Chapter 2: Inquisition

Jennifer 

The thing about men, especially men who work nights, smell faintly of stale deodorant and cheap aftershave, and have just enough local authority to feel themselves important in very small, sad little ways, is that most of them will tell you almost anything if you smile like they’ve already impressed you.

It isn’t exactly lying. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I’m not inventing interest where there is none. I am interested. Deeply. Just not always in the same thing they think I’m interested in.

Darren, as it turned out, was security on and off around the industrial estate, mostly warehouses, shuttered units, builders’ yards, and whatever other half-forgotten bits of local nowhere needed a man in a black jacket to walk about looking underpaid. He was broad through the shoulders, a little fleshy round the middle, not bad-looking in that tired, rough, local way, with close-cropped hair and the kind of face that would probably be more attractive if it ever properly relaxed. As it was, he had the look of a man who spent too much time glancing over his own shoulder and then pretending he hadn’t.

The bar was perfect for him. Perfect for this. Low light, sticky tables, a fruit machine humming in the corner like it had given up on life years ago, music too loud in all the wrong places and not loud enough where it mattered, stale lager sunk deep into the wood and floor, with the faint sharp tang of lemon cleaner trying and failing to disguise it all. The windows had gone black with night, turning everybody inside into reflections of themselves. It was late enough that the place had split neatly into categories: couples pretending not to be fighting, men who should have gone home an hour ago, girls in too-thin tops loudly insisting they were not cold, and me, tucked into a booth with a local security guard and my phone recording from inside my coat pocket while I pretended I was just another girl with a taste for bad bars and dubious men.

He liked me immediately. That helped.

Not because I’d done anything spectacular. Just little things. The angle of my body toward his. My knee turned slightly under the table. The laugh that comes half a second quicker than politeness demands. The occasional touch to his hand or wrist when he said something that invited it. Men really are astonishingly simple sometimes, which would be less useful if it weren’t also so endlessly funny.

I bought the second round before he could offer. That always speeds things up. A man will accept that you’re attractive. He’ll accept that you’re interested. But the moment you spend money on him too, some strange, needy little door opens in the back of his mind and suddenly he wants to be worth it. He wants to entertain you. Impress you. Reward you for recognising his hidden depths, even if his hidden depths are mostly football opinions and old grievances.

“So,” I said, curling both hands around my glass, leaning in just enough that he had to decide whether to look at my eyes or my chest and failed, charmingly, to manage the former for long, “you’re telling me what was in the news wasn’t the full story.”

He gave a little shrug that was all false modesty and discomfort. “I’m saying they cleaned it up.”

“Why?”

“Because people panic.”

I smiled. “I’m not panicking.”

His eyes flicked down and back up again, and there was something in that look that said he was beginning to think panic and arousal were perhaps not quite as separate as he’d once imagined. Good. Let him feel interesting. Let him feel dangerous. Men always talk more once they think they’re pulling you into something dark.

He took a swallow of his pint, wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand and said, quieter now, “Bodies looked wrong.”

That gave me a little thrill. Sharp and bright. The kind that starts in the ribs and works its way outward. Not fear. Never fear first. Curiosity. Possibility. That intoxicating little click when something you’ve half-built in private begins to catch on the edges of the real world.

“Wrong how?” I asked.

He hesitated. I could almost hear him choosing between dignity and gossip, sanity and spectacle. I helped him along by biting lightly at my straw and tilting my head like I was fascinated and a little impressed and perhaps just drunk enough to make him brave.

“Not random,” he said. “Not like some animal got at them. Not like just... I dunno, some psycho with a knife either. Too much damage in the wrong places. Too much force. And too...” He frowned, trying to catch the shape of his own thought. “Too specific.”

I said nothing, because people will often step further into silence than they ever would into a question.

It worked.

“One of the lads who was first on one of the scenes said it didn’t even look real at first,” he said. “Said your brain didn’t know what box to put it in.”

I let out a little breath through my nose, not quite a laugh. “That’s a horrible sentence.”

“Yeah.”

“And you believe him?”

He looked at me oddly, as though that were the wrong question. “I believe he was scared.”

That landed.

For a moment, just a moment, the scene sharpened around the edges. The music. The glass in my hand. The dark reflection in the window behind him. Fear changes things. Real fear, I mean. It carries differently than nerves. Smells different too, if you’re the sort of person who notices that kind of thing. Darren wasn’t just enjoying a spooky story now. He was remembering something he wished he hadn’t heard, or had heard too clearly.

I softened my expression and touched his wrist again, this time slower, my thumb brushing the inside of it. “Okay,” I said. “Forget the bodies. You said there were men you’d seen hanging around the industrial estate. What about them?”

That one made him glance away immediately, toward the bar, toward the door, toward anything that wasn’t me.

“Nothing.”

I smiled. “Darren.”

He laughed nervously. “What?”

“You just did the face people do when they’re about to say something interesting and don’t want to.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.” I leaned in further, enough now that the table was the only thing keeping my body from brushing his. “And now I’m curious. Which, for the record, is your fault.”

That got him smiling. Men do so love being blamed flirtatiously for female interest.

He lowered his voice. “Just... seen some blokes. Around the garages. Near the edge of the estate. And by some of the older units.”

“What sort of blokes?”

He gave a helpless little shrug. “Just blokes. Only not normal.”

I grinned. “That clears everything up beautifully.”

“No, I mean it.” He frowned, annoyed now at his own inability to sound sane. “There’s something off about them. You ever look at someone and at first they just seem... big, or hard-looking, or whatever, but then you keep looking and something in your head goes no?”

That sent another thrill through me, warmer this time.

I sat back slightly and let my eyes drag slowly over him in an exaggerated once-over. “I mean,” I said, smiling wickedly, “I’ve had the opposite problem.”

He laughed harder at that than the joke deserved, mostly because it let him feel I was still playing rather than interrogating. Which I was. Both. Always both.

“What kind of off?” I asked.

He swallowed. “Eyes, for one. Not all the time. Only if the light catches them wrong. Or moonlight. They kind of...” He lifted a hand, searching for the right shape. “Flash. Catch strange. Not glowing, that sounds stupid, but too bright. Too alive. Like an animal’s eyes in headlights.”

I kept very still.

“And the faces,” he went on, more quickly now that he’d started. “Some of ’em. Jawlines too heavy. Mouths wrong somehow. Not deformed, just...” He exhaled in frustration. “Like they don’t sit right in the face. And they stand weird. Too still. Proper still. Like they don’t need to fidget or shift or anything. Then every now and then one of ’em will stop and just...” He inhaled sharply through his nose. “Do that. Like they’re scenting the air.”

My whole body lit up at that. Not externally, I hoped. But inside, definitely. Like somebody had thrown open a door in a room I’d only ever stared at through the keyhole.

It was too neat. Too close to the shape of it.

I took a sip of my drink to cover the little flare of satisfaction that threatened to show itself on my face. “And you’ve seen these men yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“More than once?”

“Yeah.”

“Same places?”

He nodded, then hesitated.

“Where?” I asked softly.

He licked his lips, suddenly nervous again. “Near that Blackthorn garage a few times. Late. Not every night. Just... enough that you start noticing. And then there’s another place.”

There it was.

My pulse jumped.

“What place?”

He tipped his glass back, drained what was left of the pint, and set it down a little too hard. “One of the older warehouse sites near the back stretch off the bypass. Half derelict. Most people avoid it.”

“Most people are cowards.”

He snorted. “Most people aren’t stupid.”

“Debatable.”

I signalled for another round. He started to protest, then didn’t. Of course he didn’t. The barman came over, bored and damp-clothed, and I smiled up at him too because why waste a face if you’ve got one.

By the time the next drinks landed, I had decided to be bolder.

Partly because I could feel Darren starting to retreat into himself again, and partly because I wanted to see what would happen if I pushed. That is, admittedly, a sentence which probably explains a lot of my life.

I let my foot brush his under the table first. Lightly. Once. Then again, with less room for ambiguity. His eyes dropped to my mouth when I smiled at him. I could almost watch the fantasy beginning in his head. Me. Him. A dark car park, perhaps. The back seat of something. My tights torn somewhere dramatically. Men really do script themselves with astonishing speed.

“You know,” I said, running one fingertip slowly around the rim of my glass, “if you were a better journalist’s source, I’d probably have to reward you.”

His expression changed. Subtle, but enough. Heat. Hope. The little flash of male vanity waking up like a dog hearing its own name.

“Yeah?”

“Mmm.” I leaned in and lowered my voice. “Maybe.”

That made him smile into his pint.

I moved my hand to his knee under the table. Not tentative. Not drunken. Deliberate. The denim was rough beneath my palm, his leg warmer than I expected. He looked down, then up again, and his breathing changed. Not much. Just enough.

“You take me to one of those places,” I said, smiling as though the idea were half joke, half invitation, “and I might be extremely grateful.”

He stared at me.

I let my thumb move once over the inside of his thigh.

“Journalistically,” I added.

He laughed, but not properly. There was strain in it now. Excitement too.

“You’re trouble,” he said.

“Oh, definitely.”

The thing about seduction, or attempted seduction, is that most of it lives in the pause before anything explicit happens. In the awareness. In the body knowing where it is headed before the hand gets there. I let mine stay where it was a beat too long, watching him watch me. Then, because I wanted him off-balance and because I am, occasionally, terrible, I shifted closer in the booth until my knee pressed fully against his, my dress riding a little higher over my thighs as I did so.

“What if I said please?” I murmured.

That nearly did it.

His face flushed. His mouth parted slightly. For one beautiful second I thought he was going to say yes and damn the consequences, and there is a very specific kind of triumph in getting a man to the edge of his own better judgement.

So naturally, I ruined it by going a little further.

I let my hand slide higher.

Not by much. But enough.

Enough that his body reacted before his ego could.

He jerked back so sharply his knee banged the underside of the table.

“No,” he said, too quickly, too loudly. “No, I— no.”

I blinked at him.

The heat vanished from his face almost instantly, replaced by something much colder and much less flattering.

Fear.

Real fear.

He was looking past me now, toward the windows, the door, the mirrored dark outside, like some part of him had just remembered the world beyond my hand and my smile and found it waiting there.

“Darren—”

“No. I’ve said too much.” He stood abruptly, almost knocking his drink. “I shouldn’t have said any of that.”

I kept my voice low. Softer now. Less playful. “Who are you scared of?”

He shook his head. “That’s not the point.”

“It is the point.”

“No, the point is you don’t know who’s around. Who hears things. Who talks. You don’t know who’s connected to what.”

His words made the phone recording in my coat pocket suddenly feel incriminating in a way it hadn’t five seconds ago.

“Come on,” I said, trying to smile again, trying to pull it back from whatever edge he’d suddenly found. “I’m just asking questions.”

He looked at me then, properly, and the flattered little charge that had been in him before was gone. “Then ask safer ones.”

And then he left.

Not theatrically. Not in a huff. Just fast, with the sort of abrupt, graceless escape that belongs to people who are not embarrassed, but genuinely frightened they’ve stayed too long.

I sat there for a moment with my hand still half-curled on the table and the taste of gin sharp on my tongue, listening to the fruit machine hum and the music drone and a woman at the bar laugh much too loudly at something that wasn’t funny. The whole room felt the same as before and not the same at all. Like some invisible seam had split open and shown me the rough dark underneath.

Which, naturally, only made me more interested.

I finished my drink, paid properly, and walked back to my flat through cold wet streets that smelled of drains, kebab grease, exhaust, rain on brick, and the faint ghost of distant smoke. I should have been unnerved. Maybe I was, a bit. But mostly I was electric. Alive with it. You spend long enough chasing weird little local stories and half the time they die in your hands the minute you get close. Drunks. Mistaken identity. Urban legends wearing hi-vis. But this felt different. Not proof. Not certainty. Nothing so tidy. Just fragments, but fragments with shape.

By the time I got through my front door, I already had too many thoughts and nowhere sensible to put them.

My flat looked exactly as it always did when I was in the middle of something. Which is to say: deranged.

Newspaper cuttings covered one wall and most of my desk, layered over printouts of maps, highlighted reports, hastily scribbled arrows, names circled and re-circled in pen. My notebooks were everywhere. Open on the bed. Open on the floor. Open on the arm of the sofa beneath a cardigan I thought I’d lost last week. One shelf held journalism books and half-read theory texts with sticky notes growing out of them like paper fungus. Another held folklore dictionaries, myth glossaries, local history pamphlets, a guide to obscure beast legends in Northern Europe, and three stacks of comics because apparently I contain multitudes, most of them badly organised. Empty mugs sat on every available surface. There was a pinboard over my desk that had long since given up pretending to be academic and now looked like the private shrine of a girl one bad night away from buying red string in bulk.

It was magnificent.

I dumped my bag on the chair, peeled off my jacket, and went straight to the wall.

The attack sites. The dates. The witness fragments. The repeated references to men seen near certain industrial patches at night. Too still. Too watchful. Too strange around the eyes. Now two fixed points had sharpened out of the blur. Blackthorn garage. Derelict warehouse site near the bypass.

My pulse kicked again.

Not because I knew. I didn’t. That was the point. I didn’t know anything. Not really. But I had enough now to show someone. Enough to stop feeling like I was building a shrine to my own overactive imagination and start feeling, for the first time, like the pattern might actually be trying to emerge.

And there was only one person I wanted to show.

Ayla.

Not because she’d automatically believe me. She probably wouldn’t. Not fully. But she’d look. Properly look. And that mattered more. Ayla noticed things in a way other people didn’t. She could sit in front of a mess and somehow find the one thread worth pulling. If I was wrong, she’d tell me. If I was right... well.

I grabbed my phone.

{I have something to show you.}

Then, because I know exactly how I sound when I get excited about nonsense:

{And no, before you ask, I haven’t joined a cult. Yet.}

I hit send, looked back at the wall, and felt that bright ugly thrill move through me all over again.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t nothing.