Profile k, p.10
Profile K, page 10
Ruskin looked at her, a long stare, but gentle. ‘I can only tell you what will soon be announced. Chloe’s cause of death was failure of heart function caused by blood loss.’
Midnight’s hand flew to her mouth. It was a few seconds before she could speak. ‘He stabbed her to death?’
‘Not exactly. There was a scalpel-type blade involved, multiple injuries, but it wasn’t a … normal type of attack. This man is very dangerous. Uniquely dangerous, I think.’
‘I see,’ Midnight said. ‘Got it.’ A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead.
‘Are you okay? I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘It’s just the thought of it,’ she blurted. ‘With my sister here, and unable to leave if anything happened. This was within walking distance. I’m not sure I’d be able to protect her.’
‘Miss Jones, I can assure you, events like this are incredibly rare. If you’re careful and take normal precautions, you’re perfectly safe in this part of London. Like you said, it’ll probably turn out to be someone Chloe came into contact with who took an interest in her. I’m going to leave you to get some rest. Here’s my card.’ He put it on the table. ‘Call or email if you remember anything.’
‘I will.’
He saw himself to the door. Midnight locked it behind him, shaking her head. How had she not managed to do more? She’d had a police officer in her flat, and still not talked about her suspicions.
‘Midnight?’ Dawn called, all the consonants mushed into the vowels. Her own special construction of the name.
‘Hey, what are you doing awake? It’s sleepy time, you.’ Midnight walked into her sister’s room.
‘Is Daddy home? Mummy?’
Dawn didn’t ask about them very often, but when she did it was a knife in Midnight’s heart.
‘No, honey. No Mummy or Daddy. We’re still having our special time without them, remember? Just you and me, together forever.’
Her sister gave a huge grin and settled back down on her pillow.
‘You not leave?’ she asked.
Midnight’s stomach hardened and she fought back tears. It was the first time Dawn had put it all together, or at least the first time she’d put it into words.
‘Not ever. I’m going to be with you every single day. You never have to worry. But I’ll be grumpy if I’m tired tomorrow, so we should get some sleep, okay?’ She kissed her sister on the forehead and smoothed her hair.
‘Love you,’ Dawn murmured softly.
‘I love you too, sis. Always.’
She closed Dawn’s door, went back to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of single malt whisky from the bottle she’d hidden at the back of a cupboard the Christmas before.
Dawn had to come first. She needed to set her suspicions aside. Put her paranoia to bed. She knew nothing. What she couldn’t do, under any circumstances, was risk her job. Necto were clear about their position, and confidentiality was key.
‘Not my problem,’ Midnight said aloud, tipping the contents of her glass down in one go. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
Sleep took its time letting her in.
Chapter 14
By the time Midnight turned eight years old, their parents had managed to enrol Dawn in a day centre. The difference in their mother had been remarkable.
She’d started wearing make-up again and styling her hair each morning. There were lunches with friends, and shopping trips. She appeared years younger, and her father’s smile had returned as a result. Dawn was doing okay too, forming connections, and being kept interested in life. There were days out to petting zoos, and physical therapy made into games. Toys were provided that helped with dexterity, and play kitchens and bathrooms had been built to help students practise the basics. Their mother would pick Midnight up from school, then they would drive to Dawn’s educational unit to collect her. At home, Midnight would find ever more imaginative ways to keep Dawn entertained while she got her homework done. And every evening, she tucked Dawn into bed in their shared room, even though she could have moved into one of her own, and she never missed reading her a bedtime story.
One Saturday shortly after their fifteenth birthday – marked by a sky so blue that Midnight had woken up and simply stared out of the window for a good thirty minutes – their parents had taken them to the beach. They hadn’t tried that since they were four years old when Dawn had scooped up a handful of sand, eaten it, and thrown up for hours. But that day, they made it before the roads got clogged and the crowds arrived. A handful of dog walkers were already there, but otherwise they had the place to themselves. Dawn sat on a blanket and stared at the ocean. She didn’t fiddle or get bored. She just watched the waves whooshing in then fizzing as they rolled back out across the pebbles. She followed the swooping gulls with her eyes and breathed the salty air. It was the calmest Midnight had ever seen her.
They spent three hours on the beach, and in that time not one passer-by could have noticed the difference between them. Midnight leaned over and rested her head on Dawn’s shoulder, and for the briefest of moments her sister had looked down at her and smiled gently, not like the child who was inhabiting her brain, but like the sister she would have been, aged fifteen. All Midnight did for those minutes and hours was watch her, drinking it in, trying to cram the memory into her brain.
Then they’d climbed back into the car because her mother had an appointment at the salon later in the afternoon, and Midnight remembered that she’d been asked over to a friend’s house. On any other day she wouldn’t have even considered it, but Dawn had been so calm and happy that perhaps for once she could risk leaving her parents to look after her twin for the evening.
‘Mum, Dad, Elodie is having a few people over tonight, and they’ve invited me. I can walk there if you don’t mind picking me up. It should be finished by—’
‘We’re going out,’ her mother said. ‘We can’t change our plans now. Why didn’t you mention it earlier? Seriously, Midnight, you’ve got to get more organised. You can’t just expect us to drop everything because you forgot to give us notice.’
Her father said nothing. That was his way. He chose neither one side nor the other, which meant, in fact, that he always sided with their mother.
‘I never go out,’ Midnight said. She kept her voice calm. No point giving her mother ammunition in the form of accusing her of rudeness. ‘I haven’t been out this school year. Not at all. I stay at home with Dawn every evening.’
‘Don’t say it like that’s a chore! Your sister’s right next to you.’ Dawn was looking at the shells they’d picked up off the beach and was perfectly happy.
‘Of course it’s not a chore!’ Midnight cried. ‘But I spend every evening with Dawn, and all my time at weekends. I should be able to go out sometimes. You’re out every single weekend, and it’s not fair. I should be able to do other things too.’
‘You’re so ungrateful! You go off every day to your nice school, where you’re doing very well in classes, with a bright future ahead of you, and your sister has nothing. Nothing! You should be thinking about her, not yourself.’
Midnight wanted to snap back. She wanted to tell them how much she did, compared to what they did. She wanted to remind her mother how much wine she used to drink before they found a day centre for Dawn. But she didn’t. She didn’t because she already knew it wouldn’t change a thing. And because she already felt guilty, every single day, for the way her life had worked out compared to Dawn’s.
Instead, she stared out of the window and watched the world go by, reaching out to hold Dawn’s hand. She would make the world a better place, Midnight decided. She would take the gift of a healthy, fully functioning brain, and use it to build a better future. Dawn would be happy and safe. They would live in a community where the people around them were happy and safe too. She would make her parents see that she’d used every day of her education purposefully. And she would care for people, the way her parents seemed not to care about anyone but themselves. She would be a force for good in the world. Most importantly, she was going to make damned sure that she never, ever, turned out like her parents.
Chapter 15
The Applicant
He lay in bed trying desperately to sleep but he had an itch, and it was proving increasingly difficult not to scratch it. His new job was demanding but interesting, and he’d thought he would be ready to rest. But here he was, thinking about finding a woman. Deciding how he would choose her. Cross-referencing mentally with his diary and figuring out when he’d have time to fit in all the preparation.
The police were looking for him now, but there had been no knock at his door and there was no Photofit picture in the newspapers, no CCTV footage being played on the news cycle. Did they have his DNA? Probably. There were disconcerting blanks in his memory of the time he’d spent with Chloe, of which he had no recollection, and God only knew what he’d done. His gloves, new clothes and hat wouldn’t have kept every stray skin cell off her body, but then there had been all that blood – a million tiny waterfalls by the end – and most of what would have been on her body would have been washed into her duvet or onto her carpet by the end. He knew forensic testing was impressive these days, but it didn’t seem likely that they’d managed to check every drop of her spilled blood for someone else’s DNA.
The problem was that replaying in his head what he’d done with Chloe just wasn’t fulfilling. Unlike so many of the serial killers he’d read about, for him, remembering the kill was a flatline, less exciting every time he thought about it. With every hour that passed, the excitement faded until all that was left was a step-by-step guide to murder.
It was 3.47 a.m. and no amount of turning over his pillow was helping. He wondered who else was awake, and what they were thinking about. Chloe Martin’s sister was, for sure, and he was pretty certain he knew what she was thinking about. He’d seen her on a news clip, accompanied by police officers, as they made an appeal for witnesses. She was good-looking, and he could see a resemblance to her sister, but she wasn’t exactly what he wanted.
What about Midnight J? The person profiling him had been on his mind. It had been a risk, taking the test, but of course at that stage, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Now all that had changed, and someone out there might just have the skills and insight to see him for what he was about to become. He pulled his mobile from its charging cable and looked up Midnight as a surname. It was most common, he found, in one area of Iran and what amounted to a handful of people in Canada. Midnight as a first name, though, was becoming increasingly popular for both boys and girls. He thought about the message from Necto, sent to give him a hint of a personal link without imparting any real information. Surely they wouldn’t have revealed the surname of a staff member? Midnight J had to be the equivalent of Jenny B or Simon T. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but familiar enough to make a big company seem like a close friend.
He tried a couple of different social media sites, looking for anyone called Midnight living in London, with a surname that started with J. To begin with he found absolutely nothing, but several pages into his search he hit gold. King’s College London had published a list of students graduating from their master’s courses seven years earlier, among them, one Midnight Jones who had completed her MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience.
Perfect for Necto, he thought. Perfect for profiling. Worrying for him. Midnight Jones wasn’t just some grunt pressing a few buttons. She understood the human brain. Perhaps she even understood his brain. His stomach dropped with anxiety as his pulse rose with excitement. Midnight Jones was a potential threat, but he wondered if she was also something more magical. Had she known what he was going to do before he even did it? Did she know what he was planning to do next? And wasn’t that, if he told the whole, naked truth, why he’d taken the test in the first place – because after all the years of hiding and conforming, it felt liberating to have the possibility of being seen?
He found Necto’s website, knowing he shouldn’t, and pressed the ‘Contact Us’ icon. A box flashed up, into which he typed the new email address he’d registered and the subject line, ‘Please help me find my old friend’. He was breathing more heavily as he typed and could hear his blood pulsing in his ears.
Hello, I do hope you can help me. I did a master’s course at King’s but lost contact with a friend who was studying psychology with me. Her name is Midnight Jones, and a mutual contact said he thought she was now working at Necto in the profiling department. Please could you pass this on to her? My email address is above if she wants to write back.
Many thanks for your kind assistance,
Gemini D St John.
Don’t do it, he thought. This is not a game. It’s an unnecessary risk.
He clicked send.
Stupid, stupid boy, his mother said inside his head. Idiot. Deviant.
He told her to shut up, something he’d never have the courage to do in real life.
Now he couldn’t sleep at all. Midnight Jones was not just a potential irritation, she was a genuine threat. Every time he thought about something else, there she was, hovering in the periphery of his mind. An irritating fly.
Flies, of course, needed squashing. They were dirty nuisances who kept coming at you until you dealt with them.
He stretched and clicked each knuckle individually. He didn’t want to think about Midnight Jones any more. Just her name made him feel nervous. Better to find something to take his mind off her.
He concentrated instead on a mental picture of the girl who worked at a nearby supermarket. He’d thought about the things he could do with her a few times before, and always dismissed the notion. It was risky in a place he’d visited thirty, maybe forty times. Preliminary research had returned a couple of interesting statistics. The average British person would spend eight and a half months of their life in a supermarket. On average, an adult went to a supermarket three times a week. At least he only went every five days, so he wouldn’t be their most regular customer.
He hadn’t worn gloves when he’d started going there, so his DNA would be on some baskets and a few tins of food he’d touched then put back. They’d be able to compare it with the biological evidence he’d left at Chloe’s. All of which was ridiculous. He lived in London. Where else in the UK would you find such busy supermarkets? If he stopped going now, there wouldn’t be any recent CCTV of him in the shop. He didn’t need to go inside to see her. She worked the tills, and the glass frontage provided an exquisite, brightly lit fishbowl for him to watch her. Across the road was a coffee shop where he could busy himself at his laptop to view her unnoticed. Not that he had any solid plans, but the first Saturday he’d noticed her, he’d found it hard to tear himself away.
Her name was Mae. She had black hair, dark, shining eyes, and flawless skin. She’d run his purchases through the till with a grace he’d found hypnotic. Mae was most often on till number 3, and at weekends, her shift ended at 10 p.m. when the supermarket closed. The coffee shop had been shut by then, but he’d passed the time between a bus shelter, a cemetery and the steps of the local library, drinking her in.
That had been before Chloe. Before the inspiration for Chloe, even.
Mae lived in one of Clapham’s poorer areas. There weren’t many of those left, but it worked for him. The rich were prone to calling the police at the drop of a hat, in a huff of how-dare-they and not-in-my-neighbourhood pomposity. Go outside and actually deal with a problem? Absolutely not. But a phone call from a suitably riled member of the upper crust was to be avoided. Mae’s neighbours were more likely to assume a drug deal had gone wrong and come to scavenge from the remains.
Every muscle in his body was taut. Throwing back the bedclothes, he made his way to the shower. If he was lucky, there would still be a little hot water left in the tank.
It turned out the water was tepid which was better than freezing. His excitement had manifested itself bodily. He tried to work it out. Screwed his eyes shut trying to imagine the sounds Chloe had made, and the way her body had felt through his latex gloves. Nothing.
‘Fuck it!’ he screamed, punching a crack in a tile that left a line like a mocking smile in front of him. ‘Fuck you!’ He punched the tile again. That wiped the smirk off its face. Again and again and again. Crumbling shards fell onto his wet, cold feet, and blood dripped onto the whole sorry mess. He couldn’t help but bend down to capture it on his fingertips before it disappeared into the waste pipe, concentrating on the silken texture of the liquid. It both soothed and invigorated him.
He dried off and stared in the mirror. Sunday night he would follow Mae home again. Not to do anything. He might never do anything. It was too much of a risk after Chloe, and if Jessica ever found out, there was no chance at all for their happy ending.
But he could go and see. Double-check Mae’s route home. Finesse the logistics. He liked that. He had a very mathematical mind.
Perhaps that would be enough, the planning and double-checking. If he could only get Jessica to fall in love with him, he was sure he wouldn’t hurt any woman, ever again.
His knuckles were throbbing. He would have to clean the wound out and bind it up. There would be the inevitable questions from his mother. He’d heard those questions before, of course, when there had been other events, other injuries. The police had been round to his parents’ address, but they’d never been able to prove anything, and his father was highly regarded in the community, which had helped.
He’d denied everything when questioned by his mother and father, but they’d given him that look that only parents can give. That long, silent appraisal. He wondered if all parents were that knowing, or if it was only his.
Funny thing, they’d never asked him directly if he’d hurt anyone. It was almost as if they didn’t want to know.
