The sound of her voice, lowered in mock seduction, ridiculous, played out in the background. ‘I’m not going to offer you anything,’ she managed, her voice regaining some of its strength. ‘You repulse me.’
Adam leaned back to the laptop and paused the footage. He got up from the chair and went to Chloe, crouching beside her.
His presence, so close, made her body stiffen.
‘You repulse me, Chloe Griffiths. I liked you, you know that? But you’re just the same as all the others. Just a whore.’ He wound a finger in a short length of her hair. ‘Look at you,’ he said, gesturing to the image paused on the screen of the laptop. ‘Like Lola. Like Sarah. Like every other woman I’ve been unlucky enough to know.’
She could have told him that she’d done the webcam work because she’d had to – that there was nothing else she could have done that would have paid the kind of money she had thought at the time she desperately needed – but what would be the sense? She didn’t have to justify herself to him. She had to justify herself to Scott, but not to him. Thoughts of Scott filled her with a momentary despair. He had called her. He had been there, at the other end of a phone call, but she had been too cowardly to speak to him. If she had just answered that call it might have been him here with her now, not Adam. Her thoughts were filled with things she wished she’d done and hadn’t. Scott. DI King. She had to justify herself to Alex; to her more than anyone. She had let her down repeatedly, though DI King had persisted in standing by her, supporting her when most others would have walked away. She had been so focused on Luke, so distracted by the secrets of the dead, she had forgotten the living.
The thought of never seeing either Scott or Alex again filled Chloe with a renewed energy. She dug her wrists into the sofa, trying to force enough pressure to push herself up into a sitting position.
Adam watched, his eyes unmoving and his expression dispassionate.
‘You going somewhere? I was just thinking the same, actually.’
His hand reached for her neck and closed around her throat. She tried to scream, but he was too quick for her. He punched her in the face. She heard the crack as her nose broke and felt the pain flood through her just moments later. Blood trickled on to her top lip. Adam was on top of her, his hand pressed down, covering her mouth.
There was something in his hand: something damp pressed over her mouth and nose. She writhed beneath him, but the room began to blur again, its corners melting one by one.
When the world went black for a second time, all the thoughts that had rushed through Chloe’s mind just moments earlier dispersed, leaving her head empty. All the courage she had felt just fleetingly, all the promises she had managed to make to herself in just those few brief moments, were swept into the darkness that awaited her.
When the world went black for that second time, Chloe could have sworn she heard her brother’s voice calling to her.
Chapter Sixty-Five
They stood outside Chloe’s flat and waited for her to answer the ring of the doorbell. When she didn’t – and when Alex called her mobile to be greeted by the answerphone for a fourth time – her worries began to morph into a fear that gripped in her chest. As far as she knew, Chloe hadn’t left the flat since being suspended over the pictures that had appeared in the newspapers. To her knowledge, Chloe had been intent on hiding away from the world for a while. That might have explained why her mobile phone was turned off, but where was she?
The curtains in the downstairs window were shut. She lifted the flap of the letter box and spoke into the gap.
‘Chloe. Chloe, it’s Alex. Please answer the door.’
Nothing. Even if Chloe was hell-bent on shutting herself away from the world, Alex felt sure she would answer the door. She imagined that Chloe would keep herself in touch with the case somehow – whether by watching TV, listening to the radio news, or looking for updates on the Internet – and sheer curiosity alone should be enough to send her to the front door once she realised Alex was there on the other side. She had told her they had a suspect.
She would want to know what was going on.
Something was very wrong.
‘Radio for backup,’ she told Dan. ‘We need to get this door down.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I’m not taking any chances.’
‘What if she’s in the bath?’
‘I’ll pass her a towel.’ Alex pressed a hand to the outer wall of the building and closed her eyes. Adam Edwards had a distinctive tattoo on his arm. A snake. Chloe had received emails from a Hotmail account with the username ‘theserpent’. They had known one another years earlier.
She felt a surge of sickness race up through her stomach and into her chest. Chloe should have been at work, not here at home. Alex had also accessed files without permission. She was as guilty as Chloe, yet she hadn’t admitted so to the superintendent. A change of heart and a panic for her own position had snapped Alex into a temporary silence. She had refused to give Chloe the name of their suspect. She had refused to offer any clue as to the person under suspicion.
She had left her unprotected. Chloe had no idea how dangerous this man was.
‘Can you break the door through?’
‘Sorry?’
Dan had finished putting a call through for backup. He struck Alex as an officer more likely to be able to hack into an email account than break down a front door, but she wasn’t prepared to wait for the others to turn up. The unsettling uncertainty she had felt for Chloe’s safety had quickly morphed into a full-blown fear.
‘I think she’s in danger.’
He hesitated. ‘You sure?’
Alex’s top lip curled.
‘OK.’ Dan raised his hands. He tested the door handle again, as though the threat to force entry might have somehow willed it unlocked. Then he stepped back before slamming his shoulder into the door. His face contorted into a fixed expression of determination and he tried for a second time, achieving little more than a rattle of the uPVC.
‘Christ,’ Alex muttered. She went around to the back of the building, along the narrow pathway shared with the house next door. There was a gate in a wall at the back. The downstairs window at the back of Chloe’s ground floor flat was obscured by a roller blind. ‘I need something to smash the window with,’ she said to Dan, who had followed her around to the back of the building.