Page 77 of The Unforgiven

“If he’d done it, he would’ve been bragging about it. But I don’t think he’s got the guts to do anything more than post anonymously. Let’s go and see what we can do about finding out about those other two girls.”

“Don’t you remember when you pretended you didn’t like that boy? Evelyn, do you remember what you did?”

Evelyn looked through eyes that were dazed and confused, her brain on a different planet, rudely awakened from something that wasn’t sleep. She hurt all over, and she was cold and damp and there was hardly any light in here.

“Do you remember? You told me Lennon liked me. You said he thought I was really pretty and he didn’t mind about my weight. Do you remember telling me that?”

“No. I don’t remember. No. I promise I don’t.” Things were coming back now. Before, a day ago or maybe a week, Evelyn didn’t know what time or day it was now. Her phone and watch were gone, her clothes too, just an old, smelly blanket to keep her from freezing.

“I remember it. I remember waiting for him at the jetty that evening, hoping he’d be meeting me there like you told me, so I’d got all dressed up and tried to put on make-up and he didn’t show up. Because he’d never said he would. You’d made it up so you could laugh at me.”

There were tears now, sobs. Evelyn remembered this from before. Her captor wasn’t right in the head, she needed help. The question was, who was going to give it?

More shouting, more insults. Evelyn pulled the blanket round her tighter, huddling into it.

Suddenly it went silent. Still. Calm.

Then, movement. Difficult to see in the dark, so she didn’t see the blade coming to her, straight into her chest and then pain, searing strikes of red hot heat and the sound of her own scream filling the small brick building where she’d been held captive.

The screams didn’t last long. The darkness smothered them.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Grave waxwas the nickname given to fatty tissue after it had been submerged in cool, low oxygen water for a prolonged period of time. It was a cruel term to give to someone who’d once lived and laughed, but it did describe adipocere, the white, crumbling substance that could preserve the body shape, but at this point was patchy. There was skin slippage where large areas of epidermis sloughed off, the hands and feet showed a ‘glove and stocking’ formation, where the skin was slipping away, and the marbling, a purple-green pattern along the veins under the skin, visible on the torso and limbs.

The body in the water was significantly distended, bacterial gas forming inside the soft tissue. Her face was swollen, and patches of hair had detached, wrapped around the nearby debris, floating near the body.

It wasn’t Evelyn Smith. This body was too decomposed, having been in the water longer than Evelyn had been missing, but I was pretty certain that it was a female we had found in a reeded inlet beneath an overhang of vicious brambles and moss, partially trapped against a submerged shopping trolley from a supermarket that I was sure no longer existed. Theonly access was from a disused industrial path behind fencing that separated a derelict industrial unit, our killer’s favourite sort of location. No CCTV was nearby, the nearest camera over two hundred and fifty metres away and directed away from the scene.

I watched Jenna Osei speak to my half-brother, a few inches too close to be professional, although I had no doubt that their conversation was about how to remove the body from the water while preserving as much as they could.

This was a different scenario to the others. This body had been submerged for a lot longer and was in a significantly worse state than the other three. The atmosphere was sombre, very little chatter beyond what was needed, filled the air, which was even silent of birdsong. This part of the canal was desolate and abandoned, Manchester’s rejuvenation not having reached this point yet.

“Victim number one.” Vinny sidled up to me. “Or is there another one we’ve missed?”

“We won’t know until we find them. My guess is this is Dolly.” We’d spent yesterday afternoon looking at the photos I’d taken from Morgan’s parents, reading the names underneath each one, just no surnames.

“The hair?”

I nodded. The hair, or what I’d seen of it, had looked thick and dense. Dolly’s hair had been distinctive. The two other girls, Kelly-Anne and Evelyn had looked different, however, people changed and we didn’t know for sure that this was anything to do with the other women, or the Aberwyn girls, as I was coming to think of them.

“There’s going to be nothing here, forensically, is there?” I looked around the scene. “We’ve had rain and more rain and she’s been in there a bit.” She’d been discovered an hour ago by a group of teenagers who’d been messing about nearby withweed and each other. They’d gotten spooked and legged it, crossing the path of PCSO Awais Khan, who’d gotten a brief description before going to investigate himself and then calling it in, securing the scene and following process to smallest punctuation mark, earning praise from Jenna when she got there.

Vinny and I had been at the office, sitting with the tech squad who were using AI to age the teenagers in the Aberwyn photos so we could try reverse image searches to further identify Dolly and Kelly-Anne, as well as the boys. I was also trying to find out where Kelly-Anne from Lindridge Hospital had ended up , and was meeting more dead ends that an impossible maze.

Our Sunday morning breakfast barm from a greasy take out truck around the back of Piccadilly had been interrupted with a call from Wrigley, telling us to get our backsides in gear and head over to the old Trafford Park industrial site near Salford Quays.

I was glad I hadn’t finished the bacon and sausage bap with red sauce. What I had managed wasn’t sitting well.

Wrigley headed over to us, hands in pockets, expression grim. “Been a long time since I’ve had one in this condition.”

“Sir, I really don’t need to hear an example of the worst one you’ve ever seen.” I was prepared to disobey orders and walk off if he started on that.

“No, you’re okay, Mac. They’re going to get the body out of the river once they’ve used this glove technique to try and get fingerprints. They basically fit the lose skin over a glove and get the fingerprint that way. One of the hands has been out of water so they think they can get a print. Then they’ll move the body.”

A tent had been erected, along with a construction that would prevent any drones overhead from taking photos, a large cover that didn’t look particularly wind proof, it had to be said.

Wrigley glanced at me. “Take Lachy and go for a walk, see what’s about here. This could well have been the dump site as Jenna’s said there’s not a huge degree of movement in the water here, so the body’s unlikely to have moved here while it was in the water. Which begs the question, what route did our killer take to get the body here and how?”