The Watcher

by Kate Medina

  ‘Ready?’ Marilyn asked, pausing on the porch.

  No. Jessie nodded.

  Marilyn smiled grimly. ‘You can think “No”, but you can’t say it.’

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘Don’t give up your day job to join the World Poker Series.’

  Jessie’s smile was stressed and fleeting. ‘And there I was labouring under the mistaken impression that I had the perfect unreadable psychologist’s expression.’

  Marilyn matched her smile with a barely there one of his own. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Doctor.’

  Side by side, they stepped into the hallway and immediately the sounds of outside dimmed, as if someone had twisted the volume switch to low. Despite the swell of cold air from the open front door chilling the back of Jessie’s neck, it was warm inside the house, cosy, the heating turned up in response to the cold autumn night, the dark mahogany wooden floor muffling their footsteps after the crunch of the gravel outside, a relaxing soft beige – there was doubtless an interior designers’ name for the colour – on the walls. A dark wooden wall-mounted coat rack to her right, half-hidden behind the open front door, was bunched with adults’ coats in muted colours, the central hook topped by a bright red kid’s puffa jacket. The sight of the jacket tightened something sharply in Jessie’s chest. She hadn’t noticed it when she and Cara had come knocking.

  Immediately to their left, opposite the coat rack, was the door to the sitting room. The lights were off, the room illuminated only by the pale yellow wash from the street lights outside, intermittently broken by a streak of blue as the lights of the marked cars parked outside in the road swung to flood over the house’s facade. She hadn’t been in here either – Denise had led them straight to the kitchen.

  From where she now stood, in the centre of the room, Jessie could see the black shadowy shapes of the firearms team packing up out on the drive. Burrows’ CSI team were beyond them, ghostly white shapes pacing out on the street, reminding her of people she used to see when she was in the military, lit at night through thermal imaging cameras. Out of the patio doors that opened from the opposite end of the room, out into what Jessie assumed must be the garden, she could see only blackness.

  Her eyes snapped shut, an automatic defence response to the flood of bright white as Marilyn switched on the overhead light; they opened slowly, squinting and blinking, mole-like, until her irises had contracted sufficiently to cope with the illumination. The windows facing the street were now black mirrors, blotting out the activity outside, locking her and Marilyn alone together in this eerily silent, empty-feeling house, reflecting Marilyn’s scarecrow frame and pallid, creased face. Jessie was mirrored back to herself next to him – shorter, her face significantly less creased, but no less pale.

  The room was carpeted in earth brown, the sofas upholstered in the same relaxing beige as the walls: safe, easy clean, family friendly colours. The only pop of colour came from a mess of teal-blue scatter cushions, a couple spilled on the floor. Jessie resisted the OCD tug she felt to snatch them up, return them to the sofa, order them all neatly while she was at it. A stack of opaque plastic storage boxes to the left of the fireplace were crammed with kids’ toys, a freestanding mahogany bookshelf to the right, with books and DVDs. No other storage space: nowhere else to hide a spare envelope, let alone a child.

  Despite having sat in the kitchen of this home a few days ago, drinking tea and chatting, knowing that Boden mum had chosen the decor, Jessie was still surprised how comfortable the room felt, how homely. Well, what were you expecting? The room of a family with more important pulls on their time than to fuss about tidiness – unlike her. The home of a brutally murdered woman and a kidnapped little boy and there were scatter cushions on the sofa, plastic boxes of toys in the corner and a stack of well-thumbed women’s magazines on the coffee table. It didn’t feel real somehow.

  None of this felt real.

  While Marilyn searched the study, opposite the sitting room, Jessie opened a door further down the hallway and stepped into a downstairs toilet. It was tiny, the navy-painted walls shrinking the space to telephone-box proportions. Photographs in white frames, scores of them, studded the walls, almost all lovingly charting Leo’s journey from babyhood, tiny, hours old, to summer shots of a grinning, blond-haired little boy on a beach, his bare torso spangled with sand, to the same boy zipped into that red puffa jacket, his breath making clouds in chill air. Backing out of the door, Jessie pulled it closed behind her. She would have plenty of time later to study those photographs in painful detail, to get a sense of the family, of how they had lived rather than how they – or she at least – had died. Jessie didn’t need to disappear down that emotional black hole now. Would the bathroom upstairs be painted in this same navy blue, contrasting stunningly with its shiny white porcelain furniture and the bloodless woman floating in the bath? Not long and she would find out; she wasn’t sure that her stomach or her mind were up to it.

  ‘Jessie.’

  Marilyn was beckoning her into the kitchen. He was standing by the huge aluminium American-style fridge. The fridge door was hanging open – The only thing we left is footprints on the carpet, DI Simmons – the light inside illuminating a two-litre carton of full-fat milk in the door. The blue label was facing outwards, exactly as Jessie arranged her own fridge – hers was deliberate, a function of her OCD, but this one was probably accidental, given the messy scatter of possessions throughout the house and the stack of dirty crockery she could see in the sink. And, just to the left of the fridge, a shatter of green glass in a puddle of liquid on the floor, the ceramic-floor tile in the centre of the shatter, shattered also by the impact of it falling.

  Looking up, Jessie surveyed the rest of the kitchen. It was just as she remembered it, comfortable and homely, a chair at the far end of the oak farmhouse table where she and Cara had sat drinking tea pulled out, Lego spilled on the table top in front of it. Beyond the table, the multiple rectangles of glass in the French doors that led to the garden were pitch-black, no houses backing on to this one to cast light, no street lights throwing their illuminating glow either, not even that ghostly weeping willow visible. And out there in the darkness, beyond the broken garden fence, thousands of acres of fields and woodland.

  Jessie’s back was cold from the open door of the fridge – the feeling she got when she walked down the chilled aisles at the supermarket – but there was something else too, an airy tickle stirring the newly grown hairs around her hairline. But more than that, she had the feeling that someone, something, was standing outside looking in, outside watching. She shivered.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Marilyn’s gaze was searching.

  Keeping her gaze focused on the glass doors to the garden, Jessie nodded.

  ‘Just getting a sense.’

  A silent nod from him in return.

  Black framed in the chequerboard of glass rectangles that made up the double doors to the garden. Nothing to see outside. No movement. The only noise the faint, rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of a helicopter, not a civilian one at this time of night, so the police helicopter scrambled from Lippet’s Hill then. The air support team would doubtless be joined by dog teams, scores of uniforms, everything thrown at this search.

  Dogs.

  ‘Jessie?’

  ‘There’s a breeze,’ she said, in answer. ‘Can you feel it?’

  ‘It’s from the fridge.’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  Stepping away from him, she skirted the kitchen island, the farmhouse table. Light from the back doormat caught in her eyes. But not the doormat, she realized, but a scatter of smashed glass reflecting the ceiling spots back at her in sparkles, like a tiny, broken patch of sea on a boiling hot day. A copper-coloured key lay among the shatter of sparkles.

  ‘The rectangular pane next to the door lock is smashed out,’ she said, calling back to Marilyn.

  But he was right behind her, had already seen it. The pane was twenty centimetres tall, fifteen wide
, plenty big enough to put an arm through, twist the key in the lock.

  ‘It would have made a noise,’ Jessie said. ‘The glass smashing must have startled her just after she’d got the wine from the fridge—’ she broke off, her mind fumbling for an image. ‘No, I don’t think that works. If the pane had smashed while she’d been at the fridge she would have had a decent head start, while he smashed out the rest of the glass, fumbled for the key, unlocked it – it’s not that quick a process. She could have dashed upstairs, grabbed Leo and the phone, locked herself in a bedroom or the bathroom, called the police. We need to check to see if Denise or Leo’s bedroom or the bathroom have locks on the doors.’ She broke off again, held up a finger. ‘So perhaps … perhaps he smashed it earlier, while she was upstairs putting Leo to bed, smashed the pane and unlocked the door, but left it closed. It took us a while to see that the pane was missing. You need to look to see, don’t you?’

  Marilyn nodded.

  ‘If Leo was already in bed when the kitchen door suddenly swung open, Denise would have bolted upstairs, not to the front door and escape, and if she hadn’t had much of a head start, she would hardly have made it up the stairs before he—’ before White Fang … she didn’t say it ‘—got to her. She wouldn’t have had time to grab Leo and lock them in there. Or perhaps he let himself in earlier, hid somewhere and then Leo woke up and saw a stranger in his bedroom. Maybe Denise heard Leo screaming, dropped the wine and bolted upstairs to try to save him. However, it happened, it’s instant power, the presence of a child confers instant, unassailable power to the perpetrator. She would have done anything for the child. It’s human nature – mother nature.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘When I was a sergeant in Brighton, I worked on a case, a ring of Eastern European men, mugging women with children for their jewellery and money. They’d watch the family house, work out what time the women came home from the school run with the kids and pounce on them. The women would hand over everything they had, wouldn’t put up a fight. Like taking sweets off a baby, because of the presence of their children.’

  Jessie nodded. Her mind filled with an image, that pale figure from her sleepwalking nightmare. She shivered again. It was so intensely dark outside, it was as if the house had sunk into a lake of black oil. If the killer had been standing outside in the dark garden, looking in, he could have been only a few metres away and Denise wouldn’t have been able to see him, not with the kitchen lights on. He could have been out there for hours before he smashed the glass. He could have watched her and Leo, watched their every move, and she would have been oblivious.

  The image made Jessie deeply uneasy. How easy it was to voyeur. To stalk. Anyone.

  ‘It’s about watching, Marilyn. I’m not sure how or why, but if … if he opened the door earlier, he may have stood in the garden watching her while she was feeding Leo, tidying up, helping herself to a glass of wine, knowing, knowing that she had only minutes to live and enjoying that knowledge.’ Jessie raised her hands, let them fall back to her sides. ‘It speaks to the motivation for all this. Watching.’ She shivered, but not because of the cold from the open fridge or from the missing pane in the patio door. ‘Did the firearms officers say anything about her eyes?’

  Marilyn shook his head, his expression grim. ‘No,’ he muttered, turning towards the door. ‘But I think that it’s time we found out.’

  As they reached the top of the stairs, they heard the regular, persistent drip-drip-drip of a tap.

  Watching.

  And water.

  Why always water?

  There was a huge, damp swell on the landing carpet that had ballooned out from under a closed door to her and Marilyn’s right. The bathroom – must be.

  Footsteps squelching in unison, Jessie followed Marilyn across the soaked carpet.

  As they paused outside the door, the sound of the dripping tap was swallowed by the rush of Jessie’s own pulse in her ears. She glanced at Marilyn. Was he hearing the same? Had his pulse rocketed as hers had done? His expression was inscrutable, his face a mask of professionalism. He had learnt well over his twenty-plus years in Major Crimes to look convincing, at least.

  As he raised a latex-gloved hand to push the door open, he glanced behind and met her gaze.

  ‘I’ll go in first.’ A grim smile. ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘Used to this?’

  ‘You never get used to children. But she’s not a child.’

  ‘No … but still,’ Jessie murmured, thinking, Shit, shit, shit, get this over with.

  As Marilyn cracked the door open, the smell hit them, dense as liquid, a visceral smell of hell. Of blood and pain and terror and opened human bowels. Jessie pressed her sleeve to her nostrils.

  Jesus, this can’t be happening.

  Another push from Marilyn’s latex-gloved hand and the door swung open in one smooth movement.

  The first thing Jessie saw was the navy-blue walls, matching the colour of the toilet downstairs sporting its jigsaw of photographs charting Leo Lewin’s happy, carefree life. Her gaze fell to the shiny white tiles below the blue, the contrast making them seem almost three-dimensional – or was that the product of the condensation, the pink condensation that peppered the tiles and pooled and ran in rivulets down them? Her gaze slid further down to the white porcelain roll-top of the bath, to an arm. A woman’s pale, slender arm dangling over the roll-top. Jessie’s overshoes squelched as she took another step forward, focusing on nothing but the arm, relatively benign in its alabaster immobility.

  Another step forward and she saw Denise. Her body. Her face.

  Ghost-white.

  Slack-skinned.

  One blue eye wide open, frozen and unseeing. The other socket, sightless.

  Spinning around, Jessie ducked out of the bathroom and vomited her pub dinner all over the landing carpet.

  53

  Five-thirty a.m. and the sky over the red-tiled roofs to the east was lightening, only Venus visible, a bright dot puncturing the royal-blue sky. Jessie sat in the passenger seat of Marilyn’s ancient Z3, head tilted back against the headrest, half-comatose with tiredness and shock. Jamming her eyes shut, she stared hard into the insides of her eyelids, trying to rid herself of the image of that bloodless, slack-skinned body, floating in that bathtub of pink soup, that one blank eye socket. To rid her ears of the screams of Denise’s husband as he was wrestled to the ground outside his own home, as he lay on the drive sobbing and begging for news about his wife and son, as he was ushered away, limp with shock, by DS Workman.

  Jessie had seen Hugo Fuller too, tied to that lounge chair beside his swimming pool, his eyes put out like some medieval torture victim. But for some reason, Denise’s body, the reality of her torture and murder, had been a thousand times worse.

  Was it because she was a woman? A mother? A mother who had tried valiantly, to judge from the smashed bedside lamp in Leo’s bedroom, the top drawer of his bedside table ripped out and upside down – thrown, towards the door – to defend herself and her son with … with nothing. A woman who had sought to escape from the open bedroom window but, with only a stone patio twenty feet below, the drop too far a fall for either her or Leo to survive. Trapped between a literal rock and a metaphorical hard place. Impossible to save herself or her child. Or was it just because Jessie could put herself in that position, could so viscerally emote with Denise, feel her fear and desperation as she’d tried to save herself and her son, in a way that Jessie hadn’t been able to emote with Hugo Fuller? Because she had done the same herself, barely a year ago, in Sami Scott’s bedroom, trying to save herself and him?

  Despite emptying her guts upstairs – The only thing we left is footprints on the carpet, DI Simmons; to her shame, she couldn’t claim the same – she still felt sick and headachy. She had barely slept in forty-eight hours, she realized, as she fought a strong drag downward into peaceful, uncomplicated unconsciousness. But she couldn’t sleep now. They couldn’t sleep. They had a little boy to find and a murderer to ca
tch.

  A sudden burst of cold air chilled her right cheek and her eyes snapped open.

  ‘I’m sorry, Marilyn.’

  ‘For what?’ he asked, as he slid into the driver’s seat beside her.

  ‘The puke. I don’t think Tony Burrows will find it very helpful.’

  ‘He’s seen worse.’

  Jessie lifted her shoulders. Not from me. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Never say never,’ Marilyn muttered, with a grim smile. ‘I have a feeling that our man is only just getting started. Go home and snatch a few hours’ sleep and I’ll see you in the incident room at ten a.m.’

  Jessie shook her head. ‘I’m fine. I don’t need any sleep.’

  Marilyn angled the rear-view mirror towards her. If she had looked up, she would have seen a slim, cracked rectangle of her own pallid face, looking as if she’d aged a hundred years in the last five hours.

  ‘Have you seen yourself recently?’

  But she didn’t look up. Instead, she turned her head and met Marilyn’s appraising, mismatched gaze, focusing on his right eye, the brown one easier to hold somehow than that azure-blue, searching left eye that seemed to have the ability to cut through her, cut through the bullshit.

  ‘We need to find Leo Lewin, Marilyn, and then we need to solve this. We don’t have time to rest.’

  ‘The helicopter is out searching. The dog teams are out searching. We’ve got uniforms going house to house throughout the neighbourhood. We’ve got a team of volunteers, friends and neighbours getting briefed now, out in the back garden, ready to start as soon as it’s light enough, which by my reckoning will be in about two hours. There is nothing you can do.’

  ‘But if—’ she broke off. ‘If I can get into his mind, work out how he thinks—’