Tell Me Your Secret

by Dorothy Koomson

  Ned has got another beer but hasn’t drunk from it, even though I can see how shaken he is. I’ve given him the briefest of rundowns on the situation and what happened today and he has listened without saying much.

  Eventually, when the fragmented reality that my words and revelations created have settled around us, Ned starts to drink from his bottle.

  It feels very . . . odd, this new reality where someone else knows. When DI Foster told me that she knew about me and knew who Kobi’s biological father was, I’d felt under siege rather than exposed. That she was backing me into a corner and I had to come out fighting. Even when she came to my house and apologised, I’d felt defensive rather than unmasked. But that was because of the way she went about it.

  With Ned, I feel unsettled. It’s been a necessary revelation, but I don’t feel defensive or overly uncovered. Maybe those were feelings I’d have the luxury of experiencing if I didn’t know that someone is coming to kill me.

  ‘I thought it was me,’ Ned says eventually. I notice his hands are trembling, even though he’s doing his best to conceal it from me. ‘The way you were sometimes, I thought it was because of me.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down, it was to do with you, too.’

  He shoots me a vague smile, then glances down at the deck below our feet. He’s barefoot and I’m wearing my trainers. When he looks up again, I know what he’s going to ask.

  ‘Is—’ he begins.

  ‘Yes, yes he is. And no, he doesn’t know. No one has ever known until Detective Foster figured it out.’

  ‘This is a huge burden, Pieta. And you’ve been carrying it all alone.’

  I take his new beer bottle from his hand, replace it with the empty one in mine. ‘It only feels like a burden when I think about it all,’ I say. ‘And mostly, I don’t think about it.’

  Jody

  Friday, 12 July

  ‘Laura!’ I shout from my office. I don’t usually do that, I’m not that much of a terrible boss. I just can’t face it out there. Everyone is working so hard to try to correct my mess, and I can’t face them.

  ‘Yes, Guv’?’ she replies when she appears in my doorway.

  ‘Have you got the results of that DNA back yet?’

  ‘No, because it wasn’t officially assigned to any case, I can’t mark it as urgent and they said they would have to put it in a queue.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Whose DNA are we testing again?’ she asks as though I’d told her and she’d forgotten.

  ‘It’s better for you and everyone out there who wants to keep their job that only I know,’ I reply. ‘I thought you got that from the way I said, “Can you get this tested on the quiet and make sure you don’t let anyone else on the team know.” Ring any bells?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Any news on PC Perry?’

  ‘He’s stable and they think he may wake up today.’

  ‘Poor bloke.’ He put up quite a fight to protect Callie, but the beating he took was vicious and unnecessary. ‘How’s it going out there?’

  Laura steps into my office and shuts the door behind her. ‘Not the best,’ she replies. Long, dramatic pause . . . ‘We’re doing the best we can but it’s like she’s literally dropped off the face of the Earth.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t understand how he found her,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, come on, Laura, don’t do that, don’t pretend.’

  She pulls out a seat and sits down. ‘Do you think it was Stockholm syndrome?’

  I shrug helplessly. I’ve already taken the dressing-down of all dressing-downs from DCI Nugent and the ACC. I did so many things wrong: didn’t put the appeal out early enough, shouldn’t have let her talk to the press, should have moved her out of the area to a witness protection house sooner, should have, should have, should have . . . I deserved it all but it still smarted. They were giving me seventy-two hours to find her or find The Blindfolder, or someone else would take over. They meant take over everything, not just finding Callie, but didn’t actually say it. ‘We should have seen it. I should have seen it. She kept lying to us, to me, and we were almost wilful in not seeing it. She almost certainly called him, she must have had another mobile phone. God knows where she hid it since we searched through her things.’

  ‘You know when you said you didn’t trust her?’

  I nod.

  ‘I thought . . . everyone thought you were bang out of order.’

  ‘Yes, I remember Karin Logan, Detective Constable, telling me so.’

  ‘But you were right in the end.’

  ‘Would rather have been wrong and, you know, still have the victim within sight.’ I blow out air. ‘I should have got her counselling. All that talking to the journalist, all the speculation in the press, the fact she was lying to us . . . I should have insisted on a psychological evaluation before doing the article.

  ‘He was clearly using Callie to talk to the public, to put fear into his past vics and to scare other women. I’ve basically allowed him to terrify every woman in this country. He has terrorised women for nearly fifteen years and now he’s doing it on a national scale. And I let him. I’ll be lucky if I keep my job let alone my rank.’

  ‘It won’t be that bad, surely,’ Laura says. She’s a good person, that’s what I like about her. Under all the dramatics and theatrics, she’s a caring person.

  ‘Maybe not. But I’ll do my best to make sure none of you lot are blamed.’

  ‘What was that journalist woman doing here earlier?’

  ‘Checking up on the article, seeing if we have any leads.’ It’s quite easy to lie to Laura about things like this. I am, in a way, still trying to protect Pieta, although by rights I am hindering the investigation by keeping this from my team. I’ve already let one victim down, though, I don’t want to do that to this one. I know she’s gone on the run, and I know she thinks she’ll be able to outrun this, but she can’t. The Blindfolder is hunting her, seeking her out because she was special in some way. Special enough to leave his DNA behind. And now he knows where she is, it’ll only be a matter of time. People who try to hide, try to disappear, always make the same mistake – they contact someone from their former life. Always. They may leave it weeks, months, even years, but they always have to make that connection to their past and that is always when they are sunk. Your past defines you, and it is almost always the instrument of your destruction if you can’t let it go.

  ‘She left in a hurry,’ Laura comments.

  ‘Yes, I told her about Callie and she freaked out. I think they got quite close.’

  ‘Is that wise, Guv’, telling something like that to a journalist?’

  ‘What’s she going to do, Laura, write an article that will make people look out for Callie?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sarcastic then. I just don’t want anything to happen to her. I want us to find her alive.’

  ‘So do I . . . I’ll get back to it.’

  ‘Thanks, Laura.’

  She shuts the door behind her.

  I am not handling this very well. I was up last night going through every file, every file, looking for a clue, trying to work out who he is, where he might have taken her. I place my head in my hands, massage my temples.

  The problem with Callie going to him is that these situations never end well for the Stockholm victim. Callie said he was looking for someone. Pieta. Pieta said he’d found her, I saw that from the package she left. I did wonder why he didn’t just take Pieta and her son when he saw her and instead took the picture of her, but then I realised – like everything he did, he needed to clean up. He needed to erase all the ways we could trace him and that includes eliminating Callie.

  Why send Pieta that package, though? Surely he would have thought she would run, she would run straight to us or simply disappear.

  He didn’t seem like a gambler, someone who would take that risk. But maybe this is far more of a power-play game to him than
I realised? Or what if he had no choice? What if he needed to put Pieta on high alert because he wanted to terrify her into making a mistake? No, no, that doesn’t chime with everything he’s done so far.

  And in all of this there is Callie. The woman who has gone to him, not knowing that she is almost certainly going to her death.

  But what will he do now that Pieta isn’t in easy reach? Will he keep Callie alive? Did he allow her to go into police custody so she could tell him how we do it – what code words and code names we use, which sort of places we have them stay in?

  Maybe that was it: maybe he thought killing past victims would trigger Pieta into coming to the police and he could find her that way. Or maybe he thought we would put Pieta and her son in the same place as Callie and he would have easy access to her. Either way, he has been using us.

  This is a game to him. And, so far, he has won every round.

  I massage my temples even harder, trying to press away the headache that has been blossoming and flowering in my head since we found out Callie was gone.

  I can’t see how this is going to end. Usually, I can stand back, look at a case and see how it’s likely to pan out. I can see if we will get a resolution or if it’ll need to be put on the back burner for a while until something else happens. This case, it has all the hallmarks of a back-burner case, something that we will eventually solve – except the sixth Monday deadline has kept it firmly on the front burner.

  I am so lost in my thoughts, wandering the labyrinthine paths in my mind that I almost don’t hear the phone. From the edge of my desk, my little red and silver mobile that Winston got me for Christmas last year, bleeps. I take my time picking it up because it won’t be good news. It won’t even be neutral news, it will be something that adds more bad news petrol to the raging inferno of this situation.

  I call up the message and then have to carefully place the phone back on my desk. Another moment. Another moment when I am about to be shackled by the choices I make.

  He says he wants Pieta. And her son.

  He’s going to hurt me if he doesn’t get her.

  Help me.

  Part 7

  Jody

  Friday, 12 July

  This place called Seaford is really quite beautiful.

  I’ve driven here along the coast road with the sea as a constant companion telling me I shouldn’t do this. I should stop, go back, tell everyone on my team what has transpired: about the DNA, Pieta, her son, the package. The text messages.

  I’m not going to do that.

  I was never going to do that.

  I’m protecting Pieta’s son. I’m protecting Pieta. I’m trying to save Callie.

  And I need to avenge Jovie.

  No, I haven’t forgotten that. I haven’t let that slip from my mind. All the other stuff might be at the forefront now, but this underpins everything – that man destroyed my sister and I’m going to destroy him in return.

  As I come round the A259, the horizon opens up to me. Encountering this seascape with white cliffs, beaches and sea that seems to go out for miles is like coming to the end of the world. It’s dark, but that doesn’t take away from the sheer beauty of this place. The sick, twisted irony of doing something so ugly in a place this beautiful doesn’t surprise me. There is something very wrong in The Blindfolder, something that needs to obliterate beauty whenever he encounters it.

  The satnav directs me through the streets, some that are narrow and quaint, others that are wide and modern. I navigate my way, driving slowly as the streets are so alien to me that I’m not sure what I’ll encounter around any corner. I eventually come to the pub car park where he told me to park the car and then to walk ten minutes to their location.

  I don’t know what time it is. I don’t wear a watch and I had to leave my mobile phone behind, so to get to their location, I’ve had to print out a map. No one noticed me doing this. And no one will notice I’m gone for a while. I’ve left my computer on, my phone on my desk, my bag is there on the floor and my coat is hanging behind the door.

  He was very clear: if I didn’t come with just Pieta and her son, he was going to kill Callie. I’d tried to negotiate for time but he knew that Pieta wasn’t at her house and he wanted her. Now.

  He’s obviously going to flip when he sees she’s not here, but that’s a chance I’ll have to take. My hope is that I can convince Callie to join me, let her know that she’ll always come second to Pieta so if we come together to overpower him, she’ll be free.

  I wish I was on a beach somewhere.

  Any beach.

  The one I just saw along the coast from Seaford, that would do. Any of them would do. I wish I was on a beach somewhere, reading a book and debating in my head when I should apply sunblock. I wish I was on a beach somewhere and not walking towards my pretty much certain death.

  I arrive at the warehouse where he is holding Callie, where he expects me to deliver Pieta and her son. It is smaller than the word ‘warehouse’ implies, but still big enough to drive a transit van through its double garage doors. That’s how they did it, isn’t it? Got themselves a garage – warehouse – where they could drive straight in and unload their cargo – an unconscious woman – out of sight. Same with when they returned them, loaded them out of sight of prying neighbours’ eyes.

  I doubt they used this place previously, too far from London, too quaint and quiet for people not to notice how much movement there is late at night. No, I reckon they had somewhere near where those remains were found recently. It was deserted out there, no one would know how many times you came and went there.

  Why do I keep saying they? Because it’s become clear to me that there had to be two of them. You can’t snatch someone, keep hold of them, inject them and then speed off within seconds on your own. People would notice a fight, a struggle, a person restraining another person, a van waiting to drive away. No, you can’t do things as efficiently as he did alone. The Blindfolder had a partner.

  Callie is the most recent one, I’m sure. She has either been broken down and brainwashed to help him, or has negotiated herself into the position to avoid being killed. She probably does have feelings for him, but they have blossomed from being in captivity, from developing an empathy with your captor to save yourself. We all do different things to survive. For example, this mission to end The Blindfolder, not merely bring him to justice, has helped me survive all this time.

  Losing Jovie was a defining moment in my life. It twisted itself around my core and for a long time, I was lost. I felt like I was going through the motions. I did not see the point to life, even though I was living. I fooled everyone: I seemed to throw myself into my job, into my relationship, into every single day. But the reality was, until I met Harlow, I was surface living. Skimming on the top layer of life, unable to break through to the real, murky, complicated, incredible, beautiful, ugly layers below. When Harlow showed up, I discovered my purpose, my reason for not joining Jovie days after she left. I had something to focus on, an end goal that would balance the cosmic scales. Someone good had been taken out of the world, now someone evil had to be removed, too.

  So it doesn’t matter if he has someone with him who helps, if he has a partner, it won’t stop me. I’ve been on this mission for thirteen years, I’m not going to stop now.

  The building, at first glance, is dilapidated. The upper levels of its white walls are rough and uneven, the white paint peeling off in patches. The lower level has red-orange brickwork that looks worn and battered. There is a window in the upper level, boarded up, adding to the rundown look of the place. There is another larger window at the front, which is also boarded over. The place appears to be mostly abandoned, but if you look closely, you can see the boards are new, the paint is actually fresh in parts, the peeled back ones are just there to make it look of no real interest. The large, black garage doors are modern and new, electric, I would guess. This place is not what it seems – at all.

  I knock on the garage door.

>   Wait.

  A clunk, then a whirr as the doors lift, opening up to let me in.

  I am walking towards certain death. I’m fine with that. Truly. Because if there’s one thing I know, I am taking him with me.

  Pieta

  Friday, 12 July

  ‘There is so much I can’t tell anyone,’ I say. ‘Because once it’s out there . . .’

  ‘It makes it real?’ Ned finishes.

  ‘Not just that. People will use it, twist it, tell me it’s not my reality. It shouldn’t bother me what other people think and say, but it’s so brutal out there sometimes, it’s hard to screen it out.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘What is there to say? The truth of it is I wanted to live so I . . .’ So I talked to him, appeased him, made him believe I cared. It messes with my head, even now.

  Years and years ago, I interviewed a prostitute for an article about buying and selling sex. Of course, I did a Pieta and got very much engrossed in hearing her story. One of the things that always stayed with me was that she said if you wanted to make money and get repeat customers, you had to make every punter/‘client’ believe that he was the best. No matter how vile – and all of them were vile in different ways – you had to act like that every time. You had to switch off the part of you that felt anything, and get the rest of you to believe, actually believe what was a lie was the truth. That was the only way to get through it. You could try to fake it, but if you got one of the punters whose ego wasn’t so huge that they managed to notice other people, they would be on the lookout for any signs you were pretending. You had to do everything you could to make you and them believe what you knew to be an absolute lie.

  In The During I had to do that. I had to do that to survive.

  I woke up and he spoke to me. He told me what was going to happen. And as my limbs came back to life because the knockout drugs were leaving my body, I realised I would never manage to keep my eyes closed for forty-eight hours. I would never manage to endure it. I had to do something else to stay alive.