Anything for Her (25 page)

Brooke’s future was destroyed the moment she saw
the car on the bend. Her sanity disintegrated when she witnessed the look in the eyes of those she killed before the fall. Her entire future crumbled away when she saw the dead woman lying lifelessly on the bonnet of the car with the seatbelt wrapped around her neck.

The sun is rising in the sky as they pull up outside the house. The dawn sky is a palette of reds, as if the blood they spilled has stained the clouds, reminding them of what they did. They both left the house as innocent people: now they have returned as killers.

Louise turns off the engine. Everything falls silent.

‘Brooke,’ Louise says, her voice broken and strained. ‘We must never speak of this night to anyone.’

Brooke says nothing, but stares vacantly out of the windscreen.

‘Brooke, tell me you understand. Tell me you won’t tell anyone about this night.’

‘I killed two people,’ she says, weakly.

You only killed one
.

‘Brooke, look at me.’

She turns and makes eye contact with her mother. Two tears fall silently from her eyes.

‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this night. Only you and I can know about this. We will take this to our graves. We will die with this secret. Understand?’

‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she replies, her voice as
delicate as a baby’s bones.

They both look away in silence, unwilling to leave the car and allow the experience to become their most feared and haunting memory.

Louise longs to go inside and confide in her husband of the night she has endured, but knows she cannot – not only to protect him, but also to protect herself. She is a killer, a cold-blooded killer. No one must know, not even Brooke.

‘How are we going to live with this?’ Brooke asks. Tears continue to stream down her cheeks in shimmering rivers.

‘Day by day,’ she replies.

‘That man, he might—’

‘They won’t be able to find us, Brooke. I picked you up from the party because you drank too much. Someone else stole the car. Someone else crashed.’

‘But he’ll remember our faces. He’ll remember our lie, that we would get help and come back.’

‘I’ll die before this comes out. I promise you, Brooke, nothing will happen. The night is done. Finished. All we have to do is survive it.’

She pulls her daughter into her arms. Brooke sobs into her mother’s embrace.

‘I promise you, Brooke. I won’t let anything happen to us. All we have to do is survive.’

Chapter Fifty-one

DIs Jessica Dean and Chris Jones arrive outside the country house with a warrant to enter. It has been over thirty hours since they last saw Louise and they are beyond concerned.

They walk up the garden path in silence.

Jessica knocks on the door. They wait a full minute. Chris watches the seconds tick away on his watch. She knocks once more, and they wait another minute.

Still no answer.

The detectives nod at each other. Jessica walks habitually round the right side, while Chris makes his way round the left. Her heart beats heavily in her chest. Her gut is telling her that she going to find something she won’t like. She rests her fingertips on the pepper spray attached to her belt.

Both DIs meet around the back of the property and witness the broken window. They read the bloody message on the glass, written backwards to be read from within. In the reflection of the window, Jessica sees a dead body swinging in the breeze. She turns fast.

Brooke Leighton. The missing girl, dangling from a tree branch with a rope around her neck. Her pierced clothing is drenched in blood. Somehow, she still
retains the fear she felt when she was alive. Her eyes are still plagued with terror. Her body is stiff and her skin is so pale it is a musky grey.

‘Fuck!’ Jones exclaims.

He hunches over and vomits violently.

Jessica bows her head and looks at the ground.

She was so young
.

She notices footprints in the snow, each print speckled with blood. She crouches on her knees before the closest print and takes in every detail. She sees the imprints of toes in the snow – this person was barefoot. She follows the path of bloody footsteps with her eyes and watches them head down the garden and out of sight.

‘Chris, stay here. And if you need to vomit again, don’t do it in a crime scene.’

‘Sorry,’ he replies, breaking the strings of bile connecting his lips with his words.

Jessica walks cautiously alongside the footprints, not wanting to put herself in imminent danger or destroy any evidence. She follows the path deeper into the garden, scanning the ground and passing plants for anything left behind: a drop of blood, a shred of clothing, a weapon. She jumps over a fallen rose bush, wondering how it fell. When she reaches the end of the garden, she sees an open doorway and the bloody footsteps leading towards it. On the other side of the wall is a huge field covered in snow, with a view
of the hills rolling behind it, as if the land has frozen in waves, mimicking the sea.

By the way the footprints have been left, she knows they were made fast – the person was running. The prints don’t follow a straight line, but dart in frantic directions, careless of where the person landed his or her feet. The person wasn’t worried about what was on the ground, but who was following behind.

Following the footsteps, Jessica walks through the gateway and into the field. She looks ahead to see how far the trail of footsteps continues, and stops abruptly.

‘Shit.’

She looks down and notices a lock of blonde hair caught on the stem of a frosty weed.

She walks towards the scene and sees the mounds on the snow become shapes, and the shapes become bodies. She stops before them, taking in the sight of bloodstained snow and sighs heavily.

Louise is lying on her back with wide, fathomless eyes. Her face and chest are splattered with blood. A lifeless robin lies on the journal resting on her bloodied chest. A message has been written in blood on the cover:

READ ME
.

Next to Louise is a man. His face is still. The skin on his neck has been slashed so violently that she can see the white of the bone within.

Blood has oozed from the bodies for hours, forming a large red pool that has stained the snow.

Jessica had never considered that Louise might die. She had lost hope for Brooke. It was the girl’s beauty that had made Jessica begin to fear the worst: predators often choose stunning girls like her. But she never thought that the girl’s mother would be murdered too.

She looks at the journal resting on Louise’s motionless chest. She knows there will be a confession from the man inside… a suicide note…some sort of justification for murdering two women who had the rest of their lives to live.

The metallic scent of blood fills her nostrils, causing her stomach to churn. She won’t vomit like Jones. She learned to control her reflexes many, many murders ago.

Sirens blare in the distance. Jones will have called for back-up between retches.

She looks into Louise’s clouded eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t protect you.’

A twinge of guilt pains her chest.

I should have stayed with her when she continued searching. I shouldn’t have left her alone
.

She turns to see police officers emerging through the back gate of the country house and heading towards the scene. She realises tears are trickling
down her cheeks, turning her back to the approaching officers as she wipes them away furiously. She takes a deep breath to compose herself.

Jessica looks out across the rolling hills, the beautiful blue sky, and thinks to herself:
What a beautiful place to die
.

Epilogue

Six months after his arrest, Michael’s life has only worsened. Losing his wife and daughter to a killer has taken something from him that he will never get back. He is living each day in a prison cell that he is too terrified to leave; he feels like a bullied schoolboy who is trying to avoid his lunchtime persecutors. He was jumped on his first day: one inmate beat him with his food tray, while another jabbed him in the ribs with his fist, repeatedly, until the screws finally broke it up. He was left bruised with broken ribs. He cannot take a shower without wondering if he will be attacked, or eat without anticipating a hand thrusting his face into his food. He has been nicknamed Rich Boy, even by the screws, who seem to be on good terms with the instigators of his torment: his cell door mysteriously opens so he can receive impromptu beatings; screws turn a blind eye whenever he is pushed down the stairs and left in a limp heap, groaning and longing to die.

He never stops thinking of Louise and how he failed her. If he hadn’t cheated, she wouldn’t have left. She would have stayed at home – she would have been safe. He would have sacrificed his own life to save her. Six months on, he still cries each night at the
thought of her, and cannot bear to pleasure himself in his cold bunk: it would be as if he were betraying his dead wife. At night he dreams that he is lying in his bed in the townhouse, holding her warm body in his arms, smelling her familiar scent. Every night the dream turns into a nightmare: the scent of her perfume turns sour and repulsive. Her warmth vanishes and is replaced by bitter coldness. Her flesh disappears, leaving him to embrace her dirt-smothered bones. When he realises that he is lying in bed clutching his wife’s corpse, he releases a blood-curdling scream. He tries to flee, but every night her skeleton turns, grabs him with its hard, bony fingers, yanks him back into a painful hold and whispers to him with sour breath:
You did this Michael. You did this to me
.

He wakes up screaming every night, sometimes in a puddle of his own hot urine, which steams in his cold cell. He has not had a night unaccompanied by the same dream since her death.

Dominic has left his primary school and is waiting to start secondary school. He turned eleven a few months back with only his grandparents to celebrate it. He was pulled from his private school and enrolled into a comprehensive on the other side of London, due to Michael losing the family’s wealth. Dominic was instantly mocked and bullied for his posh accent, his sensitive nature and his immaculate uniform. Eventually he fell into a crowd and had to pretend to
love rugby more than life itself, despite hating sport, hating mud, and hating unnecessary bodily contact. He did what he needed to do, in order to survive. Now, he is a tough, scrappy child, hardened by the loss of his mother and his sister to a cold-blooded killer, and his father to his own greed.

He lives with his grandparents, who smother him with so much love that it pushes him away. He dreads coming home to their questions, which are hurled at him the moment he enters the house. He instantly runs up to his room to be alone. He used to cry about his lost family. Now he refuses to let himself think of them – or the life he lost. He refuses to speak to Michael. He blames him for everything.

If Michael calls, Dominic hangs up. If his grandparents try to persuade him to visit Michael, Dominic leaves the room and slams the door behind him. If Dominic thinks of him, he pinches his own arm: a punishment for missing him; a punishment he has created for himself. In the first few months after he lost his family, his arm was forever red from self-harming, but now his arm hasn’t a single blemish.

Michael pines for Dominic; he begs his son to visit in the lengthy letters that he writes to him. He always uses his one daily phone call to try and contact him. His attempts always go unanswered.

His wife and daughter are dead. His son refuses to speak to him. He has nothing. He has no one. He has
nothing to live for except to wait for death.

***

One morning, as Michael sits on the cold, stainless steel toilet, his cell door opens – without a knock – to the sound of jingling keys. He prepares to receive a beating, with his trousers still around his ankles, but instead he sees a screw, not a fellow inmate.

‘You have a visitor,’ she says.

‘Is it my son?’

‘It’s a woman.’

‘Who?’

‘I’m not your damn secretary, Rich Boy. Wipe your arse and find out for yourself.’

She looks away with a grimace as he wipes himself clean, as though his existence revolts her. He flushes the toilet, which always clogs up and contaminates the room with the stench of faeces. He pulls up his trousers and leaves his cell.

The screw leads him through the cold, loud prison wing. She converses with prisoners and fellow screws as she passes, while Michael remains behind her like a silent shadow.

He is led through numerous locked gates – receiving glares from numerous prisoners and staff on the way – before he is eventually led to the visitors’ wing, which is a private place where inmates meet with their
solicitors. He knows he won’t be seeing his lawyer: she vanished the second his money did.

The screw opens a door halfway down the hallway.

‘Wait in here,’ she says, her breath tainted with cigarette smoke.

He enters obediently.

The room is sombre and grey, with scuffed, drab walls and a single, square window. The bars covering the window cast shadows over the single desk and two plastic chairs in the centre.

He stands and enjoys the precious silence. Dark shadows circle his eyes and his issued tracksuit hangs from his deteriorating frame. He is nothing but skin and bones. His former self – a confident, domineering multimillionaire – has disintegrated. He is now a submissive, feeble being, who longs to go unnoticed.

He sits down on the chair facing the door, having learned never to expose his back to unseen threats, and waits for his visitor.

The door opens to reveal DI Jessica Dean and the sour-faced screw that led him into the room.

‘Michael. How are you?’

She sits in the seat opposite him, trying to hide her surprise at his withered form.

‘Great, thanks for asking. I’ve joined a book club with a gang of child rapists and I’ve fallen in love with a man named Steve. What the hell do you think?’

The screw guarding the door flinches, as if about to
say something disparaging, but Jessica raises a dismissive hand.