The Blissfully Dead

by Louise Voss

  This just couldn’t be happening.

  She had remembered, now, where she recognised him from. The hospital. He had been there the day Shawn had come to visit her. He’d been lurking in the background, standing just behind Mervyn Hammond. He’d looked different back then, with a trendy beard, but now it made sense how he’d known what she’d spoken to Shawn about, telling him her favourite song.

  Don’t look, Chloe, don’t look, Rog; no, not Rog, don’t say Rog, because it was too painful to think of her dad’s nickname for her then, because to think of that was to think of her mum and dad and how they’d been through so much with her, days and weeks and months of sitting by her hospital bed, for it to end like this with her stupidity and vanity, naked and cut up and killed like Rose and Jess . . . and soon Jade.

  But somehow, unbidden, her eyes flicked open and up, just for a split second, but in that one split second what she saw made her vomit all over herself again, retching uselessly, sick and tears mingling with the piss and shit until she thought there was nothing left inside her except terror.

  Jade looked like a toppled store mannequin, her limbs rigid in that split second, with him crouched over her, the knife blade glinting in the light of the oil lamp as he cut her, like her dad making Sunday roast when he would put cuts all over a leg of lamb to stick garlic cloves under the skin of it.

  Amid the screaming, the man ranted at Jade, told her how he’d found Melanie’s suicide note written on the back of a poster, a poster that had been attached to the gate here. From his screeched words and Jade’s begging, Chloe made out something about how Jade had contacted Melanie telling her she’d won a competition to meet the band here at this hotel, but when Melanie turned up she’d found the place derelict, the poster containing a Photoshopped image of OnT laughing at her, ‘LOSER’ written above her head. Chloe guessed all this was in the suicide note.

  It had been the final straw.

  Chloe shuddered and gagged again. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t help Jade. All she could do was wait for it to be her turn, and pray that it would be over quickly.

  She shut her eyes again, kept them closed.

  After a few more minutes there was no more screaming, then a hmphhhmph sort of noise and Chloe could hear the man breathing loudly.

  Silence. Stillness. Just the scent of Friendship hanging in the air like a poisonous gas, mixing with the smell of her fear.

  Then, out of the silence, a dragging sound. Jade being moved.

  Heavy footsteps across the stage, coming towards her.

  Eyes still closed, Chloe started to shake and hyperventilate. Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be Thy Name, forgive me, Lord, I’m sorry for everything I did wrong especially for the mean things I said about Melanie I didn’t mean them, look after MumandDadandBrandon I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m—

  The man, stinking of Friendship, crouched down behind her and unlocked her handcuffs.

  ‘Get up. And take your clothes off. It’s your turn.’

  Chapter 58

  Day 14 – Patrick

  We need to find where he’s taken Chloe and Jade.’

  Back at the station, Patrick had pulled Carmella, Suzanne and Gareth into the incident room. Irritatingly, Winkler was there again, looking like someone who’d just swallowed a mouthful of sick.

  Fran Dangerfield had filled in more details about Graham and Melanie, which Patrick now recounted.

  ‘Melanie was taken into care when she was eight, after they discovered what her mother and stepfather had been doing to her. Graham went into care when he was a toddler because his mum, a single mother, neglected him. Apparently they’d both been floating around the care system for years before they ended up at St Mary’s when they were teenagers.’ He explained what Dangerfield had said about how Melanie wasn’t able to cope with family life.

  ‘What about Graham?’ Suzanne asked.

  ‘Same, but for different reasons. He was too much of a handful for anyone to cope with. Always running off, stealing, being cruel. Dangerfield told me that on the surface he came across as an intelligent, normal boy. But if anyone crossed him . . . They thought he was heading for a life of crime until he met Melanie.’

  ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ said Carmella, with irony.

  ‘Inseparable, besotted, uninterested in anyone apart from each other, apparently. And Graham became Mel’s protector, the person who fought off the bullies.’

  ‘And killed their goldfish,’ added Carmella.

  Patrick went on. ‘I guess they are used to seeing what we might think of as psychotic behaviour there. Remember, these kids, all of them, have been through a lot. These are the boys and girls who can’t adapt to family life.’

  ‘But he seems so normal now,’ Gareth said. ‘So . . . nice.’

  ‘Don’t they always.’ Winkler sniffed.

  ‘Apparently, Mervyn Hammond took Graham under his wing, mentored him. Encouraged him to go to college, helped him get a job after that.’

  ‘And what about Melanie?’ Suzanne asked.

  ‘We don’t know much. Left St Mary’s when she was sixteen and went straight onto benefits. She had various part-time jobs over the years but nothing long-term. It appears she led a very boring life.’

  ‘Maybe Graham was supporting her, helping her out,’ Carmella said. ‘I wonder why they didn’t live together. Get married. If theirs really was a great love affair.’

  ‘Probably didn’t fit with his image anymore,’ Winkler said. ‘He was moving in starry circles; she was stuck in a council flat. He drank flat whites; she preferred a nice cup of tea.’

  In his own crude way, Winkler was probably right. Patrick had been wondering why Graham hadn’t known about the bullying of Melanie on the forums, why he hadn’t put a stop to it. Why hadn’t she told him about it? Perhaps it had something to do with what Winkler had said. The two of them lived in different worlds now. Melanie could have kept her online activities secret from her friend. He, however, was meant to police the OnT forums, to stop bullying. Why had he failed so spectacularly?

  ‘They must have been in contact still,’ Patrick said. ‘We know that for a fact. Because Graham found Melanie’s body.’

  While Patrick and Carmella were at St Mary’s, Gareth had tracked down the officer – PC Sarah Chance – who had filed the incident report when Melanie’s body was found. Sarah told Gareth that Melanie was discovered by her friend Graham Burns, who had said there was no suicide note and that he had no idea why Melanie had killed herself.

  ‘The flat was full of OnTarget merchandise,’ Sarah Chance had said. ‘Posters, dolls, T-shirts, newspaper and magazine cuttings all over the walls. Seemed a bit weird that a woman in her mid-twenties was so obsessed with a boy band, but the friend said she was very immature, trapped emotionally in her early teens. She had problems forming attachments with new people. That’s why she didn’t have a job. I got the impression she sat at home all day on the Internet.’

  No suicide note. It would have been easy, Patrick thought, for Graham to pocket the suicide note, especially if it revealed the reason for Melanie’s suicide, and he came up with his plan for revenge on the spot. Easy, too, for him, with his top-level access to the official OnT forum, to delete all the posts in which his first love fought with her persecutors. So no-one would know the link between the four girls he planned to kill – apart from the girls themselves, and Kai Topper. If only Topper had come forward sooner – but the boy was clearly too stupid to have realised what was going on.

  What about Chloe and Jade? Didn’t they realise they were in danger after their fellow co-authors were murdered? How could they have been so naïve? It was another question he hoped to ask soon. If it wasn’t already too late.

  The final piece of the puzzle was how Nancy Marr fitted in. All they knew so far was that she’d lived three doors down from Melanie Haggis’s small council flat.


  It was far more important to find where Graham was at that moment. His phone was off, so they couldn’t get a trace on it. They would need to figure it out.

  Patrick placed a laptop on the desk in the centre of the room and gestured for everyone to gather round.

  ‘We know,’ he said, ‘that the first two murder scenes were connected to OnTarget. Jessica was killed at Rocket Man Studios, here.’ He had already brought up Google Maps and pointed at the location of the disused studio on the map. ‘That place was used to shoot an OnT video. And Wendy told me that “Room 365” is an OnTarget song. Rose was found in room 365 of the Travel Inn, here.’

  He typed in the address and pointed to the location.

  ‘We know Burns isn’t at home.’ Two uniformed officers had already been round to check. All the lights were off and the neighbours said they hadn’t seen him or his car all day. ‘He hasn’t taken them to Melanie’s old flat either. Somebody else lives there now. It has to be somewhere connected to OnTarget, like the others. Somewhere symbolic.’

  All of the faces around him were blank.

  ‘If only Wendy were here,’ Carmella said quietly.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Winkler. ‘Didn’t that teenage twit have an app that traced Jade’s phone? Where was it?’

  Occasionally, Patrick thought, Winkler could surprise him. ‘Yes. He traced it here.’ He typed Platt’s Eyot into Google Maps. The uniforms he’d sent to the Eyot had found the phone in the undergrowth, lying among wet leaves. It was dead, water damaged, and wouldn’t switch on. Patrick guessed it had survived just long enough for Kai to trace it. Now it was a useless lump of plastic. ‘If Jade met Graham here, the chances are he didn’t take her far. We need an OnTarget expert.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Winkler.

  ‘Hattie Parsons,’ Patrick said, calling her and putting her on speaker.

  She answered on the second ring. ‘Detective Lennon,’ she said in a flirty voice. ‘I was wondering if you’d call me again.’

  Winkler guffawed.

  ‘Are you near a computer?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘Right in front of one. Why?’

  He told her to open maps and to look up Platt’s Eyot. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yep. Well, I’m looking at the map. What’s—?’

  ‘I need to know if there are any locations near there that have any connection to OnTarget. Somewhere referenced in one of their songs. A place where a video was shot. The house where one of them grew up, or where they met, or where Shawn lost his virginity. Anything.’

  She laughed. ‘I think Shawn popped his cherry in a park in Stoke.’

  ‘Hattie. This is serious. Please.’

  ‘OK. Sorry . . . Let me think.’

  ‘You should zoom out, look at all the locations around Platt’s Eyot; be systematic.’

  ‘All right.’ There was a protracted silence at the other end of the line. Then: ‘Yeah. That old hotel . . . Sunbury Lock Manor.’

  ‘Did the band stay there?’

  ‘Maybe. Sunbury Lock Manor is dead posh – or, rather, it was. It’s shut down now – I think some other hotel chain is planning to refurbish it at some point – but the band shot the cover of Twilight Kisses there, in this amazing shell grotto they’ve got in the grounds.’

  ‘And that’s the only place you can think of that’s nearby?’

  ‘Yeah. Why—?’

  He hung up.

  ‘Sunbury Lock Manor,’ he said, fingers flickering over the keyboard to get the address. ‘Let’s go.’

  Patrick put on the blues and twos all the way to Sunbury, switching them off as they neared the derelict building, not wanting to alert Graham who might be listening out for sirens. Carmella sat beside him, rubbing the side of her belly, subconsciously remembering what had happened at the end of their last big case. Suzanne was back at the station organising the armed response unit, getting uniforms in place, but Patrick had been unable to wait. They needed to get here as quickly as possible, so Suzanne had given him permission to scout ahead.

  He killed the lights and pulled up outside the hotel gates, which were chained up – but with, he noticed, a new and shiny padlock. Beyond the gates, the building sat among rolling lawns, the grass now overgrown, piles of rubbish lying in heaps where someone had been fly-tipping. Patrick realised now that he had driven by here before. In daylight, the place looked like a typical English stately home – the former home of a long-dead earl or duke. But in the darkness its abandonment lent it a creepy air, like a haunted house, a place where schoolboys would dare each other to spend the night.

  He got out of the car and went up to the gate, rattled it. Carmella came up behind him.

  ‘It’s been shut for three years,’ she said. She’d looked it up on the way over. ‘Useless management ran it into the ground – and then there was a near-fatal food-poisoning case that proved the final straw. It says on Wikipedia that Shawn Barrett was rumoured to be buying the building, after falling in love with it during a photo shoot. But it never happened.’

  ‘We need to get in there,’ Patrick said, examining the surrounding walls, trying to work out how easy it would be to climb over. He would need Carmella to give him a leg up, but it was possible.

  ‘No, Patrick. We need to wait.’

  ‘He could be killing them right now.’

  ‘In which case, we’re already too late,’ she said.

  ‘But what if they’re still alive?’ he said. ‘What if we wait, get in there and discover that they were murdered while we were standing here following fucking protocol?’

  ‘Pat . . . there must be loads of other places associated with the band. What if we’re wasting time here when he’s got them somewhere else . . . ?’

  But he was walking off along the side of the wall, trying to find a way in, anxiety making his voice sharper than he intended.

  ‘What do you propose we do, Carmella? Just walk away, and find out later they’re in there?’

  ‘No . . . but—’

  ‘Give me a leg up – now.’

  ‘Let me call and see how far away back-up is—’

  ‘That’s an order.’

  Carmella knew better than to continue to question him. She crouched and held out her cupped hands so he could step onto them and hoist himself up to grab hold of the top of the brick wall. She pushed and he pulled, heaving and panting until he was on the wall, looking down at his colleague. Without another word, he was over, and running. Tucked in a clearing between the trees was a small car park – empty, apart from one solitary vehicle: a new black Audi A4 with tinted windows.

  ‘Shit!’

  They were definitely in there.

  Halfway across the lawn he realised he’d left his phone charging in the car. But he wasn’t turning back now. He had no weapon, but he didn’t care. He had to reach Chloe and Jade. He could hear Wendy’s voice in his ear as the building loomed up from the darkness, framed by moonlight. Go on, boss, she urged. Go on, Patrick.

  He reached the hotel. Of course, the front doors were shut, locked. He could smash a window with one of the earthen pots that lay scattered around, but he didn’t want Graham to know he was coming, in case it made him panic and kill the girls, if he hadn’t already.

  Patrick stepped back, searching for another entrance. The front door was framed by two Roman pillars and a porch, surrounded by thick ivy that had proliferated out of control, thick and dense, making him think, bizarrely yet appositely, of Graham’s beard. A window just above the door had been smashed, presumably by vandals, jagged shards of glass clinging to the frame like monstrous teeth. If he could reach it, get onto the top of the porch . . .

  A scream came from inside, quickly followed by a girl’s voice begging, ‘No!’

  He snaked his fingers through the thick ivy, finding a wooden trellis beneath. He tugged at it – it
seemed to be attached securely. Placing one foot against the trellis, he pulled himself up, arm muscles flexing, then found purchase with his other foot. The trellis dug into his fingers, but the pain was unimportant. He heard Wendy’s voice again, urging him on, telling him to save the girls, to stop the man who had killed her. There was a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth – the flavour of hatred. He used it to propel him, to give him strength as he pulled against the trellis, straining his biceps, scaling the ivy and throwing himself sideways, landing on top of the porch on his belly.

  He lay there for a moment, the wind knocked out of him, then pushed himself up, the sudden movement almost making him lose balance. After pulling off his jacket, he used it to knock away the shards that clung to the edges of the window, then ducked through, lowering himself until he felt solid ground beneath him.

  He stood panting in a pitch-black hallway. It smelled damp, of bird shit and dust. Treading quietly, he headed towards the staircase that curved down to the lower floor.

  This, now, was the entrance hall. He hadn’t heard another scream since he’d entered the building and he had a terrible feeling that he was too late.

  A pair of double doors stood shut at the end of the hallway, and Patrick realised that a line of light flickered beneath them. He took long, quiet strides towards the doors, braced himself and pushed them open.

  It took him a moment to focus, to take in what he was seeing. It was a large old theatre, wooden chairs scattered about, with a stage at the opposite end of the space. An oil lamp flickered on the stage, two figures silhouetted against a tatty, crimson curtain, one standing, one lying on the stage floor. The standing figure – Graham, now without his beard – stood frozen, a curved, serrated knife visible in one hand.

  The other figure screamed.

  ‘Police!’ Patrick shouted, breaking into a run.

  Graham ran too, retreating towards the back of the stage, slipping behind the curtain and out of sight. Patrick reached the stage and looked down at the girl lying there, staring up at him, her eyes glassy with shock. It was Chloe Hedges. She was naked apart from a pair of knickers, her wrists cuffed above her head. Blood trickled across her ribcage in two, no, three places. Little cuts. But, thank God, it seemed Graham had only just started. The scent of Friendship, the OnTarget perfume, hung in the air and Patrick knew Graham would have squirted it into each cut, one by one, drawing out the torture, the pain.