The slap came from nowhere, sudden and sharp. Her nail caught the boy’s skin, slicing his cheek. He put a hand up, tracing the wet trail of dotted blood that bubbled to the surface of the wound. The boy looked at the magazine held outstretched in her other hand. Its opened pages, vivid in their accusations, showed an array of images: naked flesh, skin on skin; so many things he had heard about, but had never really seen this close up and in detail.
The child still in him wanted to laugh at the sight of bare bodies.
The child still in him remained scared of the ferocity of his mother’s tongue, fearing her verbal assaults almost as much as the physical force of her anger.
‘This is sick,’ his mother spat. ‘Why would you look at it? What’s the matter with you?’ She was shouting now. Her anger was visible in the red flare of her cheeks, in the fists that had formed at her sides and had turned her bony knuckles white. It was tangible in the venom with which her words were spoken.
The boy didn’t want to feel this kind of anger, but in that moment – in so many moments before and after it – he hated his mother. Even at such a young age he recognised her hypocrisy, and he hated it. He hated this life and everything she had made him.
‘Nothing to say, have you?’ she snapped, his silence heightening her anger.
She grabbed the boy by the hair and dragged him to the kitchen. The sink was filled with dirty water left from the last lot of dishes that had been washed. Lifeless bubbles lay flat on the surface of the water, the occasional few giving their last sad pops before disappearing.
‘Maybe we can clean your eyes out,’ she suggested.
He didn’t try to fight her, and later he would wonder why. He hadn’t struggled as she had tightened her grip on his hair, or fought when she had shoved his face into the murky water. He never had. His mind went momentarily blank, as he had worked so long to train it to do. When his mind was blank, he could be anywhere. He could be anyone.
Sometimes the boy was a pilot. He had always liked the idea of what being a pilot might be like: of being able to go anywhere, his own hands navigating his destiny. That freedom. He would imagine the roar of the engine, the surge of the wheels on the runway; the tsunami in his stomach that would rise and subside as the plane left the ground and took its first steep tilt skywards.
Other times he was an actor. He would imagine himself on a stage, dressed as someone else, speaking someone else’s words. He was someone else. His audience stretched in front of him, but he could never see them; they were shrouded in the darkness, the only lights focused upon him. He wanted to be someone else, anywhere else.
He held his breath under the water for as long as he could, snatching gulps of air when he was pulled back up. After what seemed for ever but was little longer than thirty seconds, his mother let go. He stood hunched over the sink, coughing and choking, his dark hair dripping water down his face.
That night, he lay in his single bed and imagined the most horrific images his young mind could conjure. When his mind was no longer blank it was filled with the purest kind of hate: a rage so intense that it sometimes scared him.
The boy hated his mother.
One day he would make her pay.
‘You’re in a good mood today.’
Detective Inspector Alex King glanced at her colleague, who was sitting in the passenger seat chewing on the corner of a thumbnail and watching her with a look that suggested good moods were something other people didn’t generally expect of her. She didn’t blame them. There hadn’t been much to smile about these past few months.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ DC Chloe Lane said, raising an eyebrow. She gave a slight smile whilst turning her blonde head to the window, presumably under the assumption that Alex would miss the look.
She didn’t.
‘You were singing,’ Chloe said, her attention drawn to a young man struggling outside an off-licence with a dog that was almost as big as he was.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were.’
‘When?’
‘Just then! Was that One Direction?’
Alex snorted. ‘No, it definitely wasn’t.’
It might have been, she thought. She hadn’t been able to get that bloody song out of her head all morning, not since she’d heard it drifting from the kitchen when Rob had gone downstairs to make a cup of tea. He had put on the radio. She hadn’t been sure how she’d felt about that: the tea making or the act of turning on the radio. It was all too familiar. They were supposed to be beyond all that now.
They’d been divorced for nearly three years, yet here they were again.
The adult part of Alex’s brain knew she should have been sceptical about what was going on. Sex with an ex-husband, in the majority of cases, was destined to be problematic, yet, for whatever reason, Alex felt unwilling to expel him from her life for a second time. Didn’t she deserve a break, just this once? Didn’t she deserve a bit of fun?
You’re forty-four not nineteen, she reprimanded herself. And where an ex-husband was concerned, there was never likely to be a no-strings scenario.
She shook herself from the thought. ‘I think it might have been.’
She smiled. She turned up the car heaters. Chloe’s face was disappearing into the folds of her jacket in an attempt to get warm. She was so slim that Alex found it unsurprising she was so susceptible to the cold. It was a bitterly chilly morning, but Alex didn’t appear to feel the dip in temperature as keenly as her younger colleague clearly did. She’d often thought Chloe looked as though she could do with a couple of decent meals and some looking after, although her size didn’t seem to impact upon her apparently boundless energy.
The sky stretching across the town that lay spread before them was grey and heavy, the threat of rain increasingly present as they neared Pontypridd. As they approached the exit that would take them to the town centre, Alex found herself struggling to remember the last sunny day this part of South Wales had seen, no matter how cold. The festive season had been characterised by grey afternoons and a steady stream of relentless rainfall, yet in its own way this had seemed fitting.
‘Thanks for the lift, by the way,’ Chloe said, breaking Alex’s chain of thought.
‘No worries. Heard anything from the garage?’
Chloe pulled a face. She somehow managed to look pretty even when she was grimacing. ‘Yeah, got an email last night. Be cheaper for me to buy a new car. Third time it’s happened. I don’t really see the point in paying again.’
Alex cut across the roundabout that took them towards Trallwn. ‘Is this your way of hinting at another lift tomorrow?’
Chloe shot her a smile. ‘Would you mind?’
‘Suppose not. I mean, I’m going this way anyway.’
Chloe’s smile disappeared back into the folds of her jacket, and she turned her head to the window, watching the traffic slow to a crawl at the next approaching roundabout.
‘Busy day ahead?’ she asked, the words muffled.
Alex rolled her eyes. ‘When’s it not? Have you seen my office recently? There’s a backlog of paperwork a foot high on my desk. You know, before I got promoted I used to think South Wales was pretty quiet. Be careful what you wish for, right?’
Her promotion to detective inspector had happened a few years earlier and life was now moving so quickly, in such a relentless rush of activity, that Alex often found herself worrying about the things she feared she might be missing. Her divorce had helped push this fear into a full-blown panic, but rather than stop to let life catch up with her she had pushed ahead, intent on holding on to her workload as the last passenger on a sinking ship clings to the only lifeboat.
‘I think you’d get bored if things were too quiet,’ Chloe said. ‘But if you get a break and you fancy a drink, give me a shout. I’m usually designated driver, but I don’t have a car. We’ll have to bus it.’
Alex smiled. It was a nice thought. They’d managed a night out just after Christmas: one so wild she’d been back home by ten thirty. Chloe was sensible for her age, which suited Alex just fine. She didn’t need to be made to feel any older than she already did.
‘A break,’ Alex said. ‘Just imagine that.’
The station loomed ahead of them, as grey as the sky that formed the backdrop behind it. It stood on a corner in the middle of Pontypridd town centre as though keeping an eye on the local residents, and Alex had often wondered why they couldn’t do something to make the place look a little less hostile, although she imagined colour might have defeated the intended purpose of its existence. It appeared they weren’t there to be cheerful.
The thought of the day that stretched ahead of them pushed her reluctantly from the car. In truth, Chloe had got her right. Not having something to do or somewhere to be gave Alex too much time and space to think about the things that haunted the silent hours of the night when she would lie in her room and find them gathered at the bedside, ready to make sure she hadn’t forgotten them. Perhaps the thought of a pile of paperwork and an afternoon locked in the office wasn’t too unappealing, just for today. She presumed she should make the most of being confined to the realms of the station while she was given the rare opportunity.
It was late January; the kind of January that holds everything still in its grip, its fingers embedded in the hard ground and its breath staining the air with shivers. She knew all about the cold, despite being indoors. She had been there for days – exactly how long, she couldn’t be too sure – and with every hour, and with every next humiliation inflicted on her, she grew colder in her bones, hoping for death to relieve her.
It occurred to her that no one might have realised she was missing. Moving from friend to friend, from sofa to sofa, had always seemed such a good idea; in fact, it had been her sole method of survival for the previous eighteen months. She couldn’t stay still, which now, bound to this chair, seemed sadly ironic. She could go weeks without speaking to what family she had left, and those ‘friends’ she had stayed with she now realised were nothing of the sort. She didn’t even know them, not really. She had used them; they had used her. She had got what she deserved in the end, she supposed.
Would anyone now notice she was gone?
The only person she had really spoken to about how she was feeling – the only person she had allowed herself to get remotely close to during the past few months – was here, and now there was no getting away from him.
The room was dark, the only window boarded up with thick wooden slats. There were drapes hanging from the walls, black and heavy, but she didn’t know why they were there or what they were hiding. Sometimes, she couldn’t see anything. Her eyelids felt weighed down and when he wasn’t there she would allow herself to close them, though she never slept. She didn’t think she’d slept for days. How long would it take before it sent her into madness?
She had cried at the start. When she’d woken to find herself in that unfamiliar place, tied to a chair by a man whose face she couldn’t see, she had cried, screamed; begged. She had offered him things that repulsed her, but he didn’t seem interested in any of it. He didn’t seem interested in her.
What did he want from her?
It was so difficult to try to piece together the events that had led up to her being here. There were things she remembered, but so many more that she didn’t. She had been to work, that much she remembered. She sometimes shared a taxi home with one of the girls she worked with, but she couldn’t remember anything about the journey home. She couldn’t remember that there’d been a journey.
She was tied to a chair, at her wrists and by her ankles. Her arms were pulled awkwardly behind her, cutting off her circulation. She had tried to squeeze her hands through the tight loops of the ties holding her in place, wear them down against the wooden slats of the seat, but her results had only left her with raw skin and broken hope.
She wasn’t getting out of here alive.
On the first day, the man had cut her nails. She had been left alone for what felt like for ever, her vision blurred by tears and her mind clogged with dark thoughts of the ways that this man might end her life. She tried to kick out, thrusting her hips forward to send the chair tipping to one side, but when she toppled with it she realised she had only made things worse, and she stayed there like that, tied to the chair with her right arm deadening beneath her until her captor made his silent return.
When he came back, he tilted the chair upright, moving it as though she was weightless. She spoke to him, but he refused to reply. When he released her hands from the knotted cable ties, a surge of adrenalin rushed her and she swung an arm at the man, clawing at the dark mask he wore over his face. It was then she felt her life had ended, because it was then she saw him for the first time. Might things have been different had she never seen his face? She would never know.
The realisation of who he was had made her sick. She threw up down the front of her top, chunks of the slop he had fed her some time during the previous evening spattering the cotton and lacing the air with an acidic, rancid tang.
Then the evening came back to her. She remembered seeing him. She remembered how pleased she had been to see him.
Later, as her memory returned in fragments, she remembered accepting a lift from him.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him through tears. ‘I’ve never done anything to you.’
Her body tensed as he reached into his pocket and produced what looked like a small black box. He unzipped it and drew out a small pair of nail scissors, which he used to slowly cut away her sick-stained top. She didn’t bother fighting him this time. Instead, she sat in the dark, shivering in her bra. He had scissors in his gloved hands, and her ankles were still bound to the chair: she couldn’t go anywhere. Fighting him would only anger him further, and then where would that leave her?
‘Please,’ she said, as he pulled the last strip of cut fabric from her body. ‘Please say something.’
The man pulled a chair that matched hers in front of her and sat before her, taking her left hand in his. When his eyes met hers, briefly, she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Of course it was him.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
Her nails were long and painted. He cut them methodically, filing each right down to the skin. At the third finger, he realised the nails were false. The realisation enraged him and he ripped at each furiously, bending them back and tearing the glue from the nail beneath. She cried out in pain. The noise only encouraged him.
He left the room.
The girl looked around her, desperately searching for something she could use to try to hit him with.
He returned. He sat back down in front of her. There was a pair of pliers in his hand.
‘No,’ she pleaded, hot tears stinging her eyes once more. ‘Don’t. Please.’
She struggled with him, but her efforts were futile. He hit her across the face, once, with an open hand, a blow hard enough to send her body reeling and the chair toppling back to the floor. He straddled her fallen body, reaching again for her hand. One by one, he ripped the real fingernails from each of her fingers.
At some stage, she passed out. She couldn’t remember everything that had happened between then and now, only that she had woken to find all her nails missing and her hands caked in dried blood. Her wrists were bound to the chair again; this time, at her sides where she could see them. She had screamed at the sight of her bloodied hands, at the memory of the pain and at the pain she still endured in the aftermath of what had been inflicted upon her, but her screams had gone ignored and she had finally fallen silent, still thinking about how she might escape this place.
Still knowing that she couldn’t.
When she had calmed slightly, she managed to shuffle the chair across the room, dragging it over the exposed wooden floorboards. She made it to the door, but when she got closer she could see it was locked. It had taken all her energy just to cross the room and a wave of frustrated tears swept over her, engulfing all hope and drowning her future.
She waited for death, praying for it, but it didn’t come.
Upon his last return, he finally spoke to her. He dragged her in the chair back to the side of the room where he had originally placed her and stood behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders, weighing her down. She heard him remove something from his pocket before she felt him take her long ponytail in his hand. The next thing she heard was the sound of scissors slicing through her hair, cutting the ponytail loose from her head.
‘I thought you might be different,’ he said, ‘but you’re just like all the rest.’
Her breathing had quickened upon his return to the room. Now, with him standing behind her and with her own hair tossed, severed, into her lap, she felt her heart slow until she was sure it would stop.
His hands tightened on her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly through her tears. ‘Tell me what you want from me… tell me what I’ve done wrong. I’ll do anything, I promise.’
She didn’t mind begging now. Not when death seemed this close.
He was disappointed in her words. She was going to say anything she thought it might take to appease him. Her desperation – her pathetic snivelled words – only made him hate her more.
She waited for him to say something. She thought that if he spoke to her again, she might be able to get him to stop what he was doing. If she could get him to talk, and properly, she thought maybe she could talk him down. She thought maybe all hope wasn’t lost.
Then he cut her throat, and all her thoughts left her.
Alex crouched alongside what was left of the body at the water’s edge. The river was high that morning and faster than usual, gushing south with an urgency that implied danger, as though the water wished to rid itself of something; which it had earlier that morning, spitting the corpse on to the riverbank where it was later discovered by an unsuspecting jogger who had ventured between the trees seeking privacy to relieve himself.
Alex turned her head and tried to find a clean pocket of air to inhale through the mask she wore. She felt sick to her stomach, yet the scene of crime officers milling around the tent and on the path along the park beyond seemed unaffected, as though young women washing up on riverbanks was an everyday occurrence in the city. She knew that after seventeen years in the force she should have become more inured to the realities of death, but it was yet to happen. She would shake it off, put on the face she wore to work each morning and move the images of what she’d seen to the back of her mind, from where they would later resurface to haunt her.
The north end of Bute Park had been shut off; the rubberneckers who had gathered to gawp at the drama unfolding had been moved along by officers. In the summer months, this area of the park would be packed with families and students, the stretch of widening river just a couple of hundred metres or so along becoming a swimming pool where, on better days, sun worshippers could cool off. Teenagers would jump from the bridge, competing with one another, showing off to friends.
At this time of year though, not even the most foolhardy would brave the water.
A tent had been erected to protect the body from the elements – though it had already been subjected to a prolonged assault in the water – and uniformed officers were now performing zone searches of the surrounding areas of parkland and riverbanks. Photographs had been taken, documenting the decomposition of the corpse and the abuse that had been inflicted on the young woman’s body both before and after death.
Alex had never seen a victim such as this. Her body was blistered and swollen, the water having ravaged and bloated her. Her ankles were tethered with cable ties; her wrists, the same. From them, tattered scraps of plastic carrier bags lay like litter on the ground, torn by rocks and the weight of water.
Something had gnawed at her skin, chewing through the girl’s flesh until angry red welts scarred her body. She was covered in bruising. On both hands, every nail was missing. The river might have ravaged her, but unthinkable horrors had been inflicted long before the water had its way with her.
What sort of person could do this to another?
Alex stood for a moment to ease the pressure on her calves, but found herself unable to turn away. Turning her face from the victim seemed disrespectful, as though doing so would mean leaving the girl alone in this state of degradation, abandoning her when she most needed someone to stay. She might have a weak stomach, but Alex refused to walk away from someone in need, and quite often the dead needed her help more than the living.
‘Who did this to you?’ She spoke softly, as though the dead young woman – this girl –might somehow find a way to respond.
Did she know her killer? Most did, and random attacks tended to be frenzied. This seemed premeditated, methodical. Why were her nails torn from her hands? Was she alive at the time? Why was she brought here?
There was a gust of breeze as the pathologist re-entered the tent.
‘Don’t take it the wrong way, but I was hoping not to see you again so soon,’ Helen said.
Alex’s path had crossed with Helen Collier’s during two other recent cases, and Alex shared her sentiments. She had been hoping for a quiet new year, but was beginning to think ‘quiet’ was destined to be something unknown to her and the rest of the team.
‘Barbaric, isn’t it?’
Alex said nothing. A pair of lifeless eyes stared up from the hollows of a water-eaten face.
‘The fingernails,’ Helen said, crouching beside the body and tentatively taking the left hand in her own. ‘I’d say this was done while she was still alive.’
Alex winced. ‘The markings to her wrists, you mean?’
The flesh at the young woman’s wrists was cut in angry stripes suggesting a struggle to free herself from wherever she had been held. Alex scanned the length of the young woman’s body – her top half in just a muddied bra, her bottom half wearing a pair of leather-look leggings that had been torn in the river – and felt sadness sweep over her. How frightened must she have been when facing her own death? How brave she had been to continue to struggle, even when she must have realised she was fighting a battle she couldn’t possibly win. There was no question of whether she was already dead when her body had been put in the river. The deep cut of her throat clearly marked her final moments.
‘Looks as though she put up a good fight. As much as she was able to, anyway.’
Helen Collier crouched at the body. ‘Here,’ she said, gesturing to the young woman’s head. ‘Her hair’s been cut.’
She worked her fingertips gently beneath the head, moving it slightly to one side so that Alex was able to see the tangled hair that lay stuck to the girl’s scalp, matted with dirt from the riverbed. ‘I’m no hairdresser, but I’d say that’s been cut off at a ponytail.’ She lifted her gloved hands to the back of her own head and motioned a snipping action, as though Alex had been otherwise unable to imagine what she’d meant. ‘I’d say your killer kept himself a souvenir.’
‘How long do you think she’s been in the water?’
Helen lowered the dead girl’s head, letting it rest back on the ground. ‘Not as long as someone was hoping. The stage of decomposition suggests no more than two weeks. These,’ she said, moving a gloved hand to the scraps of plastic tethered to the victim’s wrist, ‘were probably intended to keep her down longer. Presumably long enough for the body to decompose altogether.’
They discussed the remnants of the carrier bags attached to the victim’s wrists. It seemed likely they had been loaded with weights – rocks, perhaps – in order to pull the body beneath the water and conceal all evidence of the crime. That would explain the choice of point of entry where the girl’s body was placed into the river. This was one of the deepest parts, and in most cases where bodies were submerged in water they resurfaced at or near the place where they had entered.
If the woman had been put into the water here, how had someone managed to get her to this point? The park was inaccessible to public vehicles. It would have been impossible for someone to carry a corpse this far into the park without being seen, even at this quieter time of year. The gates were locked at ten o’clock, meaning no one was able to gain access at night.
Helen seemed adamant that the body would have entered the water close to the place where the young woman had been found, but how had that been possible?
Alex looked back at the dead girl lying on the riverbank. Her heart swelled with a sickness she knew would stay with her until they caught whoever had been responsible for the brutalities inflicted upon her.
Until they did, this face would remain with Alex, the horrors of the girl’s final minutes haunting her.
There were six people at the support group that evening: two volunteer leaders and four group members. Everyone was sitting in their coats because the hall was so cold; the three-bar electric heater that had been pulled as far as its lead would allow was offering little but the smell of burning dust, and the row of windows that lined the far wall was intent on letting in the cold, despite the ancient velvet curtains pulled to shut them out.
Sean Pugh gave a spurt of chesty coughs, as if to demonstrate how cold the place was.
‘Rachel,’ Tim said, giving the shy girl at the far curve of their circle a smile. ‘Hope you’re feeling better this week.’
Rachel’s pale face coloured pink at the acknowledgment, and Tim turned his attention to the rest of the group.
‘Would anyone like to get us started?’ he prompted. ‘What sort of a week have we all had?’
‘Shit.’
Tim turned to Carl. Six feet two on a short day, Carl Anderson’s legs seemed to fill the space in . . .
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