It took Jake another two hours, a second Americano and a cheese toastie to work his way through the conversation thread between Kieran and himself. He had been wrong. There was nothing hidden among the text; no glimmer of a hint that might be later used as evidence. Frustrated at the time he had wasted, he logged out and left the café, turning left to make his way back home. The sky was dark and heavy, threatening rain, and he checked the time on his phone before returning it to his pocket and cutting down a path that led back towards the main road. It was littered with wheelie bins and black bags waiting for the following day’s collection. Holding his breath at the stench of rotting waste, he hurried along towards the glow of a street lamp at the other end.
He never made it that far. He was stopped by a figure that stepped from a doorway; by the cold touch of metal that was jabbed to the small of his back, and by a fear that rendered him immobile. He didn’t need to see it to know what it was. Bile lurched into his throat, choking any words he might have spoken.
‘Keep walking,’ a voice told him. ‘Get in the van.’
Forty
Alex used the phone at Dan’s desk to call Paul Ellis. Dan was in the corner of the room, still at the printer, working on tracking down whose computer the list of names had been sent from. Alex would have had no idea how to go about even starting the process.
‘Mr Ellis?’ she said when the call was answered. ‘DI King, South Wales Police. You spoke with my colleague DC Mason just a while ago. Thank you for getting in touch with us. I wonder if I could ask you if any of these names mean anything to you.’
‘Go on.’
‘John Keepings. Emily Llewellyn. Caitlyn Price. Karen Pritchard. June Roberts—’
‘I was at school with them,’ Paul Ellis said, cutting her recitation short. ‘They were all in my year at school.’
Alex scanned the rest of the list, but there was no other name on it that was familiar to her. It only had around sixty names on it – not enough to consist of an entire school year. She couldn’t understand what it had been doing on the printer, or where it had come from. Paul Ellis – or the fact of his existence, at least – had been present at the station before his call had come in. But how had that been possible? And why was this list there at all?
‘Which school was this?’
‘St Joseph’s High School.’
‘In Cardiff?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one. Why are you asking about all these people?’
I’m not sure yet, Alex thought. Keeping the doubt to herself, she evaded a direct answer to the question and thanked Paul Ellis for contacting them, telling him she would be in touch again shortly. Once she had hung up, she logged on to the internet on Dan’s computer and ran a Google search for the contact number of St Joseph’s High School.
Her call was answered on the third ring. There was a parents’ evening that night and the staff had stayed working until later into the evening. The secretary Alex spoke to was aware that a request for the list of students had already been made, and Alex asked her to resend it to her own email address.
‘Could you tell me who the list was sent to initially, please?’
There was a moment’s pause as the secretary checked her sent box. ‘It was emailed to DC Sullivan.’
Alex sat up. ‘When was that?’
‘Uh … yesterday morning.’
She raised a hand, trying to get Dan’s attention.
‘Right,’ the woman said. ‘That’s just sent.’
Alex thanked her and opened her inbox. As promised, the email was waiting there. She opened it and clicked on the attachment. It was immediately clear that only part of the list had been left at the printer. Someone had taken the first page. Jake.
‘Dan. Chloe.’
They joined her at the desk, each peering over a shoulder as Alex directed their attention to a name on the screen.
‘So where the hell is he now?’ Chloe asked.
Alex’s finger traced the name. Graham Driscoll. It had persisted in emerging during their investigations, yet he continued to stay faceless; as absent now as Oliver Barrett had been for all those years. Yet Alex was beginning to suspect that in Driscoll’s case, the choice to remain hidden had been made deliberately.
Forty-One
The blow was blunt and sudden, sending Jake flailing into the darkness of the van. His head hit something hard and he groped at the metal walls in an attempt to steady himself, but his ears were ringing and he was too disorientated to keep himself upright. Collapsing into the corner, he raised his arms in front of his face, shielding it from the further assault he felt sure would follow. It never came. The van doors were closed, shutting him inside with his assailant.
‘If you make a noise, I’ll shoot you. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve got nothing left to lose.’
Jake believed every word. He knew all too well what this man was capable of: he had seen the severed finger; the photographs of the remains that had been dug from beneath that patio. If everything he had put together was correct, the man was capable of anything.
He tried to hold his breath against the stench that filled the van: an overpowering rancid, rotting smell. ‘I can help you,’ he said, choking on the words, his arms still held in front of his face. He didn’t believe his own statement – this man was surely beyond any help – but if he didn’t hold on to the hope that there might be a way to talk him out of whatever he had planned, Jake realised he had little else to cling on to.
‘Tell me what he was like.’
The command was unexpected, and Jake’s mind struggled to follow. What was he talking about? What did he want from him?
‘I don’t understand,’ he said carefully, trying to steady his voice; knowing his ignorance might only serve to fuel further anger. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know who you mean.’
Glancing into the darkness to his left, Jake narrowed his eyes and struggled to make out the shape that lay beside him. It was a pile of something, something soft and fabric-covered, and the stench was seeping from its corner of the van.
‘Kieran. What was he like when you fucked him? That’s what you did, isn’t it? That’s what boys like you do.’
In the darkness, Jake moved his hand to his side, slowly reaching down towards his pocket. His fingers groped quietly in the darkness, searching out his mobile phone, his only means of help. He needed to call someone – it didn’t matter who. If he could get someone to hear at least a part of this conversation, then whoever he might connect with would know there was something wrong. They would send for help.
‘Come on,’ the man said impatiently. ‘Tell me.’
Jake shook his head, sickened at the thought of sharing intimate details with this man. Why would he even ask him something like that? ‘Nothing happened.’
‘Liar!’
The man lunged forward and knocked the phone from Jake’s hand, sending it bouncing across the floor of the van. He pressed the gun to Jake’s face, making him whimper with a sound he wouldn’t have believed was coming from his own body. Everything he had thought about himself was wrong: the bravado, the courage, the carefree persona he delivered to his colleagues on a daily basis was just a mask for everything he tried so desperately to keep hidden. He was alone and he was scared, just as he had been for most of his life, always feeling on the outside of everything; too intimidated by rejection to ever commit fully to anything. He had somehow made it to the rank of detective constable, though even he realised he had done it with luck on his side. He had always had a way of being in the right place at the right time or knowing the right words to say to the right people in order to get him what and where he wanted. DI King had been one of the few people to see through him, and she was probably right, he thought: he hadn’t deserved any of it.
‘You can tell me, you know. I understand you.’
Jake tried to shut out the sound of the man’s voice, but it was so close it was as though he could feel it touching his skin. In the darkness of the van, just a few
feet away from where he cowered, was a body. He knew the smell; he had visited the pathologist’s lab enough times to recognise the odour emitted by a rotting corpse, and once he had inhaled it for the first time, it was something that had never left him. He could stare death in the face in all its gruesome aesthetics, but the smell of it was something he had never been able to stomach. Retching and swallowing back a mouthful of bile, he tried not to think about what or who was lying in the darkness beside him. He stared at the shape of the gun in front of him, and with a shame that seemed to swallow him, he felt the space between his thighs heat up as his bladder emptied against his trousers.
‘Men like you … little boys playing at being men … you revolt me. Hiding your dirty little secrets as though no one can see what you really are. Lying to other people, lying to yourself … taking whatever you can because you think it’ll make you feel better about yourself. You deserve to die, all of you.’
Jake watched as the man moved back, the gun still held poised in front of him, and reached down to the floor of the van to pick up the mobile phone with his free hand.
Was he here because he was gay? Jake thought. Was homophobia what all this was really about? He wondered whether Oliver Barrett had died because he had been attracted to other boys. With fear lodged in his throat and a hollow burning in his stomach, he wondered whether he was about to die for the same reason.
Forty-Two
The three detectives stood at the evidence board, studying its web of names and dates. It seemed clear to them all now that Graham Driscoll was their missing link; the piece of the jigsaw that until that evening had been eluding them. If the sender of the envelopes had a link with both the past and the present, he needed to be connected in some way to both Oliver Barrett and Kieran Robinson. The link with Barrett was now in place, but to establish a connection to Kieran, they had to start looking at the web in front of them from a different angle.
Though perhaps there was no need, Alex thought, staring at the man’s name and the few details that were written below it on the evidence board. Maybe it had always been there, staring right at them.
‘Graham Driscoll was fostered by Debra Rogers, Stan Smith’s sister. We know that he was put into the care system after his mother committed suicide, and that he left Debra at the age of sixteen. He didn’t have the best start, did he? Would you want that hanging over you for the rest of your life?’
Alex had turned to Chloe with the question, immediately regretting her choice of words when she saw the reaction that had spread across her colleague’s face. Given Chloe’s past, Alex’s turn of phrase couldn’t have been more poorly chosen. Chloe looked as though Alex had slapped her with the words, dragging everything she had tried so desperately to move away from back into the room with them.
‘Christ, Chloe … I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s fine. You’re right … no, I wouldn’t want that hanging over me.’
‘Shit.’ Alex looked from Chloe to Dan, waiting for one of them to catch up with her train of thought. ‘Chloe Lane,’ she said, throwing emphasis on the surname.
Chloe’s eyes widened as she picked up the thread Alex was dangling before them. ‘I changed my name to escape my past.’
‘Exactly. So what if Graham Driscoll did the same? There’s a reason we’ve not been able to trace him, isn’t there? He no longer bloody exists.’
Returning to the phone she had used to call the secretary at St Joseph’s, Alex pressed redial and waited for an answer. When the call continued to go unanswered, she glanced at the clock on the far wall: 8.15.
‘Shit,’ she muttered, fearing that by now everyone had packed up and headed home for the night.
‘Hello, St Joseph’s High School.’
She breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of the same voice she had spoken with not long earlier. Thank God for overrunning parents’ evenings, she thought.
‘This is DI King again. I’m going to need a school photograph of the year group you sent me – would that be possible? I can come to you,’ she added, glancing again at the clock on the far wall. ‘I can be there in twenty minutes at the latest.’
‘We’re just about to close up,’ the secretary said.
‘I’m afraid this can’t wait until tomorrow. Is a photograph available there, do you know?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a sigh she didn’t bother attempting to conceal. ‘There are copies of all the year photos somewhere in the head’s office. But I showed it to one of your officers only yesterday. He took a photo of it on his phone.’
‘Which officer?’ Alex asked, already knowing what the woman’s answer would be.
‘Well as far as I know, it was the same one I’d emailed with the student list. DC Sullivan.’
Alex’s mind jumped three steps ahead of her. Jake had got there first. All this time spent trying to make the pieces fit together, and he had already solved the mystery, having seen what the rest of them had been unable to. ‘Can you get that photograph out again for me, please. I’m on my way.’
Ending the call, she grabbed the list from the desk. ‘Dan, I’m sorry, I need you to stay here. Wait for my call. Try to get hold of Jake. I’ve got a feeling he knows something we don’t.’
* * *
Fifteen minutes and several broken speed limits later, Alex and Chloe stood in the reception area of St Joseph’s High School. The secretary was waiting for them there; a velvet photo album – crimson in colour and embossed with the school logo – sat on the front desk.
‘These have been kept for years,’ the woman explained. ‘Bit of a school tradition.’
Alex opened the album and flicked through its pages, looking for the photograph of the fifth form of 1980–81. When she found it, a couple of hundred faces looked back at her, the image so small that making out any individual detail was difficult.
‘Can you see Barrett?’ she asked Chloe, who had stepped alongside her to study the photograph.
Chloe shook her head as she scanned the rows of students. ‘I can’t find him.’
Alex had felt so certain that there would be something here, something that might direct them to their killer; or lead them to someone who knew who the killer was, at least.
As her eyes skipped over the faces, she spotted one that seemed familiar in some way.
‘Is that him?’ she asked, directing Chloe to a boy at the end of the third row.
‘I’m not sure. It could be. It’s so hard to make out. A lot of them all look the same.’
Pushing her hair behind her ear, Chloe leaned closer to the image and the two women studied it in silence. The secretary waited beside them, failing despite her best efforts to hide her resentment at being kept at work for even longer than she had previously anticipated.
‘Oh no.’
Alex glanced at Chloe. Her gaze had shifted, and she was now fixated on a face that looked back at her from the second row from the top; a face that to Alex looked very much the same as countless other faces in the photograph.
‘Is that him?’ Chloe asked. ‘Is that Driscoll?’
‘We don’t know, do we?’ Alex said, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. ‘We don’t know who he is, do we?’
‘Or perhaps we do,’ Chloe said, moving away from the photo. ‘That is him. It’s definitely him.’ She looked at Alex. ‘It’s Michael Wyatt.’
Forty-Three
Back at the car, Chloe got straight on the phone to Dan and asked him to track any vehicles Wyatt might have access to, the nature of his work making it possible he had the use of more than just his own private car. If he was responsible for Kieran and Matthew’s disappearances, he’d have needed a vehicle that made the transportation of his victims easy to conceal. And then there was the other thing that had been preying on Alex’s mind: those tyre marks found on the mountain road. Had Wyatt hit Matthew in one of the vans belonging to his company, or had he used it to abduct him from the mountain? Either way, this was it, she thought, her body charged with a press
ing sense of urgency; the missing piece they were looking for was now in place, with a link between all the victims: Oliver Barrett, Kieran Robinson, Matthew Lewis, Stacey Cooper.
Dan had tried contacting Jake but had been unable to get hold of him. Chloe tried now, but there was still no answer. Alex’s thoughts strayed to DCI Thompson. The next call would be to him, to tell him they finally had a suspect. Just yesterday, she would have been pleased with the result, but now, with Jake potentially in danger, she would take no pleasure in telling the DCI their suspicions.
‘Wyatt knew where Kieran Robinson was last Thursday,’ Alex said as she left the school gates and headed towards the address Dan had given her. ‘He organised and paid for the night out at the comedy club – it would have been easy enough for him to find out whether Kieran was going. Kieran knew him, so the chances are he would have gone with him willingly.’
‘Wyatt sent you that photo then?’ Chloe asked. ‘The one of Kieran and Jake together?’
‘Who else could it have been?’
A Promise to the Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a brilliant twist Page 19