But it was gone two, and killer or not, he had a legal right to sleep, and she was banned from the investigation anyway. It was game over.
Or was it? She just had to find a way in.
Wildeve sat on the edge of her bed, revived by Mac’s offering of food and the warmth of his company, her mind too noisy for sleep.
Adam.
She needed to see him.
His old photograph album was in the drawer under his side of the bed, and she pulled it out, careless and frantic, tossing bits of paper and receipts and his leather belt aside, desperate to see him, consumed by the fear that one day she might forget the shape of the mole by his ear or the arch of his eyebrow.
She had a pain in her temple, running down the side of her face and along her jawline. She flipped the pages. There he was. Laughing with his mates at a beer festival; a young man, in his police uniform, upright and proud; on a ferry to Ireland with his parents, gap-toothed, freckles spreading across his nose; a picture of him on his first day at primary school.
She stared at the pictures of her husband, drinking each one in, until the first bird of the day began to sing. A blackbird, perhaps. Or a wren. Her eyes – sore and gritty – told her it was time to sleep.
She was about to put the album away when she noticed a cardboard photo frame slipped into the back. Embossed on the bottom in gold lettering were the words Croft Lane County Primary School, Class of 1985, but the photograph was missing.
Adam’s primary school.
Something shifted in her brain. Where was the photograph? Had he taken it to the school reunion? No, he’d gone to the pub empty-handed. She remembered because she had given him a lift. And yet it couldn’t have slipped from the frame by itself. Someone – Adam – had removed it. But why?
Round and round. All the dead ends and loose ends. None of it made any sense. And yet, some instinct told her she was within touching distance. The corners of her puzzle were in place. Now she needed to find the rest of the pieces. She lay on her bed, the minutes ticking on.
And then her phone began to ring.
77
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
26 The Avenue – 3.37 a.m.
He was asleep.
Fletcher had talked and cried until there was nothing left. ‘I was as much a victim as those women were,’ he’d said, his face breaking open as he’d relived his ordeal. ‘It was horrific.’
He was frank and honest, told her everything. ‘We can start again, Dessie,’ he’d said, and touched her hand, offered up a hopeful smile. She had smiled back and nodded, let him think that she’d believed him.
His breathing was slow and steady, the rhythm of untroubled sleep. Who was the vulnerable one now? She gazed at the cupid’s bow of his lip, the stubble shadowing his chin and felt – nothing. When he began to snore, she slipped from their bedroom.
His work bag was in the hallway. She’d never had a reason to go through it before, would never have intruded on his privacy in that way, but this was a necessary evil.
She unzipped it.
A weakness in her legs.
Boxes and bottles. Dozens of them. Phenobarbital. Diazepam. Zolpidem. She’d had enough celebrity clients to recognize sedatives when she saw them. Fletcher must have stolen them from work. A thought – traitorous but resonant – popped into her head. The bodies in the woods. No visible signs of injury.
Her mouth was dust.
She kneeled down, rummaging through the medication and tossing it aside, desperate now to find what she was looking for.
And there it was. At the bottom of his bag. The rectangle of his digital camera. In her hands, it flickered into life.
She scrolled through the pictures, dozens of images of cloud formations, each of them filled with a kind of mystery. A halo around the eye of the sun. The bruising of a storm. A belt of trees silhouetted against a mackerel sky. For one, glorious moment, relief sluiced through her. She had been mistaken.
And then the landscape changed.
Sky became skin. The branches became arms and legs. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Of her, asleep or lying in the bath. Of women she did not recognize and who did not know they were being photographed. Some blurry, some in sharp, precise focus. All unguarded. The intimacy floored her.
They were time-stamped. Three months ago. Last week. On Sunday.
Several photographs of the neighbours who had just moved in across the road. The teenage daughter. The woman who was now missing.
A drum began to beat in her head. Where had he been all evening?
Dessie put her thumb to her mouth, tore at the nail until it was ragged and sore. She huddled against the wall and tucked her knees up under her chin. She was trembling, despite the suffocating heat.
She scrolled through the pictures again and the fire that had been smouldering in her belly since she’d discovered the lies about his past blazed into life, the flames leaping high. Her anger was the petrol, fuelling it.
On the telephone table was the card of the female officer who had knocked on the door yesterday. Dessie registered it was late, but she did not much care about the time. All she knew was that she needed to contact the police.
As she reached for the handset, a noise made her lift her head.
Fletcher was coming down the stairs.
In his hand, he was carrying the silken noose of a dressing gown, its poppies like splashes of blood.
78
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
25 The Avenue – 2.22 a.m.
Evan missed his mother.
Yes, she shouted at him, but her cuddles were the best. When Lucas Naylor had directed all the boys to gather around, pinching and punching him as he’d walked through the school gates on the first day of June, she had taken one look at his face at pick-up time and headed straight for the ice-cream van.
She hadn’t probed, not at first, but later, arm around him on the sofa, she’d extracted the full story. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the film they were watching, but she’d pulled him to her and said, ‘Those who feel small inside might feel a little bigger by knocking down others, but it never lasts. We should feel sorry for them.’
He hadn’t understood what she had meant. But later, when he’d had a chance to think about it, he wondered if she was saying that Lucas acted the way he did because he felt bad about something else.
A few days later, Lucas had stolen Evan’s lunchbox and eaten his sandwiches. Evan’s mother had made her son some toast when he’d got home. ‘Lucas doesn’t have a mum,’ she’d told him. ‘And his dad isn’t well.’ Evan knew then that he’d been right. For all her impatience, his mother hid a kindness beneath her quick temper.
A thought occurred to him, and despite the warmth, he shivered, sitting up in bed in his thin pyjama top.
What if she had left because he was rude and naughty? Was it his fault? But then he remembered the way she laughed when he tickled her feet, and the expression on her face when Aster was singing, and he didn’t think she would choose to leave her family.
And that made his stomach turn over, like falling off a wall.
He kicked off his covers. The house was quiet. Evan shut his eyes and tried to reclaim sleep. He tossed about, trying to get comfortable, but his room was airless, the heat a heavy blanket across his chest. He gave up and climbed out of bed, drawn to the window.
High and bright, the moon was lighting up the garden with silver and shadow. The treehouse was a dark secret at the end of the lawn.
Staring at it for too long made his eyes play tricks on him. His tired brain saw smudges peeping though its windows and shapes in the darkness. He rubbed at his eyes, but he could not stop thinking about the tape.
He never, ever wanted to listen to it again, and had hidden it in one of the unpacked boxes of toys so he didn’t have to see it. But the sound of that cry was imprinted in his mind. His heart hurt. It made him afraid. He knew why.
The handwriting, almost the same as his own.
&nb
sp; A cry – high and familiar.
A child, like him.
He wondered who it was. And where that child was now.
The branches of the trees were lifted skywards in worship. His vision blurred and they seemed to beckon to him, urging him outside.
The curious part of his nature – the part that pored over maps of the world and took apart his wind-up alarm clock to discover how it worked – burned to find out more.
But the young boy in him – nervous of the dark, who put his hands over his ears when the house shifted and creaked – was resistant to wandering into the garden alone with the night so black and watchful.
He stood at the window for a while, watching the treehouse. A breeze breathed through the leaves and they waved at him like tiny hands. The plums were glossy, their skins dark and lush amongst the branches.
What secrets were hidden amongst the wooden slats of the treehouse? What had happened there?
He reached for his Magic 8 Ball and whispered his question: Should I go back to the treehouse?
Screwing up his eyes, he tipped the ball over and waited for its answer to appear. After a minute, he could wait no longer.
It is certain.
Evan put on his slippers and headed into the night.
79
Wednesday, 1 August 2018
Southside Hospital, Essex – 2.24 a.m.
The mortuary was in darkness, save for a lamp in the examination room at the front of the building. A blonde head was bent over a stack of post-mortem reports. She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
Mathilda Hudson did not have to be there. She could have packed the paperwork into her briefcase and taken it home to read on the sofa, legs tucked under her, an icy gin and tonic on the table. She could be in bed. But instead she had set up a makeshift desk in this sterile stainless-steel room. It was her penance.
She was having trouble sleeping, anyway.
Yesterday, a broadsheet newspaper had printed a detailed analysis of the murders. A pathologist who knew nothing of the case had criticized her lack of progress. A public skewering. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if it hadn’t been true. It was her job to find out what had killed them. But she still didn’t know. Guilt impaled her. And professional shame.
The reports were full of medical technicalities that would have baffled the families of the victims, but they were poetry to the pathologist, full of meaning and depth. Held between those pages was the key to the Doll Maker murders, but Hudson hadn’t unlocked the puzzle yet.
What had caused all five of these victims to display signs of cardiogenic shock and respiratory distress? The answer to this question was at the heart of the police investigation. It was her responsibility to find that answer. And she took her professional duties extremely seriously.
But she was missing something vital.
She had examined and photographed every inch of their bodies, every bruise and laceration, every graze and imperfection. She had clipped hair and nails and sent the samples for testing. She had made a careful note of body temperature as soon as the cadavers had come into her care, to narrow down the time of death. She had detailed the effects of rigor mortis, she had studied and documented the pathology of their organs, she had taken bloods and ordered extensive toxicology reports.
But they were still keeping their secrets from her.
Mathilda was an experienced pathologist and she understood that death was not always clear-cut. That the weather, the age, the weight of a victim could skew the results, even if they had all been killed in the same way. Her job was to seek out the common link, to interpret the architecture of the deceased’s body and construct her case.
But she had run out of building blocks.
The bodies had not yet been released to their families. They were being kept in the freezer to preserve evidence, and in case the defence team in any future murder trial exercised the accused’s right to an independent postmortem. Adam Stanton was still in this mortuary, waiting to be transferred.
Mathilda had worked in this place for more years than most, and she was used to keeping company with the dead. Some of her colleagues found it too unsettling to stay there alone, the metal trays of refrigerated bodies enough to spook even the most rational of minds.
But she had always found a comfort in their presence. In all the time that she had been a pathologist, no corpse had ever got up and talked to her. In some ways, she wished they could. At least then she would know what had killed them.
The surfaces gleamed, the smell of bleach and something darker underneath. She sipped her peppermint tea, her stomach rumbling, but she was too engrossed in what she was doing to think about food.
She was rereading her preliminary notes on Adam Stanton. Bloody awful, the presence of his wife on Monday. But she had known Wildeve for a few years, had always liked and respected her, and had been reluctant to ask her to leave.
She had not been sure if Wildeve had turned up in her capacity as wife or investigating officer. A grey area, but one she was not about to challenge, even though she was almost certain the required permission from the coroner for next of kin to attend had not been sought. There was no way she’d be able to watch Jonathan’s post-mortem, though. Or those of their children. She had always treated the dead with the respect they were due, but she was too well acquainted with what went on to witness the taking apart of her own family.
Christ, she was tired. She would have to call it a night soon. But she did not want to leave, the weight of failure on her shoulders, the taste of self-recrimination on her lips.
The printed letters blurred. She lingered over them, reading the same passage over and over again.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Approximately 213ml of partially digested semi-solid food is found in the stomach.
Nothing untoward about that. Most people had eaten something in the hours before their death. She rarely paid much attention to stomach contents. Most of the pathologists she knew – in the south-east, at least – were the same, and almost always relied on the blood and urine results.
Given the absence of external or internal injuries – aside from the eyes which had been removed after death – she and DCI Clive Mackie had discussed at length other methods of murder: the use of nerve agents, gases or poisons. Even fear. She’d once performed a post-mortem on a woman who had died of a heart attack during a botched robbery. It was certainly possible to be scared to death. But that had happened once in seventeen years. This was not the case here.
As for the toxicology tests – the ones that had come back, at least – they had so far been inconclusive. And if she didn’t know what she was looking for, how could she begin to find it?
No signs of toxins in the lungs. And she had invested many, many hours scouring the skin of the dead for a needle’s telltale pinprick. If any of them had been injected intramuscularly, she would need to harvest the tissues around the entry point. Intravenously, and it would show up in the bloods. But she could find no evidence of injections and nothing had flagged in the test results.
As for the contents of the stomach, she had erred on the side of caution and sent them to be tested, but, again, the results were either inconclusive or still outstanding.
213ml of partially digested semi-solid food.
A distant bell rang in her mind.
Partially digested.
Most food took a couple of hours to digest, which meant that Adam Stanton had eaten something in the two hours before his death.
She reached for the rest of the reports, flicking through them, a rolling drum picking up pace in her chest.
Natalie Tiernan.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Approximately 183ml of partially digested semi-solid food is found in the stomach.
Elijah Outhwaite.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Approximately 252ml of partially digested semi-solid food is found in the stomach.
Esther Farnworth.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Approximately 191ml of partially digest
ed semi-solid food is found in the stomach.
Will Proudfoot.
GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM: Approximately 265ml of partially digested semi-solid food is found in the stomach.
All of them had eaten something in the two-hour window before their deaths.
Coincidence or something more sinister? She had been able to establish that the bodies had been killed at different times and had been dead for varying periods before they were discovered.
But what if something they had all eaten had triggered cardiac failure?
She blew out an impatient breath. She was being stupid. Of course they would have eaten something. Breakfast, lunch, whatever. But her instinct was nudging at her, urging her not to ignore this. That it might be a waste of time, but it was worth a closer look.
She put down the reports and checked her watch. Technically, this could wait until morning but she knew she wouldn’t sleep. It would whirl about in her head until she had satisfied herself that she was dancing up a blind alley.
Mathilda put on a plastic apron and a pair of gloves and headed for the refrigeration units, where she pulled out the metal tray containing the remains of Adam Stanton.
She tried not to look at his sightless eye sockets, the greyness of his face, the patchwork brutality of her own doing.
With careful fingers, she prised open his lips and shone a slim torch that she kept in her handbag into his mouth.
At first, she thought she was being stupid, and that her instinct had been way off beam. The absence of his tongue had left a bloodied cavity that made goosebumps rise on her skin, she, the most hardened of them all.
And she had checked his mouth, hadn’t she? But then she remembered that Wildeve Stanton had arrived and she’d been distracted, and now she thought about it, she couldn’t remember anything about Adam Stanton’s teeth at all.
And what about the other victims? Clarity and focus were important parts of her job. But it was difficult to maintain 100 per cent concentration at all times. Her focus had been on the heart and its surrounding muscles, the lungs and the oxygen levels in the blood. She had been so busy establishing a cause of death, looking in one direction for supporting evidence, that she had forgotten the basic mantra of her mentor, Dr Sedrowski.
The Neighbour Page 21