I Am Watching Page 16

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Owen blushed and shifted his focus back to his computer screen. “Just . . . you look tired.”

  Tired. Her alarm had roused her at 5:31 a.m. A psychological ploy, kidding her brain that she had slept past 5:30, so evidence of a reasonable night’s sleep. She had stood in the shower, letting the water thunder over her upturned face, had dressed in the previous day’s clothes, tugged her still wet hair into a rough plait. She looked like a stinking pile of garbage, and she knew it.

  Mina returned her gaze to the window. A car passed on the street below, its headlights puncturing the early morning dark. She watched as it rolled slowly past, a flicker of orange, its left turn signal flashing. And she thought of Isla’s words. What you have there is a vulnerability for him. She watched the car making its steady turn, watched until the red of the brake lights vanished from view. They were all talking about the murders. About his need to kill.

  But what about this other need of his—to display the bodies, seating each and every one of them against the wall? What if that was the way in?

  Mina took another sip of her coffee, turned and pulled her chair over to her computer, then flipped her notebook open.

  Okay, the transportation phase. The point at which our killer puts himself with the body for an extended period of time. What had that looked like for Victoria Prew? Mina tapped her pen on the page, allowing the flash of memory to roll over her. Of Victoria, her cardigan wrapped around her, vivid in the hard white of her living room. Of Victoria dead against the wall.

  She was attacked on the driveway.

  So, forget the kill for a moment. Think about what comes next.

  Victoria inert, crumpled to the ground, a deadweight in the most literal of senses. And if you were to move her, if you had to move her? What would that look like? Would you tuck your hands beneath her armpits, drag her across the rough stone of the gravel driveway?

  She flipped through her notes.

  There were no drag marks left on the drive.

  Mina pursed her lips. Okay. So, it’s gravel. You know that the weight of the body will leave an indentation. So, what? You sweep the marks away with . . . what? Your foot?

  “Owen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you have the crime scene photographs from Victoria Prew’s? I’m looking for the outside ones . . .”

  He glanced up, seemed to be working to piece her words together, then a slight shake of his head. “Sorry. Yeah. Ah, hang on.” Owen pushed himself up, fingers scrabbling through the tray of papers that sat on his desk. “I . . . Here they are. You want . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I’ll just take the lot. Cheers.”

  Mina pulled the glossy pages out of the envelope, selected the ones that showed the outside of the house, and spread them across the desk. There was the car, still parked on the driveway. There was the garden, the indentations in the mud. She frowned. Right, somewhere there should be . . . There. The side passage that led from the front to the back. It was closed off by a high wooden gate. No lock, just a latch.

  Had they . . . ? Yes. They’d checked the gate for prints, the hinges for fibers. They’d come back empty.

  Another picture, this one of the narrow passage itself. Pushed up against the wall of the house was a cavernous wheelie bin. Beside it, two large plastic boxes for recycling. And beside that . . .

  “Bingo,” muttered Mina.

  “What?”

  She waved the photograph at Owen. “Why were there no drag marks on the driveway? It’s a pretty safe assumption that he moved her across the gravel. We already found drag marks at the rear of the house, so we know he was dragging her . . . so why none in the gravel out front?”

  “I’m guessing this is a rhetorical question . . .”

  “The sweeping brush. See? It’s tucked beside the wheelie bin. He covered his tracks. Just like he must have closed the car door after he’d killed her.”

  “The shoe . . .”

  Mina shrugged. “Maybe he missed it? It was gray. The interior was gray. Dark night.”

  “Okay,” said Owen, frowning, “so he killed her and then tidied up after himself. Any prints on the brush?”

  “Ah . . . I can’t see anything that says it was examined. Do me a favor. Could you call downstairs for me? See if someone can go back out to the house and check it out?”

  As Owen picked up the phone and dialed quickly, Mina flipped through the pages of her notebook. Okay. We know he dragged Victoria out to position her. But Maggie, that was too far. No way could he have done that. So then, the tire track.

  She pulled her keyboard closer, typed hurriedly. The CCTV from the Aubrey Arms had been examined. If you were going to drive through the village from Maggie’s to the wall, you’d have to pass by there. She ran quickly through the report, then blew out a breath. Nothing. Three cars passed in the relevant time period. One, a young mother with three children in the backseat. Two, a group of four hikers, who actually stopped in the Aubrey Arms for food. Three, a man in his mideighties. None of them fitting the profile of the murderer.

  Mina leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed on the screen, her mind elsewhere. There was a tire track at the rear of Maggie’s house. He must have driven her. Nothing else made sense. She moved the mouse, pulling up an aerial map of Briganton. If he had driven out of the lane, hooked a quick left . . . he’d have risked being seen immediately outside the house, but other than that . . . he could have driven north, heading toward Bowman’s Hill, then taken another left, come out of the village on country roads, and then ducked back around toward the wall, all the while avoiding CCTV, ANPR. Which suggested that this guy, whoever he was, he knew Briganton well.

  “God.” Mina scrubbed at her eyes, unsure whether what she needed was to sleep or to cry.

  “Someone’s going out to the Prew house now,” said Owen, placing the phone back down. “Did you know that Chief Super Clee ordered a forensic reexamination of everything from the McGowan murders?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nuh-uh. Zoe just said.” He gestured to the phone. “Maybe the bosses have as many questions about Superintendent Bell as we do.”

  “Interesting . . .” Mina stared at the map, then sat up a little straighter. Victoria Prew was dragged. Maggie Heron driven. But what about the original victims? She let her finger trace across the screen. The first bodies—of Kitty and Ben and Zach—they were left on the section of wall that ran immediately behind Briganton, just a hundred meters from maybe a dozen houses. The problem was that there was a time lapse between the murder of Kitty Lane and Ben Flowers and the display of their bodies. Witnesses at the time testified to passing that section of the wall—dog walkers, joggers and, much to their intense mortification, one couple who had been using the wall as an alfresco romance point, unbeknownst to their respective spouses. All of them reported nothing out of the ordinary. The evidence was clear that the bodies were not left there much before 4:00 a.m. So where were they kept in the meantime? The original investigation had never been able to pin that down, and McGowan had remained as silent on that score as he had on so many other things.

  Mina traced the line of houses, identical then as now, with one notable exception. Where Victoria Prew’s house now stood there had been a ramshackle building, at odds with the grander designs around it.

  “Owen,” she said, “what’s this?”

  “What?” He wheeled his chair closer, squinted at the screen. “The bungalow? That was Mr. Minnaker’s. Grumpy old sod. Died when I was, I don’t know, thirteen?”

  “So before the original murders?”

  “Oh yeah. Maybe . . . three years before. The house was in a bad way when he was alive. Once he died, it pretty much fell apart. Stayed like that for . . . God, years and years, until the developer that built the Prew house bought it and knocked it down.”

  Mina was no longer paying attention. She was looking at the shape of the parcel of land, the small square house that sat in
the center of it, the way the rear of it opened onto the moor, only a low hedge separating garden from wilderness. She studied the trees that ringed the front of it, dense and overgrown, creating a private oasis, where one could hide pretty much anything. Even a car.

  “The house,” she said. “Was it well secured?”

  “Secured?” Owen snorted. “No. Kids were always breaking in there. I remember when I was fifteen, we had this party there and . . . well . . .” His voice skittered away; color rushed to his cheeks. “No,” he finished limply. “No, it wasn’t secured.”

  Mina felt the room shift. “Owen,” she said, “what if that was where the bodies were stored? In the original murder series. What if that’s where McGowan and whoever he was working with . . . if they left them where Victoria’s house is now until it was time to move them to the wall?”

  Owen seemed to freeze in time. “I . . .”

  “That would mean,” continued Mina, “that Victoria was connected to the original murder series, just like Maggie was.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Mina jabbed her finger at the map and the tumbledown house. “Maggie, she was the cousin of an original victim. But Victoria, apparently, had nothing to do with the original series, because she wasn’t here. But maybe Victoria wasn’t murdered because of who she was, but because of where she lived.”

  The victim – Ramsey

  Ramsey stared at the computer monitor, trying to concentrate on the lines of text.

  The village had shifted, now no longer safe and quiet, now a place that death stalked.

  He rested his fingers on the keyboard, feeling the shape of the keys, the ridges and the valleys between them. Concentrate.

  Ramsey leaned forward, put his head in his hands. He kept seeing Isla’s face, the raw, unadulterated fear on it when he had said the words—It’s not me he’s after. It’s you. It was an alien feeling when what you were used to seeing in your wife was a fighting-back attitude, flashes of fear snatched away by steely resolve. It was the hallmark of their life together, that refusal of hers to be weak, to be vulnerable.

  He thought of the letters, with their quiet, unexpressed threat, of the picture of the two of them, the words printed on its back.

  Isla had simply shaken her head, unwilling to see that this was anything other than a side effect of her job. Ramsey had done what he knew he shouldn’t. When Isla had left to return to work, he had picked up the phone and called her father. Along with Bonnie, Eric had been waiting for her late last night, and upon her return, she’d been met with a storm of righteous indignation and fatherly fear.

  “I need to see these letters. Jesus, Isla, where’s your sense? Why didn’t you bring them to me as soon as you got them?” Eric had snatched the letters from Isla’s unwilling hands, had read them rapidly, his face paling. “Isla . . . you know what this means, right? You understand what is going on here?”

  “Eric . . .” Bonnie, her voice oil on a storm-tossed sea.

  “No, Bonnie. She has to start thinking. This”—he held the letters up in front of Isla’s face—“it’s McGowan. You said these started after she first went to see him, yes, Ramsey?”

  Ramsey looked from the contained fury of his wife’s gaze to the less contained fury of his father-in-law’s and chose his side. “Yes.”

  Isla stared at him, a look that said in no uncertain terms that he had made the wrong choice.

  “It’s him. It’s bloody him.”

  “Dad.” Isla’s voice was like ice.

  “You know that you probably started this. Yes? You get that?”

  Isla froze. “What? Started what?”

  “You don’t think it’s a coincidence? That you start to do your little experiments with Heath McGowan and suddenly the killings on the wall begin again? You’ve rubbed his nose in it, Isla. The fact that we survived, that he’s in prison. And now he’s found some damned wicked lackey to finish off what he started.”

  Ramsey, expecting his wife to fight back, took one inadvertent step away in anticipation of the war to follow. And yet she did not say a word. Simply turned, walked out of the room, slammed the door behind her. Eric left eventually, blowing out on a gust of fury, the letters sealed tight in an evidence bag, words such as irresponsible and cavalier thrown behind him for good measure.

  Isla had not spoken to Ramsey since. She had slept in the spare room, had left the house before he woke.

  Outside his study window, the sun had broken through the clouds for the first time in what felt like weeks. Ramsey looked up, watched its pale light, the faintest trace of blue sky beyond the gray. That, he supposed, was the point of it all, wasn’t it? That the blue sky remained beyond the black. It had stopped raining; the wind had dropped. Perhaps it was a sign that somehow life could return to what it had once been.

  Ramsey closed the window of his document, pulled up Safari. The news pages were still there, where he had left them, tab after tab opened side by side. THE KILLER ON THE WALL STALKS BRIGANTON ONCE MORE. On each page, pictures of the victims, of Zach in his schoolboy finest, his hair split into awkward curtains, his smile tentative, embarrassed. And another picture—Ramsey in a former life, one filled with teenage acne and angst. The tagline “The only survivor of the killer on the wall.”

  He shoved himself away from the computer, walked with long, loping strides to the door, out into the hallway, down the stairs. The day outside was colder than it had been, the parting of the clouds bringing with it an ice-cold wind. Perhaps it would snow. Ramsey climbed into the car, thinking that snow would be nice.

  The streets were quiet, the country roads quieter still, and he arrived at the university more quickly than he had anticipated. He parked the car in the visitors’ parking lot and hurried away from it, passing small huddles of people, students, and staff, whose heads turned to follow him. Their gazes dipped as he met them, the watchers denying to themselves who they were—voyeurs caught up in the latest chapter of a sensational story. He walked quickly through the lobby and pulled open the door on the right, to a long corridor that led to a series of offices. And Isla’s.

  Isla’s door stood firmly shut, the drifting sounds of a keyboard easing from behind it. Ramsey found himself pausing, overtaken now by a craving to see his wife, to feel her hand on his cheek, to have her center him, bring him back to the middle ground. And yet the door was closed so firmly. He raised his hand, then dropped it again, sighing heavily.

  Ramsey carried on down the corridor, two, three doors, to where Connor’s door stood propped open. Through the narrow slit he could just make out the edge of him, of his dark sweatshirt, his wild hair. He tapped lightly on the door, watched as Connor twisted in his chair, recognized him, his face hurrying through a race of emotions.

  Then, “Ramsey. Come on in.”

  It was . . . chaos. Few other words would work. He closed the door behind him, picked his way around towers of papers that appeared to have been dumped randomly on the office floor. “Hey, sorry to disturb.”

  “Nah. Take a seat.”

  Ramsey looked from left to right, searching for the proffered seat.

  “Yeah, just whack those journals on the floor. There you go.” Connor had swiveled in his chair and was watching him closely. “So, how you doing?”

  Ramsey sank into the chair, shrugged. “You know. Fun and games. I went out to see Victoria Prew’s mother yesterday.” He looked at Connor and winced. “This bloody article I’m writing. They wanted me to get her reaction to what happened. Jesus. Imagine it. What do you suppose her reaction would be?”

  Connor was studying him. “How was she?”

  “She was actually very nice. Said she wanted to talk about Victoria, wanted people to see her as more than just a victim. But the grief, you could smell it, you know?”

  “Yeah, mate. I just, I can’t imagine it.” His expression had become grim “It’s . . . I mean, you. To go through it once is bad. Twice, it’s just unbelievable. You, are you doing okay?”

&nbs
p; Connor leaned forward now, a priest ready to take confession, and suddenly Ramsey felt absurdly like laughing. Okay? He could barely remember what okay felt like. He shook his head. “I . . .” Stopped, drew in a breath. “Zach’s picture. It’s everywhere.” He gave a little laugh. “My picture is everywhere. You have any idea how shit I looked as a teenager? Now it’s all I see.”

  Connor was watching him, gaze intent.

  “You know, I knew Heath,” offered Ramsey. “Before, I mean. It’s a small village. Not too many people you don’t get to know in a village like this. He was . . . You could tell he had issues, if you know what I mean. Just looked like the kind of guy that was destined for trouble. Of course, no one had any clue just how bad things would go.” The words were coming now, spilling out in an irresistible wave. “The thing is, the thing that I keep thinking about, is that I saw him a couple of days before the murders. It was early, like, really early, and Zach, he’d gone in to get his newspapers for his round. I was helping him, see. Because, I don’t know . . . I sometimes wonder if it was because I got this sense from him, you know, that he wouldn’t be around long, so I was trying to get as much time with him as I could. But honestly, I think at the time it was just because I liked hanging out with him. He was a good kid.”

  An image of Zach flashed before his eyes, of his hair roughened from sleep, the newspaper sack slung across his shoulder, of his bouncing, exuberant gait.

  “Heath, he’d been drinking. I mean, you could smell it on him from a mile away. Was on his way back to his grandmother’s after a night out. But, you know, he was pleasant enough, so you don’t . . . you just don’t think. He asked me what I was doing up so early, and I told him about Zach and his paper round. I said that he did it every morning.” Ramsey rubbed his hand across his face. “Thing is, now I don’t know . . . Was that why? Was that why he went after Zach and me? Because I told him where we’d be?”