Chapter 70
I wake up in a fog of pain but it all comes back to me in one sickening, tearing rush.
I had been wrong.
Wrong about so many things.
Wrong about the people who had done this.
Not a man and a woman, like Brady and Hindley or Bonnie and Clyde. Not a female at all.
Another partnership that was just as toxic.
Instead, an alpha male—the pack leader, the top dog—with the beta male very much in his shadow, smaller in every respect.
In courage, in confidence, in physical stature.
A beta male who had finally emerged from that shadow all these years later, to take up the mantle of the master.
The picture Maxine has sent me is still on the screen of my phone, the faces circled in red blurring in and out with each throb of pain in my skull.
Jeremy Swann, the estate agent, leans over me.
He picks up my phone off the floor, canceling the emergency call.
Through the pain in my head, I hear him rummaging in the gray backpack I carried upstairs.
“I’ll have these, I think,” Swann says calmly. “To complete my collection.”
My hands are tied behind my back. He drags me into the hidden room, grunting with the effort, and lays me alongside Jess. She looks worse than ever, a grayish tinge to her skin that makes my heart clench with fear and love and grief for how badly I’ve let her down.
Swann turns the diesel generator back on with a gloved hand, pulling a small respirator up over his mouth and nose. In his other hand he holds a short, thick wooden club with a grooved handle and a leather strap around his wrist.
“Thought carbon monoxide poisoning would be a nice touch,” he says. “Wouldn’t be the first tragic accident this house has seen. Appropriate, no? Considering what I had to do to Pete and his poor old grandma in the end.”
“You were at school with him.”
He nods, smiling behind his mask. “Two years and about a million miles below him in social terms. We lost touch after school and I was twenty-one before I bumped into him again. But as soon as we saw each other, as soon as we started talking, we both just knew. It’s hard to explain to an average Joe like you.
But we recognized each other as if we were looking in a mirror.
We saw something in each other that we’d never seen in anyone else. ”
“That you were both psychopaths.” I couldn’t help myself. Despite the fact that I was breathing in carbon monoxide with every word I uttered.
He shrugs. “If you like. If you want to put a label on it. Pete, he was… free. The only truly free person I’ve ever known.
We were the same. And yet at the same time he was an absolutely extraordinary man, like a young god, a young Achilles.
One of a kind. I’ve never met anyone like him, even close to him, before or since. ”
“Didn’t trust you though, did he?” I flex my arms, ball my fists, trying to work some movement into the knot around my wrists. “Otherwise he would never have kept his little stash of compromising evidence on you. To make sure he always had a hold over you.”
Swann studies the Rolex with an air of detached interest before putting it in the gym bag with everything else.
“Obviously I didn’t know exactly where he kept his ‘insurance policy,’ as he liked to call it.
” He zips the gym bag closed. “That was the whole point of it: the little souvenirs with their traces of blood and DNA were insurance against betrayal from the other. We weren’t supposed to know where the other one lived, where they worked, who they socialized with.
There was nothing to link us together—that was the safest way. We just met up to… to do what we did.”
“To hunt.”
“Yes.” He smiles. “To hunt. Best days of my life.”
“Until it went sour.”
“It was his fault. After a while he started to get… reckless. Almost as if he wanted to get caught, wanted the world to see how clever he was, how many he’d killed.
He was always in charge when we were together, always the leader, but that was never my plan.
We were never supposed to get caught. So I had to work out a contingency plan instead, found out he lived in this posh house in The Park, and that his dozy grandma never used to lock the back door, made it easy enough to get inside and make a few adjustments to the old gas fire.
I broke in once after he died too, when it was empty, but couldn’t find anything.
Thought maybe he had a safety deposit box somewhere instead that would get thrown away when he stopped making the payments. But I had to be sure.”
“He’d hidden his stash so well you couldn’t find it.”
“After I took care of him and old grandma Elizabeth, the house went on the market and that’s when I had the idea.
Got myself a junior’s job with the estate agent that was handling the sale.
Thought I’d get a set of keys and be able to wander around whenever I liked, turn the place upside down if I had to. ”
“And why didn’t you?”
He snorts. “I was so naive back then. I was the new junior agent and they gave me all the crap jobs, viewings on the low-end properties; they never let me handle the expensive stuff. I never even got near this place while it was on the market in 2002. It sold to that old fart Mr. Hopkins pretty quickly, and all of it was handled by the branch manager because it was top-end value.”
“You missed your chance.”
“Yeah, but then something weird happened. I got a taste for it, the house-selling business. And I was good at it, too. Enjoyed it, seeing how people lived, having access to all of it. And I thought, what better way of keeping an eye on this house, having a reason to drop by, to be in the neighborhood with a full set of copied keys. To have an interest in what was going on. Eric Hopkins was old, and I knew sooner or later it’d be up for sale again, that one day it would be empty again—and that would be my chance to check it thoroughly from top to bottom.
To make absolutely sure I was safe. I just had to be patient.
Even got some cameras set up in here to keep an eye on everything in case some idiot eventually stumbled across Pete’s stash of souvenirs.
Some idiot like you. Tried to make it easy for you, but you wouldn’t listen.
I tried to warn you off Webber with a little note about his checkered past, but you didn’t listen to that either. ”
Grayness clouds my vision. The gas.
“Please… let my wife go. She doesn’t know anything.”
He notices me fighting to keep my eyes open.
“What you’re feeling now? That’s because carbon monoxide is replacing the oxygen in your red blood cells, preventing it from getting to your tissues and organs. It’s quite painless, not a bad way to go, all things considered. You’ll just slip away. Together.”
“Let Jess go. Please.”
He shakes his head, raising the wooden club.
“Sorry, Adam,” he says. “You really should have left the past alone. If you’d just let it be, none of this would have happened.”
He swings the club down again and the pain knocks me flat, a paralyzing, thundering blow above my ear.
Unconsciousness claws at me and I start to surrender to it, closing my eyes.
Darkness waiting to take me on one last journey.