Chapter 50
FIFTY
DAN
The plan was to race back over to Tilly’s apartment with a cock-and-bull story of my own, get her to come down to the station with me of her own volition, on the pretext of asking for her help.
If she gets any inkling that I’m on to her, she may try to abscond, and there’s every chance she could be successful too, if past behaviour is a good indicator.
And I cannot let that happen. Once she’s safe down at the station, we can then re-interview her, present her with this new information that’s come to light, and ideally get a confession from her.
What I wasn’t expecting to see when I arrived at the apartment for the second time that day was that Tilly had company.
And what I wasn’t expecting, even more than that, was for that company to be Erin Santos.
I suppose in terms of a professionally successful outcome, this was the double whammy, only I was unprepared, and unsure, at first.
I hadn’t recognised Erin instantly. She looks very different now to what she did six years ago.
Her hair is much shorter and bright blonde and she was wearing make-up and smart clothes.
Her cover about being a representative from Women in Prison was highly plausible, as was the ID she briefly showed me.
Only, she’d offered me her left hand when I’d gone to shake it, and if that wasn’t enough to arouse my suspicions, those arresting green eyes – not unlike Tilly’s, or Samantha’s, or Julie’s – were unmistakable as they briefly met with mine. Still, I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure it was her though.
I stood on the doorstep as ‘Alex’ closed the door behind me, leaving me standing there with little more than a very bad feeling and a waft of her perfume. That’s what did it. It was that same perfume…
Immediately, I realise that I shouldn’t have left them alone together.
During our last phone conversation, Erin had told me she would kill Samantha Valentine if she saw her again, and I believed her.
Perhaps I would kill her too if I were her.
As it was, I felt sick enough already knowing that Julie Edwards had pulled the wool over my eyes – over everyone’s, it appears.
But moreover, that one of the ways she garnered my sympathy was through her supposed ‘condition’.
She knew that my son was deaf. We’d even communicated in sign language together.
She was good at it too. I feel embarrassed, angry with myself, violated, I suppose, that I’d been taken in and allowed my personal feelings, my emotions, to get in the way of my professional judgement.
But I’ll deal with that later. Right now, I need to call for back-up and somehow get back inside that apartment.
Erin could be armed. And I don’t want her to do anything stupid, even though that’s how I feel right now – stupid.
I ring the buzzer of Flat 68, next door.
A woman in a dressing gown with a towel wrapped round her hair answers. She looks me up and down.
‘Yes?’
I flash her my badge and an apologetic smile as she steps back in surprise. ‘I’m sorry, but I need access to your apartment. Do you have a balcony?’
I’m not the greatest fan of heights, so I take an extra breath as I climb from next door’s balcony onto Tilly’s, and don’t look down.
I press my back up against the glass doors.
The curtains are almost fully drawn, but thankfully not quite, and I’m able to look inside with a more or less clear view of the small kitchen/dining area.
Tilly’s seated at the table, and Erin has her back to me.
Only, the way that she’s standing, her stance, concerns me.
If I didn’t know better – and at this point, I don’t – I’d say that she was pointing a gun at her, though I can’t see clearly from here.
I should call for back-up right now. We could have a potential Code Zero on our hands.
I pull my phone from my pocket, make to place the call, but at the last second, I think better of it.
A terrible thought flashes into my head then.
If Erin Santos is going to shoot Julie Edwards, then let her.
Frankly, the world would be a better, safer, kinder place without her in it, and admittedly, I feel angry that she’s duped me.
But it’s not my job to play judge and jury, no matter what she’s done or who to.
My job is to make sure no one gets hurt and bring any culprits to justice, just like what should’ve happened seven years ago.
It comes to me again then, something that Ken Edwards had said on the phone.
He said that his brother’s name was Ray and that he’d taken his own life.
Didn’t Erin tell me that Ray was also her stepdad’s name?
Ray Denis, the man who killed her mother, and subsequently himself, while he was in prison serving time for it?
Ken said he sometimes changed his name. It’s got to be the same person. Oh sweet Jesus, no…
I pull my phone from my pocket again, but then Erin suddenly spins round, like she senses there’s someone behind her, watching her. I pull back against the wall, hold my breath for a moment, too scared to move in case she comes to investigate.
‘That was a pretty darn good performance, Erin.’ Tilly is speaking, I can hear her through the glass.
I strain to listen. ‘I’m quite impressed.
You’ve come on in leaps and bounds, hun, you really have!
If I was to give you one piece of advice though, going forward, I’d say to work on your accent.
You still sound like a thick Northerner. ’
‘Well, I learned from the master, didn’t I? And you still sound like a liar.’
‘Anyway, accents aside, I think he recognised you.’
I edge towards the window, peer through a tiny crack.
Tilly is smirking. ‘Dan Riley recognised you, Erin. And now there’ll be an army of them knocking down the door at any moment, ready to cuff you and take you back to Larksmere. Tatty-bye, my old friend! It was nice seeing you again.’
‘Tell me your name, Samantha. I just want to hear you say it before I paint the walls with your brains.’
Yep, she’s got a gun! I see it then as she turns slightly to the right, the black metal object in her hand is unmistakable.
‘Don’t do it, Erin,’ I whisper the words into the cold air like smoke, my fingers shaking as I reach for my phone – and then it slips through them, smashes as it hits the concrete below me. My heart immediately follows suit. Suddenly, Erin is at the window. She’s heard it. They’ve seen me.
I say a silent prayer as she slides the double doors open.
‘Dan?’ Her eyes are wide open in shock. ‘Detective Riley? What are you doing out here?’ Tilly’s right though, she really needs to work on her London accent.
I know exactly how I’m going to play this out – but it’s not going to be easy, and it will need an unspoken understanding between myself and Erin to pull it off, a silent understanding that I can only hope we have if I’ve a snowball’s chance in hell of getting everyone out of this situation alive and unharmed.
‘Journalists,’ I say, wiping my wet hands down my coat as I step inside. ‘I saw one of them on the balcony up here just now, sniffing around, bloody parasites.’
‘Oh!’ She sticks her head out of the double doors, looks left and right.
‘I think they may have gone now – when they saw me,’ I add.
I look at Erin, try to communicate my thoughts to her through my eyes. She holds my gaze for a few seconds. Is the small smile she gives me one of understanding? I can’t be entirely sure. I’m pretty convinced the gun is in her left pocket though, and I need to make sure it stays there.
‘Good job you were here to stop them, Detective Riley. Those rodents get everywhere.’
‘Indeed.’
The biggest problem I now face is how do I alert the team of my situation and call for back-up? My phone is currently in bits on the concrete floor of the balcony. If this all goes south, then Archer’s going to have my head on the chopping block. If I’m not in the morgue already by then.
Tilly suddenly leaps up from her seat as I enter the room.
‘She’s got a gun, Dan!’ She signs the words to me silently, and again I wonder just how she has become so proficient in sign linguistics, being as though she isn’t deaf, or even hard of hearing, as it turns out.
Had she studied it and become more or less proficient in one weekend, like she did the piano? Such wasted talents.
‘It’s OK, Tilly,’ I say aloud. ‘I know she has.’
Erin turns then, and pulls the weapon from her pocket, but she doesn’t point it at me.
‘She thinks I’m Samantha Valentine.’ I hear faux incredulity in Tilly’s voice.
To the untrained ear, admittedly, it would sound convincing.
‘She thinks that I’ve set her up. That I’m the woman who tricked her into killing that man all those years ago…
she blames me for what happened to her. She’s completely mad, Dan.
’ She grips hold of my arm, tries to use me as a human shield as she shuffles behind me.
‘I know she is, Tilly. Just stay calm, OK. My colleagues are on the way.’
I widen my eyes at Erin, like you do when you’re trying to tell someone not to say something out loud without actually saying it out loud yourself. I can only hope she’s caught on. And that she’s on my side.
‘Just tell me your name,’ Erin says. ‘That’s all I really want, to hear you say your real name.’
‘But you know my real name, Samantha,’ Tilly says. ‘You know who I am. We were friends, remember? Please, Sam, don’t do this. Dan here can help you, we can both help you, can’t we, Dan?’
‘I hope you’re not still buying into this bullshit, Dan.’ Erin turns her head to me. ‘She’s been playing you too of course. The whole hard-of-hearing act…’ She walks towards us then, and Tilly grips my arm so tightly I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin through my thick coat.
‘Take it off,’ she says, ‘the bogus hearing aid, take it off!’ Tilly does as she says without moving her eyes away from the gun.
Erin whips it from her grasp, holds it up in her right hand.
‘Look!’ she says. ‘It doesn’t even work!
It’s just a piece of old plastic, a decoy, she probably bought it off eBay.
’ She throws it to the floor, stamps on it.
I hear the crushing sound as it breaks beneath her foot.
‘It’s a fake, just like everything else about her.
’ Erin trains her eyes over to me again.
‘None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for the police’s ineptitude all those years ago.
If they’d only listened to me then, if they’d just believed me, then maybe Milo Harrison would be alive now, and I would be at home, with my husband and kids, living the life I should’ve had if I’d never met this sick, twisted psychopath here.
’ She waggles the gun at her. ‘Do you know, Dan, she told me that it was because Milo Harrison ghosted her that she signed that poor man’s death warrant.
She had a fling with him, and he didn’t want to know her afterwards…
but that ego of hers, that gigantic, narcissistic ego, simply couldn’t allow him to get away with such a heinous crime…
and so she decided no less than death would be his punishment.
It was the same story with Bojan Radulovic.
She was fixated upon him too, weren’t you?
’ She thrusts the gun forwards in Tilly’s direction.
‘You couldn’t accept his rejection, so you stalked him, harassed him, you became obsessed with him and wanted him to pay with his life.
Only you thought it would be much more ‘fun’ – that was the word she used, Dan,’ – Erin glances quickly at me – ‘‘fun’ to have me kill him for her. To play a sick, elaborate game of control built on wicked lies.’
‘Put the gun down, Erin,’ I say gently. ‘This isn’t the way to have your voice heard. This will only ensure that things are even worse for you.’
‘Even worse?’ She laughs then, hard. ‘How could things be any worse, Dan? Anyway,’ – she catches her breath – ‘soon it won’t matter.’
‘What do you mean by that, Erin?’
‘There’s two bullets in this gun. You know what I mean, Dan.’
I think I do. Erin’s plan is to kill Samantha Valentine, and then to kill herself.
Only, I can’t let her do either of those things.
I want her to get the justice she finally deserves.
I want her to see Tilly Ward get what’s rightfully coming to her.
A sentence behind bars, or most likely, behind the walls of Larksmere Hospital.
‘If you shoot her, Erin, then you’ll go back to prison, to that hospital. And I know you don’t want that. I don’t want that for you either, Erin. Killing her makes you exactly what she wants you to be, a murderer, just like her.’
‘But I already am a murderer,’ she says, ‘because of her.’ The sound of the gun as she cocks it causes me to take a step forwards. ‘You were never a cold-blooded murderer. I know what she did, Erin.’
I squeeze Tilly’s arm behind me, surreptitiously, try to reassure her, convince her that I’m simply going along with it for Erin’s sake, for safety’s sake.
‘I know what she’s done to you… how she befriended you, how she got inside your head and exploited your trauma, your insecurities, your loneliness, your pain.
She took advantage of you. But it’s not too late, Erin.
You have the rest of your life, as a free woman, to rebuild, to put this all behind you. ’
The gun is vibrating in her hand; it’s shaking so much that I’m concerned it’ll go off.
If I can get the timing right, if I can edge a little closer to her, then I may just be able to snatch it from her fragile grip.
But I can feel Tilly moving from behind me now, like she’s about to make a break for it and…
‘“Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord! Romans 12:19!’ Erin’s voice is a loud and slightly manic projection, as she turns and points the gun at Tilly. ‘And today, I am the Lord.’
Then she pulls the trigger.