There was an obvious link to the water, one that had been playing on her mind since they had learned about the history of the pub. One victim in a river, the other in a lake. A woman had drowned in a bathtub at the place where these young women had been held. There had to be relevance, but Alex was unable to see it.
Why would anyone put their victims in water if not to try to conceal them for a lengthy period?
There was a fifteen-year gap between the woman’s death and these murders.
What was the relevance of the pub?
Had the person – or people – who’d been responsible for the deaths of both women known about the drowning of Julia Edwards all those years ago?
Alex turned on the computer. The backlog of work she had intended to tackle nearly two weeks ago still sat waiting for her, beginning to gather dust. She logged on to the computer and opened an Internet search page. Thinking back to what she had found out from Martin Beckett that afternoon, she searched for the woman who had drowned in the bathtub at the pub to which Lola and Sarah had been taken.
There hadn’t been much coverage of the woman’s death in the media. Alex knew exactly why that was. Forties, working class: a nobody, as far as the press was concerned. No one worth the print space in their publications. Big news made big money. Had she been young and beautiful her photograph would have been splashed all over the local, maybe national front pages. As it was, she was just another woman who had met just another unfortunate end.
The article Alex found was from a local newspaper’s website. Presumably, Dan hadn’t found the article in his research of The Black Lion pub because at the time of the woman’s death the pub had been called The Farmers’ Arms. Perhaps Beckett had changed the name of the pub in the aftermath of the event, not wanting his business to be tainted by the inconvenience of the death that had occurred there. Either way, the details of the place should have been found earlier.
It was barely a paragraph – just the woman’s name and age along with a brief summary of the circumstances of her death.
A woman has been found dead at the flat above The Farmers’ Arms pub in Groeswen near Caerphilly. Julia Edwards, 42, was found on Sunday, but is believed to have died days earlier. Her body was found in the bath by one of the staff working at the pub. She is believed to have drowned whilst drunk, and police have described the death as a tragic accident.
The sum of a life, Alex thought. A short paragraph on a web page few people had probably visited. She now understood why Martin Beckett had doubted anyone else would want to live or work there. The place seemed cursed by darkness.
She glanced at the clock on the far wall of her office. It was 7.40. She couldn’t help wondering where Rob was. Who he was with, what he was doing. She imagined him in a living room, that woman sitting beside him on the sofa; her two children playing on the carpet at their feet. She was angry with herself for sparing him the thought; angry with herself for bothering to care. Was he with her now? Would he have told her that he’d been going round to his ex-wife’s house regularly for sex?
Of course he wouldn’t have.
She sipped her coffee and returned her attention to the computer screen. She had some footage to sift through: the CCTV taken from the strip club where Lola had been working. There was a chance the man Lola had met that morning had been inside the club some time during the evening, and though other officers had looked through the footage Alex realised how easily details could be missed.
The same might have applied to Christian Cooper and Joseph Black.
Until she did it herself, she wouldn’t be satisfied there was nothing more to find.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chloe turned off the television and turned her phone to silent. She wanted to be alone and rid of the world. She had seen their faces, the people at work. She had seen the smirks of some of the men and, even worse, on some of the women. After leaving the ladies’ toilets, it was as though every officer in the building had waited in the corridors to greet her, waiting to catch a glimpse of her shame while it was still fresh enough to be seen worn across her face. She had worked every day for months alongside these people. She had respected them. They had respected her, or at least she’d believed they had.
Everything had gone so horribly wrong, and she had been powerless to stop it.
She thought of DI King: how easily she had accepted her revelations, though they must have been so unexpected. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Alex had seen so much in her life, both in and outside work, that nothing came as a shock to her any more. Maybe nothing was unexpected.
She thought of the image that had graced the newspaper front page. If she was only able to remember that exact day, that exact request, then perhaps she might have remembered who she’d been speaking with that evening. But there had been so many, over such a length of time. She had never known who was at the other side of the screen, and what good would her being able to remember do her now? Whoever had been on the other side of that screen – whoever had sent that footage to the superintendent and to the newspaper – had been nothing more than a made-up name on a computer monitor; nothing more than a voiceless, faceless person who had paid her to take off her clothes.
She had thought that changing her name, dyeing her hair, moving away, would be enough to shed her old life as Chloe Griffiths. As Belle90. How naive that had been, she thought. You couldn’t escape the past. It stayed with you, there, in your shadow. It lurked at your shoulder, breathing on your neck like a ghost. Running away hadn’t worked. Confronting it might, but there were other things she had to do first.
Casting thoughts of her own problems aside, Chloe turned on her laptop. She had wanted to avoid it, but there were things she needed to do: things she owed Detective Inspector King. She had let her down. She had been too wrapped up in herself – in Luke, in Emily, and now this – and she had let her own priorities take precedence over their current case. She may have been suspended, but that needn’t mean she had to be completely useless. She didn’t matter any more. All that mattered now was Lola Evans. Sarah Taylor.
She finished the last of her barely warm coffee and pulled the laptop on to a cushion on her lap. There was so much she had wanted to say during the last meeting she’d attended, but her thoughts had been interlocked amongst others and she had allowed them to become lost.
She opened the Word document on the desktop and began to write.