by Jack Jordan
‘Or pursuing the idea that he was mad was easier for them to control, gave them the right to overlook so many clues.’
She stopped before their work on the floor, eyeing each of the victims’ faces.‘I find it hard to believe they didn’t do a single test,’ Tony said. ‘They must have done something.’
‘Shane Hughes told me this had happened before, when Stephen Port murdered those men in London. The Metropolitan Police didn’t test vital evidence, and if they had, they would have caught their killer. If I hadn’t known that, I wouldn’t have believed it either.’
Tony rose from the chair and stood next to her. They both looked down at Finn’s photo.
‘Let’s assume for a moment that they’re all dead. What I’m struggling to understand is, if the murders were orchestrated by the same man, why did he hide the first two bodies, but leave the next two to be found? And we don’t even know what he did with Finn.’
‘Maybe he was trying to throw them off the scent,’ she replied. ‘If he followed the same pattern each time, it would be clear the police were dealing with a serial killer. If they were different from time to time, it would be difficult to connect them.’
They both looked at the map, the red crosses identifying the victims’ last whereabouts.
‘But he made a mistake,’ Tony said, taking the red pen and connecting the crosses. A jagged circle surrounded the centre of town. ‘He didn’t stray far enough. He worked in a six-mile radius.’
‘And the years are almost evenly staggered. He left a few years between each of them, as if hoping the attention would die down so he could strike again.’
Their killer didn’t seem to act on impulse, he planned each move meticulously, had done from the start.
Rose looked at the photos, trying to find a similarity.
‘The victims didn’t know each other. The only connection between them was their sexuality.’
‘And something else,’ Tony said.
He dropped one file on the floor, then another, and another.
‘In each of the police files, one name sticks out.’
He looked down at his notes.
‘Dr William Hunter. He was assigned to each of the patients. He used to work for the NHS, and although he operates from a private practice now, it appears he still works with police.’
The name rang a bell. She searched through her tired brain for a spark of connection, the waking of a memory.
‘The same man Finn was assigned to.’
‘What was his name again?’ she asked.
‘Dr Hunter.’
The memory came to her like a slap.
‘I know him.’
‘What?’
‘He’s. . . he’s Christian’s therapist.’
She rummaged around in her bag. She had almost forgotten that she had booked an appointment with Dr Hunter. So much had happened since then.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘I’m calling his office.’
‘Wait,’ Tony said as she put her phone to her ear. ‘Think it through before you jump into any—’
‘Shh, it’s ringing.’
‘Rose, I really think we should talk about this first. If he’s involved, we have no idea what he’s—’
‘Hi, my name is Rose Shaw. I have an appointment but I’m hoping to reschedule.’
It was the same receptionist as before. She had a kind voice, but she sounded tired, ready for the day to end.
‘When were you thinking? Your appointment is booked in for the end of the week,’ she asked.
‘I was hoping to see him today, if possible.’
‘I’ll see if we’ve had any cancellations. One moment, please.’
Hold music rang down the line.
‘What’re you doing?’ Tony asked.
The receptionist picked up the call again.
‘You’re in luck. We have an appointment free this evening at six.’
‘Perfect. See you then.’
Rose hung up the phone and slung her bag on her shoulder.
‘What are you doing?’ Tony asked.
‘I’m going to find out what Dr Hunter knows.’
PHILLIP
4th December 2011
Phillip woke with a jolt as something wet and heavy hit his face. He looked up and saw dark, leafless branches, knits of twigs splayed out like fingers. Moonlight sliced between them in dull beams. Snow slipped from a branch and fell next to him with a quiet thump.
His skin was so numb it burnt, and his face felt frozen in place, as if smiling would cause his skin to crack. His whole body was trembling.
In the distance, he heard the whisper of a river, but the rest of the woodland was silent. There was no breeze, no wildlife, just the sound of his breaths wheezing in and out of his lungs, the crunch of snow as he tried to move.
Something hard scratched against his back. He looked up again through a squint. He was resting against a tree.
He had no idea how he’d got there, or why he would be in woodland in the middle of the night, half-dressed during the height of winter. He should be scared, he thought, but he was too tired, too cold. A strange calmness had him in its grasp.
He looked down. The snow around him wasn’t white, but red. His arms had been cut from the elbows to the wrists, exposing parts of him no person should ever see of themselves. His skin was blue, but the blood was warm as it trickled around his arms and dripped to the snow on the ground.
He should be crying, screaming, but he could only think in facts. That’s my arm. That’s my blood. Those are my veins.
Metal glinted in his hand. A razor blade. Did he do this? He couldn’t remember dragging it down each arm, or even wanting to die, but there was so much he couldn’t remember, as if the cold had frozen his memory solid and he wouldn’t know what had happened until it thawed.
He licked his cracked lips, longed for snow to fall again so he could taste it and wet his tongue. The moon was high in the sky. Dawn was a long way off yet. Through the cold and the pain, he knew he would be dead by then.
He closed his eyes and rested the back of his head against the bark, causing a cold pain to run down his neck. An owl hooted, the sound echoing between the trees. At least he wasn’t alone.
He opened his eyes with the memory, the reason why his head hurt. He remembered seeing the metal pipe swing through the air, remembered turning to run and falling to the ground as it landed against his skull with a crack. But that didn’t explain why the razor was in his hand and the life was trickling out of him and onto the snow.
Fresh flakes began to fall. Even then, he thought how beautiful they were, the way they fell to the ground in silence. He closed his eyes as they landed on his face and rested into the tree.
He didn’t want to remember any more.
THIRTY-TWO
Rose stepped out onto the quiet street and headed towards the bus stop. The breeze stung her cheeks like a wakeful slap. She had to find out how the doctor was connected to each of the victims. He could have simply been doing his job, his name linked to the victims because they needed the same support; or it could be something more sinister. Finn never met the doctor, he had simply mentioned him by name as the man the police planned to refer him to, before he fell off the face of the earth. Had Finn had the chance to meet him, would he have come face to face with his stalker?
A car engine grumbled to life behind her as it pulled out of a parking spot along the road, continued to growl behind her back. She turned and stopped in her tracks.
A police car was following her at a crawl. The window wound down. Officer Leech’s face appeared, with that familiar smirk pulling at the corners of his lips, as Watts sat behind the wheel.
‘Been to see Daddy, have we?’
She continued walking up the street, at a faster pace than before. The police car crept along beside her.
‘No talking today? Cat got your tongue?’
‘Don’t you have a job to do?’ she asked. ‘Maybe if you spe
nt your time looking into crimes rather than harassing people, I wouldn’t be doing this.’
‘Who says we haven’t been assigned to follow you everywhere you go?’
Detective Clark. He would want them watching her, making sure she didn’t unearth evidence of their barbaric acts.
Leech watched her walk, scanning her up and down with disdain or desire, or a concoction of both. He wasn’t getting off on her, but the power he had over her, his smile widening whenever he spotted her eyes shift towards the car, each time her pace quickened. She stumbled on a raised slab on the path and reddened as he laughed, a raucous howl deep from his gut, clapping his hand against the body of the car.
She turned onto the main road, walking so fast that she almost broke into a jog, and managed to drag the distance between them as the police car waited at the junction. But soon enough, it crawled up behind her, lights flashing. Other cars overtook. No one would stop to help her; if anything, passers-by were far more likely to think she was the troublemaker rather than them. Leech and Watts could do anything they wanted, and the cars would continue to pass.
‘Shouldn’t you be at home making dinner for your kid?’ Leech asked. ‘Lily, of course. Not the one you killed.’
‘Don’t say her name,’ she spat.
‘How do you forget something like that?’ he asked. He was leaning out the window, both elbows hanging over the edge. ‘How do you leave the house every day knowing that everyone knows exactly what you did?’
He wanted her to snap. She would love nothing more than to stride over to the car and slam the butt of her hand into his nose until it broke, grab him by the hair and thrust his face against the dashboard, but all she could do was continue to walk and listen to everything he said.
She could see the bus stop now, the glass of it reflecting the setting sun.
‘You talk of injustice for Finn Matthews,’ Leech said. ‘But what about your daughter? All you got was community service and a hefty fine. Does that sound like justice to you?’
‘I’m living my life sentence,’ she choked, her chest so tight she could barely breathe. ‘I’m punished every day.’
‘Not enough, it seems,’ he said. ‘We’re passionate about justice too, Mrs Shaw. We’ll work day and night just like you. Isn’t that right, Watts?’
Twenty steps and she would be at the bus stop, but what then? She would have to stand and wait, listen to the abuse. By the time the bus came, she would be a heap on the ground.
‘But you can stop all this,’ he said, his tone lighter. ‘Stop what you’re doing and all of this goes away.’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, don’t hold your breath.’
She heard the familiar whine of the bus trundling up the street.
She picked up her pace, waved her hand frantically at the driver as it neared.
‘Last chance, Rose,’ Leech said.
She reached the bus stop just as the bus pulled up and jumped on, her whole body shivering with adrenaline. She paid for her ticket and made her way to the back on soft legs, sat down in the last row before they buckled. As the bus pulled away, she peered out the rear window. The police car followed them the rest of the way.
She got off at an earlier stop and slipped down the first side street, risking glances over her shoulder to see if Leech and Watts were following her on foot. The police car pulled up at the mouth of the alley before shooting out of sight. They were going to try and catch her down one of the side streets.
She turned off the next street and ran, the shocks of her feet slamming against the asphalt reverberating up her spine.
Back street after back street she ran, glancing over her shoulder in case the fluorescent body of the police car turned round the bends in the roads, waited for the call of its sirens or the flash of its lights reflecting in the windows lining the streets. She stopped down an alley and pressed herself against the brick wall, panting for air and blinking away the lights bursting in her eyes. Her legs gave out. She held her face in her hands as everything spun. She would have struggled to run so fast and so far when she was rested, let alone without a wink of sleep.
When the fainting spell passed, she stumbled to her feet and rested against the wall. It was dark. She had run in various different directions to lose the officers, but now she was lost herself. She checked the time. Ten minutes until her appointment. She typed the address into the maps app on her phone; only four streets away.
She walked as quickly as she could. Sweat had dampened her hairline, stuck wet strands against her temples, her chest still heaving. The moment she spotted the psychiatrist’s building on Moorcroft Road, she shot inside without a second’s hesitation. If Detective Clark’s officers were going to follow her everywhere she went, she would have to make it difficult for them.
She stood in the small hallway before the staircase and caught her breath.
Christian came here every week. Before, it had been another mystery attached to him, another part of his life she didn’t know a thing about. But now that she was here, it didn’t seem to fit. She couldn’t see him here, walking up the stairs, confessing his deepest, darkest thoughts.
She climbed a narrow staircase and followed the directions to the third floor.
The doctor would want to talk about her, but she had to find a way to move the conversation to the missing men. She only had one chance. If he was tied up in this, and she spoke of it face to face, he wouldn’t want her to come back. His schedule would suddenly become fully booked, the receptionists would stop answering her calls. If she was going to unearth the truth, it had to be now.
She pushed open the door and stepped into the reception. Plastic chairs lined the walls with a large coffee table covered in old magazines. Music played quietly in the background like a whisper. She walked up to the reception desk.
‘How can I help?’ the receptionist asked.
Rose recognised her voice from speaking to her on the phone.
‘I have an appointment with Dr Hunter.’
‘Take a seat. He will be with you shortly.’
Rose took a seat in the waiting area and sank against the plastic; only then did the exhaustion hit her. It was like a wave: her eyelids immediately felt heavy, as though they were made of lead instead of flesh. Her muscles ached whenever she moved. Sweat had soaked into her clothes and stuck to her skin.
She had tried sleeping tablets for so many years, but they never seemed to work for her. Some were too weak, merely exhausting her as she remained awake, exacerbating her struggle to put one foot in front of the other. Others practically put her in a coma, and left her groggy when she woke so she could barely string a sentence together or think a coherent thought. But as she sat in the waiting room, she craved one of the small pills that would knock her out for days.
A door opened and a man appeared.
‘Rose Shaw,’ he said.
She recognised him immediately. It was the man she had seen in the waiting room at the police station after her meeting with the Chief Constable. The same man who’d had a meeting with Seb Clark that very same day.
She stood, her head swimming, and walked towards him, knocking her shin against the corner of the coffee table. A pile of magazines slipped to the floor. She bent down in a fluster, her cheeks reddening as he watched her, like she was a specimen to study, a mouse in a maze.
He was assigned to each victim; he knew every single one of them, and Seb Clark, the man trying to bury the case.
‘I’ll get it, don’t worry,’ the receptionist said from behind the desk.
‘Thanks,’ she said and stood, straightening her top, fixing her hair behind her ears.
‘This way,’ said Dr Hunter.
He opened the door and held it for her, watching each one of her movements with such intensity that she wondered if he would have her all figured out before she had even sat down and opened her mouth.
The office was dimly lit. Bookshelves lined the back wall, a large desk that felt too big
for the room. She found that, with shorter men. They had to make up for their height in other ways: expensive watches and oversized furniture. She looked at his wrist: saw the designer logo on the face of his watch. She had him all figured out too. Two armchairs sat on the opposite side of the room by the window, the blinds drawn. A standard lamp hovered over the chairs, lighting up the side table between them, with only a small clock and a box of tissues on the surface. She wondered how much this was going to cost. A lot, by the looks of the office.
‘Please,’ he said, signalling the chairs.
She didn’t know which one to take, which was his. She chose the one closest to the door and placed her bag by her feet. The seat was too soft, as though it was dragging her back, forcing her to relax, and there was a familiar scent in the air. When it hit her, her whole body steeled against the memory. The smell was citrus, just like the scent of the satsuma Violet had been eating before the crash. The memory flooded her mind like water. She heard the screams, the crunch of metal.
‘I’m William Hunter. Nice to meet you.’
He held out his hand for her to take. She shook it with as much strength as she could muster, all the while looking for the cause of the smell. She spotted the orange peel in a waste bin beside his desk.
‘Rose,’ she said, and took her hand back. ‘Although I’m sure you’ve heard about me from my husband.’
‘I feel we need to jump right in the deep end,’ he said, taking out a notebook with notes already scrawled on the pages. He slipped on a pair of glasses.
‘You’ve bottled up a lot of grief over the years, and it’s time we tackled it head on, before things get out of hand.’
‘Out of hand?’ she asked.
‘It has come to my attention that you are looking into a missing person’s case.’
‘Shouldn’t you hear what I have to say, rather than going off what my husband has told you?’
‘Is what I’ve said untrue?’
‘No, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to my grief.’
‘On the contrary, I think there’s a direct correlation.’