Chapter 26
Annabelle
This can’t be happening. How has this happened? What did I miss? My journal. I need my journal.
I pull away from Aidan and stride through the apartment to my bedroom. “Where is it?” I shout out as the guys follow me. “Where is the journal?”
“What journal?” Ethan asks, too carefully.
I spin towards him. “I know you know about it. Did you bring it here?” I fire the question at Callan.
Callan doesn’t move from his position by the door. He remains a fixed point in the room. “It’s in the top drawer,” he says. His voice is a flat line. “I put it there when I was organising your things this morning.”
“Bastards,” I hiss, but their violation doesn’t matter.
It’s here, and I need to read it again. Front to back with my mind not drowning in confusion or deep depression.
Just whisky. But that is burning through my veins and dissipating as the adrenaline beats through me.
I scramble for the dresser. I pull the handle.
The drawer slides open. It’s under my knickers.
I snatch it up and press the cold surface against my ribs.
This book is the only thing that knows the truth of the four years.
Every paranoia. Every flicker of a face in a crowd.
“What are you looking for?” Aidan asks. He stands behind Ethan. He looks ready to tear the room apart.
“I don’t know. Something! I must’ve seen or heard my mother say or do something that points to whoever murdered her.”
Ethan moves closer. “Do you think she was involved with someone?”
“Ethan,” Aidan snaps. “This isn’t the time.”
“It’s exactly the time,” Ethan grits out and moves in closer. “Annabelle, answer me.”
“I don’t fucking know,” I snap, my voice climbing an octave. My fingers fumble with the elastic band holding the book shut. “She didn’t tell me things. She didn’t have a life outside of work and me, or that’s what I thought.”
I drop onto the edge of the bed, the journal heavy in my lap.
I flip the pages, the paper dry and rasping against my skin.
The postman, the check-out guy at Tesco, the man who smiled at her while we were at lunch, her boss, her colleagues, my dad, whom I never met.
They are all suspects. All suspects of my paranoia.
“I don’t know,” I say again, more calmly, because he’s trying to help.
It’s an obvious link and one that I’ve turned over in my mind a million times.
“She’d go out to the supermarket after dinner.
I always wondered why so late. It’s why I suspected the guy at Tesco.
Bennett thought I was mad when I mentioned it.
They said they looked into him… It wasn’t him. ”
“But did she go to the supermarket?” Ethan presses.
I can feel Aidan’s glare. He doesn’t want Ethan asking these questions, but I want to answer them.
“I suppose so. I don’t really know. I didn’t pay much attention. I wasn’t there demanding to see the shopping bags when she got home. I was doing my own stuff, having a life. Look where that got her. Killed.” Tears prick my eyes.
Ethan places his hand on the back of my neck, and I sob openly.
“None of this is your fault,” he says. “She was either truly going to the shops, or she was going another time and leaving the groceries in the boot of the car, unless your cupboards ran empty a lot?”
I shake my head. “They were always full. Too full, even.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me,” Aidan murmurs.
Ethan’s head snaps up, and I peek up to see the look that they exchange.
“I wrote it down,” I say, trying to steady my voice, brushing my tears away.
“What about frozen stuff?” Callan asks. “Did she shop for frozen food?”
“What has that got to do with anything?” I ask.
“If she was shopping earlier in the day, and leaving the bags in the car, then sneaking out, saying she was going shopping, any frozen food would’ve defrosted. Boxes would have gone soggy, and food would’ve had to have been thrown out.”
I chew my lip. “My mother stopped buying frozen food sometime before she died. I can’t remember how long it was, months, at least. She wanted to eat healthier.
Fresh food, nothing processed. It wasn’t suspicious.
I didn’t even think about it. It made sense why she was going to the shops every other day.
” I stare into Ethan’s eyes and inhale deeply.
“Do you think she was covering up a relationship?”
“Yes,” he says bluntly.
“But why? Why would she hide that from me? I would’ve been happy for her.”
“I can’t answer that,” he says, taking my hand.
No. Of course, he can’t. He didn’t even know my mother.
“When did you start writing the journal?” Callan asks.
I look up at him. “The day after the police told me they’d found her body. I needed to try to make sense of it.”
I look down at the worn cover of the notebook.
The leather is scuffed from four years of being shoved in the drawer under my bed and into the bottoms of bags.
It’s my map through the fog, but looking at it now, with these three men looming over me, it feels like evidence of a crime I didn’t even know was committed.
“Start from the beginning,” Ethan says. He doesn’t move his hand from my neck. The pressure is a tether, keeping me from floating away into the memory of the morgue.
I flip the pages back to the very first entry. “I went through her phone records back then. The police did too. There was nothing. No unsaved numbers, no late-night calls. Just me, her work, and the occasional call to the dentist.”
“Phones are easy to hide,” Aidan says. “Burners are cheap. If she was hiding a man, she wasn’t using her main line.”
“I looked in her car,” I whisper, the memory of the stale scent of her perfume hitting me. “I looked under the seats, in the glove compartment. I found nothing but old parking receipts.”
“Receipts tell stories,” Callan says. I look up at him. He’s leaning against the doorframe, his blue eyes tracking the movement of my fingers on the paper. “Time stamps. Locations. Did you check the times on those receipts against the times she said she was at the shops?”
The question makes my stomach drop. “No. I just... I was looking for a name. A note. Something obvious.”
“The devil isn’t obvious,” Ethan murmurs.
I start reading the first page, my eyes scanning the frantic scrawl. They found her near the reservoir. She’d been moved. The detective said it was quick. He’s a liar.
I turn the page. I keep thinking about the white van. I saw it three times this week. Or am I just looking for ghosts?
“A white van?” Aidan asks.
“I saw it everywhere after she died,” I say, my voice trembling. “I thought I was being paranoid. The police told me white vans are the most common vehicles in the country.”
“Not when they follow you,” Ethan says.
The weight of it is too much. I drop the journal and bury my face in my hands.
The truth is a monster, and it’s been living in my shadow for four years.
These men aren’t just my captors; they’re the only thing standing between me and the man who broke my world.
They’re the last people in the world I should trust, but I can’t seem to stop.
“You say you’ve been investigating,” I say, suddenly, remembering. “What have you found out? Oh, God… your mother. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own misery…”
“Don’t worry about us, Tinks,” Ethan says. “We are just fine, but worried about you. This has always only ever been about you.”
His voice has gone soft, and I flinch. “But what have you found out about your mother? Anything? Anything that ties her to my mother?”
I search their faces. Ethan’s expression remains a locked vault.
Aidan is too still. Even Callan has turned away from the door to watch me, his features tight with a tension that makes the air in the room feel heavy.
They know more than they are saying. The silence between them is a physical wall, thick and impenetrable.
“We haven’t found a direct link yet,” Ethan says. His thumb strokes the sensitive skin behind my ear. It is a soothing gesture that feels like a distraction. “Our mother disappeared years before yours.”
“And so have countless women in between. Three of them were found within a mile of my mother. How can the police not figure this out?” I fling the journal across the room. It hits the wall with a thud. “Why don’t they want to?”
“Maybe they are being paid not to look,” Callan states so coldly. I shiver.
“What? By who? That makes no sense.” Except maybe it does. Are they being paid to look the other way? Corruption happens. We hear about it on the news, but for a serial killer? Who has that kind of money and power?
My entire body freezes. I’m sitting in a penthouse apartment in an exclusive part of the city with three men who drive flashy cars and don’t seem to have to work to maintain their lifestyle.
The Scotch I guzzled back wasn’t harsh enough to strip paint like the cheap kind I’m used to.
It went down smoother than water. Aidan threatened to rip a man’s face off like it was a normal reaction to a stranger. Who are these men? Who are they really?
“Annabelle?” Ethan asks. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine,” I say as calmly as I can. I stand up, my legs steadier than I thought they’d be. “I need to wash my face.”
“I’ll help you,” Ethan says, also standing up.
“I need to pee as well,” I say, already moving forward to the en-suite.
“I’m fine. I’ll be a minute.” I close the door and lock it before any of them can come storming in.
I lift the lid on the toilet, pulling toilet paper from the roll.
I flush it a few moments later, my mind whirring over.
They’re in their early thirties, or thereabouts.
Four years ago, they’d have been about my age.
Completely adult enough, perfectly capable of killing multiple women.
They already know how to pretend to be one another.
If they were questioned, they’d just send in the one who didn’t do it. No lie here, officer.
“Fuck,” I whisper as I turn on the tap. “Fuck.”