Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller (32 page)

‘You
think I never suspected you, Connor?’ Tris demands angrily. ‘I did, trust me. I
just didn’t want to believe it. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed forever.
Your constant disappearances, the way you kept warning me off Ellie, and that
photograph I found here … ’

He
is breathing heavily, staring at his brother. ‘I mean, shit, Connor. Two women
are dead. You’ve got Jenny tied up. What the fuck is
wrong
with you?’

‘I
could ask you the same question. How can you choose Eleanor Blackwood over me?
Your own brother?’

Tris
is beginning to look dangerous. His big hands clench into fists, and he starts
towards his brother. ‘You’re not my
real
brother. You never have been.’

‘Not
another step.’ Connor swivels, pointing the shotgun directly at his brother’s
stomach. ‘She’s not worth your life.’

Tris
laughs wildly. ‘You going to shoot me, Con?’

‘I
don’t
want
to shoot you. I promised
Dad I’d look after you when he was gone. And I’ve always tried to do that. Kept
you at home on the farm where you couldn’t get involved in the kind of drinks
and drugs scene that messed up Denzil. Stopped you from making a fool of
yourself over Eleanor when she came back from university.’ He glances at me, a
sudden hatred in his face, then looks back at his brother. ‘But you know she’ll
never love you, right? Never marry you, never settle down, never have kids.
She’s too restless. She won’t stay in Cornwall either. And I couldn’t bear it
if she took you away with her.’

‘I’m
going to break you in half, you sick bastard.’

‘You
don’t want to do that. Anymore than I want to hurt you. Think what you’re
doing. It’s not too late to be on my side.’

Tris
lunges wildly for the shotgun. But Connor is ready for him. He turns, smashing
the butt end down on his brother’s forearm, then runs towards me, his face
intent, straightening the barrel. He’s planning to shoot me, I realise too
late. Only Tris staggers after him and kicks him in the back of the knee, just
as I did with him.

Connor
overbalances, grimacing with pain, and drops the shotgun almost in front of me.
‘Fuck.’

I
run forward and kick the shotgun away as he tries reaching for it. It’s heavy,
heavier than I am expecting, but goes skidding away across the stone floor.

Connor
turns. ‘You bitch.’

I
charge forward and tackle him, but he grabs at Tris, bring all three of us down
at the same time. My head smacks into the stone floor, and for a few seconds
I’m dazed, the world a dark blur. Beside me I feel Connor stir, groaning. Then
he staggers to his feet and thuds across the cellar.

Tris
bends hurriedly over me. ‘Ellie? Are you okay?’

‘My
head … ’ I mutter.

‘Leave
her,’ Connor shouts from across the room. He sounds half out of his mind. ‘Get
away from her.’

I
look up through Tris’s legs to see Connor standing directly under the naked
light bulb. He’s staring at us both with madness in his eyes. In his hands is
the double-barrelled shotgun.

‘Look,
it’s over,’ Tris tells him flatly. ‘You’re never going to stop me leaving home.
Not with that,’ he says, gesturing to the shotgun, ‘or with anymore of your
lies. So you might as well put the gun down and let Jenny go.’

‘No,’
Connor says, shaking his head. ‘I’m not going to prison. And you’re not going
to get the Blackwood girl.’

Someone
has to stop him, I realise. He won’t stop on his own. But even as I scramble up
onto my knees, there’s a deafening explosion. I hear Jenny jerk against the
metal frame, the whole thing jangling, and for an awful moment I think Connor
has shot her.

I
look through the acrid drift of gunpowder filling the cellar. Tris is lying on
the stone floor a few feet away, clutching his leg. There’s blood already
spreading out like a dark halo around him.

Connor
levels the gun at me as I stumble towards Tris, but to my surprise he does not
fire. If both barrels were loaded, he has one shot remaining. But perhaps he’s
hoping to hang me up beside Jenny and have some fun with me before he kills me.

Like
Tris said, a sick bastard.

I
kneel beside Tris. I expect to find his whole leg shattered, maybe even blown
away. A shotgun makes a hell of a mess of a wild animal at close quarters, and
I dread to think what it does to a human being. But it looks as though Tris has
been lucky. Connor appears to have only nicked the front of his right thigh,
both men standing far enough apart for the lead to have dispersed a little
before impact.

I
feel my way along the bloodied leg, and Tris watches me, speechless, clearly in
agony. Miraculously, it looks like only one or more pieces of lead shot have
passed through the front of his leg. But perhaps Connor unconsciously aimed to
miss his brother, despite his worst intentions.

‘I
don’t think the leg’s broken. He needs an ambulance though,’ I say, ‘or he’s
going to bleed out.’

‘No
ambulance,’ Connor says raggedly, coming towards me with the shotgun. ‘No
police.’

Tris
makes a rough noise under his breath. I meet his eyes, and see him shake his
head. He doesn’t want me to push Connor. He’s white with shock though and needs
medical attention urgently.

I
stand up, blood smeared on my hands, and walk past Connor to where Jenny is
bound to the wall. Close up, the structure she’s attached to looks like part of
an old metal bed frame. She stares at me, wide-eyed behind her gag, while I
tidy the greasy strands of hair obscuring her face. ‘Sorry, Jenny. This is
going to hurt.’

‘Get
away from her,’ Connor warns me.

I
ignore him. He won’t shoot me. Not yet. He hasn’t told me everything yet, and
it’s obvious he needs to.

I
unpeel one end of the silver tape and rip it off her face, apologising again.
There’s no way to do it gently. The skin beneath is red-raw. I guess she’s had
to suffer the tape being unpeeled numerous times since being brought here.

‘Water,
please,’ she whispers.

There’s
a plastic water bottle on the floor next to the metal frame. I tilt the bottle
to her lips, and wait while she takes a few greedy sips. Then I put it down and
start unfastening the thick wire ties Connor has used to secure her to the
frame.

‘Thanks,’
she says through dry lips.

‘Can
you walk?’

Free
of her prison, Jenny takes a few wobbling steps, then sinks to the stone floor
and shakes her head. ‘N … not yet,’ she manages to say, and starts rubbing her
legs and feet as though trying to get her circulation back. ‘Pins and needles.
Give me a few minutes.’

I
glance at Connor. ‘Take off that hoody. I need it.’ He hesitates, then steps
back ten paces and puts the gun down momentarily. He strips off the hoody and
throws it across at me, then picks up the shotgun again. He’s wearing a plain
tee-shirt underneath. I stretch the hoody round the top of Tris’s thigh as a
tourniquet. ‘He still needs an ambulance.’

Jenny
says faintly, ‘Put pressure on it, Eleanor. As much as you can. And keep the
leg elevated.’

‘I
know.’

I
spot a cardboard box about two foot high. Turning it on its side, I lift his
ankle until his foot is resting on the box. He gives a muffled cry, yet somehow
manages not to pass out.

‘You
have to let Jenny go,’ I tell Connor.

‘If
I do that, she’ll go straight to the nearest house and call the police.’

‘That’s
a long walk and she’s barefoot.’

‘She’s
a PE teacher. She could probably jog to the village in ten minutes, barefoot or
not.’

‘She’s
also been chained to a cellar wall for the past five days. How fast do you
think she’s going to be moving? You could let her go now and still be out of
here before the police arrive.’

‘You
think I’m afraid of that idiot Powell? He couldn’t even work out why Dick Laney
confessed to the killings. Shall I tell you why? Because I put a few doubts in
the man’s head about his son Jago. The police knew that the sacking had come
from the garden centre; it was only a matter of time before they traced all the
recent deliveries. So I dropped by, spoke to Dick, laid a trail of breadcrumbs
that would have led him to his son as chief suspect … and next thing, he’s down
the police station, claiming to have murdered those women.’

I
hesitate, still pressing down on Tris’s leg, trying to slow the bleeding. It’s
not looking good though. His skin is cold and clammy, and his eyes look
unfocused.

‘Now
let me tell you what I think,’ I say in response. ‘I think you want to give me
your reasons for killing those women before you’re arrested. I think you want
your voice to be heard.’

‘Who
says I’m not going to kill you too? Then myself?’

‘I
don’t think you’ve got it in you to kill me. We’ve been friends too long.’

He
bares his teeth. ‘Friends? I don’t think so.’

‘Let
her go and we’ll talk.’

‘We
can talk with Jenny here. I like an audience.’

I
ignore him, gambling on my instincts being right. ‘Jenny,’ I say clearly, ‘can
you manage to walk yet?’

Her
voice is only a whisper. ‘I think so.’

‘Then
go. He won’t stop you.’

Jenny
looks uncertainly at Connor, then pushes herself up into an ungainly crouch and
grabs at the leg of the table to pull herself to a standing position. It takes her
about ten unsteady steps to reach the stairs, then she begins to crawl up the
slippery steps like a crab trying to climb out of a bucket.

It’s
painful to watch.

As
I predicted, Connor makes no attempt to stop her, his gaze fixed on me instead.
If he had intended to kill her, she would have been dead already.

‘Okay,
Jenny can go. But no tricks,’ he warns me.

‘She’s
almost naked. She needs a coat.’

‘No,’
he insists angrily.

I
turn my hands up, palms empty. ‘No tricks.’ I shrug out of the coat, and hurry
to the steps, avoiding Connor’s furious hand as he tries to grab me. ‘Just give
me three seconds.’

I
run up the steps, hand Jenny the coat, then rush back down, losing my footing
and sliding the last three steps.

Straight
into Connor’s waiting arms.

‘I
told you, no tricks,’ he snarls, pressing the cold double barrels of the
shotgun against my temple, then thrusts me back towards Tris.

‘I
only gave her a coat. She’s got no fucking clothes on, for God’s sake.’

I
check over my shoulder. Jenny has gone.

And
she has my phone now.

Connor pushes me
away. ‘Over there, bitch,’ he says, pointing to the metal bed frame with his
shotgun.

‘You
going to tie me up and play with me?’ But I walk slowly backwards, hands in the
air, as he threatens me with the shotgun. ‘In front of Tris? That’s not your
kind of thing, is it?’

I’m
not sure if there’s a mobile signal right down here in the bottom of the
valley, especially in such a heavily wooded area. But it was worth giving her
the coat with her ID badge and my phone in the pocket. Now there’s a
possibility that Tris may make it out of here alive.

My
own odds are less encouraging.

I
stop walking, only halfway to his self-styled torture area, but Connor does not
push the point. Maybe I’m right and he doesn’t like having Tris as an audience
for his sick games.

‘I
know your mum left when you were both kids,’ I say, trying to defuse the
tension in the air. ‘That she walked out on you and your dad. Never came back.
Not even for his funeral. But that’s not entirely true,’ I add gently. ‘Is it,
Connor?’

There’s
silence. Then Connor gives a soft little laugh.

‘You
hear that?’ he asks, tilting his head.

There’s
a mild vibration that permeates everything in the cellar, like it’s coming up
through the floor.

‘The
freezer. Where you kept Dawn’s body.’

He
walks across to the shadows at the back of the room. ‘That’s right. It’s a
chest freezer. Good capacity.’ Connor clicks on an overhead bulb. The white
chest freezer looks surprisingly clean. He lifts the lid, then glances back
over his shoulder at us, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. ‘Empty
now, of course.’

‘Did
you keep both bodies in there?’

‘It’s
not what you said before,’ he tells me. ‘Leaving them for you to find, that was
an afterthought. I froze them because I didn’t want them to decay before they
could be properly buried. The dead are disgusting when they decay. Though,’ he
adds, frowning, ‘they also take a very long time to defrost, I discovered.’

Tris
looks horrified. ‘For God’s sake, Connor. Why would you do something so sick?’

‘Well,
you’re adopted. How could you expect to understand? It was a family thing, only
between me and Dad. Our little secret.’ Connor drops the lid with a hollow
thud. He snaps off the overhead light. ‘You won’t believe me but the first girl
was a genuine accident. Dawn Trevian.’

‘The
dental assistant from Bodmin,’ I say.

‘I
was feeling low after Dad had died, wishing I could speak to someone about it.
I met her coming out of Bodmin Library one day. She recognised me and stopped
to talk. Then she asked after Tris. That annoyed me.’

Tris
whispers, ‘You killed Dawn because she liked me?’

‘I
didn’t mean to. I took her phone number, said I’d call her. But I still don’t
think I would have gone out with her, except for the date.’

‘What
date?’ I ask.

‘The
anniversary of your mum’s death. I overheard Tris talking to Hannah about it.
How you two had to look out for Eleanor, make sure she got through the day
okay.’

‘And
you didn’t like that.’

‘Her
death didn’t just affect you,’ Connor points out coldly. ‘People think it’s all
about the victim and her family. They forget there are always other people
involved in a murder. Other
children
.’

I
wait, silent.

‘I
rang Dawn the week before the anniversary,’ he continues. ‘Agreed to meet her
after work. We never got to the pub though. It was obvious what she wanted.’
He’s sneering again. ‘It was nearly dusk. I pulled up in the woods’ car park.
There was no one about. She was up for it, letting me touch her, kissing me
back. Then suddenly Dawn started fighting. Said I was trying to rape her, that
she was going to tell the police.’

‘You
lost your temper.’

‘I
just wanted her to stop screaming,’ he says. ‘It all happened so quickly. One
minute she was clawing at my face, spitting at me like a cat, the next she was
lying still and quiet on my lap. Like she’d fallen asleep.’

I
feel a creeping sense of horror, imagining those large hands about my own
throat.

‘I
sat there for ages. The body was getting cold. I didn’t know what to do. I knew
it would mean prison. Perhaps half my life behind bars.’ He pauses. ‘Then I
remembered what Dad had shown me.’

 
‘The perfect hiding place.’

‘That’s
right.’

Tris
is watching us, lying white and still. He says thinly, ‘I … I don’t
understand.’

‘I’m
really sorry,’ I tell Tris gently, and hope my guesswork isn’t wildly
inaccurate. ‘I think your dad killed your mum, then told everyone in the
village that she’d left him for another man. Only she hadn’t gone far. I think
he kept her in a chest freezer at the farm.’

Tris
stares at me in horror.

Connor
interrupts his protests, talking to me. ‘No, Dad wasn’t that much of a monster,
he never meant to leave her in the freezer. We buried her together after he
showed me her body. Up there in the rose garden. I can show you the exact
spot
 
where we buried her if you
like.’

Tris looks like he’s going to be sick. There’s
agony and disbelief in every word. ‘But why? Why would he kill Mum?’

 
‘Because he killed Angela Blackwood
first,’ Connor tells him.

My body goes ice-cold at his words. It is
exactly as I suspected. But hearing those words out loud is very different from
considering them in the dark spaces of my head.

But what he says next is even more sickening.

‘She was going to tell her husband he tried to
rape her. Just like Dawn did with me. And if Dad had kept quiet about what he’d
done, none of this would have happened. But you know how he liked his beer.’

‘He
got drunk and admitted to his wife what he’d done,’ I whisper.

Connor
nods. ‘It was awful. Mum stood up to him for once. She said he had to go to the
police, confess everything. He strangled her in the kitchen. A few days before
my fourteenth birthday.’

Tris
is shaking his head. ‘But Dad said … He told us she ran off with another man.’

‘To
protect you, Tris.’

‘But
he told you the truth.’

‘I
was older, and his own son. Not adopted like you. He took me out to the garage
in the middle of the night, about six months after she’d vanished. He was very
drunk. There was a chest freezer in the garage, just like this one. Mum was
inside, frozen solid. Her eyelashes were stuck together with frost. I could
still see the black mascara on them. He said we had to bury her. Together. We
took spades, dug a hole under the rose bushes here at the old mill, and put her
in.’ He pauses, remembering. ‘I said a prayer for her. Then we closed the hole
and replanted the roses over her body.’

I
remember the butterflies under glass that I saw in their house. The stuffed
dead animals, staring back at me with glass eyes. Pete Taylor liked to kill.
But he also liked to preserve his trophies.

In
the silence that follows, I ask quietly, ‘Is that when he told you about
killing my mum?’

Connor
looks round at me, his eyes hostile. ‘Your mum led him on, then said she was
going to tell her husband about him. Dad decided to teach her a lesson she
wouldn’t forget, to scare her into keeping quiet. He followed her into the
woods when she was out walking with you. And crept up from behind.’

For
a second I’m right back there in the dappled sunshine, smelling the spring
flowers, hearing the crow in the tree overhead …

‘He
only intended to play-strangle your mum. Show her would might happen if she
made him
really
angry.’

‘It
doesn’t take much, you know. The slightest pressure on the windpipe, and they
start to choke, then lose consciousness. The easiest thing in the world.’

I
make a noise under my breath, then put a hand to my eyes. My fingers come away
wet. It feels like a wound has opened in my heart and blood is gushing out of
it. The truth is so raw and cruel, I don’t know how I’m going to survive it.

Tris
is silent too, dark eyes wide and luminous under the bare bulb. He looks
stunned. Like he’ll never recover either.

Connor
touches the lid of the freezer. ‘So I bought a new chest freezer and put Dawn
inside, like Dad did with Mum, and kept it down here where Tris would never
find it. I thought I was safe. That it was over. Then I met Sarah McGellan one
night in Newquay.’ His voice becomes bitter. ‘I liked Sarah. I brought her back
here to show her the house. Only she didn’t want to stay, said it was too
creepy. When I refused to take her home, she got hysterical.’

‘So
you hit her.’

He
nods. ‘After that, I knew I couldn’t let her go. I couldn’t risk the police
coming here. They would have searched the place, found Dawn’s body in the
freezer.’

I look at the metal frame on the wall where
Jenny had been restrained, and remember the marks on Sarah’s wrists.

‘Tying
her up felt easier for you. It meant you didn’t have to kill her immediately.’

‘There
was an old metal bedstead up in the mill. I cut it down to size, fixed it to
the wall there,’ he agrees. ‘Sarah was smart, she understood what I was going
through. She had a nice smile too. I liked having her around. I knew I’d have
to kill her eventually, of course. But I wanted to make her death significant.
That’s when I came up with the plan.’

‘Three,
two, one,’ I whisper.

‘Exactly,’
he says. ‘A simple countdown. First Dawn Trevian. Then Sarah McGellan. And then
you, Eleanor Blackwood. My number one.’

I
look at Connor, hating him. ‘And the shadow man?’

‘What?’

‘You
used to watch me from a distance. Come into my room while I was sleeping. Steal
things.’

‘Even
when I was a boy,’ he admits. ‘I was obsessed with you. I hated that everyone
was so fucking sorry for you. Poor little Ellie Blackwood. Nobody cared about
me and Tris, yet our mum had been murdered too. And we were still living with
the murderer.’

Tris
says, ‘He was sick, Connor. Just like you.’

I
can see Connor getting angry again, and try to divert his attention. ‘How … how
did you do it? Get Dawn down to the woods, I mean?’

‘I
covered the inside of dad’s van with plastic sheeting, put Dawn in the back. I
parked near the bridge, out of sight of the road. Then carried Dawn over my
shoulder through the stream.’

‘And
positioned her exactly where my mum died.’

He
nods.

‘And
the number three?’

‘There
was a black permanent marker in the glove box.’

I
listen to the silence above us and wonder how long it will take for the police
to arrive. Surely Jenny must have managed to call them by now? By the look of
his face, Tris can’t hang on much longer.

‘But
where did you get the forestry sign for the diversion? That looked so
realistic.’

‘They
stack the signs behind the toilets in the car park. I changed the wording, then
set it up it where the path divides. That was the tricky bit. You might have
ignored the sign and stayed on the upper paths. Or someone else might have come
along first.’

‘But
why move Dawn’s body afterwards? That’s the part I don’t understand. Why not
leave her for the police to find?’

‘What,
and have you treated like a celebrity again?’ His voice grows cold. ‘Poor
Eleanor, her mum was strangled right in front of her, and now she’s found
another
dead woman in the woods.’

‘And
Sarah?’

‘I
didn’t want Sarah to end up frozen for months like my mum. She deserved better.
I washed her body to remove any traces of my DNA before taking it to the
cemetery though. I needed to make sure there was nothing to link her death to
me.’

I
look at my enemy, seeing Connor properly for the first time. He’s a killer,
like his father before him. Maybe he was driven insane by the horror he
witnessed. But my mum was strangled in front of me, and I didn’t grow up to be
a murderer.

I
can remember the day she died now. I remember everything. What Connor has told
me is slowly piecing together those odd gaps in my knowledge that had always
felt so huge and gaping that they could never be filled. But how small the
truth feels now. So small and hard, I could put it in my pocket.

 
‘I’ll make it easy,’ he promises,
advancing. ‘I don’t want to blow a hole in you with this bloody great gun. That
would be too ugly. A little pinch round the throat, and it will be like falling
asleep. I won’t make it painful like it was for our mothers.’

‘Kill
me, but let her go.’ Tris’s voice is a mere thread of sound. ‘You have to let
her go, Connor. She’s … done nothing … to you.’