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CHAPTER
31
HE HOLDS A knife in his hand, blade facing forward. It’s large and sharp. Slowly he carves a piece of flesh out of the apple and eats it. He relishes the thought that there’s traces of blood on the blade, that he might be consuming some remnant of his victims.
It’s cold down here. He’s strung a single light up in the corner of the room, but the bare bulb is dim, and the glow barely stretches to the bottom of the hole.
But he can see her eyes, staring up at him. Two white circles, red-rimmed, shining out of a dirty face.
Digging the pit in the basement had been hard and backbreaking, but he’d known it was necessary. It isn’t big—about eight feet deep—muddy, wet. It rained last night and the bottom filled up with about a foot of water. She’d begged him again, standing there in the mud. She’d said she was cold; she’d pleaded with him to let her go. Said she’d let him have sex with her, she’d do anything.
The thought made him angry. He would have her if he wanted to, not when she said it was okay. He’d fucked her already, when he’d first got her here. Hands tied, she’d struggled, pleaded, kicked, but her fight had only spurred him on, his punches landing square on her face, silencing her.
And the hopeful look after? She’d thought that was it. That he was going to let her go. That look soon changed when he’d dragged her down here, shoved her into the hole.
To shut her up he’d found a long plank of wood and hit her with it. Reaching down into the pit, he’d struck her, over and over again. She’d dodged him at first, but once he’d got a good blow to her head, she’d been dazed, cowered at the bottom in the mud, and he’d been able to really go at her hard.
He can see those bruises now, the scabs dirty, bleeding, and raw. He can hear the rain again, outside. The hole’s only going to get worse. He cuts another piece of the apple and puts it in his mouth.
The house is perfect. It had sat empty for years, claimed by the council after his father’s death and left to rot. Much like him, in that children’s home. Slowly the other houses were abandoned around it. Nobody wanted to live near the site of a double murder, let alone in the house where they took place. Nobody but him.
“It won’t be long now,” he says to her, and she looks at him again, eyes pleading. He throws the remainder of the apple into the pit and she goes after it, the dirty starving animal that she is, her chains rattling as she scrabbles in the water. He watches as she finds it in the mud and eats it, his lip curling in disgust.
He’ll be glad to get rid of this one. She’s no more than a piece of property to him right now, but the reality of facing this stinking, shit-filled, muddy pit every day isn’t something he’s enjoying. But maybe …
He looks at the electrical extension cord, its ends stripped bare. Perhaps he’ll enjoy this part.
He holds the insulation on the cord, just up from the bare wires, then reaches over and plugs the other end into the wall. He moves her chains closer, and she sees him—the cable in his hand—and the metal wrapped around her wrists and torso. She looks at the water around her feet.
“Please—” she starts, but the words are snatched out of her mouth as he applies the electrical current.
She screams, her body spasms and jerks, then falls into the water.
He smiles. Yes, maybe he will enjoy this part after all.
CHAPTER
32
Day 5
Friday
FRIDAY, AND EVERYTHING moves on. Everyone is back in the incident room, no hesitation. All the detectives know there’s a job that needs to be done.
Cara sits with Shenton, reviewing evidence collected from the Dahmer crime scene. Fingerprints and blood work still aren’t back, but the lab have forwarded photographs of the other exhibits collected from the apartment.
Toby slowly moves through the images on the screen, looking for anything worth following up. Cara sees Noah arrive for the day; he raises a hand in acknowledgment to her, slipping a Polo into his mouth at the same time as he starts a conversation with one of the detectives. Business as usual.
She turns her attention back to the screen. More rubbish from the trash: a wrapper from a Mars Bar, a scrap of green paper, a parking receipt.
She points. “Blow that up?”
Shenton zooms in. It’s small, barely worth mentioning, “Pay and Display” down one side, with a date and time and a set of six digits.
Toby points to the numbers. “Probably the location of the ticket machine,” he says. “What’s the chance of finding CCTV from that area?”
“Worth checking,” Cara replies.
