by Carla Kovach
‘For you, yeah.’ She rubbed her head. It already pounded. Alice was right. She shouldn’t have come. She should have stayed wrapped up in Alice’s bed with the television on. Sleeping in ignorance as to what they were up to, but she’d insisted. ‘What am I going to fall on? Do you know the layout behind this window?’ She pressed her nose to the frosted glass and could make out blurred shapes.
He shrugged his shoulders as Alice helped her to step up. A fine flurry of snow blew into their faces. Madison picked at the window, getting her fingers under it and pulling until it was open. ‘Great, it looks like I’m going to land in the bath.’ She pulled off her coat and thrust it towards Alice’s face before pushing herself through the tiny gap. Squirming with a few groans and moans, she eventually reached down and fell into the bath. ‘Ouch.’ The tap dripped cold water onto her hand.
‘Are you hurt?’ Alice sounded worried.
‘Why are you both still there? I’m going to open the door now. Hurry.’ As she listened to them scarpering off, she heaved herself out of the scummy bath and regained her balance. She pushed the creaky door to the hallway and glanced through the other open doors. The sight of an ornamental skull made her jump back, her heart beating like a jack hammer. ‘Chill, chill. It won’t hurt you.’ She swallowed, wondering what it was that Tyrone had seen.
Alice tapped on the door. ‘Let us in.’ She paused and tapped again. ‘Maddie? Are you okay?’ They both began to bang away.
Madison ignored them and glanced across the lounge and kitchen. The clutter that adorned every surface and floor was a distraction but there was something that sent a chill through her body. The photo that Alice had used to set up her AppyDater profile, the one of her eating the hotdog at the German Christmas market in Birmingham had been torn into four pieces and left on his desk. There was an open notebook. She glanced down. It had times and dates of where she had been on the Monday she was attacked and there was so much more. He’d been the one following her. She stepped back and gasped, her heart banging and stomach gargling. She couldn’t swallow and the banging in her head almost knocked her sick.
‘Open the door!’ Tyrone was banging away. ‘What’s going on? Say something.’
As tears spilled down her cheeks, she breathlessly stumbled back into the hallway, banging against the walls until she reached the door. As she opened it, she fell into Alice’s arms gasping for breath and sobbing. ‘He was going to kill me. You saw the photo of me, didn’t you?’
Tyrone nodded. ‘It’s still there then?’
‘And there’s more. So much more.’
Tyrone ran into the apartment, hurrying through like a gust of wind before coming back. ‘I knew it.’ Grabbing his phone, Tyrone pulled DI Harte’s card out of the sleeve in his phone case and began to tap the number in. ‘I’m going to call the police.’
A loud knock instantly shut them all up, then the police entered the unlocked communal door. Tyrone instantly put his hands up and Alice and Madison cowered. ‘If I have to do time, will you look after Clover, Alice?’
Alice stared tight-lipped and nodded as DI Harte stood there, her temples twitching with anger as the other officers followed her in.
64
My lips, I can’t breathe. It happened so fast, the binding of skin to skin and I can’t bear to pull them apart. Only a short while ago, I was mentally preparing myself to tear the skin from the bone in my wrist so that I could escape but look at me. I can’t even prise my own lips apart. It’s like the thought of a paper cut or a pinprick or nails down a blackboard. Sometimes it’s the smaller things that we fear the most. I shouldn’t have yelled.
As soon as I said I loved him, he flipped. It should have worked. He should be crying in a ball now, releasing me from the binds and trusting me. I’ve screwed up and now he’s going to kill me.
My stomach keeps cramping from the nauseating hunger and I want to hold it or bend over but I can’t.
‘Damn it!’ His shouting is booming through the walls. Lots of banging and swearing and he’s talking to Hailey again, the person who doesn’t exist. The music still plays and I can’t hear my breaths. That’s probably a good thing.
Lots of people say that being mindful is good. Concentrate on breathing and feeling. I don’t buy into it. When I sit in silence, I hear things and I get hung up on them not sounding right. I hear and feel my heartbeat and I wonder if everything’s as it should be. When I swallow, I catch the sound my throat makes at the back and I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it. I prefer the sound of traffic or children playing or the hum of the television in the background. But not this music. I want it all to go away. All I want to hear now is my mother’s soothing voice again and my brothers taking the pee or my father trying to discuss what’s on the news with me. I begin to rub away at my wrists.
I try to lift my neck a little to get a glimpse of what I’m doing. My eyes have adjusted to the dusky room. I can see that a tiny flap of the blackout material has lifted at the corner of the window.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch light on metal as he storms past and deadlocks the front door. Then the track ends and silence. With my stuck lips, I swallow and it sounds wrong. My ears pop and it’s like the volume just went up. Shuffling and muttering – the words I cannot decipher. Again, it’s me and the sound of my breathing and swallowing.
Saw away at the skin on my wrist, that’s what I should do. A tear slips down my face as my flesh slices even further. The raw burning sting is like nothing I’ve ever experienced and I stop. I can’t do it. Maybe this is why people give up. Death preferable to the pain of existence.
A few more tears slide down my cheek. I want to go home. I want to see my family and I miss my work colleagues. I’d never admit it to PC Smith but he’s one of my best friends and I miss him too. DC O’Connor always gives me time and cookies or whatever his wife has been baking. I always liked him a lot. My team are my friends and I want to see them again.
It is as if the air in the room has shifted. That’s what I mean about mindfulness, this intricate focus on the smallest of things. I didn’t hear him creep up the hallway but he’s there. It’s as if he’s staring right through me. My heart wants to escape. I can feel it banging away and the flutter in my throat gives me a sense of being choked. Sweat forms at my brow yet I’m shivering as the temperature drops. It’s cold, so icy cold that I can’t quite feel my arms and legs as much as I could a few minutes ago.
Panicking and pulling, I keep my focus on him, then I glance at the knife. This is it. I scream in pain and all I see is blood.
65
‘What are you three doing here?’ Gina glanced through the open apartment door then at the three students bundled together on and by the stairs. ‘Madison, shall I call you an ambulance?’
The student sobbed as Alice held her tightly.
‘Madison, are you okay?’
Tears drizzling down her face, Madison nodded. ‘He was going to kill me.’
Alice held her closely and stroked her head. ‘It’s okay, Maddie. You’re safe now.’
Corrine came out of her apartment and Lauren stood at the top of the stairs rubbing her sleepy eyes as she spoke. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m sorry, really sorry.’ Tyrone stood. ‘It’s all my fault. I told Alice and Maddie to help me. I thought I saw something and wanted to prove it. I was going to call, look.’ He held his phone up with one hand and flashed Gina’s card with the other. Her number was half keyed in. ‘We just wanted to give you the proof.’
Jacob nudged his way in between PC Smith and another uniformed officer.
Gina sighed. ‘Is this tenant in?’
Madison shook her head. ‘Not unless he’s hiding in a cupboard.’
Corrine butted in. ‘Look. What the hell’s happening here?’
Gina’s shoulders slumped. ‘Just go back into your apartment, please. Someone will speak to you in a short while.’ Corrine let out a snorty huff and slammed her door. Gina nudged Curtis’s doo
r and it fully opened. ‘Why is his door unlocked?’
Tyrone went to speak but Madison put her hand up. ‘It was me. I got in through his bathroom window and opened the door.’
‘You broke in?’ Gina stepped into the hall of the apartment. ‘Curtis Gallagher. It’s the police.’
Tyrone smacked his lips as he started to speak. ‘Like we said. There’s no one there but you should see his desk. Madison said he has a notebook and a photo of her.’
‘There’s so much more.’ Madison rubbed her tears away. ‘There are others. Amber is in his book. He’d been keeping notes on us.’ She hiccupped and took a deep breath.
Tyrone placed a hand on Madison’s shoulder and turned to Gina. ‘Don’t blame them. It was my idea. I thought I saw your officer’s picture through his window in the early hours but I couldn’t be sure. He was sitting in his front room with the light on. It was when I came home from the police station. He had his coat on and I wondered what he was doing at that time so I stood back in the dark and watched him. I’ve been keeping an eye out for days and he’s been acting strangely all week. I know I should have called you and I know I promised but I had to be sure of what I’d seen. I couldn’t just call you because I thought he was weird.’
Gina shook her head. So far, they’d broken in and entered, they may have messed with potential evidence and they could have put themselves in danger had Curtis Gallagher been in. She nodded to a uniformed officer beside her. ‘We’ll talk to you later. Will you take all three of them up to Mr Heard’s apartment?’ She needed them out of her way.
Stepping through into Curtis’s hall, her stomach began to churn. She crept through into the kitchen and lounge and peered up and down, her attention immediately brought to the desk area. Tyrone had been right. There in front of her was a photo of PC Kapoor, her AppyDater photo. The same with Madison and Amber. She popped a pair of latex gloves on and flicked through the exercise book, page after page. He’d been recording Amber’s comings and goings for ages before he took her, noting down details of her relationship with Clayton Collins and her other dates.
Madison’s page soon followed and it was short compared to Amber’s. The information gathered by him was brief but to the point. He’d needed a replacement after killing Amber and had given very little time to stalking Madison. A lump formed in her throat as she read on as he then wrote about the policewoman at the lake who he’d followed home.
Jacob entered. ‘Blimey.’ He began reading over her shoulder.
‘If he’s not here, where is he?’ She felt her fists tighten as she clenched them. She darted through every room, falsely hoping that he’d be hiding Kapoor in the wardrobe or somewhere obvious but no, it was never going to be that easy. She slammed the bedroom door and it bounced on its hinges. ‘Where is she?’ She held her head in her hands as she calmly headed back to Jacob.
‘O’Connor is looking into every angle as we speak.’
‘We’re too late. He probably knows we’re onto him. He’s probably running desperate now.’ Her mind whirled with everything they’d been through over the past few days. Information never came back as fast as they’d hoped. So many people had lied or interfered with the case throwing them off on tangents that took their investigation away from finding the murderer. Now they knew who he was, they just didn’t know where. She stared at the skull ornament and she saw him. Curtis Gallagher with his eyes sunken into his bone. He was a true reflection of his surroundings but not one item screamed stalker murderer. Just like every murderer she’d come across. They all seem like normal, perfectly fine people until you know they’re not.
Gina spotted an envelope in the waste bin. It looked official and had a government logo in one corner. She reached in and pulled it out. A Mrs Gallagher was having her benefits increased by one pound and forty pence per week.
Her phone rang and O’Connor’s name lit up. ‘Tell me you have something and get forensics to this address now. I’m getting the place cordoned off at any moment. We’ve found our murderer, I just hope there’s not another body to add to his count.’
Jacob looked down.
Gina listened as O’Connor blurted everything out. ‘We have to go.’ She darted to the front door with the envelope in her hand, gave her instructions to uniform and ran as fast as she could to her car. There wasn’t a minute to lose. Lost time loses lives in this game and that statement had been proven right on so many occasions. Jacob hurried to his car. Wyre jumped into the passenger seat and the car wheels spun in the snow a few times before gaining some traction on the concrete below.
66
Gina slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt along Chamberlain Way, the address on the envelope, the address that O’Connor had confirmed was Curtis Gallagher’s mother’s home. The sixty-five-year-old woman apparently lived here alone. She pushed the car door open. ‘Do you want the back or front?’
Wyre began fitting her stab vest over her suit jacket and shrugged. ‘Back. We should wait for the others.’
Jacob’s car pulled up behind Gina’s and a couple of police cars followed. ‘Right, let’s go.’
Gina tightened her stab vest as she trudged down a couple of steps, almost buckling on a cracked slab. ‘Be careful.’ Music blared out. It was a slow melodic song, one Gina had heard many times. Her parents used to have a Roy Orbison record. It was ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. Gina glanced at the windows but each pane was covered from the inside.
Wyre nodded and crept along the side of the building with two uniformed officers. PC Smith reached Gina’s side and held the battering ram up in readiness. Preserving life was all that mattered and they had to get in there. She nodded at Jacob to follow Wyre. If Curtis Gallagher was to escape out the back, she needed her fittest officers ready to chase him. The track came to an end and started again. Something wasn’t right, that she was sure of. Her mind flashed to an image of Amber, was she his beautiful dreamer?
Slamming her fists on the door, Gina called out. ‘Open up, police.’ She placed her ear against the door but nothing could be heard over the music. Then there was a piercing scream that made her heart jitter. The scream turned into a laugh, a sadistic tittering with a hint of fury, or was it elation? ‘Open up!’
Wyre ran back to the front of the building. ‘Guv, there’s a body in the shed.’
Gina ran as fast as she could, keeping up with Wyre. Her colleague pointed through the smeary window. ‘Blooming hell! Call it in.’ She almost pressed her nose to the window to get a better look at the corpse that was strapped into a chair.
Wyre looked away. ‘Is it Kapoor?’
Gina swallowed and took a closer look. ‘I can’t see.’ She leaned back and rammed her shoulder into the flimsy door and it pinged open to reveal the body.
67
Gina breathed a sigh of relief. ‘No, I’m guessing it’s Gallagher’s mother. We have to get in that house now. We’ll need to confirm the identity later. The rats have eaten the flesh. It’s just bone.’
Wyre looked but quickly turned away.
She stepped into the overgrown garden and shivered. ‘Wyre, cover the back door, I’m heading to the front. Count to twenty and go in.’ Running around she gave the nod. ‘Go now.’ PC Smith began slamming the old front door with the battering ram. The deadlocks fought back but after three goes, it caved in.
‘Police.’ She nodded to two officers to head along to the kitchen and she went to open the living room door but it was locked, from the inside. The back door must have been unlocked as she could hear Wyre and Jacob entering. ‘Hello, police.’ She banged on the door where the music was coming from and the laughter continued, followed by a thud. Gina flinched and stepped back. ‘Stand away from the door, we’re coming in.’
As PC Smith battered the flimsy door down, Gina’s ears were filled with the sound of the music. She entered and almost stumbled back as a spray of blood came from the pulled out knife. There was blood everywhere. On the walls, the green carpet, the chair and the music, it kept playin
g.
Jhanvi Kapoor straddled a gurgling Curtis Gallagher, his eyes wide and his laughter loud as she held the knife to his neck. Her own blood mingling with that coming from his arm. The flesh lying loose under her wrists made Gina heave a little. Tears ran down Kapoor’s face.
‘Put the knife down, Jhanvi. You’re safe now.’ She shouted to be heard.
Kapoor held it to his throat, pressing the tip against his jugular.
As he spluttered, he spat a glob of blood down his cheek. Gina could see that he had a couple of missing teeth.
Kapoor glanced up at Gina then back at Curtis and with shaky hands she held the knife out to Gina, who grabbed it and handed it to the officer behind her and Smith. Smith ran straight over to his colleague and helped her up, leading her gently into the hallway. As the record music came to an end and clicked off, the sound of sirens filled the street and an ambulance pulled up right outside. The room seemed hauntingly silent.
‘Curtis Gallagher, you are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Amber Slater, the assault of Madison Randle and the kidnapping of Jhanvi Kapoor. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’
The weasel-featured man gasped until he regained his breath and nodded.
‘Are you injured?’ Not that Gina cared but it was her job and she wouldn’t have poor care of the perpetrator hamper their case.
He shook his head and rubbed his neck. The scratch on his shoulder was superficial but would need treatment, maybe even a couple of stitches. Plus treatment for missing teeth. Kapoor pushed Smith away and ran back, aiming to kick Curtis in the side but Gina stood in her way. As her colleague broke down on her shoulder, Gina hugged her closely and led the young woman into the hallway as uniform finished up with Curtis Gallagher.