by Will Carver
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
London, 4 days ago …
Chapter 1: Girl 4
Chapter 2: Eames
Chapter 3: January
Seventeen months before …
Chapter 4: January
Chapter 5: Girl 1
Chapter 6: January
Chapter 7: Girl 1
Chapter 8: Eames
Chapter 9: Girl 4
Chapter 10: Girl 1
Chapter 11: January
Chapter 12: Girl 4
Chapter 13: Eames
Chapter 14: January
Chapter 15: Eames
Chapter 16: Girl 4
Chapter 17: January
Chapter 18: Girl 2
Chapter 19: January
Chapter 20: Girl 2
Chapter 21: January
Chapter 22: Eames
Chapter 23: January
Chapter 24: Girl 2
Chapter 25: Girl 4
Chapter 26: January
Chapter 27: Girl 2
Chapter 28: Eames
Chapter 29: January
Chapter 30: Eames
Chapter 31: Girl 2
Chapter 32: January
Chapter 33: Girl 4
Chapter 34: January
Chapter 35: Girl 3
Chapter 36: Eames
Chapter 37: January
Chapter 38: Girl 4
Chapter 39: Eames
Chapter 40: January
Chapter 41: Girl 3
Chapter 42: January
Chapter 43: Eames
Chapter 44: Girl 3
Chapter 45: January
Chapter 46: Girl 4
Chapter 47: January
Chapter 48: Girl 3
Chapter 49: January
Chapter 50: Girl 4
London, 7 days ago …
Chapter 51: January
Chapter 52: Eames
Chapter 53: Girl 4
Chapter 54: January
Chapter 55: Girl 4
Chapter 56: Eames
Chapter 57: January
Chapter 58: Girl 5
Chapter 59: January
Chapter 60: Eames
Chapter 61: January
Chapter 62: Girl 5
Chapter 63: January
Chapter 64: Girl 4
Chapter 65: Eames
Chapter 66: Girl 5
Chapter 67: January
Chapter 68: Girl 6
Chapter 69: January
Chapter 70: Girl 4
Chapter 71: January
Chapter 72: Girl 4
Chapter 73: January
Chapter 74: Eames
Chapter 75: Girl 6
Chapter 76: January
Chapter 77: Girl 4
Chapter 78: January
Chapter 79: Eames
Chapter 80: January
Chapter 81: Girl 4
Chapter 82: Girl 1
Chapter 83: Girl 2
Chapter 84: January
Chapter 85: Eames
Chapter 86: Girl 4
Chapter 87: January
Chapter 88: Girl 4
Chapter 89: Eames
Chapter 90: January
Copyright
About the Book
Detective Inspector January David has always put his professional before his private life, but now his two worlds clash horrifically as he visits his latest crime scene. Confronted with a ghostly figure suspended ten feet above a theatre stage, blood pouring from her face into a coffin below, it’s clear this gruesome execution scene is the work of an elusive serial killer.
But Girl 4 is different: she is alive – barely. And January recognises her.
Three women from three different London suburbs, each murdered with elaborate and chilling precision. And as January stares at the latest body, the most beautiful corpse he’s ever seen, he detects the killer’s hallmark. If he wants to save his own neck and prevent there being a Girl 5, January must get inside the mind of a serial killer and beat him at his own game …
GIRL
4
Will Carver is thirty years old and lives in Reading with his wife and daughter. Girl 4 is his first thriller.
Visit www.willcarver.net for more information.
WILL CARVER
GIRL
4
For Sam and Paul, who believed.
Acknowledgements
A huge debt of gratitude to everyone at Random House who read and got behind this book, particularly my editor and champion, Ben Dunn, who just gets it.
To my friend and agent, Samantha Bulos, who is, at once, my biggest fan and most brutally honest critic. You are, I have come to find, always right. Always. You make me so much better. And to Paul Bulos for doing the jobs that nobody ever sees but I never forget and will always be grateful for.
For the few teachers who made a difference, whether you realised or not: Mrs Ireland, Jane Everton and Nic Saunders. I thank you for being more than just educators.
Jason and Belinda, thank you for allowing me to clog up your café every day with my laptop and notes; there was nothing you could do about the crying babies.
To my mother, without whom I would not be here, there are too many things to thank you for. Your endless support means more than you know. You are the best that there is.
And to my wife, Francesca, for the encouragement to go for it and write. For never letting on how worried you really were because you thought it was more important that I should do this. You are my inspiration, always.
Prologue
CATHY WAS TAKEN in the spring of ’85, from outside the front of our Islington terrace, in broad daylight. I was twelve; she was ten. Battered unconscious, she was driven only a quarter of a mile away, her broken body sullied and exploited, then dumped without a murmur of remorse for her tiny, shattered life. She didn’t have time to scream or cry.
I was supposed to be looking after her.
‘Jan, let’s play blind man’s buff, please, please, please!’
‘Hang on, Cathy, hang on.’
As she drew her last breath, she was still pure; still an innocent girl. It wasn’t until after she died that this was indulgently wrenched from her.
But she was never found.
So, you see, I don’t actually know any of this.
There were no witnesses; there was no trace. No pile of bloodied clothes, no mangled twist of bones. Another body vanished; another soul obliterated. A family devastated.
Three months of intensive searching and questioning turned up nothing.
I was first under the spotlight. I can still see my father’s expression, seething as the police questioned me over and over again, slightly altering the nuance of their queries each time, attempting to elicit a different response.
‘I was in the kitchen getting us some juice. Cathy was outside counting to thirty. When I went back out, she wasn’t there.’
I repeated the words endlessly. For my benefit more than the officers’. I had no idea what they were driving at; no clue what they expected of me. I was just a child. I could only state the bare facts; they were all I had to cling on to. But what is true is not always what is fact. What is genuine is not always what is real.
I was instantly condemned by my father; that was the last time we would ever speak. My parents’ relationship disintegrated shortly after; neither of them accepting any responsibility, neither acknowledging the reality of the situation.
But where does reality end and truth begin …?
The only lead the police did not pursue involved a woman who claimed that she was giv
en clues about what was about to happen twenty-four hours before it occurred. That she had been visited by a man in her dreams, who presented a very precise set of signals that she believed would uncover the whereabouts of my little sister.
A fraud. An overnight psychic producing false hope that Cathy was still alive.
She was a liar.
She was my mother.
And this is why I hate her.
Twenty-one years on, I still keep a copy of the case file in my top drawer underneath my single malt Scotch. While every atom of my rationality convinces me that Cathy is gone, that my mother’s dementia eats away at her sanity a little more with each passing day, I want to believe that I can still find my little sister; that she is still waiting for me.
I can still save her.
London, 4 days ago …
Girl 4
IT DAWNED ON me recently. It was the day the sun came out.
I’m stuck.
Routine. Endless, laborious, extended routine.
It starts with the sex. We both know what works and what doesn’t by now. The idea of spicing anything up just seems like too much effort. So we do the same thing each time. Of course, there are subtle variations, but always the same end result. It’s not even a case of being in sync with each other, either. Just a series of predetermined moves that have a tried-and-tested, 100 per cent success rate at achieving the desired goal.
Not that it has anything to do with desire any more.
We always have sex on a Saturday, plus once on a weekday – determined by the work schedule.
Then you realise that you eat your breakfast at the same time every day and, in fact, all your main meals occur at these preordained intervals, and you know without thinking when to take a shower and how many times you go to your Pilates class in a week and which day you shop for food and when your favourite soap opera will dribble its way on to your television and when your car needs more fuel and when you are due to come on to your period and nothing changes.
It got worse the day the sun came out.
I left the house early, because I always like to fill the petrol tank on a Tuesday morning. I put my aluminium coffee cup into the appropriate holder and root through the glove box for a stack of CDs that have been sat in there unused and unloved for months. I see the record company logo and know that I’ve hit gold. It’s my The Hissing of Summer Lawns album by Joni Mitchell.
That’s how I know it’s summer.
That’s how I know it’s over.
My routine has bled from knowing what I am going to do day-by-day to week-by-week to month-by-month and now I know that, at exactly the same point next year, I will reach into my glove compartment, flick through my CD collection, which will be slightly more scratched than this year, locate my favourite album and cry inside at the futility of my predictable existence.
I need an event. Something to look forward to. Business has hit a plateau; the wedding was perfect, but that was so long ago, more than a year now; and, despite secretly coming off my contraceptive pill, I’m yet to fall pregnant. The monthly disappointment has now been added to my routine.
I exhale heavily and drop the roof on the car, as I always do at this time of year, hoping that someone will notice me.
Yes, I want a change.
Yes, I want to break free from this monotony.
Yes, I require something else in my life.
But not this.
Nobody deserves this.
Eames
WHEN YOU WATCH the news on television and a saccharine reporter talks at the camera, while blue lights flash in the background and a house is surrounded by police tape, that’s my house.
When an elderly neighbour is interviewed and drops a cliché like, ‘He always seemed so normal. He was such a nice guy.’ That’s me they are talking about.
When a small crowd forms and people look shocked, because the guy who mowed their lawn last week or helped carry their heavy shopping bags on Saturday or fed their cat while they were away on holiday last summer has been killing woman after woman for the last thirty years, my entire life. That’s me too.
Except that nobody in my idyllic Hampstead street has a clue what I do.
I’ve had affairs with several women in the area, whose husbands put work before their wives, and I’ve been with a couple of their daughters too. Just think how sick they’ll feel when I finally get caught.
Think how relieved they’ll feel that I didn’t shoot them in the mouth. That I didn’t suspend them from the ceiling with a high-gauge fishing wire or shoot an arrow through their skull.
Think how dirty they’ll feel that they fornicated with a sociopathic murderer, and how it will be the most alive they have ever felt, that someone like me could give them something so different, dangerous and exciting in their otherwise dreary, robotic lives.
When you see the reporter go back to the studio, and the anchor moves straight on to the next story, as if someone like that can’t really exist, it’s me they’re dismissing.
Think how lucky they’ll feel that I didn’t beat them to death with a rolled up newspaper or balance an apple on their head or spear them through the gut with a scaffolding pole.
But first, I have to get caught.
My first kill came early. Earlier than most.
Mother.
The original.
Girl 0.
They say she pushed too hard, that an embolism popped in her brain, but I like to think I had something to do with it. Of course, I was only around one minute old when it happened, but if I had wanted to come out, if I’d wanted to be born, none of this would have happened. They say that my guilt over this incident manifested itself into my acute claustrophobia. I tell them I don’t understand. That all I wanted was to stay in that cramped womb.
My father raised me on a diet of hatred and negligence. He always blamed me for what happened, as he should. I take full credit. But this isn’t why I turned out this way. You can’t blame Dad. He never physically abused me or threatened me. He rarely raised his voice. He just didn’t have the energy for it after Mother died; he just sat in his chair transfixed by something that might lie behind the TV. A part-time catatonic. A full-time alcoholic. But don’t blame Dad. I am what I am.
I hate it when they psychoanalyse an artist’s work and say that it must have been because he wasn’t hugged as a child or he was beaten or he was a closet homosexual for so many years. I wasn’t hugged as a child; that part is true. But my mother was dead and my father was using both of his hands to cling on to her memory. I wasn’t abused and I’m certainly not gay. I’m just doing what is natural. Doing what I am told, what I am predisposed to do.
I know the difference between right and wrong.
The first three girls took a lot of planning, but even with my letters, my clues, the tip-offs, only one detective seemed concerned. But they’ll start to take me seriously after Girl 4; they won’t have a choice.
So I write another letter. I give them the chance to stop me before it happens.
How long will it take them to piece everything together? I give them everything they’ll need apart from the name.
Girl 4.
She changes everything.
January
WHEN I GET the call I have no idea that it will be Girl 4 they’ve found.
Why had The Smiling Man not appeared to me the night before? Why was the killer returning after all these months, fourteen to be precise?
Why her?
I arrive at the scene shortly after Detective Sergeant Paulson and Detective Sergeant Murphy. The community theatre-company building has been broken in to and the cleaner has found a body. Paulson and Murphy are here on routine investigation, while I specialise in violent crime. That’s why they called me in.
‘What have we got, then?’ I ask as I get out of the car to find Paulson finishing a cigarette before entering the building. Murphy is talking to the cleaner, who doesn’t speak the best English, but manages to blurt out ‘fl
oating body’ in between sobs.
‘The cleaner says she got here around 6.30 a.m. to clean the place ready for the rehearsal that is due to start here at nine,’ Murphy explains as he flips through pages in his notepad. ‘She filled the dishwasher so that the coffee cups would be ready to use when they arrived, mopped the toilets then went into the theatre. And found the body.’
‘The floating body?’ I question with a touch of cynicism in my voice.
It’s at this point that Paulson shouts: ‘Murphy! Jan! I think you need to take a look at this.’
We step into the darkened doorway that leads into the auditorium, where the local amateur dramatic society put on their sub-standard pantomimes and fumble through iambic pentameter.
Paulson has turned the lights off to recreate the same feeling both he and the cleaner experienced. To give us the full impact.
‘Ready?’ he asks, with an almost childlike excitement about his demeanour.
We nod in unison.
When he flicks on the lights it only takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the brightness, but it takes what seems like minutes for my brain to adjust to what I am seeing.
‘A floating body,’ I repeat to myself, edging cautiously towards the stage.
Stood at the back of the theatre, my eyes adjust their focus to the stage at other end of the room, a beautifully pale brunette is lying face down. Blood from her head and face drips into a perspex box below her; her long hair dangles down in front of her shoulders, her head drooping and concealing her identity.
But she is ten feet in the air and there are no visible signs as to how she appears to be floating above her plastic coffin.
The image is horrifyingly beautiful.
The stage setting around her has been painted to resemble the sky at dusk. A few cotton-wool clouds give the scene a more three-dimensional feel. The dramatics of the whole effect are hardly amateur.
It looks like a perpendicular, levitating crucifixion.
She looks like a fallen angel. Bloodless, yet pure.
We all stand momentarily rooted to the spot in bemusement, part of the performance, a supporting cast to the play unravelling before us. Murphy writes more notes, Paulson lights another cigarette and we stare at the woman as if she is a sculpture, a work of art. In a way she is. This must have taken hours to orchestrate and arrange.