by Alex Pitt
“Sweet,” Tom muttered, and I nodded.
“Jack always went out of his way to remind me he was there. I appreciated that more than he knows, but I think he’s fed up with me now. Anyway, my mum made me go and see this therapist. I wouldn’t talk to him for weeks. Months, really. I would sit there for an hour every Saturday and he would ask me questions and I would barely talk the entire time. Then, eventually, I opened up. I realised that I did need someone. So, he increased the times I saw him each week. Two, three, sometimes four times. I needed him, and we got closer and closer.”
I shuddered at the thought, then continued.
“One day, he decided we should go for a walk. He said it would clear my head, and I believed him. I didn’t think anything more of it. That was when it happened for the first time.”
I paused for a second, catching my breath, studying Tom’s face. He seemed so concerned for me, and that really touched my heart.
“I had already met Jack by the time it first happened. Only just met him though, and I didn’t know we would be getting together so soon. After the first time, I was so distraught. I had to take a few days off college, right after I’d started. That didn’t stop me from going back to see him, though. I went again, and again, and again. Most of the time we just sat there and talked, but there were a few times we went for ‘a walk’. I couldn’t say no to him, I was too scared. My head was messed up and I didn’t want to say no to him. Do you know what the worst part is, Tom?”
“What’s that?” he asked, looking like he was about to cry.
“I wanted it. Well, I never asked for it, and I wanted to say no, and I didn’t want it going on for Jack’s benefit, but I also did want it to happen. I felt like I deserved it for what happened to Ruby. It’s like self-harm really. No one wants it to happen, they just do it to relieve the pain. That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t rejecting him because I thought I deserved it. I let my sister drown, and I needed to be punished for that. By him doing what he did to me, I was able to stop self-harming.”
“Oh, Daisy,” Tom gasped, and one tear actually broke through. Just one; a single tear.
“I found out that I was pregnant the day of the party. That was before me and Jack had had sex so I knew it was the therapists. It was about time, to be honest, because we’d done it so many times. It was always without protection, like he was actually trying for a baby. When I told Jack, which was only very recently, I decided I’d had enough. This wasn’t going on anymore. Even though I never said no to the therapist, he knew I didn’t want it. That counts as rape to me, and so I told him enough was enough. I wanted to be with Jack and this couldn’t go on anymore, and he seemed to understand. He asked me to go on one final walk with him and I agreed. That was today. I shouldn’t have been so stupid. I should have known it would still happen. But he told me it wouldn’t, and I believed him.”
“Go to the police,” Tom instructed. He wiped the tear away and sat up, alert. “You have to tell them. He can’t get away with this.”
“I am not going to the police, Tom,” I said, soft but firm.
“Why not?”
“Because I deserved it.”
“Bullshit. I’m sorry, Daisy, but he was using you for sex. He was using your distress as a tool to get in your knickers. You said you won’t be seeing him again, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do it to someone else. I don’t know who he is and I didn’t get a proper look at him, but you must know his name and where he works and what he looks like. Report him. You have to.”
I nodded dumbly. He was right. I did have to do something, as much as I didn’t want to.
“So, what’s the next step then?” Tom added.
“The next step with what?”
“You’re going to report him and you’re going to tell Jack, yeah? When?”
“Soon, I promise,” I told him. It was the truth.
“It’d better be soon, before he finds someone else to do this to.”
“It will be,” I nodded. “I just didn’t expect all of this to happen. He was so sweet and so nice, and then he just turned into this rapist pig, but I wanted it at the same time. I needed it… never mind, I’ve already said it all.”
I stopped speaking and stood to my feet, shaking Tom’s arm off. It had been around me all the time I was speaking.
“Daisy,” he said, standing and joining me. “Whatever happened, you didn’t deserve any of this. I can understand why you felt you had to be punished, but what happened to Ruby wasn’t your fault. Whatever way you choose to look at it, he raped you and you didn’t have a choice in the matter. If you’d said no, he would have just done it anyway. But you didn’t deserve it. No one does.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I told him.
This was the most I’d ever spoken to Tom, but he was a really nice person. Really nice, and so was Jack, and so was Scooter, and so was Vince. They were all nice and I felt slightly better now that I’d got the story out. I still couldn’t take it though. I was messed up in the head, ever since the event with Ruby, and there was nothing Tom or anyone else could do for me.
Nothing.
They couldn’t do anything.
I was always going to be like this.
“I have to go,” I said quickly, and he looked surprised.
“Alright, just promise me you’ll come clean, yeah? Soon.”
“Yes, Tom, I’ve already promised you that. There’s something else they need to know, anyway. Something I only found out today.”
And then I hurried down the street away from him, away from everything.
I was running away from my life.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Becky
I called Richard and told him we had a suspect. He didn’t need to ask what for. He knew. After so many weeks without a single lead, he was ecstatic. He wanted to come and arrest Morgan with us, but I told him to leave it to Davies and I. We were the coppers.
So, we went around there and knocked on the door. A woman, presumably Morgan’s mother, opened up and we charged in. This was a murder investigation, so there was no time to play nicely.
Morgan didn’t even look surprised when we came barging into his room and grabbed him by the scruff of his collar. After everything he’d done recently, I was so glad he was over eighteen so I could beat him down a bit. Not a lot, just a bit.
“He called you,” Morgan smirked, after I read him the rights. “I figured he’d do that. Little pussy,” he spat.
“Morgan, what the hell is going on?” his mother questioned, running upstairs and into his bedroom.
“We are arresting your son on suspicion of murder,” Davies told her, as he threw him down the stairs and out of the front door.
I opened a few of the drawers in his room and found the knife, wiped clean. Jack had been right; this was the same knife that had killed the girls. We’d have to come back to collect more evidence later, but this was all we needed for now.
“Murder?” Morgan muffled as I shoved his head in the back of the car.
“Don’t cook his tea for him, Mrs Yu. He won’t be home for a while,” I smirked. I was glad we’d caught him at last.
A man appeared at the front door next to his wife, a beer in his hand. His massive belly was hanging out, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. This must have been Morgan’s father.
Looking away from the door, Davies and I got in the front of the car and sped off to the station.
“Richard should be there by now,” I muttered, checking the time and giving a small nod of the head.
And when we turned up, he was there. Because he wasn’t a police officer, he wasn’t allowed to beat Morgan up at all, or even touch him gently, so he left that bit to me and threw a torrent of swear words at him instead. He couldn’t believe that such a young person was capable of two murders, especially as brutal as they were, but he had done it and we were both fuming.
Even touching him with my own bare hands made me feel slimy as I bundled him into the interview ro
om and sat on the chair across the table from him. Richard took a pew besides me, and we switched on the tape. We did the usual things, told him he was being recorded, asked him to state his name, and then we got to the meat of it.
“Why did you do it?” Richard asked, taking out a packet of cigarettes and lighting the tip. He offered one to Morgan and he accepted.
“Because he’s a little fucktard,” Morgan laughed, smoking, and I sighed at his inability to use proper words from the English language.
“Who? Jack?” Richard barked. He could be quite fierce when he needed to be.
“Yes, Jack. Who else?”
“We’ll get to what you did to Jack soon,” I said, allowing Richard to inhale the smoke. “We’re interested first in Rachel and April. You killed them both. Why?”
“What are you talking about?” Morgan asked, shocked. Well, he was acting shocked but he couldn’t be. Could he?
“Rachel. April. You killed them both. You’d better start talking, you little shit, because April was my friend.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, so quit shouting at me,” Morgan yelled at Richard, but he wasn’t taking any notice.
“Show him the bloody photos,” Richard requested of me, taking such a long drag from his cigarette.
I opened the folder on the table and threw out the photos of Rachel for him to look at. April’s body still hadn’t been discovered yet, so we didn’t have any photos of that. She was definitely missing though. No one had seen her since the night Richard had spoken to her and we were all taking his word for what had happened. It must have been frightening for him, although he would never admit that.
“Jesus, fuck, you think I did that?” Morgan queried, a smirk plastered to his face.
“Of course we do,” Richard explained. “Because this knife,” he pointed to the one in the photo, “matches exactly to this one.”
The knife I’d taken from Morgan’s house had been placed in a sealed bag, which Richard held up now and thrust into Morgan’s face.
“So?” Morgan shrugged. “There are lots of knives in the world.”
This wasn’t going to be easy. He wasn’t confessing without a fight, but we’d get him there.
“You can only get this knife in Germany. It’s made and sold in Germany. We’re not stupid, you know,” I told him.
“Could have fooled me,” he smiled, and that’s when I lost it.
I reached across the table and grabbed him. I was going to slam him down on the table, beat his tiny face in, break both of his hands, but Richard stopped me. It wasn’t that he didn’t want it to happen, I’m sure he would have loved it, but he had his rationality hat on.
“Cooper, stop. If we attack him without cause then our necks will be on the line as well,” and I nodded when he said that. “This little shit will confess sooner or later.”
“Confess to what?” Morgan roared, making us both jump. “You say you’re not stupid but I’m telling you that I didn’t do it. Just because I have the same bloody knife doesn’t mean I’m a murderer!”
“Well you cut a boy up earlier, so the odds are against you now, mate,” Richard smiled, knowing there was no way Morgan could win. “Where is Jack, anyway?” he asked me.
“Through there,” I pointed at the mirror, knowing Jack could see everything that was happening on the other side.
Richard nodded and left the room for a moment. Seconds later, he came back in with the young lad in tow.
“Just to be absolutely certain, Jack,” Richard started. “This is the person who attacked you.”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“And he used this knife,” Richard held the bag up again.
“Yes,” Jack repeated.
Richard nodded and indicated for him to sit down in the empty seat, which he did. I noticed him move it an inch or so away from Morgan, as if he was scared of him. He shouldn’t be. We can handle stupid teenage boys, even if they were murderers. I can barely get that word out.
“Snitch,” Morgan muttered, to which Jack gave him a dirty look.
“You thought I was gonna let you get away with killing people?”
“For fucks sake, I haven’t killed anyone! When these two pricks came around to my house shouting about murder, I thought you’d bled to death in the woods. I was starting to get my hopes up. But no, I get dragged back here and accused of murdering two people who I’ve never even met before.”
“Then was it someone else?” I asked, my brow furrowed. “Do you know who it was? Did they give you that knife?”
He paused for a second.
That second was all I needed.
“No,” he said, but I was already interrupting him.
“Who gave you that knife, Morgan?”
“No one, I bought it.”
“If that’s the case, where did you buy it from? Germany, or is there a shop in England selling it? We can check it out.” This was Richard who said that, and I was impressed with him.
“I can’t remember,” Morgan said weakly, and it was obviously a lie.
“You can’t remember if you went to Germany or not?” Richard laughed, and I joined in.
That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Jack was sitting there, flickering his eyes between us. He didn’t know where to look, but he was entranced by it all.
“Look, Morgan, if someone else did give you this knife, they must be the one who killed the girls. You’d be free to go. Don’t you want that?”
He paused again. He was beginning to sweat.
“I’m not a snitch, alright? I can’t tell you who it was.”
He was nervous, unable to make eye contact.
“Look, Morgan,” I said, making one last attempt to break through to him. “Whoever gave you that knife has murdered two girls. Don’t you think that’s serious? We need to know who it was, so we can stop him from doing it again.”
Morgan might be putting on a brave face, but he was probably terrified underneath all that macho façade. I knew he didn’t kill the girls, just from his facial expressions when we’d mentioned who gave him the knife.
He wasn’t the murderer.
The murderer was still out there
Morgan had just been caught in the middle of the investigation. He’d attacked Jack, there was no doubt about that, but he was innocent for the murders. Someone had killed both Rachel and April with this knife, and Morgan was going to tell us who.
The only thing I was a bit confused on was the knife left at Rachel’s crime scene. It had been placed there to taunt us, obviously, but how had Morgan got it? As far as I was aware, it should still be locked up in evidence.
When we finally managed to catch up with the real killer, I could ask him that, but I already thought I knew the answer: he’d bought two. It really was as simple as that.
The killer, whoever he turned out to be, had gone into a shop in Germany, bought two knives, somehow managed to get them back to England, and then killed two girls with them. He had dropped one at the first crime scene, killed April with the second knife, and then given it to Morgan to place the blame on him, if anyone ever found out he had it.
He was very clever, I’d known that ever since I first found Rachel, but this was something else. He was playing us all. He must have scared Morgan so much, bullied him into not spilling his name when the cops caught up to him. Morgan was scared, and I suddenly felt sorry for him.
Morgan hadn’t given us the information we needed, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need to. The door opened and Davies walked in, a grave look on his face. I thought then that the killer had struck again, while we were sitting in here accusing Morgan.
But no, it wasn’t that. It was something equally as horrific.
“Something’s happened,” Davies whispered, not sure how to phrase it.
Jack was still sitting there, and he could sense something was wrong as well. Something that involved him. I wish I could have spared him the pain, I really do.
&n
bsp; “Morgan didn’t kill the girls, but I think I know who did.”
“Who?” Richard urged.
“A Chinese man by the name of Chen Zhang. We’ve found a letter that describes some things, and they may be connected to the Rachel and April case.”
“A letter? What letter?” I asked.
Davies had obviously found something that we didn’t know about yet. Something about Jack. Something that would tear his whole world apart.
“This letter was addressed to him,” Davies pointed at the boy. “She wrote it just before it happened. Her mother called me, hysterical, so I went round there and found this.”
He handed Jack the letter, but I think he knew. He knew what had happened, and he couldn’t bring himself to read it. Not yet.
Then Davies spoke the words. The horrible, terrible, heart-wrenching words.
“Daisy Mulligan has killed herself.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
There are no words to describe how I felt in that moment. The ground beneath my feet collapsed and my heart started racing at 100mph. There had to be some mistake. It couldn’t be Daisy. Not my Daisy.
I knew there was no mistake though. I should have seen it coming. I was blind and stupid and now she was gone. I thought I was going to faint when he told me the news, and they all looked at me, horror in their eyes.
It was unspeakable. It was so horrific, even, that I wasn’t able to cry. I was completely shell-shocked, sitting there, gripping the chair. I was like that for ages, with them all staring at me, and I wasn’t able to meet their gaze. Even Morgan didn’t have anything to say.
Eventually, I muttered, “No,” and that brought them all out of their trance.
“Shit, mate,” Becky said, placing a hand on my arm. “Did you know her?”
“I think they were close,” Davies whispered to her.
I shook my head, refusing to believe it. She wasn’t gone. She couldn’t be. Any second now, my pocket would buzz and she’d be calling me. She’d say she was sorry for the joke, but she was fine. My pocket was silent. There was no buzz. She was never going to call me again.