.”
“I’m not the only person she’s done this to,” Joe told Ryan. “She told me there were other men, men she allowed to die in here.”
“We know. That’s why we were able to track her down. It’s how we found you.”
“Thank God. Thank God you did.” His shoulders shook.
The wail of an ambulance approaching sounded from outside.
“The paramedics are here to help you now, Joe. They’ll ta
ke you into hospital to be assessed, and I expect they’ll keep you in for a while, just to make sure there’s no lasting damage. I’ll get one of my officers to come with you, and they’ll stay with you the whole time. I will need to speak to you again about what happened here, though, and will need you to make an official statement, okay? But don’t worry about all of that for now. Just concentrate on getting better.”
Movement came from the front of the cabin, and two paramedics arrived, carrying a stretcher and equipment between them.
“Give us some space, folks,” the female half of the team said. “We’ll take it from here.”
“His clothes will be needed for forensics,” Ryan told the paramedic. “We need to get SOCO in here, too.”
He turned to Dev Kharral. “Stay with the victim in the ambulance. Make a note of anything he says.”
“Yes, boss.”
The property, both this cabin and the workshop, was now one huge crime scene and one in which Ryan hoped they’d find physical proof of each of Clara’s crimes. Joe Lorton might be safe and Clara Reed in custody, but the police work was far from done.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ryan sat in the interview room, Mallory at his side. Across the table was Clara Reed and her solicitor.
With the amount of evidence they’d found in the workshop next to her cabin, plus the statement from Joe Lorton, Ryan had no doubt that they had enough evidence to take to the Crown Prosecution Service to charge her. The real question, however, was if she was mentally competent to withstand a trial and questioning?
Ryan started the recording, and a beep filled the room.
“Interview with Clara Reed,” he began, “conducted by DI Chase. Also present in the room is DS Lawson and Reed’s solicitor, Philip Faw.” He gave the time and date and their location. “Clara, you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence. For the benefit of the tape, please give your name and date of birth.”
Clara complied. She kept her gaze lowered, her curly hair a mass of frizz and falling over her face. Dark circles marked her eyes, and a crop of spots had broken out across her pale skin.
“Clara, do you understand why you’re here?”
She nodded. “Because those men died.”
“They didn’t just die. We believe you killed them, and you would have killed Joe Lorton, too, if we hadn’t found your location.”
“They did just die,” she insisted. “I stopped them from leaving me, that was all.”
A knot twisted in Ryan’s gut. “You mean, you handcuffed them to prevent them from leaving, and then you left them there to die.”
“I didn’t mean it. I...lost track of time.”
“And then when they died, you cut up their bodies and scattered them around Bristol and Somerset to hide their deaths.”
Clara didn’t reply. She chewed on a dried piece of skin on her lip. When she pulled it off with her teeth, a bright spot of blood bloomed.
Ryan kept his voice level. “Tell me exactly what happened the night you met Jacob Tater.”
She twisted her hands together, and for a moment, he didn’t think she was going to respond, but then she started to talk.
“I’d gone out with a couple of girlfriends. I was the designated driver, but by about one, I wanted to go home. They were all stupidly drunk, and I knew they wouldn’t be wanting to go back until the early hours of the morning, and I didn’t want to wait that long. The club was hot and sweaty, and everyone was pissed. I went and stood outside to get some fresh air, and then decided to go. The others would be able to get a taxi home.”
“Are you still in touch with those friends now?”
She snorted in disbelief. “No. I’m not one for keeping hold of long-term friends. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you.”
“What did you do then?”
“Jacob and this girl were having a fight just inside the entrance. I could tell they were together by the way she kept reaching for him, but he just shook her off. Then he turned away from her and stormed out of the club and walked off down the road. I went and got my car from where I’d parked it a few streets over. I’d barely pulled away from the kerb when Jacob stepped out in front of me, clearly angry. I hit his legs with my bumper, and he stopped and gestured at the car, like a ‘what are you doing’ hands thing. I got out and apologised and asked him if he was okay. He exhaled and shook his head and said he was. Then I offered to give him a lift. He’d been drinking, on something else as well, probably. He got flirty with me, and I offered to take him somewhere fun. That was the first time I’d been back to the cabin in years. He thought the place was cool, and I showed him around. He kissed me and pushed me back on the bed.”
She paused, her lips tightening, her gaze darting away.
“What happened, Clara?” Ryan encouraged her. “Did he hurt you?”
He’d been expecting her to say that he’d raped her, and that all of this was in self-defence. After all, it would be extremely hard to prove otherwise, this long after the event. But she shook her head.
“No, he didn’t do anything that I didn’t want him to.” She squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to protect herself from the memory. “But when it...happened...it threw me right back to when my father touched me the same way in that same bed.”
The knot in his stomach seemed to expand into his chest. “Your father?” Ryan checked. “Are you saying he abused you?”
“Up until I’d just turned thirteen. I think once I’d started to look more like a young woman than a little girl, it put him off. When I finally got my period, that was the last straw.” Clara sniffed and wiped her eyes. “He used to say how special I was, and how only people with special relationships like ours got to do this together. We slept in the same bed, and I’d feel him move against me at night, and then my lower back would get all wet and sticky. Sometimes, he cried and said how sorry he was, asking for my forgiveness, and I was always more than happy to give it to him. I didn’t want to see my daddy crying, and at the time, I didn’t really understand why he was so upset. It made me worried that I’d done something wrong and that he wouldn’t love me anymore. If I didn’t have my dad in my life, I’d have no one. He’d homeschooled me, doing his own work alongside mine, using it to teach measurements and weights and lengths. I remembered being filled with such pride when I got something right. I always wanted to please him.”
She paused and looked up through wet eyes, her eyelashes stuck together like spider’s legs.
“You’re doing great,” Ryan encouraged her. “Carry on.”
“We didn’t have a television but played board games at night and listened to the radio, but never the modern radio that played pop songs, always older stuff, with radio presenters who used to drone on and on and on in a monotonous voice. But still, I didn’t mind, because it meant all of my father’s attention was on me, and I didn’t need to share him with anyone else. But as I got older, things started to change. My breasts developed to buds, and I got hair down there. I remember the horror in his eyes when he gave me a bath and first noticed and the shame I felt at my body changing. I wished more than anything that I could do something about it, and I started folding my arms across my chest whenever we were together, trying to flatten myself down. At night, I prayed to wake up in the morning and be back to the way I’d been before, but nothing worked.
“Then one morning, I woke up to find blood in my knickers. I thought I was dying, and I screamed and cried, terrified I was bleeding to death. With no women in the house and only ever being homeschooled, I’d never learned about periods. I’d only just turned thirteen, and my life was already over. I thought I was going to die like my mother had died. My father’s reaction when he came running hadn’t helped. He kept repeating oh God, oh God, over and over, and hadn’t been able to look at me.
“That night, he’d told me that I was growing up, and I needed t
o start to sleep in my own bed. Maybe I should have been relieved, but I hadn’t been. I couldn’t ever remember sleeping by myself, and I felt rejected and frightened. I was sure he was going to leave me now, and I’d be all alone.”
“What happened to your father, Clara?” Ryan asked.
She pressed her lips together. “Everything changed after that. He didn’t leave me, but he might as well have. It was as though I didn’t exist anymore. He wasn’t interested in my homeschooling, and he barely spoke to me. I’d make him food, and he’d take it and eat away from me. I started to hate him. Then one day, he had an accident in his workshop. He’d been working on a piece of furniture, and it fell on him. He must have hit his head as well, because he was out cold. When he came around, he was weak and disorientated, and he couldn’t get the chest of drawers off himself. He was calling me, asking for my help, telling me to go and get someone. But who was I going to get? I was a teenage girl who’d grown up off-grid. I didn’t know anyone. We didn’t have a phone. I knew how to drive the car from the odd occasion he’d shown me, but not on proper roads.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “So, I just left him there, and one day, I went to check on him, and he was dead. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to move the body by myself, so I cut him up and moved him that way. Maybe I should have been more squeamish about it, but we’d caught squirrels and rabbits in the past, and it didn’t really bother me. I just wanted him gone. I buried the pieces of him out in the woods. Then I bleached the whole workshop and just carried on with my life until social services showed up.”
Ryan exhaled and sat back, twiddling his pen in his hand. That was one hell of a story. Could they even prosecute her for the death of her father, since she’d been a minor at the time and technically, it had been an accident? He wasn’t sure it even mattered considering the evidence they had for the other three men. If she was found capable of standing trial, she’d most likely be getting a couple of life sentences anyway.
“Let’s go back to Jacob,” he said. “What happened after you’d had sex?”
