Play Dead (D.I. Kim Stone, #4)(94)

Catherine came to a halt beside her.

The sound was faint but unmistakeable. To her it was the sound of tyres.

‘Do you hear that?’ she whispered.

She felt, rather than saw, Catherine’s nod beside her.

They both stood, rooted to the spot, listening through the darkness.

‘It’s coming from down there,’ Kim said, pointing to the dirt track at the bottom of the hill.

She strained her eyes towards the direction she felt was the road. It was the sound of tyres moving along slowly.

The dirt track was on a slight decline. It had to be their killer.

She realised that the driver must have cut the engine and was rolling slowly down the hill.

Kim moved forwards, safe in the knowledge that she was hidden by darkness.

‘Look – look there,’ she said to Catherine. About 300 feet back was the unmistakeable sight of dipped headlights crawling slowly towards them.

Kim felt a mixture of excitement and relief. Mostly relief. She had called it right. Tracy had a chance.

‘Quick, Catherine. Call it through. Let the others know we have him.’

Catherine took the radio from her belt and spoke.

‘Catherine to Stacey. We have reached location three… ’ her eyes met Kim’s above the torchlight ‘… and there is nothing here to report.’





Eighty-Eight





‘What the hell are you doing?’ Kim cried, reaching for the radio.

Realisation hit her a few seconds too late and at the exact second the first raindrop landed on her arm.

For a moment everything else was forgotten. Her colleagues, the operation, even the victims, as her brain rearranged the facts that had been fragmented around her mind.

‘Jesus, you’re in it together. That’s why he brings them here. You help him get rid of the bodies but why…’

Kim’s words trailed away as more pieces moved into place. The magnet in her mind was sucking all the pieces together, and a clear picture began to form. How could she have missed the connection between the two of them?

‘You met Graham at Bromley, didn’t you?’ Kim asked, doing the sums in her head. They would have been there at the same time, and Kim knew full well that damaged souls managed to find each other.

Two more drops landed on her arm and the first thunderbolt sounded in the distance.

‘Yes and I’ll never forget it. Stupid group discussion where we were supposed to talk about our feelings and heal. Repeating our fear was supposed to help us forget it? That was supposed to make us whole?’ Catherine spat.

Kim was unable to move. A lightning strike revealed the twisted, bitter face of the woman before her. Catherine Evans had perfected the art of wearing the mask that suited the occasion, but right here was the real woman. The real Catherine, who had been unable to move on from her childhood ordeal.

‘There was one person there who had the courage to speak the truth. His truth… our truth. He spoke openly about wanting to hurt the people that had hurt him. He made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t interested in forgiveness or therapy. He wanted revenge, and that was the only thing that would help.

‘Yes, we had one thing in common that bound us together. Our need for revenge. We both knew that we would never live full lives until our tormentors were punished.’

‘But how could you help him, Catherine?’ Kim asked, stunned. ‘You know the fear of being abducted, of being taken from the safety of your life. Look what it’s done to you –and yet you’ve helped someone else do exactly the same thing.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Catherine raged. ‘It’s different. I was a child and…’

‘But even as an adult you were terrified when you thought they might come and get you again. I was there, Catherine. I saw you in that box. I helped you out. That fear was real.’

‘Of course it was real. It’s always been real. While those bastards were still alive, I lived with the fear,’ Catherine said, as a bolt of lightning thundered past them.

‘You think that’s any less real to the women Graham has taken? And you’ve helped him. I don’t understand, Catherine. Two women are dead because of the two of you. How could you do that?’

There was no hesitation in Catherine’s voice and no remorse as the lightning lit up her expression.

‘Because we had an agreement. That we would help each other.’

‘But your captors were never…’ Her sentence was left dangling between them as Kim remembered one crucial detail of their conversation at Catherine’s house. The woman had forgotten herself in her fear and admitted to being terrified that ‘he’ was coming back. There had been two tormentors involved in her capture and abuse – but her use of the singular showed that she had known that one of them was already dead.

‘It was Ivor and Larry, wasn’t it? They were the two that molested you. The change in you is nothing to do with being able to carry on working at Westerley. It’s because your second abuser is now dead. He was released from prison two weeks ago. You’ve both been waiting all this time?’

‘Those two bastards took my life,’ she spat. ‘You can’t even imagine what those fucking pigs did to me. I smell their foul, toxic breath every night; hear their perverted whispers in my ear. One after the other after the other, passed around like the bottles of whisky they shared.