I Am Watching Read online

  Then Isla’s parents’ house. This one far more traditional, with its wide bay windows, rose-covered trellis, the porch with the twin potted bay trees, looking for all the world like it was empty, locked up for the winter. But Isla had spoken to her mother that morning, had been swamped with faux good cheer. Your father said it was the ex-husband, that it’s nothing for us to worry about. It’s not like last time, not at all. Her father, predictably, had been nowhere to be seen.

  Then she was out of the village, a cloak thrown off her. The cloistered roads, with their overhanging trees, gave way to wide-open spaces running across the countryside like arteries through a heart. Isla put her foot down, driving far too fast and yet needing that speed, as if with it she could outrun the village and everything contained in it.

  “Why don’t you come for lunch?” her mother had asked. “Don’t go into work. It’s a Sunday. Who goes into work on a Sunday? Especially this Sunday.” And yet, when Isla had suggested it softly to Ramsey, he had shaken his head. No, he wasn’t up to a family gathering. Yes, he’d rather be on his own, did she mind? He would go for a walk, just him in the cold, damp air. Maybe give his brother a call. “After all,” he had said, shaking his head, “this affects Cain as much as it affects me.”

  The university parking lot was empty. Isla pulled into her usual bay, turned the engine off, and sat for a minute, perhaps two, gathering herself. Then she blew out a breath and concentrated on the movement of her fingers, lifting them, one by one, from the steering wheel. The ringing of the phone cut in, its suddenness startling her. But it was only a phone, after all. Nothing to worry about. She pulled it free from her handbag, glanced at the caller ID.

  “Connor, hi.”

  “So, I’m sitting in my office, going through the fMRI results, and I’m thinking to myself, Who the hell would be daft enough to come into work on a Sunday? And then I look out of my window, and what do you think I see?”

  Isla laughed, giddy with relief. “Put the kettle on. I’m gagging for a cuppa.”

  “Will do.”

  The rain had begun again. Isla took another breath and then shoved at her door, weighted her umbrella in her hand, carefully locked the car door behind her. She held the umbrella at her side like a truncheon, scanning the empty tarmac. Her eyes lingered on the tree line as she calculated the distance from the car to the door. Then she moved, her walk slow, measured, heart screaming at her to run, run like the wind. But no. Isla walked as if she had all the time in the world, entered her code into the keypad with deliberate care. Still, only when she was inside the cavernous lobby, the door shut tight behind her, did her breath return.

  * * *

  “Tea, one sugar. And a chocolate biscuit, because it’s a Sunday and what the hell.”

  Connor was wearing tracksuit bottoms, a long-sleeved T-shirt with a stain on the shoulder, his hair standing up in chaotic fashion.

  “Are you . . . Dude, are those your pajamas?”

  “Hey. Don’t judge me. It’s all about the looks with you, isn’t it?”

  Isla grinned, took two of the chocolate biscuits, and sank into the armchair tucked into the corner of Connor’s office. Smaller than hers, the room had vanished under the weight of the chaos within it. Stacks of folders vied for supremacy, ringing the walls, until it appeared certain that Connor spent his days building paper forts. There was a desk—Isla was relatively confident on that score. And yet all that was visible to the naked eye was paper, drifts of it that clambered up the sides of the computer monitor, threatening to bury it alive.

  Isla took a sip of the tea. “You know, I have a feeling that when Armageddon comes, it’s going to look a hell of a lot like this office.”

  “Yeah, well.” He sat opposite her, lifting his bare feet onto a pile of books. “It’s the sign of an active mind.”

  “It’s the sign of an active psychosis.”

  Connor bit a biscuit in half. “So, ah, you okay? I heard about that woman. The murder.”

  “Ah, just peachy, you know me.” Isla sighed. “You can’t move for the bloody media, though. I’ve had to leave the curtains closed throughout the house. Caught a reporter looking in the kitchen window earlier.”

  “Jesus. Tough on Rams.”

  She shrugged. “He actually handles them far better than I do. You know how he is. Everyone’s best friend.”

  “Are you suggesting you are not equally delightful?” Connor adopted a mock-shock expression. “Surely not.”

  “Bite me.”

  “See? There it is.”

  “So, you have McGowan’s scan results or no?”

  Connor nodded. He pulled a file from the top of a tower beside him and laid the photographs out across his knees. “It’s the same.”

  A sequence of blue running right throughout the paralimbic system. The function of the entire system compromised. The face of psychopathy.

  Isla leaned closer, ran her finger across the top of the colors. “Well, it’s what we were expecting.”

  “The physiology of psychopathy is pretty definitive. But as to the rest of it . . . I don’t know. I feel we’re missing something.”

  The rest of it. That driving force that turned a psychopath into a serial killer.

  Isla stared at the images, now not seeing them. Instead seeing Victoria Prew’s house, its wide windows framing the moorland beyond as if it was a picture. But the trouble was that windows worked both ways. On the tail of that came a murky memory, one she had almost forgotten, of her early morning runs, soles landing hard on the uneven ground that surrounded Hadrian’s Wall. And then, looming large in the gloom, a square of light that punched across the moor like a lighthouse. And Isla’s gaze irretrievably pulled from the sinuous ground on which she ran to the house and the bedroom and the figure moving inside it. She would not have known Victoria Prew had she bumped into her on the street. But she knew that house and that bedroom. If you were someone with that hunger, that need you were fighting against, and you were out walking the wall, maybe walking a dog, maybe simply trying to escape yourself, and you saw that light and that room and that woman . . .

  What would you do then?

  Isla stared at the pictures of Heath McGowan’s brain. If you were someone like Heath, you might watch Victoria Prew. And perhaps you would imagine what you could do to her in the darkness of night, when she was unsuspecting, unprotected. And for a while that imagining would be enough to sate the need. Then one day, maybe when you were tired or angry or stressed, and those controls, those high walls that you had built to separate the public you from the real you, maybe they sank a little, the exhaustion or the stress or the rage shifting the focus so that everything felt a little more blurry, a little less clear. Maybe on that day the imagining of your hands on her neck would no longer be sufficient. Maybe on that day it had to be something more, the feel of the woman’s skin beneath your fingers, the gasp of her final breaths, her body going limp beneath you.

  “What?” asked Connor.

  “I . . .” Isla stopped, her thoughts racing. Then she pushed herself up, grabbed the phone on Connor’s desk, dialed the number quickly, half not expecting an answer. One ring, two, three. Then—

  “Hello?” Her father sounded irritated. A drumming of noise in the background. “Who’s this?”

  “Dad. It’s me.”

  “Oh, Isl. Hi. Love, I’m a bit busy . . .”

  “No, I know. I just . . . I needed to ask you something. Just quickly. Dad, did Victoria Prew have any issues with a Peeping Tom? In the past couple of weeks. Months, maybe?”

  A long pause. Then, “Yes, she did. Why?”

  “No. It’s nothing, just an academic question. You, ah, you find the ex-husband yet?”

  Her father snorted. “Guy’s missing. Neighbors said they think he’s gone on holidays. Holidays. Yeah. I’m telling you, it’s the ex that did it.”

  Isla bit her lip. “Okay, well, I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks, Dad.” She replaced the phone quickly, cutting off the inev
itable questions that would follow.

  “What was that?” asked Connor, frowning.

  “The murder, the one in Briganton.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just . . . Look, hear me out here. Let’s call it a mental exercise.” Isla leaned back against the desk.

  Connor grinned, cracked his knuckles. “I could use a workout. Go for it.”

  “Right. My dad, he thinks . . .” Then Isla stopped herself. “Okay, he says his money is on Victoria Prew’s husband. They were going through a nasty divorce. But . . . the murder . . . it was a blitz attack. Whoever this was, he came from nowhere and took her down in the amount of time it took to get from her front door to her car. Less than that, even. Forensics found her shoe inside the car. So she’d made it. Whoever killed her, he did it fast. He had to have been waiting for her, seen the opportunity and taken it. But then . . .”

  “Why move her?”

  “Why move her? It makes no sense. It dramatically increases your time with the body, which means you are increasing the risk of someone seeing you, not to mention the additional chance that you will be leaving hair, fibers . . . Why do that? Why expose yourself like that?”

  “Well, say it was the ex-husband, maybe he doesn’t realize all this. I mean, to be fair, we’re coming at it from a fairly experienced perspective.”

  Isla looked at him flatly. “The ex is a barrister. I looked him up. He defends criminal cases. Probably knows more than we do.” She pushed herself up again, paced in the small empty square of floor between the two chairs. “Whichever way you slice it, the advantages you gain from briefly fooling the investigators into thinking it’s something to do with the killer on the wall are nothing compared to the additional risks you take on by moving the body to the wall.”

  “Unless you have to.”

  “Unless you have to,” agreed Isla. “Unless the murder isn’t enough, but the compulsion comes from the scene itself, the arrangement of the body, replicating, as close as you can, the original murder series.”

  “So . . . ,” said Connor, “a copycat?”

  “Okay,” said Isla. “Let’s say it is a copycat . . .”

  “Okay. Let’s say that it is.”

  “The first crime in the killer on the wall series was a spectacular.” The word stuck in her throat, the memory of three dead bodies, her own husband almost dead. “Three victims, should have been four. It was as if Heath wanted to begin with a bang, show the world just how bad he could be. So why didn’t this one do the same?”

  “He’s inexperienced. Taking four people down, that’s a big job. Maybe he’s psychologically not ready for that.”

  “Right. It’s almost like it was an urge that simply overwhelmed him. The crime itself, it was opportunistic, as if the chance simply presented itself to him and he grabbed at it. Victoria Prew, her house, it has these big wide windows, no curtains, nothing to stop anyone from looking in, and when you’re out at the wall, you can see everything . . .”

  “The perfect victim for someone who is building up to a murder.”

  “How many times have we seen that before? Edward Frey? Remember? He watched those teenagers for months before he went after them.” Five teenage boys, in and around Hackney. When he was finally arrested, police found a shrine to each and every one of his victims, photographs dating over months, all taken without the boys’ knowledge. Isla sat back down, her knees bouncing. “So, let’s say it is that. That this is someone who has lived with the legend of the killer on the wall, what he did to the community, how he became famous for those murders. He has this curiosity . . . What would it be like to kill someone? And he sees Victoria Prew through her window, so the thought, it just grows and grows, until in the end it’s no longer just a curiosity. Now it’s a need. The question then becomes, what comes next? He’s broken the seal. That urge he’s been keeping at bay, he’s given in to it now, which means it’s a damn sight harder not to give in the next time.”

  Connor was watching her. “Which means he’s going to kill again,” he said, his voice soft.

  Isla nodded slowly. “He’s going to kill again.” The world bucked and swayed. “I need to call my father.” Isla pushed herself up, reached for the phone.

  “Superintendent Bell?” This time he sounded extremely irritated.

  “Dad. It’s me again.”

  “Jes . . . Isla, I’m extremely busy here.”

  “I know. I just . . . Dad, I’ve been thinking about this, about the murder. And the thing is, I don’t think that this lines up with it being the ex-husband. Not at all. Dad, I think you’ve got a copycat on your hands. And – – ”

  “Isla. Can you prove it?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  A heavy sigh. “Love, I understand what you’re saying. But I have to work with the evidence. And right now, the evidence is telling me to take a good, hard look at Mr. Prew.”

  Isla turned, studied the rain as it bounced from the windows. “I get that, Dad. But . . . I have a really bad feeling about this. And if this is a copycat . . . he’s going to kill again.”

  A silence at the other end of the line. Then her father said, “Okay. I’ll look into it.” And just like that, he was gone.

  Isla stood for a moment, cradling the phone, a sound that made little sense cutting into the edge of her awareness. Then the scene shifted, and she located the sound. “My office phone,” she said, hurrying to the door. “It’s ringing.”

  A couple of quick steps across the silent hallway, a quick tug at the handle, the sound of ringing deafening now in the empty room.

  Isla grabbed for the phone. “Professor Bell.”

  There was a click and then another click.

  The voice, when it came, catapulted her back twenty years, then forward to an MRI scanner. Isla gripped the edge of the table.

  “Professor Bell? It’s Heath.”

  Isla struggled to bring her thoughts together. “Heath? What . . . what can I do for you?”

  “No, see, thing is, I heard about what happened. There in Briganton. And . . . you know, nasty stuff. Just thought I’d give you a call to check that you’re okay.”

  Isla’s mouth opened, closed again.

  “So, are you? Okay, I mean?”

  The next step – Ramsey

  Dusk had begun to fall, a relentless march of twilight beating its way through a sky that had failed to muster much in the way of light, anyway. The two men stood in the kitchen, watching the darkening sky. There was talk of a storm coming, another one, of rising waters and savage winds. It seemed appropriate, thought Ramsey. Pathetic fallacy at its finest.

  “You want to go?” Cain squinted out the window, expression doubtful. “It looks like rain.”

  “It always looks like rain,” replied Ramsey. “Yeah, come on. This house, it’s starting to close in on me now.”

  Still, his brother hung around, teeth gnawing at his lip. Older by two years, Cain was bigger, taller, broader, his hair shaved down to his scalp, good looking, but in a hard kind of way. They had handled it differently, Zach’s death, Ramsey’s attack. Ramsey had poured himself into his words, making a name as a journalist who put the victims, the victims’ families, front and center. It was full immersion, saturation in tales of grief and pain. “I don’t know how you stand it,” Cain had said time and time again. “All that sadness.” For Cain, healing had come through the chase. He had put in an application for the police force a week after Zachary’s death, had been successful a year later, had swiftly moved through uniform, into CID, where he had remained. I like it there. There, I’m not one of the hunted. There, I’m the hunter.

  “What?” asked Ramsey.

  “No, it’s just . . .” Cain pulled a face. “The Aubrey Arms, you know there are going to be people there, right?”

  “In a pub? No!”

  Cain rolled his eyes. “I meant they’re going to be all over us, Rams. You know how it can be around here. Especially for ‘the only survivor.’ ”

  Ramse
y shrugged, pulling a dark red sweater over his head. “They don’t mean any harm. They care about us, that’s all.”

  His brother looked unconvinced. “I don’t know how you stand it, the incestuousness of this place. It’s as if people don’t get that there is a whole entire world beyond the borders of Briganton.”

  “Some of them don’t. Some of them have literally never been as far as Carlisle.” Ramsey stuffed his feet into hiking boots. “I like it. It feels . . . I don’t know, like family, I guess. I like being surrounded by people I’ve known all my life. I like knowing how they’re going to feel about things, what they’re going to say.”

  Cain studied him. “It doesn’t make you feel suffocated?”

  Ramsey grinned. “Not really. You really are antisocial, aren’t you?”

  In truth, Ramsey craved the sound of it, the rumbling roar of chatter beyond the thick pub door, the way it built in a wave, reached a crest as you pulled the door open. He needed that roar now, other voices to take the place of the ones that chased one another round inside his own head. He needed a pint, coal-black Guinness with a snow-white top, the cold of the glass against his hand. Perhaps, after two pints, maybe three, a quick cigarette, the heat of it filling up his lungs, he would feel then that he was still alive. That this thing that had taken over his world again had not killed him. Not yet, anyway.

  “Come on, then,” muttered Cain. “Best go if we’re going.”

  They slipped out the back door into the burgeoning night. A bitter wind had whipped up and now snaked its way beneath Ramsey’s coat, and he entertained the brief thought of turning back, that his brother was right, that they were better off keeping to themselves, that a pint at the kitchen table would serve just as well. But still he kept on, tucking his head deeper inside his jacket. It wasn’t just the drink he needed, but the life surrounding it.