I Am Watching Read online

  “Okay.” He shook his head, and a shower of raindrops flew about his head like a halo. “So, what’s the point of it?”

  Isla kept her gaze on the mud-pooled ground. “Some people simply can’t help themselves. They need to kill like we need family, comfort. It’s an itch they just can’t shake. For people like that, when they see someone like Heath McGowan on the news, on the front of newspapers, there’s an appeal in that. They think that if they emulate them, if they do the same thing, then they will achieve the same result.”

  “Celebrity?”

  Isla shrugged. “Sometimes. Or, if not celebrity, then notoriety at least.” She paused, turned back toward the wall, the distant signs of police movement and the memory of the body hidden in among it all.

  Her father pulled up short alongside her, followed her gaze. “Bet McGowan is loving every damn minute of this.”

  She glanced at him. Thought of Heath’s phone call, her stomach shifting with the memory of it. Just thought I’d give you a call to check that you’re okay. What would her father say if she told him that? Or her husband? Isla watched the distant figure of Maggie Heron. No. In this case, silence was best.

  “I’m sure Heath is getting something out of it.” Not a lie either. Isla had no illusions that the call had been prompted by concern. Psychopaths were not known for their empathy. He had called her to insert himself into the events in Briganton. He had called her in the hope of knocking her off balance, of hearing her fear. For Heath, these murders would be the stuff of dreams. “He wouldn’t be the first. Ted Bundy coached a fellow prisoner, taught him how to gain easy access to victims using personal ads.” She stubbed her toe against a rock. “They call it a murder mentor. Someone who inspires a copycat.”

  Her father turned to her, his face darkening. “You think McGowan is involved?”

  Did she? “I don’t know. I can . . . I mean, I’m sure that the power of feeding something like this would appeal to him.”

  The wind tugged at her clothes, whipped her hair so that it beat against her cheeks, sending little electrical sparks across her skin. She watched her father and wondered, How does he stand there, so together, so collected, when the world is falling apart around him? She saw him shift, his hand moving to his knee of its own accord, the merest hint of a wince crossing his features. He’d injured it playing rugby sometime in his thirties. It had ended his playing career, wounded his pride more.

  Perhaps, she thought, it was all a charade. This togetherness, this equanimity. The coldness a work tool. After all, didn’t she do the same? Best not to allow yourself to feel the true horror of what your research subjects had done, because if you did, the only rational course of action would be to run from them, screaming. Best to shut all that away in a room of its own, else how would you move forward? It was, thought Isla, a skill she had inherited from her father.

  “I’ll go and see him.” The wind tore the words from her, throwing them away into the wilds.

  Her father frowned. “What?”

  “McGowan. I’ll go and see him. If he’s involved . . . if he’s controlling this, then maybe he can stop it.”

  Eric Bell turned, facing into the wind now, so that the little hair that still remained to him flew backward like a train. “I’ll go with you.”

  It was not a question.

  Isla glanced down, looked at the boots, which once were black, now speckled with the mud of the moor. She was a child again, asking her father if she could walk to school alone, being told no. Maybe when you’re bigger. Her left foot began to sink, the liquid earth beneath it shifting into a dark wave that lapped at the sides of her boot. She moved, pulled it free with a squelch. Opened her mouth to speak and found no words. What was it about parents? Even when you were thirty-five and married, and even though you lived your life right up against the most dangerous men the world had to offer, one word and you could be catapulted backward in time, until you were small, vulnerable again. The fear lurched, making her feel light-headed.

  “The thing is, Dad . . . I don’t think that would be a good idea.” She did not look at him as she spoke, twisting away, ostensibly from the wind, but really from his steady gaze. She fixed her eyes on the village behind him, on the stone houses, the tall steeple, Bowman’s Hill beyond. The sky had begun to darken overhead, steel-gray mounds of cumulonimbus clouds, trouble brewing. Isla studied the village. If she looked hard enough, she could see her house, the place where her husband was, the place where she was a grown-up. Isla selected her words. “I have a certain rapport with Heath. It’s essential for the research we do that they are able to talk to us. I think that bringing in you, the man who ended his killings, I think that’s likely to shut him down.” It sounded like a question, the way she said it, and Isla cursed the doubtfulness in her voice.

  Eric watched her, seemed to be considering, and then nodded, just once. “Fine. Do what you think is best,” he said. “So what else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, all this. I want your opinion.”

  She looked at the wall. “Okay, well, in the original series of murders, the victims selected didn’t seem to have any particular characteristics linking them. Instead, it appears that McGowan used a hunting-ground technique. So victims were chosen based on their availability to him and their mere presence within Briganton.”

  “But not this time.”

  Isla shrugged. “Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, Maggie is related to one of the original victims. But then, Victoria Prew . . . she’s new here, doesn’t have family in the village. She’s . . . different.”

  “So . . .”

  “So, I don’t know. It’s possible that Victoria was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That her house, its openness, its obviousness, perhaps that was what started the ball rolling. Pushed him to take that first step into killing.”

  “And now?”

  “He’s had a little more time to consider just what it is he wants to achieve. Maybe he is merely evolving his strategy. Maybe he’s gone from that one initial impulse that led him to kill Victoria Prew to a more considered selection of victims. Or then again, maybe Maggie was just there. A victim of circumstance.”

  Her father turned, looked toward the village of Briganton. “Then the next victim could be anyone.”

  “You said Victoria Prew had reported a break-in. What about Maggie? Had she had anything taken? Reported being watched?”

  “I don’t know. Ted’s not the most reliable of witnesses,” said Eric.

  “Also, I’d keep an eye out for anyone trying to get too chummy with the police. It’s not uncommon for these guys to try to insert themselves into the investigation. Also, the families. . . the ones who lost people last time. I’d look out for anyone who has recently got friendly with them, or is especially curious about them and their background.”

  Isla watched her father as he nodded slowly, his gaze pulling back from the village and landing on her, his expression grim.

  “What?”

  “If he’s going after the families of the original victims . . .”

  “Yes?”

  He looked away across the moor. “That’s you, Isla.”

  The arrival of a letter – Ramsey

  He would have to go home some time. Ramsey poured boiling water into a bulbous teapot, watched the level rise until it threatened to overflow. He had been in the Heron house for eighteen hours now. Eighteen hours in which the world had changed. Had he closed his eyes once last night? It hadn’t seemed so. Ted had remained sitting in the armchair by the window, waiting. Ramsey had suggested to him that he go to bed, that some rest would be good for him, that he needed to take a break, but Ted had simply shaken his head, given him a small smile. If I go to bed, I might miss her coming home, mightn’t I?

  Ramsey stared at the cups, bone china with a pink trim. Imagined Maggie washing them the morning before, running the tea cloth round inside them, without any thought that it would be the last time she would do it. His he
ad was aching; the lack of sleep had built up into a low, throbbing headache pulled taut across his forehead. He weighted the teapot carefully in his hands, allowed it to tip forward so that the steady stream splashed into the cups. He had learned many years ago, when the darkness threatened, to focus on the small things. The steam rising from hot tea. The smell of bread. The sound of rain against a window. When the large things in life were simply too large to bear, it was the small things that could save him. He unwrapped a packet of chocolate biscuits, the sound deafeningly loud.

  A woman’s voice crept beneath the kitchen door, high and loud. “How could it have happened? But why? I mean, are they sure?”

  Ellie had arrived just a little while ago, a round woman with a screaming shock of orange hair. She had entered cautiously, as if it wasn’t her parents’ home anymore, as if the loss of one of them had taken away her surety, and now she simply wasn’t certain how one walked or spoke or thought. She had had the lost, vacant look of one whose world had suddenly become entirely alien, had clutched Ramsey’s hand, a familiar face on a distant planet, hadn’t cried, instead whispering, over and over again, “But how? But why?”

  Of course there had been no answers to give. Why? Because the monster had wanted her. There was little more to understand.

  Ramsey reached into the fridge, poured 2 percent milk from a plastic bottle into a dwarfish milk jug, trying to breathe, watching as it splashed over the sides onto the dark oak tray, and all the time thinking of hands around Isla’s throat, her body propped against Hadrian’s Wall.

  He should go home. At some point he would have to. But then there would be nothing but a swamping silence and the choking terror of what was to come. Ramsey put the milk back into the fridge and closed the door softly. No, he was better here, being of use, keeping busy, even if all he was capable of was spilling milk on a tray.

  He picked up the tray, balanced it carefully with his one good arm, pushed open the kitchen door with his back. Ellie was sitting on the sofa now, riotous hair in her hands, the heave of her shoulders suggesting tears. The family liaison officer, Holly, a pleasant young woman who spoke in studiously soft tones, sat beside her, hand upon her shoulder. And Ted: he remained at the window, waiting still.

  Holly watched as he placed the tray on the coffee table and said in a low voice, “I’ve called the doctor. I thought perhaps a sedative . . .” A glance across at Ted, oblivious to their presence. “May be the way to go.”

  A sedative. Yes. That would be the thing. A single tablet, the yawning embrace of sleep, enforced forgetting. But then, after the forgetting would come the remembering. And that for Ramsey had been the worst of all times, for years and years following Zach’s death. Sleep would dance around him, now drawing closer, now pulling away, tempting, teasing, until finally wrapping him in a relentless embrace, and he would fall into her, drowning. And, if he was lucky, he would forget, would escape to a gentler life in his dreams. Then would come the waking, the soft climb, as of one forcing his way from a hot bath, then the shock of the bitter cold air as the remembering would hit.

  “It’s going to take some time for him,” offered Ramsey, “to come to terms with things. He’s in shock now.”

  A low moan escaped from Ellie, startling him momentarily with the realization that he had forgotten she was there. “I should have come home more. I promised I would. And then, what with work, I didn’t and now . . .” A choking sob.

  “Hey.” Ramsey sat on the arm of the sofa, he and the FLO bookending the weeping woman. “She was so proud of you. Do you know, I’d see her most mornings, when I was out on my runs, and she would talk about you so much? My brilliant daughter, the teacher. Don’t you dare allow yourself to think that you let her down, not for a minute.” He watched as the lie settled in, as her back straightened by a degree, as blissful relief passed across her face. Because the truth was, sometimes you had to lie. To tell the truth—that the only time he had ever heard Maggie mention her daughter was in complaint, about her lack of visits, about her inability to marry—the truth would be cruel. Whereas the lie—the lie was kind.

  A sound broke into the following silence, a cheerful chirrup that seemed entirely out of place in the grieving house.

  “Sorry,” said Holly. “That’s me.” She shifted, pulled her phone free, frowned as she read. Then she leaned forward, looking toward Ted. “Ted?”

  For a moment it seemed that the old man hadn’t heard her, but then he shifted, dragged his gaze reluctantly from the window, took in Ellie, Ramsey, Holly, somehow seeming surprised that he was not alone, after all. “Hmmm?”

  “Ted, I needed to ask you . . . You haven’t had any break-ins recently, have you? Found anything missing?”

  He frowned at her, a teacher looking at an errant student. “Well, she couldn’t find the cat. Remember?”

  “No, Ted. I mean . . . Well, did either you or Maggie ever have the sense that you were being watched?”

  He stared at her, but the light in his eyes had faded, the conversation swerving perilously close to a cliff edge he was not prepared to acknowledge.

  “Ted?” interjected Ramsey. “Can you think of anything? It could be really useful.”

  Ted sat, rubbing his fingers together, and then finally sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask Maggie.”

  How long could he keep this up? wondered Ramsey. How long could he protect himself with this fictional reality? He realized with a sinking sensation that he envied Ted and his opaque world.

  “I remember something.” Ellie’s voice was quiet, painfully uneven. “She . . . a couple of weeks ago, two, three at the most. Mum, she’d gone to put flowers on Aunt Kitty’s grave. She did that every week, always on a Friday. Only, she said that this time when she went, she was, you know, clearing out the old flowers, wiping the gravestone down, she said she kept feeling that someone was watching her.”

  “Did she see anyone?” asked Holly.

  Ellie shook her head, a faint smile appearing. “Mum, she reckoned it was Kitty watching over her. She’s like that. Anyway, she left, went to the bakery to get some bread and stuff, and on her way back, she had to pass the graveyard again.”

  “Okay?”

  “Well, thing is, the fresh flowers, the ones she had put on Kitty’s grave, they were gone. The grave was empty. I was pretty upset about that, thought it was local kids messing about. But Mum, she said that it was a miracle, a sign that Kitty was still with us, because she had always loved flowers in life.”

  “Roses.”

  “Sorry, Ted?”

  “No, I was just saying roses. Maggie loves roses, she does.” He stopped, clipping the words off abruptly, and for a moment seemed to be on the edge of a realization. Then he shook his head. “Her and her roses, eh?”

  “So . . .” Holly looked back at Ellie. “This was how long ago?”

  “Ah . . . two . . . No, it was three weeks ago, because I’d just gone home after a visit. So yes, three weeks.”

  Somehow, Holly managed to nod. She managed to make it appear that this information was useful, yes, interesting, yes, and yet hide the shift that it brought. That while for them this had only just begun, for the killer the journey had started weeks ago. She smiled at Ellie, muttered something about that being very helpful, and then, and only then, glanced at Ramsey, her eyes round with alarm.

  “Excuse me a second. I should just call this in.”

  They sat there, the three of them, as Ramsey thought about what he had been doing three weeks ago, about how the world on the surface of it had looked perfectly ordinary back then, about how much had changed since.

  Finally, Holly returned, her mouth a straight line. “It’s fine,” she lied, with an unconvincing smile. She studied him. “Ramsey, why don’t you head off, get some sleep? You look done in.”

  “I’m okay.” His tongue felt thick, words unwieldy with exhaustion.

  “Seriously, Rams. I’m here. I have this covered. Go. Get some sleep.
”

  He looked from Ted at the window to Ellie, who was slumped back against the sofa now, her gaze far away. He had always known that he couldn’t stay here forever, keeping busy, being useful, that sooner or later life would have to be faced. “I do have an article to write. Maybe I’ll pop home, try to get some words down. Will you call? If they need anything?”

  He was ushered out, with profound thanks and tearful gratitude, into the cold autumn air, which bit into his lungs, slapped him awake. The rain had slowed, a meager drizzle now, although the pavements remained littered with standing puddles, debris tugged there by the wind. One foot, then another. That was all there was to it. He felt the tarmac hard under his soles, the cold wind lick against his collar. Just one step and then another.

  His mobile buzzed in his pocket, and Ramsey paused, pulling it free. The text message was from his editor. Heard about old woman’s murder. Horrible. Hope you’re doing okay. Thinking it would be a good idea for you to expand your article. Not just about Prew, but old woman, too, and any other vic tims. Whole “what it’s like to live under the threat of a serial killer” angle. Do you have access to Heron family?

  Ramsey stood in the cold, staring at the text, and for the briefest of moments considered throwing his phone, dashing it to pieces right there on the pavement.

  Instead, he typed a reply. Fine.

  It was a sad truth that, in spite of all else, there remained bills to pay.

  He pushed at the metalwork front gate, its yawning screech loud against the wind. Felt for his keys, carefully selected the one that would fit the Yale lock. Ran his finger along the edge of it, trying to ignore the sense of a limitless darkness below, of the creeping familiar numbness, all the familiarity of an old friend returning for yet one more unexpected visit. Slid the key into the lock.

  The door opened with a groan, and a wave of tiredness washed across him. Ramsey was suddenly aware of the stickiness of his skin, the bitter tang in his mouth, the billowing edges of the world. He stepped inside. Sleep. Sleep would help. And the remembering that would come when he awoke? Well, he would simply have to handle that then. He had, after all, done it before.