Page 91 of The Trap by Catherine
In a straight line down her stomach.
Between her legs.
“Ohyes,” he says. “Nicki. Your sister. Of course... Sorry, I probably should’ve mentioned this sooner, but I don’t know any Nicki. I never met your sister. I don’t know where she is. My sympathies if she’s gone missing but, if someone took her... Well, I’m afraid it wasn’t me.”
“It was,” Lucy says, her voice a dry and rough and raspy thing. “It was you.”
He shakes his head. “’Fraid not, no.”
She doesn’t believe him. This is just more torture, another type of pain he’s delighting in inflicting on her.
Ofcoursehe’s going to say that. Of course he is.
But back in the car...
The first girl had been on the side of the road somewhere in Wexford. He said the second got lots of attention, a crazy amount—and that one of them was very young, too young, and she’d had a dog. That was Jennifer Gold. The third, he’d told her, had escaped from his car and run out in front of another one. That had to be Lena.
She’d assumed he was just holding back about Nicki, taunting her, making her wait. Making her suffer. But what if...?
No. No, no, no. Not possible. Of course it was him.
Ofcourseit was.
His finger is moving in the opposite direction now, retracing the line he drew on her trembling body.
But when he reaches the point at which he started, he doesn’t stop. He moves off her face and into her hair, pulling a strand of it back, away from her ear.
Puts his lips to it.
Whispers.
“And when I said I didn’t kill them, I wasn’t lying. Because there’s a difference, isn’t there? Between actually killing someone and just, you know... letting them die.”
Don’t panic. Stay calm. It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK.
Lucy is only vaguely aware of him getting up and moving away from her. She’s thinking of all the information there is to go on, out there, in the world. Someone must have seen him parked outside the cafe. One of those houses, they could have one of those video doorbells or private security systems that captured his number plate. His fingerprints might be on her phone and a man like this doesn’t just start with the worst crime you can commit, he works his way up to it. He must have some minor convictions already; his prints will be on file. They can set up some kind of stake-out operation, follow him here. And even if he suspects, even if he spots the unmarked cars on his tail and doesn’t come here, they’ll surely have some sense of the general area, and they’ll start searching here. And when they see a pink house, they’ll connect it to what Lena said before she died, and they’ll storm in here and rescue her.
And she will let all this go.
Shewill.
She already has. She doesn’t need to know what happened to Nicki. It’s over. No more searching. She’s accepted that she’ll never have the answers—and that’s OK.
Being alive will be enough.
“I promise,” she whispers.
And that’s when she sees it, on the walls.
The first time she looked, all she saw was mould. But now she sees what’s under it.
Pink.
Every square inch of wall in this place has been painted pink. It’s faded and chipping, but there’s no mistaking it, and it’s everywhere. A sickly, medicinal pink: the kind that makes her think of stomach remedies and E-numbers and the accessories that come with baby dolls.
We call it the Pink House.
She thought that meant a house whose exterior was painted pink, a house whose nickname would give it away, a flashing beacon in the countryside that would lead the guards straight to its door, to its captives, to this horror.
