Alex opened the door and allowed a rush of cold air to flood the car. Traffic rushed past, its sounds forming a wall around her. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Why hadn’t any of them seen it?
She thought back through some of the things that had been said at the meeting earlier in the week. Chloe had questioned why the killer put his victims in water. Something from his past, she suggested.
The river. The lake. The water.
The bath.
‘Did Julia Edwards have any other partners we know of?’ Alex asked. ‘Ex-husband lurking about anywhere?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Why?’
‘Perhaps her death wasn’t an accident. What if someone killed her there, years ago, and is returning there now with his next victims?’
The scepticism in Dan’s reaction was unmissable. ‘Fifteen years later? But why? And was there any evidence to suggest Julia Edwards’s death wasn’t an accident? Surely that would have been investigated at the time.’
He was right, Alex thought: there was no evidence. Prescription drugs and alcohol had been found at the scene: Julia Edwards had been so intoxicated she apparently hadn’t felt herself drowning.
Or had she?
‘Was someone else with her when she died?’ Alex wondered aloud. They needed to make finding out a priority.
Chapter Fifty-One
She shoved a foot in the doorway in an attempt to block his entry, but he pushed past Chloe regardless. He eyed the sparse flat with obvious contempt before turning the look upon her. She knew she looked a mess. She hadn’t bothered taking a shower that morning and her hair was pulled into a knotted bun on the top of her head. Yesterday’s make-up still circled her eyes. She was wearing leggings that were ripped across the knee – the results of a previous accident involving an attempt at home DIY – and a shirt that had a coffee stain down the front. She looked like someone whose grip on their life was starting to slacken, and the look her father gave her was sufficient to confirm it.
‘Get out.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘Call one of your colleagues? Oh, sorry, you can’t do that, can you?’
Chloe hated her father. She had feared him when she was a child, resented him when she was a teenager, and now those years had escalated into one wall of hatred: one she couldn’t see a way over or around.
He glanced at the opened laptop on the sofa. ‘Applying for jobs?’
Christ, he was cruel. But then he always had been, she thought. Every time he had locked her inside her bedroom, deaf to her cries. Every time he had taken his belt to her brother, each time reminding him that he had brought it on himself. Of course he was cruel. She had always known it.
‘Why are you here?’
‘You’ve been to the house.’
Chloe felt her face flush. She had always been a terrible liar, despite her frequent attempts at the contrary. As a teenager she had lied about where she had been, who she’d been with, and her parents had always known she was lying. As though they had followed her. As though God had been following her and had reported back.
‘One of the neighbours saw you.’
‘And what did they see exactly?’ she replied sarcastically. ‘A daughter visiting her childhood home?’
‘It stopped being your home a long time ago. The day you decided to reject us. The day you decided to reject everything we stand for. You’d no more right to be in my house than—’
‘Than you’ve got to be in mine?’ Chloe challenged, interrupting her father mid-sentence. Suddenly she was seventeen again. She was standing in her parents’ hallway, the front door opened for the street to bear witness to just what an awful child that poor Griffiths couple had been cursed with, shouting and swearing, pledging vows to never set foot within that house again. And she never had. Until that week.
‘Why were you there?’
Chloe shrugged. ‘Just fancied a trip down memory lane.’
The irony of her choice of phrasing didn’t pass her by. She had changed her surname to Lane in an attempt to escape her former life, now here she was, immersed back in it, and all her own doing.
‘I told you before not to come back, and I meant it. You can’t keep your meddling little nose out, can you? You were always the black sheep of our family. Always the one to question everything. Thinking you knew it all. Leading your brother astray.’
At the mention of Luke, Chloe felt her pulse quicken. She knew that ‘astray’ referred to his relationship with Emily. She hadn’t been the one to lead Luke astray. Luke had been pushed that way by a childhood ruined by rules and routine and punishment. He had sought affection, love, in an attempt to replace all that had been missing whilst growing up. If they hadn’t liked what Luke had become, it had been all their own doing.
‘And now you’ve truly shown yourself up for what you really are. Tabloid whore.’
Her father’s face had turned a deep crimson, as though even the words embarrassed him. He was trembling slightly, as though blaming her for having been reduced to such use of language.
At her sides, Chloe’s hands clenched into fists. What would it feel like? How satisfying might it be if she were to hit him, to launch her fury at him, let him pay for every time he had raised a hand to her or Luke? She had lost her brother, her best friend. She had lost her career.
What did any of it matter now? What was there left to lose?
‘What did I ever do to you?’
An unexpected sadness swept out with her words. This anger she felt wasn’t borne out of hatred. Somewhere, in another life, it had been borne out of love. She had loved her father as any daughter might. He had berated her: she had loved him. He had punished her: she had loved him. He had shunned her and she had continued to love him, still desperately seeking his approval. She had only ever wanted him to stop. She had only ever wanted him to be the man she had once thought he was, back when she had been young enough to be easily deceived.
His face softened, for a moment, and in that moment Chloe saw her other father: the father who had made himself known on rare occasions. He had made sandcastles one summer: a summer over twenty years ago that Chloe was still able to remember despite the fact that she had been so young. He had helped Luke bury his pet gerbil, making a wooden cross to mark the grave at the bottom of the garden. He had read Chloe stories. There had been good times, once upon a time. She might have tried to fool herself into believing it had all been bad, but she realised that was a lie. Nobody was ever all bad, not completely. Wife beaters ran bubble baths and made candlelit dinners. Child abusers played games and told stories, made their victims feel as though there was nobody in the world more special.
Then his expression changed, the soft edges gone, never truly there. And there it was, Chloe thought. There was the lie. You couldn’t be both: both bad and good. You could be good and do a bad thing – you could be bad and do a good thing – but one or the other had to be the true you, the real you, the one that was inherently in you, impossible to ever really remove or disguise.
Any good was a lie, Chloe thought. This was his true version: the one who sneered and gloated and belittled. And she had stopped seeking his approval a long time ago.
‘Why Marcross?’
‘What?’ Her father’s face creased, heavy lines forming across his forehead.
‘Luke,’ she reminded him, as though he had somehow managed to forget the location of his son’s supposed suicide. ‘Marcross. Why there? Had he ever even been there before? Why would he choose there?’
‘You can’t let it go, can you?’ he said, his voice wobbling on the words.
She hadn’t imagined it: he had flinched. It had been so brief that it might easily have gone unnoticed, but she had been looking for it and it had been there. At the mention of Marcross. At the mention of that night.
Something.
‘How can you let it go? He’s your son. Don’t you want to know what really happened that night?’
‘I know what happened
,’ her father snapped. He crossed the room towards her, making Chloe start. His hands gripped her shoulders. ‘Your brother killed that girl. Why can’t you accept it? He might not have meant to, but he did. He killed her. He bloody well strangled the life out of her. He knew he wasn’t going to get away with it and he didn’t want to face up to the consequences.’
He was shaking Chloe, his fingertips pressed into the shallow dips above her collarbones. In that moment, she hated what she knew he could see. Fear. Her twelve-year-old self back again, scared of this man. This man she had just wanted to love her.
She did what she had never been able to back then. She fought back. Her knee rose instinctively and slammed between her father’s legs. As he groaned and leaned forward, she shoved him with such force that he staggered into the coffee table and fell back, dazed, on to the sofa. He exhaled loudly through his mouth, breathing away the momentary pain she had inflicted.
There was an awkward moment when father and daughter stared one another out, like some ridiculous cowboy film, each waiting for the other to make a move for a pistol from a back pocket. She had braced herself, expecting her father to react, to make a lunge for her, but he did neither. He sat on the sofa, puffing like an old man as he tried to catch his breath.
‘The porn,’ he managed to stammer beneath breaths.
‘The what?’
‘The porn your mother found.’
Chloe looked down at her father, contempt consuming her. Luke had told her about the magazine his mother had found. He’d been fourteen at the time. He told Chloe how their mother had held his head under water to wash out his eyes. She treated him so cruelly: even more so, it seemed, when neither Chloe nor her father was there to see it.
Was that her father’s explanation for events? Was that his justification for believing his own son had been capable of his girlfriend’s murder?
Just after Emily’s death, Luke had turned up at the flat where Chloe had been living. He had sat on the edge of Chloe’s bed, red-faced and tear-stained, a sixteen-year-old boy suspected of murder. Luke had been inconsolable. He had sobbed through his words, retching on them as he explained how their mother and father had accused him of being depraved. They had wanted him to admit it. They wanted him to confess to what had happened: that he and ‘that girl’ had engaged in some warped, sick sex game and he had accidentally strangled her. He had panicked, left her for dead; gone back. They wanted him to admit to them, and then to the police, exactly what he had done.
‘I swear to you, I never touched her. It wasn’t me, Chloe. I would never have hurt her.’
And Chloe had held her brother’s hand in hers and believed every word he told her.
She still believed him now. She had never stopped. He was an innocent. Nothing like her, regardless of anything their father might say.
‘He was fourteen and he looked at some porn,’ Chloe said, looking down at her father. ‘Jesus, what teenage boy doesn’t?’
‘Jesus? How typical of you, Chloe, to use his name in vain. Your religion means nothing to you, does it? And that’s where we’re different, you see. Your mother and I. You and Luke. You think that behaviour is acceptable. We don’t. You think looking at pornographic imagery is acceptable. We don’t. You think accepting payment for sexual favours is acceptable. We don’t.’
He stood from the sofa and Chloe held her breath, expecting his worst.
‘Get out of my flat.’
‘Gladly,’ her father said. ‘Come to the house again and I’ll call the police. Be nice for you, I suppose. Think of it as a reunion.’
‘Come to this house again,’ Chloe said, yanking open the front door, ‘and I’ll make sure everyone knows you killed your son. Luke didn’t kill himself, did he?’
There was a moment before he headed back out onto the street and Chloe was able to slam the front door behind him. But not before she saw it again. There it was, so faint she might have missed it. That flicker beneath the arrogant, horrible exterior that acknowledged that his secret wasn’t entirely his own.
Guilt.
Now all she had to do was prove her father was a murderer.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The first call Alex made when she got back to the station that morning was to Martin Beckett, the son of the man who had owned The Black Lion. She had gone straight to the coffee machine for a caffeine fix before shutting herself away in her office, wanting to be alone with her thoughts. Dan had returned to the main investigation room to continue his research into Julia Edwards. Finding out as much as they could about the woman now seemed their best chance of finding a link with the two girls whose bodies had been retrieved from the water.
Alex searched through the contacts on her phone for his mobile number. As it continued to ring without answer, she cursed.
‘Hello?’
She kept her fingers crossed that he might hold the information she needed. She had made the link between the bath and the water when they’d found out about Julia Edwards’s death at the pub, but she wished the missing pieces had fallen into place earlier. They needed names. A solid link to Julia Edwards would finally give them something concrete from which to work.
‘Martin? It’s Detective Inspector King. Have you got a minute?’
She heard noise in the background, the sound of voices and movement.
Martin spoke to someone at his end before redirecting his attention back to Alex. ‘I do now.’
‘Julia Edwards, the woman who died in the bathtub at your father’s pub: how much do you know about her?’
‘Not much. Like I told you though, I knew too much. More than I was comfortable with.’
‘Look, I know this can’t be easy to talk about, but I need to know as much as possible about what was going on in that flat. You suggested your father had been having an affair with the woman who lived there?’
Martin gave a bitter laugh. ‘Not how I’d describe it.’
Alex paused. ‘How would you describe it?’
There was a loud exhalation at Martin’s end of the conversation. ‘More of a business transaction, shall we say. An exchange of services.’
This much Alex knew already. Clive Beckett appeared not to have been too pushy about the rent on the flat above his pub, providing missed payments were accounted for through alternative means.
‘How did you find out about your father’s…’ She had been going to use the word ‘relationship’, but Alex realised it would most likely lead to insult.
‘I heard my parents arguing,’ Martin told her, saving Alex the awkwardness of having to rephrase the question. ‘Not just the once, either. I think she had a bit of a reputation at the pub – the staff used to gossip about what was going on in the flat.’
Alex doodled distractedly across the notepad on her desk. ‘So you’re suggesting she saw other men there? Men she might have been accepting payment from?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate. Like I said, there was a lot of gossip.’
No smoke without fire, thought Alex.
‘Do you remember her moving into the flat?’
‘Yeah. Couple of years before she died.’
‘Did she move into the flat alone? No husband or boyfriend?’
Martin sighed. As responsive to her questions as he had been, Alex realised revisiting this old ground was something Martin had no desire to experience.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I was only a teenager back then. I don’t know. I think she lived there alone, but I can’t be sure. I’m sorry I can’t be more help, I really am. I’ve seen those girls on the news. I know what all this is about. You don’t think it’s got something to do with that woman though, do you? I mean, all this was years ago.’
‘I can’t give any details of the case, I’m sorry. You’ve been really helpful. I’m sorry to have dragged it all back up for you. One last thing: do the names Christian Cooper or Joseph Black mean anything to you?’
‘No,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I wish I
was able to help you in some way.’
‘You have. Thank you.’
Alex ended the call and sat back in her chair, pressing her eyes shut tightly. Despite the links with the water and the pub, nothing was making sense. Why would anyone who had known Julia Edwards all those years ago be now targeting women who, back then, were just kids?
Why couldn’t they find out who these two missing men were? It was rare these days for people to leave no trail behind them, particularly with the popularity of social media. People made themselves easily traceable, even if they failed to realise they were doing so.
Had one of these men removed the records from the support group’s filing cabinet in a bid to make himself more difficult to find? Tim Cole so far seemed entirely plausible, and they had no evidence with which to arrest Connor Price for a second time. If the man they were looking for was either Christian Cooper or Joseph Black, one of them was being careful to do everything he could to conceal his tracks.
He had gone to that group with the intention to kill, Alex thought, and the notion made her sick to her stomach. The guilt she carried about the death of Sarah Taylor was overwhelming. They should have got to her in time, but they hadn’t. They had failed her.
She had failed her.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chloe flicked on the kettle before going into the living room and taking her laptop from the sideboard. She turned it on and waited for the darkened screen to light. She inserted the memory stick and waited for the list of files to appear.
There was so much to work through she barely knew where she would begin. All Chloe knew was that there was no more time to be wasted. She had already wasted far too much. It didn’t matter any more that these files had come at such a high price. Now she had them, she could finally do something constructive.
She opened the file that contained the police interview with her brother. Just seeing his name at the top of the screen brought a lurching sickness to her stomach, a sense of sadness so intense that Chloe had never been able to describe it in just one word.
The Girls in the Water: A completely gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detectives King and Lane Book 1) Page 20