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Chapter 48
Friday 2nd April
‘One coffee, dash of milk.’
I put the mug down in front of DI Mike Stanley, and he nods a thank you. I perch on the stool opposite his at the breakfast bar and take a sip of my own coffee. It’s black and strong and much-needed; I feel exhausted, mentally and physically, my body aching, my head fuzzy from way too few hours’ sleep over the past two days.
It all still feels a little surreal, like a nightmare I haven’t quite been able to wake up from. The minutes after Pete – Pete, my hero, my love, maybe even my future now, if I’m very, very lucky – crept up behind Steph and attacked her, undoubtedly saving my life, are a blur. The front door crashing open, the sound of yells and pounding footsteps on the stairs, Steph moaning on the landing carpet, Pete’s legs giving way, me sobbing and trying to support his weight before sliding to the floor with him. And Jess, poor Jess, still immobile on the bed behind us.
She died; Jess died. They said it would have been almost instantaneous, that she was unlikely to have suffered, such was the intensity of the blow. Blows very similar, it’s now emerged, to those which killed Lisa and Jane and David. I’m still trying to come to terms with that; from being someone I wasn’t sure I even liked a few months ago, Jess had become a big part of my life, a reassuring presence, and I feel a deep, aching sadness that her life ended like it did, a sense of intense loss which has surprised me.
Pete’s OK, or he will be. He’s in hospital, recovering from the huge dose of barbiturates that Steph laced his cheese with. It was lucky, his doctor said, that he hadn’t washed it down with too much of the wine we opened but then didn’t feel like drinking – the combination of alcohol and drugs may well have been fatal, but as it is it’s thought he’ll make a full recovery.
I came back home this morning. Pete’s bedroom is now a murder scene, of course, and I spent last night in a hotel, while police processed it. It didn’t take long – it was pretty clear what had happened, after all. They’re sending specialist cleaners in later today, and I can’t bring myself to even glance into the room, not yet. But this morning they said I can move back home, if I want to, and so I’m here, for now at least.
There are so many unanswered questions right now: Steph, her head injury inflicted by Pete not a serious one as it turned out, only a glancing blow which stunned her for a minute or so but is unlikely to have caused any serious damage, has only just started being questioned. But she is, according to DI Stanley, so far being surprisingly open about what she’s done.
‘She’s admitted everything. She said she really thought she’d get away with it,’ he told me on the phone when he rang first thing this morning to ask if he could come round for a chat. ‘But now that she’s been arrested, she says she might as well tell us exactly how she did it. I think she’s rather enjoying it, from all accounts. She fooled everyone, for such a long time. It seems to be bringing her some kind of sick pleasure. She enjoyed watching us all running round in circles and going down rabbit holes that led us in completely the wrong direction. That so-called crime connection between the victims’ parents, for example. She knew we’d got that wrong, but she loved how much time we wasted on it.’
Now, he’s telling me about the drugs she poisoned Pete with.
‘They were her mother’s; she’s in a care home down in Cirencester, and she’s an insomniac apparently, so they give her pretty heavy-duty sleeping pills. Wow, Steph really hates her mother, doesn’t she, by the way? Can’t say I blame her really, but anyway, she always timed her visits for when they were doling out the evening drugs, and persuaded the staff to let her help her mother take them. I mean, it wasn’t hard – she’s a senior cop, isn’t she? They knew that, so they trusted her. Of course, she just stuck the pills in her bag, until she had a nice little collection, then crushed them and mashed them into your friend’s cheese. It’s such a strong one she figured the smell and taste would mask the drugs, and it obviously worked.’
I shake my head, my heart twisting as I think about how close I came to losing Pete.
‘She’s sick. Evil,’ I whisper.
‘Evil, and clever,’ he says. ‘It’s like it was her own little personal challenge: warning four different police forces in advance, and you, well, that was to be her moment of glory. Killing a woman at the centre of a police ring of steel, and still believing she’d get away with it. If it hadn’t been for Mr Chong, she probably would have. We’d all have believed that Jess was the killer, and that Steph was the hero who tried to save your life.’
He pauses, rubbing a hand across his eyes.
‘Poor Jess,’ he mutters.
‘I’m going to miss her,’ I say quietly.
‘Me too,’ he replies.
And then he tells me everything else they’ve learned so far. How Steph had taken a chance when she sent me the diary, hoping I’d read it and report it to the police as soon as I received it, and getting nervous when it took so long. She’d transferred to Gloucestershire two months earlier, knowing that when the serial killer case came in, her track record would ensure she’d be assigned to it.
‘She says that if you’d never read the diary, she’d have found another way to do it all. But she was pretty ecstatic when you did,’ he says. ‘And she seemed very pleased with herself for picking April Fool’s Day for your murder. She laughed herself silly over that one. She’s been laughing a lot, actually. It’s creepy. She said she really enjoyed that interview with your two male colleagues too, the ones who went to Oxford for New Year? The interview she took me along to. She loved how much time that line of enquiry wasted. Well, they all did, didn’t they?’
He tells me how she used the PNC – the Police National Computer – to help plan the murders and access information.
‘It’s illegal, of course, to use it the way she did. Every use of the PNC is logged and there are daily audits, but there’s also PNC data on other databases which aren’t subject to the same audits. Misuse is a serious disciplinary matter, and if ithadbeen picked up, we might have been onto her sooner, but we’ve been understaffed in a lot of areas recently, and so she got lucky that no red flags were raised.’
He sighs and shakes his head.
‘She was able to access vehicle and driver files, all sorts of stuff. It was easy for her to find home addresses, and check the location of CCTV cameras and that kind of thing too, of course. And then she just made sure her shifts worked around the murders. It was why she chose victims who all lived in locations within ninety minutes’ drive or so from here. Easy to get back and appear as normal in the office the next day.’
‘She said to me that she preferred to kill outside. That was a bit weird,’ I say. My throat sounds raspy and dry, and I take another sip of my drink.
He nods.
‘Yes, in retrospect she was always going on about needing fresh air and complaining about how overheated the station is. But to be fair, we all moan about it. Itisalways too hot. But it made her stir crazy. She says now that she was locked in a cupboard a lot as a child, for the slightest misdemeanour. It made her claustrophobic and panicky, and ever since she hasn’t been able to think straight in stuffy rooms. So, yes, she killed them all outdoors, so she’d be less likely to make a mistake. She talked her way into Jane’s house with her police badge, and told her she needed to show her something out in the garden. She just sneaked up on the other two in the dark. She parked her car in a CCTV blind spot, hid a heavy hammer under her jacket and ran to the murder locations, and then ran back to her car again afterwards. Simple, really. And she’s so forensically aware that she obviously made sure she didn’t leave any usable evidence behind, although she admitted she did get a bit twitchy each time, waiting for the lab report. She didn’t bring a weapon here to kill you because she’d already earmarked a few things she could use here in the house when she came round to brief you ahead of Thursday.’
As he carries on telling me what Steph’s revealed, I realise that she, of course, did all the things she told me Jess had done. Sending the spyware to my computer in an email, knowing it would be found and removed but loving how frightened it made me feel. Sending me that letter in the post, to stop me thinking about fleeing abroad.
‘She said that if it had all worked, if she’d been able to pin it on Jess like she’d planned, the fact that Jess was so quiet, so withdrawn a lot of the time, would have helped. A lot of people think Jess is –was– a bit odd, you know? But she and I were friends. She was actually just really, really shy. She’s struggled with confidence her whole life, and she found meeting new people extremely difficult. It’s one of the reasons she became a family liaison officer. She knew she’d have to get close to lots of different people and she thought it might help her. And she was getting there, too. She was terrified of you when she first met you, but she was genuinely fond of you by the end.’
