‘Jack! You-you scared me! Why…? Why are you up so early? I wasn’t expecting—’
Heather looks up at Jack with wide, frightened eyes, and he stares back at her, trying to harden his heart. He can’t let her get to him, because however he may feel about her, she’s failed him, just like all the others. Like his mother did, like Rose did, like Amber did. All of them, all the same. Except, in many ways, Heather’s worse, isn’t she? Because she never had any feelings for him at all. She came back to him purely to sell him down the river – no pun intended. He can see the bulging backpack, full of what he strongly suspects are the DVDs from his attic and the emails from his freezer and who knows what else. He can see the terrified look in her eyes that’s intensifying every second. He can smell her sweat, light but acrid, as if fear is oozing from her pores. And yet she’s still pretending, isn’t she? Still pretending that she’s just here for a date, a chilled-out Sunday. She’s even trying to smile at him now. She’s pretending she’s not afraid. She’s lying to him, with every word and every gesture.
Bitch.
‘Give it up, Heather. I know exactly why you’re here, and what you’ve been doing.’
His voice is cold, hard, and she visibly recoils, backing away from him, her body pressing against the locked front door.
‘Jack, please…’
Her reply is feeble, her voice wavering. He moves a step closer, expecting her to carry on begging. He wonders how long he can put off the moment when he grabs her and ends this. But then, to his surprise, she suddenly moves, fast, swerving around him and darting down the hallway, heading for the stairs that lead down to the basement.
‘Help!’ she screams. ‘Help me!’
Jack watches her go for a moment, then follows at a more leisurely pace. She’s obviously heading for one of the other external doors – there’s one that leads out of the basement – but it doesn’t matter which door she goes for now. They’re all locked and bolted, and all she’s doing is running herself into an even more confined space.
‘Playing hide and seek?’ he calls out, as he saunters down the stairs. He can’t see her yet, but he can hear her panting. He flexes his fingers, then reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a long turquoise silk scarf. It was his mother’s, one of the few reminders of her he’s kept all these years. That and the business, of course. He doesn’t want to kill Heather. He doesn’t want to hurt her at all, but he has no choice now, does he? If she leaves this house with what’s in that bag, he’s finished. Even with his friends in the Met, there’s no way he’ll walk away from this one.
He stands still, listening to her breathing.
She’s over there, he thinks, in the little lobby next to the back door. She can’t get out, so what’s the hurry?
He thinks about how best to do this. He’s only killed someone once before – the other day in that stinking alleyway – and he doesn’t relish having to do it again. What he did to Rose Campbell wasn’t nice, making out that she stole so much money from the company, but he wasn’t really responsible for her death. OK, he made sure she was drunk when she left, and he didn’t stop her getting into her car. But it was her decision to drive. Rose killed herself. Not his fault.
And as for Amber… When she started to pull away from him, his plan was already in place. It had been for a long time. He still can’t quite believe how well it worked. She got a life sentence. Life! For a crime that didn’t even happen. A crime he staged. A crime he faked. It’s incredible. What’s a few little stab wounds and one hand that doesn’t work quite as well as it used to, to get that sort of result?
Felicity Dixon, though. That was… unexpected. That night when Heather left her phone unattended and unlocked when she went to the bathroom, giving him the chance he’d been waiting for… that was the day he knew for certain. He spotted immediately that it wasn’t her usual phone, the one on which he’d installed the tracker app. This was a cheap model, disposable. He quickly scrolled through her recent messages and noticed that there were very few, making him wonder if she was deleting them as they came in. Why would she do that? But the few that were there, from the previous twenty-four hours, made his heartbeat pound in his ears. Messages from someone listed only as ‘N’ about ‘it’ being ‘nearly over now’. One message told her how well she’d done over the past few weeks. And one was from somebody she was clearly planning to meet, last Sunday night, at Spinelli’s. Somebody called Felicity.
He thought, fast. Then, he took a chance and deleted all but the most recent message from Heather’s inbox. He had no idea who ‘N’ or ‘Felicity’ were, but his gut told him this was not good and it was probably best that Heather didn’t realise he’d read several of her messages. The look on her face when she re-entered the room and saw her phone in his hand confirmed it. She tried to play it cool, but he could see she was horrified and that she knew she’d slipped up. He casually handed the phone back to her, saying nothing at all about what he’d just seen, but he knew right then that he needed to go to this wine bar and try to find out what they were up to. What Heather was up to. He saw her again the next night, and it was hard to hide his suspicions and to act normally with her. They went out for an Indian meal, but when they returned home he didn’t trust himself not to give himself away, and brusquely bid her goodnight and retired to his office.
The next evening, he made sure to arrive at the place she had scheduled to meet Felicity just before eight. He dressed carefully in a dark hooded jacket, jeans, and black leather gloves. He kept his head down, and stayed in the shadows and away from streetlamps as much as possible. When he got there, he spotted a narrow alleyway between two buildings, just a hundred metres or so from Spinelli’s. He stood at its entrance for a minute, trying to decide what to do next. And that’s when he saw her, the young woman, walking quickly along the pavement towards him. She paused under a streetlight to check her watch, and then looked over her shoulder, as if checking whether she was being followed, and that’s when it struck him. He knew he’d never met her before, but she looked familiar. There was something about her jawline, her bone structure. Did she look like someone he knew, maybe? Was she related to someone he knew?
He didn’t even stop to think, then. He took a chance. He stepped out of the alleyway, and called out the name he’d seen on Heather’s phone.
‘Felicity?’
She stopped dead, and he moved closer, smiling in what he hoped was a disarming manner.
‘Hey. Heather’s here, with me. Change of plan,’ he said, gesturing towards the alley, and Felicity’s eyes widened and she gasped.
‘You!’ she said. ‘But… but…’
‘It’s OK,’ he replied, soothingly. ‘Nothing to worry about, I promise. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need you to come and see Heather for a moment. If you don’t, well, she might get hurt…’
His fingers twitched, and he knew that if she tried to run, he’d easily be able to grab her, but it didn’t come to that. She hesitated for a couple of seconds, looking around the empty street, and then called out, ‘Heather? Heather? Are you there? Are you OK?’
There was no reply, obviously, but Jack began to feel agitated then, conscious that the clock was ticking, that Heather could walk past at any minute, heading for her wine bar rendezvous with this woman, and so he said quickly, ‘She’s OK, but you need to follow me now. Or she won’t be. Do you understand? You’re not going to get hurt, either of you, if you do as I say. This is just going to be a chat.’
To his surprise, Felicity looked around once more, a panicked look on her face, and then nodded.
‘Um… OK.’
He stood back and pointed to the alleyway entrance, and she meekly walked in. And then… he’s not really sure what happened then. He genuinely intended just to question her, to make her tell him what was going on, and what those cryptic message were about. Instead, as soon as she walked into that dark enclosed space with him, something clicked inside his head. It was as if a door closed, the door to the rational, sensible side of his brain.
He just… lost it.
Lost it big time.
He bent down and picked up a short, thick piece of metal that was lying on the ground – a broken pipe or something, he doesn’t even know exactly what it was – and he simply swung his arm and smashed it into the side of her skull. She didn’t make a sound, just slumped to the ground. He stood over her for a few moments, breathing heavily, and then he crouched down and put his gloved hands to her soft, pale throat and began to squeeze. His bad hand ached and throbbed, but even so, it wasn’t hard; he knew she was dead less than a minute later, her eyes open and blank, her body limp. He grabbed her small handbag and pulled out her phone, using her unresisting finger to unlock it, then tapped his way into the menus and changed her security settings, removing fingerprint recognition and setting a pin code instead. Then he pushed the bag inside the front of his jacket, lifted her lifeless form – she was light as a feather – and threw it into one of the big double wheelie bins that lined the side wall of the alley. He pulled a few black rubbish bags from the adjacent bin and piled them on top of her. A strange, relaxed feeling crept over him, as if what he’d just done was cathartic, healing almost. He retrieved the thing he’d used to crack her skull and stuffed that inside his jacket too, and then he just walked away. On the way home, he stopped on an unlit section of the Thames towpath and threw the weapon, his jacket, and his gloves into the river.
Felicity’s phone beeped twice with texts and rang once while he was busy; the messages were from ‘H’, very obviously Heather, from a number which must belong to her secret phone. He ignored the messages, and when he was back home, he went through the phone, finding only one other number listed in the address book – the mysterious ‘N’ again. There was nothing else on it at all, and that made Jack even angrier and more suspicious. This was clearly a burner phone too, just like Heather’s second phone, because who only has two contact numbers in their phone? And everyone gets messages all day long – who deletes every single one?
He stared at the phone for a while, thinking, and then, remembering the way Felicity had looked anxiously over her shoulder, he sent Heather a message to explain why Felicity didn’t show.
Heather had replied promptly, and his follow-up message seemed to reassure her. It bothered him greatly that he still didn’t know who Felicity was. The only thing of any interest in her handbag was what looked like a work rota – a grid showing a timetable for the next two weeks. The company name at the top was ProPowder Global, and the timetable mentioned three laboratories, Labs A, B, and C, with names and times filled in for each day. To Jack’s frustration though, only first names were used.
Felicity, Lab C, 8am – 4pm
Helen, Lab A, 4pm – 12am
Amir, Lab B, 12am – 8am
He looked up ProPowder Global online, but there were no employees’ names listed on the website, and he couldn’t think of any way he could contact the company and ask for the surname of one of their staff without raising suspicion. He even tried googling ‘Felicity ProPowder Global’, but nothing came up, so he’d had to admit defeat. The only other items in her bag were an unmarked door key, a lipstick, and thirty pounds in cash. Not wanting anything in his home to have both his and her fingerprints on it, just in case, he threw the whole lot in the river, even the money. Over the next few days though, what she and his so-called girlfriend had been doing slowly became all too clear.
He saw Heather again on the Tuesday night. He was obsessively checking the news websites, expecting at any moment to see a story about a body being found, but there’d been nothing, and it made him tense and irritable. They were due to go out for a meal again, but he couldn’t face it and cancelled the table, and then, desperately trying to make himself feel better, he forced her to have sex with him on the sofa in the lounge. He knew, as he’d pinned her down on the sofa, that she didn’t want it – that she didn’t want him – and yet he carried on. Despite everything she’s done, he’s not proud of that. He actually felt a little remorseful afterwards. It left him feeling pathetic and weak, especially after he admitted that he wished he could be ‘normal’ again.
Jesus.
Oh, he put on a good act. He pretended everything was OK, pretended he hadn’t seen any of the messages that flew back and forth between her and Felicity. There was ‘N’, too, who messaged on Monday.
Her brother, then. Jack had replied:
There were a couple of other messages after that, expressing relief that Felicity was all right and telling her that they all needed to chat soon. But ‘N’ only signed his messages with a kiss, no name, and Jack puzzled over it for hours, trying to work it out. A brother and a sister, working with Heather? Because they were all working together, that became very obvious as other messages from both Heather and ‘N’ trickled in. They talked about ‘getting the stuff’ out of the house and made plans for a video call to sort out the final details. And then, suddenly, it clicked.
Nathan Dixon.
‘N’ was Nathan Dixon, it had to be.
The man Jack had once let his guard down with, one night when he’d had far too much to drink. The man he’d told about his delicious revenge on Rose Campbell, and his future plans. The man who’d threatened to go to the police, forcing Jack in return to threaten his life, and that of his young daughter. Dixon had left his job and, presumably, the country, not long after that, and Jack had never heard from him again. But now… it had to be. There was nobody else it could be.
He screamed out loud in rage when he worked it out, causing Rhona to come running into his office, looking alarmed. He told her he’d just stubbed his toe on the leg of his desk, but inside the fury was white hot. The Dixons had recruited Heather and Heather was an old friend of Amber Ryan’s… It all made sense, and he couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to put it together.
But he had the upper hand, and so Jack played along as the messages continued to arrive. There was talk of ‘finishing this’, of Felicity waiting outside the house for Heather, about going straight to the police. Heather played her part well, he thought bitterly. It sounded like she hadn’t found everything, but she’d found enough. He considered carefully whether to destroy it all before she came for it; all the things he enjoyed taking out on days when he felt particularly low to reread and rewatch, to relive what he’d done until the buzz came back. He needed to feel the satisfaction, the joy, of such perfectly executed revenge. He probably should have destroyed it all as soon as he had the slightest suspicion that Heather was not back in his life for the reasons she claimed to be. But, after careful thought, he decided there was no point, when she and at least one other person still knew about it. He needed to get rid of the people, not just the evidence, and he thought he knew exactly how to do that. He worried about whether anyone else knew, though, and decided to risk asking Heather in another message from ‘Felicity’.
Her reply reassured him, but it also made him even more angry.
You think I’m stupid, Heather, he thought viciously. But you’re the stupid little bitch. And yes, it really will be over in a few days. Over for you, anyway.
He obviously couldn’t pretend to be Felicity in the Zoom call they were planning, so he concocted the story about the bug sweeping the lab, and Felicity’s night shifts, and had told them to just send on the final details. Then, of course, the body was found, and on Friday night the woman’s photo was all over the TV news. The messages to Felicity’s phone stopped then, unsurprisingly, and Jack allowed himself a little giggle, imagining how shocked and confused Heather and her co-conspirator must be, realising they’ve been exchanging messages with a dead woman. When the name of the victim was released yesterday, he knew he’d guessed right.
Felicity Dixon.
The downside, of course, was that he was no longer receiving any messages so he didn’t know exactly when to expect them, or what they were going to do now one of them was dead. But then Heather got in touch, claiming to be ill and changing their weekend plans, and saying she’d come round on Sunday afternoon instead.
So – still going ahead, he thought, and decided to make it easy for her, even telling her he’d leave a key out. He had a feeling he knew exactly how it was going to play out. He remembered that both of Nathan’s parents are dead; common sense told him the man would, therefore, have come back from wherever he’d run off to when he left Shannon Medical, to identify his sister’s body. And, as it did appear there were only the three of them involved in all of this, it was highly likely that Nathan would take Felicity’s place on Sunday afternoon and be outside waiting for Heather.
He’s out there right now, he thinks.
But Jack knows that Nathan will never willingly step inside this house again. And going outside to try to find him, particularly in daylight? No. So, his plan is simple: kill Heather, and then use her phone to send Nathan a message. He’s going to say that Jack walked in and found her in the pantry, but that she managed to grab a vase and swing it at his head. He’s going to write that Jack is currently unconscious, but that she’s struggling to open the freezer to access the emails and needs his help, now. And then, when Nathan appears, well…
He’ll have to dispose of two bodies, which is not something he ever dreamt he’d have to do, but he has a plan for that too. He’s told Rhona to take a couple of days off, saying he’s got friends coming to stay and wants the house to himself. She said she’d take the opportunity to head home to Scotland to visit her mother, and he stood in the hallway and watched her leave, bag in hand, when her shift ended this morning, smiling with satisfaction as he headed to bed to get a few hours of rest before Heather’s arrival this afternoon. He told his driver, Yuri, that he doesn’t need him for a day or two either, and the Mercedes is parked out back, the boot space plenty large enough to accommodate two bodies. He’ll have to haul them up from the basement kitchen and out through the rear courtyard to the car, but he’s fit and strong and the house and garden aren’t overlooked by any neighbours. He’s already turned off all the security cameras inside and outside the house; he’ll do a thorough clean-up afterwards too, but he’s not planning on any blood. He’ll strangle them both, which is nice and tidy. And he’ll make sure the bodies are never found, or not for years anyway, by which time any forensic evidence on them will, he hopes, be long gone. Tonight, he’s going to drive to the lake he used to swim in with his friends as a teenager. He’s been there relatively recently. One night, a year or so ago, he made the two-hour journey just to sit in the dark and gaze at it, reminiscing, remembering brighter, happier days. It’s deserted at night, but there are always boats moored there at a little jetty, and as luck would have it, he still has a pair of oars, from a childhood dinghy, stashed in his attic. All he has to do is liberate one of the boats and take the bodies out to the middle of the lake. It’s one of the deepest in the UK outside the Lake District, so if he weighs the bodies down with rocks from the shoreline, he’s pretty sure they’ll stay down there for a long, long time. He’ll have time to do it and get back before sunrise too, if he gets a move on.
Right, let’s do this, he thinks.
It’ll be a shame for Lacey, Nathan’s little girl. Her mum died when she was just a baby, he remembers. How old would she be now? Five? Six? To lose her father too… but she’ll survive. Kids are resilient, aren’t they? He survived, when his mother died. Lacey will be just fine.
There are a couple of other minor issues. Amber Ryan is one. No doubt she knows what her old mate Heather’s been up to. But he’s not too worried about her. Even if, when Heather and Nathan are reported missing, she kicks up a fuss and tries to blame him, who’ll believe her? Nobody believed her at her trial, did they? They locked her up and threw away the key. So, who’s going to believe her now? Her friends disappearing will change nothing. She’s not a problem, and she’ll rot in jail.
Just in case, once Nathan and Heather are dead, Jack will – reluctantly, but needs must – destroy all the evidence in Heather’s backpack himself. And then, just one more loose end to tie up.
Yiannis Pappas.
The man without whom he couldn’t have done any of this. But could Yiannis have been compromised too? Did Nathan, Felicity, and Heather find out about him? Was it too risky after all, to let him go about his life, knowing what he knows? Yiannis will go to prison too, of course, if anything happens to Jack. Jack won’t hesitate to give the police all the details about clever young Yiannis, and his role in all this. But if Jack’s getting away with it – and he’s pretty confident he is now – then Yiannis is that final outstanding detail. So he’ll have to be dealt with too, and as soon as possible.
Jack never intended to become a killer. But, as he stands in his kitchen, listening to the rapid, frightened breaths coming from just metres away and the frantic scrabbling at a door he knows is firmly locked, he realises with a small shiver of shock that he likes it. He likes this sense of power over life and death. He was powerless to breathe life back into his dead mother, but now he can control whether someone lives or dies, and he likes it. He’s enjoying himself.
‘Coming, Heather,’ he says in a singsong voice. ‘Ready or not.’