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She wonders whether she should just pack it in. Put everything in boxes and pass it across to the Metropolitan Police or the National Crime Agency to worry about.
Then she can go home. Have a bath. Watch the latest series of The Crown on Netflix.
Cara hears someone else come into the bathroom, closing the door to another cubicle. She realizes how ridiculous she’s being, sitting here, listening to someone else’s bodily functions.
This isn’t her. This defeat. This giving up.
This man has raped eight women, killed thirteen. He has chopped up eleven men and put them in his freezer. She mentally counts up the dead. It’s twenty-eight in total, not counting Taylor’s arson. She can barely believe the number, it seems so ridiculous.
She leaves the cubicle and washes her hands. She stands in front of the mirror. I’m damn well going to catch him, she resolves.
Even if it destroys my entire life in the process.
CHAPTER
55
GRIFFIN’S BACK, BUT he’s quiet. Jess asks if he wants something to eat but he just shakes his head, no. She assumes nothing new has happened.
But she’s going crazy locked up in here.
“Griffin?” she starts quietly. She sits down next to him at the table, where he’s staring mutely at his laptop. “Did you speak to your sister about my case?”
He nods. “Yes, but it’s not good news. They still want to arrest you.”
Jess feels her morale sink. “But you didn’t tell her where I was.”
“No.”
Jess wants to ask why not. But she doesn’t dare. She doesn’t want to question what Griffin is doing, make him doubt himself. He’s a cop, after all.
He’s still squinting at the screen, and she remembers her thought from the day before. Does he know?
“Is it on there?” she says. He looks up sharply. And with that one expression, he answers the question. He knows. “What does it say?” she makes herself ask.
“Not much.”
“It’s not what they made out,” Jess replies, the words falling away before she can stop them. She can’t look at him and stares at the piles of newspapers still littering the table. “It was an accident.”
She feels his eyes on her. She needs to tell him, now, before she changes her mind.
“He tried to stop me, with the … you know.” She gestures toward the bathroom and Griffin nods. “It was one of those old-style cut-throat razors that I’d bought for that purpose. It was night, Alice was asleep in bed, and I didn’t think I’d be disturbed. But Patrick tried to take it away from me and it slipped, gashing his hand badly. He started shouting, I was crying. The neighbors must have called the police.”
She barely remembered what happened next. She’d been hysterical, screaming in the road. The police officers restraining her: arms wrenched behind her back, a knee between her shoulder blades, her face crushed into the pavement.
“They took me somewhere. I don’t remember what they called it, but it was a mental hospital.”
“Rapid Assessment Unit,” Griffin says quietly.
“Yes, that.” She stops. She takes a deep breath in. She remembers arriving at the huge brick building, the shame and indignity of being strip and cavity searched by a woman, cold plastic gloves on her hands, unfeeling and rough as Jess sobbed in the glare of the overhead lights. Nobody listened, nobody cared. The prick of the injections, then her head: fuzzy and slow. The night in the bare room, on suicide watch, the lights on, unable to sleep, listening to the shouts and wails of the other patients echoing through the corridors. “Patrick tried to have me sectioned. To keep me in there. The police agreed. If it wasn’t for Nav speaking up for me, I don’t know what would have happened.”
They fall back into silence. Griffin’s stopped what he was doing on the laptop, his fingers hovering on the keys. She waits, fearing his judgment.
He clears his throat. That’ll be it now, she thinks. He’ll think I’m crazy for sure.
“And you stayed with him?” Griffin says, at last. “With Patrick? After that?”
“He loved me. He only wanted what was best for me.”
