“It’s my wife’s.”
“Your wife’s? Did you know she’d be here?”
“No, of course not. Do you think I want my wife to meet someone I used to cheat on her with? It’s late, we have to be on-air in a few hours. I don’t know what she’s doing here, I thought she’d be in London, but I’m sure she will have gone to bed already. We have two young children, remember? You won’t even see her.”
“But why would she be here?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been talking a lot about her coming down to sort through some of her parents’ things, so we can sell this dump. Maybe with Blackdown being all over the news the last couple of days, she finally decided to do it.”
“This feels a little awkward.”
“It’s really late. She doesn’t know what happened between us. Like I said, she’s probably gone up to bed already. I don’t see any lights on, do you?”
He reaches to open the car door but I still don’t move. I can’t. It feels like I’m in danger.
“I’m sorry, Richard. I know it was years ago, ancient history and all that, but I still feel really uncomfortable about the idea of meeting your wife.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve already met.”
I have one more left to go.
Finding a way to get her here, to this old house in the woods, posed a tricky challenge at first, but in the end all it took was a phone call. The solutions to difficult problems are often surprisingly simple.
I admit I’m tired now. But like my mother used to say, if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it properly. I plan to finish the job, because they all deserve to die.
Rachel Hopkins used sex to get what she wanted. When that wasn’t enough, she used other people. It started with her grooming school friends, taking semi-naked pictures of them, and selling the results to men at the local pub. The photos she sold never showed any faces. Rachel saved those for a sideline in blackmail. She earned good money and a bad reputation from both ventures, and it led to other things. When the men got bored of one girl, so did she, and moved her attention and affection to another.
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.