The Flat Read online

  “I could ask you the same question,” Jillian says, drawing Kate into a brief hug. Part of her wonders if Kate is here for the same reason she is, to work the Red Ribbon Killer story. Another part of her thinks that unlikely; Kate’s credentials in the world of journalism have been reduced to cinders since she published that dreadful story about Simon Coates.

  Maybe Kate is in Whitby because she’s hiding from the press. There are sure to be reporters trying to get her reaction to the arrest of Stella Coates. Well if she’s here trying to escape the papers, she’s in the wrong place. The Red Ribbon Killer has brought every journalist and wannabe from all over the country to the little seaside town.

  “I live here now,” Kate says, blowing Jillan’s theory out of the water.

  “Oh, how lovely,” she says, trying to hide her disappointment that Kate isn’t on the run after all. She might have been able to get an exclusive interview out of it. “A bit of a change from Manchester.”

  Kate nods. “And I’m working for a publisher now.”

  “Nice. Listen, do you want to grab a drink? My photographer is gorging his face on fish and chips at the moment so I’m free for an hour or so.”

  “Sounds good but unfortunately, I can’t. I’m just waiting for my friend. She’s getting some fish for her cat.”

  “Oh, maybe another time then.” She was going to try to get a few drinks into Kate and broach the subject of Stella Coates, ask a few innocent questions that sound like friendly concern. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway; Kate will see past any thinly-veiled attempt to get information from her. She’s worked the crime beat far too long to be taken in by such tactics.

  And the friendly concern thing wouldn’t work either. They’ve crossed paths a few times during their careers but they’re hardly busom buddies.

  “Well you’ve got my number,” Jillian says airily. “Call me if you fancy catching up sometime.”

  “Will do,” Kate says, offering her a friendly smile. Jillian tries to decipher its true meaning but can’t. Maybe Kate is just being friendly. Not everyone is disingenuous.

  She turns away from her old acquaintance and looks for Pete. He’s leaning against the iron railing that borders the harbour, watching the boats as he eats his fish and chips from a cardboard box.

  “Give me one of those,” Jillian says, taking a chip from the box and popping it into her mouth. She regrets it almost immediately. The chip is so hot she has to open her mouth so the cold air can cool it on her tongue.

  “Hey, get your own.” He turns away, using his substantial body to block her from his food.

  “Calm down, Pete, it’s only a chip for God’s sake.”

  She taps him on the shoulder so he’ll turn to face her. He doesn’t and continues eating with his back towards her.

  “Pete, look who I’ve just seen.”

  He turns his head to look at her over his shoulder.

  “Over there,” Jillian says. “Outside the antiques shop.”

  He looks across the street and frowns. “Who’s that?”

  “That is Kate Lumley. She used to be a reporter until she falsely accused someone of murdering his own son.”

  “Oh, her.”

  “Yes, her. Now get a couple of shots of her for me.”

  He looks at the camera hanging from his neck and at the box of chips in his hands.

  “I’ll hold those for you,” she offers.

  He looks at her suspiciously. “You can hold them but don’t have any, okay?”

  “Fine. I’m on a diet anyway.”

  Handing her the chips, he takes the lens cap off his Canon and starts snapping pictures of Kate.

  “What’s she doing here?” he asks, adjusting his zoom lens. “I thought she got kicked off that paper she was working for.”

  “She told me she’s just living here but I can’t believe she’s in the middle of serial killer territory and not investigating what’s going on. That’s not the Kate Lumley I know.”

  “Maybe she’s changed.” He finishes taking the photos and puts the lens cap back on his camera.

  “Nobody changes that much,” she says, taking another chip from the box and popping it into her mouth.

  Chapter 11

  When Ivy and I get back to Northmoor House at half past four, the roads are pitch black and I can see a few flakes of snow fluttering in the headlight beams. We spent most of the afternoon in a coffee shop and then visited the fishmongers where Ivy got a fresh piece of cod for her cat. She seems exhausted by the excursion and she’s looking forward to getting back to Winston but I think she enjoyed herself.

  The most welcome sight when I pull into the parking area is the lit windows in Northmoor House. “The power’s back on,” I tell Ivy.

  She gives me a weary smile.

  I help her inside and say goodbye to her at her door. As she goes into her flat, I hear her say, “Winston, I’ve got a treat for you.” Then the cat lets out a long meow, either in appreciation of the fresh fish or in anger at being left alone for a while.

  I go up to my flat and take off my jacket and hat, throwing them onto the sofa before sitting at my desk and switching the computer on. I might as well get back a couple of the hours I lost when the power died.

  As I skim over the sections of The Secrets of Falcon House I was reading before I was interrupted, I reach for my legal pad and pen. My hand falls on the pad but the pen isn’t there. I look over at the pad. The pen is gone.

  Frowning, I push my chair back and check the floor under the desk. It isn’t there either.

  “It can’t just disappear,” I tell myself, scanning the floor all around the desk. “It has to be here somewhere.” But there’s no pen to be seen.

  The pen itself is nothing special—just a black ballpoint from a pack of twelve I got at the supermarket—but I need to know if it’s here or not.

  Because if not, someone has taken it.

  Don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe you took it into the kitchen when you made a drink and left it there.

  But when I check, the pen isn’t in there either. Nor is it in the bathroom or living room.

  Has someone been in here?

  I inspect each room, looking for signs that anything has been disturbed. But unlike Annie Wilkes in Misery, I don’t have an ornamental ceramic penguin that always faces due south. If someone came in here and moved stuff around, I probably wouldn’t know about it just from the position of the knick-knacks in the flat.

  I do a quick inventory of our possessions, trying to remember exactly how the flat looked when I left it earlier. Nothing else seems to be missing. Just the pen.

  I tell myself I’m overreacting; who’d break into the flat just to take a cheap pen? It doesn’t make sense. The pen has to be somewhere in here; I just can’t find it. But a second search on and around the desk reveals nothing. The pen has vanished.

  I go to the front door and check the lock. It’s intact and there are no marks on the doorframe indicating forced entry.

  You knew there wouldn’t be. The person you suspect has a key. And he probably saw you leave with Ivy. He had ample time to let himself in and wander around.

  But why take the pen?

  The answer hits me in an instant. As a trophy.

  Rob must have let himself into the flat and, while he was here, decided to take something personal to me. The pen itself has no value—it’s just a cheap ballpoint out of a supermarket packet—but the fact that I was using it makes it a personal item.

  He wants something that I’ve touched. That I’ve been handling.

  The thought sickens me. I don’t know what to do. I want to go down to his flat and face him, demand that he gives me my pen back and then maybe call the police. He can’t just let himself into my home. It’s trespassing.

  But he’ll simply deny it. Even if the pen is in his flat, I couldn’t prove it’s mine; there must be a million pens identical to that one. Is that why he took that particular object?

  If he’d ta
ken one of the personal items we own—like one of the framed photographs of Greg and me or the porcelain dolphin I bought during a holiday in Greece—it could be traced back to me if discovered.

  The pen, however, can’t. No one could prove that’s my pen, unless they fingerprinted it and checked for my prints, and what police force would fingerprint a cheap old ballpoint pen? Even the presence of my prints wouldn’t mean anything; Rob could say it’s the pen I signed the lease with so of course my prints are on it.

  So there’s no point going down there and having it out with Rob. He might even get pleasure out of my frustration. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

  I close the flat door and wonder what I can do if not confront him directly. I’m an investigative journalist, after all, so I’ll do what I do best: investigate. Ivy seems to think Rob is “dodgy” and considering my missing pen, I have to agree. He’s been in the flat while I wasn’t here. If he’d slipped and out without touching anything, I’d have been none the wiser but he made a mistake by taking a trophy. Now I’m onto him. What else has he been up to?

  I take my seat at the desk and begin typing into the search engine. Maybe I can get a bit of background information on Rob North. After an hour of digging, I haven’t come up with much beyond an old photo that someone in Rob’s class at school has posted on Facebook. A number of students are sitting on a row of desks posing and in the background, Rob is walking by and looking at the camera as if surprised to find himself part of the photo. He looks about twelve years old but he already has the large scar on his head, so the accident Ivy referred to must have happened when he was no more than a child.

  Whereas most of the people in the picture have been tagged, Rob’s name is simply listed, suggesting he doesn’t have a Facebook account. It’s going to be difficult to track his digital footprint if he doesn’t use social media or uses a pseudonym.

  I decide to change tack and type in Fred and Wanda’s names, along with the qualifier “Spain.” I get some hits. It seems Rob’s parents aren’t quite as camera shy as their son. They at least have a Facebook page. It only shows me a few pictures because I’m not on their friends list but the few I can see show a couple in their late fifties sitting by a pool in the sun.

  Fred has scars on his arms and shoulders, starkly contrasted against his tanned skin. Wanda is wearing a long-sleeved kaftan and a wide-brimmed hat and I wonder if she has similar scarring to her husband and son.

  Scars aside, the Internet doesn’t give me any more information on Rob North or his parents. I imagine he would have had a tough childhood. Children can be cruel when someone stands out in some way and I guess that the scar across his head would have made Rob an easy target for schoolyard bullies.

  Is that why he uses a pseudonym on the Net? I can’t imagine that he has no online presence.

  Deciding that an Internet search isn’t going to give me any easy answers, I turn my attention to the Red Ribbon Killer. Why had the police been around here asking questions when the first woman went missing? I can understand them making house to house inquiries in town but Northmoor House is virtually in the middle of nowhere. They would have had to make a special journey to come here. Why did they think it worth their time to do so?

  I type in Red Ribbon Killer and also Snow Killer, since the killer is known by both names. A wealth of information appears on the screen, so much I barely know where to start.

  To narrow the results, I add the search term “first victim.” A photograph of a young blonde woman appears on the right of the screen. She’s smiling at the camera in what appears to be a professional photography studio. Her hair looks like she just came from a salon and her makeup is immaculate. This picture was taken for a special occasion, at a happy time during this young woman’s life. Now it bears the legend: Stephanie Wilmot, first victim of the Snow Killer.

  I click a couple of links and piece together Stephanie’s story.

  According to the news and police reports, Stephanie Wilmot was driving from York, where she’d been visiting a friend, to her home in Westerdale, a village on the moors. She never arrived. Her husband, who’d been waiting expectantly for Stephanie’s return along with their three-year-old daughter, had finally called the police. Because a snowstorm had descended upon the moors, he was worried that his wife had become stuck somewhere between York and Westerdale.

  The police found Stephanie’s car five miles from her house. It had skidded into a ditch by the side of the road. Stephanie wasn’t inside. Fearing she’d wandered off into the storm, the police began a frantic search of the area but, because of the weather, had to call it off after a couple of hours. There were no tracks around Stephanie’s car to indicate which way she’d gone because fresh snowfall had obscured everything.

  Her body was found four days later—on Christmas Eve—floating in a half-frozen pond twenty miles away from where her car had been found. Stephanie had drowned in the pond. The police might have concluded that she’d wandered onto the ice and fallen through except for the fact that a red ribbon had been tied into her hair. According to her husband, Stephanie owned no such ribbon nor had she been wearing one when she left her friend’s house. This small detail was enough for the officer in charge of the case—Detective Inspector Danica Summers—to open a murder investigation.

  I bring up a map of Whitby and the surrounding area. I find Westerdale in the middle of the moors. It’s miles away from Whitby and Northmoor House. So why would the police come here asking questions?

  Hitting the images button, I find more pictures of Stephanie Wilmot, as well as pictures of two women who fell victim to the Snow Killer in the winter of 2018, Nicola Patterson and Angela Rayburn. There’s a definite look shared by the three ladies; long blonde hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones. No wonder Nia told me to be careful; I fit the killer’s “type” exactly.

  I also find photos of the areas of the moors where the bodies were found and a picture taken this morning of the scene where Amy Donovan was found. This photograph, taken by a journalist, shows the white tent Ivy and I saw when we drove into town. A number of police officers are standing around the tent and guarding the crime scene tape. The journalist has focused on a fair-haired woman in a long coat and dark blue scarf. She’s walking away from the tent with her hands in her pockets, coming towards the crime scene tape. I click on the photo and am taken to the article it’s part of, an article in the Whitby Gazette. Beneath the photo are the words DI Danica Summers, head of the investigation into the Snow Killer murders.

  Had this woman been to Northmoor House asking questions two years ago?

  I’m still pondering this when I hear a key in the front door. I swivel around in my chair, wondering for a moment if Rob North is going to walk through the door.

  It swings open and Greg steps into the flat. He sees me at the desk and waves. “Hard at work?”

  I close the websites. After what happened with Simon Coates, I don’t want Greg thinking I’m sticking my nose into things that don’t concern me. “I’m done. How was work?”

  “Great. Fancy going out for dinner?”

  “Okay,” I say, “What’s the occasion?”

  “My boss told me today that he likes to get to know all his new members of staff and their families so he’s invited us to go out for dinner with him and his wife Marcia.”

  “Sounds good. So are we going to a restaurant in Middlesbrough?”

  Greg shakes his head. “They’re coming here. To Whitby. Terry says he knows the owner of a seafood restaurant in town. The Captain’s Table. We’re going to meet them there at eight.”

  I check the time on my phone. It’s almost half past six. Barely time to have a bath and get ready.

  Greg goes into the kitchen and I hear him curse.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The bloody ceiling’s leaking again! I thought Rob had fixed it.”

  I go in there and see drips coming from the same place on the ceiling, dropping into the sink at a slow but steady rhyt
hm.

  “I don’t understand. It’s hardly even snowing. There’s just a few flakes in the air.” Greg says. “There must be a burst pipe up there or something.” He sighs. “I’ll go down and tell Rob.”

  “We can mention it to Rob on our way out,” I suggest. At least if Rob sorts it while we’re at dinner with Greg’s boss, I won’t have to listen him stomping around over our ceiling.

  “Fine,” Greg says. “But he’d better fix it properly this time or I’m going to complain to the owners.”

  I head to the bathroom. As I open the door, Greg says, “They live in Spain don’t they?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I say, remembering the pictures of the scarred couple by the pool.

  “That’s the trouble,” Greg says. “They’re so far away, this place is out of sight, out of mind. Rob probably thinks he can do what he wants and his parents will never find out. Well, he forgets that their address is on the lease. I’ll be writing them a strongly-worded letter if this leak isn’t fixed.”

  I smile. Greg’s fighting spirit is present and correct.

  I run a hot bath, scented with peach and mango bubbles, and climb in, As I lie there looking up at the ceiling, I’m glad we decided to wait before telling Rob about the leak. It might sound crazy but I wouldn’t be able to lie here naked while he walks over the ceiling just above my head. I’d feel like his eyes were able to see me through the attic floor.

  No matter how crazy that thought is, I sink lower in the tub and manoeuvre the bubbles so they completely cover my body.

  Chapter 12

  Dani gets home at half past six. As she parks the Land Rover on the drive outside her cottage, she’s glad the snow is light tonight. Heavy snow seems to trigger the killer for some reason and the last thing she needs right now is another missing woman. She’d like Amy Donovan to be the last victim this killer gets, wants to catch him before he strikes again. But she needs time to do that and at the moment she has no leads. It’s like the bastard just appears and disappears with the snow.