Kitabı oku: «Pretty Little Things: 2018’s most nail-biting serial killer thriller with an unbelievable twist»

For Team Walsh.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Dedication

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part 2

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Part Three

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Letter from the Author

Excerpt

Endpages

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

ANON

It’s the blood that gets to you first. It’s messy, gets everywhere. Under your nails, in each line, every crevice. It’s a bitch to clean. It’s practically impossible to remove. No matter how much you scrub, on hands and knees, sponge in hand, if you look hard enough, you’ll find a trace.

That’s why I’m careful about where I do it, where I make the final cut, where I end it all.

It’s in a cabin in the woods.

I know what you’re thinking – cliché? Am I right? OK, sure, I can see why you’d think that. Frankly, I don’t care what you think. I never set out to be original. This life chose me. I’m not a product of my environment.

I was born like this.

Now, isn’t that a scary thought?

So . . . the blood.

After the blood, comes the elation. That feeling of pure ecstasy, running through your veins – at least, that’s what it’s like for me. Each of us is different. Someone else like me might tell it differently. One thing we all have in common, though, is the knowledge that we can’t stop.

Doesn’t matter how many times I hear an innocent beg me to spare their life. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear them cry, or scream, or feel them lash out, trying in vain to fight me off.

No, it doesn’t matter.

The result is the same every time.

They are dead and I’m riding that euphoric wave I can’t ever find the words to describe accurately.

They are dead . . . or they are dying.

Like this bitch is right now, her body twitching under my weight. There’s no sound except for the gurgling as her blood gushes out, bright-red, arterial spray decorating the plastic sheeting I’ve pinned up around the walls and floor of the cabin.

Her name is Bryony Keats.

She’s just celebrated her seventeenth birthday. She didn’t listen to her mother about getting into cars with strangers.

*

How many? I’m not sure I can rightly say. It’s either three or four. Reason why I say it’s possibly four depends on how you look at it.

Number four had a fucking asthma attack midway through it all, which, frankly, spoilt the whole thing for me, it really did.

Did she die because of me? Well, yes and no. I’m sure her body wouldn’t have gone into overdrive had I left her alone. BUT, she had asthma – an underlying health problem.

Properly managed, she could have lived another fifty-plus years. So, I can’t take complete ownership of it.

Mother Nature played her part.

She could just as easily have had a fatal attack next week, next month, next year . . . had she not fallen into my path.

Her name was Katie. Pretty sweet little thing she was. She was my youngest, about fifteen. Just.

Young.

Did I mention that I like them young? Well, youngish – I’m not a total monster – but I do get off on that sweet smell of youth. The skin has to be soft to the touch, like a peach. Ripe fruit meant for tasting.

That first sweet bite.

It gets me every single time. That and the precious moment when the light, the life – everything that makes that person them – has slipped away.

Speaking of which, Bryony here has just left us.

Her legs under my weight have fallen still at last, and her nails have stopped trying in vain to claw my eyes out.

I’d kept my face out of harm’s way, head cocked to the side, just so, watching as she bled out.

*

I picked her up on a winding country road in the Chilterns, en route between the county of Buckinghamshire and Kennington, Hertfordshire, not to be confused with Kennington, London, not far from MI6 – I should be so-fucking-lucky – ’cos that’d be pretty cool.

I’d been out on one of the drives I like to do when not at work.

I can literally just drive for miles, with no real destination in mind, just enjoying where the roads take me.

Admittedly this means I can scope out the area, understand my limits, respect the boundaries I have to force on myself so I don’t get caught, but it’s a real pleasure.

A Sunday-morning drive is how I found the cabin in the woods.

It was an old site that used to hire out wood cabins to families, on a self-catering basis. It was supposed to be all about getting back to nature, immersing oneself in the woods, leaving the rat-race behind – that type of shit.

This place thrived in the nineties. Then we hit the noughties, and it went to the dogs under new management.

This place was soon forgotten. It’s not even on my satnav.

Completely isolated, forgotten, broken and unloved. Until I found a use for it.

Anyway, I digress.

So, Bryony . . .

She said she’d had her thumb stuck out for about thirty minutes before I stopped at the side of the road.

When she lowered her head to give me the once-over, her eyes did show a flicker of recognition.

I did the same. I was pretty sure I’d seen her somewhere before.

‘Where you heading?’ I’d asked.

‘Anywhere but here,’ she’d replied, breezily, not seeing me as a threat.

I asked her what she meant. She told me she’d had enough of her mother’s new boyfriend, and was running away. Then she dropped her rucksack on the backseat of the car, and climbed in beside me.

Just like that.

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly . . .

I admit, my smile was beaming. Ear to ear.

Bryony – she told me her name, with a flick of her chestnut-coloured hair over her small shoulders – was beautiful.

‘Take me as far as you’re going,’ she said.

I felt duty-bound to oblige.

After some small talk, she said she needed a piss. With no services nearby, just narrow country lanes, I pulled over and she ran into the thick of some trees.

I knocked her unconscious with one blow to the back of the head with my heavy-duty torch (top tip, always be prepared) catching her mid-flow, jeans and knickers around her ankles.

Not my greatest or proudest moment, I’ll admit. Necessary, though.

After an initial struggle with her jeans, I got her in the boot, wrists and ankles bound tight.

When we got to the cabin, I waited about four hours before I caved in and killed Bryony, cutting her throat from ear to ear.

It was right after she said she knew where she’d seen me before.

She’d sealed her own fate right at that moment, because just before that I’d been in two minds about whether to let her go or not.

She was a runaway, and I can relate to that and the reasons why she was doing it. We had found some common ground, but then she went and ruined it for herself.

I still don’t quite understand what she had been saying to me – places she said she’d seen me – but she was scared shitless. I doubt many people make much sense when they’ve reached the limits of trying to control such obvious fear.

I look down at her now, at the blood on the plastic sheet. I stare into her glassy green eyes.

With her last ounce of strength, Bryony’s frightful stare had found mine, and her eyelids flickered.

Had that been a silent fuck you?

Too late to ask her now, but I like to think that’s what she meant. Even at the end she had a bit of fight left in her.

I eye the ring in her fleshy lower lip. That’ll have to come out. It’s about the only thing she has that I have considered keeping.

After I’ve carefully removed the little piece of silver, I press my hand, encased in surgical gloves, against her peach of a cheek. She’s going cold already.

Oh, Bryony. You tragic thing, you.

*

The cabin in the woods – isn’t that a film? – is about twenty-odd miles away from civilisation of any real kind, unless you count the wildlife – who, incidentally, can be a massive help if I want to dispose of smaller body parts.

There have been four girls before Bryony. Later, I’ll have them all moved to a different place, a wasteland about forty miles from where I live.

Then it’s just a matter of time before they’re found. I don’t think it’ll be long.

Bryony’s a bit different though. When I move them, I don’t want to leave her with the rest. She fought back more. She was in a different league.

I pick up my spade and go outside the cabin. The air outside is heavy with damp, but it’s mild enough.

I go to the back of the cabin and out towards the undergrowth.

I step over the four raised mounds of earth near the line of trees and begin to dig. Nothing fancy, or too deep, just enough like when you sow a row of seeds.

All I can hear, now the blood in my ears has stopped pounding, is the spade slicing through the soil.

It takes no time at all and I go back to get Bryony.

When I’m done, and have scattered a layer of soil over her, I take a few steps back and lean my weight against the spade.

I look at the five mounds of earth, from the bottom where their feet are, right up until I reach their faces.

Five bodies buried up to their necks, five faces left uncovered, looking skyward. They remind me of marble statues or the effigies you see adorning the top of a sarcophagus.

They are less than perfect, obviously. I can’t stop decomposition.

This is my garden, they are my seeds. Pretty things might grow here, even after they’ve gone, and join the sea of reds and pinks that are here already.

I head back inside, leaving the spade outside for later.

I go to the mirror on the cabin wall and take a moment to study my face.

So, there it is. This is me. What I do.

It’s a primal instinct. Something tuned in, buried deep, part of my DNA, never to be erased.

People write books on it – the reasons why people kill. Reality is, they’ve only just scratched the surface. They don’t know how deep down the rabbit hole it goes.

They don’t know about me.

As I said, it’s a primal instinct.

And that’s what makes me so dangerous.

PART ONE

Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

A pocket full of posies,

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

We all fall down.

…We all fall down.

We all fall.

We. All.

Fall.

CHAPTER 1

CHARLOTTE

The taste of acrid smoke, like ash in my mouth.

This is what I always feel in that first waking moment after a nightmare.

The ashes in my mouth. That and the heat from the fire.

Since the accident it’s all I can think about when I shut my eyes at night.

I remember . . . I remember opening my eyes, seeing twisted and bent metal keeping me prisoner in the wrecked shell that was my old Citroën Xsara.

I say was, because in the immediate aftermath, from where I was lying, it didn’t resemble anything like a car.

I remember the heat of the fire, seeing the flames licking ever closer. I remember looking at twisted metal, torn upholstery and flames drawing dangerously close to the exposed fuel pipe.

It’s like I was in a daze. I couldn’t think about what I had to do next. I was, I guess, frozen in that moment, unable to move.

Then I was dragged out of what remained of my car by the man who had been in the vehicle behind mine. Assessing the damage, he knew I had maybe a minute before the car’s petrol tank exploded.

He’d cleared us to a distance of about thirty feet before the inevitable happened.

In one deafening explosion, the car was completely engulfed in flames, and I breathed a sweet sigh of relief that I was not burning to death.

It was a miracle I was alive or that things didn’t turn out worse considering my injuries. I suffered concussion, cuts, bruises, fractured ribs and a punctured lung, but the worst was my face . . .

I’d survived a collision with an HGV that had misjudged a bend in the road while coming from the opposite direction. The driver, Paul Selby, caught my car, crushing the side, and the force had spun me around before I came off the road, going through a fence and down an embankment. The car had flipped, rolling several times before coming to a standstill. Wreckage was strewn across the road I’d previously been driving on, and I was now stationary in a field.

Paul Selby was arrested for dangerous driving, using a mobile at the wheel and causing injury by dangerous driving. He got bail, but the court date is coming up and I can’t deny the stress has been getting to me of late.

I have to keep it all in perspective, though – or so I keep being told.

It’s a crash no one should have survived.

But somehow I did.

Six months on and I had used the time to reassess my life. Life is precious. Life can be taken as quickly as it can be given.

My daughter, Elle, is currently telling me she wants a car for her seventeenth birthday, which is in almost two weeks’ time.

I keep seeing that HGV and my insides do a somersault.

‘I’ll need driving lessons too. I can’t have a car just sitting there on the drive,’ she’s telling me.

I want to scream at her not to drive.

Ever.

It’s too dangerous and I just want to protect her. She’s my only child and what if it had been her in that crash? What if something like what happened to me, happens to her?

I grip hold of the tea towel I have been using to dry the dishes, and try to pull myself together. I’m being irrational. That’s what my Iain would say if he could hear what’s going on inside my head right now.

Because I’ve gone pale, quiet, she is now peering over her iPad, staring at me. I need to stall.

‘I don’t know, Elle, cars are expensive and—’

‘Dad said I could have lessons,’ she interrupts, anticipating my predictable response.

So much for a united unit, sharing the roller-coaster ride that is living with a teenager.

‘Well, Dad hasn’t discussed anything with me.’

‘Mum, I’m nearly seventeen.’

‘I never had a car at seventeen,’ I say, turning my back to her, busying myself with the drying up.

‘I need my independence.’

I turn to look at her. I know I’m biased, but my daughter is a beauty. She’s got long brown hair that brings out the colour of her bright-blue eyes. Her features are almost perfect and I know her classmates are envious because Elle’s blossomed early.

She’s looking at me now, eyebrow cocked, while playing with her necklace.

I stare at the pendant. It’s a green-enamel four-leaf clover. Iain and I got it for her sixteenth birthday. I remember thinking it was expensive at the time, but compared to a car . . .

Elle lets go of the pendant and gets up from her chair. Standing there in her skinny jeans and slouchy Nirvana top – which she’s only wearing because she thinks it’s fashionable, not because she thinks Kurt Cobain was a lyrical genius – she looks like she could pass for an adult already.

When did my daughter become so grown up?

She looks at me, hope in her eyes.

I’m about to speak but I hear Iain coming down the stairs. He comes into the room dressed in his usual work uniform.

‘How are my favourite girls?’ He comes over to me and, as he shoves dirty clothes into the washing machine, gives me a squeeze and plants a kiss on my cheek.

I immediately look to our daughter.

Iain frowns. ‘Have I just interrupted something?’

‘Mum says I can’t have a car for my birthday.’

I raise my eyebrows at him and he winces as he heads towards the coffee machine. ‘Elle, I didn’t promise anything,’ he says as he grabs a mug.

Elle’s face scrunches up. ‘Yeah, you did.’

He looks at me. ‘I really didn’t.’

‘Don’t lie,’ Elle says.

‘I said we would consider it.’

He says this to me, because apparently I need convincing. I hold my hands up. ‘You shouldn’t say anything without discussing it with me first.’

He looks sheepish.

‘Typical,’ Elle says under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear it. She busies herself with her iPad.

Iain watches my face and mouths a sorry. I face the sink. He is beside me again.

‘I didn’t think,’ he says in my ear and slips his arms around my waist.

‘You don’t think,’ I say. ‘That’s the problem.’

He frowns, eases his grip around me. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’

He stares at me until I look at him. He gives a shake of his head. ‘Not in front of her . . .’ he says and goes to the television on the other worktop and flicks it on.

The silence is punctuated with the sound of a commercial and Iain sips his coffee as he flicks through the channels.

‘What’s happened now?’

I don’t bother to turn my head to see what he’s talking about

It’s then that I hear the sound of the twenty-four-hour news programme.

‘I think they’ve found them.’

I hear the concern in his voice and now I do turn to pay attention to the TV screen, feeling as if my blood has turned to ice in my veins at what I see.

Live footage of an isolated wasteland fills the screen.

It’s early May.

Usually you’d see signs that spring is arriving, but not here. What little grass there is dotted around has grown in straggly brown tufts.

The old crumbling brickwork of an outbuilding lies off in the distance where there is a white incident tent erected. Figures – I can’t tell if they are male or female – are walking into the tent in identical white suits.

A reporter can be heard describing the scene before we see her, standing behind a police cordon, the tape vibrating against the wind sweeping in over the fields.

I hear the reporter’s words, but only snippets linger on in my head after she has spoken them.

Crude grave . . . pit . . . four bodies . . . female . . . decomposing . . . exposed to the elements . . .

My gaze drops to yesterday’s newspaper on the countertop, its edges curled. I stare at the headline.

Still Missing.

I touch the paper, turn it to face me. I look at their photographs, now filled with a deep sorrow.

I scan the headline again and the faces of each teen staring back at me, all smiles. So young.

My gaze lingers on the first girl who had gone missing, Caroline, aged just seventeen. She has been missing four weeks . . . and now, inside, my heart is aching. I know her mother, Ruth. I’d worked with her for years and we’d grown to be friends. When Caroline had first gone missing, we’d assumed she was fighting to be independent. Ruth and I had had many talks about how giving her space would lead her back to her mother when she was ready.

I think of all the words of comfort I’ve given her and feel like a fraud.

‘It’s going to take a while to ID them,’ Iain says. I look at him and his eyes meet mine. He shrugs. ‘Well, they say the soft parts are always the first to go.’

‘Eww,’ Elle says.

He must know what I’m thinking and immediately looks regretful.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Poor Ruth and Mike.’

I struggle to find any words. In this moment, all I can do is helplessly stare at the TV just as the reporter says unconfirmed reports suggest the police have every reason to believe these are the bodies of the missing girls.

Like we needed to hear that. I already knew. Things like this just don’t happen around here.

I think of Elle as a sharp twinge pulls at my insides. I feel the pain as if it were a personal loss to me. ‘God help their poor families,’ I say, snapping back into life.

Elle reaches for her drink. ‘This is yesterday’s news,’ she says between sips.

We both look at her. She shrugs.

‘Was on the internet late last night. It was a rumour going around Facebook.’

‘Elle,’ I say, ‘why didn’t you mention this?’

She shrugs again. ‘It was just a rumour then. And what’s that you’re always telling me? Don’t believe everything you see on social media?’

I look at her and remind myself that she’s soon to be seventeen, like Caroline. Three other girls will never see that birthday. I fight back tears as my mind takes me back to the day of the crash.

‘I should call Ruth.’

‘Is that such a good idea right now?’ Iain says.

‘She’s a friend and we know Caroline.’

Knew. Knew Caroline, I say to myself, and immediately feel wrong for thinking it.

‘Ruth and Mike are probably being inundated with calls and visits from the police and immediate family, Charlotte. They’ll be overwhelmed.’

‘All the more reason I should be there for her. For them both, her and Mike.’

Iain shakes his head. ‘I feel just as sad for them, as much as you do, but you’re not in their immediate circle of friends, Char.’ He looks at me with a degree of sympathy, but there’s something else there as well and I know he doesn’t want me to get too involved.

He’s right, I guess, but it feels wrong not to do anything.

I’ve helped Ruth on and off, just going out and driving around, searching. In the beginning, I helped stick up missing posters and went out walking with a group of Ruth and Mike’s friends, just to do something, to feel like there was still a chance Caroline would come back at any moment.

Then the second girl had gone missing. We didn’t know her or her family personally but we had seen them around the area.

It feels wrong not to try and salvage something positive out of this. Ruth couldn’t protect her daughter but I know I’ll do anything to protect mine.

I glance at Elle. Her eyes are glued to her iPad screen.

‘You’re not going to that party Friday,’ I say as I turn back to the sink.

Elle is naturally cross. ‘What?’ She looks at Iain. ‘Why?’ she bleats.

I turn, nod at the TV. ‘There’s someone out there killing girls your age, Elle.’ She rolls her eyes but I don’t care. ‘I need to know you’re safe and under my roof.’

‘Mum!’ Her brow is furrowed. ‘I’ll be, like, the only one not going.’

‘Kenzie isn’t going,’ I say.

Kenzie is Elle’s best friend and a bad influence on her – not that Iain agrees with me on that front.

Elle makes a face to silently ask me how I know that.

‘I saw her mother yesterday. She feels the same as me about these house parties.’

‘Her brother will be there.’

I scoff. ‘Oh, that’s a real comfort.’

Elle turns to her father then. ‘He’s eighteen, Dad, an adult.’

‘Barely,’ I say as Iain looks at me. If he doesn’t back me on this, I’ll bloody lose it. I’m tired of looking like the bad guy all the time. Lately I feel like this every day. It doesn’t help that Elle is now making puppy-dog eyes at me. She unfolds her arms and is now putting them around me.

‘I know you worry, Mum.’

Little bleeder. I love her to death, but she sure knows how to play me.

‘If I get a ride home with Jade’s mum, can I go?’

I frown, avoid her eyes. Still nothing from Iain.

‘Pleeeease, Mum?’

I look to Iain for help. I want him to say no and save me the moody silent treatment I’ll get for the rest of the weekend from Elle if I stand firm.

‘No,’ I say as I flick the television off. I can’t bear to see or hear any more right now. I feel Elle’s eyes on me just before she storms out of the room.

Iain sighs as he comes towards me. I let him hug me from behind as I stare out of the window. I can’t bring myself to look at him in case I break down.

‘Arguing with Elle isn’t going to help you,’ he says, resting his chin on my shoulder. ‘I know it’s hard with what’s going on around the villages, but we have to try and carry on.’

I suck in a deep breath. ‘I didn’t move out to the village to feel afraid,’ I say.

‘You’re saying you don’t feel safe here?’

‘It’s not about me feeling safe, Iain,’ I say, my hand now resting on his arm around my middle. ‘It’s always been about what’s best for Elle.’

I think back to the faces in the newspaper. The pixilated smiles of those teens. My heart could break for their parents.

I think of my own mother. I think of how my family was broken apart by a loss that I have never fully understood. All I know is how I will never take my eyes away from Elle, not like I used to.