Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Jane Holland

  ‘Get away from her,’ Connor warns me.

  I ignore him. He won’t shoot me. Not yet. He hasn’t told me everything yet, and it’s obvious he needs to.

  I unpeel one end of the silver tape and rip it off her face, apologising again. There’s no way to do it gently. The skin beneath is red-raw. I guess she’s had to suffer the tape being unpeeled numerous times since being brought here.

  ‘Water, please,’ she whispers.

  There’s a plastic water bottle on the floor next to the metal frame. I tilt the bottle to her lips, and wait while she takes a few greedy sips. Then I put it down and start unfastening the thick wire ties Connor has used to secure her to the frame.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says through dry lips.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  Free of her prison, Jenny takes a few wobbling steps, then sinks to the stone floor and shakes her head. ‘N … not yet,’ she manages to say, and starts rubbing her legs and feet as though trying to get her circulation back. ‘Pins and needles. Give me a few minutes.’

  I glance at Connor. ‘Take off that hoody. I need it.’ He hesitates, then steps back ten paces and puts the gun down momentarily. He strips off the hoody and throws it across at me, then picks up the shotgun again. He’s wearing a plain tee-shirt underneath. I stretch the hoody round the top of Tris’s thigh as a tourniquet. ‘He still needs an ambulance.’

  Jenny says faintly, ‘Put pressure on it, Eleanor. As much as you can. And keep the leg elevated.’

  ‘I know.’

  I spot a cardboard box about two foot high. Turning it on its side, I lift his ankle until his foot is resting on the box. He gives a muffled cry, yet somehow manages not to pass out.

  ‘You have to let Jenny go,’ I tell Connor.

  ‘If I do that, she’ll go straight to the nearest house and call the police.’

  ‘That’s a long walk and she’s barefoot.’

  ‘She’s a PE teacher. She could probably jog to the village in ten minutes, barefoot or not.’

  ‘She’s also been chained to a cellar wall for the past five days. How fast do you think she’s going to be moving? You could let her go now and still be out of here before the police arrive.’

  ‘You think I’m afraid of that idiot Powell? He couldn’t even work out why Dick Laney confessed to the killings. Shall I tell you why? Because I put a few doubts in the man’s head about his son Jago. The police knew that the sacking had come from the garden centre; it was only a matter of time before they traced all the recent deliveries. So I dropped by, spoke to Dick, laid a trail of breadcrumbs that would have led him to his son as chief suspect … and next thing, he’s down the police station, claiming to have murdered those women.’

  I hesitate, still pressing down on Tris’s leg, trying to slow the bleeding. It’s not looking good though. His skin is cold and clammy, and his eyes look unfocused.

  ‘Now let me tell you what I think,’ I say in response. ‘I think you want to give me your reasons for killing those women before you’re arrested. I think you want your voice to be heard.’

  ‘Who says I’m not going to kill you too? Then myself?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve got it in you to kill me. We’ve been friends too long.’

  He bares his teeth. ‘Friends? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Let her go and we’ll talk.’

  ‘We can talk with Jenny here. I like an audience.’

  I ignore him, gambling on my instincts being right. ‘Jenny,’ I say clearly, ‘can you manage to walk yet?’

  Her voice is only a whisper. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then go. He won’t stop you.’

  Jenny looks uncertainly at Connor, then pushes herself up into an ungainly crouch and grabs at the leg of the table to pull herself to a standing position. It takes her about ten unsteady steps to reach the stairs, then she begins to crawl up the slippery steps like a crab trying to climb out of a bucket.

  It’s painful to watch.

  As I predicted, Connor makes no attempt to stop her, his gaze fixed on me instead. If he had intended to kill her, she would have been dead already.

  ‘Okay, Jenny can go. But no tricks,’ he warns me.

  ‘She’s almost naked. She needs a coat.’

  ‘No,’ he insists angrily.

  I turn my hands up, palms empty. ‘No tricks.’ I shrug out of the coat, and hurry to the steps, avoiding Connor’s furious hand as he tries to grab me. ‘Just give me three seconds.’

  I run up the steps, hand Jenny the coat, then rush back down, losing my footing and sliding the last three steps.

  Straight into Connor’s waiting arms.

  ‘I told you, no tricks,’ he snarls, pressing the cold double barrels of the shotgun against my temple, then thrusts me back towards Tris.

  ‘I only gave her a coat. She’s got no fucking clothes on, for God’s sake.’

  I check over my shoulder. Jenny has gone.

  And she has my phone now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Connor pushes me away. ‘Over there, bitch,’ he says, pointing to the metal bed frame with his shotgun.

  ‘You going to tie me up and play with me?’ But I walk slowly backwards, hands in the air, as he threatens me with the shotgun. ‘In front of Tris? That’s not your kind of thing, is it?’

  I’m not sure if there’s a mobile signal right down here in the bottom of the valley, especially in such a heavily wooded area. But it was worth giving her the coat with her ID badge and my phone in the pocket. Now there’s a possibility that Tris may make it out of here alive.

  My own odds are less encouraging.

  I stop walking, only halfway to his self-styled torture area, but Connor does not push the point. Maybe I’m right and he doesn’t like having Tris as an audience for his sick games.

  ‘I know your mum left when you were both kids,’ I say, trying to defuse the tension in the air. ‘That she walked out on you and your dad. Never came back. Not even for his funeral. But that’s not entirely true,’ I add gently. ‘Is it, Connor?’

  There’s silence. Then Connor gives a soft little laugh.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asks, tilting his head.

  There’s a mild vibration that permeates everything in the cellar, like it’s coming up through the floor.

  ‘The freezer. Where you kept Dawn’s body.’

  He walks across to the shadows at the back of the room. ‘That’s right. It’s a chest freezer. Good capacity.’ Connor clicks on an overhead bulb. The white chest freezer looks surprisingly clean. He lifts the lid, then glances back over his shoulder at us, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. ‘Empty now, of course.’

  ‘Did you keep both bodies in there?’

  ‘It’s not what you said before,’ he tells me. ‘Leaving them for you to find, that was an afterthought. I froze them because I didn’t want them to decay before they could be properly buried. The dead are disgusting when they decay. Though,’ he adds, frowning, ‘they also take a very long time to defrost, I discovered.’

  Tris looks horrified. ‘For God’s sake, Connor. Why would you do something so sick?’

  ‘Well, you’re adopted. How could you expect to understand? It was a family thing, only between me and Dad. Our little secret.’ Connor drops the lid with a hollow thud. He snaps off the overhead light. ‘You won’t believe me but the first girl was a genuine accident. Dawn Trevian.’

  ‘The dental assistant from Bodmin,’ I say.

  ‘I was feeling low after Dad had died, wishing I could speak to someone about it. I met her coming out of Bodmin Library one day. She recognised me and stopped to talk. Then she asked after Tris. That annoyed me.’

  Tris whispers, ‘You killed Dawn because she liked me?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I took her phone number, said I’d call her. But I still don’t think I would have gone out with her, except for the date.’

  ‘What date?’ I ask.

  ‘The anniversary of your mum’s death. I ov
erheard Tris talking to Hannah about it. How you two had to look out for Eleanor, make sure she got through the day okay.’

  ‘And you didn’t like that.’

  ‘Her death didn’t just affect you,’ Connor points out coldly. ‘People think it’s all about the victim and her family. They forget there are always other people involved in a murder. Other children.’

  I wait, silent.

  ‘I rang Dawn the week before the anniversary,’ he continues. ‘Agreed to meet her after work. We never got to the pub though. It was obvious what she wanted.’ He’s sneering again. ‘It was nearly dusk. I pulled up in the woods’ car park. There was no one about. She was up for it, letting me touch her, kissing me back. Then suddenly Dawn started fighting. Said I was trying to rape her, that she was going to tell the police.’

  ‘You lost your temper.’

  ‘I just wanted her to stop screaming,’ he says. ‘It all happened so quickly. One minute she was clawing at my face, spitting at me like a cat, the next she was lying still and quiet on my lap. Like she’d fallen asleep.’

  I feel a creeping sense of horror, imagining those large hands about my own throat.

  ‘I sat there for ages. The body was getting cold. I didn’t know what to do. I knew it would mean prison. Perhaps half my life behind bars.’ He pauses. ‘Then I remembered what Dad had shown me.’

  ‘The perfect hiding place.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Tris is watching us, lying white and still. He says thinly, ‘I … I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I tell Tris gently, and hope my guesswork isn’t wildly inaccurate. ‘I think your dad killed your mum, then told everyone in the village that she’d left him for another man. Only she hadn’t gone far. I think he kept her in a chest freezer at the farm.’

  Tris stares at me in horror.

  Connor interrupts his protests, talking to me. ‘No, Dad wasn’t that much of a monster, he never meant to leave her in the freezer. We buried her together after he showed me her body. Up there in the rose garden. I can show you the exact spot where we buried her if you like.’

  Tris looks like he’s going to be sick. There’s agony and disbelief in every word. ‘But why? Why would he kill Mum?’

  ‘Because he killed Angela Blackwood first,’ Connor tells him.

  My body goes ice-cold at his words. It is exactly as I suspected. But hearing those words out loud is very different from considering them in the dark spaces of my head.

  But what he says next is even more sickening.

  ‘She was going to tell her husband he tried to rape her. Just like Dawn did with me. And if Dad had kept quiet about what he’d done, none of this would have happened. But you know how he liked his beer.’

  ‘He got drunk and admitted to his wife what he’d done,’ I whisper.

  Connor nods. ‘It was awful. Mum stood up to him for once. She said he had to go to the police, confess everything. He strangled her in the kitchen. A few days before my fourteenth birthday.’

  Tris is shaking his head. ‘But Dad said … He told us she ran off with another man.’

  ‘To protect you, Tris.’

  ‘But he told you the truth.’

  ‘I was older, and his own son. Not adopted like you. He took me out to the garage in the middle of the night, about six months after she’d vanished. He was very drunk. There was a chest freezer in the garage, just like this one. Mum was inside, frozen solid. Her eyelashes were stuck together with frost. I could still see the black mascara on them. He said we had to bury her. Together. We took spades, dug a hole under the rose bushes here at the old mill, and put her in.’ He pauses, remembering. ‘I said a prayer for her. Then we closed the hole and replanted the roses over her body.’

  I remember the butterflies under glass that I saw in their house. The stuffed dead animals, staring back at me with glass eyes. Pete Taylor liked to kill. But he also liked to preserve his trophies.

  In the silence that follows, I ask quietly, ‘Is that when he told you about killing my mum?’

  Connor looks round at me, his eyes hostile. ‘Your mum led him on, then said she was going to tell her husband about him. Dad decided to teach her a lesson she wouldn’t forget, to scare her into keeping quiet. He followed her into the woods when she was out walking with you. And crept up from behind.’

  For a second I’m right back there in the dappled sunshine, smelling the spring flowers, hearing the crow in the tree overhead …

  ‘He only intended to play-strangle your mum. Show her would might happen if she made him really angry.’

  ‘It doesn’t take much, you know. The slightest pressure on the windpipe, and they start to choke, then lose consciousness. The easiest thing in the world.’

  I make a noise under my breath, then put a hand to my eyes. My fingers come away wet. It feels like a wound has opened in my heart and blood is gushing out of it. The truth is so raw and cruel, I don’t know how I’m going to survive it.

  Tris is silent too, dark eyes wide and luminous under the bare bulb. He looks stunned. Like he’ll never recover either.

  Connor touches the lid of the freezer. ‘So I bought a new chest freezer and put Dawn inside, like Dad did with Mum, and kept it down here where Tris would never find it. I thought I was safe. That it was over. Then I met Sarah McGellan one night in Newquay.’ His voice becomes bitter. ‘I liked Sarah. I brought her back here to show her the house. Only she didn’t want to stay, said it was too creepy. When I refused to take her home, she got hysterical.’

  ‘So you hit her.’

  He nods. ‘After that, I knew I couldn’t let her go. I couldn’t risk the police coming here. They would have searched the place, found Dawn’s body in the freezer.’

  I look at the metal frame on the wall where Jenny had been restrained, and remember the marks on Sarah’s wrists.

  ‘Tying her up felt easier for you. It meant you didn’t have to kill her immediately.’

  ‘There was an old metal bedstead up in the mill. I cut it down to size, fixed it to the wall there,’ he agrees. ‘Sarah was smart, she understood what I was going through. She had a nice smile too. I liked having her around. I knew I’d have to kill her eventually, of course. But I wanted to make her death significant. That’s when I came up with the plan.’

  ‘Three, two, one,’ I whisper.

  ‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘A simple countdown. First Dawn Trevian. Then Sarah McGellan. And then you, Eleanor Blackwood. My number one.’

  I look at Connor, hating him. ‘And the shadow man?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You used to watch me from a distance. Come into my room while I was sleeping. Steal things.’

  ‘Even when I was a boy,’ he admits. ‘I was obsessed with you. I hated that everyone was so fucking sorry for you. Poor little Ellie Blackwood. Nobody cared about me and Tris, yet our mum had been murdered too. And we were still living with the murderer.’

  Tris says, ‘He was sick, Connor. Just like you.’

  I can see Connor getting angry again, and try to divert his attention. ‘How … how did you do it? Get Dawn down to the woods, I mean?’

  ‘I covered the inside of dad’s van with plastic sheeting, put Dawn in the back. I parked near the bridge, out of sight of the road. Then carried Dawn over my shoulder through the stream.’

  ‘And positioned her exactly where my mum died.’

  He nods.

  ‘And the number three?’

  ‘There was a black permanent marker in the glove box.’

  I listen to the silence above us and wonder how long it will take for the police to arrive. Surely Jenny must have managed to call them by now? By the look of his face, Tris can’t hang on much longer.

  ‘But where did you get the forestry sign for the diversion? That looked so realistic.’

  ‘They stack the signs behind the toilets in the car park. I changed the wording, then set it up it where the path divides. That was the tricky bit. You might hav
e ignored the sign and stayed on the upper paths. Or someone else might have come along first.’

  ‘But why move Dawn’s body afterwards? That’s the part I don’t understand. Why not leave her for the police to find?’

  ‘What, and have you treated like a celebrity again?’ His voice grows cold. ‘Poor Eleanor, her mum was strangled right in front of her, and now she’s found another dead woman in the woods.’

  ‘And Sarah?’

  ‘I didn’t want Sarah to end up frozen for months like my mum. She deserved better. I washed her body to remove any traces of my DNA before taking it to the cemetery though. I needed to make sure there was nothing to link her death to me.’

  I look at my enemy, seeing Connor properly for the first time. He’s a killer, like his father before him. Maybe he was driven insane by the horror he witnessed. But my mum was strangled in front of me, and I didn’t grow up to be a murderer.

  I can remember the day she died now. I remember everything. What Connor has told me is slowly piecing together those odd gaps in my knowledge that had always felt so huge and gaping that they could never be filled. But how small the truth feels now. So small and hard, I could put it in my pocket.

  ‘I’ll make it easy,’ he promises, advancing. ‘I don’t want to blow a hole in you with this bloody great gun. That would be too ugly. A little pinch round the throat, and it will be like falling asleep. I won’t make it painful like it was for our mothers.’

  ‘Kill me, but let her go.’ Tris’s voice is a mere thread of sound. ‘You have to let her go, Connor. She’s … done nothing … to you.’

  ‘Done nothing?’ Connor swings violently back towards him, tightening his grip on the shotgun. I can see the last shreds of reason slipping away as he glares down at his brother. ‘You haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said. It was because of that whore Angela Blackwood that Mum had to die. It was because of Ellie that you and I started drifting apart. All our lives, she got the love, the attention, the pity. What did we get for losing our mother? Nothing, bloody nothing. She has to be made to suffer. Can’t you see that?’ His face twists in anguish. ‘If you’re not on my side, Tris, then you’re against me.’