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Seeing Jessica Ambrose up close has been interesting. She’s seen photos, sure, but Cara’s fascinated now she’s there in person. The woman Griffin’s been risking his career to hide in his apartment.
And she looks a mess. She’s not wearing any makeup, her hair is barely brushed, tied up in a loose ponytail. She’s wearing badly fitting clothes, including a sweater Cara realizes was Mia’s. Seeing it makes Cara jolt. Griffin’s worship of his wife was all-encompassing, and Cara realizes how much Griffin must care about Jess. Dr. Sharma too. And she wonders why.
Jessica Ambrose doesn’t seem particularly distinctive. She’s pretty, yes, but not astonishingly so. She doesn’t smile. She’s grumpy rather than charming.
But then Jess stands up. Cara’s musing will have to wait. The taxi has arrived.
They’re on the move.
CHAPTER
69
RELEASED UNDER INVESTIGATION. Jess doesn’t know what that means, except she’s glad she doesn’t have to spend any longer in that cell. She’s out and in a taxi, heading for the hospital.
She arrives and uses Griffin’s card to pay. She’s been here a few times with Nav, so she knows where she’s going. She’s guessed his locker is in the men’s changing room, and she heads toward it.
She knows Griffin is somewhere in this hospital, and she’s desperate to see him. She needs to be with him; she feels a pull that she hasn’t felt with someone for some time. With her husband, the overwhelming feeling was disappointment. That her very existence was letting him down. But Griffin takes her as she is. There’s no attempt to fix her.
But she can’t see him now. Finding this memory stick and the photos are more important. This is the only evidence that Nav was blackmailed. She’ll give it to the police, and they’ll know.
She reaches the men’s changing room and, glancing around, pushes the door open tentatively. To her relief, the room is empty, and she heads to Nav’s locker. She knows him well and enters his old room number into the combination on the padlock, clicking it open.
Inside she finds his laptop bag and she pulls it out, laying it down on one of the benches and scrabbling in the pockets. There are two memory sticks inside. One with the initials “NS” scrawled on in pen, the other black and bare.
And then the photographs. A bundle of five in a plain white envelope. Old fashioned, white frames around the plastic, the images blurred and hazy. But Jess is in no doubt what they are. Women: eyes wide, mouths screaming, legs apart. Bloody fingers in front of their faces, trying redundantly to protect themselves.
Her hand goes to her mouth. It’s no wonder Nav felt he had no choice but to inject Griffin. With the knowledge of who this man had already killed, seeing this as evidence of what he could do. To her.
She feels cold horror trickling down her back, knowing the risk of being here. But Jess has to see it for herself first. She could have just told DCI Elliott as soon as she left the interview room, but she feels the complete humiliation of being filmed with this guy. She wants to watch it, to see what Nav was seeing. To confirm for herself what a shitty person she is.
She gathers it all up and leaves the changing room, hurrying down the corridor, looking for an empty space, anywhere where she won’t be disturbed.
At last she sees a cleaner’s cupboard and opens the door, turning the light on. She closes it behind her, sitting on the floor among the mops and buckets, resting the laptop on her knees. She turns it on, logs in as a guest user, and impatiently waits for it to boot up.
The home screen eventually loads, and she puts the black memory stick in. The computer hums, then the symbol for the drive appears on the desktop. She clicks on it, nerves making her hands shake. There’s one file.
The video is grainy and black and white, but Jess can clearly make out the toilet she remembers from a week ago. The camera position is up high: it shows the sink and the door. There’s no one in the room.
The door opens and Jess watches as she comes into the bathroom. The man follows in behind her and starts kissing the back of her neck, and she turns and they start kissing properly. Jess feels her face go red, her back sweaty. How could she have done such a thing? At the time she knew it was wrong, she knew it was reckless, but it felt in keeping with her damaged mind, her broken shell of a body. But now, watching it here? It looks awful. This random guy fucking her is horrible, she’s ugly, a terrible excuse for a person. She feels as though she’s suffocating. She starts crying, knowing that less than twenty-four hours after this, her husband was killed.
She turns away from the video. She can’t watch it anymore. But just before she does, something catches her eye. It jars. Even more so than the rotten act itself. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve and looks back. On the video she’s facing away, bent over the sink, her skirt around her waist, the man still behind her, so what was it?
She pauses the video, then winds it back a fraction. She presses “Play” again.
Then she sees it. She stops. In those few seconds she’s paralyzed, her breath halted in her lungs.
The man’s still there, still fucking her, but for one split second he looks up. He looks up right into the camera.
And his expression? Pure hatred.
CHAPTER
70
WHEN GRIFFIN WAKES, his whole back is in pain. For a moment he’s confused. He hears the beeps of the monitors, the sound of voices in the corridor, sees the blue curtain pulled around his bed.
Memories from just over a year ago force their way into his head. Waking up in the hospital, head pounding, barely able to open his swollen eyes, plaster casts encasing his arms. Not able to move as he was told Mia was dead.
