‘I got an email from Chloe. Don’t mention it to the super. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it might get his back up.’
Alex talked through some of the ideas Chloe had considered in the email she had sent the previous evening. The psychological stages of a serial killer dictated the man would plan, hunt; kill. There would be a period of euphoria following the initial execution of his crime. Then a stage of depression. He would crave the feelings he had experienced in those moments that had followed the death of his victim. He would long to feel it once again.
‘You think he’ll kill again?’
Alex nodded. It seemed a given now. ‘We don’t even know whether Lola was the first.’
It occurred to Alex that the most notorious perpetrators of history’s most horrific crimes were people who blended into their communities, whose desires and compulsions went unnoticed by even those closest to them. It was thought that Jack the Ripper had been a timid man on the surface, a man who would easily have been overlooked as a suspect. Yet the brutal and macabre nature of his crimes demonstrated a violent nature that was anything but timid. Similarly, Ted Bundy was said to have been handsome, charismatic: someone his victims had initially trusted and didn’t feel threatened by. It was frighteningly easily for a psychopath to blend into his surroundings. Was this the kind of man they were hunting?
A pressing sense of time crept upon Alex’s shoulders, weighing them down. Killers such as this – if this man was, in fact, or would become, a serial killer – often had cooling periods between victims, but that didn’t mean they could afford to become complacent. Time could mean the difference between life and death for yet another victim. A lack of physical evidence was making their job complicated. He was managing to outsmart them.
If they couldn’t trace him, they were going to have to try to understand him.
‘Penny for them.’ Dan raised both eyebrows and Alex realised how deep in thought she had been. It was worrying that she was able to drive these roads without focusing on the route she was taking; that she knew these streets so well her mind was able to switch off to the routine of it all. ‘Should probably be a bit more now, what with inflation. Fiver for them, at least.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Penny for them. Your thoughts. I was just going to say that—’
He stopped. Alex clearly wasn’t listening. Her mind was somewhere else; judging by the look on her face, it seemed to be somewhere she might have preferred it wasn’t.
She suddenly pulled off the main road and parked up outside one of a row of terraced houses. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘What do we know about Julia Edwards?’
‘What we discussed in the briefing. Forties, alcoholic, unemployed. There’s everything Martin Beckett told you about her and his father, but whether it’s true or not’s another thing.’
Alex opened the door and allowed a rush of cold air to flood the car. Traffic rushed past, its sounds forming a wall around her. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Why hadn’t any of them seen it?
She thought back through some of the things that had been said at the meeting earlier in the week. Chloe had questioned why the killer put his victims in water. Something from his past, she suggested.
The river. The lake. The water.
The bath.
‘Did Julia Edwards have any other partners we know of?’ Alex asked. ‘Ex-husband lurking about anywhere?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Why?’
‘Perhaps her death wasn’t an accident. What if someone killed her there, years ago, and is returning there now with his next victims?’
The scepticism in Dan’s reaction was unmissable. ‘Fifteen years later? But why? And was there any evidence to suggest Julia Edwards’s death wasn’t an accident? Surely that would have been investigated at the time.’
He was right, Alex thought: there was no evidence. Prescription drugs and alcohol had been found at the scene: Julia Edwards had been so intoxicated she apparently hadn’t felt herself drowning.
Or had she?
‘Was someone else with her when she died?’ Alex wondered aloud. They needed to make finding out a priority.
Chapter Fifty-One
She shoved a foot in the doorway in an attempt to block his entry, but he pushed past Chloe regardless. He eyed the sparse flat with obvious contempt before turning the look upon her. She knew she looked a mess. She hadn’t bothered taking a shower that morning and her hair was pulled into a knotted bun on the top of her head. Yesterday’s make-up still circled her eyes. She was wearing leggings that were ripped across the knee – the results of a previous accident involving an attempt at home DIY – and a shirt that had a coffee stain down the front. She looked like someone whose grip on their life was starting to slacken, and the look her father gave her was sufficient to confirm it.
‘Get out.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘Call one of your colleagues? Oh, sorry, you can’t do that, can you?’
Chloe hated her father. She had feared him when she was a child, resented him when she was a teenager, and now those years had escalated into one wall of hatred: one she couldn’t see a way over or around.
He glanced at the opened laptop on the sofa. ‘Applying for jobs?’
Christ, he was cruel. But then he always had been, she thought. Every time he had locked her inside her bedroom, deaf to her cries. Every time he had taken his belt to her brother, each time reminding him that he had brought it on himself. Of course he was cruel. She had always known it.
‘Why are you here?’
‘You’ve been to the house.’
Chloe felt her face flush. She had always been a terrible liar, despite her frequent attempts at the contrary. As a teenager she had lied about where she had been, who she’d been with, and her parents had always known she was lying. As though they had followed her. As though God had been following her and had reported back.
‘One of the neighbours saw you.’
‘And what did they see exactly?’ she replied sarcastically. ‘A daughter visiting her childhood home?’
‘It stopped being your home a long time ago. The day you decided to reject us. The day you decided to reject everything we stand for. You’d no more right to be in my house than—’
‘Than you’ve got to be in mine?’ Chloe challenged, interrupting her father mid-sentence. Suddenly she was seventeen again. She was standing in her parents’ hallway, the front door opened for the street to bear witness to just what an awful child that poor Griffiths couple had been cursed with, shouting and swearing, pledging vows to never set foot within that house again. And she never had. Until that week.
‘Why were you there?’
Chloe shrugged. ‘Just fancied a trip down memory lane.’