Tyrone went to speak but Madison put her hand up. ‘It was me. I got in through his bathroom window and opened the door.’
‘You broke in?’ Gina stepped into the hall of the apartment. ‘Curtis Gallagher. It’s the police.’
Tyrone smacked his lips as he started to speak. ‘Like we said. There’s no one there but you should see his desk. Madison said he has a notebook and a photo of her.’
‘There’s so much more.’ Madison rubbed her tears away. ‘There are others. Amber is in his book. He’d been keeping notes on us.’ She hiccupped and took a deep breath.
Tyrone placed a hand on Madison’s shoulder and turned to Gina. ‘Don’t blame them. It was my idea. I thought I saw your officer’s picture through his window in the early hours but I couldn’t be sure. He was sitting in his front room with the light on. It was when I came home from the police station. He had his coat on and I wondered what he was doing at that time so I stood back in the dark and watched him. I’ve been keeping an eye out for days and he’s been acting strangely all week. I know I should have called you and I know I promised but I had to be sure of what I’d seen. I couldn’t just call you because I thought he was weird.’
Gina shook her head. So far, they’d broken in and entered, they may have messed with potential evidence and they could have put themselves in danger had Curtis Gallagher been in. She nodded to a uniformed officer beside her. ‘We’ll talk to you later. Will you take all three of them up to Mr Heard’s apartment?’ She needed them out of her way.
Stepping through into Curtis’s hall, her stomach began to churn. She crept through into the kitchen and lounge and peered up and down, her attention immediately brought to the desk area. Tyrone had been right. There in front of her was a photo of PC Kapoor, her AppyDater photo. The same with Madison and Amber. She popped a pair of latex gloves on and flicked through the exercise book, page after page. He’d been recording Amber’s comings and goings for ages before he took her, noting down details of her relationship with Clayton Collins and her other dates.
Madison’s page soon followed and it was short compared to Amber’s. The information gathered by him was brief but to the point. He’d needed a replacement after killing Amber and had given very little time to stalking Madison. A lump formed in her throat as she read on as he then wrote about the policewoman at the lake who he’d followed home.
Jacob entered. ‘Blimey.’ He began reading over her shoulder.
‘If he’s not here, where is he?’ She felt her fists tighten as she clenched them. She darted through every room, falsely hoping that he’d be hiding Kapoor in the wardrobe or somewhere obvious but no, it was never going to be that easy. She slammed the bedroom door and it bounced on its hinges. ‘Where is she?’ She held her head in her hands as she calmly headed back to Jacob.
‘O’Connor is looking into every angle as we speak.’
‘We’re too late. He probably knows we’re onto him. He’s probably running desperate now.’ Her mind whirled with everything they’d been through over the past few days. Information never came back as fast as they’d hoped. So many people had lied or interfered with the case throwing them off on tangents that took their investigation away from finding the murderer. Now they knew who he was, they just didn’t know where. She stared at the skull ornament and she saw him. Curtis Gallagher with his eyes sunken into his bone. He was a true reflection of his surroundings but not one item screamed stalker murderer. Just like every murderer she’d come across. They all seem like normal, perfectly fine people until you know they’re not.
Gina spotted an envelope in the waste bin. It looked official and had a government logo in one corner. She reached in and pulled it out. A Mrs Gallagher was having her benefits increased by one pound and forty pence per week.
Her phone rang and O’Connor’s name lit up. ‘Tell me you have something and get forensics to this address now. I’m getting the place cordoned off at any moment. We’ve found our murderer, I just hope there’s not another body to add to his count.’
Jacob looked down.
Gina listened as O’Connor blurted everything out. ‘We have to go.’ She darted to the front door with the envelope in her hand, gave her instructions to uniform and ran as fast as she could to her car. There wasn’t a minute to lose. Lost time loses lives in this game and that statement had been proven right on so many occasions. Jacob hurried to his car. Wyre jumped into the passenger seat and the car wheels spun in the snow a few times before gaining some traction on the concrete below.
66
Gina slammed on the brakes, skidding to a halt along Chamberlain Way, the address on the envelope, the address that O’Connor had confirmed was Curtis Gallagher’s mother’s home. The sixty-five-year-old woman apparently lived here alone. She pushed the car door open. ‘Do you want the back or front?’
Wyre began fitting her stab vest over her suit jacket and shrugged. ‘Back. We should wait for the others.’
Jacob’s car pulled up behind Gina’s and a couple of police cars followed. ‘Right, let’s go.’
Gina tightened her stab vest as she trudged down a couple of steps, almost buckling on a cracked slab. ‘Be careful.’ Music blared out. It was a slow melodic song, one Gina had heard many times. Her parents used to have a Roy Orbison record. It was ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. Gina glanced at the windows but each pane was covered from the inside.
Wyre nodded and crept along the side of the building with two uniformed officers. PC Smith reached Gina’s side and held the battering ram up in readiness. Preserving life was all that mattered and they had to get in there. She nodded at Jacob to follow Wyre. If Curtis Gallagher was to escape out the back, she needed her fittest officers ready to chase him. The track came to an end and started again. Something wasn’t right, that she was sure of. Her mind flashed to an image of Amber, was she his beautiful dreamer?
Slamming her fists on the door, Gina called out. ‘Open up, police.’ She placed her ear against the door but nothing could be heard over the music. Then there was a piercing scream that made her heart jitter. The scream turned into a laugh, a sadistic tittering with a hint of fury, or was it elation? ‘Open up!’
Wyre ran back to the front of the building. ‘Guv, there’s a body in the shed.’
Gina ran as fast as she could, keeping up with Wyre. Her colleague pointed through the smeary window. ‘Blooming hell! Call it in.’ She almost pressed her nose to the window to get a better look at the corpse that was strapped into a chair.
Wyre looked away. ‘Is it Kapoor?’
Gina swallowed and took a closer look. ‘I can’t see.’ She leaned back and rammed her shoulder into the flimsy door and it pinged open to reveal the body.
67
Gina breathed a sigh of relief. ‘No, I’m guessing it’s Gallagher’s mother. We have to get in that house now. We’ll need to confirm the identity later. The rats have eaten the flesh. It’s just bone.’
Wyre looked but quickly turned away.
