‘Mr Watts… the ID?’
‘I’ve got one somewhere,’ he said, throwing his hands up as a gesture to the mess, ‘but don’t ask me where it is. I don’t use it very often – we don’t tend to get asked.’
Alex reached into her pocket, took out a notebook and pen and handed both to Simon. ‘The friend who recommended Adam…his details, please.’
She waited as Simon retrieved his mobile phone from his pocket and searched for his friend’s contact number. ‘Please have a look for that ID,’ she told him. ‘If you see Adam or hear from him, phone call, anything, I want you to get straight in touch.’
‘Jesus,’ Simon said, handing back the notebook and pen. ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’
‘Mr Watts…’
‘Yes, yes, OK. I’ll let you know.’
On the way back to the station, Alex wondered what they were dealing with. If Adam Edwards was, in fact, their killer, exactly what sort of man were they up against? It had seemed they knew so little of him, yet as Alex drove in silence – Dan beside her, scouring the Internet on the iPad – she thought they perhaps knew far more than they realised.
But why was he doing this now, after all this time?
According to Martin Beckett, Julia Edwards had been living in the flat in exchange for sexual favours with his father. Had Adam known this? He had been taken into care years earlier, but had the same thing been happening during the eleven years he had lived with his mother? Had he grown up knowing what she did, and had his perception of his mother clouded his attitude towards women? He had tortured Lola Evans. He had removed her fingernails and cut her hair, essentially stripping her of some of the elements that made her feminine.
‘Found anything?’
In the passenger seat, Dan’s attention was still focused on the iPad.
‘Seems our man’s recently reactivated his Facebook account.’
They’d already searched for a profile matching their suspect, but none had been found. His absence from social media and his use of the alias Joseph suggested he had been intent on keeping a low profile.
So why reactivate the account now, Alex wondered.
‘You sure it’s been reactivated and isn’t a new profile?’
‘Yep. Posts dating back to last year. They come to a stop in July. Then they started again yesterday. He’s shared a post about looking forward to the weekend.’
Reactivating a social media account didn’t make any sense to Alex. If Adam Edwards was the man they were looking for, he had so far managed to stay beneath their radar. Reactivating old accounts on social media sites was surely making the work of the police easier for them, unless the man was so arrogant he continued to believe he was getting away with it.
Looking forward to the weekend, thought Alex. She felt her stomach churn. He was going to kill again. He had more than likely already chosen his next victim.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
It had taken Chloe a while before she had returned to the work that still lay set out on the coffee table in her living room. On any other day she might have gone out for a walk and allowed the fresh air to clear her head of unhelpful thoughts before returning to the task at hand, but there was no stepping outside the flat that day, and probably not for many to come. Facing the world seemed a daunting prospect, something she could easily do without. Thank goodness for online shopping and home delivery, she thought. Not that she could think of food. She could think of little other than the sound of her dead brother’s voice, so frantic and so scared.
It had become so easy for people to disappear from the outside world. People could both earn and spend their money online, having everything they needed in order to maintain survival brought to their doorstep by a person they would have to face for no longer than the time it took to sign a delivery slip. Entire lives could be lived from behind the keys of a laptop. Chloe had always sought company from her own screen and what a sad existence that now seemed to her. Loneliness clutched at her. It was becoming an all-too familiar sensation.
Then something even more painful gripped her: anxiety, clawing her insides. A ‘what if’ that she had never wanted to consider.
She was interrupted by the ringing of her mobile. Scott’s name flashed up from the screen. It was the third time he had tried calling her in the past twenty-four hours. He had left an answerphone message earlier, but she hadn’t been brave enough to listen to it. She wanted to answer his call. She wanted to speak to him, to hear the reassuring tone of his voice at the other end of the line. But how could she? What the hell was she supposed to say to him? I’m sorry you saw me half-naked in the papers. I’m sorry I never told you I used to perform sex acts for money.
She couldn’t speak to him. It was cowardly and she realised she might never get another chance to explain herself to him, but she just couldn’t do it, not that day. She needed time to think. There were so many other things hanging over her.
She listened to the end of the recording of her brother’s police interview. It had ended as she had known it would: with Luke being released without charge. He had been released on pre-charge bail, with the police seemingly confident – or, at the very least, hopeful – that given extra time they would secure the evidence that would justify a charge against Luke and lead to a successful conviction.
Two days later, Luke was dead.
She poured through the file relating to his death. His ‘suicide’ as the police and the coroner had preferred to label it. Her father’s car had been found at the bottom of the cliffs at Marcross in the Vale of Glamorgan. Luke had passed his driving test, but he hadn’t had his own car and hadn’t been insured on his father’s. Luke had made sure he passed his test, Chloe knew, in order to prove himself. In order to prove that, very soon, he would be able to do whatever he wanted and there would be nothing either of his parents could do about it. He had followed Chloe’s example in that. He had wanted them to know that they wouldn’t be able to control his life for ever.
It was sadly ironic that his act of defiance had finalised the nature of his death. Had he never passed that test – had he never learned to drive – Luke would never have been able to take himself to that clifftop. The police would have looked into the possible involvement of another person, but as it had stood, they had done nothing.
The post-mortem report that Chloe had copied on to her memory stick from the police database confirmed her brother’s death as suicide. A blow to the head, sustained on impact. Lacerations to the face and arms where his body had collided with the windscreen. The details were difficult to read, but as always for Chloe the not knowing seemed far harder.