Plonking her coffee down on her atlas coaster, and hauling her tired body into her office chair, she flipped open her laptop, and got to work. First up, checking emails. Her clients were a demanding bunch. Though she supposed they had good reason to be, when they suspected their spouses of cheating, or their employees of stealing.
She read through a few, replied to a few. Her fingers clacking away on the keys. Clack. Clack. Clack.
Thud.
She looked up, stopped typing. Held her breath. What on earth had that been? It had sounded as if it had come from downstairs. Like somebody had dropped a very heavy object, and it had bounced off the floorboards.
She listened intently for more than a moment. Until her lungs ached. Until her hands felt like they were going to fall off from remaining so still.
When she couldn’t bear it anymore, she breathed out. It was only then that she realised how stupid she was being. It was probably one of the windows, banging in the wind. It was hanging around with Aaron again, that was what it was. All his stories about ghosts and stuff had scared her. Had put the spooks into her.
She shook her head, laughed to herself. She’d lived here for two years, and knew that this place wasn’t haunted. There had never been so much as a door opening of its own accord, or a mysterious noise. Well, not until today anyway. But she knew it was just coincidence, that it was a perfectly explainable little noise.
Anyway, she couldn’t spare anymore time thinking about it. She was snowed under with work. She needed to shake off last night, she knew. Crack on with her real job.
She began to tap away again, answering an email to a husband desperate to know if his wife was seeing one of her co-workers.
Thud.
She stopped again. This time, her heart was really beginning to hammer, form a drum beat in her chest. She felt her breathing quicken. Her eyes flicked to the ajar study door.
She called out, pathetically. “Hello?” Cursed herself immediately. What if somebody was there? Why the hell would she give them her whereabouts?
Besides, she already knew she was being a massive idiot, that it was broad daylight and ghosts came out in the night. Stereotypically, anyway. She assumed most living, breathing nutters ran by the same schedule.
She stood up, a little wobbly on her legs. She had to giggle to herself, an unnatural sound pushing through her anxiety. Aaron had really shaken her this time.
She put her hand out to pull back the study door.
Never expected it to open before she reached it.
Alicia blinked. Looked up. And when she saw what, or rather who, was filling the doorway, she stopped breathing. Realised the noise hadn’t been a window. That it wasn’t just Aaron, putting the spooks in her.
She drank in his face, his hair, his height, everything about him. And only then did she decide to scream.
But it was already too late. Because the man was already pushing the piece of cloth to her face. His strength overpowering hers; the horrid, chemical smell of the cloth relaxing her muscles, making her feel like she needed to sleep.
She tried to fight the feeling. She tried to scream against the cloth; not that anyone would hear her. And besides, her throat was closing, and her legs were going numb, and her sight was fuzzy. She tried to focus on the cloth, to see what was on it, what was making her feel this way. But everything had become a single black smudge.
Though, just before her eyes closed for good, she could have sworn she saw a grin, splitting through it all.
20
I bent over double. Gagged.
“That’s messed up,” I said. “That’s seriously, seriously messed up.”
Aaron stared at the finger bones, blankly. It seemed as if he were putting up a wall, not letting this gruesome sight get to him.
“What do we do now?” I said, trying to regain my composure. But it was difficult, staring at those neat, little bones in Aaron’s hand.
“I don’t know,” said Aaron, his voice flat. “We could call the police. But it’s not going to look good, the fact that we’ve gone on our own little campaign, have broken into Peter’s house to find this evidence.”
I thought back to the only other time we’d dealt with a living, breathing murderer. On that occasion, Katy Johnson had dealt justice to her sister, by impaling her with floorboards sharpened into knife points. But I didn’t see Samantha as the sort of spirit that would hand out that sort of redemption.
I sighed, rubbed my chin with my hand. “I don’t know what we should do.”
“Me neither,” said Aaron. “I think we need to get away from here, form a plan. Maybe we could use Alicia again, set up a second meeting between them. Maybe we could get a recorded confession. That might be the only way forwards. It would probably go much further in the courtroom, combined with this evidence.”
I nodded, tried to show strength despite my mind being a swarm of contradicting thoughts. “Okay. Do we need to take this . . . evidence . . . with us?”
“Definitely. We can use it against him to get the confession that we need. Then we can go to the police, fully armed, and get this man sent down for what he did.”
“Great.” It all sounded a little too hopeful, but I prayed we could pull it off, for Samantha and for Bella. “Do you think we could get Samantha to cross over, now that we know who her killer was?”
“Maybe. But think, how good would it be if we could tell Samantha that we found her killer, and that we got him arrested?”
That did sound good. “Okay. We’ll hold out then. For now.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here, before Peter comes back and finds us.”
We exited through the front door, Aaron pushing it closed behind us. As we returned to the grey light, I looked beside me and before me, to the houses around Peter’s cottage. They were all silent. Nobody, as far as I could tell, had seen us break into Peter’s.
Once we’d climbed into the car, Aaron pulled out his phone.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to call Alicia. She should be home by now. She’ll know what to do much better than us. Even if she can’t make another meeting, at the very least she could give us some advice.” He pressed a button and put the phone to his ear.
“Do you think she’ll help us again?”
“I’ll pay her this time. It’s not fair to ask her for another favour.” Aaron held the phone to his ear, while I watched. After some time, he sighed, and lowered the phone to his lap. “She’s not picking up. I’ll try again in a little bit. She’s probably working.”
“Maybe she knows you’ll ask her to help again?”
Aaron shook his head. “No, she’s not like that. She’d help us again, even if I didn’t pay her. Also, I think she feels like she owes me. Which she doesn’t, of course.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Her mother passed away while we were at uni, and I helped them to reconnect. Anyway, let’s head back to the hotel room in the meantime, and read some more of this diary. I’m fascinated to see what else Josh had to say.”
As Aaron pulled away from the curb, I looked to the leather box near the gear stick. As I swallowed, it felt like I was passing a brick through my throat. Because it was only as I stared at it that I considered that Peter must have taken her finger before, not after, the burning. Otherwise, the bones would be charcoal black.
Sat in Aaron’s hotel room, we continued to flick through Josh’s diary. Some of the excerpts made me want to shout. Others made me want to vomit. Others made me want to put my fist through the wall.
However, what I consistently saw was that Josh was an arrogant, twisted individual. He’d seen Samantha as some sort of object, rather than a living, breathing human being. And when he couldn’t have her, he tried to break her. Literally.
“I still wonder what Josh did to Jacob Tanner. He must have killed him too, based on some of these entries,” I said, sipping one of Aaron’s super-strength instant coffees. There was a small kettle and
coffee pot on the room’s dresser, so we’d made the most of this.
“Oh, there’s no doubt about that,” said Aaron, his hands around his own coffee. I wondered where Jacob Tanner’s body was, whether he too had been burned in some secret place. Or, maybe he’d been killed quickly, his body buried somewhere inconspicuous. After all, Josh had cared little for Jacob. Maybe his murder hadn’t been as therapeutic for him.
Aaron had been checking his phone intermittently, and had tried to call Alicia once or twice. Now, he did so again. After dialling, it went to voicemail.
“Something isn’t right here,” said Aaron, lowering the phone to his lap. His mouth had twisted with concern.
“She’s probably just working or something. Or maybe she has her phone turned off.”
“Hmm. You’re forgetting that Peter took Alicia on a date last night, and he saw her looking in the drawer, with the diary and the finger. What if he thinks she saw something? What if she’s . . . in trouble?
“Like what?”
“Well, I don’t know. But let’s not forget that, twenty years ago, this man burned a girl alive. He also cut off her finger, probably while she was still alive, too, and killed her boyfriend. He also practically tried to rape another woman, by the sounds of that Facebook review. Who knows what else he might have done?”
I bit my lip. “But why would he think Alicia was onto him? Why would he think she knew anything about what he did, besides from her rifling in the wrong place?”
“I don’t know.” Aaron rose from his seat, took his cowboy hat from the side and placed it on his head. “Listen, I think we should drive to hers. It isn’t far anyway, only about twenty minutes, and we could speak to her about a second date with Peter. Plus, it would put my mind to rest.”
“Alright.” I heaved myself from my seat, my lack of sleep beginning to attack my body, despite the caffeine flowing through my veins.
Walking through the hotel, Aaron said nothing. I could tell he was stewing over Alicia. He needed to relax. She was going to be fine, probably tapping away on her computer or something. I was sure of it.
21
Alicia opened her eyes. Blinked.
Immediately, adrenaline coursed through her veins. The image of the man in black surfaced in her mind. Him pressing the cloth over her mouth. That horrid, chemical smell. The world slipping away from her, then nothing else.
This all felt like it had been seconds ago. But now, rather than waking up on her study floor, she was met with nothing but darkness. Groggily, she tried to lift her head. Grunted in pain as she whacked it on something hard. Some sort of wall.
Her claustrophobic prison was the least of her concerns though. Because it was as she grunted that she realised that there was something gluing her lips together, so that she couldn’t emit a sound. That her hands were tied tightly behind her back, her ankles roped too.
She wanted to scream: already knew there was no point. Instead, she tried to breathe deeply through her nose, calm the adrenaline, calm her shuddering heart. When she’d been in the police force, they’d had some training on how to deal with hostage scenarios. She knew that she needed to stay calm.
But this was difficult, for it felt as if somebody were inserting lots of tiny pins into her skin, pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling. And her stomach felt like a trembling volcano, as if she might vomit at any second. This only made her panic more, because she knew that with her mouth taped shut, vomiting would surely suffocate her.
Still, she tried to calm herself. Take those deep breaths through her nose.
It took some time for her stomach to settle, for her breathing to slow. When it finally did, she tried to listen. Past her thumping headache, she heard a rushing noise. In fact, lots of little rushing noises. She weighed up for a moment whether she was just hearing things, whether or not it was a side effect of the cloth.
But, focusing a little more, she realised that the noises were unmistakable. They were rushing cars.
She was trapped in somebody’s car boot.
In desperation, her pulse speeding up again now, she rolled onto her back. She lifted her legs, even though they were held tightly together. With all her strength, which was not much after being drugged, she kicked the boot door above her. The boot shuddered in reply.
She kicked again. Then again.
She’d kicked five times when she felt the speed of the car change. When she heard the little whooshing noises disappear. The man was slowing down, she realised. He’d heard her kicking. He was going to come out, put her back to sleep.
She kicked harder now, faster, with absolutely everything she had. Her heart was a jackhammer, her legs were rubber bands stretched to their extremities. But still she kicked. Still she pounded.
Until she lifted her legs, and her feet hit air. Until grey light spilled into her dark coffin.
She squinted against the light. Through her squint, she saw grey clouds covered with a canopy of trees. He had taken her to the middle of nowhere.
And there was he, stood in the middle of it all, looming over her like some sort of god, come to deliver her final punishment. Relaxing her squint, she took in his face, a cruel, twisted picture of menace. It took a second for her to recognise the heavy glasses, the languid face, the mouth which had been that of a gentleman’s, now showing its true danger.
It was as his name echoed through her mind that the cloth closed around her nose. Her scream caught on the tape, caught in her throat. Before he was a black smudge again, on a background of fluffy greyness. Before the scene was no more.
22
“There’s her car, look. So she is home.”
I looked to Alicia’s Mini, parked on the drive of her little house. Alicia lived in the middle of nowhere. We’d had to drive down some of the narrowest roads I’d ever seen to get there. At one point, we’d had a battle with a tractor, and we’d had to practically drive into the bushes lining the road to let it through. It had been an absolute nightmare.
But now, I could see why Alicia lived where she did. I could see the edge of the river, running past her home. The open valley; the hills rising; the lush green trees. I assumed it would be peaceful out here, the perfect place for someone like-minded. There were only three or four houses dotted around Alicia’s, so there would be minimal disruption from humanity.
Aaron parked in front of the drive. Once he’d climbed out of the car, he stood, and looked up at the house. Waiting beside him, I looked to the net curtains, billowing out of the front windows.
“All the windows are open,” Aaron said. “She must be home.”
Aaron stomped up her drive. He’d switched back to his heavy boots, admitting that he’d felt more and more uncomfortable the longer he’d worn normal clothes.
He rapped on her door-knocker three times. I listened for footsteps inside, but all I could hear was the rushing of the river. We waited for perhaps twenty seconds before Aaron knocked a second time. He tapped his foot impatiently. When there was no reply once again, he walked towards the windows, saying nothing. I watched as he grabbed one of the net curtains, pulled it away, and lifted his leg to climb over the windowsill.
“What are you doing? She’s probably just gone for a walk or something.”
“Jonny, she’s an ex-police officer and private investigator. She wouldn’t go out at all without closing all her windows.”
As Aaron disappeared through the window, I sighed. Shrugged my shoulders and broke into my second house that day.
Once I’d clambered over the windowsill, I looked around me. Alicia’s home was cute. She had a modern but cosy living room, with a sign above the door that read ‘Nature is where the heart is’. Every surface seemed to gleam. I wondered how much effort Alicia must put into keeping her house tidy.
As such, I doubted she’d be happy with Aaron clomping across the laminate floor. He opened the door at the back of the room, which clearly lead to the kitchen, and disappeared inside.
He reappeared a moment later
. “No sign of her,” he said. “Let’s check upstairs.”
I could sense Aaron’s stress as we walked up the staircase. Admittedly, I too was beginning to feel a slight churning sensation, as if something wasn’t quite right.
The first room we came across seemed to be some sort of study. The room was lined with bookshelves, holding a variety of books, both fiction and non-fiction. Some were written by Charles Dickens, another promised a guide on how to advertise a small business. Aaron seemed less concerned by the books though, and more concerned by the desk.
I turned to see him staring into a coffee cup, half-full with black coffee. On the desk, a laptop was open, a notepad resting beside it featuring scrawls of hurried notes. The desk chair was pulled out from the desk, as if Alicia had been working in here just moments before.
I looked up to Aaron, who was frowning deeply.
“What’s wrong?”
“You don’t know Alicia like I do,” he said. “Number one, she’s hyper-organised, and a super clean-freak. She wouldn’t leave her desk chair untucked like this. She’d close her laptop, and she’d put her notebook away.”
“Maybe she forgot?” I offered. “Maybe you’re reading too much into this?”
Aaron shook his head. “That’s not the only thing. Number two, Alicia is a coffee addict. There’s no way she’d go out without draining her cup of coffee. She wouldn’t leave it to grow cold. She absolutely hates waste. I’m telling you, she used to moan at me about it all the time at uni, when I’d throw away unfinished meals and half-drunk tea.”
I pursed my lips. “Just because she left her desk untidy and didn’t drink her coffee, doesn’t mean something terrible happened to her. Maybe she had to be somewhere. Maybe she was in a rush.”
Aaron raised his hand to his face, closed his eyes and squeezed his nose with his fingers. “No. Something’s not right here. Just trust me, okay?”
The Witch Hunt (Jonny Roberts Series Book 3) Page 16