The Nightmare Place (18 page)

Part Three

Twenty-Nine

Sitting on the rattly bus, her head resting at an angle to her own sunlit reflection in the window, Margaret realises she is smiling. In recent months, returning from the library has always made her slightly nervous. The outings are moments of freedom, whereas at home she has always felt slightly under siege. But that has changed, she realises.

It’s changed
.

With the sun beating down on her, she makes her way steadily up the cul-de-sac, the bag of books growing heavy in her hand. As she approaches the end, she sees that Derek is out in his garden, wielding a hosepipe at waist height. Because of the weather, a ban is in force, but he clearly doesn’t believe it applies to him, or else he’s confident that nobody will say anything or report him. He is whistling to himself as he sprinkles water over his ornate flower beds.

Margaret decides to ignore him. There has been no interaction between them since the argument over the bees, and if he is upset with her for not getting rid of them, at least he hasn’t pressed the issue. Most likely it was just as Karen said in the tea room that time, that he’s been taking things out on her, and that deep down he isn’t really bothered.

She walks past the bottom of the neighbours’ garden and then turns up the footpath between their houses. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder what Derek is doing there at this time of day. She’s too busy concentrating on ignoring him as she steps on to her own path, and that’s when the first one crunches very softly beneath her shoe.

Immediately, Margaret stops.

And then she looks down. The path ahead is dotted with them. At first, the sight doesn’t make any sense, because it is like the ground has been scattered with the tiniest clumps of earth. But then she realises how quiet and still the warm air is. Nothing is flying. She looks at the hedge. Even when she stares through it, no movement appears.

She steps back carefully, and then crouches down. The bumblebee she has trodden on is dead, but some of the others lying on the path are not. Here and there, a mandible or a leg is quivering slightly. One of the bees appears to be chewing hopelessly at the air. She looks upwards at the corner of the house, and there is no movement there at all.

She stands up slowly, refusing to accept that it has happened. It is impossible. This is
her
house. Surely he wouldn’t dare.

Behind her, Derek is still whistling happily to himself. When she turns to face him over the fence, he glances across, and with his free hand he throws her a mock salute.

I can have someone come round if you don’t know how.

I know people.

Then, still whistling, he goes back to watering his garden.

Margaret stares at him for a few seconds more. She is trembling, but she doesn’t know whether it’s from anger or shock, the invasion of what he’s done, or simply the sheer
meanness
of it. Right now, it is so difficult for her to comprehend what has happened that she can’t believe it actually has.

I have said it, and so it shall be done
.

After a few moments, she turns her back on the man and walks the rest of the way down the path, careful not to stand on any of the dead or dying bees. For some reason, that feels important. When she gets inside, she locks the door against the outside world, and something is snuffed out inside her. A feeling leaves. She leans down awkwardly on the kitchen counter and begins to cry.

Thirty

Detective Inspector Zoe Dolan

Detective Inspector Chris Sands

Ms Jane Webster

ZD: But he never gave this woman’s full name?

JW: No. He was rambling a bit. It was all jumbled the way he told it, and I think he kept forgetting bits and then having to go back. I would have asked him if I could have done, but he never took the tape off my mouth. I was just there to listen. That’s what he said. That’s all he wanted me to do.

ZD: What about where she lived?

JW: Not the area, no. I’ve already told you about her house, though, the way he described it. There was a field out front, and a back garden where she hung her clothes out to dry. And a security light, I guess, because he said he tripped it the night he went there.

ZD: Which is when he saw the man in the kitchen window?

JW: Yes. He presumed she must have got herself a boyfriend he hadn’t known about. She was single when they met, he thought, but I got the impression he’d been stalking her for a while. So at first he just thought he’d ‘missed his chance’ with her.

ZD: Can I just clarify? Those were his words?

JW: That was how he put it. I remember, because he was so upset. It was obvious that he’d barely even spoken to this woman, but the way he talked about it, it was as though he’d just waited too long to ask her out. That he just hadn’t moved quickly enough, and so he’d lost her to someone else.

ZD: But then he changed his mind about that.

JW: He read about it in the newspaper a couple of days afterwards. That was the evening the man came round to his house to see him.

ZD: This is the man he alleges he saw in the window of the property? The supposed real attacker?

JW: Yes. ‘The monster.’ That’s what he kept calling him.

ZD: How would that man have known who Johnson was, or where to find him?

JW: I don’t think Johnson knew. He guessed that the security light would have given the man a good view of him, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. As far as he knew, he’d never met the man before. And he asked him, but never got an explanation.

ZD: Why did the man go and see him? It seems to me like that would be pretty risky behaviour, if what Johnson was telling you was true. He could have placed him at the scene.

JW: Yes, but I don’t think the man saw it that way. The impression I got was that he thought of Johnson as some kind of kindred spirit almost. Johnson said the man just invited himself in, and that he saw some things in the house that made him think they were alike. Or at least that he could use Johnson.

ZD: Why didn’t Johnson go to the police?

JW: He didn’t say. I presume he was scared about his own involvement. But the way he talked about this man, I think he was also very scared of him. That he felt incredibly intimidated by him. When he was speaking about him, he always called him ‘the monster’.

ZD: And ‘the monster’ came round more than once?

JW: Yes. He kept coming back. It sounded to me like he was trying to
groom
Johnson for a while, but then he was disappointed because Johnson wasn’t really like him at all. He was a bit, obviously. I mean, he did stalk those women, and he did go into their houses when they weren’t there. But I don’t think he could ever let himself go through with actually hurting them. It was always the other man who did that. Johnson was really upset about it, and he had to listen to it every time the man came round, but he was too scared of the man to do anything. And so he had to keep doing what he was doing.

ZD: Which was?

JW: Listening to everything he’d done. And giving him the keys.

‘Ten pages of this.’

DCI Drake slapped Jane Webster’s signed interview statement down on the desk between us.

‘If it wasn’t so thick, do you know what I’d do? I’d make it into a paper aeroplane and throw it out of the fucking window.’

He shook his head in disgust, then stared at the window to the side of him, as though he was actively considering it.

I could sympathise with him, but only to an extent. Our commanding officer had been somewhat overeager to position himself in front of the media outside my house that day, and had managed to give the impression the case was closing – that the creeper had been identified and was now deceased. Jane’s statement, if true, had the potential to embarrass not only the department, but Drake specifically.

At the same time, and being as charitable as I could manage, I knew it wasn’t only image he was concerned about. All of us had breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the investigation had reached a conclusion. None of us wanted to believe the man responsible might still be out there.

‘I’m sure Webster’s telling the truth, sir.’

Drake turned to look at me.

‘You believe
a single
word
of this?’

Sitting beside me, I could feel Chris sinking down in his chair. Drake’s office had that effect on him. He seemed to anticipate the fairly regular verbal beatings with a slightly pathetic sense of resignation. I made an effort to sit up straight. Neither of us had done anything wrong, and neither had Jane Webster.

‘That’s not what I said, sir. I said
Webster
was telling the truth. Which is to say, I believe that this is an accurate enough account of what happened in my house. This is what Johnson really told her.’

‘And what do you make of that?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’ I shrugged. ‘Not a paper aeroplane.’

That got me lasers. ‘Well, let’s run through it, shall we? Johnson claims that a mysterious stranger – a
monster
– shouldered his way into his house and began helping himself to his collection of stalking memorabilia? Is that basically about the size of it?’

‘Yes, sir. And kept coming back. Every time he did, he told Johnson the details of what he’d done.’

‘Why would someone do that?’

I shrugged again. ‘Maybe it’s like Webster thinks, and he was trying to groom Johnson to be more like him. Or perhaps it was a kind of safety valve for him.’

‘A safety valve?’

‘That’s why Johnson phoned the helpline. We’ve seen an increase in the violence during the assaults, so it’s obvious the perpetrator is escalating. It often reaches a boiling point for this kind of individual. Maybe this was a way of letting off steam. Sharing the responsibility.’

‘I notice the present tense there,’ Drake said.

‘Just keeping all options open, sir.’

He snorted. ‘A
monster
. Tell me, why would Johnson be that scared of someone? He wasn’t exactly small.’

‘As hard as it might be to understand, sir, some men are intimidated by overly aggressive males.’ Out of sight, under the desk, I kicked Chris’s foot. ‘But maybe this man was doing what Johnson
wanted
to, deep down. On one level, he was disgusted, but on another, it excited him. So he was living through it vicariously.’

Drake stared at me, as though wondering if, like Jane Webster’s statement, I was too big to fold.

‘But that’s supposition,’ I added.

‘Yes. It is.’

He rested his knotty forearms on the desk, one on either side of the statement.

‘All right. We’ll come back to all that in a moment. I had the pleasure of visiting Mr Johnson’s former address yesterday afternoon, and I’ve never seen a more disturbing house in my entire career. Please tell me everything you know about it and him.’

I turned to Chris, to let him know it was time for him to do something in here other than shrivel. He lifted himself up in his seat and began running it through for Drake, although there wasn’t a great deal to tell. We’d already known that Adam Johnson had no convictions on record, and further digging had failed to turn up a single instance of him crossing our path in any way at all. The cottage, as I’d suspected, had belonged to his parents, both of whom had been deceased for several years. It appeared that the front room had been left untouched in their absence, and Johnson’s existence in the house had been limited mainly to his bedroom – another time capsule, in its own arrested way – along with what had once been his parents’ bedroom.

‘Ah yes,’ Drake said. ‘His key room. Now tell me about everything that’s been found in there.’

‘One wall was divided into a grid,’ Chris said. ‘It was covered with details of all the women he’d been following, along with photographs, personal items, things like that.’

When Chris said
personal items
, Drake’s eyes flicked to me, and I hated him a little more. We kept our gazes on each other as he said:

‘Evidence, then, of his connection to all six victims?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And other women too,’ I said. ‘Including me.’

‘These are all the women he’d presumably been stalking? Have you cross-checked—’

‘Yes,’ Chris said. ‘Every woman listed on the grid had at some point been a customer of SSL, and Johnson was down as the attending locksmith.’

There had been nineteen in total. It was obvious that he’d paid more attention to some than to others, the victims especially. We’d been in contact with the rest of them, and none of them had known anything or reported concerns. It was as though this other man, assuming he existed, had taken a perverse delight in targeting the women Johnson was particularly attracted to.

‘They’ve all been informed,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m sure that brightened up their day. Let’s concentrate on the six actual victims for a moment. We have a link between Johnson and all of them, don’t we? He changed the locks at their houses, and had the opportunity to keep copies of the new keys. We know he went into their houses and stole their possessions. We know he followed them and obsessed over them. Yes?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We also know that he called this Webster woman on more than one occasion and
confessed to the crimes over the phone
. In fact, that’s how we caught him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Which brings us back to this.’ He tapped Jane Webster’s statement. ‘Assuming this is even close to verbatim, what evidence do we have, exactly, that this mysterious second man ever existed?’

‘None,’ I said. ‘Only Johnson’s word.’

‘And do you know how highly I rate this man’s word, especially when it’s placed against all that other evidence you just described to me?’ He held his index finger and thumb a millimetre apart. ‘Not even that much. Not even that.’

He was right, of course. The possibility that Adam Johnson had told the truth was exceedingly slim: it was far more likely that Jane Webster had been listening to the ramblings of a madman trying desperately to minimise what he’d done in the final moments of a self-destructing life. Johnson couldn’t deny parts of his involvement – the stalking; the keys; the stolen possessions – and the mystery second man was an invention that slotted conveniently in between them. Even the language he had used fitted. A monster. Not a separate individual at all, but a part of himself that frightened and upset him, its visits symbolic ones.

Not only was there no evidence that a second man existed, there was no evidence that he
needed
to
. Everything we had pointed to Johnson acting alone: we simply didn’t need to conjure up a mysterious partner to make sense of what had happened.

I knew all this. But even so.

‘We don’t want to end up with egg on our faces. Sir.’

Drake stared at me for a long time, considering that, then finally looked away.

‘Oh, I’m well aware of that, Detective. And I’m not saying for one second that we should simply
discount
the possibility that this other man exists. So you tell me. Who is he?’

‘We don’t know, sir.’

‘And what about the victim? Who is she?’

‘Again, we don’t know. As I said, all the women on Johnson’s wall have been accounted for. They’re either victims we already knew about, or else they’ve never been attacked.’

‘But if he’d been stalking her, surely she would have been there as well.’

‘Unless he erased her details. She was the first victim of this other man – let’s say – so he might have been upset enough to remove her.’

‘Christ.’ Drake rubbed his eyes. ‘We don’t know when this incident took place. We don’t know where. We don’t even know if it was a rape.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think we know it wasn’t. We looked at other rapes, and I’ve looked at them again. There aren’t any that match the description Johnson gave. But there was a huge pile of borderline cases we went through at the time. If the attacker didn’t have the keys back then, and if he was interrupted, we wouldn’t necessarily have connected the MO.’

‘How many?’

‘I couldn’t say. Into the hundreds, probably, but I don’t know how many would fit.’

Drake stopped rubbing his eyes and stared at me for what felt like an age. Then he sighed.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go over them again.’