He might have argued with her, but DC Mason appeared to have resigned himself to Alex’s headstrong will. He disappeared, briefly, and returned with a brick salvaged from a crumbling front wall a few houses down. Alex took it from him and threw it through the glass pane of Chloe’s back door. Against Dan’s protestations, she thrust a hand through the space of shattered glass and grappled with the key that was hanging from the lock of the back door. When she next saw her, Alex was going to have a little chat with Chloe about leaving keys in doors. For someone so smart, the young woman was guilty of some serious lapses in common sense.
Alex stepped into the kitchen. In front of her, pulled shut, was the door that led through to the bathroom. Water. The bathroom. The bath.
She crossed the room to the door, holding on to her plans for a security talk. Time surrounded her, casting her in shadow, goading her as it so often did. Alex placed a hand on the door handle and shoved it open, not allowing time for hesitation and further unwanted thoughts.
There was no one there. There was no bathtub. A glass shower cubicle stood in the corner of the room, a towel flung over its partially opened front screen. Alex exhaled loudly. Behind her, Dan attempted reassurance.
‘I’m sure wherever she is, she’s fine.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ She turned to her colleague. ‘But where the hell is she? Why isn’t she answering her phone?’
Alex left the bathroom, sidestepping Dan to get back into the kitchen so she could go down to the living room. There were two glasses on the coffee table; two plates that held the remnants of what had been dinner. Dinner for two.
‘Shit.’
Chloe’s laptop lay opened beside the plates. Alex passed a finger across the keypad, sparking the screen to life. It asked for a password. She cursed again. Her focus fell to the floor. Chloe’s hair. She crouched and gathered the chunks in her hands, her body almost teetering beneath the weight of her fear.
‘Boss.’
Alex stood and turned to Dan, who was standing in the living room doorway. He was holding Chloe’s mobile phone. ‘In the kitchen.’
‘1707,’ she told him.
‘Her passcode? How do you know it?’
‘I’ve sat beside her on plenty of car journeys.’
1707. The date and month of Luke’s birthday. She had seen it whilst reading one of the files relating to Emily’s case.
She watched as Dan tapped the passcode into the phone. Then she dragged her attention back to the used plates and glasses on Chloe’s coffee table. She didn’t want to touch anything else for fear of disturbing what might become evidence. There was no doubt in Alex’s mind as to who had been here with Chloe. Sick bastard, she thought. He had sent those emails, sent that video clip, made Chloe vulnerable and then preyed on her when he had known she would be at her weakest.
Alex was snapped from her thoughts by a noise at the front of the building. She pushed aside the curtains. Backup was here.
Where the bloody hell was she supposed to send them now?
She turned back to the room, planning to leave the flat via the back door. It was then she saw it. The small smear of blood on the sofa cushion. Her fear morphed into panic.
‘Boss.’
Alex looked away from the sofa and up at Dan.
‘Chloe’s Facebook messenger app. You might want to read this.’
Chapter Sixty-Six
She awoke to a square of mottled ceiling, yellowing and riddled with patches of damp. The ceiling shifted, swaying from side to side until coming to rest above her. She was cold. Her head felt heavy, tumbled, as though it had been through a washing machine and was still resting at the bottom of the drum, waterlogged and ready to be wrung out.
She was so cold. Her clothes were cold, her skin was cold; the bones that held her body as one were frozen stiff.
It took a few moments of blurry consciousness to realise that her hands were still tied in front of her, the wire cutting into her skin. The same at her ankles. She couldn’t feel her feet. They were so cold that it was as though they were no longer attached to the rest of her. She felt drugged by her own heaviness, yet somehow weightless. The leggings and shirt she was wearing clung to her body like a second skin.
Tilting her head, Chloe looked at the shallow water surrounding her. She was lying in water. She was lying in a bath.
She pushed her head up from the cold porcelain. It took all her effort. The dizziness she had experienced moments earlier returned with the sudden movement, giving the false sensation of falling. She was in a roll top bath, in a room painted a pale, watercolour pink. The lines of the old stonework could be traced up to the ceiling; the cracks in each stone creeping upwards, as fine and delicate as spiders’ webs. She might, in another life, have thought this room beautiful.
With that thought, a tsunami of others crashed over her. It was him, she thought. She had written it down for Alex – she had described the man they had been looking for – but the pieces of the puzzle had never quite slotted into place to make one complete picture. Not until now.
Amidst her despair there was a flicker of hope. DI King had told her they had a suspect. She had said that something Chloe had written had led them to him.
Had she meant Adam? Were they looking for the right man?
As though sensing his name in her thoughts, the door was pushed open. Adam entered the room. He was wearing a jacket now, the serpent tattoo concealed.
‘You won’t get away with this,’ Chloe managed.
Adam studied her. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet and rested his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. ‘But I already am. Come on. You know how easy it is to live a double life, don’t you, Chloe? Change your name. Pretend it makes you someone else. Only it doesn’t, does it? You can change the outside, but you can never really change what lies underneath. You’re just keeping it hidden from everyone else for a while.’
‘Those women… they’d never done anything to you.’
Adam’s mouth tilted into a wry smile. He leaned forward and turned on the nearest tap. ‘I know you don’t really see things that simply, Chloe. Life’s not that straightforward. You’re better than that.’ He sat back, his eyes still fixed on her.
‘Please don’t do this,’ Chloe begged, watching the water hit toes she could no longer feel. ‘We were friends, weren’t we? Please.’
‘You are my friend. That’s why I need your help. I didn’t want to kill them. I wanted them to suffer, but once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I want to make it stop. I don’t want to do it, any of it. It isn’t me. It’s like this voice in my head, it won’t go away; I try to hide it somewhere, try to drown it out, but it keeps coming back. It’s louder than me. It’s stronger than I am. You believe me, don’t you?’
Chloe’s eyes widened as the freezing water continued to fill the bath around her. She felt her spine numb as though submerged in ice. Pain throbbed through her face. Her nose, she thought. She only now remembered that her nose had been broken. The ties at her wrists cut off her circulation as she struggled and writhed, too tired and too desperate to do anything but flop at the bottom of the bathtub like a fish put too late back into water.
‘Tell me you believe me.’
She nodded, the words half-choked in her painfully dry throat. ‘I believe you.’
Adam moved towards her. He reached for the tap and slowly turned it off. Then he smiled. ‘You bitches really will say anything just to get your own way.’