Her photography started to get a little more inventive and adventurous too. Teenage girls were filled with alcohol and drugs, until they were willing to take off all their clothes, and let her take pictures of them knowingly. Eyes half closed but legs wide open. I never saw a man’s face in any of the photos I found, but sometimes I could see their hands. Grubby fingers touching, holding, scratching, pinching, and sticking themselves inside things they shouldn’t.
Rachel kept the pictures in a shoebox in her wardrobe.
That’s where I found them and I didn’t like what I saw.
You have to understand that I have witnessed some terrible things during my lifetime. Human beings are capable of inflicting unspeakable misery – on themselves as well as others – and there are so many things I wish I could unsee. Police and journalists get exposed to inhumanity every day, but those horrors aren’t a secret. They get reported so that the whole world knows the truth and justice can be served. The whole world doesn’t need to know about what happened in Blackdown all those years ago. But the people responsible must be punished.
None of the other girls were as bad as Rachel, she turned them into the worst versions of themselves. But they let her. They could have said no. There is always a choice.
They made the wrong one.
Him
Thursday 00:30
I think I might have got things wrong.
Perhaps because of the alcohol, or the tiredness, or the sheer horror of it all.
As soon as Priya suggests that Anna is in danger, I think she may be right.
I need to find her, but I don’t know how or where, and everyone is watching me.
The sideways glances keep coming from my colleagues, as they traipse in and out of what used to be my home. When I take a moment to see myself through their eyes, it doesn’t look good. There is no sign of forced entry. A knife is missing from my kitchen, I have a connection with every single one of the victims, and a picture of them with their faces crossed out – covered in my fingerprints – was found in my house.
I’ve never been honest about my relationship with Rachel Hopkins, or the fact that I was with her in the woods the night she died. I thought Zoe was the only one who knew, but it turns out so did Helen Wang. Now they’re both dead too. It doesn’t look good, no matter which way you view it. Even I am starting to doubt myself. I had an imaginary friend when I was a boy. I used to blame him when I did something wrong, but then so did a lot of children. It doesn’t mean I’m pretending to be innocent now.
I did not kill my sister.
When my parents died, I blocked it from my mind for such a long time. Sometimes I still do. But I can’t forget the image of Zoe lying in a bathtub of bloody water, with her wrists slit and one eye sewn closed. Whatever she did, or didn’t do, nobody deserves to die like that. Whoever did this to her is a monster, and I plan to find them and deal with them my own way. But first I need to know that Anna is safe.
I dial her number for the tenth time. It goes straight to voicemail again, as though it is out of battery or switched off. Having been married to her for ten years, I know that turning off her mobile is something Anna never does.
I need to find her, but I left my car at Priya’s house. I spot Zoe’s keys in the dish in the hall and head for the front door.
‘Going somewhere?’ Priya asks, seeming to appear from nowhere.
‘Just stepping outside for some fresh air.’
‘OK.’ She nods, and stands aside to let me pass. ‘Don’t go too far.’
Even she seems to suspect me of something now.
I walk out to the front garden, drinking down greedy gulps of the cool night air, still trying to sober myself up. I see Priya watching me from the window as I light a cigarette. It’s only when I give her a half-hearted wave that she steps back inside and lets the curtain fall. As soon as she is gone, I get in Zoe’s car and reverse out of the driveway as fast as I can.
The first place I stop is the hotel. The receptionist is asleep when I knock on the glass door. I can see her head resting on her arms on the front desk, a long brown plait resembling a rope. I bang a little louder and she glares in my direction, before pulling herself upright and strutting towards me. She has a large set of keys in her skinny little hand, but seems reluctant to use them.
‘We’re closed and we’re full.’
She says the words slowly behind the glass door, and I wonder whether it is her inability to speak the language, or her belief that I won’t understand it that causes her to do so. I hold up my badge and she lets me in.
‘I need to speak to one of your guests. It’s an urgent police matter.’
She looks horrified at the mere suggestion of it.
‘I don’t know whether I’m allowed to wake people up in the middle of the night,’ she says, her forehead fretting into a series of ugly lines.
‘You probably aren’t, but I am. Her name is Anna Andrews.’
‘She was here earlier!’
The woman beams at me, as though she just guessed the right answer in a game show.
‘Great. Which room is she in?’
‘She isn’t. The hotel is full.’
Patience is not something I have an abundance of at the best of times. I don’t mean to shout at her, but I can’t help raising my voice.
‘I don’t understand, you just said that she was here earlier.’
‘She was. About an hour ago. She thought that she had a reservation, but someone had cancelled it. So, they left.’
‘They?’
‘There was a man with her. He seemed to have an idea of somewhere else to go.’
The dodgy cameraman, no doubt. I knew there was something not right about him.
‘Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.’
I drive around town twice, looking for any sign of the ugly blue crew car I suspect they are travelling in, knowing that Anna still doesn’t have her own. I stop at the first set of red traffic lights, but not the second. Then, for lack of a better idea, I drive to her mum’s house. I know how much she hates going there, but if the hotel was full, she might have decided to stay the night.
I knock on the door and wait, expecting a light to come on in the front bedroom. Anna’s mum is many things, but she isn’t deaf yet. When there is no answer, and no sign of life, I look beneath the flowerpot but the key is missing. Luckily, I had a spare made a few weeks ago – I’ve always had a weird obsession with collecting multiple sets of keys in case I need them – and with my mother-in-law’s memory deteriorating at such a rapid rate, it seemed like a responsible thing to do. It takes me a few attempts to find the right key, but then it slots into place and I’m inside.
I turn on the light and I’m surprised to see stacks of boxes everywhere.
‘The only way you’ll get me out of this house is in a coffin,’ is what she always said, whenever anyone suggested it might be time to move out. I used to think that Anna’s mother was holding onto this old house for sentimental reasons – memories of her husband perhaps – but Anna always insisted that it wasn’t that. Apparently, the marriage didn’t end well; her dad left them and never came back. Neither Anna or her mother ever talked about him and there were no pictures. She said it was so long ago, she wasn’t sure she’d even recognise her own father if she passed him on the street.