by Celina Grace
She heard Zac’s zipper go down again and moments later, the sound of his hands on himself, slowly at first but gradually increasing in speed. A bubble of nausea came up into her throat but she realised that now was the moment, now he would be distracted, now she might have a chance. This was as vulnerable as he was going to get so it had to be now.
Zac’s panting increased and that was the moment that Kate decided to act. She could feel the adrenaline course through her, like a shot of vodka straight to the stomach. Come on, Kate, do it!
She launched herself from the sofa, as silently and swiftly as she could but Zac must have seen the movement from the corner of his eye as he half-turned towards her as she slammed into him. They both hit the floor hard, struggling and gasping. For an exhilarated second Kate thought, this is it, I’ve got him, I’ve got him but even a small man like Zac Downey had the advantage of strength after the first surprise. He lashed out, punching her full in the face with his fist – she heard the crack as her cheekbone broke and the flash of pain that followed it – and Kate tumbled backwards, half her face on fire. Zac was on his feet the moment later, snatching the knife from Fliss’s limp fingers.
“Oh, you slippery bitch,” he panted. Kate scrambled to her feet, keeping her eyes on the glint of metal in his hand. “You didn’t drink it, did you? You stupid bitch.”
Kate didn’t dignify this with an answer. She was moving backwards slowly, trying to plot her route out but Zac was between her and the doorway.
“Come on then, bitch. It was going to be a murder-suicide anyway and you’ve just picked the method.” Zac raised the knife. “It’ll be my first time taking an active role in the event. How about that, Kate? I’ll pop my cherry with you. That’s funny, don’t you think?”
The demon showed in his eyes – he was no longer handsome, not even slightly. Kate had seen eyes like that only once before, and she shuddered at the memory. Keep him talking, keep him talking. If she could distract him, maybe she could kick the knife from his hand.
“I’ll do anything you want, Zac,” she said in a low tone, as unaggressively as she could.
“You bet your fucking life, you will. You think you can just reject me and I’ll let you get away with it? You’re goddamn right you’re going to do exactly as I say. You’re going to suffer for it, bitch.”
What the hell was he talking about? Kate didn’t bother to ponder it. They were circling each other, as much as the small room allowed. I’m going to have to do it, she thought, heart pounding. I’m just going to have to rush him again and hope for the best.
Just as she was gathering her resolve, two things happened. There was an ear-splitting, thundering crash of something massively heavy hitting the front door and the front door then hitting the floor of the hallway. Zac’s head whipped around towards the sound and Kate propelled herself forward, one foot going up and out towards the knife. She felt her foot connect with his wrist, saw the knife go flying, the blade catching the last dying light of the fire as it fell through the air in a curving arc. A second later, there were shouts and a figure in the doorway, a man rushing in, two men rushing in. Zac went down under both of them and Kate, stumbling forward as she overbalanced after her roundhouse kick, realised it was Olbeck, Olbeck and Jeff, both of them overpowering the struggling, shouting man on the floor.
“You have the right to remain silent—” Olbeck began the caution in a shaking voice as Kate crawled over to where Fliss sat, white and still and slumped in the armchair. Kate crawled through the thin streams of blood on the floor and reached out for her friend, reached out and said in a voice she barely recognised as hers “Fliss, Fliss, I’m here, hold on. Hold on.”
Chapter Twenty One
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t,” Olbeck said simply. “I just had a feeling, a bad feeling. All I could hear was rustling and a man’s voice and murmuring but I – well, I just didn’t like it. Not that late at night, not after how you’d been lately. It didn’t sound like Tin to me. So I just said to Jeff, I’m just going to pop round to Kate’s and see if she’s okay, you know how she’s been—”
“And I said, you’re not going on your own, I’m coming with you,” said Jeff.
“So we drove over, and of course, as soon as we looked through the front window—”
“You really must get new curtains, Kate, anyone could peer in,” contributed Jeff, helpfully.
Olbeck gave him a look. “Anyway, luckily they don’t meet in the middle because we could see what was going on straight away. So – bang – down comes the door.”
They were all gathered in the incident room, the morning afterwards. Jeff had driven Kate and Olbeck back from the hospital, where she’d been X-rayed and prodded and checked for concussion and her eyes examined for damage.
“How does it feel, Kate?” Anderton asked.
It was Kate’s turn to give him a look. “Sore,” she said, succinctly, because that’s exactly what it felt like, and also, it hurt to talk.
“Got some heavy duty painkillers from the hospital?”
Kate nodded gingerly.
“Good,” said Anderton. He jumped off of the desk at the front of the office and began to stride up and down. Kate saw him look over at Jeff, and Olbeck obviously intercepted the look as well.
“I’ll just walk Jeff out to the car,” he said hastily. “Can you hold off on the debrief until I get back?”
“Of course.” Anderton inclined his head with courtesy.
Jeff came up to Kate and gave her a very careful hug and a kiss on her undamaged cheek. “Take care of yourself, hun.”
“Thank you,” said Kate with sincerity. “You both saved us both.”
Jeff gave her a grin which unfortunately she couldn’t return. “Any time, my darling.”
For a moment, the phrase recalled Zac’s crooning murmur to the dying Fliss, but only for a moment. Kate squeezed Jeff’s arm again in gratitude and said goodbye.
They watched as Olbeck and Jeff left the room, and then Kate turned back to Anderton. She was just about to steel herself to ask the question when Theo did it for her. “How is Fliss?”
Anderton looked sombre. “She’s in intensive care, currently under observation.”
Theo looked a little sick. “Do they – so they think she’ll make it?”
Anderton spread his hands. “I think the outlook was fairly positive. She’s responding well to the blood transfusions. But—” He looked suddenly older and greyer than normal. “But I would imagine she’ll be transferred to a secure unit, if and when she’s well enough to come out of ICU. There’s no way they’ll discharge her as normal, given what’s happened.”
“So she’ll be sectioned?” Kate asked with difficulty.
Again, Anderton spread his hands in a half shrug. “I don’t know, Kate. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’ve got enough on my plate, worrying about how I’m going to explain to the high-ups that a member of my team was actively sabotaging an investigation and working alongside the prime suspect.” He caught sight of their faces and shrugged. “I know, I sound callous. I hope Fliss will be fine but let’s face it, she’s basically been having a nervous breakdown for the past few months. It’s going to be a long, hard slog before she gets anywhere near normality again. And in the meantime, we do have to deal with it.”
Kate made an ‘mmm’ noise and she saw Theo and Rav nodding. Olbeck came back into the office and shut the door. “Sorry about that,” he said, apropos of nothing.
“Don’t apologise,” said Anderton, who was by now standing over by the whiteboards. As one, they all regarded the photographs of the dead girls and the dead boy, spread out like limp dolls on the grassy floor of the stage, hanging from a tree, bluish-white on the dirty floor of the changing room. Kate wondered whether Zac had been there when it happened, doing what he’d done over Fliss’s dying body. Her fists clenched.
“A suicide fetish,” Anderton said reflectively. “And they say there’s nothing new under the sun. How wro
ng can they be?”
“So Zac Downey...influenced, coerced, whatever you’d call it, all these young girls to kill themselves? For his sexual pleasure?” Olbeck’s face looked as though he’d just drunk something sour.
“Something like that,” said Anderton. “Although I would imagine it was the whole thing that got him off, not just the final act. The whole act of grooming someone young and vulnerable, influencing them into thinking that was the only way out. What a master manipulator he must have been.”
Kate thought of the other crimes in Vermont, the other four girls who had died, if not at his hands then through his actions. “Are we liaising with the US police over the cases over there?” That was a long sentence for her and she winced and fell silent.
“Kate, please don’t talk if it hurts. Write it down or something.” Anderton’s gaze met her own and for a moment, the pain in her cheekbone was forgotten. He cleared his throat. “Yes, we’re already in contact with the relevant police department over there. I’d imagine there are more than a few points of similarity between those cases and our own.”
“What about Kaya Trent and Joshua Widcombe?” asked Rav. “That was still a murder-suicide?”
Anderton nodded. “Oh yes, of course. But instigated, put into motion, by Zac Downey. I imagine he told Kaya all sorts of lies about how Joshua was cheating on her, deceiving her. Possibly with Veronica Stemmick.”
“Iago,” said Kate.
“Yes, exactly. Pity they hadn’t done Othello for their school play, instead of Romeo and Juliet, we might have tumbled to it sooner.” Anderton turned away from the whiteboards with an angry shake of his head. “And then, of course, when Kaya and Joshua died, he could start on Veronica, make her start to feel guilty about what she’d done, even if she hadn’t done much. He was good at choosing the vulnerable ones, the ones who really did hate themselves for whatever reason, whether it was justified or not.”
Theo raised a hand to his head, as if something had just occurred to him. “I’ve just thought – Fliss – he was the one who must have told her about you and me, Kate. You know, that we had that thing.” He realised all the other men in the room were staring at him and added hastily “It was a total lie, of course. But that’s partly why she was starting to get so strange, she was so jealous.”
“Jealous?” asked Olbeck. “Oh, because she fancied you?” He rolled his eyes. “Sure about that, are you?”
Theo looked annoyed. “I didn’t say that was the only reason.”
“He’s right,” said Kate, wincing at the pain in her jaw as she spoke. “She was jealous. Unreasonably so, because there was nothing in it, but she didn’t know that. She trusted Zac to tell her what she thought was the truth.”
Olbeck half laughed. “Huh. Anyone who really knows you would have seen through that one in a hurry.”
Kate was glad that her painful face gave her a good reason not to smile. She knew Anderton was looking straight at her and determined that she would not meet his knowing gaze. Not this time.
“That’s not seriously why Fliss went over to Kate’s house to – to kill her?” Rav said incredulously. “There has to be something more to it than that.”
Anderton pushed both hands through his hair. “Well, of course there is,” he said, dropping those hands to his lap. “Fliss has been in an incredibly vulnerable state since her mother died last year. You too, Kate, forgive me. I wonder if Zac thought about targeting you, as well?”
Kate nodded. “He tried to. I think he tried to but I wasn’t falling for it.”
Anderton nodded. “Well, there you go. Fliss is young, she’s nervous about her role here, she’s trying to find her feet.” He was silent and then added with a sad tone “I’m sure we probably all could have done more to help her with that part of things. God knows.” He cleared his throat and went on. “Anyway, Zac finds her vulnerabilities – her mother’s death, the fact that she wants one of her workmates... She thinks that Kate turned him down, she’s painfully jealous. I don’t know, it goes even deeper than that. We’ll have plenty of time to ask her if—” He stumbled for a second. “I mean when she wakes up. When she’s ready to talk to us.”
“It’s probably even more pragmatic than that,” offered Olbeck. “Zac knew, because Fliss told him, that Kate was going to be interviewing him the next day. So he seized the opportunity to get Kate out of the way and stage the next suicide. Two birds with one stone.”
Kate was remembering other things. How Zac Downey had been first on the scene of each suicide. Was that to cover up forensic traces of his presence there during the actual crime? She remembered what he’d done while watching Fliss dying and, through a twist of nausea, thought it was very likely that was the case. Had he taken photographs, videos of the dying girls, for his own personal perusal later? That would be something else to search for on his laptop and in his personal possessions.
He hadn’t been at the scene of Claire Collins’ death though, had he? But then Kate remembered the heavy rain, the obliteration of footprints and other evidence due to the bad weather. Zac Downey might well have visited the body before it was discovered; might, in fact, have been there encouraging the poor girl on to do what she did.
Kate thought of poor Claire Collins, that scream for help that her written monologue had revealed. Why had Zac Downey brought that to Kate’s attention? To throw her off the scent? Or because it was just another way of manipulating the situation? With a start, Kate remembered that was the time he’d asked her out, or so she had thought and she’d turned him down. Was that what was behind the hissed venom in his voice as they had fought? Was his ego that fragile? Of course it was, she told herself. That was the whole problem.
Anderton was still talking. “We’ll be digging into Downey’s computers, laptops, possessions, etcetera. I’d imagine we’ll find some very strong evidence there – forums visited, mobile phone records, photographs, videos, that sort of thing. I’ll eat my hat if we don’t find the pay-as-you-go mobiles he gave to Kaya Trent and Claire Collins as well.” Something seemed to strike him and he closed his eyes momentarily. “Oh Lord, I’m going to swing for letting Fliss bury that report. That could have led us straight to him.”
“You weren’t to know,” said Theo. “Or if you were, we all should have known.”
“Maybe.” Anderton ruffled his hair reflectively, his gaze drawn back to the whiteboards. “Anyway...I’ve no doubt now that we’ve got a watertight case, not least because of Kate and Mark’s eyewitness testimony.”
They were all silent for a moment, thinking about the case. Kate knew she should be pleased, jubilant even, that a killer had been stopped and more vulnerable young people saved from a similar fate. Because they all knew that Zac Downey would not have stopped. He would have gone on singling out his victims and playing his terrible mind games. Kate had stopped that and she knew that she should feel pleased about it; happy that an evil man would now be removed from society. But at that moment, she found it hard to feel much of anything.
Perhaps it was the painkillers.
After the debrief was over, Kate wandered outside. She was on sick leave now but the thought of going back to her house was not a pleasant one. Not that she could have returned anyway; it was still sealed off as a crime scene. When was she going to be able to move back in and, more importantly, did she really want to? The place would be tainted now; memories of Fliss’s dying body slumped in Kate’s armchair, the coffee table a reminder of facing Zac Downey across it, seeing the glint of the knife in his hand and the demon in his eyes looking out at her.
She looked at her mobile and saw a text from Tin, who’d called and texted frantically since the news broke. That meant something, didn’t it? Kate pondered for a moment and then sent a text back. It was easier than talking, anyway. Out of station now, face hurts, can Merlin and I come and stay with you for a bit? Xx
She sent it, feeling a little anxious. It seemed like a big thing to ask, seeing how little they actually knew each other. But
what was the point of this relationship, any relationship, if you couldn’t rely on one another when things got tough? What do I actually want from a relationship? Kate thrust away the first thought that came into her head, which was Anderton. That was never going to happen, and even if it did, didn’t she want other things too? Marriage? Children? I don’t know, Kate thought, staring bleakly into the distance. I don’t know.
A text pinged back almost immediately from Tin. Come and stay as long as you like, Merlin too. I’ll come and pick you up right now xxx.
Kate smiled and then gasped at the pain in her face. But the text had lightened her mood. Buoyed up a little, she sat down on the bench that stood at the base of the steps that led up to the station and opened up her email. She thought for a moment and then began typing.
Hi Magda, I hope you’re well. I know it’s been a while since we last met but I was wondering if I could book in again with you. My mother died several months ago and I think I would benefit from being able to talk to you, as you helped me so much before. I’ll contact your office to arrange a date and time that is convenient for us both. Thanks and best regards, Kate Redman.
Kate sent the email and put the phone away. She tipped her damaged face up to the warm rays of the sun and sat back a little, waiting patiently on the bench for Tin to come and collect her.
THE END
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