by Alex Pitt
“Start talking,” Becky said to Chen, but he just smiled back. Did he ever stop smiling?
Davies was standing next to me and he placed his hands on his hips, eager to hear the story. We were also accompanied by a man named Rory. He’d been looking after Morgan while we were gone, keen to help out in some way.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Chen said, his accent thick, sitting back in the chair and putting his hands behind his head.
“Morgan,” Richard asked, steering the interrogation towards him. “Is this the man that gave you the knife?”
“No,” Morgan said sharply, and my heart plummeted. We needed the positive ID in order for Chen to be a real suspect.
While Becky had been loading Chen into the police car, Davies and Richard had scouted Chen’s house for clues. They’d turned up chairs, sofas, cabinets, anything that might be hiding a clue. The only thing they’d found was a plane ticket to Germany, along with a receipt for two knives bought at the same time. Richard took the receipt out of his pocket and placed it on the table.
“We found this at Mr Zhang’s house. A receipt for two knives and, coincidentally, you attacked Jack with a knife sold in Germany. There’s something else we found out while we were looking for his address. Mr Zhang was seeing you for therapy sessions, and that doesn’t strike me as an unhappy coincidence. Can you tell us why you were seeing him?”
“How did you find that out? That’s patient confidentiality,” Chen shouted, but Morgan shrugged. He wasn’t afraid of the truth.
“It was my dad. He’s been beating and threatening me for years. I needed to see someone.”
He was afraid to meet anyone’s eye, looking like a naughty little school boy who’d been caught eating sweets in the classroom. He shrank back in his chair, trying to hide from everyone.
“Right,” Richard muttered.
There was no point in Chen denying he’d bought the knives. He knew that Richard had found the plane ticket and receipt. It was just one ticket, I noticed, which meant that his wife hadn’t been with him, unless she kept hers separate.
“You bought the two knives in Germany,” Richard stated, taking out the plane ticket and placing it next to the receipt. Chen didn’t even try to deny it. “So where are these knives now?”
“Yes, I’d like to know that too,” Becky added, unnecessarily.
“I’m not sure,” Chen lied, sheepishly looking away. It was the first time I’d seen him look nervous, but I liked it.
“Tell me,” Richard screamed, banging the table and making us all jump.
“I lost them, OK?” Chen shouted back, matching the pitch of Richard’s voice.
“Oh, no, my friend, that isn’t going to cut it. You lost the knives? You expect me to believe that? You lost both knives? Morgan?”
Morgan was looking between them all, faces torn. He knew he should tell the truth, but he was also afraid of the man sitting next to him. Afraid, and a little bit stubborn. Morgan wasn’t the kind of person to rat someone out, even if they were a murderer.
I’d been so focused on getting Chen arrested since I’d heard the terrible news about Daisy, but it was nice to see Morgan squirm for once in his life. He wasn’t so sure about anything anymore, and it was a sight to behold.
“Morgan, listen to me,” Becky said, leaning across the table and speaking directly to him. “We know this man is guilty. He’s a piece of shit, and three girls are dead because of him. We need to hear from you that he gave you the knife, because then we have a testimony. Please.”
“I don’t know,” Morgan stuttered, still unable to make eye contact.
“Don’t be a little rat,” Chen snarled, and this all but confirmed his guilt.
“Shut your mouth,” Richard bellowed back.
It was quite intense watching them all. Becky trying to reason with Morgan. Morgan looking scared and anxious. Richard looking like he was about to throttle Chen, and the murderer himself was looking more relaxed than anyone in the room. It struck me that this was the opposite of what the scene had been like when Morgan was under interrogation. It had been Becky losing her cool then, and Richard calming her down.
“All we need is your word,” Becky continued, not put-off by Chen. “Your word that he gave you that knife, and then we have reasonable grounds. We found these in your office, by the way,” and she tossed the photos onto the table.
“Shit,” Chen muttered, and Becky grinned at him. He wasn’t so confident now.
I guessed Chen didn’t even know how we’d got the scoop that he’d been the man to arrest. He wouldn’t know about Daisy yet, but he must have known that someone had tipped him off. He would’ve placed the blame on Morgan, but it was only then that he put all of the pieces together in his head.
“You told them already, didn’t you? You got caught waving that knife around. Stupid prick,” Chen spat straight into Morgan’s face.
“It wasn’t me, I swear,” Morgan cried, but I don’t think Chen believed him.
“Yes, it fucking was. Someone saw you with that knife and called the cops and you ratted me out. What did I tell you, Morgan?”
“You said to not show it off, to make sure it was hidden, but I didn’t realise why. I don’t watch the news, so I didn’t know what was going on. I knew there were two dead girls, but I didn’t know this knife had anything to do with it.”
Richard and Becky looked like a kid on Christmas with this information. Both Chen and Morgan had let it slip by accident, but that was enough to nail him.
“So, he did give you the knife?” Richard smiled.
“Shit,” Morgan and Chen said at the same time, realising their mistake.
“Yeah, alright, I admit it. He gave me the knife. Now, can you please explain everything that’s going on? I don’t quite get it all.”
Morgan slumped back in his chair, a confused look on his face. He was a kid caught in the middle, without all the information. Becky had to lay it out, it was only fair.
“Alright, fine,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything, and then you can help us arrest this piece of shit. Does that sound fair?”
Morgan nodded, so Becky continued.
“A few weeks ago, a girl was killed. Her name was Rachel. I’m sure you know that bit. The part you might not be aware of was that she was killed with the knife you attacked Jack with. The very same knife. A German knife. It was left at the scene of the crime. Recently, there was another attack, presumably by this man. He had the same knife that was used on Rachel because Richard saw him, so it must have been the same killer. It was too much of a coincidence otherwise, but there was no body this time. We still don’t know where it is.”
Chen snorted at this, but that did nothing apart from dig him deeper into the hole.
“Then, tonight, a girl committed suicide. You know that because Davies came in here and told us all about it. At the house, she left a note for Jack and, in that note, she described some of the horrible things this man had done to her. She also said that Chen had photos of the dead girls in his office. These photos, along with the receipt for the knives, will almost be enough. The only problem is, he could claim they were some other knives. It might be a big coincidence. We need you to tell us he gave this knife to you.”
“Hold on a fucking second,” Chen said, shaking his head and holding up a hand. “Daisy’s dead?”
“Yes,” Becky confirmed. “So, you’re admitting you know who she is, and you know what you did to her? That’s a start.”
“I didn’t do much, we just had a bit of a rough and tumble once.”
“Don’t lie to us,” Becky spat, disgusted with him but still keeping her cool. “Morgan, I’ve told you everything. Now it’s your turn.”
“He did give me the knife,” Morgan admitted, much to the dismay of Chen. “But you have to believe me, I didn’t know. I didn’t know this was the knife used on the girl’s. If I had, I’d have reported him.”
I doubted that very much, considering his constant reminders
that he wasn’t a snitch, but whatever.
“That’s fine, we believe you,” Richard said, joining back in with the interrogation. “Just tell us everything you know.”
“OK,” Morgan nodded.
With that, he told us his tale.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Morgan
My dad had been beating me since the second I was born. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but it was pretty close to the truth. I certainly couldn’t ever remember him holding me in a loving way, or anything like that. All I could remember were the bruises.
My mum ran off pretty soon after my birth, leaving me in the hands of my father. I don’t really remember much about her, but I’m kind of glad about that. My best guess, and it is just a guess because my dad gives me a beating every time I bring it up, is that she couldn’t take his vile temper anymore. If that was the case, how the hell could she leave me alone with him?
When I was thirteen, he finally married again. This woman was almost as bad as he was. She didn’t beat me, but she knew what was happening and she did nothing to stop it. She could have rung the police, or social services, or childcare, or anyone, and then run for the hills, but she didn’t. She let it carry on.
In all fairness, I could have rung them as well. I’d always had access to the landline and a simple call while they were at work or passed out on the couch would have done. There were two simple reasons why I’d never done that. They were simple, but they were the reason I’d spent so much of my life afraid of the house I was living in.
The first, I was afraid. I was too nervous to call the police because I didn’t have any tangible evidence. Sure, I had bruises on my body, but that could have been from anything. He purposefully hit me below the collar so that no one at school would be suspicious. The only time he couldn’t stop people seeing was when I was getting changed for PE, but naïve little schoolboys wouldn’t have done anything to help me. His wife, Helen, would have backed him up by denying it all anyway.
The second reason, I’m not a grass. That was a lesson I’d learnt from my father, and I adhered to it always. If I knew something incriminating about someone, I kept my trap shut, even if it directly impacted me. That was why I was so surprised, at the age of eighteen, to find myself snitching on Chen Zhang. Sure, he’d murdered girls, but my father would have told me that wasn’t a reason to grass him out. However, I knew it was the right thing to do, and so I did it. I told them the knife was his.
My first encounter with Chen was a few months ago. A few months before I found myself sitting next to him in the police station, under interrogation. I went to him, and I told him everything that my father had been doing to me. All the bullying, all the blackmail, all the fights.
I realise that this was in direct contradiction to the ‘no snitching’ rule, but I wasn’t going to count this. As far as I was concerned, telling a therapist was my way of relieving all the distress my father had brought on me. It wasn’t like he could tell the police what had been happening anyway. Patient confidentiality, and all that.
To be quite honest, he did help me. Knowing there was someone there was such a comfort. I knew I could talk to him about anything, and it wouldn’t leak to anyone outside of his office.
No one knew I was seeing Chen. That was a private matter. I didn’t want to appear weak, like I was scared, afraid. That wouldn’t be good for my image. Even my best friend, Sam, didn’t know.
I’d always hated Jack and his friends, ever since I met them at the start of the college year. I don’t know why, but something never sat right with me. It was mainly Sam who bullied them, but I was always in tow. Then, all of a sudden, it was like he’d forgotten they existed.
When we got back to college from the Christmas break, Sam didn’t utter a word to Jack or any of his stupid friends. Because I liked Sam so much, I didn’t either. I just presumed he’d got bored of them.
However, when that Daisy girl started showing up around the college and taking a fancy for Jack, Sam and I got more involved with him again. Daisy was ridiculously, incredibly hot, and it was such a shame what happened to her. I didn’t see it coming, but then I didn’t know her all that well. OK, let’s be honest, I didn’t know her at all. The only thing I knew was that she’d got the hots for Jack, and so me and Sam beat him down in the corridor one day. I have to respect the dude for that though. He didn’t cave in once. He protected her name throughout it all.
I heard Sam kissed Daisy at his party, which Jack was super pissed about. That figures though, because the two of them came upstairs and caught me and Trisha in bed together. Jack threw our clothes out of the window, and we went downstairs and collected them.
I was so angry with him about that. As it turned out, Becky Cooper went to break up that party. Now that I think about it, I do kind of remember. I knew the police had been, but I didn’t bother checking their faces. I was too busy pulling my clothes on and hiding my embarrassed face, but I think I vaguely remember Becky from that night. I wouldn’t have realised if she didn’t point it out though.
After all the shit went down at Sam’s party, I was angry. I was stupidly angry with Jack, and so I went to Chen. That’s what I’d been doing for the past few months. Seeing Chen whenever I felt fed-up. He said he was seeing someone else more than once a week, and he could do the same for me if I wanted.
I agreed.
It wasn’t just about the relief I got when I spoke my mind to Chen, but it got me out of the house for a while, and that was something I was endlessly grateful about. My dad didn’t ask where I was going, but I don’t think he cared. Nor did my step-mum. I often thought that, if the police ever turned up on my doorstep, they wouldn’t ask what I’d done wrong. They wouldn’t care. As it turned out, I was almost right. My step-mum did ask what was going on, but my father didn’t even bat an eyelid until after I’d been bundled into the car.
I’m getting ahead of myself here but, only a couple of days before my arrest, Chen had given me the knife.
He told me it was something he always carried around with him, and I thought that was odd. Maybe a pocket knife would have been fine, but a knife that size? Surely, he couldn’t always carry it around. Anyway, he gave it to me and said I could use it to take my anger out on things. Not people, he stressed, but objects. He was very clear about that fact; I was only to use it on objects. But, now that I’m thinking about it clearer, thinking about the girls he supposedly murdered, maybe he was just saying that as a cover and he’d be very happy if I went around slaughtering people.
He suggested going down to the park and carving names in trees when things got too hard. It sounded childish, but it probably would help. I’m surprised, now that I know all the details, that he given it to me. What if I’d seen the news? What if I’d heard people talking about this knife. Maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he believed me when I’d told him about my ‘no snitching’ rule.
That was actually what I was doing when I’d seen Jack in the park that day. Chen told me that he liked to hide things in the woods. He said that no one ever goes in there and he’d found some cubby holes tucked away that no one would ever find, so I went to look. I just wanted to explore, carve some name and swearwords into trees, without consequence.
That’s when I saw Jack. Before I attacked him, I told him I’d been going there every day to look for him. That wasn’t true. In fact, it was the first time I’d been to the park since Chen had given me the knife. I just wanted to create the impression that I was there for him, not because I’d been carving names. There was blood on one of the trees, so I carved in that one. It expressed my feelings accurately.
I know it was wrong, but I took everything out on Jack. I was pissed at him for what he’d done at the party, but I also needed some actual human flesh to take my anger out on, and most of the anger originated from my father. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t going to target him, so I cut Jack up instead.
I can’t say that I feel bad about it because I thought I was getting even f
or what he did at the party, but maybe I’d taken it to the extreme.
So, when I found myself in the police station later that night, with Chen next to me, Becky and Richard sitting opposite, I looked at the glass, knowing he could see everything going on, and I told Jack I was sorry.
Everything I have just told you, I told to them. And, in amongst all of that, I’d said something key. Something I’d missed at first. Something crucial.
While I was telling them my story, I’d hinted at something that eventually led them to the evidence that allowed for Chen to be locked away.
And, given everything he’d done to so many people, I couldn’t say I was sorry about that.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Richard
I couldn’t believe it. After all this time, after all these weeks, Morgan had been the key. Chen had said something to Morgan, and Morgan had relayed it to us. The thing was, he hadn’t even realised what he was saying.
The fact: Chen used the woods to hide things. He had specifically told Morgan that no one would ever find his hiding places. Maybe we were jumping the gun a bit, but we had to find out. It all made sense, although I didn’t want to get too carried away in case we were wrong.
Morgan had also said that there was blood on the tree he’d been carving in. Could it be April’s? It was a long shot, but if it did turn out to be the dead girl’s, her body wouldn’t be too far away.
If Chen had hidden the body in the woods, it was a stupid mistake. He said that no one would find his hiding places, but what if they had? He’d found them in the first place, so surely someone else could also stumble upon it. Either way, I was sure we’d find out soon.
Needless to say, Chen was livid with Morgan. Not only had he told us that Chen owned the knife, but he’d let a lot more details slip. Judging by the look on his face, I reckoned my theory was right about the body in the woods.
“Can I come with you?” Jack asked when I walked into the room he was in.