The Girls In The Water (Detectives King and Lane #1)
Victoria Jenkins
Prologue
The slap came from nowhere, sudden and sharp. Her nail caught the boy’s skin, slicing his cheek. He put a hand up, tracing the wet trail of dotted blood that bubbled to the surface of the wound. The boy looked at the magazine held outstretched in her other hand. Its opened pages, vivid in their accusations, showed an array of images: naked flesh, skin on skin; so many things he had heard about, but had never really seen this close up and in detail.
The child still in him wanted to laugh at the sight of bare bodies.
The child still in him remained scared of the ferocity of his mother’s tongue, fearing her verbal assaults almost as much as the physical force of her anger.
‘This is sick,’ his mother spat. ‘Why would you look at it? What’s the matter with you?’ She was shouting now. Her anger was visible in the red flare of her cheeks, in the fists that had formed at her sides and had turned her bony knuckles white. It was tangible in the venom with which her words were spoken.
The boy didn’t want to feel this kind of anger, but in that moment – in so many moments before and after it – he hated his mother. Even at such a young age he recognised her hypocrisy, and he hated it. He hated this life and everything she had made him.
‘Nothing to say, have you?’ she snapped, his silence heightening her anger.
She grabbed the boy by the hair and dragged him to the kitchen. The sink was filled with dirty water left from the last lot of dishes that had been washed. Lifeless bubbles lay flat on the surface of the water, the occasional few giving their last sad pops before disappearing.
‘Maybe we can clean your eyes out,’ she suggested.
He didn’t try to fight her, and later he would wonder why. He hadn’t struggled as she had tightened her grip on his hair, or fought when she had shoved his face into the murky water. He never had. His mind went momentarily blank, as he had worked so long to train it to do. When his mind was blank, he could be anywhere. He could be anyone.
Sometimes the boy was a pilot. He had always liked the idea of what being a pilot might be like: of being able to go anywhere, his own hands navigating his destiny. That freedom. He would imagine the roar of the engine, the surge of the wheels on the runway; the tsunami in his stomach that would rise and subside as the plane left the ground and took its first steep tilt skywards.
Other times he was an actor. He would imagine himself on a stage, dressed as someone else, speaking someone else’s words. He was someone else. His audience stretched in front of him, but he could never see them; they were shrouded in the darkness, the only lights focused upon him. He wanted to be someone else, anywhere else.
He held his breath under the water for as long as he could, snatching gulps of air when he was pulled back up. After what seemed for ever but was little longer than thirty seconds, his mother let go. He stood hunched over the sink, coughing and choking, his dark hair dripping water down his face.
That night, he lay in his single bed and imagined the most horrific images his young mind could conjure. When his mind was no longer blank it was filled with the purest kind of hate: a rage so intense that it sometimes scared him.
The boy hated his mother.
One day he would make her pay.
Chapter One
‘You’re in a good mood today.’
Detective Inspector Alex King glanced at her colleague, who was sitting in the passenger seat chewing on the corner of a thumbnail and watching her with a look that suggested good moods were something other people didn’t generally expect of her. She didn’t blame them. There hadn’t been much to smile about these past few months.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ DC Chloe Lane said, raising an eyebrow. She gave a slight smile whilst turning her blonde head to the window, presumably under the assumption that Alex would miss the look.
She didn’t.
‘You were singing,’ Chloe said, her attention drawn to a young man struggling outside an off-licence with a dog that was almost as big as he was.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were.’
‘When?’
‘Just then! Was that One Direction?’
Alex snorted. ‘No, it definitely wasn’t.’
It might have been, she thought. She hadn’t been able to get that bloody song out of her head all morning, not since she’d heard it drifting from the kitchen when Rob had gone downstairs to make a cup of tea. He had put on the radio. She hadn’t been sure how she’d felt about that: the tea making or the act of turning on the radio. It was all too familiar. They were supposed to be beyond all that now.
They’d been divorced for nearly three years, yet here they were again.
The adult part of Alex’s brain knew she should have been sceptical about what was going on. Sex with an ex-husband, in the majority of cases, was destined to be problematic, yet, for whatever reason, Alex felt unwilling to expel him from her life for a second time. Didn’t she deserve a break, just this once? Didn’t she deserve a bit of fun?
You’re forty-four not nineteen, she reprimanded herself. And where an ex-husband was concerned, there was never likely to be a no-strings scenario.
She shook herself from the thought. ‘I think it might have been.’
She smiled. She turned up the car heaters. Chloe’s face was disappearing into the folds of her jacket in an attempt to get warm. She was so slim that Alex found it unsurprising she was so susceptible to the cold. It was a bitterly chilly morning, but Alex didn’t appear to feel the dip in temperature as keenly as her younger colleague clearly did. She’d often thought Chloe looked as though she could do with a couple of decent meals and some looking after, although her size didn’t seem to impact upon her apparently boundless energy.
The sky stretching across the town that lay spread before them was grey and heavy, the threat of rain increasingly present as they neared Pontypridd. As they approached the exit that would take them to the town centre, Alex found herself struggling to remember the last sunny day this part of South Wales had seen, no matter how cold. The festive season had been characterised by grey afternoons and a steady stream of relentless rainfall, yet in its own way this had seemed fitting.
‘Thanks for the lift, by the way,’ Chloe said, breaking Alex’s chain of thought.
‘No worries. Heard anything from the garage?’
Chloe pulled a face. She somehow managed to look pretty even when she was grimacing. ‘Yeah, got an email last night. Be cheaper for me to buy a new car. Third time it’s happened. I don’t really see the point in paying again.’
Alex cut across the roundabout that took them towards Trallwn. ‘Is this your way of hinting at another lift tomorrow?’
Chloe shot her a smile. ‘Would you mind?’