Bloodstream: A gripping, unpredictable and shocking thriller
Bloodstream: Part 1 – Chapter 1

He hadn’t seen anything like this for a long time. An authentic confession to murder. No ifs and buts. No I didn’t really mean it, it was all just a terrible accident. Simply a total and utter acceptance of the facts and what seemed like genuine remorse.

Detective Inspector David Murphy let his size thirteen shoes slide off his feet a little and scratched at the closely shorn beard on his face.

‘I don’t believe you.’

The man sitting in front of him didn’t gasp in shock, but moved back in his chair a little.

‘Wh . . . what do you mean? I’m telling you I killed her. Stabbed her right in the chest, here,’ the man said, hitting his heart for effect.

‘I’m not buying it,’ Murphy said, letting his eyes drift round interview room two. It needed a new paint job. The white walls where now a faded, almost grey colour.

‘I’m just trying to be helpful here,’ the man said, almost pleading. ‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I? I mean, it must have been me who did it. It has to be. I hear her voice sometimes and I have to tell someone what I did so she’ll stop. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, it would be. If a word of it was true,’ Murphy replied. ‘The problem is I don’t think any of what you’ve told us since you sat down in here is the truth. Is it, Keith?’

A long sigh came from beside Murphy. DS Laura Rossi becoming bored of the exchange, he guessed. ‘Tell us again.’

Keith took a deep breath and began to speak.

‘We were seeing each other, me and Amy. We’re like boyfriend and girlfriend. We talk about everything. Spend loads of time with each other. Have been for a few months . . .’

‘See, that’s the first problem, Keith,’ Murphy said, attempting to keep a smile from his face. ‘Boyfriend and girlfriend?’

‘That’s right.’

Murphy shook his head and tried to hold the laughter in. That this guy could have any chance with Amy was ridiculous. Amy was just about to turn nineteen, a fresh-faced beauty with her pick of men. Keith was in his forties, with a pock-marked face scarred by teenage acne that had yet to disappear. The grease from his hair alone was enough to keep the local chippy in business for a good few weeks. That was before you considered other ‘issues’.

‘Go on,’ Murphy said with a wave of his hand.

‘We must have got into an argument, like, and I had hold of a knife. I did it. Stuck it right in her chest. Sometimes people argue with me and they won’t stop. They just go on and on, so I have to stop them somehow. I see knives and I put them in their chest and they go away for a bit. Then they come back some time later and start up with me again. So, that’ll be how it happened. I can see it, all in here.’ He paused a second, but then pointed to his head.

‘Go back a minute,’ Rossi said, writing down notes as Keith spoke. ‘Slower this time. You’ve been seeing Amy for a few months, right?’

‘Yeah. I have, honest. I know it sounds weird, right, but she liked me. Always speaking to me nicely, smiling and saying sweet things to me.’

Murphy made a noise, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. Rossi ignored him and continued talking.

‘Why do you think no one close to Amy would mention you, Keith? Because this is the first time we’ve heard your name mentioned.’

Keith looked off to his left. ‘I . . . I don’t know. Maybe she never told anyone about us.’

‘You’ve been together for a few months in your words and she doesn’t tell anyone?’

‘Must be.’

Murphy pictured Amy walking hand in hand round town with this guy, laughing with him, gazing into his eyes . . . it was ridiculous.

‘How did you meet her?’

‘I went into the shop where she worked. It’s over the road from my flat. It’s on the ground floor, so I’m level with the street. I like that. I used to go in every morning for the paper and other stuff. Then, I’d wait until she was definitely on shift. Got to know her pattern and that. We hit it off straight away, honest. She was so nice to me. Always smiled as soon as I went in there. Then, I practised at home asking her out. Over and over again and she always said yes. So . . . so, I did it. I asked her. I definitely did. I think I did.’

Murphy shook his head and looked away. Muttered ‘Christ’ under his breath and checked the time.

‘What happened after you say you stabbed her?’

Keith glanced at Rossi before averting his eyes from her stare. Murphy watched him, trying to work out why he thought he had done something like this.

‘Well, when you stab someone, they bleed a lot. I’ve seen it on telly and that. In films, they stab people and there’s blood everywhere. So, I wou . . . couldn’t stop the bleeding, but she wouldn’t be breathing anyway by then. If you stab someone in the chest, they die really quickly. It happens in loads of films and TV programmes. I have bin bags in my house, so I must’ve wrapped her up. I would have done it nicely though. Then I took her home. Carried her there all by myself. From the shop. There must have been a lot of blood there, so can you say sorry for me? I don’t remember cleaning it up, so it must have been all over the place. I don’t know. I haven’t been in there since.’

‘When was this?’

‘About ten in the morning, I think on a Friday. Or a Tuesday. Few weeks ago. Or two. It was quiet, so no one saw me. She didn’t weigh that much, so I could do it on my own all right.’

Murphy motioned with his hand to continue.

‘After that, I reckon I took her out to the front past Speke Airport. Garston way, down by the docks there. Put her in the Mersey and watched her float away. That’s what I probably did.’

‘You didn’t do anything to her other than wrap bin bags round her and just dump her in the river?’

Keith looked at Murphy and gave him a shrug of the shoulders.

Murphy allowed the snort from his nostrils to escape. Bodies didn’t float down the Mersey for very long without being seen, even those at the tail end of the river where there were fewer tourists. Further up, near the Albert Dock, it wouldn’t have lasted five minutes before being seen. It . . . she . . . would have been found by now.

That was just the practical element. There was also the fact that Keith seemed to have mental health issues, which made everything he was saying about what he may have done to Amy questionable to say the least.

Part of Murphy was thinking ‘poor guy’ . . . the other part was complaining about the time that was being wasted.

‘Are you ready to give us your surname yet, Keith?’ Murphy said, attempting to be more professional and not the irritable detective he had been for the previous hour. ‘So we can check into you, things like that?’

Keith didn’t respond. Just stared at the table, replaceing the grooves scratched into its grey surface of unyielding interest.

Amy Maguire had been missing for over three weeks. Vanished, one Thursday night. Into thin air and everything that went with it. Murphy and Rossi had been helping the short-staffed F Division in Liverpool South investigate Amy’s disappearance. Their division in North Liverpool had been almost overstaffed at that point. The newly created Major Crime Unit now in existence, following a few years of increasingly high-profile cases. Higher command hadn’t spread resources widely or anything as logical as that. Instead, they had simply bulked up the numbers in Liverpool North.

The Amy Maguire case might have fallen through the cracks if it wasn’t for the fact nothing major had come through their doors in almost a month. Liverpool South had a multitude of other cases to deal with, so the investigation had been shifted north and Murphy was about to hand it off to a detective constable to handle, when he’d seen something in the file which piqued his interest.

Amy’s mother, Stacey. A name and an address he remembered well.

A few days after she had disappeared, Murphy and Rossi had gone down to the shop where she’d worked. Rain had been coming in bursts, threatening to soak the ground and anyone in its way. Rossi had struggled to hold an umbrella over them both while Murphy looked towards the shuttered-up shop as they stood in the last place CCTV had caught Amy’s image. The camera only caught the area immediately outside the shop entrance. Amy had left the edge of the frame and disappeared into darkness. Police tape strewn almost randomly across the street, as uniformed constables struggled to keep order. A small number of angry voices with nothing better to do, snarling at the plain-clothed detectives, screaming for a justice the country didn’t provide.

Murphy blinked and was back in the interview room.

‘Interview terminated at ten fifteen a.m.’

Amy Maguire was still alive. She had to be.

Murphy walked ahead of Rossi as they left the quiet of the room and stepped out into the corridor. He pushed through into the stretch of corridor that led towards the main incident room, making an effort to keep the door open for Rossi, before letting it swing shut behind him. Calm to cacophony in a single walk.

‘How long have we worked together for now? And don’t you dare say “too long”.’

‘Must be over three years. Why?’

‘Have we ever had someone come in and confess to a murder they haven’t committed?’

‘A few times. Usually they don’t get this far though. Uniforms downstairs tend to see them coming. Obviously slipped through the cracks this time.’

‘It’s not like I’m averse to people confessing crimes to me – I’ve heard enough of them in the past – but it doesn’t half piss me off when someone confesses to something that hasn’t happened.’

‘Wait up, will you . . . Mannaggia.’

Murphy slowed a little to allow Rossi to match his step, then carried on towards the new office near the back of the building. Their old incident room was now used by the Matrix team who focused on drugs and gangs, leaving domestic violence, trafficking and the occasional murder for Murphy and his team. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

He threw open the door and walked to his desk at the back of the room past the array of staff now technically under his supervision. In his peripheral vision he saw his boss through the glass of her internal office, but he kept his gaze forward, unwilling to be beckoned within just yet.

Murphy slammed his fist into the back of his chair, instantly regretting it as it spun away and into the wall.

‘I’ve told you not to hit it so hard,’ Rossi said, sitting down at the desk opposite Murphy’s. ‘You’ll end up breaking a bone. We’ll have to get you a punchbag in here or something, if you’re going to spit your dummy out every time you don’t get your own way.’

Murphy made some sort of guttural noise at her and dragged his chair back. He sat down, shaking his right hand to rid himself of the low throb which had already set in.

‘Why don’t you start up boxing again,’ Rossi said, leaning across the desk.

‘Because I’m too old for all that now. Been almost twenty years since I was in a ring. I’d get flattened in a second. Plus, the pain in my hand says I’ve forgotten how to throw a punch properly.’

Rossi hummed and sat back in her chair. ‘Who does that?’

‘Does what?’ Murphy replied, as he began to calm himself. ‘Punch chairs? At least it wasn’t a wall . . .’

‘I meant confess to a murder which sounds not only improbable, but of which there is no evidence that it has actually happened.’

Murphy swept open palms across his cheeks. ‘Attention seeker? Mental health patient . . . God knows. We know it’s not true . . .’

‘Possibly . . .’

Murphy went on as if Rossi hadn’t spoken. ‘We’re still treating this as a missing person, not a murder enquiry. So, we send a report and see if there’s anything anyone wants to do with Keith. That’s not our problem.’

Rossi nodded slowly. ‘Don’t think we should dismiss it entirely though. It’s not like he was confessing to killing JFK or something. It’s possible that he could be telling the truth.’

‘It was Amy on the video. Walking from the shop at eleven at night, not at nine in the morning like he said. Her mum was still awake at one in the morning and it’s only a ten-minute walk from there. Amy would’ve been home well before then.’

Murphy had spoken a little harsher than he’d meant so wasn’t exactly surprised when Rossi didn’t answer at first, instead giving him a silent moment of contemplation.

‘People don’t just disappear . . .’ Rossi replied after allowing the silence to drag on for a few moments longer than was comfortable.

That was the only problem with trying to dismiss the thought that something had happened to Amy. Almost three weeks with no word. Nothing to say that she had run off of her own accord. Murphy scratched the back of his head and pulled himself closer to his desk. ‘Sometimes, you just have a feeling, okay? Remember that girl we pulled out of that basement a few years back?’

‘How could I forget? That was the first proper case we worked together on. It’s burned on my memory. It was about that time I started seeing more lines on my face in the morning.’

‘Well, I bet everyone thought she was dead or on some island somewhere. Turned out to be wrong, didn’t it?’

‘I think that was probably a one-off. I’m not sure how many people want to take young girls off the street then keep them alive in a dark basement for a year. Just for some kind of experiment. We have to be realistic here.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe it’s something else this time.’

‘I’m all for positive thinking, Murph, but even I’m struggling with this one. Kick it back to Liverpool South and let them deal with it. Nothing more we can do now. We’ve spoken to all her friends, done the press thing, all that. Not a single lead, other than a possible mental health patient, confessing to a murder that we have no evidence for.’

Murphy didn’t answer. He was remembering Stacey Maguire as she had been years earlier. Seventeen, almost the same age as Amy was now. Mid-nineties haircut and pale skin. He smiled without thinking.

He was broken from his thoughts by DC Michael Hale appearing next to his desk. ‘Boss is calling us in.’

Murphy raised an eyebrow at Rossi before following her and DC Hale, catching up to them as they entered the boss’s office. The boss being DCI Stephens, head of their not-so-little corner of E Division.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Stephens said. Murphy closed the door behind him, not for the first time bristling at the fact that there was enough room for four people to work comfortably in this room whereas everyone else was tripping over themselves.

‘We’ve got a situation developing at the moment near Anfield . . .’

‘At the stadium? Someone nicked a footballer’s car or something?’ Hale said. Murphy gave him a withering look, which made Hale stiffen and turn away.

Stephens deigned to look at him for a second before switching her attention back to Murphy and Rossi. ‘If you’ll allow me to finish my sentence . . . no, not at the stadium. Although not far from it. Two bodies found in a house in Anfield.’ She rattled off an address which Murphy was pleased to see both Rossi and Hale noted down.

‘Suspicious?’ Murphy said, noting a harried look in Stephens’s eyes and wondering what had caused it.

‘Very. And that’s not all. Early reports are that we’ve found our missing celebs. And that it’s bad. Very fuc—’ Stephens stopped herself short. ‘Let’s just say if what I’m hearing is right, we’re about to have a lot more company than usual.’

Murphy nodded and turned round, not waiting for Rossi and Hale to follow.

It always begins with a body. Or bodies, in this instance. Murphy thought of the cases over the years – the bodies he had seen in their last moments – and carried on walking.

That was what he was paid to do. To keep walking towards the bodies.