Adam sat beside her. ‘Glass of water?’
Chloe shook her head. What was wrong with her? One minute she’d been chatting – she had almost laughed a couple of times, which was something that just hours earlier she had thought she would never again be capable of – yet now her head felt soaked with sickness. Her eyelids felt heavy. Her body longed for sleep, yet her mind was trying to fight off the desire. Her limbs felt detached somehow. It was a horrible sensation, one that made her study her own skin as though she no longer recognised it.
Adam reached for her hand and took it in his. He gently stroked the back of her knuckles with his thumb. She could barely feel his touch. She was watching it, but it looked as though it was someone else’s skin he was touching, someone else’s hand that rested beneath his. She didn’t feel really there. Why was her vision so blurry? Why did her jaw feel as though it was no longer capable of forming words?
‘Lola had such pretty hands. Small, pale, like yours. But everything that’s pretty on the outside is ugly when you scratch beneath the surface, isn’t it?’
His words were pooled in a muffled cloudiness. Chloe watched his mouth moving, but the words seemed to be lost, slowed down. She tried to speak the other woman’s name, but her mouth refused to form the word and any sound she might have made was caught in her throat and suffocated.
His hand closed around her wrist, tightening. Then the room went black.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Alex was fraught with worry, and when she again tried Chloe’s mobile phone it went straight to answerphone. You’re worrying unnecessarily, Alex told herself. Chloe had wanted to shut herself from the world for a little while. That’s what she had done. She was fine.
She wished she could believe it, but a nagging anxiety kept whispering in her ear, reminding her she couldn’t be so sure.
Her thoughts had collided into a knot of facts and assumptions. If Chloe was there beside her now, sitting alongside her in the passenger seat, as was so frequently the case these days, she would have taken that knotted mess and unravelled it all as though dealing with a ball of Christmas lights of which Alex could no longer see either end. Or would she? The Chloe she had known just a few months earlier would have. She would have dragged the once messy bundle behind her, presenting it back in a neat line that would make perfect sense, stress free and rationalised. But recently… things hadn’t been quite the same recently. Under similar circumstances, Alex doubted anyone would have worked to their usual standards.
Those emails had started it all off. Chloe hadn’t been quite herself after Christmas. It had been so easy to miss and Alex might have put it down to any number of things. Christmas wasn’t a time of fairy lights and anticipation for many people. For many it was a time of loneliness, regret and nostalgia, and Alex had been caught up sufficiently in her own problems to have easily missed the struggle of others. Had she noticed Chloe’s shift in mood at the time, she might easily have put it down to something ordinary brought about by the supposedly festive season.
Those emails. Alex’s foot pushed further to the floor. Chloe had told her those emails came from an address she didn’t recognise: an address with the username ‘theserpent’. She had dismissed them so easily as somebody messing about – a prank undertaken by someone who had too few brain cells and too much free time – and now she wished she had done more to help her when she’d had the chance.
Adam Edwards had a tattoo of a snake on his arm. When Simon Watts had been asked for any identifying features, this had been the first thing he had mentioned.
She stopped the car to find Simon’s number in the notepad she had stashed in the glovebox. Connecting the call with the car’s Bluetooth system, she resumed her drive to the village where Chloe lived.
‘DI King,’ she told him, hearing the immediate sigh that escaped him at the sound of her name. ‘That tattoo you mentioned—’
‘The tattoo? Yeah. What about it?’
‘You said it was a snake?’
‘A snake, yeah.’
‘Do you know what Adam’s email address is?’
‘His email address?’
Alex wondered whether Simon Watts was going to continue the conversation by simply repeating back everything she said to him. It would have been frustrating anyway, but with so little time in front of her Alex didn’t have the patience for it now.
She ran a red light at a crossroads and swerved to avoid a taxi. The driver came to a screeching stop and slammed on the horn. ‘Yes,’ she snapped, ‘his email address. What is it?’
‘I live with him,’ Simon Watts said impatiently. ‘Why would I need to email him?’
‘Just check,’ Alex told him.
Simon Watts sighed before moving from the phone, presumably checking the mail on his email account via his mobile: ‘[email protected],’ he said eventually.
‘Thank you,’ Alex said through gritted teeth. ‘Not too difficult, was it?’ She cut the call and put through another call to DC Mason. Her mind was racing. Of course he hadn’t used his normal email account; that would have been far too risky. It was likely ‘theserpent’ had been set up just recently, in the past month or so: just before Chloe had received that first email.
‘I’m on my way to Chloe’s,’ Alex told Dan. ‘I’ve tried calling her. It’s going straight to answerphone.’
‘She could be anywhere.’
Alex’s face tautened at the suggestion.
As though somehow sensing her reaction, Dan was quick to correct himself. ‘I mean she could be shopping, or with a friend, or—’ He didn’t bother finishing his sentence. He had unwittingly spoken Alex’s worst fears.
A silence fell. It allowed Alex time and space to think again, but her thoughts were leading to the darkest corners, each separate piece stretching itself and linking with the next in an attempt to create a whole.
Lola Evans had been a young woman with an eating disorder, without parents and separated from the grandmother she had lived with on what seemed to have been very much a part-time basis. Sarah Taylor had been recovering from an abusive relationship that had left her hospitalised. Both victims had been taken at a time when they had been vulnerable, which went a long way to explaining Edwards’s choice of the support group as a place to meet the women upon whom he would come to prey.
And then there was Chloe, a young woman whose twenty-six years on this earth had been blighted by more tragedy than most people would have to endure in a lifetime. Her vulnerabilities had lain with her brother. All Edwards had needed to do was resurrect Luke – bring his memory back so he dominated Chloe’s consciousness.
Those images he must have stored – that footage he had kept in his possession all this time – had secured his hold over Chloe, making sure she was at her lowest ebb when he made his move. It must surely have been Edwards who had sent it.