by Jen Williams
“Who? Who are they?”
He shrugged as if this didn’t matter. He gestured around at the dirty walls. “I’ve been trapped all my life. I told Colleen that once, and she tried to give me a way out, I think. It was her who showed me the sky, but here I am, stuck here, forever, even so. What I am isn’t my fault. And listen,” he turned back to her, his face stern. “I understand you wanting to know about your mother, but I’m no fool. You ask too much about other things, you’ll get yourself in trouble. I don’t want that for you.”
“What—?” Heather thought of the heart scratched into the terracotta pot, the sense she was being watched. What did Reave know about that, exactly? “Michael, what do you know? Am I in danger?”
He shook his head, not looking at her.
“Don’t go up there. There’s nothing for you, there. Don’t poke around in stuff that doesn’t concern you, lass.”
But DI Parker had stepped forward, lightly touching the back of Heather’s arm, signaling that today’s session was over. Later, as they walked back to the prison entrance, Heather found herself thinking about Michael Reave’s final words. They had only left her with more questions.
“What about his family? Are any of them still around?”
Parker shook his head. With another session over no closer to any answers, he looked distracted again, impatient to be somewhere else.
“All dead. His mother, as I mentioned before, vanished when he was a kid, and if she’s still alive she’d be very old now, and she certainly wouldn’t fit our profile. There was a father and an older sister, both of whom have a few scattered reports on social services—suspicions of sexual abuse in the family.”
“Jesus.”
“But they’re both dead now, too. Some distant relations, but nothing that leads anywhere.”
Outside, under the cold blue sky, Heather stood alone at a bus stop, still thinking about her mother and the mysteries she had left behind. It was clearer than ever that Colleen Evans had been of enormous importance to Reave, had represented something to him that Heather couldn’t begin to understand. And she had to believe that Colleen had had a similar attachment to him, yet nothing about that fit in with the strict and unbending woman Heather had grown up with. There was something else, some other connection. There had to be.
When the bus eventually came along, Heather got on board without looking at the driver. She found a seat at the back of the bus, got out her notebook, and began writing.
CHAPTER
26
BEFORE
EARLY MORNINGS IN the woods were full of birdsong and light. The muttering from Michael’s graves was at its quietest but he still liked to visit each one, letting them feel his wolf-shape as he passed over—it was important that they knew he was there, no matter how far he travelled these days. On this particular morning, the wood was awash with bluebells, a near-purple haze that peeked around every corner. Michael was considering picking some to take with him on his next outing—he had taken to placing flowers in the mouths of his women, so that a little piece of Fiddler’s Wood would rot with them—when he heard a soft voice calling.
“Is someone there?”
He lent his shovel against a tree and moved toward the sound.
“Hello?”
He saw her long before she ever saw him. There was a girl in the woods, wearing tight blue jeans, mud spattered green wellies and a diaphanous white shirt that floated around her arms. She had pale blonde hair that fell in soft waves across her shoulders, and a pale, slightly pinched-looking face. There were two spots of hectic pink blush on the tops of her cheeks, and she was carrying a battered looking paperback book under one arm. When he stepped out from the trees near her, she startled, almost dropping it.
“Oh,” she laughed, her face turning pinker. “I thought I heard someone else walking here. Sorry.”
“You’re from the commune?” Michael cleared his throat. He didn’t much want to speak to anyone, not with mud on his hands and the graves so close, but right from the very start there was something about her—something that provoked him.
“Yeah.” She hugged the book to herself. “Are you not?”
“Did you get lost?”
She shrugged and looked away. “I wanted to see the woods in the morning. I didn’t think anyone else would be here, because …”
When she trailed off, Michael nodded. The other young people from the commune wouldn’t be here because they spent every night drinking and smoking weed, staying up until the small hours, talking and laughing before sleeping until midday in their fetid sleeping bags. Or grunting together like animals. Michael had heard them himself, from his room in the house, or from the woods.
“I can walk you back there.” It was clear she didn’t want to go back just yet, that she’d come here with the express intention to wander a little longer, but she bent to his will easily enough, nodding once so that her hair bobbed up and down. “What are you reading?”
She looked down at the book in her arms as though she’d never seen it before. “Oh, this is my old Grimm fairy tale book.” She held it up for him to see; the brown cover was covered all over in white creases, and in the middle was a stark woodcut of a huge black wolf, its jaws open wide to reveal lots of white teeth. Its feet were tangled about with ivy, and it stood against a stark white sky. Michael’s heart began to beat faster at the sight of it. Who was this woman who carried what he was in her arms?
“It doesn’t look much like a children’s story,” he said, uncertain what else to say.
“They’re not, not really, or not how we’d think of them.” The girl shrugged, half smiling. “They’re very old, passed down from family to family. An oral tradition. But I love them,” she added with sudden feeling. “They’re just so honest, you know? It’s all about the dangers of the wild world, and good and bad, and doing the right things …” She trailed off. “I thought it would be good to read them out here, as if they … as if they would be more real out here.” She flushed a darker shade of pink, clearly embarrassed. “Anyway.”
They had come to the edge of the woods, and the commune stretched away in front of them. It still wasn’t huge but, as the man liked to put it, its citizens were enthusiastic. From where they stood, Michael could see the man—he looked so much older among all these young people—standing over a group who were mostly sitting. There was a fire going, and the smell of coffee drifted toward them. Most of the men and women looked barely awake, but there were the two Bickerstaff sisters standing with the man, and they looked alert enough, their long blond hair recently cut very short, into identical pixie cuts. The man called them his “Hitchcock girls,” although Michael had only the vaguest idea why; the one time he had been to the cinema, he had panicked when the lights had gone down and he had had to leave rapidly—the cupboard had seemed very close, that day.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” The woman sounded uncertain as she said it. Michael just nodded. “They love hearing him talk, about the countryside, the vital importance of the rural landscape, about freedom from domesticity and the rat race. Some of the stuff he says, makes me wonder… ”
She trailed off again and Michael wondered if she ever did finish a thought out loud. They were closer now to the group, and he found his eyes going to a couple on the edge of the circle; the man had his hand up the woman’s jumper, and she was yawning, not quite paying attention to him. All at once he realized that the girl was looking at them, too, and when she glanced up at him he saw something in her eyes—fear, excitement. The white length of her neck seemed to shine in the morning light, and he felt a powerful surge of emotion toward her; protectiveness and lust, all tied up and tangled. She is the hare that lays down for the teeth, he thought, abruptly dizzy.
“I should go back,” she said doubtfully. “It’s my turn to wash out the breakfast pans.”
“What’s your name?” His voice seemed to come from very far away.
“Colleen,” she said.
CHAPTER<
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27
THE DOORBELL RANG just as Heather was finishing typing up her notes from the last few days. Standing up, she moved down the hallway as quietly as she could, her eyes rooted to the panel of warped glass in the center of the door. There was a figure standing there, and she was fairly sure it wasn’t Lillian. Feeling half foolish and half sick, she snatched up a heavy wooden ornament from the side table and, holding it to one side, peered out the peephole. The figure outside shifted, and she caught sight of messy sandy hair and an unbuttoned collar.
“DI Parker?”
He looked pained as she opened the door, as though he’d been half hoping she wasn’t home. Smiling sheepishly, he held up a bottle of wine.
“I know. This is all kind of wrong. But it’s been a rough day and …” He shrugged. “If I tell you I looked up your mum’s address now, will that save you throwing me out later?”
“Come in.” Heather stepped to one side, settling the wooden ornament back down on the side table as she did. “You’re bloody lucky, as I ordered takeaway about twenty minutes ago and I habitually order enough for six people. Can you eat three people’s worth of Chinese food?”
“I’d consider it an honor and a challenge.”
Later, when the Chinese food was largely demolished and they had started their second bottle of wine, the conversation had moved inevitably back to the Red Wolf copycat. Parker threw his disposable chopsticks into the plastic carton.
“Another body today. I didn’t tell you, but …” He shrugged. “This is escalating. The original murders took place over the course of several years, but this bastard? Four women in what? Just over a month? We’re sweating bullets over it.”
Heather shifted in her seat, blinking rapidly. They were on the sofa, having dragged the coffee table over to put the dishes on, and it was very tempting to slip into the doziness summoned by a stomach full of noodles, but Parker was mildly drunk and suddenly talkative.
“Was she … the same as Elizabeth Bunyon? And Fiona Graham?”
For a long moment Parker didn’t say anything, and she felt a pang of sympathy at the expression of sorrow that passed over his face. Eventually he nodded. “Their hearts missing. Mouths filled with flowers. Graham was found by a dog walker out before sun up. When we got there, the grass was still frosty, and it was like … like she was made of ice. Her blood all crisp on the grass.” He shook himself. “The new girl was a junkie called Abi. That’s terrible isn’t it, reducing her to that? But that’s what happens. Victims become a line of summary while we trip over ourselves trying to figure out who he is. Abi was cut here,” he slid his hand across his stomach, “severing her in half. And there was a hole in her chest, soil inside it, things buried. The photos are something else.”
Heather shivered, thinking of the terracotta pot on her mother’s doorstep. She wanted to ask if they had found anything heart-shaped near the body, but that would be coming too close to revealing her own thoughts.
“Christ. I’m sorry, Ben. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to see that stuff, and just carry on with work. Did you find anything on Fiona yet? I mean, forensics stuff?”
She expected him to shut down at this; to realize that he was sharing too much. But instead he shrugged and sipped at his wine.
“Nothing useful yet. Whoever this bastard is, he’s careful not to leave anything of himself behind. But the other stuff—the flowers, the insects … Back when the original killings were happening forensic entomology wasn’t such a big deal. I’m hopeful something will come out of that, some clue as to where he’s based perhaps …” He trailed off, then said, blankly, “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”
“Hey, better than keeping it all bottled up.” Heather leaned forward and began stacking the empty plastic dishes, and together they carried them into the kitchen and began dumping them in the bin.
“Even so,” he leaned with his back against the counter. He’d taken off his blazer and rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, which had revealed a thin white scar on his forearm. “It’s the last thing you need.”
Heather shrugged. She was wondering what Ben would think if he knew why she had lost her job in the first place—or that she used to be a journalist. Her stomach turned over slowly—he wouldn’t be here, getting cozy with her on the sofa, that was for certain.
“What’s your gut feeling?” she said suddenly. “You’ve studied serial killers, you’ve spoken to Michael Reave before. You’ve had access to everything, all the files and photos. If you had to guess now, what would you tell me?”
Parker grinned a little crookedly. “I’m not an FBI profiler, Heather.”
She came closer, leaning on the counter next to him so that she had to look up into his face. His cheeks and forehead were a little flushed, contrasting nicely with his hazel eyes—in this light, they almost looked green.
“Come on. You must have thought about it?”
Outside, the wind picked up, throwing dry autumn leaves against the windows. Parker cleared his throat.
“Well, a white male in his thirties, maybe. Has a job that allows him to move around, probably lives alone. If he does have a wife, she’ll know nothing about it. And he’ll be someone with a troubled background, just like Reave. Abusive or absent parents, most likely. Not everyone who is abused as a child grows up to be a serial killer, but almost all serial killers have experienced abuse.”
“Is that like how not all bastards vote Tory, but all Tories are bastards?”
That surprised a laugh out of him. “I thought politics were off the table until at least the third date.’”
“Well you’re already at my place, so …” Unhelpfully, memories of the trapped bird, of the note in the medicine cabinet, the scent of her mother’s perfume, all rose up at once. Suddenly, Heather wanted Parker to stay—while he was here, the house felt safer, less bleak. Catching the killer seemed like a wild fantasy, something she had been using as a distraction; even understanding her mother seemed like an impossible task. And she was tired of feeling sad. It would be so good, she thought, to feel something else for a while. “I think technically that counts as the fourth or fifth date.”
She looked him in the eyes as she said it, hoping he would get the hint. He looked away, smiling, but made no move to step away from her.
“Uh. I think the killer chooses his victims very carefully, maybe has them chosen well in advance, because he knows how to take them with the minimum of fuss. There has to be something that links them, but I can’t bloody see it. They’re all roughly the same age, thirty-four, thirty-five, that’s it.”
“They’re all roughly the same age as me.” She frowned.
“Heather, we showed the photo you gave us to Fiona Graham’s parents.”
“Oh.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead, trying not to imagine Fiona Graham’s grief-stricken mother, sobbing over a picture of her daughter that she had never seen before. “They must be devastated.”
“It wasn’t pleasant. All they want at this point is to be left to grieve, but …” He paused, and Heather got the impression that he was once again telling her more than he should. “They identified the little girl as their daughter, and they do remember the occasion. Fiona had been taking part in a sort of junior conservation scheme, and there was a little presentation of certificates at the fête. It was called the Young Nature Walkers prize, or something. That’s why they were there.”
“Huh. I don’t remember anything like that.”
“As far as we can tell, they didn’t speak to your mother, or your father, and there’s no obvious connection between them.”
Heather shook her head. “Isn’t that weird though? I mean, it’s a huge coincidence that they went to a fête and sat and ate cake with the woman who used to know the man who …” She squeezed her eyes shut; shifting all the facts into place was giving her a headache. “The man who inspired the killer who murdered their daughter?”
“The woman who had been wri
ting to Michael Reave for decades,” he corrected her, and Heather shivered despite the warmth of the kitchen. “Yeah, we think it’s a strange coincidence, too. We’re going back through the letters you gave us, and the ones Reave has from your mother, in case we can draw any more connections between your mother and the victims.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry to ask this, but … what was your relationship like with your mother?”
Heather leaned back, almost laughing then swallowing it down hard. “Do you think that’s a fair question to be asking me right now?”
“I’m sorry, I really am, but I’ve got women being … Look, I had to talk to another father about his daughter today, and we had to ask him to identify her belongings, only there were spots of blood …” His voice was tight with emotion, and Heather felt a swift pang of desire for him. “He’s going to do it again, and probably very soon. We need to get the jump on him.”
“You’re right.” She looked down at the kitchen tiles. “Look, I left home when I was sixteen, not long after my dad died. I barely spoke to my mum after that—just the occasional awkward phone call when a relative died, that sort of thing. We weren’t close. She sent me Christmas cards.” Quite out of nowhere, it became difficult to speak. Her throat felt stuffed with feathers. “Christ, it was a bloody mess, if you want the truth.”
“Do you think it’s possible she was picking the victims somehow?”
For a long time, Heather didn’t say anything at all. There was a rushing noise in her ears, and a terrible thumping behind her eyes. I know what you are, and I think you know too. She could picture her mother, crouched over a terracotta pot with a knife in one hand, her face twisted with some unknowable emotion.