Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Eight
“Stabbed in her own bathroom.” Paul Hunter plucks the cigar from his mouth and sighs out a huge plume of smoke. “What a way to go.”
The Signal’s meeting room reeks of stale coffee and all-nighters. The news team is gathered around Hunter’s desk, having been called into an early meeting, and are hanging on his every word, their notebooks open.
Elsie is standing flush to the wall at the very back of the room. Her ears are ringing with what she has just heard. She is as bone weary as any of the reporters officially assigned to the murders—not least because she spent last night staking out one of the main suspects.
Right now she is struggling to accept that, even given Hank’s behavior and the evidence she and her friends have found, Hank might not be the man they are after.
If this girl Hunter’s just told them about, killed as she showered at home, is a victim of the same man who killed Sarah, Emily, Cheryl and Diane, and the murder happened last night, it cannot be Hank who is responsible.
He did not leave the garage last night. He did not speak to anyone.
Yet this murder occurred just an hour from his workplace.
Unless…
“What time did the murder take place?”
The whole room turns to Elsie. Hunter raises his eyebrows but checks his notes.
“Chief said the call came in just after midnight.”
Shit.
Midnight. She was at the garage at midnight. Hank was most definitely there, which means he cannot have been responsible for this murder.
“And we’re sure this is the same killer?” Elsie asks, frustrated.
“The coffee machine has a lot of opinions today,” Heston quips over his shoulder, his eyes bloodshot.
Elsie snaps. “You spend the night on the street, Heston?” The room takes a quick breath. Heston turns in his seat and glares.
“Elsie,” Hunter warns, incredulous, “that’s not appropriate. Heston’s your senior.”
“And I don’t have to justify myself to secretaries.”
“Heston,” Hunter snaps, “no assholes in my office.”
The assembled group chuckles quietly.
“Chief’s pretty sure it’s the same guy,” Hunter continues, moving on from the fuss. “We’ll take his lead. Heston, do some digging.”
The reporter slowly scrapes his seat back and slopes out.
As everyone else gathers up their belongings, Elsie hangs back. Hunter already has his head in some copy and is striking sentences through with a red pen.
“You want to tell me what all that was about?” He doesn’t look up from his work.
Elsie clenches her jaw. “Heston has scratches all over his arms. I just wondered where he got them.” There’s no point in skirting the truth.
She first saw the marks on his hands several weeks ago.
Then, when she and Patti were in the bar questioning Greaves and Bale, he’d appeared, ordered a drink, then left immediately.
It had struck Elsie as odd. Was he trying to create an alibi for himself?
Since then, he’s been disheveled, avoidant.
What’s to say the scratches aren’t defensive wounds?
Plus, he knows everything about the murder cases.
He’s always late to the office—suggesting he’s been out all night. Doing what?
“Is that any of your business, Elsie? He’s a grown man.”
She sighs, begins to leave, then thinks better of it.
“What was her name?” she asks him.
Hunter glances up, looking very much as if his patience is being tested.
“The girl. Do we know anything else about her?”
“She’s number five.”
She growls despite herself. “These women are real people.” Elsie knows it’s bold, but she has to say it.
“They’re not just props. We should be writing more about them, looking into their lives.
They deserve that.” She knows she’s right.
Whoever is doing this may have taken their lives, but he is superfluous to their stories.
She can’t let the killer be the person everyone remembers.
These girls deserve to be known, but she is aware that sort of sentiment won’t tempt Hunter.
She straightens, adds as a sweetener, “And it might help us catch this killer.”
“Elsie”—Hunter removes his glasses—“it is not our job to catch the killer.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s our job to gather the facts and to report on them in a compelling way for the general public to consume.”
“I just thought…” She falters. “I thought it might provide an interesting insight for readers if we looked at these women in more detail.”
He glares at her wordlessly before his eyes move pointedly to the door. She knows what that means.
“Five hundred words,” he calls after her as she leaves, stopping her in her tracks. “Give me half a page on the girls, and we’ll run it in the domestic column.”
A grin spreads across her face, but she won’t let him see it. She clears her throat.
“I’ll get on it right away.”
“And, Elsie…”
She turns.
“Heston’s wife got a cat. It hates him. Just like the rest of us.”
—
Later, at Beverley’s, Elsie tells her about the article.
The most recent victim, Kate McKenzie, was a talented young horse rider and musician.
She had so much life in her, so much to give, and it had all been snuffed out, just like that.
Elsie cannot imagine the horror of being targeted in your own home, in your own shower, by a stranger.
Her mind reels with the thought of it. She knows that writing this article is important, that it will give these lost girls a voice, reclaim some of their power.
“That’s fantastic.” Beverley’s words are flat. Elsie can tell she is distracted.
Bev has taken the realization that Hank may not be responsible for the killings very badly.
“We were there from ten until two,” Elsie explained. “Kate’s murder happened sometime just before midnight. It just can’t have been Hank who killed her.”
Beverley tried to argue the toss. “This could have been a blip,” she suggested weakly, “a separate case entirely. Maybe Hank was decompressing, getting ready to kill again.” But Elsie could see that she wasn’t even convincing herself.
Now she looks crestfallen. The case has taken it out of all of them, but Bev looks more harried and wrung out than Elsie has ever seen her.
“It’s not your fault, the Hank stuff,” she says gently.
Beverley’s eyes close briefly. She shakes her head, looks away.
“It’s not your fault, or our fault, that someone else got killed, Bev.”
“We were looking in the wrong direction,” Beverley argues. “Someone else got killed because we got it wrong.”
“The police got it wrong!”
“We should be able to find this guy.”
Elsie can see that Beverley is shaking.
“I thought that if we examined all the pieces and put them together, we would find the guy, and that would be it. I was so sure. Sharon was so sure.”
“He’s just another useless husband,” Elsie counters.
“We should have stopped this from happening.” Beverley’s cheeks are wet, and she clenches her fists in frustration.
Then she seems to come to, half stands as if about to spring into action.
“We should be considering more options. Maybe we need to look at Sean Wilson again, Chris Appleton, that guy across the street. I’ve been trying to convince Detective Greaves—” Her words are rushed.
“I know why you’re saying this.” Elsie pulls Bev back down onto the couch. “But you couldn’t have stopped Henry, and you can’t stop this guy. It’s not your job to do that. Stop punishing yourself.”
“I could have stopped Henry.”
“No, you couldn’t. None of us could have stopped what they did.”
“No, Elsie. I could have.” Beverley is holding her gaze. “I could have stopped Henry. I had a chance—there was one time—and I didn’t do it.”
Elsie shifts awkwardly on the couch. Beverley is just agitated, upset after everything: the argument with Margot, another murder, finding Sarah’s body, this whole mess.
“It was when I was pregnant with Audrey.” Elsie wants to interrupt, to stop her friend from harming herself in this way, but she lets Beverley speak.
“I was having a rough time. I was constantly nauseous, and I mean all the time. I spent all day hanging over the kitchen sink or with my head in the toilet. I couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t look after Benjamin. It was just a blur.”
Elsie swallows. She can feel brittle fingers grazing the back of her neck.
“Henry was never there,” Beverley continues.
“He was always working late or on jobs out of town. Then, when he was here, he’d leave early in the morning.
He’d be out of the house before Benjamin and I were up.
He said he was working hard to get overtime, to save money for when the baby came.
I couldn’t be mad at him. He was doing it for us, to give us a better life. ”
There’s always something oddly tender in the way Beverley speaks about Henry, even when she’s trashing what he did.
Elsie knows Beverley is no longer in love with him, that she knows what he did was monstrous, but it is as if she has separated him into two men: a father and husband—a protector, a breadwinner, a hard worker—and the killer who came after him.
As if the real Henry died somewhere in between.
Elsie was not as shocked as Margot to discover that Beverley had been to visit him at San Quentin.
She always thought it was simply a matter of time before she would.
Elsie has no desire ever to breathe the same air as Albert, but Beverley is different.
Henry had a hold over Beverley that Albert had never had over her.
“What happened?” Elsie prompts softly. Beverley is inspecting a couch cushion.