Tell Me Your Secret Read online

  ‘What?’ The air around me is gradually, steadily, closing in.

  ‘I don’t know what you said, or did, and I didn’t think we’d hear back so soon, but you did it. We have the exclusive story of the year!’

  Delighted clapping erupts around me, startling me enough to make me physically jump and almost drop my coffee.

  ‘We have so much planning to do,’ Lillian says. ‘Call that babysitter of yours and tell her she’s going to be working late tonight. Same goes for you, Reggie,’ she says while giving him a filthy look. ‘I can’t believe you managed to do it. I think it was the dishy photographer that gave us the edge, personally, but the most important thing is that you didn’t mess it up.’

  My jaw is clamped shut to stop me screaming, my fingers are curled to hide the shaking and my eyes are wide open to stop the memories that creep in whenever it’s dark.

  Part 3

  Jody

  Wednesday, 12 June

  Jovie was number 1.

  When she showed me the burn on her back, I’d been able to see quite clearly that the charred flesh, the pink-red rawness, was contained by the very distinct frame of the number 1.

  She was the first. He hadn’t even called himself The Blindfolder yet, that was how inexperienced he was.

  That’s why I blame myself for all the women who came afterwards. No serial killer gets it right first time, they get better with practice as they hone and perfect what they do. If I had encouraged her to report it, if I hadn’t been such a judgemental bitch, she might be alive right now. The other women might be alive right now. And we would have some forensic evidence.

  Are you still wondering about the decision to kill The Blindfolder that I made all those years ago? That was thirteen years ago. Things change over time, don’t they? You change, life changes you, and the things that seemed important at that time, the thoughts that fuelled and powered you then, don’t always stay the distance.

  I mean, in between then and now, there has been a lot of water flowing under the various bridges in my life. Between then and now, I have done a lot of soul-searching, truth-confronting, me-admonishing. I did that to my sister. Me, just me. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me and I put her off reporting what had been done to violate and hurt her.

  And then, she found a way out that meant I could never make it up to her.

  I’m staring at the pictures of Harlow, Shania, Bess, Gisele, Freya. And now, Yolande Calverley, the latest woman who was found in Preston Park. I’ve stuck their pictures on the glass wall opposite my desk so I can look at them. Callie is outside on the main board. In here is for the women who didn’t make it, the ones I’ve let down. That isn’t Callie, yet. I haven’t given the team the pictures of Carrie, Ioana and Tonya to put up, either. Their names are on the board, their story outlines are up there. But not their photos. It was a judgement call based on the fact I could only find mugshots of the three of them. They seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth and I do not want the team to only see pictures of them in a terrible state and waver for one second in their quest to find this man. If I put up mugshots, they may unintentionally backburner any fervour they may have.

  I know I should have Jovie’s story and picture up there, but then everyone would know. Everyone would realise because she looks exactly like me. I look exactly like her. I keep Jovie apart, anyway. When the other women come to me, when they sit and smile at me, acting normal, before they remind me that it is my fault they are dead, Jovie never comes.

  ‘Guv’,’ says Laura, who’s a DC, knocking on my slightly open door.

  ‘Yes, Laura? Come in.’

  ‘It’s the partial toxicology report on Yolande Calverley. You were right, it was succ—succ—’

  ‘Succinylcholine,’ I supply. ‘Most people call it Sux.’

  ‘Yes, that. A massive dose. Didn’t have a chance to break down and be missed as death by natural causes.’

  I take a deep breath in, involuntary but necessary. I do it every time I hear about Sux. If you’re injected with it, you don’t have the chance to do that.

  ‘It’s hideous. I don’t know why I haven’t heard about it before, but it’s basically like drowning in air,’ Laura says.

  I know, I think.

  ‘It almost immediately paralyses you and stops all the muscles in your body working.’

  I know.

  ‘And it stops you from breathing or moving. So you know what’s going on, but you can’t breathe and you can’t do anything about it. So you basically lie there and suffocate.’

  I know.

  ‘It’s hideous. I can’t believe someone would do that to these women. I mean, isn’t it enough he brutalised and burned them, does he really have to come back years later, when they think it’s all over, and kill them? But not just kill them, suffocate them so they know what’s going on while it’s happening? It’s so nasty. So unnecessary.’

  I’m surprised by this outpouring from a police officer. She’s youngish, but she hasn’t just started. She must know the evil that stalks the corridors of everyday life, why does this bother her?

  I mean, it’s clear why it bothers me, why does it bother her?

  ‘I don’t get why anyone would do that. I mean, yeah, people do awful things all the time, and this isn’t my first murder investigation. But this feels so personal.’

  ‘They all feel personal.’ Human pain, human loss, human erasure, it all feels like it happened to you. I just get better at pretending it doesn’t damage me as much.

  ‘I suppose. But it’s like he’s sat back for all those years and waited for her to get all comfortable, start to get her life together and then, bam!, he comes back to kill her.’ She shrugs. ‘It’s just wrong. And it’s really got to me. Maybe it’s because of what you told us about Harlow coming to you all those years ago. I kind of feel like I knew her because you did.’

  This was what I wanted. I wanted them to feel like it meant something to them so they would put that bit extra in to the investigation, would go that extra mile to get it solved. But I didn’t want it tipping over into being too emotional to stand back and see the bigger picture, to be cynical and critical when necessary.

  ‘I didn’t know her, not really. I just saw her, I experienced how brave she was being despite what had been done to her.’ I pick up the cup of coffee that sits on my desk. I can’t remember when I made it. The mug is still warm, so it wasn’t that long ago. I shouldn’t drink coffee. It gives me palpitations, triggers hot flushes by switching my adrenals all the way up to eleven. I know my body. When you’ve tried everything to conceive, you tend to. I shouldn’t drink caffeine, shouldn’t eat sugar, should cut down on oestrogen-rich foods, eliminate alcohol, cut down stress, meditate, simplify my life. I know that I have to do all of those things to give my body a fair chance at getting pregnant. It’s unfortunate that my life, my job, my age are just designed to be unable to do those things.

  I put down the cup.

  ‘We should get on with today’s briefing,’ I say to Laura. ‘See what we’ve turned up today.’

  ‘It’s like being buried alive,’ Laura replies, completely ignoring what I said. ‘That’s always been my fear. Being buried alive and no one knowing that you’re still awake. I remember seeing this show once where that happened. Except the guy was evil so the mortician knew he was awake and still carried out the autopsy on him. Urgh. I shouldn’t watch those things.’ She shudders. ‘I wonder if it was Sux in that film as well?’

  ‘Possibly. Could you—’

  ‘I really hope that’s the only type of drug out there like that.’

  ‘There are loads of them.’

  ‘What?’ she almost shrieks, her panicked eyes seeking out mine.

  She heard that, of course, any work-related things she’s deaf to.

  ‘Sux is a neuromuscular agent, they’re used essentially to stop you moving during surgery. They’re used to keep a patient still while the other anaesthetic drugs put you to sleep. No
one really uses it on its own unless someone is in respiratory distress and they need to get a tube down quickly. No matter what, though, you have to ventilate – breathe for – the person. Otherwise, as you say, you suffocate.’

  Laura is eyeing me up suspiciously. ‘How do you know so much about it?’

  From what Jovie had said, Harlow had said, what Carrie who walked into Lewisham Police Station had said, they were given something fast-acting to knock them out when they were first snatched. Chlorine on a rag doesn’t work fast enough. Sux would incapacitate you, but needs something else, like ketamine or potassium chloride, to knock you out. A mix would work like an anaesthetic, much quicker than chlorine on a rag – even if it was injected into the muscle instead of the vein. Which had me checking out doctors who might have been connected to Jovie and then Harlow. Nothing so far.

  ‘This isn’t my first complex murder, Laura,’ I reply. ‘Each murderer has a signature, which is not just about who they kill or the way they kill. There is also how they kill and what they get from the way they kill.’

  Laura nods.

  ‘Can you get everyone together, I want to see where we are with everything.’

  ‘Yes, Guv’,’ she replies.

  I like when they call me Guv’. It makes me believe that I can do this. I can find The Blindfolder.

  And end him.

  Jody

  Wednesday, 12 June

  Now that Callie has chosen BN Sussex as the publication she’ll talk to, I need to check out the journalists involved.

  If we are going to do this thing, I would have preferred one of the more well-known publications, a national, so we could reach as many people as possible. But I let her choose, so I have to respect that.

  It’s going to blow up, of course. The other papers would start to run things to spite Callie and dilute the story before it could come out in the other publication; they’d be trying to find someone to leak them information from the official investigation. Then they’d be going back over other cases, anything similar to make links they think we’ve missed but we’ve most likely dismissed as irrelevant. All this will do is cause panic. It will empty out clubs, dial up the fear women live with about being out alone, tap into the old stereotype that stranger sexual assault is the only type of sexual assault there is.

  Stop it, Jody, I tell myself. Stop getting distracted.

  I open up the file on Ned Wellst. Crime wise, nothing remarkable except a couple of speeding tickets. The only other interesting thing is how much he has moved around. He rarely stays in any one place for long, doesn’t seem keen to put down roots. I flick away from his file but then come back to it.

  It’s rare for a person who has no family history of it – parents in the army, oil rigs, diplomatic service, etc – to move around so much as an adult. He went to school and sixth form in London, then Leeds to university. After that, he didn’t seem to settle anywhere. I stare at the list of addresses for him. Nearly forty of them over a twenty-five-year span. He seems to have moved at least every year, sometimes three times in a year. Constantly moving. No dependents, no wife, no children, just him. Always in motion, gathering no moss, none of the detritus we all pick up along the way.

  I frown at the screen. He’s forty-five and has never lived in one place for more than a year. Why? And now he’s here, a part of this case. Hmm . . .

  I bring up the file on Pieta Rawlings. Nothing remarkable, except a missing person’s report.

  Pieta Rawlings

  Thursday 30 April, 2009

  Thirty-five-year-old Pieta Rawlings was reported missing by her mother, Mrs Aida Rawlings, on Saturday 25 April, 2009. Her mother hadn’t heard from her in over forty-eight hours and said that was extremely unusual. Pieta’s father, Gerrald Rawlings, had been to her property and she was not there. We initially were not concerned until a basic PNC showed that her mobile phone had been handed in at Tower Hill Police Station on the last day anyone had heard from her.

  An initial visit to her property indicated that she had not been home. Calls to the numbers in her mobile phone showed no one had heard from her. After she didn’t turn up or call in sick for work on Monday 27 April, we visited a Mr Jason Breechner, the number most called and most calls received. He told us he had spoken to her on Friday night at about 11 p.m., and had made plans for her to visit him at his home that Saturday, but she hadn’t shown up, nor had she called to cancel or rearrange, hence the large number of calls – she always called to cancel and almost always answered her phone to him.

  When Miss Rawlings failed to call into work for three days in a row, we visited her property again on Thursday 30 April with the intention of gaining entry and searching it for clues as to where she might have gone. Before we attempted to gain entry, we knocked on the door a couple of times while waiting for a locksmith and Miss Rawlings answered. We spoke to her in her flat and after a little while, she told us she was fine and had ‘been on a bender’.

  She didn’t show signs of suffering the after-effects of excessive alcohol intake or drug abuse, but insisted that was what she had been doing. She seemed nervous and unable to settle. She kept constantly looking at the other attending officer, PC Ewan Jerrand.

  I questioned Miss Rawlings without PC Jerrand, a male officer, present in the hopes Miss Rawlings would be more forthcoming about what had happened to her in the time she had disappeared. Although she visibly and physically relaxed once PC Jerrand had left the room, she still maintained that nothing had happened to her and that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted or similar.

  Despite what she said, it was quite clear to me that Miss Rawlings had been quite severely attacked, most likely raped several times over a sustained period of time. Possibly by more than one assailant. She exhibited very overt and classic signs of extreme post-traumatic stress consistent with this type of assault and moved as though in some considerable pain.

  I gave her my card, and told her to call into the station or ring me if she wanted to talk. I doubt she will.

  I know this report goes beyond the usual scope of a missing person’s report, especially when the subject has been found, but I thought what I observed should be recorded somewhere in case Miss Rawlings decides to come forward at a later date to report her attack. This could help to back up her claims.

  PC Margie Koit, Thursday 30 April, 2009

  I finish the report and stare into space for a while.

  I was right about Pieta Rawlings. She was a victim who hadn’t dealt with what had happened to her. But there was more to it than that. That’s what had been nibbling at the edge of my mind like a caterpillar working its way through a cabbage leaf. I’d been so pissed off with Callie that I hadn’t properly registered it at the time: Pieta Rawlings’s responses were off.

  Yes, she was a rape victim, but . . . I close my eyes so I can better conjure up her face. Ordinary, normal, but guarded, wary. She’d been triggered, as any victim would be, but the way her eyes had stared at Callie’s scar . . . It wasn’t the shock and horror that the photographer showed, it was different. I’m not sure how to describe it to you. It was like she’d seen it before, but at the same time it was something new to her. It was a brand-new familiar terror.

  I open my eyes again.

  Am I reading something into this situation that isn’t there? Because that’s what I do. When I’m in the midst of an investigation, I find ways to link everything – and I mean everything – to what I’m working on. I mean, several times I’ve had to quietly and discreetly eliminate Winston from my enquiries. (Poor guy has no idea I always check out his alibi for the time of the crime I’m working on because I don’t ever want to climb into bed beside him with even the slimmest shadow of doubt that he could be the person I’m looking for.) Am I doing this with Pieta Rawlings? It’d be a hell of a coincidence if she did know something, was possibly another victim of The Blindfolder.

  I close my eyes again.

  Her face had contracted in genuine horror when Callie said The Bli
ndfolder’s other victims had been killed and that he was clearly hunting down the ones who’d survived the first time around. I can see it now: she looked terrified. None of the other journalists had responded like that to the news of the other murders. It was shocking to them, news that they were going to hook their stories on, but not the panic that Pieta Rawlings showed.

  My eyes run over the report again, like fingers seeking out snags in a piece of expensive silk: ‘. . . visibly and physically relaxed once PC Jerrand had left the room . . . quite severely attacked . . . raped several times over a sustained period of time . . . moved as though in some considerable pain’ jump out at me.

  She disappeared for a weekend, she didn’t call work, her boyfriend said she hadn’t shown up, she was in pain . . .

  She’s one of them, isn’t she?

  Pieta Rawlings is one of the ones who survived a weekend with The Blindfolder.

  Jody

  Friday, 14 June

  Pieta Rawlings isn’t very pleased to see me. Her face does that thing where she’s trying to decide how she’s going to play this – pretend she doesn’t know me or act like I’m her new best mate.

  ‘Detective Foster, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Hello.’

  Not so much my new best mate, more someone she knows and would rather meet for a coffee somewhere public to avoid a scene.

  ‘That’s right. Detective Inspector Foster, if we want to be accurate and, you being a journalist, I’m sure you want everything correct.’

  That niggles her – it subtly changes the look in her eyes. The alteration is almost imperceptible to someone who isn’t looking for signs on how to read this woman. Someone who isn’t me, basically.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she asks and moves to cling on to her front door, bridging the gap between it and the doorpost. If she was previously going to voluntarily invite me in, that isn’t going to happen now.