‘Don’t be silly, Chloe, you don’t—’
The car door was slammed shut. Alex sighed, unlocked her seatbelt and got out of the driver’s side, calling to Chloe’s back as the young woman walked the pavement of the main road that led towards the station.
What was happening to her? Just a few months ago, Chloe had been one of the most resilient young women Alex had ever known. She had seemed so grounded, so focused. But perhaps she hadn’t really known her at all.
Alex stood by the car and watched as the distance between them grew. She wanted to believe in the young woman she had championed these past few months; the young woman she had requested to have work alongside her. Was her judgement of character so poor that she hadn’t seen what had really been there all along?
Try as she might to push the notion loose, Alex was beginning to feel she had made a terrible mistake. DC Lane wasn’t who she had thought she was. She was fragile, vulnerable: distracted. She wanted to help her, but she was restricted by professional boundaries. Without looking at the case files, they had nothing more to work from other than Chloe’s suspicions.
Chloe knew it.
And now Alex was watching her unravel.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chloe was tired and hungry and the thought of her bed was a momentary distraction from the scene she had created in DI King’s car. She was wracked with shame at her behaviour and guilt at what she’d said. She hadn’t meant it. She was angry with the world, but mostly just angry with herself. There were things she knew she should do now; things that had been put off and delayed because there hadn’t been a right time. She knew now there was never going to be a right time, yet she was filled with a sense of urgency that begged that time should be now.
She stripped off in the bedroom and went to the shower, standing beneath a jet of water that was too hot and made her pale skin flare red. Each sting felt like a punishment, as though she deserved to feel this pain. She couldn’t prove Luke’s innocence. She had let Alex down. All the people she cared about were the very people she was letting down.
Her thoughts roamed to Scott, a momentary, welcome distraction, yet one that brought with it a sense of hopelessness. The thought of him made the sting of the hot water more acute. She wished she could stop herself from holding back. The old Chloe, a Chloe she hadn’t seen for years, would have let him know exactly what she was thinking, regardless of the consequences. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt the touch of a man’s skin against her own. She carried too much shame to ever let anyone get that close.
She turned off the shower, stepped out on to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and wrapped herself in a towel. In the bedroom, she put on underwear and an oversized T-shirt before sitting on the edge of the bed to blow-dry her hair. She ran a finger over the mousepad on her laptop, prompting the screen into life. She had several tabs on the Internet open and she clicked on to her emails as her other hand ran a hairbrush across her scalp.
She would usually delete emails from addresses or names she didn’t recognise, but this particular one was titled ‘FAO DC Lane’. She felt her heart rate slow as her finger hovered over the mousepad. No one contacted her about work via her personal email. The past couple of months had taught her not to be so hasty with her use of the delete button. She had spoken to DC Mason about wanting to get an ID on an email address, telling him she had received anonymous written abuse. He was the station’s resident IT geek: if anyone would know how to gain information from the address, he would. Chloe had made him promise not to mention the emails to anyone else at the station. If Dan had been suspicious of this, his face had failed to betray the fact.
Chloe had given him the email address, but Dan had come quickly back to her with the news that the IP address had been masked. There were ways of gaining further information on the sender, he’d told her, but they would involve needing a warrant.
Chloe had thanked him and told him not to worry about it.
She put the hairbrush down and opened the email. There was no message, only a link to a video file. She clicked on the link, knowing she shouldn’t, but unable to resist. As the opening image appeared on the screen, Chloe felt nausea spread through her chest. Unable to watch, she closed the link and sat further back on her bed, her heart thumping beneath the towel she still wore wrapped around her.
She couldn’t make sense of what she had just seen, yet the sight had chilled her to the bone.
Chapter Forty
Alex got the call at ten to seven that morning, not long after getting out of the shower. She pinned her wet hair back hurriedly and dressed in the clothes she’d already laid out at the end of the bed. She called Chloe, who sounded so awake that Alex wondered whether she had been to sleep at all. Having agreed to pick her up on her way, Alex headed in her black Audi to the village of Taff’s Well, from where she would head to the M4 motorway.
Neither woman mentioned what had happened the previous evening, but it had lingered, unsaid, during the call.
Chloe lived alone in the downstairs flat of an end-terraced house in Taff’s Well. The street was tucked behind the main road, close to the rugby club. The noise of the A470 could be heard from the street, but other than that the area was peaceful. As Alex approached, she saw Chloe waiting on the pavement. She usually looked immaculate – something that never failed to make Alex feel comparatively frumpy – but that morning she looked nothing like the Chloe Alex was so used to seeing. Her hair was dishevelled, piled into a messy bun on the top of her head. She was without make-up. When she got into the car, Alex could see dark shadows circling her eyes.
‘Is it Sarah Taylor?’ Chloe asked, pulling the seatbelt around her.
‘I hope not.’
Alex pulled back out on to the main road. It was early, but the morning’s rush hour traffic was already starting to build. Chloe was uncharacteristically silent, her head turned away from Alex as she watched the houses slowly pass them by.
‘Everything OK?’
‘Fine.’
Alex knew enough to know that ‘fine’ invariably meant anything but.
‘If it’s what happened last night, it’s forgotten.’
‘I said I’m fine.’