Thursday, January 29
Dan closed her bedroom door and sat down on the bed.
The shopping list of dates, the name of a dead woman marked against most of them, was hanging loosely between her fingers.
She looked at the piece of paper again, examined the dates, and lowered herself onto the bedroom floor, turning slightly so that she could reach under the bed and pull out the lockbox where she kept her notes from the Hamilton investigation.
It took her a moment to notice that her hands were shaking.
Memories of Hamilton were jostling to the front of her mind. The image of the bodies she’d found in his garage, the snapshot that regularly visited in her dreams, seemed now sharper with hindsight, her mind having filled in gaps and enhanced the detail, until all that she knew of their injuries and the horror of their deaths was in high definition, a perfectly presented study of torture and death.
Her breathing deepened and then quickened, and she placed a hand to her chest as she remembered fighting with him in his garage, remembered his eyes, his smile, the strength of his hands, the sound his blood made as it seeped across the floor and soaked into the dry concrete.
Dan looked away from the lockbox, tipped her head back against the bed, and blew out a long breath through rounded lips. She ran her hand through her hair, closed her eyes tight, and then pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to squeeze the memories away.
Then she remembered the parking lot, a year after Hamilton had been jailed for life. She remembered the men who had been waiting there for her, their ruthless attack. As she did, the scars on her back, long since faded but never fully gone, seemed to burn behind her, painful again, the agony fading only as she clenched her teeth and counted slowly to ten.
The hunt for Hamilton had been one of the longest and most uncertain manhunts in British criminal history, and Dan had ended it when she’d found three women stacked like firewood, their bodies broken and their skin mottled, underneath a tarpaulin in the corner of Christopher Hamilton’s garage.
But even though he was now locked away, there was so much that she didn’t know.
He’d been convicted of the murders of the three women, but he was widely considered to be the most prolific nonmedical serial killer in British history. The number of possible victims reckoned to have suffered and died by Hamilton’s hand over his relentless thirty-year massacre reached over one hundred, with some estimates at double that, but what confounded police, and Dan, to this day was the absence of his victims’ bodies.
Dan knew that everywhere Hamilton had ever lived, or spent any serious amount of time, had been searched, X-rayed, and excavated, but with no trace as to where the bodies of his other victims might be.
Theories raged that he carried his victims’ bodies on board naval warships and disposed of them at sea, though Dan knew that the risks associated with this undertaking would have been simply too high. Also, she knew that there were periods of years when he wouldn’t have had access to seagoing vessels, and so this theory was ruled out.
Dan had never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Where does a killer hide so many bodies so well that they are never found?
She’d assumed the location of these murdered women would be something Hamilton would take to hell with him, or that one day someone would discover a collection of bones while walking on a moor somewhere, and the mystery, or some part of it, would be solved, the families allowed some modicum of peace and closure.
But what Felicity had just told Dan changed everything.
That someone was now sending well-preserved body parts to the police, that the body parts were arriving on the date of the victim’s disappearance, that each of these victims was firmly believed to have been abducted and murdered by Christopher Hamilton—all of these things made Dan’s head spin.
Dan rested her head forward in her hands and opened her eyes, looking down now at the lockbox.
Could there have been a completely separate, unconnected killer all along? A second killer working in parallel with Hamilton?
The thought seemed unlikely.
Flashing light caught Dan’s eye, and she heard her phone vibrating. She ignored it at first, then fumbled around on the bed until she found it and looked to see who it was.
She paused and took a moment to settle herself.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, leaning back against the bed and letting her head rest against the mattress.
“I was just thinking about you and thought I’d check in,” he said. “Are you okay? You sound tired.”
Dan couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m okay, but I am a little tired. I can’t really talk at the moment, though; I’m in the middle of something.”
There was silence at the end of the line.
Her dad, who was so loud and gregarious in person, was crap on the phone. He hated using it, much preferred the face-to-face approach, and could never seem to settle into being himself on a call.
“I was thinking I might come down south for a few days next month,” he said. “I don’t have to stay with you, happy to get a hotel nearby, thought I might go for a beer with Roger and catch up with some old friends.”
Dan closed her eyes and sighed.
“You know you can stay here,” she said.
“Are you sure? I could fix some things for you while I’m there. That shower needs replacing, and the extractor wasn’t working properly, either. I could get those sorted out, and I bet the garden’s looking grim. I’d tidy that up for you, too.”
Dan noticed how much more easily he talked when it was about functional things, things that needed to be done, problems that needed to be solved.
“That’d be great, Dad. Thanks.”
He paused again.
“Okay, well, I’ll get Mim to text you the details and I’ll let you get on.”
“That’s great,” said Dan.
“Love you,” he said.
“I love you, too. Tell Mim I said her, too.”
She ended the call and dropped the phone on the floor beside her. She wondered how it must seem to someone like her dad, who loved her, there was no doubt about that, but who didn’t really know what was wrong with her.
He knew that the events on Tenacity had taken something from her, knew that something else had changed in her before that, but in the absence of someone to confront, an enemy to fight on her behalf, he simply didn’t know what to do.
Dan knew that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her, but he was completely unequipped to deal with what had happened, so much so that she could never tell him all of it, because the weight of it, the weight of knowing and not being able to fix what she’d been through, would destroy him, as surely as it was slowly destroying Dan.
She pulled the lockbox toward her and set the combination to open it. She steeled herself for the first picture, the one she always kept on top, but she managed to set it aside without lingering on it; there was no time for self-flagellation now.
The other files and papers were there, her notes and the laptop that she kept solely for her research into Hamilton’s relentless slaughter.
She reached for the small laptop and stopped. She didn’t need it. She recognized all of the dates on the piece of paper, and she recognized the names that would go with them, too. She could have recited each of them from memory.
Felicity knew this.
Dan leaned back against her bed and looked at the picture of her family on her bedside table.
Felicity and the National Crime Agency didn’t need help with theories or identification. Felicity wouldn’t be in any doubt at all about who these women were or who had been abducted on which date. Nor would she have any doubt that Hamilton was responsible for their disappearance.
No, Felicity needed something else, something that she hadn’t been able to ask for, something that she’d needed to let Dan work round to. She wanted Dan to go and face him again, she wanted Dan to meet with Hamilton.