Dead Set Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Will Carver

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Truth

  Prologue

  Part One: Pledge

  Girl 8

  The Foot

  January

  The Front Line

  January

  The Call

  Eames

  Girl 8

  January

  Eames

  January

  The Skys

  Audrey

  Girl 8

  January

  Eames

  Audrey

  January

  The Gentle Child

  January

  Girl 8

  January

  Audrey

  The Cycle

  Part Two: Turn

  Girl 9

  Eames

  Audrey

  The Sponsor

  January

  Eames

  Girl 9

  The Conversation

  Girl 9

  The Request

  Eames

  The Revisit

  Audrey

  January

  Girl 9

  January

  Girl 9

  January

  Audrey

  January

  The Perfect Day

  Part Three: Misdirection

  Girl 10

  Audrey

  The Dig

  January

  Eames

  January

  Girl 10

  January

  The Suspects

  Girl 10

  Audrey

  The Hospital

  January

  Audrey

  January

  Eames

  Girl 10

  The Bones

  Audrey

  January

  The List

  Eames

  January

  The Weight

  January

  Girl 10

  January

  Eames

  Audrey

  January

  The Confession

  January

  Audrey

  January

  The Park

  Part Four: Reveal

  Girl 11

  January

  Audrey

  The Lean

  Audrey

  The Cheap Seats

  Girl 11

  The Drunk

  Eames

  January

  The Anomaly

  January

  Audrey

  Girl 11

  The Mistake

  Audrey

  The Tale

  January

  The Tail

  January

  Audrey

  January

  Part Five: Prestige

  Eames

  Audrey

  The Wait

  January

  The Wolf

  January

  Girl 12

  January

  Eames

  The Fourth Girl

  January

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Detective Inspector January David doesn’t love me.

  He loves his missing sister. He loves his job.

  But he doesn’t love me. Not in the way he should.

  I am his wife. I am still his wife.

  And I will do anything for him.

  No matter what I have to sacrifice.

  About the Author

  Will Carver is thirty-three years old, married and comes from Reading. His fantastic debut, Girl 4, was published in 2011, with The Two following in 2012. Dead Set is his third thriller.

  Also available by Will Carver

  Girl 4

  The Two

  Dead Set

  Will Carver

  Mum, this one’s for you.

  ‘The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.’

  Erik Weisz, also known as Harry Houdini

  The Truth

  IN NOVEMBER 2006, Dorothy Penn consented to have sex with the man who would take her life. She was discovered standing naked, tied to her bed, which had been flipped upright, and shot through the mouth at close range.

  She was the first.

  She was Girl 1.

  Over the next two years, this man continued to kill. Each victim chosen for their name, each from a different London borough, each killed with increasing theatricality, taking inspiration from the world’s greatest magic tricks, mutating them into scenes of morbidity. The press called him ‘The Zone Two Killer’.

  His real name is Eames.

  The night before Dorothy Penn died, Detective Inspector January David saw something. In his sleep. A dream, a vision, an intuition of a giant, dark figure occupying an empty black space in his mind, feeding him clues about the woman who would die within the next twenty-four hours.

  This apparition would visit him the day before each victim would be taken, delivering his message through a perpetual grin, giving the detective enough time to stop the murder. January David called him ‘The Smiling Man’. He disappeared the night that Eames was captured.

  Five innocents died at the hand of Eames. One survived.

  Girl 4.

  Audrey David.

  The detective’s wife.

  This was not through luck or a mistake; she planned it this way. She planned everything. Manipulating the mind of a serial killer to do her sinister bidding in a warped attempt to be noticed by her husband, to be loved. Loved more than the sister who has been missing from his life for over twenty years.

  She failed.

  And now she is gone. Left without a word. January David does not know of his wife’s involvement, he knows not where she is, only that she is not alone. The baby will be eighteen months old by now. Her baby. Eames’ baby. She naively believes that this is all behind her. That January David no longer cares.

  She wants him to care.

  But The Smiling Man has returned; another girl will die in the next twenty-four hours.

  For now, Eames remains incarcerated in a high-security psychiatric hospital.

  With four more tricks on his list.

  Prologue

  WHEN A PERFECTLY coiffed reporter perches himself inside a cell and throws a question across a flimsy wooden table, believing he already knows the entertainment value of the answer, that’s not me he’s trying to bait. If it were, his adrenalin would lose its battle with fear.

  When this journalist’s adversary claims not to remember murdering anybody, when they eventually cave, stating that killing is like a drug, that we all go a little mad sometimes, that occasionally I feel like a vampire, that is not reality. That is not something I would say.

  I am not a sound bite.

  I don’t want notoriety.

  Just leave me to do my job.

  I’d rather disappear.

  In the beginning, when I gave myself up, when Detective Inspector January David took the glory of capturing me, when he thought it was the end, everyone wanted an interview: they needed the exclusive conversation; they had an idea for a true-crime story or a novel; they were making a documentary.

  Think how lucky the filthy reporter will feel that I didn’t jump across the table and strangle him, the relief he’ll experience as the door is locked behind his back on exit; when he gets to go home and tell his wife that she is safe, I am still locked away.

  Think how protected this hack convinces himself he is with the camera pointed directly at my face, and how naive he truly is to believe that I care.

  I’ve been in this place for nearly two years now. You can’t call it an asylum. We are no longer known as lunatics. Political correctness. Or the rather weaker reason that there has been an evolution in the attitude towards mental health. It is a hospital. You must refer to it as a hospital.

  For the criminally insane.

  You have to whisper the last part. Or say it in your head.

  But there is no space in my mind for anything other than Audrey. The last time I saw her she was barely conscious. Folded in half, waiting for her unappreciative husband to arrive and not save her again. Not be there in her time of need.

  When the saw dropped.

  That was January David.

  Detective Inspector January David.

  That is not who I am.

  When the columnist asks about your childhood, whether it was normal, whether it was loving, his knees bounce nervously under the table I could easily tip over. His hands tap silently against his thighs beneath the thin wooden top I could force down on his neck as he lies on the floor, his windpipe crushed and clamped together before the man with the camera feels the impetus to react. He wants me to say that my father hit me. That he left. That I suffered some kind of abuse, which manifests itself as violence and hatred towards women. But that is not me either. I’m nothing like all the others.

  I am Eames.

  They know of five people that I killed. What they should want to know is why I let Girl 4 live. They should want a reason for Girl 7 to still be breathing. But they speak only of my mother’s death and the families of my victims. Because that is good television or magazine copy. Maybe they can rile me. But they do not ask why Girl 4 and Girl 7 are the same person. Why they are both Audrey David. The detective’
s unfaithful wife; the woman I love. Why is she still alive? How can I love this woman?

  I have not finished with her.

  She was not supposed to die then.

  That is the simplest of answers.

  But her time has come.

  When January David uses the term ‘career case’, that’s me he is proud of. It is I who define him. When this same detective believes enough time has passed to place part of history in a locked compartment of his brain, just as the faces of the five victims he failed to protect start to blur in his mind, as the scent of his wife finally fades from the material of their formerly shared home, that will be the optimal moment for a demon to return to his life and reopen those wounds, unlocking that compartment.

  That monster is me.

  Imagine his confusion when he finds Girl 8.

  CE23.

  Think how terrified he will be that I could walk straight out the front door.

  Detective Inspector January David, when will you realise that Audrey was not the final trick? That this is far from being over? That things have changed. Altered. Metamorphosed. That there are four more.

  Your wife was not the reveal.

  She was merely misdirection.

  It was never the plan to stop at Girl 7.

  That’s not me.

  I can’t stop.

  Part One

  Pledge

  Girl 8

  Wednesday

  CHELSEA, 22:53

  I’M MEETING EAMES at the theatre.

  This afternoon I laid the foundations of my imaginary illness to my colleagues and my boss. My head hurts. It might be a migraine. I feel sick. My neck is stiff. Is it hot in here?

  I’ll call them in the morning and fake a sore throat. Maybe I’ll cough for good measure.

  I’ve been vomiting all night.

  My gut keeps cramping.

  I’m sweating but I feel cold.

  The framed poster on my living-room wall says Amen Avenue. Written and directed by Kerry Ross. That play was over two years ago, when Eames was still killing people and we were reading the newspaper articles thinking it could never happen to us. That was before I’d forgotten his name.

  The experimental theatre company I once belonged to is no longer inflicting its horror on small, discerning crowds in Chelsea since our performance space closed two Novembers ago. The Old Sanford Meisner Theater would only seat seventy-three people at capacity and is, at best, off-off the theatre district. Amen Avenue was the first and last play I wrote that was performed.

  Until now.

  My old theatre company website is still active and has the contact details of each member listed. Nobody has taken the site down because it is a record of the things we achieved as a group. We’re all still proud of it even if we aren’t in touch as often any more. That is how Eames found me. I don’t even use that email address any more, I just kept it in the vain hope that I may need it again some day, when I can leave my fledgling PR career and move back to the theatre. I don’t hate my job; it’s great. It’s just not where I want to be in five years. Or ten. Or the rest of my life. So feigning sickness is hardly a crime.

  My nose just started bleeding.

  My skin won’t stop itching.

  I think I need to take the morning off.

  Every couple of weeks I go into the email account to keep it activated. As usual, everything is junk. Job offers, pills to enhance my apparently dreary sex life, discounts and free shipping applied. And what seems like a philanthropic gesture to fund a play. Somebody contacting playwrights and directors in the area with the hope of resurrecting the Sanford Meisner Theater as a performance space for lower budget exploratory ventures.

  This is the ticket.

  A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  I am being presented with my dream in order to take away my life.

  Too wired to sleep, I flip open my laptop and email the former members of our troupe, hoping they, like me, retained their accounts and empty them weekly of trash. Desperately, excitedly hoping that they, like me, still allow themselves to dream.

  Tomorrow, I will call in sick. Women’s problems. Ear infection. I’m having trouble sleeping. I will be picturing the next production. Getting the gang back together. Filling those seventy-three seats. I won’t be worrying about e-shots and website banners. I won’t be distracted by a distant memory of the name Eames.

  Tomorrow I will know what a mistake I have made as I lash out, kicking my legs hard against the floor for leverage, waving my arms about hoping to hit something, fighting for breath. I will remember Eames.

  Tomorrow, when they find my body, when they see that I have been made to look exactly like one of his previous victims, that I have been chosen as the understudy to Audrey David, everyone will be reminded.

  And they will recognise me as a fool.

  The Foot

  Wednesday

  CAMDEN, 23:57

  ALAN BARBER IS not important to Aria Sky’s life story, at least not as a person, a personality; it is only his actions that carry significance. And he only knew her in death.

  He has a list of sins throughout his life, he has even added some this evening, but he is incapable of murder. The first time he noticed the young girl it was late and he was pissing all over her.

  It begins in Camden.

  And ends in Regent’s Park.

  The Taittinger gathers dust on the top shelf. Below that, the Disaronno is crying out for some wannabe trendy sophisticate to order it with orange and ice while winking at a female stranger across the room. The Macallan whisky doesn’t look like it has been opened on the shelf beneath, but just under that is the place Alan Barber calls home. Somewhere between the Gordon’s, Plymouth and Tanqueray.

  ‘I can’t get fat on gin and tonic,’ he tells the other two men at the bar. They are a decade or two older than he is and are sticking to ales and bitters. ‘Clear spirits are the key to staying slim while having fun.’ He doesn’t tell them the effect that the tonic water has on him. That he spends half the next day on the toilet losing liquid and calories.

  Recumbent bulimia.

  Dysentery of excess.

  Two hours pass and Alan Barber alternates between the three available gins on offer so nobody can tell he has had an entire litre to himself: each bottle has only gone down by one third; it’s barely noticeable.

  Then his friend finally arrives.

  His name is irrelevant; in fact, his actions are negligible. The one thing he does is keep Alan Barber drinking into the late hours, testing his constitution, forcing him outside with that woman then walking him through the park late at night and waiting while Alan Barber relieves himself through a fence which has a four-year-old girl on the other side.

  ‘What can I get you, (Insignificant Friend)? The usual?’ Alan asks.

  His friend nods and sits down.

  Alan Barber orders a Disaronno with orange and ice for his friend and a Plymouth and tonic for himself. He lays a ten-pound note on the bar and excuses himself to go to the lavatory while the barmaid completes the order.

  At the furthest urinal, facing the corner at an angle, an older, more portly gentleman leans with his left hand against the tiled wall, his right hand by his zip, whistling. Alan Barber never sees his face.

  This is unfortunate because, unlike Alan, he is important.

  He is significant.

  He is capable of murder.

  Alan Barber is so drunk that later, when the police question him, he will not be able to recall this seemingly arbitrary encounter. At first.

  Though he does not need to clear his throat, Alan coughs as he approaches the urinal furthest to the right, thus alerting the other patron to his existence.

  ‘When you get to my age, you have to whistle sometimes just to get things moving,’ the faceless killer jokes, masking himself from view, fixing his eyes on his flaccid, unused dick.

  Alan Barber grunts an acknowledgement towards his left then stares down into the bowl, looking at the yellow cakes, which smell of bleach, piss and lemon. He does not avert his eyes even when the notable character to his left finishes, walks behind him, washes his hands and leaves.

  When he returns to the bar, his friend is sitting with a girl. He has bought her a drink with the ten-pound note that Alan trustingly left, and there is now nothing in the way of change.

  ‘Hey, Alan’ – his friend stands up from his stool – ‘this is (a female name Alan Barber instantly forgets).’ He does remember that they went into the cold, empty beer garden after closing time and that she sat on the bench, unzipped his jeans and performed an impressive oral dance on him, complete with humming interludes. He omits this portion of the night from his original testimony, too. He doesn’t mention that he walked away, unable to ejaculate.