I Am Watching Page 6

  Mina studied the ground, the oozing mud, the white flecks of rock, the grass still gleaming with rain. Nearer to the rear of Victoria’s home, the mud eased off, leaving behind only gray stone, the occasional patch of grass. Nothing in which to leave a print. Mina stood for a moment, then turned around in a slow circle.

  “Anything?” asked Owen.

  “No footprints. Can you see anything? Drag marks? Based on the mud on her, he pulled her some distance.”

  Owen pursed his lips.‘ “I’m going to look closer down toward the wall. It’s boggier there. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Mina nodded. She didn’t say that lucky days generally did not begin with a dead woman left sitting at a wall. She looked up toward the house again, the vast expanse of the bedroom window now looking for all the world like a cinema screen. I stood in there last night. Was he here? Was he watching us? she wondered.

  She felt her breath begin to quicken, a feeling akin to panic beginning to flutter around the edges of her awareness.

  Focus.

  Whatever had happened, it’d happened quickly. The first team at the scene had found Victoria’s car waiting for her in the driveway. Inside the driver’s footwell, a single shoe left sad and alone, lying on its side. It was as if she had made it into the car, with one foot at least, and then had been dragged back out of it. An umbrella had been found caught on a hedge, its frame twisted about by the force of the wind or by something else. The attack on her, when it had come, had come quickly, filling little more than the time it took for her to open the car door and climb in. Less. He had waited until she was distracted, fumbling with her keys, perhaps folding up that umbrella that had got so wildly out of hand. And when she was vulnerable, because of the dark and the distraction and the weather, he had pounced.

  Why was Victoria here? Why had she come back? Mina had watched her drive away, and so she should not have been there, on her driveway, waiting to die. And yet here they were.

  Mina crouched down to study the ground that lay immediately beyond the back gate.

  “I’ve got some drag marks,” Owen called, “a little farther down that way.” He gestured toward Hadrian’s Wall, back in the direction of the tent. “It would have been a fair task getting her that far. I mean, she wasn’t big by any stretch, but still . . . I wouldn’t fancy it.”

  Mina stood up and stared in the direction he indicated. A flash of yellow marked the spot, the evidence marker waiting where Owen had left it.

  “The thing I don’t get,” said Mina quietly, “is why move her at all? If you want to kill her, why not just kill her where she was originally attacked? Why not leave her there? I mean, it’s not like he was trying to hide her. Why go to all that effort?”

  Owen bit his lip.

  “What?”

  “Maybe . . . I mean, the killer on the wall.”

  Mina frowned. “You’re kidding, right? You think Heath McGowan broke out of prison, came to kill her, put her on the wall, and then broke back in.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean that. I mean, this village. It’s lived with what happened for twenty years. To have something like this, it’s going to be terrifying for them.”

  “Okay?”

  Owen shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just saying that it’s a pretty good way to distract people from your real reason for wanting her dead.”

  Mina looked back toward the house. “She did say her divorce had got nasty. She seemed pretty sure that the stalker wasn’t her ex, but still . . . how often do you hear that? Oh, he’d never do that.” She let her gaze track along the wall to the tent. “Maybe you’re onto something.”

  There was a sudden movement at the cordon, the parting of the crowd, a flurry of voices. A stooped figure in a large overcoat broke free, ducking with an awkward stride beneath the yellow tape, out toward the body. Detective Superintendent Eric Bell.

  It had been a deciding factor for her, when the job had been advertised, a vacancy in the Northern force. When her family had gasped in horror at the thought of her crossing the great North-South divide, trekking into the unknown, she had held him out to them as a balm. But I’ll be working with Eric Bell. You know the one. He solved the killer on the wall case. Remember?

  Eric Bell had been the one to make the link with McGowan, a little spot of that charm he kept in special reserve poured into the ear of McGowan’s grandmother. It was enough that she voiced her own doubts about the boy, mentioned that he’d been asking questions about the habits of her neighbor, Kitty Lane, that he had a quick temper and a nasty little drug problem. Told Bell where he could find him, with that girlfriend of his. Of course, by the time Bell got there, the girlfriend had become the next victim. And then the arrest and the whole world throwing itself at Eric Bell’s feet, the detective who had caught the killer on the wall. He became a celebrity, for a while at least, the darling of the media. Mina had seen him in more than one documentary about the case. “He even wrote a book about it,” she had said to her mother. “Think of the opportunity.”

  The truth was, it was Eric Bell that had drawn her to policing in the beginning. Those stoic images of a hero policeman that had filled her teenage years, his legend sufficient that he was no longer a Briganton commodity but one cherished by the whole world. Or so it had seemed to Mina, anyway. Imagine being that, being the person who could end a reign of terror, who could bring safety and justice.

  And yet it had turned out that it was not always wise to meet your idols in the flesh, that few illusions were allowed to survive the scrutiny that came with close contact.

  She had introduced herself back when she first arrived, a long and, in retrospect, frankly embarrassing speech about the extent to which he had inspired her. She had got perhaps two-thirds of the way through it when Detective Superintendent Bell had simply turned on his heel and walked away.

  Thinking back on it now, Mina couldn’t really blame him.

  She watched him march toward the tent, the determination marred only by the limp, a hiccup in his movement. “God, it’s like the arrival of Madonna,” she muttered.

  “Yeah, well, the great Eric Bell. What do you expect? The entire village is probably ready to conduct human sacrifices if it’ll help him close this thing down like he did last time.” Owen shook his head. “Come on, we’d better get back. You know, pay homage.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just a second.”

  Mina peered over the gate into Victoria’s garden.

  “What?”

  “No, I just want to see.” She hooked the catch with her finger, pushed the gate open, the metal screeching against the path. “The lights.” She gestured to the narrow lampposts. “They were on last night. I left the house at the same time as Victoria. I don’t remember her turning them off.”

  “Maybe she did it when she came back?”

  Mina moved carefully from lamppost to lamppost and stood on tiptoe.

  “What is it?”

  An uneasy feeling settled on her. “The lightbulbs have been unscrewed. Look. You can see where they’re coming away from the base.” Mina looked back down the path toward the gate that connected front garden to back. “Before he moved her body, he made sure the garden was in darkness so if anyone looked out of their windows, they wouldn’t see.”

  She felt cold now, suppressed a shiver.

  He had stood here, where she stood. Had stretched up, calmly extinguished the lights. Mina looked down at her feet, still resolutely on the paved path. And there, in the sodden grass right before her, was a shape. She ducked down.

  “Owen, I’ve got a footprint.”

  Beginning again – Isla

  The water was so hot, it scalded her. Isla moved, positioning her face into the stream, a thousand pinpricks against her cheeks, as if this would wash it away. A body at the wall. A body at the wall. She swiveled the dial, turning the heat up. She couldn’t see, the water beating too hard for that. And so her back prickled with the sense of being stared at, her hands moving up to wip
e her eyes, evolution taking over where common sense had left off. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s just your imagination. But her hands moving, anyway, clearing her vision, her heart thumping with the need to know that he wasn’t here, that she wasn’t the next one dead.

  She blinked into the light. The bathroom was empty, save for the dense clouds of steam. She closed her eyes, hung her head, and stepped back beneath the water.

  She had run this morning, as she did every morning. Every single morning, she laced up her shoes, slipped the catch on the back door, and slid out into the darkness. Every morning, that same shoot of fear up her back. Pushing off, her heart beating out of proportion to the level of strain, and telling herself that it would be okay, because it was just fear, and fear could be conquered. Out the back door and down Dray Lane and then through the field, until finally she reached the wall. Running, the wall at her right, because here she felt like something bigger than herself, that she was a part of what had gone before, perhaps tracing footsteps left across the centuries, and that thought made her feel bigger and smaller both.

  Or perhaps she ran the wall for the other reason, for the fear itself. Daring herself to repeat that run of twenty years ago, to face it, every single morning. To lay footstep after footstep past the place where she’d found the bodies, simply to prove to herself that she could. That she would not be beaten.

  But today, with the thundering rain, the ground so soft it seemed that it would swallow you whole, today she had done something different. Had run down Dray Lane, had paused in the early morning darkness. She could feel the wall somewhere beyond, waiting. But it was wet and the ground was saturated and she had pulled her hamstring only a few days ago, so if she overdid it now, she could be out for weeks. Instead, she had reversed herself, back up Dray Lane, sticking to pavements, had run up past the church, the florist, had circled out of Briganton, up onto the country roads, had swooped back down, the village laid out before her.

  Had she gone the other way . . .

  Isla dumped the shampoo in her hands, more than was strictly necessary, let it flood into her eyes, where it stung.

  She had been on her way back home—had started thinking about hot coffee and a shower, hotter still—when she saw the crowd that had gathered at the edge of the moor. And in spite of the impossibility of it all, she had known. Had begun to run harder, hamstring be damned, and had snaked her way through the elbows and the umbrellas until she drew level with the cordon. Then the tent, and, emerging from it, alien in his forensic suit, her father.

  “Dad!”

  She felt the crowd pull back from her, driven by the force of her bellow, felt the PCSO twist to stare at her, inappropriately dressed in Lycra, wet hair plastered to her head. And her father. He pulled up short, his shoulders settling in what, even at that great distance, appeared to be resignation. He gestured to her, a quick flick of his fingers, an order that had to be obeyed, and Isla followed, sliding across the cordon to the far side, where the prying eyes were fewer. They were still watching, though; she could feel the weight of their gaze on her back.

  “Isla,” said her father. “You’re soaking.”

  Isla stared at him, assessing whether he had had a stroke, then glanced down at her running clothes, back at the tent behind him. “I . . . yes . . . Okay, never mind about that. What the hell is going on?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. Go home.”

  “Don’t give me nothing. That’s a forensic tent. Is there . . . Dad, is someone dead?”

  Her father looked away, and it seemed to Isla as if he was trying to find a way to flee from this conversation, as if some particularly witty conversational gambit would make her forget about the police and the forensic tent and the descending sense of the inevitable having come to pass.

  “Dad! Please . . .”

  “Yes, Isla,” her father snapped. “Yes, there’s been a murder. A woman is dead at the wall.”

  The shampoo now ran into her mouth, the taste acrid. A body at the wall. A woman murdered and left for the world to find her in the historic stomping ground of a serial killer. What did that mean? A copycat? Someone looking to walk in the footsteps of Heath McGowan, continue his good work? Or something else, a single solitary violent act, hidden in the history of a serial killer?

  Ramsey had been cooking when she got back, had been preparing the pancake batter for Emilia and her boys. A family breakfast, one that Isla had played along with, pretending that she didn’t know what they were trying to do. That her sister would walk into the house, would hand the baby to Isla—Isaac, six months old—wrapped up in his fluffy bear suit, his skin peach soft, smile like a thousand-watt bulb. That Emilia and Ramsey would smile and say that Isla was a natural, and oh, didn’t Isaac just adore his auntie Isla? It had become a long-running dance. And Isla would smile, too, and would pretend that her husband hadn’t co-opted her sister into this endless war to reproduce.

  She had stood at the kitchen door, had watched her husband as he hummed along with the radio, the whisk hitting the sides of the bowl in time to the music, balancing the bowl on the countertop, awkward with his one good arm. Had felt a lightness in her head and a hollowness in her stomach. She’d watched her husband, felt a wash of guilt, then another wash, more familiar—that fear again. She had hung in the doorway for an absurdly long time, unable to move, forward or back. Had started to say it. Once. Twice. But always the fear, the words ending before they had begun.

  And then he had turned, had seen her, the whisk stopping mid-rhythm, had known without her saying that something was wrong.

  Isla had opened her mouth, not knowing what would come out of it until it came. “There’s been another murder.”

  Isla scrubbed at her hair, nails scraping against her scalp. Eyes shut tight as the shampoo leached into them. The burning not enough to drive away the image of her husband’s face growing slack, the lightness becoming fixed, color slipping away as he made sense of her words. Not Ramsey the man now, but Ramsey the teenager, the only survivor. The radio still trilling, oblivious, the clank of the whisk hitting the side of the bowl.

  Thoughts fluttered and collided. They needed organizing. But for now, all she could think was that it had happened again.

  Isla snapped the shower off and grabbed for a towel, suddenly aware that her hands were shaking. Wrapped it around her, tight, her insides liquid. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. “Breathe,” she said to the woman. “Just breathe.”

  The fear growled.

  Isla slipped out of the bathroom, padded across the landing in bare feet. She knew where Ramsey would be.

  The file was spread out before him across the habitual orderliness of his desk. The newspaper articles, the pictures. He sat, slumped back in the desk chair, staring at it.

  “You okay?”

  Ramsey nodded, an acknowledgment of her presence rather than an answer in the affirmative. “It never goes away, does it?”

  Isla moved closer, slid into his lap. Feeling his breath on her bare shoulder, she rested her wet head against his cheek. “It’ll be okay.”

  Because what else did you say? When it seemed that life had moved on finally, had allowed you to leave a serial killer, a dead brother, in the years long past. When you finally, finally, started looking to the future, started to make plans that did not involve murder, and then this. It was as if they had been playing make-believe all these years; as if their lives, their plans, all of it was simply a game of dress-up, a diversion to fill time until the real nub of their lives would return.

  Ramsey kissed her on the shoulder, his arms moving around her.

  “My dad, he said that the victim was in the middle of a nasty divorce,” said Isla. “That she’d moved here to get away from him.”

  Isla felt Ramsey shift beneath her. “So . . . you think that’s what it is? Someone using the whole killer on the wall thing to throw the police off?”

  Did she think that? Who the hell knew? The truth was that right now, Isla would say
anything to make her husband feel safe again. And that lie, it was as good as any other.

  “Could be. I think it’s certainly something worth considering.”

  He sighed, and she could feel the relief in it. That whatever this latest horror turned out to be, it would not be the horror from twenty years ago. Best to forget that, whichever way it went, a woman had been murdered.

  A sound downstairs, footsteps, then a trill of voices. “Isla? Rams? You here?”

  Isla looked at her husband. His expression changing to a smile. “Circus is in town.” He kissed her on the nose, shifted her to standing. “You dress. I’ll go prevent the monkeys from running amok.”

  Isla stood where he had left her, listening to his quick tread on the stair, the faux-angry “Who’s making all this noise?” roar, the cascade of boyish laughter that followed. They adored him, the boys—Noah, six, and Elijah, three, baby Isaac. She tucked the towel tighter around her, listening to their shouts. Ramsey would be such a good father.

  But then, inevitably, her gaze fell to the newspaper cuttings that remained splayed across the desk, and her insides tumbled.

  She shook her head, took a deep breath, and slipped into their bedroom, dressed quickly, not bothering with make-up. She took the stairs slowly and, as she walked, tried to push away the fear.

  Her sister stood in the living room, laughing, her children clambering across their uncle’s broad back, the baby somehow miraculously sleeping soundly in his car seat. Emilia was beautiful, had always been so, right from childhood. Golden blond curls that framed her face, pronounced cheekbones, soft where Isla was hard. Then, in the periphery of her vision, Emilia noticed her sister, the laughter slipping away.

  What?

  It was a question unframed, but they had lived life long enough together that most things did not need to be said. Isla nodded toward the kitchen, felt her sister slipping into line behind her.