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“This is what I don’t get,” he says. “Everything about this—the kidnap, keeping Pippa here, carefully burying the bodies at the wasteland—it points to an organized offender, right?”
“If you subscribe to that psychology, yes. Someone smart, competent, holding down a normal job. Staging crime scenes. Maybe even taking trophies.”
“But the attack in the park?” Adam continues. “That’s more disorganized. Spontaneous. A loss of control.”
Maggie sighs and he turns to face her. She’s staring up at the wooden beam, at the hooks. Where he knows Cole’s first victims had been tied up, held captive for months.
“Perhaps they’re losing their grip,” she says softly. “It must take a huge toll on someone’s psyche, even one as fucked up as this. It’s inhuman.” She looks at him and her eyes are pained above her mask. “My guess is it won’t be long before he loses it altogether. The only worry is who he takes down in the process.” She pauses. “Don’t let it be you, Adam.”
“He won’t—”
“I can see it already. Look at your face. How much sleep have you had in the past few days? Two, maybe three hours. It’s not healthy.”
“None of this is healthy, Mags. Look at it.” He gestures angrily around the room. At the blood, the chair. The floor where the broken bodies once lay. “None of it,” he repeats, quieter.
He walks away from Mags, out of the outbuilding. But before he does, he pauses in the doorway. The marks that Romilly mentioned are still here. Lines carved into the wood, one above another. Adam runs his gloved finger over them—XX, XIX, XVIII—imagining the monster that made them. Knife in hand, creating the notches, knowing he’d just buried another. How had he felt? Adam wonders. Triumphant, satisfied? Had there been any remorse at all?
The number for the final girl, Grace Summers, number seventeen, is missing. She’d been found dead in the outhouse; he hadn’t had time to bury her. In the rush, he’d forgotten to mark his kill.
Disgust rises in Adam’s throat, and he turns away quickly from the horrific prison Cole created. He needs to think. They still have time.
He walks around to the front of the house, ignoring the white vans starting to arrive, the teams of people setting up the cordon. They know what they’re doing—another crime scene to preserve. They don’t need him.
He scuffs his feet in the gravel. The driveway is covered with weeds; ivy trails up the side of the house; tiles are missing from the roof.
It’s smaller than Adam expected. He knows from reports it was only a three bed, but somehow it had grown in his mind: an innocent house with a horrible secret in its grounds.
The place where Romilly grew up.
* * *
The front door is open, and Adam walks through. Adam has told the crime scene officers to focus on the garden and the outhouse, but a few are inside, not being able to resist having a look around—the legend, the horrific reputation preceding it. The hallway is dark; it smells of mold and mildew, and wallpaper peels slowly downward to the stained wooden floorboards, which warp and creak in the damp. The hallway opens out into a kitchen. Old style, untouched since Cole’s arrest in November 1995. Ownership shifted to the bank: they’d left it to rot. Adam had heard true crime buffs had tried to buy it on multiple occasions, but they’d always been declined.
“I hope they bulldoze it to the ground,” Romilly had said, but they never had.
He leans down and opens a cupboard door with a gloved hand. A few belongings remain: pots and pans, the contents of a normal kitchen. It seems strange, the dullness at odds with the aberration that went on a few hundred meters away. He looks around, imagining a young Romilly, eating her breakfast, sitting at this table. The fridge is decorated with magnets: life-affirming misquotes and sunsets on each one: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass: it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” “We are all broken—that’s how the light gets in.” And an eerie, prescient “Silence is Golden.”
Adam frowns at the banality.
He leaves the kitchen, doubling back into the hallway, heading up the stairs. As the reports described, there are three bedrooms and a bathroom, and he stops at the doorway to the one on the far side.
There are faded marks on the door. Letters in the paint, where something was once stuck. ROM, they say. He pushes the door open.
The room is sparse, belongings removed. The bed is stripped back to the mattress. Desk, bedside table, wardrobe. All empty. Once the house became a crime scene, anything personal had been seized. Whatever had been required as exhibits were catalogued for the trial, the rest taken to a huge aircraft hangar. Adam remembers Romilly telling him about going there. The surreal feeling, the sentiment it stirred. The conflict in her head, knowing what her father had done. The embarrassment and intrusion: her most private belongings out on display. She’d been given an hour to take what she wanted; she’d walked away empty-handed.
Adam wonders now where everything had gone after that. All of Romilly’s life before the age of eleven: erased.
His phone rings in his pocket, and he pulls it out, looking at the number. It’s Marsh, no doubt wanting to know an update, keen to get Adam back to the station. But he ignores it, needing the time to think.
He sits down slowly on the denuded bed. Rests his hands on his knees. Stills his breathing. So she was here. Pippa was here. It’s not easy to move a person, even a semiconscious one. He would have needed a car, a van. This VW Transporter they still haven’t tracked down.
And the debris from the equipment in the outbuilding, where was it coming from? A hospital? A doctor’s surgery? Does the perp have some sort of medical background?
This must join up. With each piece of information, they are narrowing down the suspect pool: a Venn diagram of potential medical knowledge, mental instability, VW ownership. They need analysts to look at the data, detectives to review CCTV. They will find this man: the intersect.
Adam hears a shout outside, and he stands up, looking out the window. SOCOs are moving toward the back of the garden, toward the outhouse. He stares at it; he hadn’t realized it was so close and so clearly seen out of Romilly’s bedroom window. How many times had she looked out in the same way he was doing now, unaware of what was going on at the end of her own garden?
Voices call out again, and he hears DC Quinn shout up the stairs.
