Chloe looked helplessly around the room. She had no idea where she was. She didn’t want to die there, in a stranger’s home.
She didn’t want to die.
There had been so many moments during those past eight years when the thought of death had come to rest beside her, settling at her side with a silent persistence. It hadn’t seemed to look as frightening as it once had. Its silence seemed almost comforting, in contrast with the noise and the chaos of everything else that had surrounded her.
Now she understood how wrong she had been. She didn’t want to die.
Her thoughts returned to Scott and to that bloody phone call she hadn’t answered. She wished she’d just picked up. If she had, she wouldn’t be here now.
Adam sat on the closed lid of the toilet. ‘Lola Evans made some very tempting offers. Bit like you once. Remember?’
She remembered, but she didn’t want to. Two weeks after Luke died, Chloe had confided in Adam. He had gone to her flat, sat with her in her room as she’d cried over her brother, and after finishing the second bottle of wine she’d seen off by herself, she had tried to kiss him. The night had come back later in snapshots, blurry and unordered, and she knew Adam had refused her, pushed back, said something about not taking advantage.
Now she realised that wasn’t why he had turned her down.
He hated her.
‘You leave your laptop lying around far too readily. Makes it too easy for people to find out what you’re up to. What do you reckon, Belle90?’
It was amazing how the mind could restore itself when it needed to, even when her brain felt as addled as it did now. That night came back to her, a daydream so vivid that it seemed to play out in front of her, blurred by time and everything that had taken place since. At some point after trying to kiss him and having her advances refused, Chloe had slept. During that time, what had he been doing?
Her laptop had been in her room. He must have accessed her Internet history, the not-so-secret life she lived online.
Chloe screamed. She had no idea where they were or how long it had been since he had taken her from her flat, but surely there would be someone close enough to hear her cries for help.
Apparently not.
Adam flinched slightly at the noise, but he didn’t move from where he was seated. His hand moved to the sink. Something flashed from his hand.
A knife.
The sight shocked Chloe into silence. She stared wide-eyed at the blade, her thoughts consumed with images taken at Lola Evans’s post-mortem.
‘It’s not really how I want to go about it this time.’
Her head lolled back against the side of the bath, too heavy to hold upright any longer. Keep him talking, she thought. Keep him distracted for as long as possible.
Yet in her heart, Chloe wasn’t sure there was any point in prolonging what seemed to be inevitable.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Alex had taken Adam Edwards’s phone number from his landlord that morning and had tried several times to get through, each attempt leading her nowhere. The number Dan had found on Chloe’s phone at her flat – a number that had called her twice earlier that day – was now being traced. It looked as though Edwards had used a second phone: the one through which he had made contact with Chloe. He had presumably assumed that the police wouldn’t be able to trace him through it, had assumed they would have no idea of its existence. His mistake had been leaving Chloe’s phone behind in the flat when he had taken her.
It was now clear why his Facebook account had been reactivated. He had used it to make contact with Chloe.
Dan was in one of the police vans with another officer who specialised in the use of phone tracking equipment. The technology was able to masquerade as a mobile phone network, allowing them to access communications and track a location. Once a trace was detected via GPS, he would be able to feed information through to Alex and the rest of the team out on the ground. In the meantime, Alex had to think quickly about where Adam might have taken Chloe.
Waiting outside the flat whilst scene of crime officers secured the evidence left there by Adam and Chloe, it seemed to Alex sadly ironic that she had previously considered the similarities between her young colleague and the two women who had been killed by this man. The similarities were making themselves all the more obvious at an increasingly rapid rate. Lola Evans had been working as a stripper, something few people had known about. Sarah Taylor had been having an affair with a married man. Chloe had worked as a webcam girl. All three were ‘guilty’ – if that was how Adam regarded them – of living secret lives, double lives, and all in some way connected to sex.
According to the information Alex had received from Martin Beckett, Julia Edwards had also had her secrets.
This man’s crimes weren’t motivated by sex: they were committed because of it.
What else did Adam Edwards know of Chloe’s life? Alex had no idea how close they had once been. She had read the Facebook messenger conversation between the two of them which suggested they had once been fairly close friends. The emails he had sent anonymously demonstrated an awareness of Chloe’s desire to find whoever had been responsible for the death of either Emily or her brother. Presumably, he knew of at least elements of Chloe’s past.
Alex watched a scene of crime officer head back into the flat. She felt so bloody useless standing here, waiting for Dan to come back to her with something concrete. Chloe had been in the same place, feeling the same way only that morning, and now… where was she? Alex felt a piece of her heart crack at the thought that something might have happened to her. She had already been through so much.
Alex needed to clear her head, to think straight, and to do it quickly.
She paced the narrow length of path that ran between Chloe’s building and the house next door. Behind her, out on the street, she could hear a uniformed officer losing his patience with a woman who refused to move along and stop lingering by the police cordons erected by the roadside. Alex shut them both out, focusing her mind on the things she knew: things she knew might hold the answer to where Adam had taken Chloe.
She was distracted from her thoughts by a familiar voice.
‘Alex.’
She turned. Superintendent Blake was heading down the pathway towards her, his grey face etched with concern. ‘DC Mason’s got me up to date. Any idea where this bastard might have taken her? Are you OK?’
He put a hand on her arm, and for once Alex was grateful for the physical contact. His was a reassuring face in a world that had become bleaker than she had ever seen it. Was that how Chloe had perceived Adam? Had he offered her comfort, familiarity, at a time when it seemed the rest of the world had chosen to turn its back on her? Was that why she had let him into her home without a second thought?