As she walked, she heard her own feet and her breathing. And the pounding of her heart.
It took a few minutes to find the willow seat in the gloom. It was a beautiful thing, so Mackintosh and yet so natural. The base was dark and broad, and the arched lattice back was tall and graceful. She settled into the seat and waited. And waited.
By a few minutes after the hour she began to fret that he might not show. She got to her feet and wandered around the half-hidden lawn, as if that would make time slip past faster. Then she heard a crunch on gravel followed by soft footsteps on grass and knew he was there. Ryan. Her man of mystery. Her heart missed a beat and she had to tell herself to calm down.
He was behind her but she didn’t turn, played along with the game and the romance of the setting.
‘Ryan?’
She heard his voice for the first time. Low and firm, slightly muffled. Confident but perhaps a hint of nerves.
‘Don’t turn around.’
The instruction made her wary, but it excited her too. She stood still, letting him approach, her head telling her one thing and her adrenalin another. A triumph for exhilaration over sense.
She heard him take a step closer, felt his breath on the back of her neck, and just before he reached her, felt a chill run down her spine. She started to take a step away, an instinctive survival motion that kicked in a split second too late.
The hand on her mouth came as a shock.
Not just a hand – material between the hand and her mouth. A cloth of some kind. It was gripped tight to her and she could smell something on it. It stung her nostrils and she tried to pull away, but he was tight behind her and the hand was clamped firmly across her mouth.
His voice was in her ear, husky and breathless, laced with naked menace.
‘You’re going to die, bitch. Accept it.’
Her head was starting to spin, and she could feel her senses scramble. Darkness was coming.
‘Give in to it. Fighting’s no good.’
She raised her right knee to waist height, held it for just a second, then crashed her foot down onto his shin with every bit of strength she had. His grip on her mouth weakened and he cried out in pain. She repeated the move, stamping her foot hard and fast onto the already damaged shin. He screamed in agony, and shoved her away from him, a gentle thud as something fell to the grass.
She spun, head still woozy but adrenalin washing the effects way. He was dressed in black with a balaclava masking his face. A knife lay on the lawn near his feet. She grabbed his wrist, twisting hard till his arm was wrenched behind his back in one slick, practised move, making him squeal and beg. She reached up with her left hand and ripped the balaclava off his head.
‘Stop. Don’t. Please.’
She twisted his arm further, knowing it was close to breaking and not caring.
‘Please!’
‘I actually like it when they beg.’
She saw his head half turn towards her in confusion.
‘Do you remember saying that? I like it when they beg, but the crying becomes a pain. So don’t cry, whatever you do.’
His head twisted round, seeing her face properly for the first time. Confusion and rage contorting his features. She wrenched his arm tighter.
‘Why don’t you beg some more, huh? Go on!’
The voice emerged from the side of the building. Urgent. ‘That’s enough, Rachel. Rachel, let him go. We’ve got it from here.’
Narey turned to face Giannandrea, impassively returning his stare. Without looking at the man she held, she twisted his arm fiercely one more time and waited till the two uniformed cops had hands on him before releasing her grip. They took an arm each and lifted the man near clear off his feet so that he was facing her.
‘Fraser Anderson, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Eloise Gray on or around April 12 2019 at an unknown locus, as a result of electronic communications evidence. You do not need to say anything but anything you do say will be noted and may be used in evidence. Do you understand?’
Anderson grinned wildly before throwing his head back and laughing. The sound filled the air, echoing off the walls of the house.
Narey stared at the former IT consultant, itching to slap the laughter off his face. Instead, she nodded at the firearms cops and they wheeled him away as he spewed invective at anyone who would listen.
Giannandrea was at her shoulder, joining her in watching the constables load the man into the back of a newly arrived van to take him to the station.
‘You’re okay, right?’
‘I’m fine, don’t worry. It was just a bit of chloroform. Not enough to knock me out in that time.’
‘Respectfully, Rachel? If I may?’
‘Go on, Rico. Just say what you’ve got to say.’
‘It was a really stupid fucking idea. What if he’d come behind you with a knife rather than a soaked cloth?’
‘I’m wearing a stab-proof vest. You know that.’
‘Not round your neck you aren’t.’
‘Then we’d have had a cast-iron case and Tony and Alanna would have done very well out of the insurance and the compensation.’
‘That’s not fucking funny, Rachel.’
‘Oh come on, Rico, you had eyes on me at all times. The uniforms were ready to move. It was our best shot and I wasn’t going to put anyone else in the position of doing it. And I wanted to do it. More to the point, we’ve got him.’
‘Did you know it was Anderson, before you turned around? That he was Marr?’
‘No. But he seemed most likely. He ticked all the psychological boxes, he had the ability to be different things to different people, he had the IT knowledge. And he was violent. He fitted the description of the guy dumped by Brianna Holden. Andy, the married guy who probably didn’t tell her his real name and shortened his surname instead. Thing was, it didn’t matter. Whoever was standing behind me was the person who murdered Eloise and the others. That’s all I needed to know.’
*
Two hours later, Narey and Giannandrea sat at one side of a desk in the custody suite at Dalmarnock. On the other sat a clearly manic Fraser Anderson and a dour duty solicitor named Eric Rennie.
Anderson had replied with a firm ‘no comment’ to each of her opening questions, but she knew it wouldn’t last. His temperament was like a beach ball being held under water and would soon erupt. She’d make sure it did.
‘Are you going to beg, Fraser? I know you hate it when they beg.’
His eyes flared and she knew she’d got to him. No time to delete and retype, no time to consider or hide his reaction.
‘Luck,’ he blurted out. ‘It was just luck. Nothing else.’
Rennie glared at his client, urging silence. Narey pressed.
‘What was luck?’
‘No comment.’
‘I always believe you make your own luck. You contacted Vikki on that website but you could have contacted any of fifty women on that site and it would have been me you got. We put every one of those profiles up in the hope you’d come after one of them. And we left enough info lying around on social media pages we constructed to let you find what you needed to carry out your pathetic little seduction charade.’
‘No. I don’t believe it.’
‘I bet you don’t, but it’s true. And I suppose you won’t believe that we chose photographs of young women who all bore a resemblance to Brianna Holden. Just the way you like it.’