by Luca Veste
The noise came again. A bang. Against the front door. He shook his head, trying to decide if he was happy that Natasha had come over, or if he would have preferred a solid eight hours of sleep.
He moved down the hallway, opening the door as he reached it, a small smile on his face.
No one was outside.
He stepped out on his front step, moving quicker down his path as he heard footsteps running up the street.
He saw a blur of movement in the distance, turning the corner. Out of sight. Confusion washed over him as he looked back at his house. Nothing out of place. Nothing left there.
He remembered as a kid they would play a game of ‘knock a door run’. Banging on some poor person’s door and then running away quickly.
It was too late at night for that, he thought. He considered running after whoever it was, but his hesitation had already left him far behind.
Instead, he moved back towards his house and went inside. His heart rate returned to normal a few minutes after he closed the door behind him and heard the microwave ping.
He ate his meal in silence, reading over the notes he’d collected, trying to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of his mind.
That someone was watching him. Had been at his house, banged on the door and ran away. For a reason.
He fell asleep on the sofa, thinking about one thing.
His next step.
NOW
Twenty-One
The Second Interview
Tuesday 30th October
Interview Room One
Lancaster Police Station – sixty miles from Liverpool City Centre
It was later in the day now. A tired and tepid air had settled over them as they sat down for the next stage. Another interview. More questions, when all he wanted to do was sleep.
He was a mixture of emotions. Boredom had set in earlier, while he was sitting in the cell alone. Then, there was another part of him that wanted to shout and scream at the top of his lungs. To tear the place apart in frustration.
‘This interview is being recorded both visually and audibly. Investigating officers are Detective Inspector Patrick Hicks and Detective Sergeant Victoria Lee. Suspect still refuses to give us his name.’
The same spiel as earlier. He continued to stare at the table, trying to quieten the other side of him. The voices straining to be noticed in his head. Feeling his grip on reality start to slip.
‘We would like to talk about the woman you were found with,’ Hicks said, his voice steady and strong.
He thought that inside, Hicks would be anything but steady and strong. He could almost smell the revulsion the detective was feeling for him. ‘And I said she wasn’t important. Not yet.’
‘We want to talk about her,’ Hicks said, more forcefully now. ‘Why were you there with her?’
‘Why are we anywhere? I had something to do. She was there, too.’
‘What’s her name?’
He shrugged his shoulders and then enjoyed the silence that followed. The seconds slipping by, closer and closer to the end.
‘How did you end up there? What contact did you have with the victim previously?’
He almost laughed at that. Victim. As if that’s all she was. ‘That was the plan. She would be there and I would be, too. That’s how the story goes. I was just playing my part in it.’
‘Just another victim to you,’ Hicks said, barely containing his anger towards him now. He could feel it coming off him like heat from an open flame.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Beside him, the solicitor coughed, but at least he’d stopped trying to interrupt him. Probably just wanted to get out of there. Back to his wife and kids, away from all of this madness.
‘Okay, if you like, we can go one by one. Would that be better?’
He didn’t respond, looking at the bare walls around him instead. The seconds continued to tick by.
‘Stacey Green, twenty-two years of age,’ Hicks said finally, reading from his notes. ‘Worked in the local cinema. Youngest of three children. Single, lived with her doting parents. Your second victim.’
He didn’t say anything, waiting for a question to appear. He knew this was just a technique, humanising the dead, trying to provoke an emotional response.
He couldn’t give them that.
‘How did you get in contact with her? How did you two cross paths?’
‘How does anyone meet these days? All that matters is that I killed them. All of them. One by one. So, why don’t we stop messing around with all these stupid little details and charge me? I mean, we both know that’s what’s going to happen, so let’s get it over and done with. Stop wasting my time with these questions.’
‘We need to go over the details first…’
‘That’s what I want to do,’ he said, interrupting the detective. His voice reverberated around them, but the two detectives didn’t even flinch. ‘You’re just not asking the right questions. You should be looking into all those deaths and seeing the connection between them all. Instead, you keep messing around with diversions. Let me talk and I’ll tell you what you need to know.’
There was a pause. A glance between the two detectives. The solicitor sitting next to him seemed to shift away from him slightly, as if distance would help him. ‘Why don’t you ask about all the other victims? How I convinced them to believe a story and then die.’
He could see the anger return to DI Hicks’s eyes. He needed that.
He needed his judgement to be clouded.
He was desperate.
‘We’ve gone over some of the names you’ve given us,’ DS Lee said, a pen in her hand, scoring down a list on one of the files in front of her. ‘They were found dead in a few different locations, but concentrated in the north-west region mostly. Different ages, split between genders. You’ve been concentrating on women more recently, I see. Your first named victim was male. The male is the only one classed as an unsolved murder. The rest are all apparent suicides. Over the past eleven months, all of them were found dead. That was all that linked them together until you told us you killed them. Why now?’
‘Because you found me.’
‘How did we find you?’
He paused, wishing he’d accepted a drink of water now. His mouth had been going dry, but the last question had finished the job. ‘You’d have to ask someone else. I don’t know. Luck?’
‘Perhaps it is just luck,’ DS Lee said, looking back at her notes and not giving anything away. ‘Shall we talk about your fourth victim – Melissa Carmichael – what can you tell me about her?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything,’ DS Lee replied, her face inscrutable. ‘Start from when you chose her as a victim. How did you meet her?’
He didn’t like the way she had taken charge of the interview, leaving DI Hicks to sit in silence. He had found it easier to deal with the barely constrained anger of the man. The blankness of DS Lee’s features troubled him.
‘She told lies. So I told her to go to a certain place. Perform certain tasks. She didn’t question me. She did as she was told and she became my fourth victim because of it.’
‘What did you ask her to do?’
He didn’t answer, staring back at her instead. Not sure what she was trying to achieve. She didn’t strike him as someone who could be intimidated.
He didn’t want to answer.
That was the truth.
He didn’t want to reveal the full extent of The Game. Not now.
It was almost fun, in a delirious sort of way, watching them try to work out what was sitting in front of them.
Perhaps he really was losing his mind. Perhaps he’d already lost it. They would believe that, quite easily. Someone rocks up and confesses to killing eight people, over an extended period of time – it doesn’t look sane.
Maybe it would be easier if they believed he was mad and that would be that. Lock him up in a secure hospital and never worry about him again.
/>
Maybe that would be for the best.
‘You do something bad and you have to try and atone for your lies. Butyou never realise you’re playing with a loaded dice. And no one has won yet. Charge me with eight counts of murder and it’ll be over. Until then, it goes on.’
He knew on some level that wouldn’t be the outcome. That soon, the house of cards he’d tried to construct would come tumbling down. He didn’t know how to stop it. Didn’t know what he should do.
He wasn’t sure of anything. Only that the story hadn’t finished yet.
BEFORE
Twenty-Two
Mark suppressed a yawn as he left his car and made his way up the path the next morning. He rang the bell. The house seemed like any other in the area. Small, a decade or so old, with that new-build brick colour. To him, they’ve always looked like a strong wind could blow them over. He knew this was what would soon be the norm – that every house in the country would look like these at some point. Smaller, less weathered. Communities changing before his eyes. As more investment came into the city, this was how the future would look.
He shook his head and checked his notes again.
Chris Jackson. One of the names that had stood out when he’d gone through all the messages to Emily again that morning. The most vitriolic, the most threatening. Mark was standing on the doorstep, about to ring the bell again, when the door opened. A lad of about twenty stood before him, arms bulging from a tight white V-neck, showing the tufts of dark chest hair poking out. Tattoos fighting for freedom from the sleeves. Skin the colour of a burnt orange. Hair swept over his head in a manner that probably took hours to perfect.
‘Yeah?’
‘Chris Jackson?’
The lad slouched, one hand still holding on to the door. ‘Yeah, who are you?’
Mark produced his identification. ‘Detective Constable Mark Flynn. I was wondering if you’d be able to answer a few questions, related to a current investigation.’
Whatever or whoever Chris had been expecting, it quite obviously wasn’t a detective wanting to ask questions. He stammered a couple of times, then nodded a little too enthusiastically and showed him inside. Mark walked through into what he assumed was the living room and turned to see him still standing by the front door. ‘You can come back inside with me, it’s okay.’
‘I probably shouldn’t have let you in,’ Chris said, seeming smaller now, even as the muscles on his biceps struggled to be contained. ‘My mum and dad are both out.’
‘That’s okay. I think you’ll want this conversation to be between us for now.’
Chris was still hovering in the doorway, seemingly lost in the strange direction his morning had suddenly taken. The room smelled of lavender and Lynx Africa, the television in the corner paused in the middle of a game of FIFA. Mark sat down on the smaller of two sofas, taking up most of the space, even with his small stature. Eventually Chris was sitting down on the opposite seat, putting his controller on the table.
‘What’s this about then?’
Mark took a few seconds, then began taking printouts out of the black folder he’d been carrying. ‘It’s about these communications you sent a few months ago.’
Chris took the sheets of paper from him as Mark leaned across to hand them over. He began reading them, a look of confusion sweeping across his face as he did so. Mark spoke as he continued to scour them. ‘I’m investigating the disappearance of Emily Burns. I gather you know who that is.’
‘I don’t understand…’
‘It’s quite simple really,’ Mark said, placing the folder back in his lap and staring at Chris as he talked. ‘Emily has gone missing in suspicious circumstances and we’re looking into all aspects of her life. It seems you’ve had some interaction with her in the past. I’d like to talk about that with you.’
‘I don’t even know her,’ Chris said, but his voice was quieter now. The semblance of confidence he’d been holding on to evaporated with each passing second.
‘Really? That’s strange, as it looks to me like you were speaking to her for a long time. The first messages you exchanged with her were over a year ago now.’
‘No, I mean, I… I didn’t really know her at all.’
‘You’ve said that. Yet, it looks like you were in some kind of online relationship for quite a while. It didn’t end well though, did it?’
Chris hesitated, clearly working out if he should continue the lie. Finally, he spoke. ‘No.’
‘I think the last message you sent was “If I ever see you on the street I’ll push you into the road in front of a car.” That sound about right?’
Chris didn’t answer, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he dry-swallowed a few times.
‘How about an easier question,’ Mark said, when it became clear Chris was struggling. ‘How did you know Emily Burns?’
The silence was shorter this time. ‘I didn’t really know her. I knew the girl she pretended to be.’
‘And who was that?
‘Jenny Ward.’
‘You didn’t know her before then?’
‘No… well, no, not really. She told me… afterwards, that she knew me from school, but I had no idea who she was. I thought I was talking to someone from Canada. She’d ring me and everything. She somehow found out I was planning on moving over there to do a sports degree. She made it seem like I’d have someone waiting for me.’
‘And this went on for over a year without you knowing who it was?’
Chris made as if to answer quickly, then stopped himself. Mark imagined he wasn’t used to being made to look a fool. His entire demeanour when he’d first opened the door had screamed entitlement. He would be the lad at school who was good at everything. Had his pick of a number of girls, loads of friends. Always listened to, never maligned.
Exactly the type of person Emily would have wanted to teach a lesson, it seemed.
‘I didn’t really think it was real,’ Chris said, holding on to the sheets of paper still, but no longer looking at them now. ‘She was just there, with a nice comment, or a message that would make me smile.’
‘There was more to it than that,’ Mark said, knowing some of the comments that had been shared. Intimate discussions… well, intimate was probably too delicate a term to use. ‘You sent her pictures of yourself. That must have been embarrassing when you realised the girl you were supposedly talking to was someone else entirely. Someone you knew, who knew your friends.’
‘Yeah, it was,’ Chris replied, his grip on the printouts tightening now. ‘I didn’t like the fact that I’d been played with. I was supposed to be going over to Canada in the summer, but I didn’t in the end.’
‘That was Emily’s fault?’
‘Yeah… well, no, not really. But it didn’t help. When I found out she wasn’t who she said she was… I went crazy for a bit.’
‘You were scared of being thought of as someone who could be played like that. You were worried that she would share some of the things you’d shared with her. Does that sound about right, Chris?’
‘I wasn’t happy about it,’ Chris said, trying to keep his voice level and calm, but it was painfully obvious he was still angry. Hurt. Embarrassed. All wrapped up in one combustible ball. ‘You can’t just mess with someone like that. It’s not right. She made me think she was some fit girl in Toronto – a cheerleader and everything – and it turned out to be some fat bird from round the corner. That’s not right.’
‘How did you find out you weren’t talking to who you thought you were?’
‘I got a message from someone else she had been messing with,’ Chris said, finally laying the paper to the side. ‘It was out of the blue. I knew something wasn’t right when she wouldn’t FaceTime me, she would only speak on the phone. And a few times the accent would slip, like. Then I got a message from someone who told me her real name. I didn’t remember her at all, but a couple of lads from school did. She’s a proper nutcase, man.’
‘And how did you tak
e the news?’
Chris smiled without showing his teeth, shrugged and then sighed. ‘I think you can tell not that well. I was angry. You would be too if you’d been strung along like I was.’
‘What do you think of those messages you sent now?’
‘I don’t know. She kinda deserved it, don’t you think? She made me look like a complete idiot. I couldn’t just let that go, you know. It wasn’t right, what she did. I know other people probably got it worse.’
‘And the person who told you who she really was?’
Chris shook his head. ‘No idea who it was. Anonymous. I didn’t believe them at first, but you know, I put it together and couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been.’
‘You know others who this happened to?’
‘Has to be others, right? It wasn’t just me. There were probably loads of people she had on.’
‘There was more, though, wasn’t there?’ Mark said, trusting his instincts. Something had been bugging him since he’d started going through all the communication Emily had with all these people… these victims. There was something he wasn’t seeing. Something that happened outside of the social media circle he’d been allowed a glimpse into, something that would trigger the rage that was directed back at her. ‘She did more,’ he probed.
Chris breathed deeply, looking towards the floor as if it contained the answer. ‘She had pictures. Stuff I didn’t want people to see, you know? She threatened me. Said she would share them with everyone I knew. Family, friends, the lot. Unless I kept talking to her. But I couldn’t. I didn’t think she’d go through with it.’
‘She didn’t share yours, did she?’
Chris didn’t answer, but Mark could feel the answer hanging in the air between them.
‘I promised not to tell anyone what she’d been doing. That was the deal we made. I was one of the lucky ones.’
‘How did she do it?’
‘Through email. Said she was going to send them to everyone she could, post them everywhere, if I ever said anything about what she’d done. I took it serious, like. I was too scared about what would happen, so I didn’t say a word. She’s a nutcase.’