by steve higgs
Lord Hale glanced at the armed men to his left and right. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t care. He is of no further use to me.’
The short man indicated with the barrel of his gun. ‘Out. All of you. Where are the others?’ We filed out, our hands held where they could see them, but none of us answered his question.
He didn’t bother to ask twice. Instead he jabbed his gun into Big Ben’s ribs from behind. ‘Think you’re tough, do you?’
Now it was Big Ben’s turn to shrug. ‘Yes.’
It was a simple reply but not the one the short man wanted. He pulled his trigger to send a trio of shots into the wall behind us. Anne screamed, Lily screamed, I almost wet myself but Big Ben just yawned. ‘Put it down, tiny man and then we’ll see how tough you are.’
‘Boss,’ one of the other armed men called to get attention. ‘There’s voices coming from this room.’
Now we were truly busted. The shots undoubtedly startled the rest of the dinner guests and they had been heard. With guns pointed at us, to make sure we didn’t move, four of the six armed men readied themselves and kicked in the door. More screams and shouts of terror echoed out into the corridor, but we were all caught. Every last one of us.
The short man, who chose to personally lead the raid on Mary and Michael’s room, now used a radio to call for reinforcements. They soon arrived, another half a dozen men, all wearing the same caterer’s outfits and all armed with the same Heckler and Koch weapon. I worried they would just shoot Dr Parrish, but they let us take him, Big Ben and Professor Pope being pressed into the task of carrying his arms and legs.
‘Where are you taking us?’ asked Tempest’s mum as they led us down the house’s main stairs. I thought maybe she was stalling, or trying to get some kind of dialogue going, but she had other ideas. ‘If you wish to lock us up somewhere, there’s a perfectly good bar we were in before dinner. That would be ideal. Or you could put us somewhere else and bring the contents of the bar to us. That could work too.’
The short man spun around to face her halfway down the stairs. ‘Hey, shut up, lady. We are not caterers, okay?
She kept her mouth shut. For about three seconds, which was just enough time for the short man to turn around and start walking again. ‘Well there’s no need to be rude. You look like caterers. It even says Carter’s Catering on your tunic.’
I saw the man twitch, his thumb hovering over the safety catch as he wrestled with whether to just shoot her or not.
We were led down the stairs and through a door and down some more stairs and then into an empty storeroom. Once inside, we all turned to look at our captors, hard stares being returned from all of them. Lord Hale hadn’t come down with us, he stayed on the ground floor to supervise the rest of the house being stripped. It was clear that was the activity being undertaken. Oil paintings, statues, busts, all manner of objects were being carefully packaged and boxed. It was a slick operation though I still couldn’t see the advantage for Lord Hale. What I was certain of was their need to eliminate any witnesses. I couldn’t work out why they hadn’t done it already.
So, when short man said, ‘Don’t worry, folks. We just need you out of the way until we are finished. No harm will come to you if you just stay here.’ I didn’t believe a word.
They were going to kill us, and the only reason I could come up with for stalling was that they wanted to make it look like an accident. How would they do that?
A Crazy Plan. Sunday, December 11th 0409hrs
The door to the storeroom shut with an ominous clang and the sound of an electronic keypad being operated. The noise of a solenoid clicking told me the door was locked, though I continued to stare at it until someone touched my arm. It was Tempest’s dad, Michael.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked. The answer of course was yes, from a physical perspective. I had a number of bruises because tonight had been far more adventurous than expected and I was hungry and getting quite tired, but as I stifled a yawn, I had to admit that I was fine.
With a nod, I asked, ‘How’s Tempest?’
‘Much better,’ he said, appearing next to me. ‘I have a corker of a headache, but the blurred vision has gone.’
‘Just weak,’ said Big Ben, throwing a casual insult for Tempest to ignore.
Tempest pulled me into a hug, more for his benefit I thought than for mine. To one side of the room, on the left if one was standing in the doors, lay Dr Parrish. Professor Pope was standing over him with a bag of plasma which Lily already had going into a vein in his elbow. The professor was squeezing the bag to get the fluids in quicker while Lily administered a drug of some sort. They could prolong his downward spiral, stretch it out for a few more hours, but Lord Hale and his team gave the impression they were almost finished which had potentially terrible repercussions for all of us.
We needed to escape. It was a thought that was beginning to feel like a mantra, so many times it had echoed in my head this evening. I felt as if I had been fighting for survival for hours now, which technically I had. Always believing salvation was around the corner, always convinced we could get out and get away. Now we were trapped in a storeroom, our brief moment of freedom as we got out of the basement lasting no more than half an hour.
The storeroom’s walls were painted white, the floor was concrete, and the ceiling looked to be as well. There were no windows. Big Ben was testing the door, seeing how solid it felt and looking for a weak spot when it refused to yield.
He stepped away and pulled a face. Then made like he was going to kick but changed his mind at the last moment. ‘What do you think they kept in here?’ he asked when he turned around to look at us watching him.
The storeroom was empty save for a few torn pieces of paper and some broken plastic banding. He was most likely right, and they had emptied the room earlier this evening, taking the contents as they had everything else of value.
‘More artwork,’ Michael hazarded. ‘That seems to be what this is all about. Do you think it is insurance fraud?’
I had the same thought myself earlier, wondering if Lord Hale was clever enough that he could sell the artwork to black market buyers and collect the insurance money. I wasn’t educated when it came to art, but during the course of my police career I attended a few burglaries where artwork had been taken. I was always stunned at the value associated with it.
Then a little itch tickled the inside of my skull. ‘Michael, when the elevator opened and Lord Hale was waiting for us, did you notice how sweaty all the men were?’
He cast his eyes down as he pictured them. ‘Yes, they were. Grimy and sweaty like they had been working really hard.’
‘Did you notice that Lord Hale’s dinner jacket was also grimy.’
He thought about it, slowly shaking his head when he reached an opinion. ‘I can’t say that I did. Was it?’
‘Yes.’
Tempest looked at me. ‘What’ve you got, Amanda?’
I puffed out my cheeks, trying to decide. ‘Lord Hale looked like he had been working just like the other men. If they were getting dirty moving and shifting the artwork and statues and things, then their appearance makes sense. They were sweaty, but now when I picture Lord Hale’s head, there was no sweat on his face. Their faces were grimy where they had got covered in dust moving old oil paintings and the sweat had tracked lines through it. His bore no trace of sweat but it was grimy. His hair was still perfectly in place too.’
‘Okay,’ said Patience, joining us as everyone else began to drift in our direction. There was nothing else for them to do. ‘So, what is that telling you?’
‘I don’t think we were talking to Lord Hale.’ I had said the same thing to Patience earlier, but then it was just a feeling. Now I was sure of it. My revelation was met with utter silence, which was better than everyone laughing at the suggestion. ‘I don’t think we have met him yet.’ Now I got a few raised eyebrows. ‘Think about it. He’s grimy from lifting heavy boxes and crates as they take the art from this house and put
it in their catering vans.’ Everyone waited for me to make my point. ‘He’s supposed to be eighty years old.’
Everyone saw the incongruity at once. I berated myself for not seeing it earlier. Had I not been so preoccupied with Alexander the crazed murderer and poor Dr Parrish, perhaps I would have.
‘He outran us.’ The latest comment came from Big Ben. I had forgotten that. ‘You said at the time that he must have taken a short cut to get to the stairs ahead of us, but he didn’t, he just went faster. What eighty-year-old can do that?’
My mind was whirling now. ‘Okay, so the Lord Hale we met this evening is an imposter. He is robbing the place, but Alexander turns up and starts killing the staff. His crew know nothing about it because it is all going on below the ground floor where they know they have us trapped, and he can’t communicate with them because he wanted to make sure none of us could speak to the outside world. This place is bristling with electronics, but they want us to believe there is no mobile phone signal.’ I stood on tip toes to look over heads to find Anne. ‘Anne, you recognised someone when the elevator doors opened. Who were they?’
Anne, who was helping Lily with Dr Parrish, stood up and dusted off her hands on her dress. ‘I knew them as David and Derek, though I suppose we have to question the validity of anything they said now. I met them weeks ago when Dr Parrish took me on, but they had been here much longer than that. They both work in the control room.’ Their names weren’t important, that they worked in the control room was because Lord Hale’s imposter would need an inside man who knew how to work the system. Someone released the bats on cue. Someone controlled the knights. Now we knew who it was. Alexander must have killed Brian after he grabbed Derek from the dining room at the start of the evening.
There wasn’t a lot of mystery to solve anymore. We knew who the bad guys were. We even had a pretty good guess about what they were up to. None of it mattered though because we were trapped inside a storeroom with an electronic lock on the outside and no way of escape.
The solenoid on the door made a popping noise and clicked.
All eyes turned toward it. They were back already. Their task was complete, and they had returned to dispose of us in whatever elaborate way they believed would throw the police off their trail. Well stuff that. I was going out fighting. Big Ben, Tempest, and his dad were already heading for the walls either side of the door. Frank saw them go and joined them, two each side. I wished I had a weapon of any kind as I crouched into a sprinting position. The second that door opened, I was going out of it, through whoever was first in line. We wouldn’t get many of them, but maybe they only sent a small crew; three or four guys. If one of us managed to get hold of a weapon, we could turn the whole thing around and go hunting for the caterers.
The thought of that put steel in my veins. The door started to move, I started to run. The door was swinging open, I was picking up speed. Big Ben and the others were all poised to swing around the doorframe once I barrelled through it and a face appeared in the widening gap to give me a target.
Too late, I realised the face I was just about to smash my way through belonged to Narcissus. I couldn’t stop; I was right on her.
She screamed and tried to shut the door again but I slammed into her, knocking her backward so she hit the wall opposite and then as I tried to apply the brakes, everyone else, led by Big Ben and Tempest piled through the door after me. No one else had seen who was there, they were just attacking like a maddened mob and hoping to live through it.
Shoved from behind, my cry of, ‘Wait!’ went unheard and I landed on top of the now crumpled Narcissus with bodies falling over and piling on top of us.
‘Where’d they go?’ shouted Big Ben, trying to get up. His face was right next to mine, his body squashing me quite convincingly.
The next minute was eaten up by everyone untangling themselves and working out which leg went with which person. With nothing to stop them, the surging crowd found free air and hadn’t been able to stop, each person behind pushing the person in front until only Lily and Tempest’s mum were left standing.
Mercifully, despite the crushing body slam I gave her, Narcissus was uninjured. A little shaken but conscious and able to walk. ‘I saw the whole thing,’ she said. ‘They have cameras everywhere. I started to fiddle with them after you left, expecting to find they showed the escape room floors in the basement and maybe the dining room we were in, but they go all over the house. I could see them positioning themselves outside the elevator. I shouted at the screen, of course,’ she admitted, her cheeks colouring. ‘Is everyone okay?’
I wrapped her into a hug. She had just saved our lives. ‘You risked a lot to come here alone to let us out.’
‘Oh, err, no. It was nothing really.’ She pushed away as I let her go. ‘I watched them all go back upstairs. There’s no one on this floor but us.’
Big Ben stepped in to give her a hug as well, Patience slapping his arms down with an expression that dared him to try it again.
I was stunned to be free once more but there was even less time to lose now. ‘How far to the control room from here?’ I looked around as I asked.
‘It’s around the corner,’ Narcissus said with a point. She wasn’t lying either. It was less than ten yards from where they locked us up. They were sloppy. Lord Hale especially. If he had done a head count, he would have seen he was one witch short and then we would have been truly in trouble.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Gina.
I was standing in front of the console, staring at all the buttons and thinking about what the best scenario could be. When I spun around to face my fellow dinner guests, I saw a sea of expectant faces. They all wanted to go home, but I think they all knew we weren’t getting out until we beat the bad guys. With a wry grin, I said, ‘I have a crazy plan.’
Quinn. Sunday, December 11th 0454hrs
‘Narcissus can operate the doors and windows from this console, and we can watch what is happening on these monitors. We have to do several things but none of them should put us in any danger.’ I missed out that some of us were going to place ourselves directly in harm’s way because I was selling them all a plan and most of them would indeed be tucked safety away from the bad men and their machine guns.
‘First we need to lock them in wherever they are and disable the elevator.’ With a smile, Narcissus took my cue and flicked a few switches. The screen flicked to show images on the ground floor including one shot which showed Lord Hale in the centre of the entrance lobby and the grand doors beyond. Another screen showed the elevator with two men in it. With some more switches flicked, a command typed into the keyboard, and a click of the mouse, the front doors swung closed. Then the windows we could see on the screens all went black as shutters outside folded in and then the elevator lunged to a stop, the two men inside losing their footing to crash into one another.
‘That’s step one,’ I announced, a happy bounce in my voice.
‘What’s step two?’ asked Michael.
I pointed to the keyboard. ‘Now that we have them off balance, we need to call for help.’
Patience frowned at me. ‘The phones don’t work, girl.’
I flipped my eyebrows at her. ‘Try again.’
She gave me a questioning look, then said, ‘It’s in Mary’s bedroom. They made us leave everything behind.’
Mine was dead. ‘Anyone got a phone that works?’ If no one did we could do it by email, but a phone would get a faster response.
It was Tempest who was first to hold one in the air. ‘Sloppy of them not to confiscate them.’
I caught it as he threw it underarm in a lazy arc. ‘I guess they figured we couldn’t use them. Which we couldn’t until Narcissus reconnected power to the mast.’ I opened Tempest’s contact list, scrolled through while trying not to note how great a percentage of the contacts were women’s names and came to the one I wanted.
Waiting for it to be answered as it undoubtedly woke the person at the end, I pulled it a
way from my mouth so I could speak to Narcissus. ‘Want to hit them with some special effects?’
Just as Narcissus was getting busy, the call was picked up at the other end. ‘Chief Inspector Quinn.’
I took a moment to prepare myself. I disliked my former superior intensely. He was a stubborn misogynistic pig of a man, who rarely even looked down to see who he was stepping on as he made his way to the top. He was, however, someone I could rely on to react. He would see the personal gain to be had and scramble all the forces he could muster. Telling myself I was ready, I said, ‘Good morning, Ian, this is Amanda Harper, are you ready to make a huge bust?’
Next to me, Big Ben sniggered and echoed, ‘Huge bust.’
I turned away so I wouldn’t have to look at him using his hands to make the universal sign for big boobs and hoped Ian Quinn wasn’t about to hang up on me. When he finally spoke, the bleariness was gone and the usual sneer I always heard when he spoke my name was back. ‘Harper. I thought… No, make that prayed I had seen and heard the last of you. I will therefore assume that this is either a gloriously misguided attempt to waste my time, in which case I will be pressing charges, or, and I consider this far more likely, you have a genuine case for me. What is it?’
Behind me, Narcissus was using the voice changer to create the monster voice. ‘I have come for you Lord Hale. I can see you and I know where you are. You have moments to live, Lord Hale, you and all your little friends with their puny guns. Nothing can stop me. I am a demon come to drag you all to hell.’ She was really going for it, making her own voice as creepy as she could.
‘Harper, I’m waiting,’ prompted Chief Inspector Quinn. Letting the others have a little fun with some of the special effects, killing the lights and creating mist, I explained to the chief inspector where we were, what had happened and who he ought to send. In typical Ian Quinn fashion, he didn’t bother to thank me, he merely growled, ‘Don’t tell me how to do my job, Harper. I’m far better at it than you.’ Were it not for his self interest in making a big bust and solving a triple murder I thought he might have rolled over and gone back to sleep. As it was, he said, ‘Stay safe and keep those civilians out of harm’s way. The cavalry will be there soon.’