Her garden reflected her interest in the outside space she owned. It was half slabbed and half turfed, with a big green storage box, left by the last owners, at the end.
Bryant knew her well enough to know that if she was home she was most likely to be found in the garage.
But throughout the summer she had found Barney lying on the slabs close to the house, peacefully sniffing the air for just a few minutes at a time before coming back inside to find her. She had grown concerned about his intake of fresh air, but he wouldn’t stay outside without her. She wasn’t going to admit that to Bryant; he teased her enough about the dog as it was.
Bryant sat and crossed one ankle over the other. Barney settled to his right and nuzzled his hand. He automatically raised it and started stroking the dog’s head.
Yep, that’s my boy, Kim thought. Loyal to the person who last gave him food.
‘So, are you gonna tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Probably not,’ she said, sitting in the other chair.
She didn’t even bother to ask how he knew there was something on her mind. It could have been one of a hundred small things that no one but Bryant would have picked up on.
‘Was it me using my own office?’ she asked.
‘Nope.’
‘The fact that I sent everyone home early?’
‘A good pointer, but no, and it wasn’t all that early: it was four o’clock, and we started at seven.’
‘Oh, what then?’
‘That,’ he said, nodding towards her foot that was knocking against her left ankle. ‘Your conscious mind isn’t a foot tapper but your subconscious mind is.’
She instantly stopped tapping.
Bryant laughed. ‘And there you go: thinking you can control it when you don’t even know you’re doing it. It’ll be off again in a minute.’
‘Bugger off,’ she said.
‘You could always do that thing where you talk to yourself and I pretend I’m not here?’ he offered.
‘So, why wouldn’t I just wait until you’ve gone?’
‘Good point,’ he said, staring forward.
Silence fell between them as Bryant continued to stroke Barney’s head.
‘It’s nothing you can help with,’ she said.
‘Probably not.’
‘So, there’s not really any point going on about it,’ she said.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘For God’s sake, stop interrogating me. My mother is up for parole, okay?’
‘Shit, Kim.’ His hand paused above Barney’s head.
‘And I’ve had a letter from Alexandra Thorne.’
His head snapped around. ‘You’re joking?’
She shook her head.
‘Jesus, I’m surprised it’s only your foot that’s been tapping. Okay, start from the beginning and go slowly. I’m old and I need time to process all of this.’
Kim took a deep breath.
‘My mother has a parole hearing at the end of the week. As her only relative I have been informed.’
He frowned. ‘But she’s been there a very long time, surely—’
‘Bryant, don’t even think she’s done enough,’ Kim snapped. That was one betrayal too far.
‘After what she did, three lifetimes wouldn’t be enough. What I was going to say was, she’s been there a long time so surely this has come up before.’
Kim shook her head. ‘My mother has always managed to engineer some kind of violent episode right before a parole hearing is due.’
He looked at her questioningly. ‘Intentionally?’
‘Yeah, believe it or not, it was Alex who put all the dates together and surmised that she keeps herself locked away as a present to me, because she knows that’s what I want.’
‘How the hell would Alex know that?’ he exploded.
‘She worked it out when she visited Grantley last year.’
‘Alex the sociopath visited your mother the paranoid schizophrenic in a facility that houses the criminally insane?’
‘Bryant, do try and keep up.’
He shook his head with bewilderment.
‘Only, this time, there have been no violent episodes and my mother is going ahead with the hearing,’ Kim explained.
She had thought that saying all these things out loud might bring some semblance of order to the thoughts in her head. So far that was a big fat no.
‘What changed her mind?’ Bryant asked.
Kim smiled. ‘My letters. Apparently my forgiveness has given her a whole new outlook and the second chance—’
‘Whoa there. Back up. I’m trying to keep up but… hold on. You’re not going to tell me that our crazy doctor has been writing to your mother as you?’
She shrugged. ‘Okay, I won’t tell you that but, in a nutshell, yes.’
‘Shiiiit,’ he said, and sat back.
Kim rose and went to the kitchen. She snatched both letters from the drawer and took them outside. She held them aloft. Bryant took them and continued to look at her.
‘This is not like your recent project in the garage is missing a handlebar and you can’t get it for a few months kind of problem, is it?’ he asked.
‘Not quite,’ she said, retaking her seat.
As Bryant’s hands were now occupied holding the letters Barney moved to her side of the table.
He read the one from Grantley and placed it face down on the table, while quietly shaking his head. As he read the letter from Alex his jaw dropped lower and lower.
‘Bloody hell, Kim,’ he said, when he’d finished. ‘I can hear the menace in every single sentence.’
He caught her eye and forced her to meet his gaze.
‘You do know that you can’t go and see her, right?’
Kim said nothing. That was clearly a conversation for another day.
‘Damn it, Kim. You’ve already been, haven’t you?’
Or maybe not. Sometimes she wished he didn’t know her quite so well.
He dropped his head into his hands and swore.
‘I had to, Bryant. I had to know what she’s up to.’
‘And do you?’ he asked, forcefully. ‘Did she melt under your fear-inducing gaze and tell you everything?’ he asked, nonplussed.
‘Well… n—’
‘Of course she didn’t. Because whatever she’s up to has been planned for months so she was never going to tell you, but now you’ve done the worst possible thing.’
‘What?’ she asked.
‘You’ve entertained her. Whatever plan she had for you would have been difficult to execute with absolutely no involvement on your part.’
‘But I wanted to know… ’
‘What?’ he asked, waving the page at her. ‘You already knew. You knew that she’d been communicating with your mother as you. Whatever comes next was reliant on you taking the bait.’
Kim said nothing. He was right. It was a nightmarish roundabout ride and she had voluntarily climbed aboard.
When he eventually spoke, his voice was quiet, reflective. ‘You know, when I was a kid we lived by playing fields and there was a small building which served as the changing rooms for the footballers. The pavilion we called it.
‘The walls were awash with graffiti and insults. This was years before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. People would write “Paula is a slag”, or “Karen is a bitch”, or tallies of how many boys a girl had slept with. There was nothing good daubed on that pavilion yet every girl I knew went and checked it every night. My sister included.
‘One night she ran into the house in floods of tears, and I asked her why she had to go and read it every night, and it was simply because she had to know. And sometimes knowing isn’t all that.’
Kim had listened to and understood his words. ‘But how can I prepare myself for what’s coming?’
‘You can’t, because she’s never going to tell you what she wants.’
‘She wants me to go and see my mother,’ Kim blurted out. Damn it, he might as well know it al
l.
Bryant shook his head. ‘Don’t do it, Kim.’
‘She says my mother has something I want.’
‘Can you not see that she is already playing you? She is manipulating your need to know, to get you to do what she wants.’
‘But I want those letters she has from my mother,’ she said. ‘There may be something I can use to keep her inside.’
‘She’ll never give you anything you can use. How would that benefit her in any way, and what could your mother have that you’d want? If you haven’t needed it in twenty-eight years, do you really need it now?’
Kim heard the words. They were going into her ear. She just wasn’t sure they were reaching her brain.
Bryant let out a long sigh. His voice turned quiet, serious.
‘You can’t have forgotten how close you came? How she almost destroyed you the last time?’
‘Of course I remember, Bryant. I was there. But doesn’t that make me better armed this time?’
‘And therein lies your problem. That you are under the impression you have any armour at all.’
Kim knew what he was saying. The fact that she had still not addressed or dealt with her issues ensured that she was still vulnerable to their manipulation.
‘And having given you plenty of advice that you didn’t ask for and that you’ll refuse to follow, I shall say good night.’
Kim followed him to the door. He stepped out and turned.
‘Is there anything I can say that will persuade you not to go and see your mother?’
Kim stared at the ground. ‘I thought you’d appreciate that I’m addressing some of my demons?’
Bryant put his hands into his front pockets. ‘But you’re not, are you? This isn’t a decision you’ve come to of your own free will. This is not you choosing to address your feelings of hate and anger. You’re being goaded into it and that in itself means it’s not the right time.’
Kim accepted his words. They were true enough. But the decision had been made.
He waited for an answer to his original question.
She shook her head. ‘The answer is no.’
He sighed and gave a backwards wave when he reached the top of the drive.
Every single word Bryant had said made sense. Anyone who knew Alex would advise her to stay away. Anyone who knew her would try to insist.
And yes, she had to admit that the woman knew her every weakness.
But Kim had to believe she knew Alex’s too.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
He melded back into the shadows as he watched her colleague leave. What was he doing here so late at night?
It would not be long now until he got the answer to his question.
This one woman had saved people from the devil that talked inside his head.
I can make you clean.
I can make you forget.
I can make you whole.
I can give you back your life.
He knew he would never escape Alexandra Thorne. Maybe once he could have. Maybe if the bitch across the road had tried to save him he’d have had a chance.
But the devil picked him up and threw him aside when it suited Alexandra Thorne, and he allowed it. Would always allow it. Had always allowed it: from the moment she had taken his hand and smiled into his soul and promised him she could take away his pain.
Of course, she’d never had any intention of doing that. He had only ever been her plaything: an experiment, a test to see how far she could go. He had been nothing but a test of her own manipulations.
But for a while he had believed.
He had beaten a man half to death before he’d realised the man was not his uncle; that he was no longer in that tiny bedroom.
The man had only shaken him awake in the darkness to disrupt him from the torture of his nightmares. But so strong were the words of the devil he had seen only one face. And it was a face he had already destroyed.
And then he had known that he would never be clean. He would never be whole. He could never be saved.
There had been other potential victims of the devil and the bitch across the road had saved them.
So why the fuck hadn’t she saved him?
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Kim tore her gaze away from the curious round object on her desk and headed into the main office.
From her spot on the edge of the spare desk she could still see it from the corner of her eye.
Who had placed it by her front door? Was it some kind of taunt? Was it Alex playing mind games with her? No one left gifts on her doorstep.
‘Okay, folks,’ she said, turning away, ‘as you all know we have a potential second victim.’
Kim moved towards the board that she had updated first thing: for her, this morning, it had been a few minutes after six. She had desperately chased sleep but that place of limbo between awake and asleep had been filled with visions of both Alex and her mother. She had been unable to find her way past and had taken Barney for his morning run just after four o’clock.
‘Her name is Maxine Wakeman, and she is a confirmed drug addict who has been in and out of rehab,’ Bryant said, bringing her back to the room. She wasn’t aware that she had stopped talking.
‘She is twenty-two years old and adopted,’ Kim added. ‘Bryant and I have spoken to her adoptive mother, who hasn’t seen her in a while. We’ll be speaking to her birth mother this morning.’
‘Nice area,’ Stacey said, wheeling towards Bryant and handing him a piece of paper with the address.
‘Maxine’s mother is a television personality… apparently,’ Kim said. The name had not been familiar to her. ‘She appears on a morning show as the resident psychiatrist.’
‘Geraldine Hall?’ Dawson asked.
Kim nodded, surprised.
‘Missus watches her every day. Well most days. Really knows her stuff, so she says.’
‘Thanks for that, Kev,’ Kim said.
‘No similarity between the victims,’ Stacey said, frowning.
Kim shook her head. She felt like she’d already had this conversation fifteen times, although the fact of the matter was still troubling her.
One of the most crucial aspects of an investigation was finding the thread, the commonality between victims. The denominator that linked seemingly random victims back to a motive. The link could be an area, a certain type or physical description, age bracket, income bracket, workplace – any one of a hundred things – and yet Kim could not think of even one that would link Deanna Brightman to Maxine Wakeman.
‘Stace, what do we have on the Brightmans?’ Kim asked.
‘Yer were right about the financials,’ Stacey said. ‘A deposit in the six figures was put down on that house twenty-one years ago. A year earlier Deanna went into hospital seven months pregnant and came out not.’
‘A medical malpractice settlement?’ Kim asked.
Stacey nodded. ‘That’s wor I’m thinking. I’m still trying to gather more—’
‘No. That’s enough,’ Kim said. It was enough detail. Especially if the negligence also explained why the couple had no children of their own. ‘Carry on trying to get the number for that old phone of Deanna’s.’
No one had it: her family had updated their phones in the six years since it had been her only phone. The fact that it was the only thing missing told Kim it had to mean something.
‘And I want you to focus on Jason Cross. I want to know more about him. He’s a liar and got very defensive when pushed too far.’
Stacey made a note.
‘Kev?’ Kim asked.
‘Nothing to report, boss,’ he said. ‘Interviewed everyone at the Saltwells yesterday. None of them were in the pub the night before when Maxine Wakeman was murdered, and I also got a pretty long list of the patrons who were in the pub that night.’
‘So?’ Kim asked, struggling to define the young detective’s mood.
‘I’ll be making a start on some of those names, and I’ll take photos of Maxine, Deann
a and the car with me just in case anyone recognises anything.’
Kim nodded her agreement.
‘Okay, well, as we know that Maxine Wakeman was adopted, it’s about time we found out what her real mother has to say.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Alex woke and glanced at the bed opposite.
Tanya sat with her back against the wall, her dirty trainers dangling over the edge of the bed. Her feet tapped together, and the comb in her right hand was being slapped against the palm of her left as she stared intently at her.
‘Morning,’ Alex said, with a pleasant smile.
Other people might have chosen to stay awake, fearing for their life in the company of the most feared woman in the place.
Tanya continued to stare as though Alex had not spoken.
‘Good morning, Tanya,’ Alex repeated.
‘You know I am gonna hurt you, yeah?’ Tanya said, definitely.
Alex sat up. ‘No, you’re not,’ she said, calmly.
Alex was rewarded with the snarl she had come to know so well in such a short time.
‘You just wait… ’
‘For what, Tanya?’ Alex asked. ‘I’ve just been sound asleep for seven hours, two feet away from you. If you wanted to kill me I’d already be dead,’ she said, looking at the comb in Tanya’s hand.
Alex had spent many hours deciding which methods or techniques she might use on Tanya once she had her in the cell.
Conversational hypnosis had been her manipulation of choice. She preferred the term ‘covert hypnosis’: it was basically the art of causing people to change their minds or see things your way without them even knowing you were influencing them.
She had begun the process last night. She had continually told Tanya that she wasn’t going to hurt her while she slept. Despite it being exactly what Tanya had wanted to do she had chosen not to. Her subconscious had taken over. The expressions and terminology she had used were all alluding to something, and Tanya now wanted to know what it was. It differed from regular hypnosis, which was a direct suggestion, whereas covert worked indirectly.
It was the difference between ‘have a piece of cake’ and ‘this cake is delicious’. It was about planting the seed of suggestion so the decision to reach for a piece of cake was made by the person themselves.
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