by Vince Vogel
He was a tall man with brown skin and a buzz cut. A look bordering on annoyance sat on his face.
“So,” he said, “take me through what happened tonight.”
“But I already have. We’re wasting time talking about it when we should be out there looking for her and Kevin.”
“But there’s a problem, Sergeant Dorring. See, this murder case you’re talking about. We can’t find any evidence of it on Captain Saunders or Lieutenant Yates’ computers or on any of their filed documents.”
“But we’ve spent the past two months on it.”
“Yes. For two months you and Sergeant Conner Jones have been assisting with security in a detailed risk assessment of the surrounding towns with officers Saunders and Yates. But nothing about this murder case you’re talking about.”
“A risk assessment?” Dorring said, frowning at the man sitting opposite.
“Yes. We’ve had bother with rioting lately. Captain Saunders was assigned your assistance so she and Lieutenant Yates could monitor key places.”
Dorring couldn’t believe his ears. What was going on?
“That’s wrong,” he said. “We’ve been hunting a killer. A man killing locals. Cutting things into them. We brought two of the victims here for autopsy.”
“Well, there’s no report of that.”
Why didn’t she tell me? went through Dorring’s head. We’ve been sharing everything of late and yet she couldn’t even tell me that she’d lied to her superiors and was keeping the whole investigation a secret.
“So how did George Bishop get involved?” the MP asked.
“We found his knife in one of the victims,” Dorring told him. “He’d sold it to someone.”
“Who?”
“We never found out. I was going to ask him more questions, but that’s when he was killed in the toilet.”
“So it was the same killer who did that to him?”
“Yes. The same one who’s got Jane and Kevin now. That’s why you have to understand, we have to find them.”
“No one saw anything, though,” the MP said. “How’d you explain that? Surely they would have seen a struggle.”
Dorring stared at the man. The look of gentle annoyance had made way for one of suspicion.
“He must’ve taken them,” was all Dorring could think of saying. “After he killed Bishop. Surely you’ve spoken to Conner?”
“Yeah. He says the same as you. But all we got is one dead SAS guy, two missing MPs, and you and your partner talking about some investigation we’re only now hearing the first of. You can see how it looks.”
He stared at Dorring, the look of suspicion obvious now.
“Are you even looking for them?” he asked.
“Yeah. We’re looking. We’ve practically got the whole base out looking for…”
He was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Excuse me,” he said and went outside the room.
When he was alone, Dorring sat and listened to the murmuring of voices on the other side of the door. He felt terribly helpless. His imagination attacked him. He wondered what the killer was doing to Jane in that moment. If she was already dead. A terrible void opened up inside of him and threatened to pull him all the way in. He glanced about the room. He wasn’t cuffed. Was there a chance he could get out of there? Go find her himself? There was so little time. Panic began to set in and the void became even larger.
The door opened and the MP walked back inside.
“We think we’ve found them,” he said. “I’m heading there now. Maybe you can help.”
Dorring remembered the car ride across the base as though it were only an hour ago. He remembered every detail as he remembered every detail of the deaths of his wife and daughter some years later.
The radio transmitter on the dashboard kept making muffled sounds, but Dorring ignored them. The MP didn’t speak the whole way and they drove in silence through the dim orange light of the streetlamps.
Dorring couldn’t help thinking about what they would find.
There’d been a report of screaming coming from a small construction site on the edge of the base. A new firehouse was being built there. It was behind the fencing of this that the screams had been heard by two MPs on a routine patrol of the area.
When Dorring and the detective arrived at the scene, they found flashing lights everywhere. On the junction close to the construction site, several RMP Land Rovers were parked. An ambulance belonging to the Defense Medical Services was there too.
Dorring leaped out of the Land Rover the moment it stopped.
“Hey!” the MP shouted. “Stop him!”
The others heard it too late. They were talking with each other at the tape barrier they’d made at the entrance to the half-built firehouse. Dorring ran through it and towards a set of flashlight beams he saw inside the breeze block shell. He entered a large room where the fire engines would be eventually kept when the building was finished. In one corner, medical officers were busy seeing to someone. They were kneeling beside him, one holding his hand and the other one packing dressing on a wound that Dorring couldn’t see because the first paramedic was blocking his view.
Dorring scanned his eyes to the opposite corner of the room. A group of MPs were standing over something. Dorring saw blood on the ground by their feet. They were standing at the edge of it and blocking the view of what was lying on the other side of them.
He decided to go to the medical officers first.
Coming up behind them, Dorring gazed at him. It was Kevin. His face was terribly pale and he was shaking violently. His shirt had been removed and blood covered his stomach. In his flesh, the words Who Dares Wins.
He looked up at Dorring with horrified eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m so sorry…”
Dorring felt like his head would explode. The blood appeared to thicken in his brain. He ran to the other corner and barged past the MPs. Snatching a flashlight off one of them, he shone it on what lay on the floor in the blood.
There was shouting, but he didn’t hear it.
She was naked. Her hands and feet had been tied. Her mouth was open. Caught in a scream of permanent terror. He’d finished her by cutting the throat. On her abdomen she wore the insignia the killer was well known for. Who Dares Wins. He’d mutilated her and killed her.
He’d won the game and destroyed the first woman Dorring had ever loved.
The smell of her blood rose into Dorring’s nostrils and filled him up. His stomach knotted and twisted like writhing worms. It was like a kick in the guts and he keeled over, vomiting everywhere.
After that, Dorring slipped into psychosis. He recalled very little of the rest of that night. Only that they gave him something and he slept in a whirring nightmare of seeing her body over and over. Of watching her dragged away. Of watching her mutilated.
When he awoke from that, he was a different man. The horror of that night had had the effect of seven years in one single second. He would never be the same after witnessing what a monster had done to the woman he loved.
So he began hallucinating and having recurring nightmares. He was sent off for assessment and it helped in a way. Not through the cognitive therapy they gave him, but through his ability to push things deep inside himself. He pushed Jane so far down that he buried her under six feet of subconscious.
And there she lay for fourteen years alongside all the other buried memories in Dorring’s rich graveyard of the mind.
All the way up until now.
35
“Wake up, sleepin’ beauty.”
Dorring slowly lifted his heavy lids. The grinning, malevolent face of Mo stood before him. Behind her, Abigail sat on the floor, her hands and feet bound in duct tape, a piece over her mouth, her frightened green eyes staring up at him.
They were inside the basement of a house, a set of wooden stairs leading up. Dorring’s body had severe new pains in it, especially his back, and he gathered he’d been thrown down. A wedge of l
ight from the hallway shone into the dim gloom of the cellar. The rest of the room was bare concrete walls. A chain hung from the ceiling joists and Dorring hung from this, his taped up feet dangling a foot above the wooden floor.
The television set could be heard above them. The family going back to what they were doing before Dorring arrived.
“Is this what you did to Kevin?” Dorring asked.
“My God!” Mo almost screamed. “You’re so stupid!”
“And Stevie was right—you are a whore!”
Mo’s face suffused with hatred and she charged at him. With her fingers, she pressed into the gash on his hip, pushing the long nails into the open flesh. Dorring writhed but couldn’t get away from it.
She stood back from him and laughed.
“My brah’s gonna do awful things to your woman,” she said. “He did awful things to your woman before. He told me about it. About when he was in the army.”
“Who!?” Dorring asked in complete frustration.
“Oh no,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “He made me swear that only he is to tell you that.”
“Where is he?”
“Him and Lord Appleby have some business to attend to first at the manor. They’re gonna be billionaires. We’re all gonna be rich. The whole island. The Russians are gonna pay billions for a bunch o’ flowers. Gonna poison people with them. But once he’s finished with that,” she swooped forward and grabbed Dorring by the chin, “he’s gonna come here and finish all of this for good.”
36
At Appleby Manor, everything was set up for dinner. The dining room was made out as though for royalty and the long, ancient dining table was covered in silver platters filled with lobsters, oysters, fresh trout from the lakes, fresh haddock from the seas, and so many other delights from around the island.
Bruce Appleby knew the Russian Admiral, Sergei Rogozhin, was very fond of fish, having grown up on the far eastern coast of the Russian Federation in the city of Vladivostok. The culinary delights were to impress him and leave him in a good mood to sign the contract worth five hundred million pounds a year. The Russians were set to surpass even Appleby’s own developments with the Gordon’s Heather. Rogozhin was a talker and in their previous meetings, he’d taken to talking about his country’s plans after a bottle or two of good wine. The Russians were apparently devising a missile system that could send a chemical warhead halfway around the planet, and, using the Gordon’s Heather CA191 nerve agent, have a kill zone between a hundred and four hundred square miles, depending on weather patterns in the drop zone. It was as good as a nuclear warhead but without the structural damage or the destruction of the planet. All it did was neutralize the civilian population. There was no hundred year wait before you could repopulate. No nuclear winter. No holocaust except human.
Bruce Appleby was awaiting Rogozhin’s entrance in the great hallway of the manor. The one that Dorring had stood in the day before. Now it wasn’t so filled with office workers. Now it was filled with men dressed in black tuxedos with shades and earpieces. Guns tucked into their dinner jackets.
Out on the lawn, Rogozhin’s helicopter had arrived and the Admiral was getting out. It had come directly from his ship, which sat somewhere on the edge of international waters in the North Atlantic.
The moment that Rogozhin and his men came to the door escorted by his own people, Bruce Appleby, twenty-ninth Lord of McGuffin, smiled ingratiatingly and approached the rotund admiral. The Russian’s two men flanked him on either side. Large men with stern expressions on boyish faces, short blond hair. They narrowed their eyes at Appleby as he met the meaty hand of Rogozhin.
“Sergei,” Appleby said. “So nice to see you again.”
“And you, Bruce. Is everything well?”
“Yes. Everything is tip top. Now if you’d like to follow me, we have dinner waiting. And as I know you’re a man with little time, you’ll appreciate that I don’t stand on ceremony.”
“Very good, Bruce,” Rogozhin said as he followed Appleby out of the hallway, under the shadow of the chandelier, and into the long dining room.
The back wall was coated in paintings, mounted animal heads, and a collection of very old maritime clocks. The moment they entered, the fat Russian made his way gleefully to the table and began filling a plate with food.
“Such treats,” he said. “I’m so glad I came here on an empty stomach.”
“Then dig in, gentlemen,” Appleby said.
The two bodyguards took their cue from their boss and began filling their own plates. Followed by their mouths. Appleby stood back watching. It was all ceremony. The deal was practically done. The food was no more than a way of giving it a pleasant stamp.
Nevertheless, Bruce Appleby stood watching with trepidation biting his gut. Dorring had slipped the net a second time, this time killing many of his men, including his best: Conner. The only thing that could destroy his well laid plans now was Dorring turning up.
Why now? Appleby said in his head. I’m so close to getting what I’ve worked for all this time and it’s going to be ruined by my brother’s foolish bloody games.
It was as Bruce thought this that his phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and shook his head when he read who it was. They say that if you think of the Devil, Appleby said to himself, he will appear. No truer words.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said to the company. “I must take this call.”
“Go,” Rogozhin said as he chewed on an oyster. “We’ll eat first. Talk later.”
Appleby grinned sycophantically, bowed and left the room. He walked to the end of a corridor and answered the phone.
“Where are you?” he said sharply.
“I found him,” replied the gruff voice of his brother, obviously ignoring the question.
“Dorring?”
“Who else?”
“Is the girl with him?”
“Yes. Mo has them both at my mother’s place.”
“She caught them?”
“Yes. I told her he might go there. Told her to watch the place. She caught them. They’re in the basement.”
“Right, no more games,” Appleby said in a vexed voice. “You go there now and you kill them both.”
“What about the Russians?”
“I’ll see to them. You get this sorted. It’s cost us too much already. All these bloody games.”
“It’ll all soon be at an end, brother.”
“Really?” Appleby asked in an exasperated voice. “Because you promised our father all those years ago that you’d stopped. But you can’t, can you?”
“I promised you,” his brother said. “Let me have Dorring and I’ll stop forever. You can live in peace of my horror.”
“You’d better,” Appleby snapped. “What’s the point of being rich men if you’re going to risk it all because of your sickness?”
“Father never thought I was sick. He said I was merely a wolf.”
“That’s because he was sick too. Now come on! I can’t talk with you all day. Go see Dorring. Kill him and that bitch and end it all.”
Appleby put the phone down. He felt a little better. Dorring was caught.
37
There was someone at the front door. A loud knock shook the house.
“Oh, now you’re in trouble,” Mo said, smiling all over and clapping her hands gleefully together.
She turned her eyes onto the stairs as footsteps approached along the floorboards above. Dorring gazed past her at Abigail. She was shaking. Dorring glanced about the area around her. The floor wasn’t concrete. It was wooden. Built over the original excavation. Probably because the house predated concrete. He saw something glinting in the dim electric glow. He nodded towards it and Abigail’s eyes followed his signal’s direction.
A foot to her right, she spotted what he meant. While Mo gazed at the stairs, she scooted her body to the side so that her bound wrists were over it. Then she began to move them back and forth ever so slightly so the movement w
ouldn’t be noticed.
The wooden steps creaked. Dorring glanced to his left and spotted the boots climbing down. Mo ran to the bottom to greet him. Soon, his whole body was on display. The hood hanging over him. Mo ran up the last few rungs and hugged him.
“Ma brah,” she said lovingly.
He patted her on the head like a dutiful dog and turned to Abigail. She stopped the movement of her hands. A smile opened up on his mouth. Then he turned to Dorring.
“She with you now?” the figure asked.
Dorring couldn’t believe it. He knew the voice the second he heard it. Now he knew for sure that he had always meant to end up in this basement. That the moment he decided to act on Kevin’s message, he was destined to be chained up here. That the message was thrown out there like a fishing net and it had gathered him in like a helpless fish.
Mo let go of him and the figure continued into the basement. He came before Dorring and flipped off the hood.
Standing before him was Kevin Yates.
“You scrawled those words on your own stomach,” Dorring said.
Kevin lifted the coat up and revealed his lily white stomach. The insignia scarred into him. Not as neat as his other marks, since this one had been written upside down.
Who Dares Wins.
“I wanted something to always remind me of it,” Kevin said. “Despite everything, I loved her. She was so bored out there and so was I. I got so bored that I started doing something I’d tried not to for a long time. Tried hard not to. I wanted to be a good soldier. Just like her. Like you.”
“You’re a monster,” Dorring said. “You led me here to kill me.”
“Yes. I sent that message a year ago when I was bored. I wondered if you’d ever get it. Man, you should have seen my face when I spotted you at the graveyard. When I was following her.”
Kevin pointed at Abigail.
“You murdered Jane,” Dorring said, tears welling in his eyes.
“No matter how much of a monster you think I am, I loved Jane,” Kevin said. “You know, she laughed at me the morning after we slept together. Said it was a stupid mistake. It didn’t feel like a mistake to me. Then she got with you. Dangled you in my face. I hated both of you for that. That’s when I decided I’d end it with aplomb. End it all with her dead.”