Chapter 62
“So, this supposed investigator,” Jess says, sitting cross-legged on the sofa. “He could be anyone. Did he show you his warrant card?”
“He said he was a civilian investigator now, working with some regional cold case unit.” I describe the webpage Webber had shown me on his phone, the old news story with his picture.
She shrugs. “Easiest thing in the world to fake. What about a car—what was he driving?”
“He just turned up. Said he got a taxi.”
“Or maybe he didn’t want to bring it because it’s a gray Volvo. Please tell me you didn’t hand over the rest of the stuff, the last of the things you found?”
“Gave him the glasses. Kept the other two things.”
“I don’t like the sound of this guy,” she says. “Something about him doesn’t ring true. And that whole thing with him waving a big knife around—that’s just messed up.”
“He was quite strange. But maybe the job does that to you, working on the murder squad for years.”
“What if it is him though? What if Webber is the sidekick, the one who’s been hiding in plain sight all these years?”
“Then why didn’t he stab me up in that room today, when he had the chance?”
“Maybe it’s all about recognition for him now; maybe he’s craving the ‘credit’ that he never received at the time. The point is, how do you know he isn’t just burrowing his way into our lives, to find out what you know as part of some sick plan to go down in a blaze of glory?”
“He wants to solve this case, Jess. He wants the same thing as us.”
She gives me a look as if I’m being hopelessly naive. “I don’t think you should trust him. I don’t think you should trust anyone.”
Exhaustion from the last few nights of broken sleep overtakes me and I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep in the late afternoon.
When I wake up and head downstairs, there’s a car in the drive I’ve never seen before.
A battered white Toyota pickup with a dirty green tarpaulin stretched over the cargo bed at the back.
I look around the front garden. No one seems to be here—no one is supposed to be here, as far as I know.
Jess was picking the kids up from school and working from home this afternoon, but she’d not mentioned anything to me about a visitor.
The dashboard of the pickup is littered with fast-food wrappers and other rubbish, the seats tattered and stained.
I shift the tarpaulin off the cargo bed to find a set of aluminum ladders, a chainsaw, various spades crusted with soil, and a thick stack of heavy-duty refuse sacks.
Lying next to them, a sledgehammer and two black-handled axes.
A figure emerges through the gate from the back garden and I feel a sudden jolt of alarm before I realize it’s Tobias, in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Three bulging garden waste bags in each of his hands. He nods a greeting to me as he heads over to the green bin at the side of the house.
Jess’s words are still fresh in my mind. I don’t think you should trust anyone.
What was the other thing she had said? He doesn’t really like being shut in; he prefers to be outside.
Maybe that was because he’d spent so much of his life under lock and key, behind prison walls?
Was that why the killings had stopped, all those years ago?
I summon the memory of Saturday night, trying to picture the intruder in my house during the power cut.
Was he the one who had broken in, the one who had been at the top of the cellar stairs?
This stranger who had access to my garden, my house?
“Hi,” I say. “Tobias, isn’t it?”
He dumps the first bag into the green bin and I notice a dirty bandage around the palm of his left hand.
“That’s me.”
“What happened to your hand? Car accident?”
He doesn’t look at the bandage. “Barbed wire.”
“Right.” I turn and head for the house, reaching for my keys. “Wait there a minute, will you?”
His voice, behind me now, takes on a harder tone. “Is there a problem?”
I ignore him. In the house, the tiled floor of the hallway and the kitchen are wet, as if they’ve just been mopped. I call out but there’s no answer, eventually finding Helena upstairs in the spare bedroom wiping glass cleaner off one of the big leaded windows.
The last stranger I’d confronted up here was Shaun, who had knocked on my door with some story about his grandfather’s old watch, and I’d had to march him out of the house after finding him rooting around in the master bedroom.
She has the same yellow Marigolds and pink housecoat as the last time she was here, same outfit, hair clipped up in the same way, but all I can think of is the conversation with Webber from earlier.
One is the distraction, the lure, the shiny decoy; the other one makes the kill.
Helena was in her mid- to late forties, so around the turn of the millennium she would have been in her early to mid-twenties.
She was an attractive woman now, with fine, delicate features, and I’m sure she had been as a younger woman too.
And at least two suspected victims of the A52 Killer—Edward Stiles and Dean Fullerton—had been single men who might have been easily taken in by a woman like that.
The distraction, the lure, the shiny decoy.
My heart starts to thud painfully in my chest and suddenly the only thing I can think about is getting her out, getting them both out, off my property, away from here. The idea of strangers being here makes the small hairs stand up on my bare arms.
There’s a real multiplier effect when you have two suspects working together.
“Nearly finished in here,” she says breezily. “Your wife asked me to take the dog for a walk around the block as well. Coco, isn’t it? She seems very friendly.”
“You have a key from Jess, do you?”
“Yes.” She is completely calm. “Back door.”
Of course. I kick myself for not thinking of it sooner. She’s had access to the house since before the weekend—that’s why I’d never heard a break-in on Saturday night.
“Listen, I’m really sorry but there’s been a bit of a… misunderstanding,” I say. “I’m going to need your key back until we can get some more sets cut.”
“Oh?”
“I need to give a set to my brother-in-law and we just don’t have enough to go around just yet. Sorry.” I hold my hand out. “Do you mind?”
She reaches into a pocket and drops the key into my outstretched palm.
Quietly, she says: “I was glad to hear your wife was OK, after last night.”
There is a sudden chill at the back of my neck, as if cold fingertips are resting there.
“Thank you. She’s a tough one.”
“Sounds like she was lucky,” she says. “Thank goodness.”
Is there the ghost of a smile at the corner of her lips, or am I just making her nervous?
“You know what?” I say. “It’s actually not a good time right now; the kids are back from school soon, and Daisy’s still not really settled in yet. She gets very anxious around strangers so I wonder if you could just finish up now? Obviously we’ll pay you the full amount.”
She gives me an odd look but doesn’t argue, pulling off the rubber gloves with a shrug and heading downstairs to find her cousin.
As their battered Toyota is crunching up the gravel drive, Jess’s car appears on the street. She waits for the pickup to indicate and pull out onto Regency Place before turning in and parking up behind my Nissan.
She gets out and goes to the rear door to unstrap Daisy from her car seat.
“Hey, what’s up with Helena and her cousin?” she calls over to me. “Just saw them leaving but they were supposed to be doing three till five today.”
“I sent them away.”
She frowns, as if she’s misheard me. “You did what?”
“It’s not a good idea to have lots of strangers in the house right now. Lots of people we don’t really know.”
“They’re not strangers. She came recommended on that WhatsApp group, the Park Estate neighborhood chat.” Her voice is laced with disbelief. “You didn’t actually tell them to go, did you?”
“I didn’t know you’d given her a key.”
She helps Daisy to climb down from the back seat onto the drive while Callum clambers out the other side, swinging his school backpack from one strap.
“Quite difficult for her to do the job without a key,” she says. “So you’re going to pick up where she left off, are you?”
“I don’t trust her,” I say. “Or him.”
“This has gone far enough, Adam.” She slams the car door with a little more force than is needed. “I’m worried about the effect this is having on you, as well as the head injury. You’re not being rational and you need to stop; this all needs to stop so the police can deal with it.”
“The police aren’t interested.”
She checks over her shoulder to make sure Callum and Daisy are not in earshot. But they are both momentarily distracted by a squirrel sitting on the garden wall.
“That fall in the cellar could have killed you,” she says under her breath. “I got lucky last night. Who knows what they’re going to do next? Enough’s enough. This has to stop.”
“That’s the whole point,” I say. “It’s not as simple as that anymore. Whoever’s doing this, they’re not going to stop or leave us alone. Not unless we stop them first. And until then we have to protect ourselves, which means keeping strangers away.”
She stares at me a moment longer, frustration hardening her features. Then she simply shakes her head again and stalks into the house, Callum and Daisy trotting along close behind.