From Inside the House

Chapter One

He switched off the kitchen light. The room disappeared. The moon cast tendrils of soft light through gaps in the trees outside to lie across the slate countertops and appliances. The LED display on the oven showing the time was the only source of unnatural light: a tiny beacon in the dark. He turned and padded out into the hallway, the wooden floorboards chilly under his bare feet.

The house was still, apart from the creaks made by a building settling for the night. He could just about hear the wind outside, its invisible fingers searching through the neighbourhood, and felt the welcome feeling of security that came with knowing the elements could not get in, that the house would protect him.

Without turning on the hallway lights, he checked that the chain was in its slot on the front door and that the bottom lock was engaged. The action was habitual, done every night. He barely noticed he had done it. With a yawn he turned and started up the stairs, glad of the change in temperature from wood to carpet, the thick threads that poked up between his toes.

The bathroom light made him squint; his eyes were not prepared for the brightness. The bulb was a daylight type, to allow one to see one’s reflection better, but at night it was harsh and unforgiving. He frowned at his tired face in the mirror above the sink, then grabbed his toothbrush, loaded it up and started brushing. The scratching of the bristles against his teeth seemed awfully loud, and he pushed the door shut. He didn’t want to wake Anna. That never went well. She was the proverbial sleeping bear that should never be poked, and he didn’t have the energy for another argument. There had been enough arguing already that evening.

He had come home late again – not entirely deliberately, although if he were honest with himself he knew he hadn’t exactly rushed to get back. They were trying for a baby. The problem was, he didn’t want one. At least, he didn’t think he did. It didn’t feel quite right. He loved his wife – but a child? The thought didn’t sit well. Naturally, he had not voiced this to her beyond signs of mild doubt. The fact that he had got home late, too tired for them to have sex, had not gone down well at all. After a tense dinner and a back-and-forth sniping session largely revolving around his lack of commitment to the cause she had stormed off upstairs and he had let her, feeling like a shit.

He jumped when the bathroom window rattled next to him, whipped by the wind outside. It seemed to be getting stronger. A vague recollection of a weather warning on the morning news seeped into his tired brain. Another thing for her to complain about. Why haven’t you fixed the window? I’ve asked three times!

Again he felt guilty. It was easy to paint his wife as a nagging, irritating drain, yet he knew that wasn’t really true. She was funny, kind, fiercely loyal. Was it enough, though? He wasn’t certain any more, and he had no doubt that a baby would not fix that. He felt like a total bastard, not sure what do with his feelings beyond weak attempts to bottle them up.

He spat out the toothpaste, rinsed the sink and checked the window, just to be sure. It was locked. A little loose, but it would hold. The weather wasn’t that bad.

As he stepped out onto the landing, flicking the bathroom light off behind him, he stopped, his gaze fixed on their bedroom door. Would she still be awake? Lying in bed reading, the heat of her anger vibrating across the room at him? He glanced at the spare bedroom, considered it for a moment before disregarding the thought. That would only make things worse.

From downstairs came a click, clear and distinct.

Still motionless, he pricked his ears, waiting. He couldn’t place what it was, but the sound did not come again. He dismissed it. Probably another bloody window needing repairs. Lucky me.

Rubbing his eyes, he realised how exhausted he was. He’d delayed coming to bed so he could avoid another argument. He pushed open the bedroom door and let out a hushed sigh of relief when he saw that his wife was fast asleep. As quietly as he could, he undressed and slipped under the covers beside her. She didn’t stir. He felt a tension in his shoulders release – he hadn’t known it was there to begin with – and let sleep take him.

He woke with a start when something pressed down on his mouth – firm, rough. He felt groggy. As he tried to take a breath, he struggled. A scream caught in his throat as he locked eyes with the masked man standing over him. The whites of his eyes practically glowed in the dark, wind-battered house.

Chapter Two

‘D o I even want to see?’ Detective Inspector Daniel Graves asked, his eyebrows raised, as he registered the revulsion that was bubbling across the face of the sergeant standing next to the front door. The man shook his head. Daniel wished he had the option to say ‘Sod it’ and leave. Wet strands of hair stuck to the sergeant’s forehead from the recent downpour and he looked utterly miserable, as if he wanted to be literally anywhere else.

Daniel steeled himself as he stepped into the house. The October cold whipped in forcefully behind him, like a boisterous child trying to push past a parent. His trench coat fluttered and he pulled it closer. Someone had once told him that London weather was nicer than up north, that it saw more sun and was usually a few degrees warmer, even in winter. But the borough of Camberwell begged to differ; Daniel could swear he had seen just as much sunshine before he moved down south. Inside the house was just as chilly and grey, as though the violence that had occurred here had bleached out all colour and warmth.

This was the worst part of his job: visiting violent crime scenes. He dreaded it. He had worked hard over the last year not to let the death he encountered every day in his job get under his skin, but he knew he would always find it difficult. He followed the sound of the commotion upstairs, to be greeted on the landing by Stephanie Mitchum. Severe as ever, her hair pulled in a tight ponytail, the forensic anthropologist gave him a formal smile and nod before starting to update him.

‘The victims have already been identified. The homeowners, Jane and Henry Alton.’

Daniel was not a fan of Stephanie Mitchum. He wished she had at least a modicum of warmth about her. Looking at dead bodies was chilling enough without the steely woman exacerbating the experience. When he had first met her, he had felt as though she had been judging him or looking down on him for some reason, as if he was a naughty child and she was the head teacher ready to give him detention. He thought he might have pissed her off somehow, unknowingly earned the cold treatment. It had not taken long to discover, however, that she was always like that. His work partner DI Charlie Palmer had confirmed as much. Daniel often wondered if he should say something about it to Stephanie, to make it easier to work with her, but so far he had chickened out. Now wasn’t the right time either. He brushed off the frost she emanated.

‘It’s definitely them? I heard that they were…’ He didn’t really want to say the word he was thinking of, as though verbalising it would make the situation worse.

‘Disfigured? Don’t beat about the bush, Graves; it serves no purpose. Yes, they are, but both bodies have been ID’d by the medical and dental records we have for them. I’ve no doubt they are the Altons.’

The smell of what lay beyond was starting to seep into Daniel’s nostrils. Gagging a little, he stepped forward.

‘I hope it’s been a while since you ate, Detective,’ Stephanie warned before stepping aside, her tone more condescending than caring. With a shiver, Daniel moved cautiously to the bedroom door and crossed the threshold. He didn’t want to see what waited in the room but knew it was necessary. Immediately he felt bile rise into the back of his throat, and swallowed to keep down the burning fluid and the two slices of toast he had eaten for breakfast. He pressed a coat sleeve over his mouth and took in the scene.

The bed was soaked with blood: deep shades of red where it was still damp, brown and muddy where the duvet had started to dry. On her back on top of the duvet lay Jane Alton, naked apart from a blood-stained bra and pants. Her throat had been slit, as had her wrists. Her face was a mess of bruises, cuts and torn flesh, to the point where her features were pretty much indistinguishable. It looked as though she had been hit multiple times. Her death had been brutal.

If it was possible, Daniel thought Henry Alton’s body was worse. The man had been crudely mounted to the wall above the bed with large metal nails in his hands, wrists and shoulders. His legs dangled over his wife’s head. His skin had started to discolour, with the blood collecting in his feet and lower legs. He too wore just underwear and, like his wife, his face had been smashed to a pulp, his features obliterated. Unlike Jane, his throat and wrists were intact. Unlike Jane, his heart had been cut out of his chest: the hole was ragged, lacking precision.

‘Jesus…’ Daniel muttered, allowing his gaze to fall to the floor, away from the gore in front of him. He had never seen anything like it.

‘I warned you,’ Stephanie said without any hint of sympathy. ‘One of the worst I’ve ever seen.’

One of? Daniel thought.

Despite her words, Stephanie’s expression remained calm. Daniel couldn’t help wondering how bad a murder scene would have to be to extract a more human reaction from her.

Eager to leave the room, Daniel stepped past the anthropologist and headed back downstairs, the smell of decay thankfully lessening slightly as he went. Stephanie followed and joined him in the cramped, but tidy, kitchen at the back of the ground floor. Daniel took a seat at the table and let out an exasperated sigh.

‘Are you okay?’ Stephanie asked, finally showing a possible shimmer of empathy. Daniel nodded, though he felt a little shaky. Everyone had trouble stomaching murder scenes – everyone apart from Stephanie Mitchum, anyway – but he did wonder if they affected him more than others. He didn’t know any other detectives who had had such an early introduction to blood and violence as he had; he had been forced to save his teenage sister from possible rape, still a teenager himself at the time. He knew that taking a life so many years ago would always stay with him, that it had impacted so much of his adult existence, including his career choice. The grim tableau he had just laid eyes on, however? That was something else entirely. He took a few deep breaths.

Thoughts of Jenny Cartwright flooded his brain, unasked. She had been killed – he had failed to save her – only a few months ago. He still had to get over her death. Her smile, her laughter, her bloodied heart cut out and left gift-wrapped in a box on his doorstep… After that, seeing another body lacking its heart was a lot to handle. Could the same person who had killed Jenny Cartwright have killed this couple? He shook off the notion. It was a coincidence, of course. Had to be. Just because her killer was still at large didn’t mean there was a connection. Nonetheless, his fingers pulled at his shirt collar, restless. He was sweating and was prepared to take his coat off, despite the cold of the house.

‘What can you tell me, then?’ he asked once his pulse settled down. Surprisingly, Stephanie seemed to be more patient than normal, and had been waiting quietly for him to say something.

‘Not too much, unfortunately. Both victims likely died of massive blood loss and trauma, but I imagine that you had already figured that out. What’s more interesting, if that’s the right word to use, is what the killers did before and after.’

‘Go on,’ Daniel said.

She was leaning against the door frame. Next to her, pinned to the fridge with a magnet advertising Thorpe Park, was a photograph of the now deceased Alton couple beaming at the camera, looking as if they didn’t have a care in the world. He looked away, keeping his gaze on Stephanie instead.

‘Both bodies show clear signs of being tortured first.’

‘Okay, I wasn’t expecting that. You’re sure?’

Stephanie nodded, her tight ponytail bobbing. ‘It looks like they were bound to the bed frame initially. We found traces of cheap rope fibres on the pillows and dotted around the room. Both show signs of friction burns around their wrists and ankles, and we found a thread that was likely from a sock in Jane Alton’s mouth, suggesting they were gagged. A sock with blood on it was on the floor – probably the same item.’

‘Presumably the intruders found that in the house. I wouldn’t have thought they would bring socks with them.’

‘It’s unlikely,’ Stephanie continued. ‘The victims were also both beaten around the face before death. Our blood spatter analyst was able to separate out patterns on the back wall of the room and bedding from various different injuries. The bigger sprays were caused by a slit throat and a heart being ripped out.’

Daniel grimaced.

‘I can’t imagine why their faces were beaten so much, though I would hazard a guess that it had nothing to do with concealing identities, since they left the teeth and fingerprints intact. And then, of course, the bodies were posed – quickly and messily, but the killer clearly made some effort. Whoever did this seems to have had…’ Stephanie paused.

‘Fun.’

Stephanie swallowed. The sheer brutality of the murders seemed to have rattled her.

‘Detective, this was a messy affair and extremely violent, but from what we’ve found so far the killer had no finesse. There was clearly no attempt to keep things tidy, to take time over the victims.’

‘I’m inclined to agree. It’s almost opportunistic. So what was the motive? Especially displaying the bodies in that way?’

‘That’s your remit, I’m afraid, Graves.’

They both fell silent, expelling matching sighs. Daniel stood up. ‘I’d better call DI Palmer.’ Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he made his way down the hall and out the front door, stopping when he reached the street. The fresh air felt good, but didn’t rid of him of his unease. He glanced back at the house, looking up towards the bedroom window. The killings were gruesome, extreme and carried out with relish. Whoever had murdered the Altons was not to be messed with … and Daniel had no doubt in his mind that there would be more to come.

Chapter Three

Outside, the weather had taken a horrible turn again. Rain pelted the windows that ran along the side of the office. The weather reflected Daniel’s mindset. Gloomy and overcast.

Waiting for his partner DI Charlie Palmer as well as Superintendent Peter Hobbs, Daniel had been sifting through some of his emails when his mind got distracted. Before he knew it he was on Facebook, Jenny Cartwright’s memorial page filling his computer screen. Her profile photo showed the smiley redhead – a woman he had barely got to know before she was murdered. A woman whose death he believed he was responsible for.

‘You really need to stop doing that,’ a voice said into his ear. Daniel jumped before spinning around to see Charlie Palmer perching on the edge of the desk behind him, his arms folded over his broad chest, a gentle smile curling the corners of his mouth. The man looked far too pleased with himself for provoking a reaction in Daniel.

‘You really need to stop doing that! You scared the hell out of me!’ Daniel gasped, his breathing ragged as he tried to recover, one hand to his heart.

Charlie shrugged before nodding at the screen, his smirk fading. ‘I’m serious, mate. It’s not healthy.’

Daniel went to defend himself but his partner cut him off. ‘I’m not kidding. It wasn’t your fault, and you couldn’t have known that would happen. You need to move on.’ His last words pricked under Daniel’s skin.

‘Move on?’ Daniel said. ‘Some bastard killed her just to get at me and you think I can move on?’

‘You know what I mean,’ Charlie answered, his tone already softer. They both knew what a touchy subject it was.

Daniel swivelled back around in his chair, closed Facebook and sank his head into his hands. He took a slow breath, felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘It’s okay, Dan, honestly, but just… try to give yourself a break, right? We’ve not found anything on it. We have no leads. And you know as well as I do, we looked at it from every angle we could think of. For now, we just have to accept it. She’s gone and there’s nothing we can currently do about it. I know it’s shit, but you have to try and get past it. Now, come on. I saw Hobbs come in. We need to go catch up about this new sicko on the block.’

Daniel heard Charlie heading off across the office behind him but did not follow immediately, giving himself a minute to calm down.

He knew Charlie was right, technically. Daniel couldn’t have stopped Jenny from being murdered because he could never have anticipated it. It had come out of the blue. She had been cut down by a vindictive, brutal person, apparently treated as collateral damage in the killer’s bid for revenge against Daniel for another woman being killed. It didn’t seem to matter that the other woman had been a psychotic killer and had murdered at least three people. Daniel had saved Jenny’s life, stopped her becoming victim number four, but she had been taken anyway in a cruel act of revenge. Jenny Cartwright had done nothing to deserve such a horrible end to her life. There had been undeniable chemistry between Jenny and Daniel. He thought that perhaps they could have become something. That just added to the sting.

Neither logic nor reason helped to prevent the guilt that Daniel felt, however: the all-too-frequent nightmares, the chilling moments when he glimpsed someone and could swear it was Jenny, until he got a better look. It had only been three months. He also knew that they had been as thorough as they could be on the case, given the available resources. A crack team of detectives, sergeants, CSIs and more had tried to find anything – anything at all – that would point to who had killed Jenny Cartwright, but they had turned up nothing. They hadn’t even found the rest of her body. The police knew that the connection had to be to the case Jenny had given them information on, but that knowledge didn’t help. Daniel was left with the sickening belief that Jenny was dead simply because someone out there was pissed off at him and wanted to get their own back. And the message that had been sent in the box with the heart – Jenny’s heart – had made that pretty clear.

You took something of mine, Graves, so I took something of yours. An eye for an eye, so to speak. And guess what? She was just the start.

Game on.

He had to assume that whoever had killed Jenny had not finished their sick game. His feeling of helplessness was almost as overwhelming as constantly being on edge, expecting every phone call, every email, every ring of his doorbell to be another horrific piece of the puzzle. Daniel had felt like his move to London had been worth it after he’d saved Jenny the first time, solved the case and stopped a killer – but now? He couldn’t help feeling that he had made a terrible mistake and had started a chain reaction of misery.

‘You coming, sir?’ said another voice from somewhere behind him. Daniel took a quick breath in an attempt to compose himself before turning round to see Sergeant Amelia Harding waving at him to follow her.

‘You don’t need to call me sir, Amelia,’ he said. She gave him a warm smile before heading for the incident room, and he let the sight of her warm him back up a little. Her company always made him feel better. He’d opened up more to her than to any other colleague, including Charlie. Amelia knew all about his sister, Amanda, and the death of the bully who had tried to rape her, that Daniel had been the one to take the would-be rapist’s life, and she had listened and understood with no judgement. He cherished the friendship that was starting to grow between them.

As he reached the glass-walled incident room, he could hear a lively debate within. He mentally geared himself up before joining the fray.

‘It’s fucked up, is what it is,’ Charlie said with disgust. He was tapping a finger on one of the crime scene photos pinned to the wall. ‘No normal person would do that.’

Shutting the door behind him and avoiding looking at the grisly montage of photographs, Daniel nodded a polite hello to the superintendent and to the junior sergeant joining them to keep a record of everything. Daniel could see that Hobbs was on edge – never a good thing. He was fingering his salt-and-pepper stubble, something he did when stressed. He was a fair man but very demanding – rightfully so, really, given their work. If he was feeling the pressure, though, then everyone would be.

‘Good, you’re here, Graves. What do we know? We need to shut this down as fast as possible, so tell me everything we have.’ The lines around Hobbs’ mouth were deep as his jaw tensed.

Daniel filled him in on what they knew of the victims, Jane and Henry Alton. Neither husband nor wife had any criminal record, they weren’t particularly well off, and they weren’t, as far as research could tell, involved with anything untoward. They seemed to be a typical married couple in their early thirties with no skeletons in their cupboards – and no known reason that anyone would to want to kill them.

‘So we don’t have a motive?’ Hobbs responded. His voice rose at the end of the sentence, but Daniel knew it wasn’t a question. He continued to detail the crime scene and everything he had discussed with Stephanie Mitchum. The couple had been killed in the very early hours, they had been tortured, and the killer had shown a lack of precision. The wounds inflicted on the victims were messy, and a sock had been used as a gag. The rest of the house had apparently been left untouched, and nothing obvious had been taken. Other than a lack of a clear point of entry the murders seemed spontaneous – acts committed potentially for sheer amusement.

‘And then, of course, there’s what the killer did with the bodies,’ Daniel said, glancing at the photos – not that he needed a visual reminder. He was fairly certain that he would remember the scene for as long as he lived.

‘Do you