Chloe felt emptied. She wasn’t prepared for this – she could never have been prepared for this – and none of it made any sense.
They had once met through her, she remembered. Chloe had moved from one shared house to another: Adam had helped her move her things. Luke and Emily had popped over to see the new place. Adam had been there. As far as she knew, he and Emily hadn’t seen one another again after that.
They would never have met if it hadn’t been for her. All of this was her fault.
‘You’re lying,’ she said again. The words sounded pathetic. Feeble. Their lack of conviction gave all the evidence that proved she knew them to be incorrect.
‘She used to turn up at the garden centre quite a lot,’ he told her. ‘Always when you weren’t working. Wouldn’t have looked too good to be seen flirting with me in front of her boyfriend’s sister, I suppose.’
‘Shut up,’ she snapped.
Adam raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? You don’t want to know what happened? All these years and now you don’t want to hear the truth?’
He was right. She had wanted to know the truth about what had happened to Emily. She had always believed that knowing what had happened to Emily would lead her to the truth of her brother’s death. But not like this. Now the words were being spoken – now the truth was being aired in front of her – she no longer wanted to hear. Like a child, she wanted to put her fingers in her ears. She wanted to close her eyes in the hope that if she couldn’t see the monster, it couldn’t see her.
‘She tried it on with me so many times,’ he told her. ‘She was gagging for it. She was so easy to lure. A few cheap flowers. A few cheap words. I did the honourable thing, told her I wanted it to be more than sex, that she was special. Told her I wouldn’t do anything while she was seeing someone else. She stalled a bit. She said she felt guilty, said Luke was nice, she didn’t want to hurt him. But she still did. Women are all the same really, aren’t they?’
She was sixteen, Chloe thought. Not a woman. Just a girl. In that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to hate Emily for the way she had behaved. It didn’t matter what she’d done, what any of them had done. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. None of them did.
They had all paid for someone else’s choices.
‘Who are you, Adam?’
His family had rarely come up in conversation, but she remembered him telling her once that his mother lived in North Wales with her second husband. He said he visited her a few times a year and that he’d never met his father and didn’t know anything about him. Now she didn’t know what to believe.
All lies, she thought. She didn’t know the first thing about him. Everything had been a lie.
‘She threw herself at me,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘Tried to kiss me. Everything happened so quickly. I hadn’t planned it. Not that time.’
‘You let Luke take the blame.’
Adam shrugged. ‘Sorry. Collateral damage.’
All thoughts left her. Her mind went blank, a white sheet dropping behind her eyes, filling with a screaming tinnitus that threatened to deafen her. Her balance was lost again. She moved her feet, shifting back against the wall, steadying herself.
He watched her, his expression fixed. No sign of remorse. No traces of anything she could recognise as human.
He stood from the toilet seat. Chloe raised the knife, holding it poised. His hand moved to his pocket. She felt herself trembling. The cold had come back to her, her still-wet clothes clinging to her body like a second skin. There was a piece of cloth in his hand.
‘What use is that now?’ she asked, her words shaking as she studied the dampened cloth.
‘I came here to do a job. I never leave until the job’s done.’
Chloe thrust the knife at him, but he was quicker than she was. He grabbed her bound wrists with one hand, twisting them so that the knife pointed away from him. She kicked out at him, her foot meeting with his shin, smashing into the bone. It knocked him off balance, momentarily, and she flailed as he faltered, redirecting the knife and yanking her wrists from his hands. She swung quickly. The knife met his side, embedding itself inside him.
His eyes widened at the shock of the pain. ‘You fucking bitch.’
She tried to pull the knife back out, but he hit her away. He grabbed her by the throat and pressed her against the wall, closing his hand over her mouth and nose. There was a sweet smell, sickly. She flailed helplessly, a fish out of water, but within moments there was nothing but darkness once more.
Chapter Seventy-Three
‘That’s it.’
Alex saw the building at the end of the narrow lane they had turned on to. Backup vehicles were now on the road behind them. They pulled up alongside the car already there, parked behind Adam’s white van. Alex barely waited for the driver to come to a stop before getting out.
The cottage was small, secluded from the neighbouring houses by an expanse of fields and a cluster of wide trees that formed the boundaries of the garden. There were no signs of any lights on, but if Adam and Chloe were where she feared they might be, then that particular room may not be visible from the front of the house.
Armed officers got out of the van that had pulled into the lane behind them.
‘The bathroom,’ she told them. ‘Unless you see him or Chloe anywhere else, head straight upstairs.’
She followed behind four armed officers. A lever was used to break open the wooden front door and the officers rushed inside, heading straight for the stairs. Alex ran after them. There was a man’s jacket hanging from the end of the stairs. She followed the officers up to the first floor. One of them called Edwards’s name. There was movement upstairs.
The bathroom.
The door was shoved open. Adam Edwards was on his knees on the carpet of the bathroom floor, his body straddling a limp and lifeless Chloe. His hands were closed around her throat. The first officer in the room hit Edwards with the butt end of his gun and sent him toppling sideways. Another two officers helped pin him to the ground as he struggled violently against the first. Alex rushed to Chloe. She was soaking wet, her sodden clothes clinging to her slight frame. There was dried blood on her face. She wasn’t moving. It seemed they were already too late.
She pushed Chloe’s severed hair from her face and touched her fingertips to her throat, trying to find a pulse. Alex could feel and hear nothing but the pounding of blood in her own ears.
Then the sound of Edwards’s voice ripped through it.
‘If you’d got here a bit earlier, you could have watched.’
Alex turned to the officers restraining him. She refused to look at Edwards. She would face him in the interview room, on her grounds, her terms. Not here. ‘Get him in the van.’ She saw the blood for the first time then; saw the knife still embedded in his side. She wanted to grab the handle and push it deeper, give it a good twist. Finish what Chloe had started.
She turned her attention back to Chloe as Adam Edwards was taken from the room. ‘Chloe. It’s me. It’s Alex. Come on, I know you’re with me.’