by Tim Weaver
Then another sound from in front of me.
I slowly stepped back, placing my foot as carefully as I could, and felt the heel of my boot disappear into soft mud. There was a gentle sucking sound, barely any noise at all, and yet – in the silence – it was like a scream. Suddenly, there was movement in front of me. As I stepped back again, caught mid-stride, he came out of the darkness, almost ripped from it, and – before I had a chance to react – I was being slammed against the ground, wind fizzing from my body, white spots flashing in front of my eyes.
A moment of confusion.
I started to get up, hand flat to the mud path.
And then a boot swung out of the dark, not even there until it was inches in front of my face, and as I tried desperately to avoid it, the steel toecap connected with the bridge of my nose – and I thumped back violently against the ground for a second time.
And this time I blacked out.
When I came round again, I was still in the same place. My head felt like it was on fire, pain in the bridge of my nose, in my forehead, around my eyes. I touched a finger to my face. My nose wasn’t broken, but I could feel wet blood all down my lips and over my chin.
Getting on to all fours and then slowly, unsteadily, to my feet, I headed back the way I’d come in, eventually hitting the light. It was starting to cool off now, or maybe I was just so coated in cold mud that it only felt that way. As I stood there, wiping the blood and the dirt from my skin, dizziness hit me and a wave of nausea swept through my system. I put a hand to my mouth, trying to push it down, and as I did I realized the smell of the staffroom was still clinging to the inside of my throat, to my mouth and nose.
A second wave hit me – and this time I was sick.
When I was done, I wiped my mouth and looked back into the darkness of the tunnel. Pell. If he’d been using the staffroom, he’d been using it for something bad. The room may have been empty, but the smell of death remained, and so did the evidence of suffering. He knew the line. He knew how to navigate it, how to keep its secrets from people, how to use it against me. And he’d be long gone by now.
But even as I realized that, even as I saw the logic in it, a weird feeling passed over me.
Like someone was still watching.
Pell hadn’t returned to his house, although I hadn’t expected him to. I walked down his driveway to the tap and turned it on, washing my face with the lukewarm water. I rinsed off the mud, leaving great big wet patches on my jeans, and then I took off my T-shirt and turned it inside out. It masked some of the bloodstains; enough, at least, not to turn heads on the train ride home. Then, finally, I scrubbed down my boots. When I was done, I turned the tap off and stood there, watching the water run into the gaps between the patio slabs. But even washed down, I could still smell the room on me.
The blood and the death.
In my clothes, in the thread and the stitching.
In my skin.
51
For the first time in months, I dreamed. I was hiding behind a door in the bedroom, only able to see two ways: right, through the gap between door and frame; and left to Derryn’s old dresser, where the mirror reflected back the door and the hallway beyond.
In the darkness of the hallway I could see shapes: figures, one queued behind the other, waiting to enter the bedroom. At first a feeling passed over me – the kind of sixth sense you only gain in dreams – and I told myself, They’re the people you’ve found; the men, the women, the kids, all of them tracked down, brought home and returned to the light.
But then one of the shapes moved away from the group.
And I realized they weren’t those people at all.
When I woke, my whole body was slick with sweat, the sheets beneath me wet, the duvet twisted around my legs and my stomach like a cocoon. I kicked it off, sat up and then remained there, perched on the edge of the bed, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. Behind me, I felt Liz stir. She made a soft sound, a gentle exhalation, and then her fingers were brushing the small of my back. ‘Are you okay, baby?’ she said quietly.
I nodded and looked at the clock: 1.21 a.m.
Her fingers moved across my skin. ‘You’re soaking. Were you dreaming?’
I turned and looked at her in the darkness of the bedroom. Behind her, the curtains weren’t fully drawn and moonlight poured through the gap in a thin sliver the shape of a knife blade. It fell against her skin, her body and part of her face. She was so different from Derryn, our relationship so different, and yet for a moment they were both the same: the person I shared my life with – but not the things I’d seen, or the things I’d done.
‘Yes,’ I said, taking her hand. I shifted back into the darkness, where she couldn’t see my bruises. The less she saw of them, the longer we went without having to discuss my work, and why I did what I did.
‘What was the dream about?’
‘Just a …’ I stopped myself and looked at her again. How do I tell you everything I’ve done? I brought her into me and we sat there in silence, and then, after a while, I felt her breath on my neck, her face turned to me, still waiting for an answer. ‘I dreamed about some of my cases,’ I said finally. ‘About the men I’ve hunted.’
She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she was searching for the lie. I’d told them to her before, out of nothing more than a need to protect her from the truth – from discovering a man she knew nothing about – and she’d seen right through them. But I must have been convincing enough this time because she dropped her head back against my chest and squeezed me. I felt my heart swell up with guilt, but let it go. She couldn’t know what I’d really dreamed of, because if I told her the truth, she’d realize I’d deceived her. She’d defended me as a solicitor, and supported me as her partner, but I’d only ever told her enough to get me off. She didn’t know every detail about the killers I’d tracked.
And nothing of the bodies I’d put in the ground.
The people in the hallway had been those killers, and they’d been those bodies, waiting in line to enter the bedroom. The hiding spot I’d used in the dream had been the same spot I’d used once, back at the start, when one of them had come to my home in the middle of the night to kill me. I understood why I’d returned to that hiding place in the dream and I understood why those men – the ones now in prison, and the ones who were nothing more than bones and earth – had come to me. They were my memories. The men who’d tried to walk me to my grave. The men who’d attacked me, shot at me and tortured me.
And right at the back, behind the devils and executioners, had been someone else. A deep unease had slithered through my stomach as I watched him – an ominous feeling, spreading fast like an oil spill – and even though I told myself it was a dream, felt the unreality of it, I couldn’t pull myself out. It was like I was drowning. I just gasped for air, desperately trying to reach for the surface, and became frightened in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. And all the time, the man just stood there, looking into the room at me.
Hood up. No face.
Just darkness.
PART FOUR
52
When I woke the next morning, the sun was gone. Through the gap in the curtains, all I could see was swollen grey cloud and rain spitting against the windows, breaking into lines and running the length of the glass. I returned to Pell’s place in Highgate, found a parking space just up from the entrance, and sat there and waited. It was harder to be inconspicuous on a Sunday: even though it was raining, the clouds a granite grey, the gutters swirling with dead leaves and water, people passed the car frequently, on walks, with dogs on leashes, heading to the park or down the road to the Tube station. I tried my best to make it look like I was busy: I opened and closed the glovebox when people walked past, polished the dashboard with an old rag, got out to open the boot and look through it. But eventually, as lunch came and went and Pell still hadn’t returned, I gave up and just sat there. The house remained the same as it had been the day before: fewer sha
dows because there was no sun, but its windows no less dark.
At just gone two, hungry and impatient, I scooped my phone up off the passenger seat and dialled Gloucester Road to see if Pell had turned up for work today. It seemed unlikely. The house had the lifeless feel of a building that had gone days without being occupied. When I finally got through, the lady I spoke to said he’d called in sick for the second day running, and before she could ask me anything in return I hung up. Pell wasn’t ill; at least not in the way they believed he was. If he was strong enough to put his boot through my face, he was strong enough to make it into work. The question wasn’t whether he was lying about being sick.
It was why.
An hour later, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and noticed something.
I’d walked past it without even taking it in the day before, but now a memory flared, like a brief spark of light. Two cars behind me, on the other side of the road, a vehicle sat awkwardly between a Range Rover and a black Lexus. It was an old Toyota; an early 1990s Corolla, its blue paint damaged and chipped down the doors. But it wasn’t just that the car looked out of place.
It was that I’d seen it before.
Three nights earlier, outside Wellis’s home, I’d watched Eric Gaishe walk up to the corner of his street and wait for someone. Someone driving a blue Toyota.
This blue Toyota.
It had come down the road to Gaishe, he had leaned in through the passenger window and then – after the car left again – Gaishe had suddenly been holding money. A business transaction. At the time I hadn’t thought about it, but now it seemed obvious. You can’t call up an escort agency and ask for a thirteen-year-old, Wellis had said to me. There’s not a number for that in the Yellow Pages. So I run a service for people. And the night I’d seen the Toyota, he’d been running that service.
And Duncan Pell had been the punter.
Wellis knew both of them, Pell and Sam, but it wasn’t a coincidence. I could see that now. When Wellis had been telling me about using Sam to legitimize his business, he’d said, Someone I knew told me about him. This guy said Wren was in finance.
Who was the guy? I’d asked him.
Just a guy who I do some business with.
Pell. He went out for a drink with Sam after the fight at the Tube station. And some time after that – maybe right at the start when he was being vetted by Wellis, and maybe only in passing – Pell must have mentioned that he’d met this guy who was in finance. I looked back at his house, and something disquieting took flight inside me: Leon Spane was dead and dumped on Hampstead Heath, his holdall and coat in Pell’s home; then there was the pouch full of knives, coated in blood; and finally, there was Pell’s taste for underage prostitutes.
The task force thought Sam Wren had killed Marc Erion. They had evidence that was difficult to dispute, a killer every profiler in the land would tell you was gay, and victims who were homosexual. Sam looked good for this.
But Duncan Pell had a link to Wellis’s prostitutes too.
And if I had doubts about Sam, I didn’t have doubts about Pell.
Not a single one.
53
The inside of Pell’s house was cooler than the day before. Outside, the temperature had dropped to the mid teens and the rain had brought some relief from the heat. Inside, the stuffy, enclosed smell had been replaced by the stench of damp; deep in the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling. I made my way upstairs, into his bedroom, and went through his cupboards again. I’d been pretty thorough the first time, but I checked everything again anyway: every shelf, every drawer, under the bed, on top of the wardrobes. I moved across the hall to the second bedroom and did the same. The holdall was still in there, returned – along with the contents – to the way I’d first found it. Magic Trees swung gently as I searched the wardrobe, pushing clothes aside and sliding out shoeboxes. Jewellery was in one of them: some chains, a couple of rings, and the two stars of an army lieutenant, loose among the rest of the clutter. In the others were receipts and old bills. I’d been through it all already.
I stacked them back inside and then closed the wardrobe door. It rocked slightly, the legs unsteady, and on top – on the other side of the ornate, carved front panel – I heard something shift. I reached over, feeling around. I’d done the same the day before and not found anything, but now my fingers brushed the hard edges of another shoebox. I teased it towards me until I could get a proper grip, then brought it down and flipped it open.
Inside were a stack of blank DVDs, numbered one through to ten.
I headed downstairs into the living room, opened the disc tray on the DVD player and pulled the TV towards me. It was sitting on an old-fashioned stool, in the same dark wood as the wardrobe upstairs. I dropped the first disc in, closed the tray and hit Play. The television kicked into life.
A black screen.
And then a picture: video footage of the inside of a flat. I didn’t recognize it. It looked small and pokey, half lit, a couple of worn red sofas and a kitchen behind that, most of it in shadow. Two other doors, one left, one right. In the right-hand one, the light was on and I could see the edge of a bed and a dresser with a mirror on it. In the left one the light was off.
The camera moved around constantly, as if the operator was getting comfortable, but then, after a while, something clicked and the picture was still. Now it was on a tripod. From behind the camera came Duncan Pell. He was naked. He walked across the flat and stood in the centre, facing the room with the light on. He didn’t say anything; just watched the bedroom, his right hand opening and closing beside him. On his middle finger was the silver ring with the rune on it, the one I’d seen him wearing at the station. As his fingers moved, it caught the light rhythmically, like a bulb switching off and on.
A minute later, a woman emerged, dressed in her bra and panties, stockings on, but only half pulled up. At first it was difficult to make her out. As soon as she appeared, Pell shuffled across to his left, obscuring her, and started playing with himself. But then he used his other hand to beckon her over – like an order – and she stepped towards him.
And I realized who it was.
The girl I’d found in Adrian Wellis’s loft space.
My heart sank as I watched her edge closer, reluctance in every step. Everything she felt in that moment, all the fear and the panic, was written in her face.
Wellis reckoned she was sixteen, but she wasn’t even close.
Pell pulled her to the sofas, dragged the tripod to one end of it and made her face the camera as he moved around behind her. Then he started having sex with her. Halfway through, as he got more and more aggressive, he slapped her back and buttocks – and after a while, the slaps became fists and tears started rolling down her face. I could barely bring myself to watch it after that. I reached forward to turn it off just as he pressed her face down into the leather of the sofa, her expression becoming almost contorted: all pain and suffering, eyes wet, mouth pushed to one side, the skin at her cheeks stretched to breaking point.
‘Fucking hell,’ I said quietly, and hit Stop.
My eyes turned to disc two and I wondered, for a moment, whether I even had the capacity to watch any more. I’d seen the darkness in men, the things they were prepared to do to one another, but with kids it was harder to become detached. Where adults could disguise the pain and corruption that had been visited upon them, children wore it like a mark, branded by their suffering. All that would be left of this girl, whatever her name was and wherever she was from, would be a husk; a shadow of herself.
Finally, reluctantly, I put disc two in and pressed Play.
The same girl. The same flat.
As I watched, I remembered again what she’d said in the loft: Don’t let him hurt me. She hadn’t been talking about Adrian Wellis or Eric Gaishe.
She’d been talking about Duncan Pell.
And then I noticed something else.
I shifted closer to the TV. At the far side of the shot was the edge of a long m
irror, its reflection casting back the rest of the room. The doors into the bedroom and the bathroom. The sofas. Pell with the camera in his hand this time, and the girl on all fours in front of him.
But they weren’t alone.
A ripple of unease passed through me as I leaned in even closer. To the side of the sofa, about seven feet from Pell and half out of shot, I could see a pair of legs, exactly parallel to one another.
Someone was watching them.
54
17 June | Today
Across London, in a quiet residential street close to Wimbledon Common, Healy sat in his Vauxhall watching a mid-terrace, cream-coloured house. It had a small concrete yard, well maintained. Two potted firs either side of a red door with a black knocker. Metallic blinds at the downstairs window, wooden blinds at the two top-floor ones. A kitchen and two bedrooms. Healy knew that, even though he couldn’t see into any of them from where he was. He knew it because he’d walked this street up and down, countless times.
This was where the psychologist lived.
Teresa Reed.
He’d followed her back from the supermarket; watched her park her Mini and let herself in. She was alone. She was always alone. He knew her routine back to front now, and she had no one to warm her bed and little in the way of a social life. A couple of times he’d been here on a Saturday night, or a week night, and he’d seen friends of hers call in. But it was a rarity, and over the five long months he’d been keeping track of her, he’d used that. He’d bumped into her on purpose that first time at Belmarsh, and engaged her in conversation, for a reason.
And this was the reason.
Healy reached into his pocket and got out the photo of Leanne. It was a bleached, slightly blurred shot of the two of them, arms around each other, about two years before he found her. A different time. A different life. He felt one of his eyes tear up, but he didn’t bother wiping it away. He let it break, let it trace the edge of his cheekbone and the corner of his mouth. Then, when he finally started to compose himself again, he looked up and saw Reed emerge from her front door, carrying a watering can.