by Alex Pitt
I shook my head.
“Sorry, mate, but you’ve been here long enough. Go home, and we’ll call you later. We’ll tell you what we find, yeah?”
The boy looked distraught by this, but there wasn’t really any point in him tagging along. He’d just be another detriment, someone else we had to look after. If I’d had it my way, he wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere with us that day, but he’d been tied to the story ever since he’d reported Morgan earlier on.
Morgan was to come with us though. It wasn’t that we really wanted him there, but we needed him. I couldn’t say I was his biggest fan, but the fact that he knew where the bloody tree was made him invaluable. He was to show us that and then go back to the car. We didn’t want him to meddle with a potential crime scene.
Chances were high that he’d go home instead of actually returning to the vehicle, but maybe he’d enjoyed the time away from home and wouldn’t be so eager to go back.
Thinking about that, there was something else I needed to talk to Jack about.
“We still have to decide what to do about Morgan. Obviously, it wasn’t good what he did to you, but it was his first criminal offence. Well, the first one we’ve caught him out on. I’m sure there’ve been more. We can let him off with a warning, but only if you don’t want to press charges. If you’d rather get him arrested, I’m sure Becky and Davies can see to that.”
“No,” Jack shook his head firmly at me. “Let him off. That’s alright, yeah?” he asked, looking at Davies.
Davies shrugged, saying, “I suppose so. As long as you’re sure.”
“Yes. He helped give us information on Chen and that’s all I wanted after what happened to Daisy. He can go.”
Every time he thought of the girl he’d lost, I could see tears about to burst from his eyes and stream down his cheeks. God, I wish I could have helped him, I really do. It’s not healthy for a kid his age to go through something like that.
Deciding I needed a drink, I beckoned Davies to follow and took a hip flask out, raising it to my lips. Rory was taking Jack home, but I’d meant it when I said I’d be in touch. He deserved to know what was happening.
I offered the whiskey to Davies, but he turned it away. It was late in the evening and I’d usually be at home drinking my life away, so I thought I might as well do it out on the job.
“Come on, Cooper,” I said, banging on the interrogation room.
“Hang on a second,” she said, opening it and dragging Chen with her. “I’ve gotta lock him up until we get back. I don’t trust someone else keeping an eye on him. I’d rather he was in a cell.”
I agreed with her on that one, but I just wished I was allowed to throw him in there myself. There was so much I wanted to do to him.
“You realise you’re wasting your time, right?” Chen asked, but I just laughed.
Did he really think he could dissuade us from going to the woods?
“Shut your trap,” Cooper said, ‘accidentally’ barging him into the wall.
“Well can I at least go to the toilet first?” he smirked, as Becky inserted the key into a lock and twisted the cell door open.
“If you need the toilet,” she said, throwing Chen into the cell. “You can piss yourself.”
With that, she slammed the cell shut and the four of us made our way out to the car. The four of us being me, Cooper, Davies, Morgan.
I fiddled with the radio in the car, trying to find something interesting to listen to, but came up short. I wasn’t really in the mood for some tunes, but I thought it would be better than another silent car journey. When the radio failed to help, I decided to be a social creature for once in my life.
“So, Becky, how have you been?”
That was such an awkward question, but I wanted to know. I needed to know she was fine after what had happened between us a few weeks ago.
“Fine,” she nodded, turning to look at me but then fixing her eyes back on the road.
“I was thinking, since we’re nearing the end of this case, maybe we should go for a drink afterwards.”
“You know what, Richard? I think I’d rather like that,” and I could see the corners of her mouth turning into a smile.
“That OK with you, boss?” I asked Davies.
“Well, yeah. I guess you could both do with one. Strictly speaking, you’re not an officer so I couldn’t stop you anyway.”
“Wicked. In that case, shall I tell you what happened-”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Cooper interrupted, but her laugh gave her away.
“Whoa, watch your language,” I joked. “Children alert.”
I looked in the mirror, catching a glimpse of Morgan’s face. He was smiling, but still looked too uncomfortable to say anything.
We arrived at the back of the woods, parking the car on the road, and we all climbed out. If I was right, and I was pretty sure that I was, I was about to see April again. I thought she would look a hell of a lot less pretty than the few times I’d seen her in the Venus club since our initial hook-up.
Morgan showed us to the tree, and I moved my hands along it, tracing the engravings. He knew some very inventive swearwords, but I’d rather he carved them in trees instead of people.
There was no guarantee that the blood on the tree was April’s. We could get it checked out but it might take a while, and it would be a better use of the time to search for these cubby holes that Chen had mentioned.
I told Morgan to go back to the car, but Becky shook her head. She said he could help search, which I thought was madness. If he did stumble across a dead body, it would scar him for life. Becky didn’t see it that way, and said we could do with an extra pair of hands. With four of us scouting the woods, it shouldn’t take too long.
To be exact, it took thirty-eight minutes, and Morgan was the one to discover it.
“Hey,” he shouted, but he’d drifted far from the rest of us and had to repeat it a few more times before the words floated to our ears.
“What have you got, kid?” I asked, approaching him.
“Down there,” and he pointed to a hole.
“Oh shit,” I whispered, bending down and pushing past shrubbery.
There was something down there. The hole was deep, covered by bushes and overgrown branches. Morgan had done well to spot that, but then I realised it hadn’t been all thanks to his eyes. His nose had been twitching and mine started going as well. Making my way down the hole, the smell got worse.
It wasn’t awful like you’d expect dead bodies to be, but it was pretty bad. If we’d given the body another week to decompose, the stench would have been terrible. Chen would have had to move the body by then, because anyone would have been able to smell it from miles around.
And yes, you’ve probably guessed from this, we did find April’s body.
I screamed for Becky and Davies and they came running over. Down the leafy slopes of the hill, we found the girl lying dead. She’d had bits of her skin removed, but she had the familiar stabs in her neck and a completely deformed look on her face.
“Christ,” I said, holding my hand to my nose. I wanted to gag. I never imagined I’d see her like this.
“It doesn’t look like he’s cleaned her up yet,” Davies noted, and I nodded.
“He thought no one would find her, so he hasn’t bothered,” I pointed out.
He’d have to clean and move her pretty soon though, if we hadn’t found her. Like I said, the stench would have alerted people within a week or two, presuming someone actually passed by this part of the woods.
Davies took out his camera and started snapping photos. He’d have to set up a proper crime scene, but it all started with the photos. Then, he took out his phone and called someone back at the station.
It wasn’t long before it was all-hands-on-deck. Police officers and forensic experts turned up, analysing the body, checking for fingerprints. Thanks to their fancy equipment, it wasn’t too long before they managed to give us a positive ID on the murdere
r. It was, to no one’s surprise at all, Chen Zhang.
I hope you weren’t expecting some big twist in the story. We’d caught the right criminal this time, and he was locked in a cell at the station.
The three of us, Davies, Becky and I, headed back to the car. We quickly swung around to Morgan’s house to drop him off, giving him stern words and telling him we were issuing him with an official warning, then went back to the station. We’d also kept the knife, but he didn’t seem too torn up about that.
Getting back to his cell, we found Chen taking a nap. That was how it appeared anyway, but he opened his eyes when we approached and flashed us a smile.
I opened the door and kicked him in the shin.
“Stand up now, piece of shit,” I growled. He faked offense at the insult.
Becky and Davies grabbed Chen and dragged him back to the interrogation room. We now knew for certain that he’d been the one to kill them, which was good news for us. Davies had his team out, scanning the area for anything they could find and doing everything that had to be done. I still wasn’t quite sure of all the ins-and-outs of it.
“Talk,” Davies barked, throwing Chen into the chair and sitting opposite him.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, innocently.
“We know you killed them. We found April’s body and your prints were all over it, so don’t even try and lie. We want to know why you did it.”
“Fuck,” Chen muttered under his breath. He wasn’t so confident now.
That worked in our favour though. Realising there was no way to worm himself out of it, Chen told us everything. After all this time, he was an open book, and told us everything we wanted to know.
Chapter Forty
Becky
As he told us the story, I was horrified. I couldn’t help it. This man, Chen, was completely sick in the head. He’d done some disgusting, horrible, gut-wrenching things but, now he’d been caught, he wasn’t afraid of telling us them in detail. In fact, he seemed proud of everything he’d done.
The first important thing to note is that his wife didn’t know. She didn’t know anything, but I think she’d guessed something was up when police barged into her house and arrested her husband. We would tell her soon, she deserves to know.
And really, all in all, it stemmed from his wife.
“She’s infertile,” Chen told us. “But I wanted kids. I really wanted a child of my own, so I started looking for someone else to mate with.”
“So, you decided to rape three girls in order to get them pregnant?” I asked, horrified.
“Well, I guess it sounds bad when you put it like that,” he smirked, and I so badly wanted to slap him across the face.
“Everything you’ve done is bad,” Richard roared, and I nodded in agreement.
So, as he’s already said, his wife was infertile and he wanted a baby so he tried to have one with three separate girls. The first, Rachel, was going well for him. He raped her several times, once to get her pregnant and then more because he enjoyed it.
When she came to him and said she was pregnant, he was overjoyed.
“I’d never known happiness like it. She was a good girl. She would have made a good mum, but she couldn’t keep her bloody mouth shut.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She started fighting back. That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he banged the table in fury. “She was supposed to let it happen and give me a child.”
“That’s sick,” Richard told him calmly.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it really is.”
“If you mean sick as in a good way, like ‘yeah, man, that’s sick,’ then I totally agree. If you mean it in another way, then…”
“Quit fucking around,” Richard shouted at him, and he snapped to attention.
“Right, so, where was I? The dead bitch? The pregnant, dead bitch I should say. She started mouthing off, saying she was going to tell people what I’d done. She was going to get an abortion, saying she’d never give me what I wanted, and I just couldn’t have that. So, I did the abortion myself using a car.”
“Yes, we did notice she was pregnant,” I noted.
“You couldn’t have. I-”
“You mutilated her body after she’d died so that she didn’t look pregnant, but we have our ways,” I smiled, pleased to have caught him out on something.
“Alright, well, if you knew she was pregnant then congratulations to you. But I decided she had to die before she ratted me out to someone, and I didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant, so I removed the evidence. I nailed her to the wall and then smashed into her tummy and legs. I thought no one would ever know. Then, I rearranged the scene and wiped everything clean, leaving the knife behind. That was a last-minute decision. I was going to take it with me at first but I had a spare knife and I knew my DNA wouldn’t be on it, so I left if for you. I guess it was my mistake now, but it was my way of laughing at you. I was saying, ‘ha, you’ve got nothing on me’.”
Richard asked Chen about the knives then, and he told us. He’d been to Germany recently and taken a fancy to them in a shop. He hadn’t planned anything malicious at the time, but they’d been handy to have later on. He bought two because the dodgy shop-owner was keen for his money and did him a special deal if he bought both of them.
Getting them back through security was the thing I was confused about. In England, they are very strict about what you can take on planes. Not so much in Germany, it would seem.
“I wrapped them in a towel and that was enough. German security isn’t all there.”
And, as it turned out, his wife hadn’t been with him. That was probably a good job for him, otherwise she’d have known about the knives and pieced it together when she’d watched the news. That explains why the plane ticket and receipt hadn’t been obvious. A few things had had to be turned over before they found them.
Anyway, back to the girls…
“I killed Rachel because she was going to get rid of the baby anyway and she was saying she was going to tell the police. I couldn’t have that, stupid girl, but I’d taken a fancy for one of the barmaids every time I’d visited the Venus club for Rachel.”
Richard’s brow bristled at this. He knew who Chen was talking about.
“I raped April. This time, there was a problem but it wasn’t the same as with Rachel. I managed to scare April enough that she wasn’t going to rat me out to anyone, and I told her about the horrible, disgraceful things I’d do to her if she did tell on me, so she kept her trap shut. The problem with April was-”
“She had the implant,” Richard interrupted.
Chen looked surprised. “Very good. Did you know her? I guess you must have done, the way you came down to save her that night. Yes, she had the implant. I asked her to get rid of it, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell on me, but she also wasn’t going to give me a baby.”
“Fuck. Now I know how Jack feels,” Richard whispered, and I turned to look at him.
“What do you mean?”
“Jack didn’t know about him and Daisy, and I didn’t know about him and April. She never told me. I never guessed, but there were times when she seemed a little sad for no reason.”
“Ah, poor Daisy. We’ll get to her now. Can I carry on?”
When he knew he probably wouldn’t have a baby with April, he turned his focus to Daisy. He still had sex with April, but that was only because it gave him a rush to do it. He felt powerful when he was putting all his control over these women.
In the end, Daisy got pregnant. When he found that out, he killed April. He had no use for her anymore. He loved Daisy, because she was messed up already. She’d been through a lot in her past life, which he told us about in detail, breaking the confidentiality rule. She let him do it to her, and he was overjoyed when he found out she was pregnant.
The only thorn in his side was her boyfriend. He asked her several times to break up with him so they could have this baby togethe
r, but she wouldn’t do that. She was scared of him, but she wouldn’t hurt Jack for him.
He accepted that because he knew they’d eventually break up one day anyway. When the baby was born, Daisy couldn’t keep up the pretence that it was Jack’s. It wasn’t fair on him.
“She wouldn’t have told him the truth, though. She promised she wouldn’t, and I believed her. She’d rather he thought she cheated on him, instead of the truth. She couldn’t burden him with the real details, and I made sure she knew what would happen if she did. I do feel bad though. She loved that kid, and now she’s gone. What the fuck did she have to kill herself for?”
He slammed the table, but both Richard and I stared at him pathetically.
“Let me get this right,” I started. “You are so scary that you managed to silence two rape victims, even though Daisy was completely in love with Jack?”
“Yes,” he grinned. “Like I said, she was in love with him, but she was messed up in the head so who really knew what she was thinking? To be honest, I don’t know what would have happened in the long run. Maybe she wouldn’t have been suitable to give me the baby after all, but I was ecstatic that I’d managed to knock her up by using the situation with her sister to get in her knickers.”
I was outraged by what he was saying, but I nodded. I knew exactly what he was talking about, just from reading the note.
“But now I guess we’ll never know,” he continued. “Because the bitch killed herself.”
“And it was all your fault,” I told him. “She felt like she deserved for you to rape her, but she killed herself because of the shame of it. She didn’t want a baby with you, and she’d have to tell Jack face-to-face that the baby wasn’t his. Instead, she let him find out from a suicide note. She was already depressed, but you tipped her over the edge.”
“Oops,” he said, raising a hand to his mouth and feigning guilt.
“There are just some other details we have to clear up,” Richard said, fury in his eyes. “We found April in the woods. What was your plan there?”
“I didn’t really have one, to be honest. I kept her there for a while until I knew what to do with her. You ruined it, coming and finding us by the strip club. I could have set up a crime scene again for you, but then you showed up and I thought it was best to move her quickly before you came around. I still made sure there was no evidence left behind, but then I moved her into the woods until I knew what to do with her. I’d found that hole I hid her in by accident one day. I was taking a piss in the bushes and fell down it, would you believe?”