Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,94

my coffee and send a WhatsApp message to Tara.

Can you talk?

The coffee is strong and bitter, but the kick is almost immediate as the caffeine hits my bloodstream. I stir in half a sachet of sugar to make it a little more palatable and take another sip. A selfie pops up in reply to my message: Tara on her sofa, birds-nest hair and bleary-eyed from sleep. Charlie, her youngest, is on her lap, thumb clamped in his mouth, both of them wrapped together in a large blue blanket. They look so cosy together I can’t help but smile, despite what I’ve just read. The message below the picture reads:

Not right now, deep into Paw Patrol. But can text.

You read Daily Mail story?

Yes, grim. The three attacks definitely

connected then?

It’s not actually confirmed on the record by police.

Daily Mail and all that

I take the coffee back to bed, tucking my legs under me and wrapping the duvet around myself. My phone buzzes with another message from Tara.

Looks to me like the story is solid. Simms is a sleazeball

but he’s a good operator. Good contacts. If Met had

squashed the connection theory he wouldn’t still be

touting it around a year later

So Kathryn’s sister was third victim of this guy?

He wouldn’t say it out loud or put on email, got

very cagey. But I used my charms

The message ends with an emoji of a laughing/crying face. I type another message.

How did he know her name?

Wouldn’t say. My guess: £££

changed hands with a police contact

So she recovered then if still got anonymity?

Assume so

I wonder what it’s like, having to live your life knowing that the man who attacked you is still out there, carrying on as if nothing has happened. Recovering from terrible injuries, all the while worrying that he might be watching you, stalking you, ready to strike again if the mood took him. Ready to finish the job he’d already started. I also wonder how this story managed to pass me by when it first happened, when it was making headlines like this one. It rings a vague bell, but it was around the time of our last go at IVF, when I was focused on that to the exclusion of almost everything else – even Richard’s affair, I realised later.

I read the whole news story again, more slowly this time, lines jumping out at me as I scroll down.

‘. . . woman attacked and left for dead . . .’

‘. . . sustained and brutal attack . . .’

‘. . . bears all the hallmarks of previous crimes . . .’

My mind spins back to Thursday, to Leon Markovitz in my house. Lying in wait for me, his face almost totally covered by a balaclava. Fingerless gloves with latex gloves beneath them. ‘Murder detectives have reportedly been unable to find ANY fingerprints, fibres or traces of DNA.’ And there was something else odd about the way he looked, something I noticed on the train but was too preoccupied with Mia to fully take in.

His eyebrows. Shaped and plucked, perfect fine lines. No, not shaped but gone completely. Plucked out and drawn in again. His head shaved tight to the scalp. No hair or eyebrows to leave a trace at a crime scene. I remember his podcast, Inside the Killing Mind. The retelling of dozens of sadistic murders in graphically gruesome detail, for a large online audience. Victims – mostly women – stabbed and strangled, their bodies battered and violated and dismembered. Buried in shallow graves, disposed of as if their lives were nothing, meant nothing, had been nothing. How deeply could you immerse yourself in that world before it started to have an effect on you? How long before it started to distort the lens through which you viewed everyday life? A shiver flashes through me as I remember the encounter in my spare room, his black-clad form emerging from behind the door, dead eyes flat and unblinking in the moments before he raised the stun gun to my neck. The split-second of helpless fear, of agonising pain before I blacked out. I pull the duvet closer around me, willing the memory away.

No matter. The article has given me an idea. I finish my coffee, the last mouthful already tepid, and send another message to Tara.

Thanks for this. Really helpful xx

No prob. You going to tell me

what’s happening?

Soon. Need to ask you another

favour though in meantime

Of course. Anything to distract me

from Paw Patrol

I send her a longer message telling her what I need, and