by Alison James
Harland looked directly at Rachel. ‘You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go after Christie Becker, right? She still lives in Maryland, so I could have gotten my own back on her quite easily. Surprise, surprise: she never really made it as a model. She got married a couple of years after high school. He’s a car salesman, and by all accounts a bit of an asshole. By the time she was twenty-five she already had a couple of kids and another on the way, and her pig of a husband was playing around with someone else. She gained thirty pounds and had some kind of a breakdown. Doesn’t work; just stays home with the kids and chows down on Cymbalta and Xanax. Probably washed down with some chardonnay or vodka. She’s a mess.
‘So, you see, going after her wouldn’t have worked. I don’t want revenge on someone like that. She’s already messed up her perfect little life all on her own. Karma has come her way and done the job for me. Which is great.’
‘So why not leave it there?’ Rachel asked. ‘Walk away? The best revenge is living well.’
Harland frowned as though she was a simpleton. ‘Because there are so many more Christies out there. So many mean girls who still have their perfect little lives, who poke fun at girls who are overweight or plain. And I can be like them. I can have their homes. I can have their lives. And I can make them pay.’
Chapter Fifty-Three
Rachel was silent, her mind whirring. For a while she had even managed to forget about her throbbing wrist and the burning pain in her left shoulder.
‘I expect you have questions.’ Harland was still on the edge of the bed, her expression almost shy.
Rachel nodded, drawing on her experience of interviewing criminals and trying to remain as detached as possible. ‘If you to managed to make such an incredible change to your appearance – all that work and money – why not be proud of it? Why not just live permanently as…?’ She twitched her left shoulder in the direction of the wig and the make-up on the dresser. ‘Why not just do that? Be that person. Get out there with your size 6 body and your pretty face and knock ’em dead. That would give the likes of Christie Becker something to think about.’
Rachel found it impossible not to forget her fear for a few seconds and inject a note of empathy into her words.
Harland was nodding slowly. ‘I hear you. That’s a tough one to answer.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Only way I can explain it is that you need a heck of a lot of confidence to pull that off, and I just don’t have it. Not after I was broken down the way I was. I lack the confidence to carry off being that –’ she pointed at the wig – ‘24/7. I like to be able to hide, I guess. Being able to switch in and out of it.’
Rachel remembered Brickall’s treatise on bullying at school. Fifty–fifty. ‘An awful lot of kids go through bullying,’ she observed.
It doesn’t make them killers.
Harland shrugged. ‘We all react differently to different situations I guess,’ she responded dispassionately, as though they were discussing taste in interior décor.
‘So, how about your work as a lab technician? Didn’t your employers think it odd when you…’ Her voice trailed off as once more she tried to work out how to phrase the question. She couldn’t bring herself to say when you disappeared to kill people. She was on the brink of gaining Harland’s trust, and she couldn’t risk blowing it now. Pussyfooting – flattery even – was essential. ‘Why did they think you kept taking absences? Didn’t they mind?’
‘Oh, I’m self-employed,’ said Harland airily. ‘After I’d been there a few years I was given the chance to go onto a freelance contract. I set my own hours: work a few weeks on, a few weeks off.’
‘I see. Okay, something else that I’d like to know.’
‘Shoot.’ said Harland, smiling now.
She craves attention, thought Rachel. It’s been that way all her life. Rejected, ignored, overlooked. Something that can push you one of two ways: self-destruction or destruction of others.
‘Why go through a home-sharing app to find people? It seems like… how can I put this?’
‘Too much work?’
Rachel nodded. ‘Exactly. It’s another layer of detail and organisation, and that just adds massive risk, surely?’ The investigator in her was genuinely interested in the answers to her questions. Treat her as if you’re in the interview room, she repeated over and over in her head. Don’t lose it and lash out at her.
‘Well, first up, I enjoy the detail and the organisation. You could say that floats my boat. And remember, when you meet someone in that way, the interface confers a huge logistical advantage.’ Harland spoke as though describing a marketing campaign rather than a psychopathic murder. ‘Think about it: when you host on CasaMia you’re electing to open yourself up to complete strangers. You are inviting them right into your life. You’re not suspicious or afraid, your guard is right down. Quite the opposite really; you’re saying, “Here’s my home, come on in!” That’s why it was ridiculously easy to do what I did. Because they welcomed me in. They literally didn’t see it coming.’
She glanced at Rachel for a reaction, but there was none, so she went on. ‘But mostly it’s what you get in exchange for that extra preparation. It’s a trade-off, where the effort is matched by the reward. If you just, say, pick out a girl in the crowd and go after her, what are you left with? Nothing. I wanted to get inside the lives of these girls. I wanted to understand how it felt to truly be popular and entitled. I wanted to be them, just like I wanted to when I was at high school. When you create a home-sharing profile, you’re giving people a little window into your life. I built on that basic information by researching my hosts thoroughly in advance. And if they then handed me the key to their home, I was rewarded with access-all-areas.’
‘Temporarily. Each time, you knew it couldn’t last.’
‘Sure. But there are always more. There are a lot of entitled little homecoming queens out there.’
Rachel thought of Phoebe and Tiffany, and their callous treatment of the Harlands of this world. She thought about Melissa Downey, who by all accounts was a decent girl, but who couldn’t resist a bit of body-shaming of her own. She made her next observation as delicately as she could, but there was no way of whitewashing it completely.
‘So the pleasure was in inhabiting someone else’s life,’ she offered. ‘It wasn’t about ending it.’
Harland stared straight ahead, green eyes glittering. ‘Exactly right, Detective. The God’s honest truth is; I didn’t like the killing part at all. I find it distasteful. It was something that had to be gotten out of the way.’ She gave her odd smile. ‘And believe me, a dead body is a massive inconvenience.’
‘So, with Phoebe Stiles?’
‘That was pretty straightforward.’ Harland was matter of fact, and Rachel knew she must go along with this approach. Ensure things were unemotional, free of recrimination. Because keeping Harland on side was just about her only hope of getting out of that room alive. ‘It was a nice clean blow; trust me, she didn’t suffer at all.’
‘And once you’d done it, you could go along to her modelling assignment in her place.’
Harland glowed. ‘Exactly right. And I did enjoy that. I even had a go at a British accent. I had to wear the brown contacts – which gets uncomfortable pretty quickly – and the stylist was trying to mess with my wig. The shoes were the wrong size too, which nearly derailed the whole thing. But I thought it went pretty well, all things told.’
‘I guess you could say that,’ Rachel conceded, thinking back to the video, trying not to let her mind stray to Phoebe’s flower-laden casket. ‘And after that, impersonating her in phone messages wasn’t too much of a stretch.’
‘Exactly. And the boyfriend’s texts let me know he was going to Reno, so all I had to do was use the spare key he gave her and make a gift of the weapon.’
‘Your lab experience must have helped you when it came to cleaning up?’
‘Sure,’ Harland preened.
‘But of course Tiffany Kovak was first,’
said Rachel. ‘I almost forgot.’
Harland pulled a face. ‘Let’s be honest; she was quite forgettable. Easy enough to get her out of the way, but her life wasn’t exciting enough. She had a nice car, but that was about all. After I’d driven around in it a bit, I got bored. The school gym staging was probably the best part. I thought that was quite a stroke on my part. Took me right back to Christie and Josh.’
‘But you made a mistake when you cleaned up. You left a lipstick.’
Harland laughed. ‘No! No, that was deliberate! Out of boredom I guess. Just a little clue to keep things exciting. I knew nobody would figure out who it belonged to.’
Rachel gestured with her free hand. ‘And yet, here we are.’
The silence that followed was tense. ‘Tell me about Melissa,’ Rachel prompted.
‘Well that didn’t go so well. To start with, anyhow. I had to, you know –’ she mimed strangling – ‘which I did not like at all. I hated it.’ Harland shuddered, as though it were she who was the victim. ‘But the boyfriend kind of made up for things. He reminded me a lot of Josh Anstead.’
‘You killed him too?’
‘I had sex with him, and then I killed him.’ Harland’s tone was boastful. ‘Shows how much he must have loved her, right? But first I got him to help me with the body. He didn’t know that it was his girlfriend he was lifting, of course. And he was very easy to finish off, which evened things up after the –’ she pointed to her neck – ‘business.’ She spoke with genuine satisfaction.
‘And Talia Schull? In Boston?’
Harland sighed. ‘Mixed success there. But, you know, in some ways it was good that she stayed out of my way. There was no body to get rid of, and I had fun being her. I did her job in a lawyer’s office, and that was a great experience. I put my latent acting talents to good use again. And I was actually pretty good at it anyway. I like to think I would have made a good lawyer.’ She looked almost wistful. ‘Plus, she had awesome clothes.’
‘So overall, Boston was good?’
‘Yes, I’d say so.’
Rachel felt a tsunami of exhaustion and delayed shock wash over her. The room was warm and stuffy and filled with the pervasive smell of cloying perfume. A dull pain pulsed at her temples. She wanted desperately to get up and move her legs. To run.
Sensing her mood, Harland stood up. ‘You look beat. Tell you what, why don’t I make you a little more comfortable?’ She left the room and came back with kitchen scissors and a fresh cable tie, proceeding to cut Rachel’s left arm free, but only once she had fastened her right arm to the bed frame in its place. The relief from the spasms in her left shoulder was immense, but it was only a matter of time before the right side took up the burden. The sores on her left wrist were open and weeping. After offering a bedpan, Harland wished her a good night and left, exactly as though she was a regular guest.
* * *
Rachel was desperate for sleep, but forced herself to stay awake. She could hear Harland in the other bedroom, moving around without her manufactured limp. There was some clattering in the kitchen, then taps running, a toilet flushing, the faint sound of a TV or radio. Eventually, with an effort that took every ounce of her strength, Rachel lasted out until she heard the click of a light being turned out. Silence. How long would it take Harland to fall asleep, Rachel wondered?
She did not have to wait too long. After what must have been less than twenty minutes, she was rewarded by the sound of long, loud snores from the other bedroom.
Adrenaline kicked in. The cup of tea had been left cooling on the bedside table next to what had been her free hand at that point: her right. Harland had been so engrossed in her tale, she had forgotten to clear it away.
Now it was Rachel’s right hand that was tied and her left that was free. She performed a manoeuvre that was the bastard offspring of basic military training and hatha yoga, flipping her newly freed left wrist over her right shoulder and twisting, until she had rotated far enough to pick up the tea cup. She lifted it to her lips and drained the cold tea. She would pay for that later with the need to pee, but so be it. Then she took the china cup and smashed it hard against the iron bed frame. It cracked cleanly into two pieces which she managed, with great difficulty, to shove out of sight but within grasping distance, under the mattress.
Panting slightly, she fell back on the bed and drifted off to the sound of her captor’s snores.
Chapter Fifty-Four
It was light outside, thin fingers of sunlight penetrating the slatted blind and dappling the carpet. Since there was no clock in the room and Rachel no longer had a watch, she was unable to check the time. All she knew was that her bladder was so full that it was giving off sharp stabbing pains, and the headache that was a mere tapping the evening before was now a jackhammer. She attempted to exercise her sore, weak legs with a cycling motion and ankle rotations.
This was the second morning she had woken up to find herself lying here on this bed, almost immobile. Nearly forty-eight hours of thinking that surely, soon, someone would come. But nobody had. Where were they? Where was Rob? And what about Joe? Would he be worrying about his messages going unanswered? A wave of despair washed over her, bringing tears in its wake. She brushed them away with her left hand and wiped her nose on her sleeve, which was all she had.
Harland noticed her reddened eyes when she came in, but instead of mollifying her they seemed to cause fury. Mean Harland was back with a vengeance, jabbing the bed pan against Rachel’s buttocks, forcing her to drink scaldingly hot coffee, refusing to let her feed herself cereal in case she spilled the milk. Harland didn’t need to feed her at all – what purpose did it serve? And yet she didn’t seem to be able to stop herself, as though propelled by some dormant nurturing instinct. Would she have been different, Rachel wondered, if her family had been a functional one, if she’d been happy and accepted at school? Would that have put paid to the powerlessness that flipped itself inside out, becoming a need to overpower.
As she went to the door with the breakfast tray, Rachel asked. ‘Could I have some painkillers? Please.’
There it was again: the tight-lipped, mean look. But Harland returned a few minutes later with two Tylenol and some water, waiting silently while Rachel swallowed the tablets. Then she left Rachel alone for what felt like hours. There was the noise of sweeping, then vacuuming in the background. Rachel continued her feeble attempts at exercise, waiting. It was Sunday. The next morning, Rob would be back at his desk. Back in London, in only a matter of hours, she would be a no-show at the NCA, and not answering her mobile either. Would someone there check on her, or would they think she was extending her paid leave into an unauthorised absence? Surely, given her potential promotion, they wouldn’t think she’d stayed away of her own volition?
Harland eventually reappeared, looking serious. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I want to ask you something.’ She wasn’t wearing the glasses or the dental plate or the fat suit, but her body was shrouded in loose clothes, as though she needed to keep it in check.
‘Go on.’
‘Do you think I’m crazy?’
Rachel did not reply.
‘You do!’ said Harland shrilly. ‘You think the only explanation for this is that I’m crazy.’
Rachel shook her head. ‘No, I was just thinking how to answer the question, that’s all.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘I think you suffered trauma in the past, and that’s acted as a trigger for you acting in a way that many people would consider to be… abnormal. I understand that you were driven to your actions by some very powerful feelings. Not all of which seem crazy to me, no.’
Harland had stood up and picked up her wig, grooming it as though it was a pet. ‘I don’t believe you. You were probably one of the popular girls at school yourself. I expect you had things pretty easy.’
Keep her sweet, thought Rachel. Keep her talking, and someone might come. Please let someone come.
‘Actually, Harland, you’re wrong.’ Rachel pulled herself
up with her free elbow so that she was sitting. ‘I was definitely not one of the cool kids.’
Harland gave her a wary look, but Rachel could tell that she really wanted this to be true. Which indeed it was.
‘I was a bit of a heifer, and shy. Not a huge fat blimp, but tubby. In a kind of shapeless way.’ She held up a strand of blonde hair. ‘And before I could afford to spend a fortune on highlights, this was just plain mouse-coloured. I wore braces on my teeth for years. I wasn’t academically gifted, or musical, and – like you – I never got picked for acting roles. I was okay at athletics, but way too clumsy to do well in team sports. I was just a bit of a nothing, really. And I was picked on.’
‘For real?’ She had Harland’s full attention now.
‘Yep. Nothing as extreme as you went through, just name-calling, having my bag snatched, my games kit nicked. That kind of thing. But it affected my confidence, even so.’
Harland sat on the bed again. ‘So what did you do about it?’
‘Worked as hard as I could and got a place at police college. I got into fitness and running, and shed the puppy fat. Lost the braces, dyed my hair blonde. But it was finding something that I was good at that made the real difference.’ She tried not to let her voice shake when she spoke the next words. ‘I’m a good police officer, and that gives me confidence. And that’s what defines me now, not what happened in my past.’
It was impossible not to make this last bit sound like a criticism, but Harland disregarded it, instead latching onto the tale of Rachel’s transformation. ‘So in a way you’re just like me.’ This seemed to please her inordinately.