The first murder had been twenty-five years ago. I’d been thirty-two and a newly qualified detective sergeant. It had been one of the biggest and most frustrating murder cases I’d ever worked on. He’d killed seven women – that we know of – over an eight-year period without being caught, and then just seemed to vanish into thin air.
‘Could it really be him?’ Saunders continues. ‘After all this time?’
We’ve been through this. I know Saunders is talking for the sake of it. If there is a silence Saunders will fill it. Although, like I said, this evening I’m grateful for the distraction. Nothing has made me feel more like a failure than my inability to solve this case. Guilt for all the women who have died at the hands of that bastard still keeps me awake at night.
Saunders touches the tips of his dark spiky hair, which looks stiff with gel. He stares perplexedly towards the sea as though that holds the answers.
He’s about to open his mouth again when I interrupt: ‘If I’m honest I’d hoped he’d died. But this means he could have been in prison. We need to look at anyone who has been released lately. Someone who was incarcerated sixteen or seventeen years ago. After his last victim.’
‘Belinda Aberdale,’ he recites solemnly, as if I’m not going to know even though I told him about it. He’d still have been a student back in 2005. The names of the seven victims have been etched into my memory. I can still recall Belinda’s freckled face as though it was yesterday. Her dark hair, her blue eyes, her slightly crooked smile. She’d been forty-two. A wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter. ‘You don’t think it could be a copy-cat killing, do you?’
I’d wondered this myself while we were upstairs and Celia was showing us the etching. It’s a crude drawing, intricate but hurried, bloody. Just like the others had been. It looks like the head of an insect – it was my boss at the time, DCI Charles Bentley-Gordon, who dubbed it a praying mantis and it stuck long after he’d left the force.
‘We’ve never released the detail about the insect markings, though,’ I say. I stub my cigarette out on the wall and take another swig of coffee. ‘That information was never released to the public or the press.’ I sigh. ‘No, I think this is the same killer. It has to be.’ I jump down, crunching over the shingle beach, and head back towards the house where Celia is finishing up. Saunders follows me.
‘Stay here,’ I instruct him, when we’ve reached the house. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
He nods and begins talking to the two officers guarding the scene.
As I’m walking up the stairs Celia is coming out of the bedsit, a grave expression on her face. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she says, when she sees me. ‘Can you come with me? I need to show you something I think is important.’
7
Emilia is up in her attic office on Tuesday morning. Hannah is calling her at 10 a.m. and she can’t relax until she’s spoken to her. She’s still worried about what her editor might say about her latest book.
She tries to keep herself busy, half-heartedly picking up the stack of papers piled on her keyboard, which includes the birthday cards from six weeks ago, which she likes to keep, and stuffs it into a box under her desk. She really should tidy up in here. The rest of the house is pristine but her office is where she can be her true messy self. Elliot and the kids keep out of it, thank God. Once, when Elliot spotted the mess from the landing he joked that it looked like they’d been burgled. ‘I don’t understand how you can work in such a pigsty,’ he’d said then, and quite often since. Maybe it’s a throwback to all the times she’d written in her tiny flat surrounded by Jasmine’s paraphernalia before she and Elliot moved in together, but in a lot of ways she finds the mess comforting.
She stands in the middle of the room and surveys it now: her desk overflowing with books, papers, and a coffee cup that has started to grow mould in the bottom, the tripod and ring-light shoved into the corner, the exercise bike she’d bought in lockdown but has hardly ever used, except to hang clothes meant for the charity shop over the seat. On the shelf above the desk sits the box with the decapitated seagull inside. She should chuck it away and doesn’t understand why she’s kept it. She’d been shaken after receiving the parcel on Sunday evening. She hadn’t wanted to mention it at dinner in front of the kids, but when Jasmine and Wilfie had scarpered after they’d wolfed their food, Ottilie had turned to her and said, ‘What’s wrong, Mils? You’ve been distracted all evening.’ Then she’d told them about the strange ‘gift’。
‘So it was just left on the porch?’ Ottilie had frowned. ‘Inside the door?’
When she’d nodded, Trevor had launched into another lecture about safety measures and not letting anyone have access to the porch. Ottilie quaffed more wine, her head to the side as though she was watching a play.
‘I bet it’s an obsessed fan of the series,’ Ottilie said, with a wave of her hand, nearly knocking over a wine glass. She always became more animated after she’d had a few. ‘Maybe the seagull broke in the post.’
‘It just unnerves me that they know where I live,’ Emilia said, sitting back in her chair.
‘I expect it’s easy to find on Companies House.’
‘Not my married name, though. I dunno. The use of my married name makes it feel personal somehow.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it, sweetheart,’ Elliot said, pouring himself another glass. ‘Is it because of what happened on Friday?’
And then, of course, Trevor and Ottilie had wanted to know what had happened on Friday, so Emilia had had to explain about the hoax, and how it was similar to a scene from her debut novel.
Trevor had patted her hand reassuringly. ‘It’s just a coincidence, that’s all. There’s no way someone could orchestrate a hoax at the exact time you’re riding a bus.’ He had shaken his head, signalling it was the end of the matter. This man, who only moments before had been chastising her about an unlocked front door. But he was like that, was Trevor. She’d always found him a bit contradictory and hadn’t really liked him when she was first introduced to him ten years ago. She’d found him a bit brash, slightly dominant of May, who ran around after him as if he was a king and she a mere subject. Elliot had laughed when she’d told him so. ‘My mum loves it,’ he had said. ‘It makes her feel useful now that I no longer live at home, and they adore each other.’
Elliot was their only child and May had once told her she’d longed for more but kept having miscarriages, until the emotional toll became too much and they gave up. May had died suddenly from an aneurysm at the age of fifty-six, a year after seeing her only son get married and only a few months after holding her first grandchild in her arms. ‘I never thought he’d settle down, my lovely,’ she’d said, hugging Emilia on their wedding day. ‘He’s had serious girlfriends but he always insisted he wasn’t the marrying kind. And then he met you. You’ve changed him.’
It was only after May’s death that Emilia realized the depth of love Trevor had felt for his wife. He was lost without her and her death diminished him. He spiralled into a depression that lasted nearly a year. Emilia and Elliot had encouraged him to sell the family home in Devon and move nearer to them. It took some convincing but eventually Trevor bought a flat in Isleworth and found a job as a security guard in Brentford. He threw himself into being a good grandfather to Jasmine and Wilfie and, over the years, Emilia had grown very fond of him. It was clear how much he adored his son and grandkids – which was more than she could say for her own parents, whom she saw only occasionally even though they lived just an hour or so away in Guildford. She often wished she had the same bond with her parents as Elliot had had with his.