Beyond the Blood Streams

by Ben Oakley

  I thought I heard a voice and I cocked my head to listen closer but still couldn't make it out. There was nothing for it, I had to crash in and surprise the hell out of Foster to be able to get him off guard. I saw eight steps leading to the floor and realised I could probably jump them in one go.

  I took short breaths to fire myself up and then a long deep one before holding the steel rod tight, ready to kick the door. Then with absolute conviction, I kicked the door with all my might and it smashed open. I jumped into the room with the rod held high, just missing the lower rung of the steps. I fell forward slightly and had to use my hands to push myself back to an upright position.

  The room was large, much larger than the cellar itself. The walls were brick-laden and it smelled worse than the stale beer. The sewers couldn't have been too far away, I was sure of it. There were a few more barrels scattered around and some stacked to ceiling height but the place was damp, very damp, almost as if the walls were running wet.

  Then I saw Megan Paine on my left side, chained to the wall by her ankles. She was fully clothed but it was clear she had been through an inordinate amount of suffering. Her hands were tied behind her back, she had a black eye and her clothes were ripped and dirtied. She was gagged so couldn't scream but she saw me and her eyes widened.

  “Megan!” I called out before moving fast towards her.

  I heard her muffled screams as I approached and knew straight away that Foster was hiding in amongst the barrels. I stopped suddenly and Paine nodded her head, moving her eyes to the right hand side in quick succession. The tears were staining her gag but Foster was close and I wasn't going to fall for some cheap trick.

  I called out, “Foster! Come out, it's game over.”

  I heard him chuckle and then watched him move out from the barrels close to Paine, about six metres in front of me. He smiled at me and stood at Paine's back before grabbing a knife from nearby, pulling her head backwards by her hair and then placing the knife to her throat.

  “Is it?” he said with a malevolent glee.

  I readied the steel rod and watched the tears flow down Paine's face.

  “Foster, do the right thing here. You hurt her any more and your bargaining chip goes right out of the window.”

  “You think this is a bargaining chip? You have no power here, you're not a detective, you're not even a private investigator, you're nobody.”

  He was the same Doctor Foster I'd met before but without his medical clothing. Instead he looked like a local guy on a night out, black jeans, black t-shirt and black jumper. He was coming across very differently to how I remembered. It was as if when he wasn't a doctor, the masks fell away and his true personality was unleashed.

  I took a step forward with the rod held high but he yanked Paine's head back harder, exposing her throat in a more worrying fashion.

  “What are we doing here?” I said.

  “Playing a game.”

  “You think killing seventeen people is a game?”

  He smiled at me, “soon to be eighteen.”

  Paine groaned and tried to fight herself away but struggled against Foster's strength.

  “Come on Foster,” I shouted, “why are we here? The game's up. SCO19 are on the way and there's nowhere you can run. Let her go, make this easy and we can all get some bloody sleep.”

  “Have I tired you out?” Foster said.

  I took a step closer, “let her go, don't do this.”

  “Come any closer Mr. Lake and I'll cut her throat so deep, her head will be hanging half off.”

  “Jeez,” I stopped and shouted, “then why haven't you?”

  “We've been waiting for you.”

  “I don't know you, Foster. I never heard of you before two days ago.” I tapped my chest then pointed at him, “we have no connection, you and I, nothing that links us in the real world or in that twisted mind of yours.”

  He mocked me, chuckling to himself, “twisted!”

  Moving the knife away from Paine's neck, he pulled her backwards into the wall and she shuffled into the corner to move away from him. He held the knife out in front of him. I wasn't going to fight a man with a blade, not until I knew I had a chance.

  I repeated, “there's nothing that connects us, we are not similar in any way. You had a successful career. How do you go from that to murder? Doctor, help me understand here and then maybe I can help you.”

  He gripped the knife tighter and pointed it at me. “Human behaviour is very curious, don't you think? When something comes our way that seems too perfect, we always pick at the little details to make it less so. But this – this light that came my way, was perfect, and so I embraced the whole of it.”

  “Whole of what?” I said.

  “Perfection. Are you not listening?”

  “How is any of this perfect?”

  “When I killed Stansey King, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Her death was – beautiful. I dragged her down into the sewer that runs beneath this very building. I floated her sedated body on the surface of the canal and then sliced the carotid artery in her neck. She never woke again.

  “The Blood Streams flow right beneath us. This room is sitting on top of a major sewer line. With the right handiwork, you can break into it and cover it without anyone ever knowing you're here. No one ever knows you can have access to a vast underworld of tunnels and waterways.” He stepped forward and stamped twice on a wooden hatch in the floor, “stairway to heaven, Mr. Lake.”

  “She found out you were down here, didn't she? You killed Jess because she caught you in this room below the cellar?”

  “No, no, I am telling the story, not you. You listen to me! The day after Stansey King dies, I go to her home town in Oxford and find an escort who's so desperate for money, she'd do anything. I give her £500 and I tell her to stay with me for the night at my home in Essex. She agrees, eager to make me happy as I was one of her first.

  “I get talking to her and she opens up about her life and I'm thinking what the hell she is doing. Then she says her name is Stansey King and I think the girl is some kind of spy sent to bring me down but then she shows me her passport. Crazy bitch was telling the truth. Two Stansey King's. Two, you believe that? The opportunity was greater than I would have thought.”

  “Opportunity for what?”

  “To bring you in on this.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You don't know?”

  “I'm awaiting your eloquent story telling.”

  “When I worked at Linden, the opportunity to mess with people's heads was too much to just pass over. I experimented on some of the female patients with prescription drugs just to see what could be done. But you see I broke through that moral barrier, I had overstepped the mark and once you've had a taste of it then you just wanna do more. I couldn't stop myself from taking the next step.

  “I looked at how to forge some of the records and my goodness that was easy enough. I figured if I wanted one of these girls to play with on my own terms then I needed to get them back to my home in Essex. Then I would do what I wanted with them for as long as I wanted before bringing them back here to release their souls into the Blood Streams.”

  I watched him with the knife and he was becoming more excitable the more he spoke. I didn't know how I was going to get the knife off him. Paine was incapacitated so it was between me and him.

  “This is about power and control,” I said.

  He cocked his head at me, “the greatest motive of all. Did you expect something more detailed? Let me lay it out further for you. I moved to the UCH and saw the huge number of victims coming my way, I just had to choose which ones I wanted at which time. Then I would drug them and send them to Linden, I couldn't take them from the UCH, I didn't know where the patients had come from. I needed time to find out more about their backgrounds and families before choosing them.

  “When I got them to Linden, I drugged them further, changed their records and forced them onto unescorted leave. Sometimes I would he
lp them leave the hospital and other times I watched them leave in a confused state then picked them up just down the road. In their confusion, every selected victim came with me and I owned them for as long as I wanted.”

  I quickly glanced around the room in front of me and couldn't believe what this guy was telling me. Then I saw the overly large barrels.

  “You brought them here in the barrels didn't you? You drugged them, sedated them and put them in there. Who's gonna question someone rolling a barrel into a bar?”

  “Clever boy.”

  He moved to one of the larger barrels and flicked off a clip on the top. Then he was able to lift the top of the barrel off.

  I shook my head gently, “you altered the barrels so you could fit a human inside. That way, you could use the sewer system from here to take them anywhere along the canal.”

  “You're jumping the gun, Mr. Lake.”

  “But I still don't understand, why me?”

  Foster bit his lower lip as he tried to hide a gleaming grin. He reached forward and lifted the wooden hatch that led into the sewer. The smell hit me straight away.

  “It's twelve rungs down into a three foot by three foot smaller sewer pipe. This leads to a major sewer tunnel which has off-shoots to anywhere along the canal. It's messy but it works and there's no cameras down there. I would keep the girls alive then wait until they were in the canal or in the affluent before cutting their necks and watching them bleed into the water. I created the Blood Streams, Mr Lake, and I continued to feed the system until now.”

  “You're a sick bastard, you know that?” I said.

  He raised the knife and pointed it at me, “not so fast, I haven't finished. So I had this second Stansey King and I came up with this plan to see if I could incriminate another person. Because I had been experimenting on her mind with sedatives and hallucinogens, she became so messed up that she was a perfect victim. The plan involved putting this confused girl into someone's house with a single phone number of the property's owner.”

  “It backfired,” I said.

  “Did it though?”

  “You didn't incriminate me.”

  “But I got you, Mr. Lake. I got you. I knew who you were because I was in this bar twice a week. In your conversations with the landlady, you would offer up all kinds of personal details, free to everyone within earshot. Then it clicked that it had to be you. I thought to myself, here's this guy coming in here every now and again, moaning about life, talking about conspiracies and mysteries and all that shit. Then I researched you and yeah, you were the one.

  “God, you made it so easy. It was simple to get her in your house. Your strange relationship with the landlady meant she knew more about you than you knew about yourself. You know you left your keys here a few months back, drunk out of your head?”

  I vaguely remembered I'd lost them but I didn't know where. This son-of-a-bitch had been watching me for months.

  “You think I was an easy target?”

  “Of course you were.”

  “Why did you kill Jess?”

  “Bit of a bonus, that one. I was coming in here for over a year, people's routines in a quiet bar like this are easy to work out.”

  “Oh Jeez, you're the guy with the broadsheet.”

  I remembered shaking his hand outside the entrance to The Ribnik only yesterday. He had most of his face covered, I had no idea.

  He laughed maniacally, “you idiot. It was originally a cheap disguise for a bit of fun then I started to get good with it and came in here wearing it and no one said any different. Some detective you are.”

  “Why Jess?” I pleaded.

  “She was lax in running this establishment, how do you think I found out about this room in the first place? She only entered it once in a blue moon. I helped her one day with an empty barrel and she showed me. It was perfect. I knew I'd get away with using it because it went largely ignored. I'd come here in the early hours from the cellar entrance and dig through bit by bit to the sewers below.

  “Two nights ago, for the first time in quite a while, she walked in and I hid behind the barrels. Don't know what she was doing but I watched as she opened the hatch. I couldn't have that, so I jumped her from behind, cut her throat and dropped her into the sewer. I went in after her and floated the body to the canal, leaving her near the Zoo. Gotta take every opportunity that comes your way, right?”

  He looked back at Paine and held the knife to her face. I didn't know whether I should take the opportunity or not? I wasn't sure I could reach him in time before he turned.

  “Don't touch her!” I shouted.

  “Just looking at a real detective before I bleed her into the water.”

  I watched as Paine tried to pull herself away from the wall and fight back but she couldn't. Then Foster slashed Paine on the left cheek and she screamed into her gag.

  I held my emotions in and realised quickly that an opportunity had presented itself. I lunged at Foster with the steel bar raised high above my head.

  Fifty Two

  I swung the bar downwards as hard as possible. But he was too quick and I guessed right then he had expected it.

  He side-stepped me and the speedy bastard managed to dodge my attack. I had moved the bar through the air with such conviction that the motion almost saw me fall down the hatch into the sewer.

  I tried to stop myself falling in, arms flailing everywhere, aware that Foster had gone to the side of me but it was too late. The only thing that stopped me falling in was his powerful stab to my lower left side. I screamed out as he forced me backwards. The pain was instant and overwhelming.

  He yanked the knife out and shoved me with his full force. I crashed on my back to the floor and shuffled to the back wall by the steps to the cellar above. I moved slightly to my right so I could put both hands on the wound.

  The dizziness was instant, the pain had made sure of it. The room was getting darker almost instantly but I heard Paine groaning at me and it kicked me back to life. The adrenaline surged through me and I got to my knees.

  Foster was suddenly in front of me, his hand on my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my neck. The way he yanked my head back opened the wound on my left side. I tried to pull him off with my right hand.

  “I didn't want to do this here,” he said, “but you're gonna bleed into the Blood Streams for me.”

  He put the knife to my throat and I saw the intensity in my eyes.

  “Wait!” I pleaded. Just talking made the pain worse.

  “What can you possibly give me now that will save your life?”

  “Stansey... King.”

  He looked at me confused and cocked his head to the side but he hadn't seen what I had seen.

  At first it was a hand and then I saw her appear from the hole in the ground. Stansey had followed me and worked it all out. She had come in through the sewers and was covered in affluent as she climbed the steps in silence with a knife in her hand.

  She stepped into position behind Foster. I could see her chest moving up and down as she breathed in fast and deeply. I didn't know how she could breathe normally after crawling through the sewers but she had done. Her conviction was obvious. The intent on her face was powerful enough to lead to the ultimate revenge.

  Then I saw Foster looking closer into my eyes and I figured he had seen her reflection in there.

  “Don't give him a chance,” I said quietly.

  Foster suddenly dropped his own knife and reached to his back where Stansey's knife had gone in. He released me and I dropped to the ground at his feet.

  I picked up his knife and mustered all the energy I had left to slam it into his calf. He fell to the ground still grasping with the knife in his back. Stansey rose behind him, her intention still clear.

  She jumped on him, easily pulled the knife from his back and brutally stabbed him again in the side. She screamed at him and punched him in the back of the head before straddling his back, lifting his head back by his hair and putting the knife
– my kitchen knife – to his throat.

  I reached over and grimaced through my own pain to place a hand on her affluent-covered lower back.

  “No, Stansey, don't do it.”

  She screamed, “what he did to me!”

  “I know, God I know. Help Megan and then help me.”

  “I have to do this!”

  “We've got him,” I nodded, “he's not going anywhere. Help me.”

  I saw her tense and push the blade onto his neck ready to slice, “I wouldn't live with myself if I don't kill him now.”

  “No,” I said, “you won't be able to live with yourself if you do.”

  “Please let me,” she cried.

  “Look at me,” I reached higher to her shoulder. “Look at me!”

  She glanced over in tears, “Harrison.”

  I looked directly into her muddied eyes. “Remember! It's how we choose to live with time and with ourselves that makes the difference of who we truly are. Don't let what happened to you define your life. Help Megan and help me.”

  She relaxed and let Foster's head drop to the floor with a loud clang. If the knife wounds hadn't knocked him out then that would have certainly done so.

  I suddenly heard the main door upstairs crash to the floor and a team of people run into the building at the top. I heard others coming down through the cellar entrance.

  I called to Stansey, “help me up.”

  She wiped her face and pushed herself off Foster to wrap her arms around me and get me to my feet. I could deal with the smell of the sewer but it was the pain in my left side that was hurting too much.

  Stansey helped me over to where Paine was sitting. She lowered me to the ground next to her and then Stansey helped untie Paine's hands. We couldn't unchain her ankles but Paine motioned to leave them. I removed the gag from her mouth and she took a deep breath before retching.

  Stansey slumped down beside me on the other side and I heard the knife clank to the side. She still had it in her hand.

  “Give me the knife,” I said to her.

  “I stabbed him, not you.”