Pretty Little Things: 2018’s most nail-biting serial killer thriller with an unbelievable twist

The cabin in the woods – isn’t that a film? – is about twenty-odd miles away from civilisation of any real kind, unless you count the wildlife – who, incidentally, can be a massive help if I want to dispose of smaller body parts.

There have been four girls before Bryony. Later, I’ll have them all moved to a different place, a wasteland about forty miles from where I live.

Then it’s just a matter of time before they’re found. I don’t think it’ll be long.

Bryony’s a bit different though. When I move them, I don’t want to leave her with the rest. She fought back more. She was in a different league.

I pick up my spade and go outside the cabin. The air outside is heavy with damp, but it’s mild enough.

I go to the back of the cabin and out towards the undergrowth.

I step over the four raised mounds of earth near the line of trees and begin to dig. Nothing fancy, or too deep, just enough like when you sow a row of seeds.

All I can hear, now the blood in my ears has stopped pounding, is the spade slicing through the soil.

It takes no time at all and I go back to get Bryony.

When I’m done, and have scattered a layer of soil over her, I take a few steps back and lean my weight against the spade.

I look at the five mounds of earth, from the bottom where their feet are, right up until I reach their faces.

Five bodies buried up to their necks, five faces left uncovered, looking skyward. They remind me of marble statues or the effigies you see adorning the top of a sarcophagus.

They are less than perfect, obviously. I can’t stop decomposition.

This is my garden, they are my seeds. Pretty things might grow here, even after they’ve gone, and join the sea of reds and pinks that are here already.

I head back inside, leaving the spade outside for later.

I go to the mirror on the cabin wall and take a moment to study my face.

So, there it is. This is me. What I do.

It’s a primal instinct. Something tuned in, buried deep, part of my DNA, never to be erased.

People write books on it – the reasons why people kill. Reality is, they’ve only just scratched the surface. They don’t know how deep down the rabbit hole it goes.

They don’t know about me.

As I said, it’s a primal instinct.

And that’s what makes me so dangerous.

PART ONE (#ulink_3ff0e384-bb68-5908-87ee-7bd94814e334)

Ring-a-ring o’ roses,

A pocket full of posies,

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

We all fall down.

…We all fall down.

We all fall.

We. All.

Fall.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_6782acd1-d199-5806-933f-5672d311a36d)

CHARLOTTE

The taste of acrid smoke, like ash in my mouth.

This is what I always feel in that first waking moment after a nightmare.

The ashes in my mouth. That and the heat from the fire.

Since the accident it’s all I can think about when I shut my eyes at night.

I remember . . . I remember opening my eyes, seeing twisted and bent metal keeping me prisoner in the wrecked shell that was my old Citroën Xsara.

I say was, because in the immediate aftermath, from where I was lying, it didn’t resemble anything like a car.

I remember the heat of the fire, seeing the flames licking ever closer. I remember looking at twisted metal, torn upholstery and flames drawing dangerously close to the exposed fuel pipe.

It’s like I was in a daze. I couldn’t think about what I had to do next. I was, I guess, frozen in that moment, unable to move.

Then I was dragged out of what remained of my car by the man who had been in the vehicle behind mine. Assessing the damage, he knew I had maybe a minute before the car’s petrol tank exploded.

He’d cleared us to a distance of about thirty feet before the inevitable happened.

In one deafening explosion, the car was completely engulfed in flames, and I breathed a sweet sigh of relief that I was not burning to death.

It was a miracle I was alive or that things didn’t turn out worse considering my injuries. I suffered concussion, cuts, bruises, fractured ribs and a punctured lung, but the worst was my face . . .

I’d survived a collision with an HGV that had misjudged a bend in the road while coming from the opposite direction. The driver, Paul Selby, caught my car, crushing the side, and the force had spun me around before I came off the road, going through a fence and down an embankment. The car had flipped, rolling several times before coming to a standstill. Wreckage was strewn across the road I’d previously been driving on, and I was now stationary in a field.

Paul Selby was arrested for dangerous driving, using a mobile at the wheel and causing injury by dangerous driving. He got bail, but the court date is coming up and I can’t deny the stress has been getting to me of late.

I have to keep it all in perspective, though – or so I keep being told.

It’s a crash no one should have survived.

But somehow I did.