Talking to Strangers, page 22
“Luckily, our victim hadn’t bothered to change the default password. Never understood people who don’t—it’s like leaving your front door open,” the techie muttered. Another early riser, he was sitting in the glow of his screen and blinked like a small owl when Elise snapped the office lights on. His Star Trek T-shirt had ridden up over his belly, revealing the grubby waistband of his Calvin Klein boxers. He smelled like stale bread, and Elise wondered if he slept in his clothes.
“So, the last communication our victim received before her phone went dead was at twenty-three thirty-nine. There was an exchange of text messages first,” the techie said slowly.
“Who from?” Elise tried to look over his shoulder without inhaling.
“Number was withheld on her handset,” he said, “so the victim won’t have seen who was calling. But I’ve matched the call times to the service provider data. The number ends seven-four-nine, but it’s a pay-as-you-go. Not registered.”
Shit!
“Well, what did it say?”
“I’ll come to that,” he said, and Elise resisted the impulse to shove him aside and get on with it herself.
“Come to it now,” she commanded. “Please.”
“All right, all right. Keep your hair on.” Elise’s hand went immediately to her chemo curls, and she stared the blushing techie down. “Um, sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Leave it,” she said wearily. “What have you got?”
“Okay,” he stuttered. “So, at twenty-three twenty-seven the victim got the first of three texts from this source. It reads: ‘I see you like the outdoors? How about getting together?’ ”
“Okay, not much to go on, is it?” Elise said, and Captain Kirk tried a comradely grin.
“Anyway, the victim replied, ‘When? Free tomorrow.’ So Seven-Four-Nine sent a second text immediately: ‘Tonight is good. I’m only twenty minutes from Ebbing. Call you when nearby.’ ”
Bingo!
“That puts the meeting around midnight,” Elise said. “It must be the killer. Isn’t there anything else? Had he called before?”
“There’s a ten-second call from Seven-Four-Nine later—at twenty-three thirty-nine, the last time Karen’s phone was used. But it sounds like a typical late-night hookup to me,” the analyst said, and Elise suppressed a shudder at the thought of those boxers. “You know the victim was on an app?” he added. “It’s on her phone. She’d set herself up as LaDiva. She swiped right on someone called Bear earlier that Friday night. At nineteen thirty-six. That account was deleted the next morning.”
“Could it be the same man?”
The techie gave a small nod. “Could be. I’ll try to link the two digitally.”
* * *
—
Elise started a new list in her head as she drove back to Southfold. She almost took the lift at the station but made herself walk up the stairs and then went for a pee while she had the time.
Caro was in the ladies, rubbing her top with a wet paper towel, when Elise walked past and into a cubicle.
“Found a bit of Jessie’s porridge.” Caro grinned. “How are you doing?”
“Er, good. Not sleeping great and having my occasional lapses—but you know that,” Elise called through the loo door. “Do you think anyone else has spotted it? Has anyone said anything?”
“No,” Caro said, a beat too slowly. Elise heard the lie and put her head in her hands for a moment.
“It’s happening less, Caro,” she called.
“Yep,” her oppo muttered, the if you say so unspoken but clearly heard. “Probably a good idea to have another look at your lists and see if there’s anything else I need to know about.”
“I was just about to check through,” Elise said, pulling screws of paper out of her top pocket. She used to color-code them for urgency, but she’d forgotten to do that lately. There was too much else to do. They were stuck together and crumpled. Like her thoughts.
“Look, you’re doing great—everyone says so.” Her sergeant sped up to bring the heart-to-heart to a safe close. “It’s still early days.”
Elise paused to compose her face before opening the cubicle door. The thing was, it wasn’t. It was a year since she’d first been diagnosed. And suddenly she was back in the consultant’s room, hearing and not hearing the news. She’d gone on her own—she couldn’t think of anyone she could share it with. Hugh was long gone and, anyway, it’d be nothing. A cyst with a wicked sense of humor or something.
But it wasn’t. It was bad news. She’d seen enough of it in her job, and it was there on the consultant’s face as soon as he walked into the room. She’d stared at him, but she hadn’t been able to take in his words. All she’d heard was a loud buzzing in her ears. The oncology nurse had led her to a quiet corner afterward to tell her all over again.
Elise was due to have her three-monthly blood tests that week. She’d booked a lunchtime appointment on Thursday so she could disappear and be back without having to tell anyone at work. Not even Caro. She couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else waiting for the results. She’d endure it alone again. Best that way.
“Anyway,” Elise said, resetting the conversation as she emerged to wash her hands, “we’ve got a result from Karen’s phone. She arranged to meet someone in Ebbing at midnight. No name, unregistered phone, but no abduction off the street.”
“Thank God. We need a break.”
“Yep. Now, what else before we go in?”
“Well, some goodish news—we’ve retrieved the photo of Karen’s body on Clayton’s phone,” Caro announced.
“But that’s brilliant,” Elise crowed and sprayed water all over her trousers. “Oh, shit!”
“Okay, don’t get too excited.” Caro passed her a wodge of paper towels. “There are ice crystals on Karen’s eyelashes if you zoom in, and those would have taken time, postmortem, to form. So the picture was taken after death. Oh, and the bastard also took intimate pictures. There must be a special place in hell for someone who upskirts a corpse.”
“Christ, he must have taken them when he found her,” Elise said. “But why?”
“Well, Mr. Clayton has also deleted some fairly gruesome ones of Mrs. C posing in the wood. I wonder if he was sharing them? I’ve sent Chevening and Thomson to pick him up. I’ll take him when he gets here.”
“Okay, so Noel Clayton’s our cyberflasher, but surely he didn’t mean to send that photo to Kiki Nunn? Why would he? So who did he really want to show it to? Can you organize a search of his place this morning? There may be other trophies. Come on, I want to get the team moving on the new info.”
“Behind you,” Caro said, lobbing the paper towels into the bin.
The first signs of fatigue had infected the incident room when Elise and Caro walked in. A miasma of stale breath and last night’s fast-food run lingered, and officers were slumped in their chairs. No one was talking.
“Morning!” Elise said sharply, opening a window to let the burger smell out, and the bodies stirred.
“Karen Simmons wasn’t taken off the street or from a nightclub—she agreed to meet a man in Ebbing on Valentine’s night around midnight,” she said, and watched spines straighten. “We have the messages sent to her from an unregistered number. Her date said he could be in town in twenty minutes. He was in the area already.”
“Wow!” DC Chevening said. “He’s local. She might even have known him—she wouldn’t have gone to meet a complete stranger in the middle of the night, would she?”
“Actually, I hear that’s part of the thrill for some people,” Andy Thomson said. “Just saying.”
“Right, well, Karen had made contact with someone calling himself Bear on a dating app earlier that evening,” Elise continued. “He may be our man.”
FIFTY-SIX
ANNIE
Monday, February 24, 2020
Xander must have told Henry as soon as he’d got back from the shops yesterday. Annie had dithered over asking him to keep her visit to the police station quiet, but she hadn’t wanted to ask her son to keep secrets for her.
When nothing happened, she wondered if Xander had decided not to say anything anyway. Henry was quiet, but no more than he had been lately. And she thought she’d got away with it for now.
But she should have known.
Henry waited until Xander had caught the early train back to London and Gav had gone to school.
He was sitting on a chair in the garden, no coat. Annie went out with a mug of coffee and perched on an old stool. “What are you doing out here? You’ll catch your death. We should have put the garden furniture away properly. It’ll be ruined by the summer,” she wittered, for something to say.
“Xander says you went to talk to the police.” He looked at her, daring her to lie.
No more secrets, Annie whispered in her head.
“Yes. I rang them, but the inspector said she’d been about to get in touch with me. To ask why I went to the vigil.”
“Why did you go?” Henry muttered into his coffee.
“For Archie,” she whispered. “It was where he died, too. And I needed to go back. We should have done it before.”
“Why?” Henry mumbled. “It was too painful. And what was the point? He wasn’t there anymore.”
“He was for me. And Karen Simmons dying like that. It brought everything back, like it was happening all over again. I did tell you, but you didn’t want to hear.”
Henry looked away. “What did you tell the inspector?” he muttered.
“About Archie’s death.”
“What about it?”
Anne took a deep breath as she stepped off the cliff edge.
“My doubts about the investigation. You know I had them. How the police stopped looking once Nicky Donovan was arrested. How we never knew why he did it. We never heard him say, did we? I’m not sure the inspector was that interested at first. But then I showed her a copy of Nicky Donovan’s suicide note.”
Henry rose from his chair as if he’d been stung. “His suicide note? How did you get that?”
“From his mum.”
“Oh, my God, Annie, what have you done? Where is this note?”
She got her phone out of her pocket and found the photo she’d taken.
He read it out loud in a sneering voice—“ ‘I can’t help the way I am’ ”—until he got to the end. Then he finished it in silence, his lips twitching.
“He only talks about one boy, Henry.”
“Yes: Archie,” he croaked.
“No. It’s Xander, isn’t it? You must see that.”
“No, I don’t. He didn’t tell the truth to the police when they picked him up. He was still deceiving them when he decided to kill himself. He was a liar.”
“Like you,” Annie snapped. “You lied to the police, too, didn’t you?”
He wanted to shout—she could see it in his eyes—and scream his innocence in her face. But Henry knew she saw through him. He slumped back in his chair.
“I did it for you,” he said so softly she had to lean down to hear. “To protect our family.”
Annie wanted to hit him.
“To protect yourself, you mean,” she hissed at him. “You didn’t want anyone to know you were banging some secretary somewhere while your child was being killed.”
“Annie,” he gasped. “You cannot believe that.”
“I do.” And the madwoman escaped. Annie was screeching the words that had roiled inside her head for years and the whole street would be able to hear and she didn’t care. “You blamed me for not watching them,” she shrieked.
“I didn’t…” He faltered. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t need to. I could see it in your eyes. Hear it in your silences. But you weren’t even there. You were screwing around instead of looking out for your children!”
Henry tried to get hold of her, but she wrestled free and ran to the house. “Who was she, Henry?” Annie yelled from the door. “Was it worth losing your son for?”
“Shut up!” he yelled back as he caught up and shoved her through the door. She knew she had frightened him properly, and for a second Annie felt triumph surging through her. But then he started to sob and she was his wife again. The hardwired need to comfort him rang through her body, and she reached for him.
“Get off,” Henry wept, pushing her back. “You don’t know anything about it. You didn’t want me—it was all about the kids. I didn’t exist as far as you were concerned. And she wasn’t some one-night stand. I loved her. I was going to leave you. We were going to leave Ebbing to make a new life.”
Annie couldn’t breathe, as if he’d punched her in the chest, but the adrenaline pumped her back up. “Ha!” she heard herself shriek. “I would’ve packed your bags for you. Thrown a bloody party! Why did you bother to stay?” But she knew. It was the same reason she had. Their dead child.
Henry was sobbing, bent double by the door. “Stop it, why don’t you stop it?” he gulped.
And she did. Annie went and sat at the kitchen counter and tried not to look at him. The row was already replaying in her head. The “what if?” torture game thrumming in her head. What if she’d left him before Archie died? There’d been times—the debts, the sexting—when she’d allowed herself to think about it, but she’d told herself she loved Henry too much to give up on him. Now she knew he’d given up on her. What if he’d gone off? Where would she be now? Would Archie still be here? Would they all have started new lives? We were going to leave Ebbing, he’d said. And the truth lit up in her head. The other woman hadn’t been at the office. She’d been from Ebbing, too.
“Who was she?” Annie asked again, and Henry stood up to walk out. “Don’t you dare,” she spat. “I knew her, didn’t I?”
He put his hands to his face. “I didn’t mean it to happen,” he said.
“Who was she?”
He started to cry again.
FIFTY-SEVEN
KIKI
Monday, February 24, 2020
Elise King ignores my first call. My name must have come up on her screen, and I’m probably the last person she wants to hear from. But I dial again. And again.
“Kiki!” Elise snaps, her irritation ringing in my ear. “Can we make this quick? I’m up to my neck, here.”
“Um,” I say and immediately choke to a standstill. I mustn’t cry. I can’t speak if I’m crying.
“Kiki? Are you there?” Elise barks. “Are you all right?”
“Er, no, not really,” I croak. “I need some help. Some advice. Can I talk to you? Off the record?”
“Off the record? What is this about? Is it about my complaint to your news editor? I really can’t talk about that.”
“No,” I say.
“Look, is it urgent?” Elise says, and I hear Caro Brennan talking beside her. “Sorry, Kiki.” Elise cuts me short. “I’ve got to go—I’m in the middle of several things.” And I cling on to the phone and fight to control my breath.
“Please,” I say.
“Hang on, Caro,” she hisses to her sergeant. “Okay, what’s happened?” she demands.
“I’ve been raped,” I sob. “By an online date.” And close my eyes. It’s out there now. I can never unsay it.
There’s a beat of silence, and I hang there, wondering if she even heard me. “Where are you?” Elise speaks, professional and urgent. “Where is he?”
“I’m at home and I don’t know where he is,” I gulp. “But not in the house.”
Her voice softens. “Okay. Hold tight. Don’t answer the door or the phone to him. We’re on our way. And, Kiki, don’t shower or wash. It could be important.”
* * *
—
An hour later, I’m sitting with her in Southfold’s teal-and-gray rape suite. The reporter in me notices that it’s been rebranded as the Comfort Suite, but it is no less grim.
A doctor is on her way to examine me and take swabs, and I sit shivering, dreading the idea of anyone touching me. Like he must have done. The stickiness prickles my thighs. Oh, God, I just want to sleep.
But the specialist officer is wheeled in to ask her questions. Who? Where? When? I feel wrong-footed. Asking the questions is my job. Normally. But nothing is normal now.
I try to focus on my answers, but having Elise in the room distracts me. She is watching quietly from her matching sofa across the room. But she’s taking in every word, and I wonder what she’s thinking.
“Can I ask something?” Elise says when the interview pauses. The specialist officer and I nod. “Why did you meet him a second time? After he stalked you?”
It is what I would have asked. What sort of idiot are you?
I groan. My eyes are like slits and my throat aches from all the crying, but I need to explain myself.
“I just wanted it to stop,” I croak. “And I thought it would if I told him, face-to-face, to leave me alone. Stupid, I know. But I really thought I could handle the situation.”
“Okay, this is not your fault in any way,” Elise says quietly and comes to sit beside me. “It sounds like you were drugged—the bloods may confirm what he used, but not everything hangs around in the system this long. We just need to find him—now. Let’s go through the description again.”
“Solid,” I rasp. “Sort of light-colored hair. Good-looking, longish face. He said he worked in security. Freelance, like me. I’ve been trying to remember what he told me about himself, but he spent all his time asking me questions, talking about me. I was so flattered.” I stop, straining not to cry before whispering: “But I suppose he didn’t want me to know who he really was.”
