I Am Watching Read online

  She pulled a box file from the shelf behind her, flipped open the lid of it, pulled a weight of paper from inside. There were manila folders, stacked one on top of the other. Isla arrayed them across the tabletop in front of her, leaving spaces between them, a dozen in all. Then she flipped open the cover of each, one after the other. A dozen men stared back at her. A dozen different photos tacked to the inside cover of the files.

  Twelve men. Between them, they had murdered seventy-five people.

  She studied their faces, as if there she would find some kind of physiognomic truth. The truth was they looked like twelve men, like any twelve men, some attractive, some not, some threatening, some nondescript.

  If you wanted to find the commonalities within these men, she thought, you had to look deeper.

  Isla turned a page, one for each file, so that before her lay twelve sheets, four images of the brain on each, each image taken at a different angle. There. There was what made these twelve men all the same. Splashes of bright blue in the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex, the parietal lobe. The riot of light indicating that these areas, so important in the ability to understand social situations, to process emotions, and to decide upon a course of action, were, in these men, failing. Then the same vivid blue in the orbital frontal cortex. The area that helps us control our baser urges. The entire paralimbic system standing proud, highlighted by its lowered density.

  Isla studied the brain scans. These twelve men had been failed by their own biology. Their brains, while structurally perfect, did not work as they should, the entire paralimbic system, a network that ran throughout the brain, simply refusing to operate to its full potential. Like an ankle or a knee with an inherent weakness, so that its owner was limited in his or her ability to function in the world. But for these men . . . this dysfunction meant an awful lot more than the inability to run a marathon. Their failings and weaknesses changed the world around them, often bringing destruction, occasionally death. No one knew if the psychopathy—a complex, impenetrable personality disorder—was caused by the brain dysfunction or if the brain dysfunction was caused by the psychopathy. And yet, whichever way it fell, the results remained the same. Those suffering from a poorly functioning paralimbic system all showed the same basic traits—problems in feeling emotionally connected to others, a tendency toward being emotionally shallow, irresponsible, impulsive, and sometimes downright cruel.

  Twelve men, all killers. All with the same fatal physiological flaws. Would Heath’s scan show the same? It would be unscientific to jump to conclusions in the absence of evidence. But Isla would still be willing to bet her next month’s salary that in Heath she would find an almost identical pattern.

  Isla looked across the sea of psychopaths. It was an easy word to throw around—like being depressed when you are merely sad—and yet here before her were the true psychopaths. All scoring well into the thirties on the Psychopathy Checklist, all carrying with them that edge, the sense that you were little more than prey in the hands of a predator.

  Isla leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, chin resting on hands, and searched the images for a secret. Because these men, they didn’t kill just once. They killed again and again, until they were stopped. And if she could find something, some unexpected area of blue hidden within their brains, that separated these twelve from the myriad run-of-the-mill psychopaths that stuffed the files in the bookcase behind her, then maybe she could use that to stop the next serial killer. Or the one after that.

  A gust of wind tugged at the trees, battering branches against the window. Isla winced but refused to look up. A hundred and twenty people. She had scanned one hundred and twenty people so far. She had been scanned more times than she could remember. It was a long-standing family joke that it was always advisable to tell Isla what it was you wanted for Christmas, for birthdays, otherwise you would end up with a functional MRI image of your own brain, nicely framed. She had coaxed most of Briganton into an fMRI machine, including her mother, her father, her husband, and her sister. It was, she had told them, a gigantic adventure. After all, who could pass up the opportunity to see inside themselves? To drill right down to the heart of who you were?

  One hundred and twenty people. Of those, forty-four met the criteria for psychopathy and had been imprisoned for various crimes, up to and including murder. Two control groups, then. The normals. The psychopaths.

  Then the twelve serial killers. The ones for whom it wasn’t simply a loss of control, a temper run amok, but rather a base urge, something that pushed them and pushed them until in the end they just couldn’t stop killing.

  She looked at the twelve. Her twelve. What is it that makes you different? What pushes you beyond even the loose-limbed limits set by psychopathy as a whole?

  She reached down, pulled the Heath McGowan file free from her bag, and placed his photograph on the tabletop, beside the others.

  Thought of his question. Will you tell me why it happened?

  She studied his flat gaze staring back at her. Would she be able to? Could she find the answer?

  A sharp rap on the door sent Isla’s heart rate spiking. She sat up straight, rolling her eyes, angry with herself for the fear.

  “Come in.” It sounded harder than she intended it to, a bark that she didn’t mean.

  “Don’t shoot!” Ramsey’s head peered around the door; his hands were raised in front of him. “Good day, then?”

  Isla grinned, shrugged. “I like to sound mean. It keeps the students away. What are you doing here?”

  Her husband slipped into the room, pressed the door firmly shut behind him. “I had to go pick some stuff up for Stephen Doyle. Thought I’d call in on you and see if you ever plan on coming home.”

  Isla smiled, studied him, the way she sometimes did when he came upon her unexpectedly. Tall, six feet two on a good day; broad shouldered; and blond. Looking at him made her heart skip a beat. Isla was pretty sure she wasn’t alone in thinking her husband was devastatingly handsome. She was observant enough, had seen enough heads turn in his presence to know that it was a generally accepted conclusion. Ramsey was hot. It hadn’t happened between them straight away, after Zach, after Ramsey’s attack, and the killer on the wall. While the village fought to understand itself and Ramsey’s family grieved, there were other concerns than romance. And then, suddenly, it was past and Heath was arrested and they were safe again, no matter how unsafe they continued to feel.

  And then Ramsey was gone. Escaping Briganton and all the dark memories that it carried, for a journalism degree. For ten years, Ramsey Aiken was little more than a memory of a dream, and when she thought of him, it was facedown in damp grass, an inch from the door of death. Then, one night with Emilia in the Aubrey Arms, two glasses of wine down and heading for the bottle, the door swung open, bringing with it a chill breeze and the transformed figure of Ramsey. They say time stands still in moments like these. Isla was no romantic, and yet even for her, that much was true. She watched him survey the pub—searching for his brother Cain, she would later discover. Then his gaze swung closer and closer, until it was on her, and a wide smile broke across his features.

  They had been together ever since.

  He kissed her on the forehead. “You know you have odd socks on, right?”

  Isla looked at her feet, one yellow, one blue. Shrugged. “I couldn’t find a pair. Then I realized I didn’t care.”

  “So?” He sank into the adjacent chair, carefully shifting his injured arm. “How was it? The scan, I mean.” He said it lightly, and if you didn’t know him, you might be fooled, but Isla could see it, the crease around his eyes, hear the catch in his voice.

  “It was fine.” Isla kept her gaze steady, her voice even. “He was very well behaved. Did the tests properly. There was no issue with too much movement, so we should get some good data out of it.”

  She had answered, and yet the truth was, that wasn’t the question, was it? He wasn’t asking her about her study; he was asking about her e
xperience of sitting across from the man who had tried to kill him.

  She opened her mouth. Closed it again. “He wasn’t what I expected,” she added quietly.

  Ramsey nodded slowly. He picked up Heath’s picture, studied it, was quiet for a very long time. Then he asked, “So . . . has he said anything about . . . you know?”

  Three dead bodies sitting on the wall.

  Three more to follow.

  “No. Nothing,” Isla said, leaning her head back, suddenly exhausted. “It’s not unusual. The information has value. Heath knows that. When all their power has been removed, men like this, they like to keep what they have, the truth of what they did, guard it, in case one day it will be of use to them. Heath knows that we want him to talk about what he did. He’s getting pleasure from depriving us of the answers we need.”

  Ramsey nodded slowly, plucking at a thread that had worked its way free from the seam of his trousers. “I know.” Then he sighed. “So, I had a different day . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stephen Doyle attempted to jump off the roof of your building.”

  Isla stared at him, and Ramsey held up his hands. “He’s okay. He didn’t, obviously. But he’s in a bit of a rough spot. I took him to his sister’s, said I’d come back here and get his things. Connor is going to arrange some counseling for him. Well, some more counseling.” He shook his head. “This thing just never ends, does it?”

  “No,” said Isla softly. “No, it does not.”

  Saturday, October 22

  “It’ll be okay” – Mina

  It began with a distant figure running.

  There should have been nothing to that, nothing at all. But in the murky early morning light, something about the movement made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Mina slowed the car, the Ford Focus’s engine groaning, leaned forward across the steering wheel.

  Mina peered through the spotting rain at the shape, willing it to coalesce into something that would begin to make sense. A long khaki coat, mud-soaked Wellington boots, a rain hat wedged firmly down so that the face was all but obscured. A lolloping, uncomfortable run, long looks thrown back over her shoulder. A dog, a dark-haired cairn terrier, towed behind, short legs a blur of movement.

  Yvette Goulding.

  Mina flipped her turn signal on, pulled the car up on the curb, shoved the door open. A gust of wind snatched it from her, forcing it to strain at its hinges.

  “Yvette?”

  The wind tugged at the response, pulling it from Yvette’s mouth and throwing it away toward the moors, until only a whisper remained. “Help. Help me.”

  “Yvette.” Mina hurried toward her, the wind yanking at her coat, at her hair. “What – – ”

  And Yvette, with her steel-rod back, her glowering menace, the iron librarian, as the children called her, sank to her knees on the rain-soaked pavement, gripping Mina’s hands. A noise breaking free from her that sounded like keening.

  “What is it?” Mina held on to her, allowing herself to be pulled down so that at last they were both kneeling on the ground in the rain and the wind.

  Yvette looked at her, tears flooding her cheeks, whispering, “It’s happened again.”

  Perhaps somewhere else, that would not have been enough. Perhaps in another place, it would not have felt like the intervening twenty years had been simply an exercise in waiting, the silence between notes.

  But it was not another place. It was Briganton, and even Mina had been here long enough to understand the way things worked. Time stilled, and the rain stopped.

  “Where?”

  The dog had pushed its way in between them now, was burying its nose in Yvette’s neck, whimpering. The elderly woman pulled the little dog closer to her, words directed into its fur. “At the end of Dray Lane.”

  Mina stood up, leaving Yvette Goulding and Jackson, the dog, sitting on the ground, and began to run. Water threw itself up from the lake-deep puddles. Round the corner and into the heart of a hurricane. The wind funneled through the narrow passageway, shoving her backward. Don’t come this way. You don’t want to see this.

  But there was no choice.

  From tarmac to slick mud, which threatened to throw her from her feet with each step, the uneven ground straining her calves, her thighs. Not looking up, because somewhere inside, she already knew what it was she would see.

  And then looking up, because ultimately you had to, didn’t you?

  She stopped dead in her tracks.

  She had googled Briganton after the real estate agent had offered her the house. And what had appeared first was not about its history or its scenery or its people. Instead, there was a picture in a newspaper, a woman, propped against the wall, dead. It had been taken by an enterprising journalist with a long-angled lens, had made the front page of every newspaper. There was a flurry of complaints in the comment section, about the media failing to allow for dignity in death, but what good did that do? The picture had been taken. The memory formed.

  And now it was here again.

  Only . . .

  Mina stepped forward, recognition tugging at her.

  Red hair. A single Christian Louboutin shoe. A woman standing at her floor-to-ceiling windows, telling Mina that she liked the view. And Mina telling her that she would be safe. That it would be okay.

  Victoria Prew.

  The body on the wall – Mina

  Victoria sat, her back pressed against Hadrian’s Wall. Her red hair hung in rat’s tails, wet against the slack gray of her cheeks. A vivid red line of fingermarks ringed her throat. Her hands were folded into her lap, and a dark swath of mud ran up her back, coloring her blue coat black. There could be little doubt that Victoria Prew was dead.

  Mina stared at the body, felt a tremble begin just above her right knee, a sense of heat rising through her cheeks. It wasn’t the deadness of Victoria that did it. In ten years in the Met, Mina had seen plenty of deaths. It was the grass beneath her, the way it bent and leaned, muddy pools blossoming beneath her thighs. It was the aged gray of the stone wall that pressed up against the peacock blue of her coat.

  It was the sense of a legend being catapulted back into life.

  “Mina?” said Owen. “Are you okay?”

  Mina stared at the body. “Yes,” she lied.

  The CSIs moved around the body, the wrinkling of their plastic suits creating an uneven harmony against the inevitable thrumming of the rain on the roof of the hastily erected tent. Mina folded her arms across her own forensic suit, drew in a couple of low breaths.

  “This was her? Last night’s call?” Owen kept his voice pointlessly low. As if there could be any secrets in such a small space.

  “Yes.”

  I told her it would be okay. I told her she would be safe.

  Mina’s vision was dancing, shifting back and forth between Victoria Prew, alive and vivid, and Victoria Prew, dead. It was dizzying, like a film that flickered between black and white and glorious Technicolor.

  “Poor thing,” said Owen softly.

  “Excuse us, guys,” said a CSI. “I need to get around you.”

  Mina made an effort to smile “Sorry, Zoe. I’ll give you some room. I’m going down to the house. I just . . .” But the words failed her, falling away, and, in lieu of them, she ducked beneath the tent flap out into the mercifully cold air. She breathed deeply, the chill grazing her throat, and tried to push away the memory of the woman’s slack face, limp hands.

  A small knot of people had formed at the cordon, set up where the boggy moor gave way to pavement at the boundary between the wilds and the village. Brightly colored umbrellas punched holes in the dull day. A police community support officer stood guarding the entry to the site, looking thrilled and terrified in equal measure. Mina scanned the crowd, careful to avoid eye contact with any one person. She counted one, two reporters. Could pick them out in their North Face jackets, their inappropriate shoes. The rest, they were Briganton people. Her gaze landed on diminutive Maggie H
eron, standing among the crowd, with well-worn boots, a coat thrown over a nightgown, long gray hair braided down her back, her face heavy with resignation. For people like her, for the ones who had lived through the killings, this would be as the reawakening of a dream.

  Mina turned away, suddenly aware of the cameras, the swing of their lenses toward her, and looked along the wall. You could see little beyond it this morning, a heavy mist sitting low across the undulating hills. It had stopped raining, and yet the moisture still sat heavy in the air. Waiting.

  Then a sound behind her, the rustle of the tent, Owen ducking awkwardly beneath the low door. “Getting a bit warm in there. You’re going down to the house?”

  Mina nodded.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  They walked in silence, the only sounds the distant murmur of the gathered crowd and the schlep of their boots through the mud. Mina kept her gaze on the houses that sat perhaps a hundred meters along from where the body had been left. Large homes, high hedges fencing them off from the wall. And there, four houses along, stood Victoria Prew’s, with its boxlike face and indecently low gated hedge. It was a dull day, visibility terrible, the mist making everything soft at the edges, and yet even now, Victoria’s house stood out like a beacon.

  Mina walked steadily toward it, wondering if the murderer had stepped where she was stepping now. Had he felt his foot jar against this rocky outcrop? Hadd he felt the wind that worked its way up across the moor strike his face?

  She slowed her step, approaching the rear of the house with an overabundance of care, her gaze fixed now, not on the house itself, but on the ground. He had stood here, watching, Victoria had said so herself. That is, she allowed, if the murderer and the stalker were in fact one and the same.