Page 6 of Gone in the Night
Ben shrugged. ‘Same thing.’
Morgan stood on the ladder, only going as far up as she could reach the zipper to the tent.
Ben watched, not realising he was holding his breath until she tugged it down and a cloud of decomp and bluebottles filled the air, making Morgan almost lose her balance. Tristan cupped a hand across his mouth.
Morgan clung on to the side of the narrow aluminium ladder and turned on the torch she’d tugged from her pocket, staring into the blackness inside then nodding emphatically.
She climbed back down.
‘There’s a body in there. A woman, red hair, a lot of insects.’ She was far enough away from the Land Rover to bend over and suck in a deep breath of fresh air to try and rid her lungs of the smell.
‘Could you make out how she died?’ Ben asked, his voice almost hesitant, as if not sure he wanted to know the answer.
‘Knife through her chest. There’s blood inside that’s dried up. She’s been there a while.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Tristan.
‘Because most of her face has been eaten away by the maggots.’
Tristan’s tanned complexion turned a deathly pale colour as he turned away from her and jogged a short distance, his hand still cupped over his mouth, and vomited into a gorse bush.
Ben thought about all the ways he could have spent his first day back in work after his glorious trip to NYC. He’d envisioned catching up on a multitude of emails and being filled in by Cain on all the station gossip he’d missed. Murder was not even remotely on that list.
‘Thanks, Morgan, right, let’s do this.’
Ben’s heart sank as he tugged the radio out of his pocket and began to request CSI and a pathologist, as well as officers to come guard the track up to the scene. This was going to be a nightmare; they had no way of knowing how long she’d been dead until the post-mortem. There was not a single house in sight, and it was so off the beaten track he didn’t know if anyone used the road apart from the odd fell walker or mountain biker. He could feel a migraine about to descend upon him, and he heard Morgan whisper in his ear, ‘Here we go again, welcome back, boss, it’s like we never even left.’
FIVE
The man counted on his fingers how many days it had been since he’d killed the woman. Six days of her lying and fermenting inside that tent. He wondered if she was mummified? He thought that there was an excellent chance she could be with the warm weather and the dry air inside of the tent.
As a child he’d been obsessed with the ancient Egyptians and their mummification process. He had gone on a year six school trip to the British Museum, to see an exhibition all about Tutankhamun. He had been as enthralled as a ten-year-old boy could be with the whole thing, they even had a couple of mummies on display, which had totally blown his young mind. When they were allowed in the gift shop at the end of the tour, he had picked up a book he had enough pocket money for, which was all about the pharaohs, and clutched it to his chest the rest of the day, excited for the train journey home so he could read it and look at the photographs. So began his life’s work.
He would have loved to have worked in a museum, but he wasn’t clever enough for university, and his mum had made him promise not to leave her when she was so ill. He hadn’t known back then that her illness was self-inflicted; she chose to drink neat vodka for breakfast, lunch and tea, then stay in bedwallowing. His dad had walked out years before, and although he didn’t blame him for not being able to cope with his wife, he never forgave him for abandoning him and leaving him with a drunk who didn’t care about anything but herself. As he got old enough, he’d realised that she’d probably pickled her own internal organs without any help, similar to what the Egyptians did. Instead of leaving her like he should have and going away to university, he’d stayed out of his duty towards the woman who had given birth to him and not much else. He wasn’t very fond of change and preferred familiarity which was why he was still here and why he had opted for a job that was local. He’d found his mother dead in her bed a month ago and cried for hours, not over losing her but at the relief he’d felt of being finally free of her.
It wasn’t that he disliked his job, in fact it was the opposite – he rather enjoyed it – but he still wished he could have gone to university. Maybe one day he would, it was never too late to follow your dreams. Wasn’t that what all those bloody awful inspirational speakers on Instagram and such were always blathering on about?
He’d known as he’d crept up on the woman inside the tent that if he did this it was going to change his life forever. If he got caught there was not a chance he could follow his dreams, but the compulsion to do it had been so strong, so intense, so all-consuming inside of him he knew that he wouldn’t satiate it until he’d stabbed her through her heart.
He’d been thinking about it for months – if he was honest, it was more like years – but he’d never had the perfect opportunity or the freedom until now, and it was foolish to give it up so easily. He may never get the chance again.
He had given up waiting for the police to knock on his door after the first forty-eight hours, had even managed to relax and carry on as normal. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her, andthe temptation to go back and see what her corpse looked like after all this time had been far greater than he’d anticipated. He’d managed to hold off, though and wondered if anyone had found her yet.
He knew from all the true crime documentaries that the killers who went back to the scene were more likely to get caught. He sat back, drained his can of lager and pressed play onMindhunter, his favourite Netflix show. He was gutted they had never made another series; it was by far the best programme on serial killers he’d ever watched, and he secretly wondered if he would ever have the notoriety that Kemper, Bundy, Gacy and Nielsen had, or was that a thing of the past? All the women had a thing for the US killers, and he wondered why that was. He spent hours trying to figure out why they seemed so much more appealing than any of the UK killers. He got that everyone portrayed Bundy as a charismatic, handsome guy, but he wasn’t any of that. He was like any other killer, like him, and that made them both sick, twisted, evil men. He was well aware that harbouring any kind of internal feeling to take another person’s life had nothing remotely charming about it. It crossed the line between good and evil, and up until he killed that woman, he had been able to stop those intrusive thoughts, but they had finally won over. Now, he wondered if he was forever going to be chasing the high that it had given him, or would he chalk it down to been there, done that and now walking around in the T-shirt?
He didn’t know where his story would end, but it would never be turned into an episode ofMindhunter, which was a real shame.
SIX
The scene was difficult to manage purely because of the access issues with vehicles. Declan owned an Audi 4x4 and he had managed to get a blow-out when he’d hit the sharp, jutting edge of a huge rock, causing his tyre to explode with such force it made everyone duck thinking someone had thrown an explosive at them. Morgan had walked down to meet him, and she radioed Ben to come and collect the pair of them. She had tried not to laugh, it wasn’t funny, but Declan was fuming about it and his expression was so serious it was hard to contain it.
‘For feck’s sake, what’s the point of this car being a 4x4 if the tyres are going to pop like a balloon at a kid’s birthday party for no good reason?’
‘I think that rock was a pretty good reason, Declan. It’s massive and has very sharp edges.’
He glared at her for a moment, then looked at the rock and began to laugh. ‘Mary, mother of Jesus, how did I hit that? Do you think I need some driving glasses?’
She shrugged, trying not to grin, not wanting to antagonise him as they watched Ben driving slowly down towards them. Declan had got suited and booted whilst waiting for him toarrive. He got into the front seat of the car, Morgan into the rear. He held up his hand towards Ben and spoke.
