I Am Watching Read online

  Connor bit his lip, seemed to be picking his way carefully through his words. “Rams, guys like this, when they find a target, they go after the target. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything you could have done about it. You and Zach, you were just unlucky that it was that day, that you happened to be there when he needed victims.”

  Ramsey wiped his eyes, sitting up straighter, pushing away that image of Zach walking in front of him. “I . . . Look, this isn’t why I came. I’m sorry. It’s . . . Right, I needed to talk to you about Isla.”

  “Okay?” Connor frowned.

  “She’s been getting death threats.” Ramsey watched as Connor’s eyes darted around as he tried to think up some covering lie. “She showed them to me, Con.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah.” He coughed, running his hands through his hair. “Well, yeah, it happens. I mean, it happens to me too. Not as much as to Isla, but it’s kind of part of the job.”

  “And did she tell you that letters have been coming to the house?”

  Connor paled. “What? No. Jesus.”

  “Look, I’m worried. The murders, these letters. I mean, the kind of people she deals with, you both deal with, what if it’s made her a target? Her father, he’s freaking out about that, and maybe he’s got a point. Everyone is thinking that these killings are about what happened in Briganton the last time, that that’s the motivation, but what if it’s something different? What if whoever it is has come to Briganton because of Isla? What if they’re using the village’s history, playing to the media, the local fears?”

  “So, what?” asked Connor. “You think this is someone we’ve dealt with in the past? Someone we’ve studied?”

  Ramsey sighed. “I don’t know, Con. Maybe it’s just my paranoia. I just . . . if anything ever happened to her.”

  Connor looked down at his hands. “Yeah. I know. Look, I’ll go through all my old records, see if I can find anything that rings a bell. And as for Isla, I’ll keep an eye on her, make sure she’s safe.”

  Ramsey nodded. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  The knock on the door startled him and Connor both, its three quick raps pulling him back into the world.

  Connor rolled his eyes, pulled a face at him. “Come in.”

  The door eased open. A young woman, achingly thin, with dense make-up, blond hair streaked with blue, smiled brightly at Connor, then Ramsey. “Hey. I have my assignment.”

  “Oh, Scarlett, excellent. You’re the first one to the finish line.”

  “I do like to win.” The girl gave a tinkling waterfall of a laugh and pushed the door open farther, and they saw a narrow young man hanging in the hallway behind her. His gaze flicked up to them and then away again, but his hair was brushed forward so far that it was astonishing he could see anything at all.

  “Hi, Parker,” offered Connor. “You have your assignment too?”

  The boy looked up at him, his cheeks flaming red, then darted his gaze back down. “No, I, I forgot to bring it in. I can go get it.” He glanced down at his watch. “Is that okay? I mean, I can be back here by five . . .”

  Connor looked at Ramsey, gave him a quick grin, then turned back to the students. “I’m here all day, Parker.”

  The girl was watching Ramsey now. He looked down, picked at the fabric of his trouser leg. Almost wished that she would just come right out and say it, the way some did: “You’re that guy, aren’t you? The victim?” But then it seemed her gaze was torn away, pulled by something outside the room, and she stepped back, shifting her attention elsewhere.

  “Hi.” Parker wasn’t speaking to them but had colored. His gaze dropping, he looked like he regretted speaking.

  “Hey, Parker, Scarlett.” Isla’s voice came like a cold drink on a hot day. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” chirruped Scarlett. “Just dropping off an assignment.”

  She backed out of the room, allowing Isla to take her place. The sounds of her and Parker’s footsteps, their low murmurs echoed down the quiet corridor.

  Isla frowned at Ramsey. He watched her, waiting to see whether the storm had passed.

  She gave him a half smile. “Do you work here now?” Detente.

  He grinned, suddenly able to again. “Yeah, Connor has hired me as a cleaner. He needs someone to sort out this shit hole.”

  “Hey!” protested Connor. “I’m sitting right here.”

  Isla smiled, hefting a briefcase from hand to hand. “Dude, seriously. My husband’s going to need a tetanus shot now. Right. I’m off.”

  It was something in the way she said it. The way the words were formed, defiantly almost, the way her eyes darted down, brushing the edge of his gaze.

  “Where are you going?” asked Ramsey. His heart had begun to beat a little faster.

  “I have some more tests to run.”

  It was the way Connor shifted, pushing himself upright, the look of alarm that flashed across his face.

  “Isla,” said Ramsey quietly. “Where are you going?”

  She wouldn’t look at him, and then she did, a square look, one that dared him to press her, all trace of the frightened girl vanished. “I’m going out to the prison again. I’m going to continue the tests with Heath McGowan.”

  Perhaps the room suddenly became silent, or perhaps the air had been sucked from it. It was difficult for Ramsey to tell. “You . . .” His heart was thundering now. “Isla, are you insane?”

  She didn’t answer, just looked at him.

  “I . . . I don’t know what more proof you need. Whoever is doing this, they have you in their sights.”

  “Yes,” replied Isla calmly. “And Heath is in prison. So it’s not him. Therefore, I’m going to continue my research.”

  Ramsey could feel the swell of anger rising up as he pushed himself to his feet, could tell the words that would come would be hard as nails. “Jesus Christ, Isla. How much more? How much more do you need to do to prove yourself? Yes. You’re not afraid. We all know that. Only I bloody am. And that man”—he was shouting now—“that man killed my brother. That man almost killed me. That man is dangerous, Isla. He is so dangerous, and you have brought yourself to his attention. Every day. You are visiting him every day. What do you think that means to him? What do you think he’s going to do with that? You’re making this worse, Isla.”

  She looked from him to Connor, her head lowered, jaw tight. “What would you have me do, Ramsey? Run away? Hide? Well, guess what? This is who I am. This is what I do. And I’ll be buggered if this bastard is going to stop me.”

  “And if he’s controlling it? If it’s Heath who is running this, from inside his prison cell?”

  Her color was high now; voice cold. “Then someone had better figure that out. And if you’ll excuse me, that is just what I intend to do.”

  Dying flowers – Mina

  Mina’s calves ached. The wind had picked up, was hurling itself into their faces as if it wanted nothing more than to drive them backward, indoors, where they belonged. She and Owen rounded the corner of Dray Lane and stood looking down toward the wall.

  “Well, that went well.” Owen shivered.

  They had walked the route, two miles from the lane that ran behind Maggie’s house, up toward Bowman’s Hill, out of the village on winding country roads, and then back down until they reached the wall. Mina wasn’t sure exactly what they had been looking for. Anything really. And yet here they were.

  “It was worth a shot,” she offered.

  Owen grunted. “Would have liked to have seen the super do that.”

  Mina grinned, thinking of Eric Bell, with his burgeoning potbelly and his almost hidden limp. “You think the great Eric Bell couldn’t have whipped our arses on that?”

  Owen snorted. “We heading back?” Then, seeing her expression, he frowned. “What? Oh God, what now?”

  Mina shrugged, the hood of her coat brushing against her ears. “Thought maybe we could just pop along and visit the scene of Ben Flowers’s attack. You know, seeing as we’re here.�
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  “Min . . . you’re going to get us fired.”

  Mina wrinkled her nose. “I know. I’m sorry. Look, you head back and tell the super, I don’t know, that I’ve got period cramps or something.”

  “Period cramps? Really?” Owen rolled his eyes. “Dear God. Come on.”

  They retraced their steps, walking quickly through the village, past the Aubrey Arms, a right at the church, down the hill, the cold wind scrubbing at their cheeks. The Dog & Bone sat about a third of the way down the hill, its placard swinging wildly in the bitter cold wind—a bloodhound gnawing on a bone. With its tattered notice boards and scuffed paintwork, it had a rougher feel to it than the Aubrey Arms. There was rarely trouble in the village, but when there was, it usually came from here. It also had the rather dubious distinction of being the last place that Ben Flowers was seen alive.

  “So,” said Mina, flipping through a file as the wind tugged and pulled at the pages. “Ben Flowers, twenty-six years old, ran his own gardening business. Which is . . . yeah.” She held up a photograph, faded with time. “Did you know him?”

  Owen shook his head. “I heard the stories, after. But no, I don’t remember him.” He leaned closer in to Mina and the file. “He wasn’t a small man.”

  It had been taken in the church grounds, that photograph. It showed Ben, lost in concentration, working on the grounds, a shovel in hand, his thick arms taut, flexing into deeply curved muscles, a wide chest.

  “He was married, no kids. Wife was a Rachel Flowers. On that night, that last night, he’d come here”—Mina waved toward the Dog & Bone—“with his friends. The investigation dug up more than a dozen people who remembered seeing him. Reports were that he was quite drunk.”

  “Quite?”

  “Steaming,” amended Mina. “He stayed here until late, about one fifty a.m.”

  A lock-in.

  “He finally left,” said Mina, “apparently barely able to walk. A friend of his, Toby Benedict, was with him. Reports indicate he was also pretty drunk. What happened next is less clear. Toby, in his interview, said that they walked together down the hill”—she gestured at the sloping pavement that led down into the heart of the village—“but that he, Toby, that is, turned off along Wiseman’s Lane. Last he saw of Ben, he was still ambling downhill.”

  Mina sighed, took another pull of coffee from her thermos, letting her gaze trail across the pub door, seeing a staggering, useless behemoth of a man, buffeted by the night air, making an unsteady turn down toward the village. She moved away from Owen, calculating the proceedings. You could just about make out the church off there in the distance. To the right, a couple of streets connected with this road, leading to homes and people, but on the hill itself, there was little to break the silence. A little farther down, a new housing estate had sprung up on the left as you descended, well embedded now, with its box houses and self-consciously manicured lawns. But twenty years ago, a walk down this hill would have involved nothing but you and the moors.

  “It would have been pretty isolated back then. Not a bad spot to make a kill.”

  “So, no one saw Ben after he left Toby Benedict?” Owen asked.

  Mina shook her head. “Not until his body was found the following morning.”

  Owen looked back at her. “That’s interesting.”

  “The original investigating team certainly thought so. In the original case, Toby was earmarked as a possible suspect. Until they found Heath McGowan, of course.” Mina walked back toward Owen.

  “Okay,” he said, “so let’s think this through. Do we have a time of death on Ben Flowers?”

  “Ah.” Mina leafed through pages. “Between one fifty and three a.m.”

  “And Kitty was five p.m. until eight p.m., yeah?”

  Mina nodded. “Okay . . . so Kitty first. Then Ben. So based on our theory, McGowan, and . . . whoever else, took both victims to the derelict bungalow that stood where Victoria Prew’s house is now. They leave them there until the early hours of the morning. Then move them to the wall.” Mina drained the coffee, her insides growling. She wished she had thought to bring food with her. “Okay, so according to Ben Flowers’s postmortem, Flowers received several blows to the head with a large, flat object, consistent with, say, a plank of wood. Some were glancing. Others were enough to have knocked him out. Grazes on his elbow, his knee, suggest that at some point during the evening, he had fallen, perhaps against the curb.”

  Mina nodded, thought of . . . What’s her name? Eve? A detective she had never met before this case. “Hey,” she had said, “did you know they took fingernail scrapings from all the original victims?” They couldn’t get anything from them back then, but it might be worth pursuing.

  Mina stared up at the wavering sign. Perhaps, in the end, it would all come down to science, after all.

  The sound of voices shattered the quiet. Two little girls emerged from the new estate, dressed in thick pink parka coats, their hair pulled into high ponytails. They walked on either side of their mother, both chattering loudly. Mina watched them, their laughter gripped by the wind and thrown at her. Amazing, somehow, that innocence could remain even in the light of so much death.

  “You said he was married? Ben, I mean.”

  “Rachel Flowers,” agreed Mina. “She’s . . . ah, lives in Braith, so not too far. She’s a nurse now.” She grinned at Owen. “Fancy popping in for a visit?”

  Owen groaned. “You are going to get us in so much trouble. Fine. Fine. Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  A hamlet with little more than a dozen houses nestled up against Kielder Forest, Braith sat perhaps ten miles from Briganton. Mina drove the shimmeringly wet country roads with care.

  “I never did hear back from that girl,” offered Owen. “The one who stood me up.”

  Mina eased her foot off the accelerator and nodded slowly. “Probably for the best. Sounds like a flake.”

  “Yeah.” Owen sighed.

  Mina glanced at the clock. She had had four missed calls from her mother overnight, had called her back on her way into work. Her mother had had a nightmare. Had seen Mina throttled by the killer on the wall. I want you to come home. I want you to leave there, come here where it’s safe. That bubble of something hard had formed in Mina’s belly again. Was it anger? Resentment? That she had run so far, and yet it still was not far enough? Really, Mina, if only you would come home. That’s what I really need. And Mina had felt that old familiar sinking sensation, heard the sound of the only door sliding closed. “No, Mama,” she had said, slipping her foot into the gap. “I can’t do that.”

  She and Owen spoke little as the remaining miles slipped by, Mina looking out across the vast emptiness of the moor. Some people called it lonely, but for Mina the undulating scrub represented freedom. Eventually, as a pallid sun broke through the dense clouds, Mina pulled the car up outside a small detached house with a trailing ivy clambering up its frontage, the trees shielding it from the world outside. A pink child’s bike sat outside the front door, a bubblegum helmet hanging from one handlebar.

  What had she expected? That twenty years on, Ben Flowers’s widow would still be drawing her curtains and wearing black? She released her seat belt slowly and climbed from the car, dense with the unsettling sense of abandonment, the forgotten dead. And yet, that was how it was, wasn’t it? How it had to be. That people died, were mourned, and then left behind.

  She followed Owen slowly along a stone-covered drive, waited while he drummed politely on the door. The sound of hurrying footsteps, and then the door swung open. Rachel Flowers was in her forties now, and there was no other word to describe her than beautiful, with large brown eyes, full lips, make-up careful and discreet. She was also bald.

  “Oh, hi. Sorry. I . . . Mornings are crazy here. I haven’t even put my hair on yet.”

  Owen stuck out his hand, face stoic. “I’m DC Owen Darby. I called from the car? This is DC Mina Arian.”

  “Of course. Come in. Come in. I’ve made coffe
e. Can I get you anything to eat? Some toast? The kids are in the living room, eating their breakfast, so perhaps best if you come through to the kitchen.”

  They followed her down the long hallway, into a brightly lit kitchen.

  Rachel poured coffee into three large mugs. “Terrible for you, of course, but frankly, I wouldn’t get out of bed without it. Was it a yes on the toast?”

  “No,” said Mina, stomach growling. “Please don’t go to any trouble. Coffee is fine.”

  “Pish. It’s no trouble. Have a muffin, then. Blueberry, so I hope that’s okay?” Rachel shoved a plate of muffins toward them, slid onto the bench seat beside Mina, then dumped two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She ran her palm across the smooth stretch of her scalp. “Excuse the dazzle of light hitting my scalp. I have wigs, which I tend to wear if I’m out and about, but my God, they’re uncomfortable. Still, one always feels that one should warn people so as not to shock them. Bald lady inside. Beware.”

  “Are you . . .”

  “Sick? No. Well . . . alopecia. It hit just after Ben . . . Stress, I imagine. Shocking at the time, of course, although somewhat less shocking than your husband being killed by a serial killer, so, you know, perspective. Still, it’s been a long time now. It’s amazing what you can adapt to.” She moved the muffins to beneath Mina’s nose. “Please, take one. So, you wanted to ask me about Ben?”

  “Yes.” Mina’s fingers had gripped the muffin without her fully intending them to, were clutching it tight, with little apparent intention of letting go. “I’m so sorry if this brings up painful memories for you.”

  Rachel waved her apologies away. “That’s the thing about grief, about losing someone like that. It never really leaves you, anyway. It creeps under your skin. Sometimes, I’ll be doing something silly, like sitting in traffic or weeding—weeding is a good one—and I’ll hear Ben’s voice. Don’t do it that way. Do it this way. And, do you know, even after twenty years and a second marriage to a man whom I love more than life itself, still, in those times, I’ll miss Ben so much that it physically hurts.”

  “I’m sorry,” repeated Mina.