Closer Than You Think
Page 1
About the Author
DARREN O’SULLIVAN is the No.1 best-selling author of psychological thrillers Our Little Secret, Close Your Eyes and Closer Than You Think. Formerly an actor, theatre director, and teacher, Darren was accepted onto the Faber & Faber novel writing programme in 2015. After completing their extensive six-month training, his debut was born. Darren lives in Peterborough where he’s currently writing his fourth dark and unsettling novel which is due for publication in 2020. Darren loves to chat to readers and spends too much time on twitter, you can find him on @darrensully.
Praise for Darren O’Sullivan
‘An immensely talented new author’
John Marrs, author of The One and When You Disappeared
‘Engrossing, compelling and twisty from the first page to the shocking ending. This book grabbed me and didn’t let go’
Michele Campbell, author of It’s Always the Husband
‘Unique and utterly compelling. This twisty psychological thriller will chill you to the bones’
Gemma Metcalfe, author of Trust Me
‘A stellar and original concept, brilliantly executed. The final chapters had my heart in my throat! O’Sullivan is certainly one to watch’
Phoebe Morgan, author of The Doll House
‘I was gripped by this taut and emotional thriller.’
Louise Jensen, author of The Sister
‘I thought it was absolutely brilliant – really fast-paced, and packed full of action.’
Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me
Also by Darren O’Sullivan
Our Little Secret
Close Your Eyes
Closer Than You Think
DARREN O’SULLIVAN
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Darren O’Sullivan 2019
Darren O’Sullivan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008277871
Version: 2019-02-06
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Praise for Darren O’Sullivan
Also by Darren O’Sullivan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Fourteen Weeks Later
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Turn the Page for an Extract From the Thrilling Close Your Eyes…
Dear Reader
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For my family
Prologue
28th August 2018
Bethesda, North Wales
The eighth
He once read somewhere that people become who they are based on their environment and experiences. Their childhood memories, the interactions with friends and profound moments, good and bad, experiences create the building blocks of existence, and once those blocks are set, they are solid, like a castle wall. Some people are kind, some passionate, some victors, some victims. Some are violent. He knew that more than most. And although people couldn’t fundamentally change, he knew, from personal experience, they could evolve. Transform. A switch could be thrown, showing a different way to be, without really being any different at all. It happened in nature: the caterpillar doesn’t change its DNA when it becomes a butterfly, but unlocks a part of itself that has lain dormant, patiently waiting for the right moment to create a cocoon. He had experienced several evolutions which had altered the direction of his thoughts and actions. But these didn’t change who he was. He would always be someone who killed.
And it wouldn’t be long before he would kill again. A matter of an hour or so. He wanted to fulfil his purpose now, but knew he had to wait, be patient, and watch. Standing in the shadow of a wide tree, he looked into the eighth’s bedroom window, waiting to see her enter, and he thought about when he would be in that room with her just before he ended her life. He knew she would panic and cry and scream before he sedated and killed her, because they always did.
He had planned to be outside her house after dark. But, with it being such a long time since he had done the one thing that made him feel alive, the thing that made him feel like he was flying, he arrived early and took time to enjoy that forgotten sense of anticipation. This also gave him a moment to reflect on the last person he’d failed to kill in this manner. A woman named Claire Moore. She played on his mind more than she should. The one that got away, so to speak.
Before coming to Bethesda, he’d felt compelled to write a letter to Claire. He wanted to explain the reasons for his absence from the world. He revealed to her that after their eventful night a decade before, he needed to regroup, re-evaluate. After her, he never intended to kill in the same manner as he would tonight. But then he discovered she was moving on, leaving that night, their night, in May of 2008 behind. He wrote that he had learnt she was becoming the same person he felt the need to visit before. Which told him she was forgetting him, and he didn’t want his last survivor to forget him, because if she did, everyone else would.
He knew, one day, she would read his letter. Perhaps, before then, he would write more. If so, he would let her read them all, right before he ended her life. He could have killed Claire Moore several times in the past few months but decided not to. He wanted to wait, savour the
moment. He wanted her to know him as well as he knew her, and to understand his reasons.
He wanted to be able to taste the connection they once shared on the tip of his tongue, as the light in her eyes faded. Claire Moore would die, as she nearly did by his hand all those years ago, but not yet, not until he was in buried in the centre of her soul once more. He wanted every voice to sound like his, every shadow to be one cast by his frame blocking the light. It was the reason he was in Bethesda, and why the woman whose window he looked into would die.
The knowledge of what would happen within the next hour, and what would follow over the coming weeks – the speculation, the fear – coursed through his veins so hard his skin itched. He knew he needed to focus, to contain his excitement, until night staked its claim over the day. He centred on his breathing, regulated his heart rate. He pushed thoughts of what he would do to the woman in the house opposite him out of his head.
Then she, the eighth, walked into her bedroom. He watched her step out of her work clothes, her light skirt falling effortlessly around her ankles. He enjoyed the sight of her slim frame in just her underwear, and the tingle that carried from behind his eyes to his crotch. It was a feeling he hadn’t felt in a very long time. There had been plenty of kills since 2008, but not one reignited the fire he remembered from a decade before. For the past ten years, when the itch had been unbearable, he had scratched it discreetly, and taken those no one cared for. The old and alone, the homeless, the migrant. But this one was to be a spectacle, like in those wonderful days in Ireland, putting him back where he belonged, in people’s minds, in Claire’s mind – a destructive force touching everyone like cancer.
He missed being someone who was feared. In the days when a simple power outage caused widespread terror, he would often kill the electricity to a street, just to watch people panic, thinking they would be next. He especially enjoyed one occasion, three months after that night with Claire Moore, when a storm swept off the Atlantic and cut the power in Shannon. It caused the whole town to descend into terror, thinking he had visited. Police took to the streets, people locked their doors. News helicopters circled, expecting to see a house fire in the aftermath – his other calling card. But there was no fire, no death as he was in Greece on that day, on the island of Rhodes, enjoying the sunshine without a care in the world. He intended that trip to be one in which he learnt to be the man he would become, the man he had evolved into. But, seeing the news, the terror coming out of Ireland, drove the desire to kill once more. It was there, on the sun-bleached Aegean coast, that his metamorphosis began, as he felt a more primal calling. He needed to kill, not because it was his purpose, but for the thrill of it. After a brief search he found his victim, an unaccompanied male who had survived the Mediterranean Sea to start a new life in Europe, and he ended his life, luxuriating in the power he felt while doing so.
But the power didn’t last long, because no one cared about this man’s death. And upon returning home to Ireland, he could sense he was being forgotten. Over time, only the areas he had visited remembered the horror of those months between April 2006 and May 2008. To try and cling on to his power, he would still toy with their memories, killing the electricity from time to time, just to see the panic unfold. He would walk through the town and watch as whole families squashed together in one candlelit room. But time heals all wounds, and their outright terror diminished to a quiet readiness. Eventually, a power cut became just an annoyance once more.
The eighth hadn’t closed her bathroom door and he could see as she unclipped her bra and dropped it on the floor. He glimpsed her breasts, and the tingle intensified. But he didn’t want to fuck her; the very idea was repugnant to him. His pleasure came from somewhere else.
He visualised his approach as he waited for the sun to set. Once darkness held, he would go to the single distribution substation. It was less than two hundred metres away, and he knew it supplied the power to her house, along with a few hundred others. The enclosed five-metre wall containing the substation was built in the Nineties, along with the houses it supplied, and was secured with a padlock on its front gates. The bolt cutters that sat heavy in his rucksack would make light work of that. Then it was a case of isolating the switch gear and using a rewired portable generator that would intentionally overheat and blow. This simple and well-practised task would black out the entire street and beyond.
He pictured the walk from the substation to her back door, and then breaking in. He knew he would find her stumbling around upstairs with her phone as a torch. He suspected she would be in her nightwear. He thought about what he would do to her. The fun he would have. The joy he would feel feeding off her fear.
Then, once satisfied, he would place her body in the bathtub, douse her with petrol and ignite her. He would leave before the heat cracked the windows and smoke billowed into the sky. He would go home and cook himself a meal, a pasta dish to replenish the burnt carbohydrates from his evening’s work, as he knew from experience work drove his appetite. Then, full and content, he would watch the news, waiting to see what he did featured on it, and the assumptions they would make. And he knew he would get away with it, because he’d gotten away with it before.
His kills in Ireland landed in the lap of a brute of a man named Tommy Kay. Kay was a drug dealer with a reputation for being heavy-handed if a favour or loan hadn’t been repaid. He was sent to prison for running down a man in his Range Rover, nearly killing him over a hundred-pound debt. Kay’s arrest and that night with Claire Moore were a few months apart, and although Kay was never charged with the murders in Ireland, he was widely believed to be the serial killer that haunted the country, never saying otherwise. Perhaps he enjoyed the notoriety it gave him?
But Kay’s motivations for tacitly claiming his kills weren’t his concern, because one day they would know how wrong they had been. Until then, he would play on what the media would no doubt suggest: because Kay was now dead, tonight was a copycat.
After ten minutes the eighth came out of her bathroom, a towel around her body, another wrapped around her hair. She turned on her TV, then stepped towards the window, her arm outstretched to close her bedroom curtains. She couldn’t see him. He knew it. The fading sun directly behind him was low. The trees tall. She wouldn’t be able to see anything beyond the dusty orange skyline. But still he pressed himself further into the tree’s shadow. She paused before drawing the curtains, her eyes looking out above his head. The last line of sun painted colours in the evening sky. A perfect disguise for him. Hide the ugly thing that he had become in something equally beautiful.
It was almost time. Another thirty minutes and it would be dark enough to work. He smiled, knowing how tomorrow’s newspapers would read.
Chapter 1
6th May 2018
St Ives, Cambridgeshire
As I lay on my right side, left arm under the pillow that my head rested on, I fiddled with my necklace, counting the keys that hung from the thick silver chain. Four keys. Front door, back door and two smaller window keys, one up, one down. I watched the alarm clock flick from one minute to the next. I had done so for the last hour, waiting for it to say 05:05, then the alarm would sound, and I could get up. I’d wanted to get up at three minutes to four, a dream of fire waking me, but forced myself not to. By doing so, I hoped I could present myself as a woman who wasn’t struggling to sleep. Although, I don’t know who I was trying to kid. I was struggling to sleep, I always do at this time of year.
I watched the minutes turn into hours and waited for my alarm before rising, because it felt like a victory over myself. It was me telling myself I could be normal if I worked hard at it. And that was important, to be as normal as I could be. This daily victory was one of the few things I liked about the month of May. It seemed small, maybe even pointless, but the small things mattered more than I could have possibly foreseen. I had no choice but to enjoy the little things. Like the morning sunshine and the sound of the breeze in the trees; the buzz of bees in my garde
n collecting nectar from one of the many flowers I grew. If I focused on these details, I would get through the month I dreaded. Then June would come, and I would survive another year.
Rolling over to face the window, I looked through the small gap in my curtains to see pale blue sky outside. Not a cloud in sight. It made me smile. A cloudless morning was another victory. Stretching, I uncurled my arms and straightened my legs groaning as my muscles pulled, and blood flowed in my limbs. A feeling I liked. Reaching over, I turned off my bedside light and picked up my phone, checking the date. I didn’t know why I did that. I knew exactly what day it was. I had been checking and counting down for weeks now. The date that was the source of my sleepless nights, the date that ruined the month for me was only thirteen days away. Thirteen long days until I could reclaim the night for its intended purpose. I couldn’t help but feel a rising trepidation that started just below my belly button and slowly oozed up through my stomach and chest. I sat upright and tricked myself into thinking gravity would stem the flow. With a few deep breaths, it worked.
This year marked ten years since it happened. My mother had somehow convinced me it would be healthy to go back to Ireland, back home. I didn’t like flying; I didn’t like the idea of going back there again. But Mum stressed it would be good for me. It would cleanse me, and, she said, would help me remove the guilt I was feeling for enjoying the time I was spending with my new friend, Paul. She was right, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it.