That was fun. It was so much fun I almost forgot to visit the girl. She surprised me a bit today – clearly she has a feisty side, and being with me has brought out a better side of her character. Suffering is good for some people. Luckily, I prepared for a cold snap, but the weather is showing no sign of lifting. How disappointing if she dies before Ava has a chance to save her.
Honestly, the number of ridiculous mistakes people keep making, it truly makes my mind spin. If I didn’t love Ava, I would have killed her for spilling any secrets to the law. As it is, she is doing well, and the game is taking some pretty interesting twists. Ellen’s death has always been fairly low on my list of secrets, anyway, and I have a number of options prepared for the police. Unlike certain other people, for years I have been sure that at some point Ellen’s body would be discovered. Therefore, I laid down plans to cover this eventuality. I have adjusted the board to reflect my players. Only one has been retired so far, which means the others have everything to play for.
Alex Jennington was an easy kill. I didn’t bother with any games – not when I have the girl locked away, and Ava so close. It was quick, and he was still half-asleep. I think he was rather excited by the idea of his new source, and I assured him I had thought long and hard about divulging this key bit of information.
I can’t be sure he wasn’t recording our initial call, and where that might be stored, so I kept it fairly vague and semi-formal. It wasn’t until I met him in the darkness by the old primary school that I was able to ascertain he had put all the facts together. He still didn’t know who had killed Ellen, but he did know about something else. It would have pissed Ellen off, to know this isn’t just all about her. She always was a selfish bitch. Beautiful, but a bitch.
It made my skin prickle with anger as Alex Jennington described his plans to gather more evidence. His rather colourless voice was lit up with excitement and interest. There was pity, too, and that burned my soul. Pity is one of the most disgusting of human emotions. It is one of the reasons I have arranged things as I have.
It was just too bad he had stumbled on this particular secret in the course of his investigation. I had hoped he might get distracted elsewhere. All he really needed to do was find out enough to tell the Smiths their daughter was probably dead, and it might have been Jesse who killed her. End of story. The police were never going to waste time on a ‘maybe’ cold case, and the parents could depart knowing that the reason their daughter never contacted them was because she was probably dead. Jesse was dead, so there was no line of investigation.
Neat and safe. But no, Alex Jennington had to come sniffing around me and my doings, and Ava has taken this whole photography thing and blown it out of proportion. Surely she knows on some level that it was me in her room? Perhaps her intelligence is slipping… That would be bad news for the girl.
I picked him up in my Land Rover and drove down to my kill site. I offered him a drink from my flask as we wandered down to the Big Water and talked about the things that had happened to me. We wandered right up to the high point, near the cluster of bent and twisted trees. Their bleached limbs were pale and ghostly in the darkness. The zip line was all set up for Tough Love of course, and this was the start point. I needed him close to the line, ready for the next stage of my plan. No point in lugging a dead body around if you don’t need to. I checked his body carefully for recording devices, and took the SIM card out of his phone as he bled out. He thought I was going to show him a grave site, and of course he was right, he just didn’t realise it was his own.
‘Wnaethoch chi fwynhau hynny, Ava Cole?’
‘Did you enjoy that, Ava Cole?’