The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1)

by Victoria Jenkins

  ‘Anyone heard from Lola?’

  Connor turned to look at Tim. He shook his head.

  ‘She said she’d be coming back after Christmas,’ Sarah said.

  ‘But no one’s seen her?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘She’s never been that regular, has she?’

  Connor turned back to the wall, busying himself with rolling up the cable of the electric heater. It didn’t need doing – he just didn’t want people looking at him. He didn’t really feel like going for a drink. He didn’t want to go home either. The problem was, Connor didn’t really know what he wanted. Except the one thing.

  The need for that never seemed to leave him.

  Chapter Five

  Alex sat on the edge of a desk in the main investigation room of the station and looked at the image of the murder victim pinned to the board in front of her. The team had assembled, discussed, and dispersed, and on any other day Alex might have been due to head home. Now she wasn’t going anywhere. Murder victims couldn’t be made to wait for office hours, she thought. While there was something she could be doing, she would make sure she was doing it.

  ‘What you thinking?’

  Alex became aware of the superintendent’s eyes on her. He was still sitting at one of the computers, so quiet that she had forgotten he was there. She had never liked having to address the team in front of him, always feeling reduced to her teenage self, keen to impress a favourite teacher. It was ridiculous, especially after all these years of working together. She and Harry Blake had known each other for years, and he had always treated people fairly. During her ongoing fertility treatment, the superintendent had been an unlikely ally. He had fought her corner when the nonsensical rules regarding time off work for treatment had stated Alex should use her days off as unpaid leave. According to the police service’s rules, IVF treatment was a ‘lifestyle choice’. Like having a boob job, Alex remembered thinking at the time.

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ she answered flippantly. ‘Nothing much.’

  Harry raised his eyebrows, knowing the opposite was always true. Alex never switched off. There was always something going on behind those dark eyes, even when she stoically refused to share it with anyone.

  ‘How was the body transported through the park to the river?’ Alex said, thinking aloud. ‘The victim was small, but no matter how easy she might have been to carry, how the hell would anyone get across that kind of distance without being seen?’

  Harry ran a hand over his short greying hair, looking past her as he pondered the question. ‘How late does the park stay open?’

  ‘According to the council’s website, pretty late even through the winter.’ Alex gestured to another of the computers. The website was still up on the screen, left from where she had studied its details before addressing the team. ‘Someone must have had vehicle access to the park. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  She gestured for Harry to join her at the computer.

  ‘The pathologist seems certain the young woman’s body was placed in the water at or very near the place where it resurfaced. The only plausible theory is that someone transported the woman to the river in some sort of vehicle. Yet according to this there’s no public access to the paths.’

  ‘What type of vehicles have access to the park?’ Harry asked, his attention still fixed on the website.

  Alex slid from the desk and into a chair beside him, moving a fingertip across the keypad of the opened laptop. She typed the words ‘Cardiff Bute Park vehicle access’ into the search engine and a huge list of results was thrown up. It took little time for her to find a council file that was open to public viewing which documented a brief history of the park and assessed the suitability of its current access points.

  ‘Read this.’

  The park had been open to the public since 1947, having previously been the private gardens of Cardiff Castle. Since being opened for public use, the park had gained only two additional access points. According to the council’s document, a need for additional vehicular access was justified by the volume of vehicles that required entry to the park for services such as supplying the nursery, setting up and dismantling equipment and staging for events, maintaining and managing the water flow in the Dock Feeder, maintaining the riverbanks, and for general upkeep of the gardens.

  Cooper’s Field was the area of the park most often used for events. Alex had been there on several occasions. Back during her days in uniform she had worked at events such as Party in the Park: long, sticky hours when she would be grateful for the sighting of a drunken scuffle just for something to break up the monotony of the day. As a civilian she had stood in the field with an army of fellow numbered women, waiting to start Cancer Research’s now-famous Race for Life event that was held there every summer. Trying not to linger for too long on the tributes and photographs pinned to the backs of the pink T-shirts swarming the spaces in front of her, because running was difficult enough without a thick lump of sadness stuck in the throat.

  Alex hated to run, but she hated bloody cancer with a far greater intensity.

  She glanced at Superintendent Blake, who had recently made his return to work. She had missed his presence at the station. God, he could be cantankerous at times, but he was honest and he was fair, which were admirable traits in a world that often lacked these two seemingly uninspiring qualities. Eighteen months earlier he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. It had hit his family hard; in particular, his two children who were aged eleven and twelve at the time. Treatment had followed. His doctors reported an encouraging response to the radiotherapy, but had advised him to take it easy and allow his body time to recover.

  With typical Harry Blake pig-headedness, he had decided to ignore them.

  Alex smiled at the thought of Chloe’s first encounter with the superintendent after he’d returned to work. It hadn’t been obvious at the time whether it had been more embarrassing for Harry or for Chloe, but it had provided Alex with amusement for the rest of the day. Chloe had transferred to the department during his time off, and upon his return Harry had mistaken her for an A-level student there on work experience – and Harry didn’t have much time for work experience.

  The reception Chloe had received was less than welcoming, but amusing for everyone else. Harry, feeling it necessary to acknowledge the girl’s presence, had asked if she had any relatives at the station. Chloe, having realised the error of judgement he’d made, deadpanned that her dad was locked up in cell number four. It was the only time Alex had ever seen Harry’s face redden, but Chloe’s had matched it when she’d found out who she’d been speaking with.

  It was true that Chloe looked younger than her twenty-six years, but once Harry had got to know her, he quickly learned there was a lot more to the young woman than met the eye.

  Alex had always thought there was more to be discovered, but Chloe kept her personal life just that. And Alex could understand that.

  ‘The North Gate entrance is right in the city centre,’ Harry said, snapping Alex from her thoughts. ‘That would mean someone drove along the main road and turned into the park whilst carrying a corpse in their vehicle.’

  Alex felt sick at the thought. She had seen this poor girl only shortly after her body had been dragged up from the river. It was going to be a long time before she stopped seeing her.

  She forced her thoughts back to the park. There were no events held in Cooper’s Field during the winter, so that eliminated one group of vehicles. The words ‘maintaining and managing water flow’ meant nothing to Alex, but she would need to find out exactly what was involved. As for the nursery and the gardens, were gardeners even employed during the winter months? It had always seemed to Alex to be a seasonal sort of job. She had planted daffodil bulbs in her front garden one year and had been rewarded the following spring with seven tiny flowers that had managed the course of a week before wilting and giving up. It really didn’t qualify her as an authority on the subject.

  ‘Let me find
the street.’ Alex leaned across the desk and reached again for the keyboard. She searched for Boulevard de Nantes in Google Street View and located the place where a vehicle that might have transported the woman would have made its turn into the park. The access point was near a set of traffic lights, parallel with the pedestrianised top end of Queen Street, a popular shopping street in the middle of the city centre.

  ‘You’d think those traffic lights would have cameras,’ she said, ‘but possibly not. I’ll get on to it first thing in the morning, find out if they exist and whether the bloody things were actually turned on.’

  And then what? she thought. The body had been in the water for anything up to two weeks, according to Helen Collier. Someone was going to have to sit through up to two weeks’ worth of CCTV footage in order to identify every vehicle that had entered the park during that time.

  Whose week was she going to make by handing them that entertaining task?

  ‘In the meantime,’ Harry said, ‘you should probably go home.’

  ‘Probably.’ She caught his look and raised both hands in mock surrender. ‘Two minutes,’ she lied. ‘Then I’m out of here, I promise.’

  Alex minimised the Internet page and waited to watch the superintendent leave the room. She then searched for the bank of profiles she had earlier retrieved from the missing persons database. If this young woman had been in the river for anything up to two weeks, someone must surely have missed her during that time. Thinking she might be kept occupied by the surprisingly long list of missing people the database had thrown up, Alex went into the quiet corridor and down to the small staffroom to make a cup of coffee. The vending machine in the corridor produced what could only be described as water that smelled vaguely of coffee, deemed worth keeping for emergency caffeine needs should the kettle ever decide to spontaneously combust, which it had decided to the previous week.

  There was something irrepressibly tragic about the image of a missing person. Even the photographs that had captured joyful moments – wedding days, graduations, sun-bleached beach holidays – were made eerie by the subject’s updated status as ‘missing’. Smiles became saddened, eyes dulled; gestures became fake somehow, as though the soon-to-become-missing person wished to emphasise that moment in an effort to erase a fate they were subconsciously aware of. As though somehow they had known back when the photograph was taken – had known all along, really – that at some point they would be leaving the world that existed on the other side of the camera.

  Alex sipped her coffee as each face greeted her in turn. Missing sons, missing brothers, missing wives. Everyone meant something to someone, even those who might not have believed they did. Where did the missing go? What happened to those people who left their homes one day, heading for work as they did every other morning, and simply disappeared from their lives? It seemed to Alex that it should no longer be possible for a person to just go missing, yet every year thousands did.

  Her finger hovered over the keypad, lingering over an image. A young woman – a girl – was sitting on a low wall in a back garden, a small square of overgrown lawn behind her. She wore a summer dress, pale blue with spaghetti straps, and a pair of sunglasses was pushed up on to her head. Her long hair was swept to one side, over one shoulder, and the ghost of a smile sat upon her lips, as though giving in to it might cause her fragile frame to shatter.

  The young woman seemed to call to Alex in silence through the screen, and though she had looked so different when the image had been taken, Alex had no doubt that this was the girl whose body had been pulled from the river.

  Chapter Six

  The group had gone to the pub and ordered drinks; all except Carl, who had made his excuses and left. If no one else noticed that Connor and Sarah had simultaneously disappeared after the drinks had been taken to a table in a far corner – the kind of spot that most of the group was happy to opt for in order to be lost to the rest of the room – then Rachel Jones at least had spotted them, and she sat with her back turned slightly to the others, her dark eyes watching the empty corridor down which Connor and Sarah had slipped away.

  Connor followed her to the toilets, reached for her elbow and pulled her into the cold night air of the small enclosed smokers’ area.

  ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘What?’

  Connor exhaled loudly and pressed a hand to the brick wall of the pub, his body blocking hers and stopping her from leaving, though they both knew she wouldn’t have left even had it been an option.

  ‘You know what. All those innuendos in the meeting. You’ve got to stop this, Sarah, please. If anyone finds out—’

  ‘If anyone finds out what?’

  He should never have stayed out with her that first night all those months ago, he thought. They hadn’t been to the pub that night; they had stayed at the hall and he could still remember that night so clearly, all the truths and the admissions that had been spilled by not just them but by other members of the group. He had felt the connection instantly, like some sort of invisible length of thread that passed across the room and pulled him towards her, and she to him. He had felt she understood him, and at the time that had been exactly what he’d needed.

  And now it was everything he didn’t.

  He might have been initially attracted to her because he had thought she understood him, but the only attraction that had kept him going back was the one he kept feeling in his trousers every time she stood too close to him. The one he was feeling now, even though his brain was telling him how stupid he was and how much trouble this woman could cause him.

  ‘What you did earlier, the way you spoke like that at the meeting. It wasn’t you.’

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  Perhaps that was true, and why wouldn’t it be? They all professed to honesty, but the real truth was that they all kept their darkest secrets hidden, buried in their own heads. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t need the support group.

  ‘This has to stop, Sarah.’

  She shifted her weight from one foot to another, her body tilted at an angle and her arms folded across her chest. She hated it when he said her name like that. He was older than her, but not by much, so how did it always manage to sound like some sort of reprimand, like a teacher berating a student or a parent scolding a wayward child?

  He thought she was going to argue with him, but instead her folded arms relaxed and she breathed a gulp of night air before saying, ‘I know.’

  He exhaled. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault, all of it. I should never have let it happen. And I don’t want you to stop coming to the meetings, but if you feel you have to then I’m sorry for that too.’

  What was he saying? He didn’t care if she stopped coming. It would make his life a lot easier if he never saw her again. But if he told her that, she might decide she had nothing to lose. She would tell the rest of the group what they’d been up to, and then everything would really go to shit.

  Sarah closed her eyes. ‘I don’t want to stop coming.’

  ‘Then what happened earlier. It can’t happen again.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, looking at him. ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t want to make a scene, but going quietly still felt like giving in to Connor. Things had always been on his terms. They met up when it suited him; he answered her calls when it suited him. He picked her up and put her down and expected her to be available whenever it was convenient for him.

  How was that fair?

  It had started as fun. She knew it was wrong, but didn’t she deserve a bit of happiness after everything that had happened to her? He had made her feel wanted. She hadn’t meant to have feelings for him. They’d just happened by themselves. Now she couldn’t make them go away. She had tried, but they just kept coming back.

  ‘I don’t want us to stop seeing each other.’ She hated the desperation in her voice. She had heard it before, in another life that seemed so long ago now, and she thought she’d left that old Sarah behind.

  Apparently
not.

  Connor sighed and lowered his head, focusing on the ground between his feet. ‘It can never be what you want it to be. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sarah said too quickly. ‘What’s wrong with this, with the way things are now? I won’t make a fuss, I promise. I won’t say anything. We can just keep things as they are. No one will know.’

  She might have hated the fact, but she didn’t want to be without him. She had tried being on her own. She couldn’t do it. Eventually, he would come to realise that he didn’t want to be without her either. She just had to be patient.

  Connor was shaking his head. ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry. It’s too risky.’

  He didn’t even meet her eye to say the words, and when he went back into the pub, Sarah waited outside, allowing the cold air to dry the start of tears that had caught at the corner of her eyes. He would change his mind, she thought. One way or another, she would make him see sense.

  Connor used the toilet before heading back into the pub. No one seemed to notice he had gone; no one except Rachel Jones, whose quick eyes fixed upon him as he re-entered the bar. Connor took his seat without making eye contact.

  One thing had made itself obvious that evening. Rachel knew what was going on between him and Sarah.

  Chapter Seven

  Chloe Lane sat in the bedroom of her flat and stared at the screen of her laptop. She rarely watched television. When she needed company, she sought it online, sneaking a peek into other people’s lives via Facebook. Most of the people she was friends with online she never saw in the real world. They were people she had known at university, first in Cardiff and then in London – ‘known’ meaning she had once lived on the same floor as them, or had sat in the same lecture hall. There were people she had met during her first few years with the police, although she wasn’t bothered if she never saw any of them again.