‘So we’re relying on Tim Cole to give us an honest account?’ one of the DCs asked.
‘For the moment, yes.’
There had been a few other developments of which many members of the team were still unaware. DC Mason had spent considerable time gathering information on the history of the pub and the people who had lived and worked there. He now shared what he had uncovered with the rest of the team. Alex passed the focus on to him.
‘The Black Lion belongs to a man named Clive Beckett. There’s been a dispute over land ownership and freehold which has been going on for the last four years. The pub’s a listed building, so application for demolition was refused. The nature of the listing means no restoration work can be undertaken either.’
‘Makes sense,’ one of the team said sarcastically. ‘So the building’s just left in that state?’
‘Yep. Stupid, right? Clive Beckett seems to be something of a businessman, by all accounts. The turnover at the Lion was small fry. Seems he was happy to just let the place go after a while.’
‘He been contacted yet?’ asked Alex.
‘No. He moved to Australia a few years back. I’ve contacted his company, spoken to one of his employees. Left a message for him to get back to us as soon as possible.’
‘Family?’
‘One son and an ex-wife who both still live in South Wales. They were divorced years ago.’
‘How long has the place been empty?’ one of the other DCs asked.
‘About five years,’ Dan told him.
‘Would either Clive Beckett’s son or ex-wife still have access to the pub?’ Alex queried. ‘We need to speak to them, find out when they last went to the place. We need to find out exactly who’s had access, particularly during the past few weeks. By all accounts, there’s been no legal reason why anyone should have been inside the building. There was no work going on there, no surveys being done.’
Was there a link between this building and the parks? Someone who had reason to be in the grounds of each?
‘Did Beckett and his family live in the pub?’ It was the first time Chloe had spoken up since the meeting began.
‘No,’ Dan answered. ‘Clive Beckett and his wife lived in Lisvane at the time. He owned a few different pubs around South Wales, all of which were sold during the divorce. He employed managers to run them, but the recession meant they all took a hit by the looks of it.’
‘Do we have contact details for his ex?’ Alex asked.
Dan nodded.
She was impressed. DC Mason, though with them only a short time, was already proving to be invaluable when it came to research. He worked quickly and he was thorough. There had been a time not so long ago when Chloe had been the same – in fact, Alex had considered that Chloe Lane and Daniel Mason together would be a partnership worth having on board any investigation – but her younger colleague’s focus had since slipped and she seemed permanently distracted.
Despite her feelings of loyalty to the young woman, Alex knew Harry had been right about his emphasis on focus. They couldn’t afford anyone on the team to be anything but fully committed to these cases, and to finding out who murdered these girls and left their bodies in the water.
‘I’ll contact Beckett’s ex-wife once we’re done here,’ Alex told Dan. ‘Let’s focus on what we know about both women. Sarah’s body being found has changed everything. The pathologist reckons her body was in the water for no more than two days, meaning Connor Price couldn’t have put her there. He was in custody at the time.’
‘Doesn’t mean he hasn’t been involved.’
‘True. There’s still the possibility we’re looking at two people working together. We know that Lola’s blood was found at The Black Lion. We also now know that the second sample isn’t a match with Connor or Sarah, but as you rightly say, it doesn’t necessarily prove Connor’s innocence. Some of the men from the support group attended by Connor, Lola and Sarah are due in for testing today. Quite frankly, the longer this goes on, the more I’m beginning to doubt Connor Price’s involvement. Yes, he’d been having an affair with Sarah, but there’s no evidence of any romantic or sexual link with Lola. There’s no doubt that the same man, or men, is responsible for both women’s murders. These aren’t crimes of passion – they’re premeditated, calculated. We’re looking for someone thorough, someone clever, someone who knew both women and had access to Bute Park and to Cosmeston Lakes. CCTV footage from cameras at the entrance to Bute Park on Boulevard de Nantes has picked up a white van. It’s not the most helpful footage – the plate blurs out on a close-up. 8.45 p.m. on the twelfth of January. It’s a Ford Transit – no other identifying features, obviously. That would make our lives far too easy. I’d like you two to chase up any calls that have come in during the past twelve hours,’ Alex said, addressing a couple of officers sitting to Chloe’s left. ‘Let’s see if we can glean anything useful amongst the time-wasters. Any questions?’
‘Why water?’
Alex looked to Chloe.
‘Why is he putting his victims in water?’
It was something Alex had pondered on her return to the station earlier that day. ‘I’ve wondered the same. But without any further clues as to who this man is, it’s almost impossible to say. It was clear today that less of an attempt had been made to sink Sarah’s body than had been made with Lola.’ Alex paused. Talking about these young women as though they were nothing more than corpses made her nauseous. She always tried to attach each victim to a partner, to parents, to friends, tried to imagine herself at such a loss.
‘Something from his past perhaps?’ Chloe suggested.
Alex nodded. ‘Likely. We need to find out more, and as soon as we can.’
‘The other women from the support group, should we be keeping an eye out for them?’
Something else that had crossed Alex’s mind. She wished they had the resources to ensure that every other woman who had attended the group had security until this man was identified and locked up, but that kind of service was far beyond their means. ‘At the moment, the only other woman we know for certain who was attending the group regularly is Rachel Jones. Tim Cole is supposed to be getting back to us today with the other names. We’ve already spoken with Rachel and she’s aware she’s to remain vigilant. Let’s be careful not to scaremonger though, OK?’
Her words were received with nods.
‘Right. Let’s get to work then.’
DC Mason handed her a note with the name and contact number of Clive Beckett’s ex-wife. As she took it from him and commended him for being so thorough, Alex watched Chloe slink from the room without acknowledging her colleagues.
What was the matter with her? She’d been like it all day, barely speaking to Alex in the car both to and from Cosmeston Lakes that morning. She found it difficult to believe that all this was over the brief clash of words – barely enough to describe as an argument – that they’d had in the car the previous evening. Alex went out into the corridor, but Chloe was already gone. She was about to head to her own office when Superintendent Blake called her into his.
‘I’ve asked for the post-mortem on Sarah Taylor’s body to be considered priority, so I’m hoping we might be able to—’ Alex stopped talking, aware that Harry was paying her words no attention. His mind was elsewhere, betrayed by the glazed expression his face wore.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, closing the door to his office behind her.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Here.’ Gesturing to the screen of his desktop computer, he reached for the monitor and turned it towards Alex.
There was a video paused on the screen: a low-lit room, walls adorned with posters and flyers; an unmade bed. On the bed, naked except for a pair of black French knickers, was a young woman, barely in her twenties and possibly still a teenager. Her brunette hair hung long, partially obscuring her face.
Alex looked at the superintendent questioningly. ‘What’s this?’
He clicked play. The girl rose on to h
er knees, a thumb hooked into her underwear as the fingers of her other hand pushed back a length of hair from her face. She stared directly into the camera, her eyes widening as she responded to an unheard instruction from her audience on the other side of the screen.
Alex felt the office floor shift beneath her.
‘It’s her, isn’t it? Harry asked, pausing the recording once more.
Alex looked back at the screen. She looked so different, yet so unmistakably her.
‘What happens next?’
‘Here, or on the recording?’
‘The recording.’
‘You don’t want to watch for yourself?’
Alex shot him a scathing look. ‘No.’
Harry shook his head. ‘You can use your imagination.’
They both looked back to the monitor, though neither wanted to acknowledge what they were met with there.
On the monitor, DC Chloe Lane remained poised, frozen; her thumb still hooked into her knickers.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was easier that day for Chloe to gain access to the things she needed. She had slipped from the team meeting without speaking to anyone and gone to a quiet corner of the incident room to access a computer. There was never going to be a right time. Now seemed as good a time as any, and she already felt she had wasted too much.
No one believed her brother wasn’t a killer. Chloe knew that despite Alex’s loyalties, she too was sceptical. Why shouldn’t she be, when all the evidence stacked against Luke was so incriminating? Until she had something to back up her suspicions, even Alex wasn’t going to take her seriously.
Chloe retrieved a memory stick from her pocket. She had tried the previous afternoon to access the files she needed, but had been interrupted by Dan Mason. She’d waited until today for another opportunity.
She turned the sound off on the speakers and logged on to the system. The day before, she had managed to access the files, but there hadn’t been enough time to download them. She returned to them now, keeping one eye on a couple of colleagues talking at the far side of the room.
She clicked copy and waited.
Alex had been caught in a shower soon after leaving the station and her hair – longer than she had allowed it to grow in some time – was a tangled mess, pulled back and knotted into the smallest of buns at the nape of her neck. Her shirt and jacket were creased and she felt sticky beneath her clothing despite the bite of January air that nipped at her skin as she got from the car.
Her mind was already a messy tangle of thoughts: Lola, Sarah, Chloe. What the hell had she witnessed on the screen of that computer?
It occurred to her later that her first thought when she had seen him had been of her appearance, and she had reprimanded herself for having been so vain. Yet, had she known she would see him there, in the supermarket, Alex knew that despite everything else that was going on she would have made more of an effort. It would have done little to soften the blow of what she had seen, but simply being slightly more presentable might have done something – anything – to prevent her from feeling so inadequate.
As it was, when she saw Rob in the supermarket that evening she both looked and felt a mess.
One of the worst parts of it – a part that insulted Alex so keenly, though there were so many other elements of that moment that caused equal offence – was the fact that Rob had tried to pretend at first that he hadn’t seen her. He had glanced along the aisle, looked directly at her, and turned away quickly as though she didn’t exist. It had stung like a slap, and even hours later she found herself unable to let it go.
But then there was the other thing: the thing that rendered Alex momentarily immobile, frozen by the rows of baked beans as she looked on in disbelief.
There was a child sitting on Rob’s shoulders.
A boy of around five years old was sitting on his shoulders, laughing, as a girl – slightly older, maybe seven – danced in the aisle, her wellingtons making sucking noises each time she lifted a foot from the floor. There was a woman crouched just behind the girl, scanning a row of tinned soups. Alex watched, transfixed, as the woman turned, looked up and said something to Rob. She continued to watch as her ex-husband said something in response and the woman stood, taking the young girl by the hand.
She didn’t allow time to talk herself out of it.
‘Rob,’ Alex said, giving the woman a brief smile as she approached them. The woman smiled back. She was attractive, Alex caught herself thinking. Younger than she was. Quite a bit younger.
The look on Rob’s face said he hadn’t expected her to be quite so confident. ‘Alex.’ The word wobbled off his tongue. ‘Uhh… nice to see you.’
Alex narrowed her eyes slightly. Then the truth of what she was witnessing hit her. The woman was smiling at her, the kind of pained smile that delivered an unwelcome pity. She had clearly heard the name ‘Alex’ before. This woman knew who she was, in the context of ‘ex-wife’ at least.
‘And you,’ Alex said, having to force the words out. ‘Anyway, bit of a rush. See you.’
The little girl smiled up at her before continuing to suck up her wellingtons from the supermarket floor. Alex turned and headed back down the aisle, her heart pounding. How stupid she had been, she thought, as she abandoned her basket of shopping near the foyer of the supermarket. How naive to think that for once she had been the one who had been calling the shots.
She hurried back to the car and locked herself inside. Beneath her shirt, her heart was pounding. She felt sticky and hot despite the cold. She pulled off her coat and turned on the engine. From the pocket of her coat, her mobile began to ring. It linked up to the car’s Bluetooth system. She looked to the dash.
Chloe.
Alex hesitated. The coward in her wanted to ignore the call. How was she supposed to talk to Chloe as though everything was normal, when everything was so clearly not? She couldn’t rid her brain of the image she had seen in Harry’s office. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to hold a conversation with Chloe without mentioning the video. Keeping if from her would be as good as lying and Alex didn’t want to do that, not to Chloe. She wasn’t sure she could.
She didn’t have to. The ringing stopped, her phone cutting Chloe to the answerphone.
Chapter Forty-Three
The following morning, an image of Chloe similar to the one that had been paused on the screen of the superintendent’s office computer adorned the front page of one of the local newspapers. Alex stopped at a garage for petrol on the way into work and was stalled by the weatherproof plastic boxes on the forecourt that were home to the daily papers. She felt physically sickened.
Who could despise Chloe so much they’d want to make her suffer in this way?
Harry Blake had held off from speaking to Chloe about the video file he had been sent the day before, clearly uneasy about how to broach the subject. Now these images adorned the newspaper’s front page the entire station would be aware of it. The superintendent was bound to be furious this morning, wishing he had spoken with her yesterday. Alex’s heart ached for Chloe. She didn’t understand the images – she couldn’t imagine Chloe, who she had always known to be so sensible, allowing herself to be photographed or filmed in such a way – but until she had the facts, she didn’t want to judge. Over the past six months Alex had grown close to Chloe. But how well did she know her really?
How well could anyone know another person?
She grabbed a paper from the plastic display case and went inside to pay for her petrol. After leaving the forecourt, Alex pulled off the main road and into a side street. She cut the engine and drew the newspaper on to her lap.
Cop a Load of This
Those five words alone were enough to fill Alex with an anger so powerful it might have brought her to frustrated tears. It was typical tabloid wordplay, crass and unimaginative. No doubt the ‘journalist’ who had written it had been impressed with his or her own efforts.
This webcam stunner is twenty-eight-yea
r-old Chloe Lane,
the ‘article’ began,
a Detective Constable with the South Wales Police.
Even in the first sentence they couldn’t get their facts right, Alex thought. Chloe was twenty-six. How reliable was the rest of the piece going to be in its presentation of the ‘facts’?
Taken several years ago, this still from a webcam shows the young DC writhing on a bed whilst accepting payment for her ‘services’. For more, see page six.
Alex felt anger course through her. Payment? For God’s sake, these parasites just made things up as they went along. What evidence did they have to suggest anything of the sort? Plenty of young women made the mistake of allowing boyfriends to photograph or film them in ways they might later regret, but revenge porn was no proof of anything more. Amidst the previous evening’s thoughts of Rob and of the children she had seen him with – the family it looked as if he had become a part of – Alex had kept returning to Chloe. She had come to the conclusion that her young colleague was the victim of revenge porn. It was an area where Alex had little experience, although the numbers of complaints filed to the police was increasing at an astonishing rate. She assumed that the number of incidents was likely to be far greater than the complaints. Many women – and, in an increasing number of cases, men – were likely to be too embarrassed or ashamed to admit what had been done.
The paper was breaking the law. It was an offence to make public any intimate or sexual image or video that was otherwise private. They should be held to account for this, Alex thought. Prosecuted. Yet again, the press seemed to consider itself above the law.
She turned to page six. The words that greeted her plunged her from righteous fury into confusion.
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 16