Donna sat on her couch, skin tingling from the scalding shower she had just stepped out of, hair damp, Andrew cradled in her arms. Since getting home, it had seemed important, no, vital, to hold him close, feel his warmth. Keep him safe. And looking at him, studying his face and his tiny, perfect hands, almost kept the memories of what she had seen at bay.
Almost.
She remembered what had happened after she’d found the body in a series of snapshots, random moments flashing before her mind’s eye. Perfectly natural, a police support officer had told her. At times of trauma the memory could be affected.
Her screams had quickly attracted Gina and Mike, the technician who had helped produce the show. They had grabbed her, dragged her from the ground and back into the office. Donna remembered the harshness of the lights, the unyielding glare that seemed to give everything hard, jagged corners and lurid colours that made her head ache.
While Gina called the police, Donna had fired up her computer and, on instinct, started writing up the story. She stared at the screen without seeing it, trying to articulate the horror, the plan forming in her mind. Website copy first, then a news piece, then call Sky. She knew that if she stopped, tried to process what she had seen, rather than treat it as a story, she would grind to a halt, the terror and shock sucking her in like quicksand. And if she let that happen, she would never escape.
She was halfway to the door, camera in hand, when Gina grabbed her.
‘Donna, where the hell are you going? Stay in here until the police arrive. Jesus, whoever did that could still be out there!’
Donna blinked, eyes drifting to the locked door. What did Gina mean, where was she going? She was going to get a picture to go with the story, of course. She was going outside, into the car park and . . .
. . . and . . .
The sobs ripped through her, sudden and overpowering, driving her to her knees again as the memory of Matt Evans’s pulverized corpse crashed into her mind.
By the time the police had arrived and sealed the area, Donna was almost back in control. As the station was an active crime scene they were taken to Randolphfield, then led into a small room where the threadbare soft furnishings, lamps and cheerful watercolours on the walls did nothing to distract from the industrial grey paint and the feeling that this was an office going through the motions of being welcoming.
She answered the barrage of questions as fully as her shock-addled mind would allow, a police support officer giving her an encouraging smile every time she spoke. Yes, she had known Matt had been missing the whole day, but it wasn’t unusual for him to drop off the radar. No, she didn’t know if he’d received any threats or had any enemies. No, she had no idea why his body had been dumped at her car in particular. Yes, she got on fine with him. No, she never saw him socially.
The interview lasted about forty minutes, the constant repetition of the questions giving Donna the chance to process what had happened. There were memories and images her mind would not let her see, and she could feel herself flinch away from them any time they threatened to surface, but she was able to detach that from what had happened and see it as the story it was.
Matt Evans had been killed in the same manner as the first victim, Billy Griffin. Whether the dumping of his body on her car was incidental or intentional was irrelevant: Donna had received the message loud and clear.
These murders were linked. And she was going to report them.
When the interviews were over, she met Gina and Mike at the main doors of the station, huddled together in the pre-dawn chill as they waited for a taxi. The police had offered to drive them home but they had all refused for their own reasons, Gina and Mike not wanting Donna to know they were going home together, Donna not wanting to get out of a police car and face her mum.
Unwilling to talk about what they had seen, the conversation fell to practicalities. With the station deemed a crime scene and off limits, Gina would call MediaSound, make alternative arrangements, then let the staff know what was going on.
Donna offered to help, ignoring the guilty flash of glee that pulsed through her even as Gina spoke. With Valley FM out of bounds, she was free to offer the story, and anything else she found, to Sky first.
She called the night desk at Sky while she was in the taxi on the way home, gave an account on the spot to allow them to get the story on the air, then emailed Gina the copy she had written. It would be uploaded remotely to the Valley website. She felt a momentary pang of panic over the morality of reporting a story to which she was a key witness, but let it fade when the desk editor, Jack Mathis, said he’d interview her as a bystander and not the reporting journalist, with the promise of sending a camera crew to her for follows in the morning.
By the time she arrived home twenty minutes later, Donna had broken the story on TV and online. She couldn’t remember anything she had said to the night desk at Sky or a word she had written for the online story. She wanted to run away and hide, hold Andrew and keep him safe. Knew that if she did that, she would never emerge from the flat again.
It didn’t take the calls long to start flooding in, contacts and fellow journalists literally waking up to the story and keen to talk to her. She switched off her phone as she reached her front door. Time enough for that later.
She’d called her parents from the police station, telling them what had happened. Tears threatened to overwhelm her again when her mother bustled her into the flat, arm around her shoulders, talking to her in a low, soothing tone that Donna hadn’t heard since she was a child.
She showered as her mother made tea, Andrew stirring for a feed by the time she had towelled herself dry. She went to him, sending her parents to the spare room to sleep, then took him to the living room and held him in her arms.
She flicked the TV on, keeping it silent, watching the news ticker on Sky announce, ‘Third murder in Stirling’. A twinge of excitement cut through the exhaustion, shock and horror. Three murders in two days. And she had scooped them all to get the story out. National news. And she was leading on it. A picture of Matt Evans flashed up on the screen, a cheesy publicity shot that had been harshly Photoshopped to make his hair fuller, his skin healthier, his eyes brighter.
A shudder twisted through her, the sudden image of the last time she had seen those eyes barging its way into her mind. She took a deep, steadying breath, forced away the tickle of panic in her chest. She looked down at her son: he was squirming in her arms, repositioning himself on her chest. He was so small, so defenceless. And she had effectively abandoned him tonight to cover this story.
The panic faded, replaced by a resolve that at once calmed and terrified her. The story had come to her now, literally dumped in her lap by whoever had killed Matt Evans. It was hers. She would work the story, get the job she wanted, keep Andrew safe and build a future for both of them.
And if a killer got in the way of that future, she would sweep them aside as she had every other obstacle and setback.
For herself. And for Andrew.