She sent a text to Crystal for more information and Crystal replied almost immediately. One of Stewart’s known mistresses lived at that location—flat four. Crystal must have been alerted by the application as well.
When Sophia knocked, no one answered. There was a part of her that was glad because she had no idea what she was going to say. Why couldn’t she just let go?
As she turned to go, she could hear a noise coming from the flat—a shuffling noise. Could it be Liam? She placed her ear as close to the door without touching it. The noise sounded like a shuffling or perhaps it was a whimper. A dog? Maybe Liam was tied up inside. Her immediate thought was to try the door handle but she just as quickly stopped herself. Liam might be tied up, but that didn’t mean he was alone.
If she went in, what would she face? Was it worth it? She had some weapons and defence training but she would be useless against any of Stewart’s men even if she had a gun—all of Stewart’s men would have weapons.
Sadly, she knew that unless she had eyes in the flat, she couldn’t go in without putting herself in danger. Even if Liam was in there and was in danger, she couldn’t save him.
She backed down the hall and returned to her car. She tried Liam’s number again but it only went to voicemail. Why was he being so stupid? Then she remembered the pen set; unless he looked under the passenger seat and found it, it would still be there. Quickly she sent another text to Crystal. She had to locate which device he had given her and then she had to turn it on.
It seemed like forever and not the four and a half minutes it took Crystal to reply.
According to tech, fifty pens were made but only one had your name engraved into the side. The device was never turned on but they will do so now. I will send you a way to track the device on your mobile.
Sophia received an email and opened the tracking application, but nothing appeared on screen. She was about to text Crystal again when a blip appeared. The yellow dot was moving and she was at least twenty minutes behind. It became incredibly hard to track him while driving and she thought about waiting until he stopped before she continued but what if he went out of range? What if he was in trouble? Why didn’t he just turn on his mobile phone?
After following him for a half hour, she knew where the car was headed. Shit. Now she sped up. He still had a fifteen minute lead on her and really, it didn’t matter whoever had control, Liam or Stewart, if she didn’t catch up to them, it wouldn’t turn out well either way. Hell, she knew it may not turn out well even if she did catch up.
Although the crime scene tape leading out to the mass grave site was still attached to trees and fence posts, no officers were around. Liam had clearly broken through because the tape cutting off the path had been torn in two. She didn’t know how many speeding tickets she had collected on the way up but she was only five minutes behind him.
“Please, no one do anything stupid before I get there,” she muttered as she parked her car behind Liam’s. “Please, don’t let anyone do anything stupid once I arrive.”
She popped the boot and took the only thing resembling a weapon from it—the tire iron. She made her way up the muddy path, slipping twice. Although she couldn’t see anything in the dark and didn’t dare turn on her torch, she knew where the grave sat. She made her way as quietly as she could.
A thin beam of light and voices could be heard as she approached the clearing. Sophia could only see two figures in the dark and she squinted to try and make out who was kneeling on the ground at the edge of the pit and who was standing with a gun behind him. As Sophia took a few steps closer, she could make out Liam’s figure and voice. Liam held the gun.
That’s when she decided to step out into the clearing.
“Liam,” she said. Neither man noticed her so she yelled a bit louder. “Liam!”
This time, both men turned to look at her. Liam did not look happy.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. He didn’t move the gun from Stewart’s head and soon after, turned back to him. “You shouldn’t have come. How did you find me?”
“Are you crazy?” she asked.
“Tell your boyfriend that he’s making a mistake,” Stewart said.
“Shut up,” replied Liam. He kicked the back of Stewart’s leg and Stewart cried out.
“You bastard. You think you’re going to get away with this? My men will hunt you down.”
“Liam, listen to him. You’re not thinking straight. We’ll eventually bring him to justice. You don’t have to ruin your life this way.”
“Ruin my life this way? Stewart ruined my bloody life long ago. The only difference now, I’m not going to let him ruin any more lives. So, Evans, just drive away from here. You don’t need to witness this.”
Sophia approached. “You’re not a cold-blooded killer.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that once you kill someone, you can’t take it back.”
Sophia actually thought she saw the gun start to go down but she must have been mistaken because after Liam shook his head, the gun was moved closer to Stewart’s head.
“I’m determined to do this, Sophia,” he whispered. “And I really need you to walk away.”
“I’m not going to leave you, Liam.”
“What do you want? If you’re looking for money, I have plenty. What do you want?” asked Stewart, turning his head toward Sophia. He didn’t dare look at Liam.
“Money? I wouldn’t take any of your bloody money,” said Liam. “You don’t even know what you’ve done.” He leaned down and whispered. “Kendra Foxton. You just remember that name because it’s the reason you’ll be lying dead in that pit in a minute.”
“I don’t even know who that is,” he replied. “You’ve kidnapped the wrong man.”
“Shut up, you freak. You know her as Katelin.”
Stewart laughed. “You two are spooks? You’re not going to kill me.”
He started to raise himself off the ground, but Liam kicked him again in the same leg.
“Shit,” he yelled and rubbed his leg. “Yeah, I remember her, she was stupid. That’s why she was killed. If she’s dead, it’s because she was a lousy spook—”
“Shut up,” Liam yelled.
“What the hell are you doing, Stewart?” Sophia asked. “You want him to kill you?”
She put her hand on Liam’s shoulder, she could feel him shaking. “He’s just winding you up and it’s not worth it. Just walk away. Come with me. We’ll go on holiday together. My father has property in Greece. We can go to Greece, we can get away, just the two of us.”
“Get lost, Evans.”
“I’m not moving.”
“I mean it, Evans, walk away. Now.”
“I’m not moving. It doesn’t have to end badly, Liam. Please, Liam, please. You can’t do this, you can’t kill him. I can’t be a party to this. I can’t let you do this.”
“Then walk away.”
Liam was visibly shaking now. He took a step back and breathed in deeply.
“Okay,” said Liam. He lowered the gun by his side.
Stewart’s shoulders relaxed and he sat down on the ground. Neither man was the one she knew only a day before. How did her life ever get so complicated? This could have ended so wrong.
“Let’s go home, Liam. We can leave Stewart here to find his own way.”
“Okay,” came Liam’s whisper.
Sophia turned to go and heard a gun explode behind her. Time slowed around her as she fell to the ground. She smelled the grass and felt the breeze as she rose to her feet.
“What have you done?” Sophia asked.
Stewart lay face down in the mud at her feet.
“You need to go, go right now.” He put the gun away, under his jacket, grabbed her arm and dragged her toward her car. “I’ll clean everything up. Don’t worry about me. Go to your flat and talk to no one, we were together all night. Do you understand? Do you understand?”
He shook her.
<
br /> “You shot him.”
“Focus. Everything will be all right.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Just as Theo and Dorland were about to visit Dorie Armes, Walter Peters walked into the station. Theo caught his eye immediately and directed them to a small sitting room where they could talk privately.
“What is it?” Theo asked him.
“I was going through my wife’s belongings, and I found this. I don’t know what to make of it.” He handed Theo a small red notebook. “I don’t know if it’s real or . . . I don’t know. I hope it’s not real.”
Theo sat down and started reading:
I’m writing all this down now because I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t really want to go through with the plan but I think I may be forced to in the end. To protect the others, I’m not writing down any names. I just need everyone to know why I did it.
Sometimes I wonder if I dreamt the whole thing because I’ve had plenty of nightmares before. I keep going over the day we planned it all, wondering if I misunderstood. Perhaps it was all a big joke. But it can’t be, can it? Things like this are never a joke.
I was in the lift at the hospital because Mrs. Cho had given birth the night before and I was on my way to check up on her. Suddenly, there was a jolt and the lights went out. We had just passed the second floor. I heard someone ask if someone had pressed the stop button.
I hadn’t paid any attention to who was on the lift with me, so I didn’t even know how many people stood with me in the dark. However, a minute later, when a dim yellow emergency light came on, I saw that two women and I were the lift’s only occupants. I remember we talked about the reasons why the lift would have stopped. One suggested that there could be a fire in the building and the other a terrorist attack. I know they said it because they were scared. I know I was scared, but I suggested we should avoid all worst case scenario discussion while trapped.
We waited in silence for about ten minutes but it felt like hours. Eventually a man, probably a lift repairman, asked through the sealed door if anyone was in the lift. We all cried yes in unison. He informed us that he didn’t know why the lift had stopped or how long we would be stuck inside, but promised that the lift wouldn’t fall.
I remember remarking that we were in a government hospital and so the lift was bound to be old and in disrepair. We all had a laugh about that.
Slowly we relaxed and all of us took a seat on the floor. We introduced ourselves. For the sake of this narrative I will say there was D, the nurse, E, the hairdresser, and me, the doctor. It was like a joke: A doctor, a nurse, and a hairdresser walked into a bar. In this case, it’s a lift and in the punch line: no one wins. Well, at least I don’t feel I’ve won. I should’ve been stronger. I’m a doctor, for goodness sakes, but the hairdresser, she was the instigator.
How does one even bring up killing someone? We joked about it. I mean, who hasn’t? We’ve all wished someone was dead, haven’t we? Our boss. Our spouse. Our parents. Our neighbors. But we never do it. Thinking about it now, I’m sure I thought she was joking all the time.
It all started when I asked the hairdresser why she came to the hospital. She told us about her doctor’s appointment and how her medication was worse than the disease and the disease is pretty bad. The poor girl was HIV positive.
We just stared at her pitifully. She told us to stop because everyone always felt sorry for her and it didn’t change anything. She told us she wished she never got infected in the first place. I could hear the anger in her voice. She went from the chatty, joking woman to a bitter woman in seconds. And I really couldn’t blame her. I’ve seen one child die from AIDS and it was horrible.
She had only found out three months ago, after she caught an infection. She couldn’t understand how she got it. Of course she panicked. And she told us that she was less concerned about herself and her first thought was for her husband. She knew she had to tell him and that he had to be tested.
We asked her how he took the news.
She told us he said he should have told her sooner. Can you believe that? He knew and didn’t tell her. He also didn’t tell her he was having an affair with a man for eight months. What a bloody bastard! I was angry for the poor woman. And she said they had been having sex more than ever because she wanted a child.
We were silent for a while. I think all of us forgot we were trapped in the lift.
The nurse went next. At first she just complained about everyone in the world. She listed a few horrible people that didn’t even care they’ve ruined our lives. Then she told us her sad story. When she was fifteen, her older sister went missing. Their family searched for years but knew she had to be dead. She was sure her sister would never have left them for so long without contacting them in some way. It tore their family apart. Her step-dad left and her mum went insane and had to be cared for because she couldn’t care for herself anymore. And she only turned sixty this year.
I asked if the police had stopped looking and she said something that shocked me, she thought she had found her sister’s killer. Of course we asked her how.
She explained she found a pair of earrings that had belonged to her, a pair she had made herself so she knew they were hers. Her sister had borrowed them the day she went missing. She told us she thought about those earrings a lot and at one point even convinced herself that if she had never lent the earrings to her sister, maybe her sister wouldn’t have gone missing. We just sat there quietly. Listening. Shocked.
She explained that she eventually became a nurse; partly to care for her mum and perhaps it was because she thought she was meant to catch her sister’s killer.
We asked an obvious question. How did you find him?
She explained she unbelievably started to work for him. The company she worked for asked her to fill in on a temporary assignment when one of the nurses became ill. On the third day of caring for the old man, she came across her earrings. She knew they were hers because when one of the stones fell out, she had to hot-glue it back in and use green string to keep everything together. She could still see the green string. She took them home with her.
So did you confront him? Ask him about your sister?
No.
We couldn’t believe it. The hairdresser was ready to beat the sorry arse right then and there. I guess she was no longer needed on her temporary assignment and was assigned to another older couple. She told us that eventually she did go back and ask about the earrings. He said they belonged to his mother and had the nerve to ask for them back. In fact, he laughed at her. Although he never confessed to anything, the nurse knew he had done it. It was the way he looked at her, and the way he probably looked at all women, like they were his toys. Dirty old bastard.
Again we sat quiet.
Then they turned to me. I had to have a story too. Compared with their stories, my life situation seemed like a bed of roses. Thinking about it now, I should have kept my mouth shut.
I told them my husband was cheating on me and how I had caught him two weeks before. How I couldn’t bring myself to say anything and how he acted so in love with me but cheated on me with another woman.
I became more and more angry the longer I continued my story. I could tell the others were getting angry as well. The longer we stayed in the lift, the worse the situation became for us. We went from trying to stay positive to slowly bringing out the worst in each other. I knew then that we would walk out of the lift changed women. I just didn’t know how changed we would be.
Did you know we actually came up with a name? We called ourselves the Otis Group. Otis, for the man who invented the lift. I guess in the end, it was his fault. He shouldn’t have invented such a shitty lift.
The hairdresser came up with the idea. Thinking about it now, I think she had come up with it long ago but could never find a situation where she could have so much privacy and such willing participants.
Such a simple sentence. “We should kill them, you know.”
We looked at her like she was joking, but I knew immediately that she wasn’t. The nurse didn’t want to because she was afraid of getting caught.
The hairdresser convinced us that if we were smart about it, we wouldn’t get caught. It would be like the movie, and we would have to commit each other’s murders. And then, we would have to alibi each other out. If we keep our mouths shut, they could never prove a thing.
For only about fifteen minutes did we fight her on it. Fifteen. Meanwhile, we considered it. We must have because it didn’t take long for both of us to decide to go along with it. Within minutes we had a plan and a time line. How easy it is to plan a murder. The murder of three people. Three people we knew everything about.
The hairdresser said she would go first, commit the first murder and she chose the serial killer. She said she had nothing to lose.
A few minutes later, before I had time to change my mind, the doors opened. We had been in the lift for over four hours. We didn’t speak to each other much after we exited the lift, but it was like we shared our whole lives.
For some reason I thought that if I returned to my normal life, this would all go away. But then I read the papers the day the serial killer died. I hadn’t realized I had fallen to the floor until one of the nurses asked if I was all right. I picked up the paper and quickly folded it so that they wouldn’t see what I was reading, but for some reason, I always felt they knew. I wasn’t even guilty and I felt they knew. But I was guilty, wasn’t I? If I hadn’t agreed, no one would be hurt. It was my fault.
Later that night I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train on my computer. I even kept my earphones on so as to keep it from my husband. I felt so ashamed. And in the film, it never turned out well. They got caught. I would get caught too. I couldn’t get some of the lines out of my head.
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