My senses clear as the adrenaline hits. It was all an act. The tears, the bruises and self-harming, everything. I’d been right to question Cassie’s mental state, because it turns out she was acting, badly. This whole meeting was nothing more than an attempt to gain my trust.
“Okay, Cassie, you’re in control,” I say, cursing myself for opening the car door. I’d sensed that there was something “off” about her, but I’d thought it was harmless attention seeking.
I wince as I place my cut palm on the steering wheel. Blood smears on the leather.
“Come on, let’s go,” she says.
I put the car in gear and begin to reverse out of the space.
Once we’re on the village road, I decide to try and keep her talking. I’ve learned from Isabel how much psychopaths and narcissists like to talk about themselves. “Did you kill Dominic?”
“Yes,” she says. “In his car of all places. Poor boy was sleeping in it close to the campsite outside the village.” Her eyes constantly flash back and forth from the road to me. I wonder how well she knows Hutton and the surrounding areas. Perhaps I could take her somewhere else.
“He didn’t put up much of a fight. In fact, he let me into his car one night. I pretended to be homeless with nowhere to go. It was cold and he took pity on me. Then I stabbed him.”
There’s no time to feel pain for what happened to Dominic. No moment to close my eyes and grieve that loss, to dwell on the suffering he felt at Cassie’s hands. He was such a mild-mannered, kind person that it makes me feel sick that she did that to him. I press it down and pull myself together. I need to stay focused for the baby inside me.
“Did you take Josh?” I ask.
She smiles. “That would ruin the surprise.”
I see the petrol station coming up on the main street and decide to take a gamble. “I need more petrol to get home.”
“Liar,” she says. “I can see the monitor.”
“A bandage for my hand then.”
“You’re driving just fine. Keep going.”
I grind my teeth together. She knows I’m stalling, that I’m trying to find a way to alert someone.
“Drive back to the cottage like a good girl. I know you’ve been stabbed before and I know you’ll want to avoid that again.”
There’s a hint of slush on the roads, and overhead the sky is oppressively white. More snow is coming. There’s nothing I can do but drive Cassie to the cottage, but if this snow comes, it’ll make it even harder to either get help, or escape. Fear lays low in my body like an indigestible stone in my intestines. Keep her talking.
“Are you working with Isabel?” I ask.
“Not answering that,” she says.
“Did you kill Jess?”
She smiles. “Yes, I did.”
I don’t know why this revelation shocks me more than the others. Jess and Cassie were actresses on the same film. They were friends. “Why did you do that?”
She presses the knife into the outer layers of my clothing, taunting me with her blade, in the same way Isabel would. The two of them are uncannily alike. It makes me want to throw up.
“Do you know how many young actresses auditioned for the part of Isabel Fielding?” she asks.
“How could I possibly know that?”
Cassie ignores my retort. “Two hundred. And I was the one who won the part because I wanted it more than anything. I have been trapped in a prison all my life, passed from one person to the next. Did you know that before I won my first acting role, I’d been in foster care?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yep. Well, my foster father made a deal with the director. He told the director that he could do whatever he liked with me as long as my foster father received all of my money. It was a TV advert. It paid pretty well, and the director did everything he wanted with me. I got lots of roles after that, but I never saw any of the money until I was eighteen years old and I moved away from that psycho.”
“I’m sorry for the child who was treated so poorly,” I say, trying desperately to listen to her story, but also watching the road for any sort of opportunity to get away. “But what does this have to do with Jess?”
“She was a traitor for one thing. She was in and out of a boring relationship with him.”
“Neal?”
“Yes.”
“But so are you.” I point out.
“I have a reason for that,” she says.
“What reason?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she says.
“Have you done something to him?”
“You’re asking too many questions,” she snaps.
“I’m listening, too,” I say. “No one has listened to you before now, have they?”
She remains silent, but there’s the barest twitch at the corner of her mouth and I wonder whether I’ve broken through a barrier.
“How does murdering people help with the pain of what you been through?”
That movement turns into a frown. “Pain?” she snaps. “What pain? No one can hurt me.”
“That’s a lie,” I say. She presses the knife harder and I almost steer the car into traffic.
“Get a grip, Leah!” she shouts. “Watch it.”
When the car is righted, she settles down again. A moment later, she begins to talk. “I’ve been a fan of Isabel’s since she escaped Crowmont Hospital. Her childhood must have been abusive with the father she had, but instead of being a victim, she outwitted everyone. She lived on her own terms. I kept a folder on my laptop with every morsel of information I could find about her. My favourite of her kills was James Gorden.”
“I don’t understand how you could admire that. It was disgusting,” I say. “You’d feel differently if you’d seen the aftermath.”
“I doubt it,” she says, and I believe her. “He had it coming. The guy was a creep with a weird fixation on Isabel. Why was a man in his thirties interested in a young woman convicted of a crime as a child? Because Isabel turned him on.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, that’s wrong. I met James Gorden and he wasn’t like that. He was interested in true crime and nothing more.”
“He was obsessed with her,” she insists.
“He wanted to uncover the truth.”
“You were obsessed with her too,” she says, “otherwise Isabel wouldn’t have been able to manipulate you like that. Isabel Fielding is the most sexualised serial killer of our times.”
“Come on, Cassie. None of that is true. Isabel was a child when she committed her first murder, and since then she’s been tucked away in an institution for most of her life.”
“I know it,” Cassie says, with complete conviction. “What Isabel does is a justified reaction to the persecution she’s faced.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Cassie, but that’s completely misguided.”
Despite everything, I can still see the child in her, the one who bit her lip in the café. Yes, I understand that it was an act, and that she uses her large eyes to manipulate. But a part of me empathises with the girl stuck in foster care, abused by people in the entertainment industry, so powerless for most of her life. I can see why she idolised someone like Isabel. Someone who uses absolute power to her advantage. But I can’t marry any of this up to Isabel’s actual crimes.
Hurt people hurt people. But it doesn’t have to be that way. My baby doesn’t need to inherit the crimes of my father, I can teach him or her to break the cycle. Even Tom, someone with an appetite for murder, has the psychological strength to seek help. It’s now, in this moment, that I finally reject the notion that psychological damage can’t be overcome, no matter what Cassie says.
“Isabel had a choice,” I say. “Just like you have a choice. What she did to Maisie might have been a response to her trauma as a child, but it didn’t have to continue. She could have accepted help. She could have changed. But she didn’t.”
“The system failed her. Our world failed her,” Cassie replie
s. “Why should she live within society’s rules if society doesn’t care about her?”
“Are you working with her?” I ask. “Do you communicate with her?”
Cassie barely reacts. The tiniest of blinks.
“What arrangement have you made with her?” I ask. “Why did you kill Dominic? He was nothing but decent; he didn’t deserve any of this. He’s not your foster father or the director of that TV advert. Did Isabel order you to kill him? Tell me Cassie.” We reach the driveway to the farm and I almost keep driving so I can keep her talking for longer. While we’re in this car she won’t kill me.
To get past the cottage I have to drive agonisingly close to the main farm building. I crane my neck, searching for Seb’s truck but it’s gone.
“Isabel is manipulating you. It’s nothing more than that,” I continue. “There’s no righteous cause, Isabel just wants to kill me, and you’re a useful tool to help her achieve that. Wake up, Cassie. This is about her obsession with me and my family. I think deep down you probably know that. She wants to punish me and Tom for what happened at Crowmont, for making her recognise how alone in the world she is. It’s all my fault that she can’t have a normal life, don’t you see that? She’s stunted emotionally and she’s blaming me for it.”
“No, she’s free,” Cassie says.
I sigh and reduce the speed on the car, hoping that at least Donna will notice me. Somehow, she’ll know something is wrong and call the police. And then I remember… the police surveillance. Surely, they will be around somewhere. Impulsively, I jam my hand against the horn, depressing it and holding it down so that the obnoxious sound blares out. Cassie pushes the knife into my flesh and I cringe away from her, the sharp pain making me wince.
“Stop that!” She slashes the knife towards my hand and I let the horn go before she cuts my knuckles. The horn stops and so does the car while I catch my breath.
“Keep driving. Act normal now.” Cassie is riled up by the horn. She didn’t predict me doing that and the lack of control has irked her. That’s good. Maybe I can keep doing that until she makes a mistake. And if she makes a mistake, I can take advantage of it.
The cottage comes into view and I immediately check around for signs of the police. They should have been following me, now I think about it. But because they blended so well into the background, I’d completely forgotten about it. When I check my rear-view mirror, there’s no one there. And no one at the cottage. Where are the police?
Cassie notices me looking around and smiles. “The police got a tip-off earlier. Someone used Anna Fielding’s credit card in a small village about thirty minutes out of York. The police are going there now to find Isabel and Owen. Which they will, because they know which hotel they’re staying at. Well, they’ll find… something.”
“What have you done to Josh?” I say.
“Park here, Leah,” she says. “Now we’re going to get out of the car together and you’re going to behave yourself, or I’m afraid I’ll have to cut you even more.”
I glance down at the blood in my palm. I can barely feel the pain, I’m so afraid of what’s to come.
“The best part of this plan,” Cassie says as she unclips her seatbelt, “is that Seb hired a private investigator. He found the address before the police did. He might be the one to get there first.”
I want to smash her face into the glove box. Seb can’t be the one to find his brother. It’ll break him. My Seb, the man who feels so deeply, so instinctively. No. I can’t bear it.
“Come on,” Cassie says, and her voice sounds so eerily like Isabel that I double-take to make certain it’s still her. “It’s time to go in.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
DCI Murphy
The air is stale from numerous bodies squashed into a small room. This is not where DCI Murphy envisioned doing his detective work, in a tiny village police station with tons of officers cramped together. But here he is, working on a tiny shared desk in Hutton village. He’d come here to train and co-ordinate the local officers with how to deal with Isabel Fielding. After all, this is a place where graffiti was the main issue before she escaped from Crowmont.
But they were ready and willing to tackle the task ahead, and if he’s honest with himself, he knows deep down that there’s nowhere in the United Kingdom that feels advanced enough to deal with a threat like Isabel. A relentless, twisted individual who looks like a fifteen-year-old girl and behaves like Hannibal Lector. Not only that, but she has a family with money. David and Anna Fielding might be dead, but she still has her psychopathic brother to help her.
It was only after Isabel and Owen left Thailand that he discovered they had an uncle living there. And then he discovered that the uncle, now deceased, was involved in some pretty disgusting crimes. Including the trafficking of young women. And at that point, it was the first time Murphy had felt any pity for Isabel Fielding. Lloyd Fielding had been found in two pieces: his body, and his penis. The latter had been disconnected and tucked into the pocket of his trousers. His body had been pulled out of the Mekong River by the authorities there.
“Sir, we’ve found something interesting.”
Murphy looks up from his desk. The young PC is flushed with excitement, waving a piece of paper. His name could be Ridley, or Roberts; Murphy’s not sure.
“Someone used Anna Fielding’s credit card at a hotel. They must be getting desperate enough to make mistakes.”
“Where?” Murphy asks.
“Outside York,” says the lad.
“Good work.” Murphy nods at the PC. Robertson?
The PC, whatever his name is, beams. For the last couple of months, he’s been training the officers to research, research, research. To check CCTV over and over again. To utilise the systems in place and even to understand more about DNA evidence, which in itself had been complicated and inconclusive in the case of Jess Hopkins.
Murphy looks out at the room and sees they’re thin on the ground. “We need to get the surveillance detail back from Leah and Tom Smith.” He quickly calls both Tom and Leah to let them know that their usual surveillance will have to be pulled away urgently. Both phones go straight to voicemail. He doesn’t have much time, so he tells them not to go back to the cottage, or to be alone. It’s the best he can do in the circumstances because they don’t have a moment to spare.
“Okay,” he says, gathering the officers around him, “here’s how we’re going to do this…” And then he launches into a plan he hopes is detailed enough.
Isabel has slipped through his fingers too often and it can’t happen again, not now that she’s so close. He arranges for a team to surround the hotel, briefing them on the building, the exits, and the village. Then he makes a call to York, hoping to get snipers somewhere in the vicinity. Even if there’s nothing left in the budget, he has to try. This has to be it. It can’t possibly go on. The country has lived in fear of this girl for too long.
“Everyone know what they’re doing? Vests on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Aye, boss.”
A chorus of voices answers him. He feels apprehensive for his team. For the people under his care. Not for the first time, his stomach flips over. Isabel Fielding might be a slip of a girl, but what she lacks in physicality, she makes up for in intelligence. He’s seen his colleagues underestimate her over and over again.
What is he missing, he wonders. What could go wrong that he hasn’t accounted for? He climbs into the panda car. He never felt as though he’d made any mistakes when it came to this case, but he did know he’d been outwitted several times; by Isabel, her father, and her brother. But then so had everyone else.
And the case is confusing. The DNA evidence on Jess Hopkins, for instance. He’d seen the hair himself. It was the same colour as Isabel’s hair, and roughly the same length, though he wasn’t an expert. And yet the hair hadn’t been a match. They were missing the root, and that made all the difference. Was it Isabel’s hair, or could there be another young, female
psychopath out there obsessed with Isabel’s murders? Copycats did exist but mainly in American movies, not in Yorkshire villages. But perhaps that was his own bias skewing his police work. Perhaps this kind of thinking is exactly why he hasn’t found Isabel sooner.
He isn’t the one driving the car, giving him time to clear his mind before the raid begins. He’d called ahead at the hotel and was waiting for any updates regarding their movement.
He allows himself a moment to consider whether this feels right. Whether it sits right in his gut. No, he can’t call it. He isn’t sure. And yet, this could finally be it. He could catch Isabel at last, and make sure she doesn’t escape this time.
Chapter Thirty
Seb
There’s no answer when either of us call Leah, and we’re almost at the address. There’s no turning back, no warning her about what we’re about to do. If I die, there’ll be no last words other than whatever I said to her this morning, which I can’t even remember. Was it, see you later, love you? Or, back soon? I don’t know. My thoughts drift to the baby not yet born but it’s too much, I have to push those thoughts away.
The other cars on the road are an annoyance, the tiny bit of slush slowing everyone down. At one point a man in a transit van blares his horn as I cut him up at a roundabout.
Tom gestures at the road. “We want to get there alive.”
I glance over at Leah’s son, knowing how little I trust him. He murdered an innocent person and now he’s sitting next to me in my truck. And beyond that, he’s perpetually calm, to the point where it’s unnerving. We’re about to confront a serial killer and he’s picking the edge of his fingernail.
“Try Leah again,” I say.
Tom glances at me and seems about to retort, but then he takes his phone and does as I ask. “Still no answer.”
“Something isn’t right.” I shake my head.
Tom’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “A gut feeling, I guess. I think we’re being played.”
Tom is silent for a moment. Then he says. “There’s an element of this that feels too easy. How did you get the address?”
Three For A Girl (Isabel Fielding Book 3) Page 18