At first, he was relieved to see that the discovery of Hayden’s body had made only a small splash on the local news. He’d been careful to clean away all DNA evidence, and he was sure he’d been alone on the moor. No one had seen him.
Late on Monday afternoon, he was driving down the motorway toward Exeter with the radio on and the windows down, when he heard on the news that the police had linked the death of Hayden with four other bodies that had previously been unidentified. David Lamb and Gabe Kemp were mentioned. He swerved the car, narrowly avoiding a large lorry, and then he pulled off the road into a lay-by.
He sat for a few minutes, sweating, with the engine ticking over in the heat. The news finished, and a song started to play. He switched off the radio and looked on his phone. The story was now on the main BBC News website, and it said that the police believed the deaths of these young men were linked to the Joanna Duncan missing-journalist case from 2002 and that they would be reopening her case. There was a recap of all the details and a hotline number for anyone who wanted to report information to the police.
“Hotline number. Fuck,” he said out loud.
Tom had feared that this could happen. That one day the police would make the link. He took some deep breaths. The bodies of those young men may have been linked, but he was certain that there was no DNA evidence to trace their demise back to him . . .
And Joanna Duncan.
Joanna’s body was tucked away nicely, and he was certain she would never be found. However, the police needed a suspect for their investigations, someone that they could go big and wide with and blame.
A lorry went roaring past, shaking the sides of his car. Tom turned the rearview mirror to face him and stared at his reflection.
“You need to stay calm. Don’t lose your shit,” he said to his reflection in the mirror. He sounded weak and pathetic. “Peter Sutcliffe . . . They only caught the Yorkshire Ripper by a fluke, when the police stopped him for a traffic violation. Ted Bundy, the same. The police have fuck all. They know nothing. And anyway . . . you’re not like them, you’re not . . . like them.”
He reached up and stroked his face, feeling the contours of his nose and mouth, his lips, and tracing the line of his forehead as it rose to his hairline.
“You’re the innocent one. You should know that . . . Those young men, they might look like something on the outside, but they have problems, serious mental problems. They used their looks to manipulate and hurt other people. You stopped them from hurting others. Like you were hurt. But you survived the bullies, and you have a purpose.”
Tom closed his eyes against the blazing sun, and for a moment, he was thirteen and back in that hospital bed again. The attack in the school showers had left him with a broken jaw, a fractured eye socket, and broken ribs. He’d been trampled on so viciously that he had internal bleeding on his kidney, which meant the bag connected to the catheter at the end of his bed had filled up with pink urine for two weeks.
Three of the boys involved were expelled from school, but none of the other boys there that day had given evidence to support him. They had all joined together and said they saw nothing. Even the teacher, Mr. Pike, told the police that he’d found Tom afterward, lying in the showers, bleeding.
He’d made a full recovery, but never having the answer to the question why had driven his anger and fear ever since. He’d also had bad experiences in his early twenties. The men he’d slept with, or tried to sleep with, had been cruel, and he’d been used, abused, and beaten up. It was only by paying for sex that he was able to find acceptance. If you were paying, they didn’t have the right to complain. And then he decided to be someone different. He decided he needed to be the one in control. That was when Tom’s paying for sex took on a darker tone.
Movement outside the car window brought him back to the present. There was now a large lorry pulled up on the hard shoulder behind, and cars were whipping past. He looked down and saw that he was hitting the steering wheel over and over with the palm of his hand. The man outside the car was short and portly, with sweat glistening off the top of his bald head. Tom stopped and had to catch his breath.
“Are you okay there, mate?” asked the man. He looked concerned—a little frightened, even.
Tom wound up his window and started the engine. He pulled out of the lay-by with a squeal of rubber and glanced back as the bewildered-looking man receded in the mirror, hoping he wouldn’t remember his face.
36
Sarah rang Tristan’s phone as he was driving along Ashdean seafront.