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

by Victoria Jenkins

  Chloe never added anything much to her own timeline, happy to keep her private life just that. Not that there was much to write about, she thought. But if other people wanted to tell her what they were doing, it seemed rude not to pay them some attention. These things that had become normal and everyday – boasts of workout sessions, photographs of impressive (and often less than impressive) cake attempts, daily updates on the progress of babies who did nothing but eat, sleep and shit (and what else could they be expected to do, really?) – were a welcome distraction from things like corpses on riverbanks.

  They were a distraction from the ghosts that stood in the shadows of Chloe’s day-to-day life.

  She rubbed the heel of her hand against her eye, pressing back the need for sleep. She was tired, it had been a long day, so why she now thought to check her emails this late she wasn’t sure, as though some sixth sense had driven her to turn on the laptop and had then led her away from Facebook and towards something that would stop everything else dead in its tracks.

  She should have tidied up a bit. The rest of the flat was neat and orderly – she didn’t own enough for things to become cluttered – but her bedroom was a different matter. The wardrobe unit that framed the head of her bed was filled to bursting, with more clothes crammed into the set of drawers beneath the window. Her make-up bag spilled its contents across the top of the unit, used face wipes smeared with concealer and mascara waiting to be thrown away. These were the things that allowed her to be someone else. Every morning when she dressed and applied her make-up, Chloe felt as though she was donning a disguise.

  She sat in bed, shivery in her pyjamas and reluctant to put the heating on when she would soon be asleep anyway. She glanced across at her phone. That afternoon, she had sent a text message to Scott – a man she had met a few months earlier, who, in those months, she had let down more than probably merited forgiveness – but he hadn’t replied. She couldn’t blame him. She wondered whether one day she might ever be able to get beyond all the things that stopped her from ever getting too close to somebody, but for now she very much doubted it.

  Looking again at the screen of the laptop, Chloe felt a shiver pass through her. This time she knew it wasn’t just the temperature that had prompted such a physical response. The first message received weeks earlier, just before Christmas, could have been put down to error, or perhaps some sick prank from somebody who knew too much about her. But this, the second: this was no coincidence. She stared at the words on the screen.

  Found him yet?

  She checked the day the email had been sent. She hadn’t logged in for a few days, but it had been received that day. She checked the time it was sent: four thirty that morning. Chloe ran a fingertip across the mousepad and clicked the search bar at the top left corner of her email page. In it, she typed the words ‘the serpent’. The screen buffered as her useless Internet connection decided on whether or not it was going to work. Then there it was. The first message, sent almost a month earlier.

  Reaching to her bedside table, Chloe took a pen from the top drawer and searched for an opened envelope or the back of a receipt on which to write. She found a tattered old notebook hidden among the debris of the drawer. She knew she wouldn’t forget it, but she wrote it down anyway, scrawling the email address hurriedly on the first clean page she came to.

  theserpent@hotmail.com

  She ran a hand over her face in another attempt to push away the tiredness that had previously beckoned her to her bed. She had drunk a coffee not long before, with sugar she didn’t usually take, and now she wished the blast of caffeine would actually do what it was expected to and make her feel a little more alert. Her heart pounded in her chest. She had been waiting years for something, anything, and now this, as though someone else knew who she was looking for. There was only one ‘him’ she had ever sought. It couldn’t possibly refer to anyone else.

  Pushing the laptop from her, Chloe went to the wardrobe in the corner of her small bedroom and reached for the suitcase that lay on top. It was heavy, weighed down with papers and documents, and she strained as its weight eased on top of her. She wasn’t sure how she’d ever been able to get it up there in the first place. Over the years, this suitcase had travelled with her between every move. Perhaps she had grown accustomed to carrying the weight of its contents with her.

  Without it, what did she have, really?

  She took it to the bed, unzipped it and flipped the lid open.

  It had been a while since she had opened the suitcase, yet everything inside it was as familiar to her as her own reflection. She reached past files of papers to the photo album that lay beneath and sat on the side of the bed before opening it. It was an old album, with a green satin cover. Its edges were battered and its front cover tea-stained, but Chloe considered these imperfections evidence of love. Here was the proof that she had returned to this album, returned to its pages, time after time: sometimes with smiles; often with tears.

  Here was the evidence that she had never forgotten him.

  From the pages, their faces looked back, young and laughing. Ice cream smiles and limbs swinging from park monkey bars; staring back at her were all those early days: the days before they’d learned about the things that made them different. These were the days before everything had gone wrong and all the bad things became irreversible.

  His life – his death – had been blighted by a question mark, and Chloe was the only person prepared to search for the answer. Those happier photos were the minority. In the others, she saw both their faces as she now remembered them, as she believed in her heart she would always remember them: distant, lost; always thinking of something else.

  Always thinking of somewhere else.

  And it shamed her now that it had been so long since she had held his face in her hands, as though that absence over time had meant she had forgotten him. She never had. For the past eight years he had followed her, ever present, continuous, like some unfinished sentence that had never come close to a full stop.

  The sense of an ending frightened her, but the thought of never finding one was even more unbearable.

  She slipped a finger beneath the page and turned to the next, offering sad smiles to the faces looking back at her. Everything she had done had been with the intention of this. It was time she got back to what she was meant to be doing.

  It was time to tell DI King the truth.

  Chapter Eight

  The following day, the next of kin of the young woman Alex feared she’d identified on the missing persons database attended the station after an early morning visit from uniformed officers. Alex sat in one of the station’s interview rooms opposite a woman she suspected might not be as old as she looked. The woman was frail, using a stick to balance herself when she walked, and when she’d taken the seat opposite Alex it seemed to have taken all her effort, visibly exhausting her. Alex went to fetch her a cup of tea, subtly using the offer as an excuse to leave the room and give the woman a few minutes alone to get her breath back.

  When Alex returned, April Evans told her that she hadn’t seen or heard from her granddaughter, Lola, in over two weeks. She had reported her missing just a week earlier, and Alex questioned the woman’s delay.

  ‘She’s a bit of a free spirit,’ April explained, wheezing the words from her chest. ‘Always has been. She pops in, she pops out again – I can’t keep tabs on her.’

  ‘Can you describe Lola for me, please, Mrs Evans?’

  The woman rummaged in her handbag and retrieved a mobile phone. She tapped the screen a few times, evidently not adept at how the thing worked. Once she’d found what she was looking for, she leaned over to show Alex the screen. It was a different photograph to the one that Alex had seen on the database the previous evening, but at the sight of Lola’s face, her heart sank once again.

  ‘Where was the last time you saw Lola?’

  ‘At the house. Friday before last. She popped in for some of her things, she said. Stayed long enough
to manage a quick cup of tea with me. Look, I know not seeing her for a week seems a long time, but it’s nothing unusual for her. She’s twenty years old, she’s got her own life. She doesn’t want to be seen living with her nan. She stays with friends, with her boyfriend. I used to try to get her to check in every now and then, but she wasn’t having any of it. I tried her mobile during the past week when I started to get a bit concerned and every time it went straight to answerphone. That’s not like her. That phone is always on. That’s what made me contact the police.’

  Alex listened to the woman’s words, unable to escape the underlying detachment that came with them. April Evans had reported Lola missing, but it had taken a whole week before she did so. She spoke of her granddaughter in the way a casual acquaintance might. What had their relationship been like in recent months? She was about to have to tell the woman that they’d found a body in the river – that now she’d seen another photograph of Lola she believed there was more than a possibility the dead girl was her granddaughter – and ask if she would make a formal identification.

  ‘A body was found yesterday morning,’ Alex told her, ‘in the River Taff at Bute Park. There were no belongings on the body, so we’ve not yet been able to make a formal identification.’

  The woman glanced down at the darkened screen of the mobile phone she still held. Her granddaughter’s photograph had now disappeared, blanked away by the fading of the screen. She was silent before looking back up at Alex.

  ‘Have you seen her? Does it look like her?’

  ‘I’m going to have to ask if you’d come with me to identify your granddaughter. I know this is very difficult for you—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said quickly. ‘Can we go now?’

  Alex was stalled by the woman’s reaction, her eagerness to view a corpse that might prove to have once been her granddaughter. There was no panic, there were no tears; she seemed calm somehow, as though she had expected the worst.

  ‘I’ll take you. I have to warn you though that the body was in the water for a while.’

  April Evans nodded, acknowledging Alex’s words as a warning. ‘It’s fine,’ she said again. ‘Where shall I wait?’

  April Evans stood at the side of the table, looking over the body of her granddaughter as though observing the remains of a stranger. Alex still found it unsettling to look at Lola Evans, yet the young woman’s grandmother had shown little emotion, reacting to everything with silence and nods. She stared absently at the bloated grey flesh of the girl, quietly absorbing the realities of Lola’s final moments.

  Looking away, April moved a hand to her mouth; the first signs of a reaction.

  ‘Is this Lola, Mrs Evans?’

  April nodded. She moved her hand from her mouth. ‘Yes, it’s Lola.’

  She turned away from Alex and looked at the closed door that kept them shut inside the claustrophobic room. ‘Her mother died when she was three. Cancer. When she was twelve, my son was killed. Knocked off his motorbike by a drunk driver. She’s seen more suffering in her life than most twice her age.’

  Alex wondered whether the family’s tragic background went some way to explaining the woman’s strange, perhaps delayed, reactions to the sight of her granddaughter’s tortured and decomposed body laid out on the table in the pathologist’s identification room. It was almost as though April Evans expected darkness to lurk at her door.

  ‘Who did this to her?’ April asked, turning back to Alex. There were tears in her eyes, stubbornly fought back with pride and defiance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she told her. ‘But I promise we’ll do everything we can to find out.’

  Chapter Nine

  Alex and Chloe were joined by the rest of the team and the superintendent in the station’s investigation room. A photograph of Lola Evans provided by her grandmother was pinned to the board at the far end of the room, highlighting the empty white space that surrounded it. They had very little to go on. Lola Evans was twenty years old and lived with her grandmother despite rarely being there. According to her grandmother she was often out until the early hours and she spent a lot of nights staying at friends’ houses. She worked as a self-employed mobile beautician although April Evans hadn’t seemed convinced this was the only way she’d made her money. When questioned further about what she meant by the comment, she gave an equally vague answer, merely stating that the lifestyle Lola seemed to have become accustomed to – the constant going out and the never-ending clothes she seemed to buy – was unlikely to have been funded through facials and pedicures.

  ‘The post-mortem report on Lola Evans came back this morning,’ Alex said, addressing the team.

  ‘As we already know, there were several injuries inflicted on the victim, particularly to the hands and nails, and the assault was likely sustained over a period of time. We need to find out her last known whereabouts.’

  Alex paused and turned to the image of Lola: a photograph of her taken on Christmas day, sitting at her grandmother’s table beside what looked like a meagre celebratory meal. Thinking back on what April Evans had told Alex of the family’s history, she guessed there was little worth celebrating at any time of year, but least of all during December.

  Lola looked hung-over in the photograph, with heavy bags circling her bleary eyes and what looked like the previous evening’s make-up darkening her skin. It also seemed glaringly obvious that she was unlikely to eat much of what was on her plate. The post-mortem report showed the ravages of anorexia on Lola’s body over the years.

  Looking at the sad eyes of the girl in the photograph – at the knife and fork that would no doubt have been pushed half-heartedly around the plate once the photo had been taken – made her life’s brutal ending somehow all the more tragic.

  ‘Lola Evans suffered from anorexia. She was hospitalised three years ago at the age of seventeen with a weight of just five and a half stone. Her grandmother said she made improvements with the help of various medical and psychiatric professionals but it was short-lived. Her family history is tragic, as you’ve already been informed. Now, initial indications would suggest that Lola wasn’t taken at random.’

  ‘The post-mortem shows no evidence of sexual assault.’

  Alex turned to Superintendent Blake. ‘No, so that rules out what might have been our obvious assumption. So what else? Lola was young, attractive, but obviously highly vulnerable. Who might have wanted to make her suffer in this way, and did that person know her? Lola’s mobile phone is missing. The service provider has drawn a blank. She owned a laptop, but it wasn’t in her room at her grandmother’s house when officers carried out a search there. Dan,’ she continued, nodding to a uniformed officer sitting close by, ‘you went to the house, didn’t you? If you could give feedback.’

  Daniel Mason was a detective constable recently transferred from another unit. A few years older than Alex, he was one of the few men she’d encountered on the force who didn’t seem to mind taking instruction from a woman younger than him. Ribald station banter often revealed more truth than anyone liked to admit. Dan had shown her nothing but respect and had fitted into the team as if they’d already known him for years.

  ‘Not much to report back, I’m afraid,’ Dan said, turning in his seat so that he was able to face the rest of their colleagues. ‘Laptop missing, as DI King said. No signs that Lola had been planning on going anywhere – no great amount of clothes missing and her passport was in the bedside drawer. There’s a suggestion from her grandmother that she might have had a boyfriend, although she doesn’t seem too sure about it. The bag of equipment Lola used for her beautician’s job was in her room, so she hadn’t been working for around two and a half weeks.’

  ‘Not at that job, anyway,’ Chloe chipped in. ‘Didn’t her nan suggest she might have been making money in other ways?’

  The superintendent cut in before Alex could respond. ‘I don’t want us to spend too much time speculating on what other source of income she might have had, at least not until we�
�ve got some facts. I don’t want anything to skew our perception of this young woman, OK?’

  Alex nodded in agreement. ‘The fact of the matter is, she was brutalised and whoever was capable of inflicting this kind of suffering on another human being needs catching.’

  ‘He could do with a bit more than that,’ Chloe muttered.

  ‘Before he does it again?’ Dan asked.

  Alex sighed. ‘Let’s hope not. And let’s not rule out the fact that “he” could be “she”.’

  She gestured to the other images on the board; in particular, to the close-up shots of Lola’s hands and the bloodied fingertips from which her nails had been pulled out. ‘This kind of torture is inflicted deliberately, with intent. Why the nails? Any link to her work as a beautician?’

  ‘What?’ piped up one of the younger male officers at the back of the room. ‘She gave someone a dodgy manicure and they decided to get their own back?’

  Alex wasn’t in the mood for attempts at humour, particularly when they were in such bad taste. Her lip curled, as it often did when she was unimpressed. The look was enough to cast an uncomfortable silence over the room, especially when it was reinforced by the superintendent. If nothing else, the comment allowed her to allocate the task of watching the two weeks’ worth of CCTV footage requested from Cardiff City Council.

  ‘Her hair was cut off,’ Alex continued, drawing the focus away from the young constable. ‘Why?’

  ‘Souvenir?’ Chloe suggested, repeating the assumption that had been made by the pathologist at the scene.

  ‘Perhaps. That might suggest she wasn’t chosen at random. It would also suggest her murder was premeditated. We need to find out as much about Lola Evans as we can,’ Alex said, bringing the meeting to a close. ‘It appears she has a boyfriend, or someone her grandmother thinks she might have been involved with. He plays in a band that seems to be quite well known around Cardiff. Let’s find him, see what he knows. If there are any developments, I want to be made aware straight away, please.’