Tell Me Your Secret Page 23

  Monday, 27 April, 2009

  ‘It’s nearly time to let you go, Pieta,’ he murmured against my ear. ‘But I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay with me. Would you like that? Would you like to stay with me.’

  I kept myself very still. I couldn’t move because I was screaming inside. If I moved, I would start screaming outside, too.

  ‘If you tell me you want to stay, I’ll keep you. I will keep looking after you. I will take care of you like I have. I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? Haven’t I?’ he repeated when I didn’t reply.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to stay with me? Just a little while longer?’

  Tuesday, 25 June

  I feel foolish because I am foolish.

  What on Earth was I thinking? That Ned and I would get together? That what happened between us meant anything? So stupid. So . . . stupid! They probably sat and laughed at me, like he used to do with his other little friends. Laughed at poor, fat, pig-faced Pieta, thinking that anyone could be her friend, thinking she could somehow break through her loneliness in even the smallest way.

  I shudder, their laughter practically ringing in my ears as I walk around the corner to where I’ve parked my car, my footsteps quick and determined; I need to get away from here as quickly as possible. I mean, what was I thinking? Ned Wellst? Him? Well, quite clearly, I wasn’t thinking.

  Callie talked for about forty minutes but was constantly yawning and shifting in her seat until she said she was too tired to talk any more: talking, remembering, revisiting was exhausting and when you’d been up all night, it just made matters worse. ‘Can we call it a day?’ she asked at the apex of another yawn. ‘I’m too tired to do this. Sorry.’

  We were sitting on the sofa, my silver-coloured tape recorder whirling away between us, and my gaze constantly straying to the bed. How many times did they do it? I kept wondering. How many times, how many ways? Or did he just put his arm around her, like he did with me?

  ‘No worries,’ I’d said, packing away my recorder and notebook and pen, glad to be allowed out of there sooner than expected. ‘Call me later if you’re up to it.’ I’d found a smile, right from the bottom of my heart where I stored up the appropriate responses to the things that hurt me, and had beamed it at her.

  ‘You’re such a love,’ Callie had said.

  Ned had been skulking around, first in the shower and then, when he returned, dressed, polished and generally looking refreshed, he’d picked up his camera and started taking her picture again. They’d obviously planned for him to stay the night, since all of his camera equipment was in the corner of her room. Or maybe, urgh, he’d been taking intimate pictures of her last night. I shudder again, and move faster.

  Underground car parks with no view of daylight or the street, and limited exits are my idea of hell. But the position of her hotel means I have no choice but to park here. At the bottom of a slope down into the car park, I scan my ticket at the entrance and wait for the door to slide back.

  I go to the machine and don’t bother to search my bag, which is always a graveyard of small change, and simply pay by credit card. I’ve been just over an hour – literally five minutes over – so the price has shot up. I don’t care. I just need to be away from here.

  In the car, I’ll put on loud music, I’ll drive as fast as I can within the speed limit and I’ll put all of this behind me – literally and metaphorically.

  I hear footsteps and every nerve in my body jangles to attention. Move, I tell myself. Don’t freeze, move. Just get going, get to your car, get to safety.

  More footsteps, the squeal of wheels.

  The squeal of wheels. My body almost stops. The squeal of wheels, the hand on my mouth, the arm around my waist, the lifting sensation as I’m yanked up and away.

  No, I’m not going to stay still, I’m not going to let it happen again. Kobi needs me. I want to live.

  I break out into a run, and I hear the footsteps running too, keeping pace, catching up. No, no, this isn’t going to happen.

  ‘Pieta!’ Ned calls. ‘Pieta, wait!’

  His voice makes me run faster. I weave in and out of cars, desperate to get to mine, which sits like a light-blue beacon, waiting for me to leap in and speed away.

  ‘Pieta!’ he shouts.

  I make it to the car, but haven’t got my keys out. That’s how churned up I was, how upset, I didn’t even do something I usually do as standard. I didn’t even sling my bag across my body. I rip the pink suedette square off my shoulder, stick my hand in and start to feel around for the keys. Where are you, where are you, where are you?

  ‘Pieta, look—’ Ned says and places a hand on my shoulder.

  I quell the scream that rises up through my body, and tear myself away from him. ‘Get away from me!’ I shout at him. I throw myself back. ‘Don’t touch me! Get away, get away, get away!’

  He raises his hands in surrender, his palms as pale as his horrified and confused face, and he does what I need him to do – step back a few paces, put distance between us.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he says carefully, his face still bathed in bewilderment, his hands still up in peace.

  ‘What do you need to talk about to me of all people?’

  ‘That wasn’t what it looked like. Nothing happened.’

  ‘I don’t care what you do,’ I reply.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. Nothing happened.’

  ‘I honestly don’t care what you do, but you know, Ned, she’s really vulnerable. Really, really vulnerable. She might say she doesn’t want to be defined by what happened and she’s fine and she’s moving on, but talking about all of this has made her even more fragile. And I can’t believe you’d take advantage of that.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he insists.

  ‘So you didn’t spend the night with her?’

  ‘I spent the ni— She called me. Do you hear? She. Called. Me. She asked me to take some photos of her. She just wanted to see herself differently after the intensity of the last few days. After the photos, she said she didn’t want to be alone. I know what it’s like to not want to be alone. And yes, I could see that despite everything she’s said, she is delicate. So when someone’s on the edge and they ask you not to leave them alone, what do you do? Walk away? Not me.

  ‘I thought I was helping her. All I did was be there when she asked me not to leave. I slept on the sofa.’

  ‘Yeah, right, a good-looking woman asks you to stay and you slept on the sofa. Look in the dictionary, Ned, my picture’s right next to the definition of “gullible”.’

  ‘I didn’t— I wouldn’t, all right? It would have been easy to, she dropped enough hints about wanting us to do it. But I know she’s vulnerable. And besides . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Besides . . . there’s someone else I’m kind of seeing right now. Well, not seeing, that’s stretching it. But we’re entangled. I like her a hell of a lot. I think she’s incredible in so many ways. Beautiful. Funny. Warm. Clever. Insightful. Seeing her is the best part of my day. Not seeing her or hearing from her is like I’ve missed the sun coming up. Pieta, I’ve been a lot of terrible things in my time but not a cheat. And I wouldn’t do anything with anyone else when I’m involved with her.’

  We stare at each other across the distance. I want to believe him. Of course I do. I want to have someone care about me in the way he’s just described, to genuinely feel like the sun hasn’t come up because he hasn’t seen or communicated with me. But he has form for being rotten, and he has that form with me. And I would be silly, no, actually, I would be self-harming, if I didn’t feel suspicious about what he did or didn’t do with Callie last night.

  I watch him bury his hands in his pockets.

  I’m never going to know what happened last night. Even if she tells me the same story, I’ll never completely know if anything happened between them. If he was tempted, if he made a move, if it was actually her who turned him down.

  This is a warning shot fired across
my most exposed side – getting involved with Ned is bad news. Just the hint of him being with someone else is making me ignore my own safety, taking risks I can’t afford to right now. A killer could be stalking me and I’m being reckless because the guy I shouldn’t even be talking to might be screwing someone else.

  I’m sure Kobi will understand when someone’s sitting him down to tell him his mother isn’t coming home because she got emotionally, romantically involved with the man version of the boy who made her life hell.

  ‘Get your head in the game,’ a newly qualified teacher once told Kobi. ‘Get your head in the game,’ my son often parroted to me.

  Get your head in the game, Pieta. You have so much at risk.

  ‘Does Detective Foster know you feel like that about her?’ I say, and I’m grateful when he treats me to one of his indulgent smiles.

  ‘Can I take you for a coffee?’ he asks. ‘Spend a little time together?’

  ‘I’d love that,’ I say with another of those smiles conjured up from the bottom of my heart. ‘But I really need to get back and transcribe today’s stuff in case I have to go back to talk to her.’

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  I don’t know what he’s thinking as he walks away, but I have well and truly got my head back in the game. And it’s one that doesn’t involve Ned.

  Part 6

  Jody

  Thursday, 27 June

  Callie has come into the office. When they called from the front desk to say she was there (accompanied by PC Perry, I hope) I knew it would not be good.

  I stayed in London to revisit the other crime scenes again. I wanted to see them in context now that I have seen Preston Park as well as the other Brighton parks where the other women were left. At each scene I wondered where the others were? What did he do with the others who couldn’t keep their eyes closed? Or was it only these three newly found bodies who couldn’t manage to keep their eyes closed? I’ve asked Laura and Karin to go through the missing person reports for 2007, 2008 and 2009 to see if they can find any women who fit this description. It didn’t occur to me over all this time to look up missing person reports. It would help to plot which clubs or pubs or bars they were at when they disappeared.

  I also went with the officers to make the follow-up FLO calls. That was something I could have done without. Seeing the devastation, hearing their anguish . . . I forced myself to do it so I could steel my resolve. I had to remind myself what I had to do.

  And now, back to a visit from Callie.

  This cannot be positive.

  She sits in my depictured office. I do not want her looking around at the images and putting extra worries into her mind. I’ve got enough of that for all of us. Laura had been here, but Callie asked if it could be just her and me.

  ‘First of all, I want to say I’m sorry,’ she states.

  Oh God, I think. This is going to be terrible.

  Callie Beckman reaches into her bag and retrieves a mobile phone. She slides it and a SIM card across the table to me.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘He, The Blindfolder, gave it to me.’

  ‘He gave it to you.’

  She clasps her hands together and keeps her head lowered. ‘He let me go early. He said he wouldn’t kill me if I helped him to find more women. I didn’t manage it, you see. I didn’t manage to keep my eyes closed but I begged him not to kill me. I begged him and begged him, I cried and pleaded and promised to do anything if he wouldn’t kill me. In the end he said he would let me go if I helped him.’

  I think I’m squeezing up my face like I’m squinting at the sun. Like I’m pained. And I am pained. I am agonised.

  ‘I said yes.’

  We should be sitting in an interview room right now. Another officer should be here. She should have a solicitor. This is messy and so many lines are being blurred. I don’t like this. I like order in my investigations. I like my victims to be victims and everyone else to be a potential suspect. I don’t like my victim to be sitting here, telling me that she agreed to help the man who kidnapped and tortured her.

  I especially don’t like the fact I was right about not trusting her; I particularly don’t like the fact she could have a few dozen more related secrets lurking in there and she won’t tell me them until she has to.

  ‘I know it sounds bad, but I would have said anything to get out of there. I was going to go straight to the police. You know, tell them everything. And then I realised he could be watching me. I was too scared. I was in pain with my back. I just left it. I thought it’d be all right.’ As she talks, she’s doing that thing she does where she wrings a tissue. She squeezes it and twists it, turns it and crushes it. ‘And then I got angry. I mean, who was he to do that to me? I wasn’t going to be a victim so I did go to the police. But I left out the part about him letting me go because I knew they’d think I was in it with him.’

  ‘I don’t understand how we get from there to a mobile phone.’

  ‘He started to write to me. He had my address from my driving licence. In the letters he told me what he wanted me to do. How he was looking for someone, one of the other women that he’d, you know, kept, and he needed me to—’ The tissue comes apart. ‘He needed me to help him. He said it would be easier for him to approach these past women if he had a woman with him. They were nervous around him, he said, so a woman would make it easier.’

  I look beyond Callie to the activity outside. All these people working so hard to find Callie’s abductor, and here she was, telling me she helped these women to meet their ends. I look at the officers outside my glass box and wonder which one I should get to arrest her.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ she says. ‘You’re looking at me like I’d ever do that. I wouldn’t. He sent me these letters and then I get the one I told you about. The one with the picture. But what I didn’t tell you, it also had that mobile phone. He said it was clean, that it would be hard to trace. He said to keep it on me at all times, to wait for his call. When he found the woman he was looking for, he’d call me to help him. That’s why I panicked and ran. I didn’t turn the phone on.’

  ‘Do you have any of these letters?’

  ‘No.’ Head shake, tissue twists. ‘No. He said to shred and burn them because that way there’d be no trace.’

  ‘But you kept the mobile phone when you left.’

  ‘Because I knew I’d give it to you one day.’

  ‘Callie, I could – in fact I should, charge you as an accessory after the fact.’

  Her tissue twisting, halts and she draws back in her seat, horrified by this revelation.

  ‘You knew about one of the murders; you might have been able to prevent the subsequent murders if you had come forward at that time. We could have put the appeal out months ago.’

  Her hands fly up and knit themselves over her mouth and she sits back in her chair, horrified anew that she has had a part in this. ‘Those women died because of me,’ she says behind her hands. ‘Oh God, I feel sick.’

  ‘You should feel sick, you should feel absolutely sick to your stomach,’ I say. ‘You didn’t kill them. But you didn’t help them, either.’

  Her face pleats itself with anguish, tears collect on her long eyelashes, her mouth corrugates with a swallowed sob.

  ‘You need to cut this shit out, Callie,’ I say, unmoved by her display of emotion. ‘If I’m not going to arrest you here and now as an accessory, or charge you with obstructing the course of justice, destroying evidence and perverting the course of justice, you need to tell me everything.’

  She nods, tears dripping down onto her cheeks.

  ‘Tell. Me. Everything.’

  ‘I will. I will.’

  When she tells me what he wants and what he is doing, I know exactly why he is doing it and who he is searching for.

  Pieta

  Friday, 28 June

  In all my years, all the news stories and features I’ve written and edited, I’ve never been in a real life Murder Investigation Office.
It’s late when I’m shown in and DI Foster meets me at the door. She’s asked me to come in for a chat, which I’m guessing translates into me bringing her the recordings from my last Callie meeting. I’d tried to make excuses but she’d gone quiet to everything I said. In the end, I just had to say yes otherwise she was going to come to my house.

  It’s eerie in here. There are no people, the computer screens are off, the phones aren’t ringing. I’ve always thought these places were on the go 24/7, never stopping in the quest to solve murder. Especially serial murders.

  ‘If you could come this way,’ DI Foster says. She takes me past a large, clear board covered with pictures and I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but I’m sure she slows down. I’m sure she wants me to see the faces of the women up there, to see smiley photos, the dead photos, the pictures of the numbers on their backs. I whip my gaze away; I can’t let them into my head. It’s bad enough with Callie, I can’t see any more of them.

  In her office, which is really a smaller version of Lillian’s, she offers me a seat and closes the door while I lower myself into the chair opposite hers at her desk. She has pictures in here, too. My eyes are hitched on them, caught up in them. They look so normal, ordinary and, most heartbreakingly of all, happy. I have to look away. That could have been me. That almost was me. My face could have been up on that wall. My number could have been up there.

  ‘Pieta, look, I don’t have time for niceties and to dress things up. Events are spiralling out of control. I’m scared, genuinely scared, that we’re going to end up with another murder any day now. Which is why I’m going to go ahead and release a description to the press tomorrow and ask women who have encountered him to come forward. We’ll be offering them police protection.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Well, the story is written, it’s been through editing and legal so it’s all ready to go.’