Page 34

THIRTY-THREE

Wednesday, 4 September

The briefing back at the station had been frustrating. Gina had hoped they’d have an address for Marie Blaine by now, but her name wasn’t coming up in any of their searches. Nothing had so far been found in Colson’s van that proved he could have attempted to kidnap Keeley Moore, either. It had been stuffed with a mattress, a travel kettle and what Keith in forensics had described as a month’s supply of dried ramen, but they were still looking.

Colson had a connection to Marie, and also a connection to Keeley through Tristan Moore – was that too much of a coincidence? And where was Marie? Gina pondered the rest of the investigation. No more information had come to light with regards to the other men Marie had dated and the interviews with the company directors had also given them nothing. One of them had to be John Doe. It was frustrating that the leads were drying up.

It was almost one thirty in the morning when Gina pulled up on her drive and stepped out.

Her security light didn’t come on.

She glanced at the other houses on her small row in the middle of the countryside, and they were all in darkness. That was to be expected.

Maybe she needed a new security light. At least she had her CCTV camera. She shuddered at the thought of the back one not being online. She needed to fix it, and soon.

Her personal phone had remained quiet for the rest of the day, but she was still going to do a search for Pete Bloxwich as soon as she got in. The number he’d messaged her on had been withheld. She was going to tell him straight that, unless he stepped back out of her life, she would forward his messages along with the dirt she had on him.

It might mean the end of her and her career, but some of those messages had been vicious. Besides, she knew he wouldn’t want everything to get out. It would ruin him, too.

They both had too much to lose, and with him being a journalist, he could easily get his side of the story out there faster than she could blink. She needed to get on top of all this before it leaked into her professional life.

One threat, and Pete would soon crawl back into his box and leave her alone.

She pulled her keys from her bag and heard a thump coming from around the back of her house. Ebony meowed and ran out of the bushes along the side of her house and Gina laughed. It was just the cat.

‘Hello, you.’ She bent down and picked Ebony up. Her cat butted its head against Gina’s chin as she placed the key in the lock and turned it.

Her hallway felt different.

She flicked her light switch, but the light didn’t come on. Maybe there had been a power cut. Putting Ebony down, she grabbed her personal phone and used the torch.

The cat meowed from the kitchen and she knew Ebony needed feeding. Hurrying through, Gina grabbed a pouch from the cupboard and squeezed it into the cat bowl. She placed it on the floor and Ebony ran over and began eating.

Removing her coat, she placed it over the back of a kitchen chair and opened the fridge. Instinctively, she reached for the kitchen light switch and it came on. Maybe there had been some sort of surge and the hall light had tripped?

She grabbed a bottle of cold water and some leftover pasta salad that she’d made the other day, and began chomping on it as she kicked her shoes off. She’d check the fuse box once she’d eaten.

A door creaked above as a gust of wind bellowed outside.

That didn’t feel right.

Could she have left an upstairs window open? Her hands were shaking.

She blew a breath out slowly. She was letting those messages – and Pete – get to her. She was home and she was safe.

Grabbing her phone, she started looking at the footage from the camera at the front of her house, whizzing through the whole day until she was seeing the live feed again. No one had come to her door except the postie at ten that morning. Ebony had walked across the drive several times, but that was it.

She left her dinner on the table, and followed the breeze upstairs. All she had to do was close the window and chill the hell out.

She stopped on the top step, holding her phone out to light up the landing, and she flicked the bathroom switch.

Nothing seemed out of place.

She pressed the camera app on her phone, showing the view of the main camera outside her front door again. There was still no one there.

The back-garden camera was still offline.

She peered into her bathroom and saw that the window was on the latch, so she pulled it closed. The spare room was as she had left it, spare bed made up and a pile of her clean laundry on the chair under the window. The curtain began to blow as another breeze caught it.

That must be what was causing the breeze to travel through the house.

She shivered. It might be early September, but it was chilly at night.

Hurrying over, she closed it and went back down to open the cupboard under the stairs. She flicked the only switch that had tripped and heard the click of the hall light coming on.

It was nothing. Just her imagination playing her up.

She strode back to the kitchen to grab her food, and then noticed that one of her drawers wasn’t closed.

Opening it fully, she saw that all the tea towels had been ruffled and the random lighter and tin opener that used to live there had been moved. Then she opened the next drawer and saw that some of the knives had been placed in the fork section of the holder.

Running into the living room, she opened the cupboard to her sideboard and noticed that a couple of boxes containing house paperwork were not in the order she kept them in.

Her heart was banging.

She hurried back upstairs and peered out of the spare room window into her back garden.

That was when she saw that her camera had been broken and was lying on the slabs below.

Running into her bedroom, she began checking her drawers and bedside tables before returning to the spare room.

Someone had been in her house.

Everything was only slightly out of place, but she knew someone had been through her things.

Had Pete Bloxwich been in her home looking for the memory stick? Or was it one of the sickos who had been sending her emails. It was obvious now, he had to have climbed in through her spare room window after damaging her camera.

She went over to the window again, looking out. There was a slight platform under that window where the previous owners of the house had built the kitchen extension, and her bin was just underneath it. She never left her bin there.

She googled Pete Bloxwich and his website came up. Heading straight to the contact page, she typed out a message.

We need to speak! What the hell are you doing stalking me at work???

After hitting send, she’d been left with no option but to call Briggs. Just as she went to call him, a voice came from behind her. ‘Hello, Gina.’

She grabbed the nearest thing she could find – the iron – and held it in front of her chest. ‘Come any closer and I will cave your head in.’

Pete Bloxwich stood there and held his hands up. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Besides, I’m not armed, and I have no intention of hurting you, but oh, that doesn’t matter, does it? You’ll probably just push me down some stairs and claim it was self-defence.’

How dare he? Bloxwich had gained illegal entry into her house and now he was blocking her only exit out of the room. ‘I will expose you and everything you did. How you set up the MenRTakinItBack website. Your readers would love to know what a misogynist you are. I still have proof.’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Oh, Gina, I can also play tit for tat, but that’s not why I’m here, so why don’t you shut up and listen.’

‘Or why don’t I just call for backup and cave your head in with this iron?’

He shrugged. ‘Do it. It’ll be a lot messier, though, and right now you need me. If you hurt me, I can’t help you out of this sad mess, and things will only get worse for you.’

She put her phone in her pocket and the iron down on the bed. ‘Speak.’ Her thudding heart felt as though it was in her throat.

‘I’ve actually come to help you. Believe it or not, I closed that website down and someone has hijacked and rebranded it. They’re even using my old profile name as the administrator so this will come back to me. Unless we work together, we’re both over. I can end this. It will take time, but I can do it.’ He smacked his lips. ‘I just have conditions.’

‘Stuff you and your conditions?—’

‘Gina, just shut up. Our relationship isn’t a democracy, it’s a dictatorship, because how I see it, I hold all the aces. I have the necessary skills and time. You have neither, because this is currently going around the forum.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. After a bit of scrolling, he held up a photo.

It was like the air had been sucked out of Gina’s lungs as she gasped. In the photo, she was blindfolded, in her underwear and tied to a metal ring in the shed covered in bruises.

That had been taken when Gina was about two months pregnant with Hannah. Terry had come home angry and drunk and she’d pushed him away from her. Their argument had led to him knocking her over. Terry had changed before her, tearing her clothes off and dragging her out to the shed in the cold. She had no idea he’d taken photos. She had looked so different back then; so scrawny.

‘Next time it might not be a photo of you wearing a blindfold and the world will get to identify you. Lovely Stephen put this up during the last stint and someone saved it and recirculated it. Your lovely ex-husband must have had quite the collection of photos from your past. Some psycho happened to get hold of this one and republish it, and this time, people are liking what they see and they’re all looking for you.’

‘That’s not me.’ Her stomach roiled.

Pete nodded slowly. ‘Don’t try to deny it, Gina. We both know it’s you. I dig deeper than MikeTheMan ever could. There are no depths to where I will go to get my facts.’

She shivered at the mention of her pseudonym on the site. How did he know?

‘There are paths in this rabbit warren that you are not privy to. The release of your address is barely a click away and I’m going to temporarily stop that from happening until I can come up with a permanent solution. I will put an end to this, but I need time, and I also need something else.’

She shook her head and clenched her fists until her nails pierced her hands. ‘You’re not having that, no way.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Gina. I don’t want to be here. I started a new life. I’ve been living in a cutesy cottage in Devon with an amazing woman I met on Tinder, then all this reared its ugly head. I can help myself and I will help you, too, but only if, when it’s all over, I can have all the copies of our last conversation.’

‘You mean your confession? How you were behind the BoyzRTakinItBack forum, showing you to be the woman-hater you are?’

He nodded. ‘Exactly. Like you, I want a second chance in life. I want my hideous past to be buried for good. Sometimes humans do stupid things in the heat of the moment, and I’d just come out of a really fucked-up relationship back then and was angry, okay? Does it mean I should pay for that mistake for the rest of my life? Neither of us should. We both have so much in common and we can get out of this unscathed.’

‘Don’t bank on it.’

He smirked. ‘Said the murderer to the ex-misogynist.’

She sighed. She had so much more to lose. ‘I am not a murderer.’ She had never confessed to anything.

‘Stephen thinks you are, but whatever, I literally don’t care anymore.’

‘How do I know I can trust you?’ she asked.

He scrunched up his nose and shrugged. ‘How do I know I can trust you ?’

‘Okay.’

‘Do we have a deal then?’ He held his hand out.

Gina let out a long breath through puffed up cheeks. ‘Get out of my house, fix this, and go back to Devon. I never want to see you again. Do all that, then we have a deal. Agreed?’

‘I want exactly that, partner.’

‘Get out, and we are not partners,’ she yelled. ‘I will never partner up with a piece of shit like you.’

He shrugged, turned his back and left.

Gina had no option but to let Pete help her and she knew it. That very fact made her want to cave a wall in with her bare fists. She also felt for the new woman in Pete’s life. Once this was all over, she had to help her see what kind of a man she was living with. But first, she had to do everything she could to save herself, otherwise she was no good to anyone. Pete would have his time; it just wasn’t now.