The Game

by Luca Veste

  ‘This is not helping you, Mark,’ DI Bennett said, and now her voice was soft and motherly. ‘The only way to do that is to let me help you.’

  It was Mark’s turn to sigh. He opened his eyes, his lids heavy with tiredness. Looked down at the laptop and its flashing red light. He paused as he lowered the lid on the dying laptop, something in the background image catching his eye. He realised there was more than one picture captured on it. It was actually a collage of different images.

  Mark recognised some of them.

  He traced a finger across the screen, seeing them all in turn.

  ‘Steven Hallet… Melissa Carmichael… Stacey Green,’ Mark whispered, as his finger shuffled across the screen, capturing each image in turn. ‘The building Joanna Carter lived in… the scrapyard where Emily was found.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Mark ignored DI Bennett’s voice, looking through the pictures on the laptop screen. They were all there in front of him.

  And in the top right-hand corner… the outside of the garage where Holly Edwards had been waiting for Mark to arrive.

  All of the places where the bodies had been found.

  There was a moment when he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. What was in front of him. Then, it all coalesced and came into focus.

  The dates all those people had been killed. How close together they all were. Eight dead in less than a year – seemingly unrelated, only one death really unexplained. All the rest, dismissed as someone taking their own life.

  The first, the aberration. The violence used. Impossible to hide.

  It was because the first was unplanned. A random act of violence from someone who didn’t have a way of controlling himself.

  Not yet.

  The timing.

  He heard DI Bennett’s voice in the background, but he wasn’t focusing on that any longer. Her increasing pleas to be answered only distracted him. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he mumbled, ending the call and switching off his phone in one movement, as his mind continued to turn.

  When Holly Edwards had rejected John Redwood for the last time. When she had stopped answering his messages, his pleas.

  He didn’t need to check to make sure. He was almost positive it would have been mere days before Steven Hallet had been killed.

  ‘My parents took me to the Lake District to get my mind off it. Just a snap decision they made to take me up to the cottage we have up there. It was night by the time we arrived.’

  They would have stopped at the services. John, filled with anger and rage. Chances upon Steven Hallet and beats him to death.

  Enjoys it. Feels satisfaction from what he’s done.

  ‘You bastard…’

  Mark looked at the images on screen, knowing what each represented, all except for one.

  One he recognised.

  It was his last shot. He might be too late, he knew that, but he had to try.

  The laptop finally died, so he took it from his knees and placed in the passenger footwell. Turned his phone back on for a few seconds and checked the map. Memorised the route back to the motorway, then turned it off again. Turned the engine on and blinked as light entered the world around him once more.

  It was time to end this.

  Fifty-Four

  It had been a long time since he’d last been at the place. Mark had at one time been a regular visitor – when he’d first moved over to Liverpool, on his days away from the police training. Walking and taking in the beauty that could be found there.

  Sefton Park. Only it was more like a different world. Over two hundred acres in size, Mark had discovered new things every time he’d visited. He hadn’t been for a while, but still remembered parts of it vividly. Others were a little less memorable, but he knew where he was going. He knew the way.

  The place that had been in an image on John’s laptop screen. A statue and fountain. Modelled on Eros, the Greek god of love, or attraction. He had walked past it years earlier. He might have ignored it completely if he hadn’t been struck by how much it had reminded him of a similar statue in London. Turned out, when Mark had investigated a little further, the two statues were in fact related. The Liverpool version had been created by the same people behind the capital’s version.

  He knew John had chosen this place. Probably thought it meant something, it being Eros.

  The fountain was located near the middle of the park – a good fifteen-minute walk from the car park on Mossley Hill Drive. It was pitch black when he parked up, the clock on the dashboard blinking almost midnight. Fear hit him, as he thought about the time it had taken him to get back.

  Mark got out of the car and started walking, unsure what he would actually find at the fountain. The thought of John just waiting there for him seemed a stretch, but he had been wrong about him before. Taken in by his crying act, the way he’d dismissed him as just a little boy in over his head.

  Mark had been wrong. So wrong.

  It took him a while to find it, coming to it from a different way than he was used to. In the dark, everything looked slightly different also. The paths merged into one, nothing to differentiate one from the other. The trees around him, stripped of their leaves as autumn took hold. Underfoot, the constant swish of walking through them was the only sound he could hear.

  Then, he heard something else.

  It was soft at first, as if it were only his imagination, then it became more prominent.

  The thought made him nervous, his heart beating against his chest as he grew closer to the sounds. Every step felt like a mistake. A betrayal to himself. He could run away and be safe, but that wasn’t happening.

  Always running towards the danger, not away from it.

  He kept moving forwards. It was too late to turn back now.

  Mark rounded a final corner, seeing dim light in the distance. A single beam of light. The chanting became clearer now, driven to him with force on a gust of wind.

  ‘One… two… three.’

  The numbers being recited. A male’s voice encouraging, disparaging. A female, stilted and slow. Treading over the words as if they were hot coals.

  Mark broke out into a run. Within half a minute he was standing at the edge of the stone path that surrounded the fountain.

  Took in what he was seeing.

  Natasha, a rope around her neck, around her body. Her hands tied in front of her. All interlocked. She was walking slowly around the base of the fountain, the other end of the rope being held by him.

  John Redwood.

  ‘Thought you could stop us,’ he said, talking to Natasha. ‘You never had a chance. Now it’s the last level.’

  Mark moved closer, his feet scraping on the gravel path. John slowly turned to greet him, his sorry look of yesterday replaced with emptiness. A smile slowly crawled across his face.

  Mark had done exactly what he’d expected him to do.

  ‘Glad you can finally join us,’ John said; even his voice was different. More confident, more sure. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d work out where we’d be. Was going to call, but thought it’d be more fun to see if you could get here to watch the grand finale.’

  ‘Let her go,’ Mark said, stepping closer to them. He could see John’s hand on the end of the rope, knowing one forceful tug and he would start strangling Natasha. Possibly even break her neck. He moved slower. ‘This is all over, John. You don’t need to do this.’

  ‘I think I do,’ John replied, moving his hand so it was firmly on the rope now. ‘This is the last one. This is my gift to you. She’s been playing too.’

  ‘Holly Edwards was all you were working towards. Natasha hasn’t done anything wrong. She wasn’t on the forum. She wasn’t a choice. No one wants her gone. No one wants her punished.’

  ‘I disagree,’ John said, the single beam of light coming across and shining into Mark’s eyes. It was coming from something in his free hand – a phone or camera. He couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I’ve been watching you for days,�
� John continued, following Natasha as she walked a little further around the fountain. ‘You’re just like us. Alone, betrayed. Even looking the way you do, they’ve still broken you.’

  Mark tried to get a good look at Natasha, but she was masked by John’s body. He could hear her voice, however, soft and scared. She was whispering under her breath. ‘There is nothing I need you to do right now, other than to let her go and talk to me. It’s over, John.’

  ‘You know who this statue is?’ John said, pulling the rope tighter and bringing Natasha to a halt.

  ‘Eros. God of love,’ Mark replied, trying to move a little closer. He wanted to see Natasha. Try to let her know he was there and she was going to be safe. ‘It’s a grand gesture. I’m guessing you picked it for its history.’

  ‘You’re wrong. On both counts. It’s actually Anteros. Said to be the brother of Eros. They did the same in London – depicted the wrong god of sorts. Do you know what Anteros was?’

  ‘Can’t say I do,’ Mark said, risking another step forward. He was blinded for a split second, as John moved whatever was in his hand, light blasting into his eyes. ‘Not all that good with Greek gods.’

  ‘He was the punisher of scorned love. He avenged unrequited love. Now, that’s more apt, don’t you think?’

  Natasha was standing still, head bowed, defeated. Mark side-stepped and brought himself further in line with her, working out what his next move should be. ‘Apt if you think the way you do, I suppose.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me how I think? That’ll be interesting.’

  ‘Well, apart from the obvious wanting to be caught part, you think unreturned love is something that should be punished. This isn’t to do with the lies they were telling to people online. This is all personal. The whole Game thing was just a cover. You used it to kill Holly. You found other people like you online and they built this into this game, where you were supposedly killing people to punish them, only that’s not what happened. Joanna, Emily, all of them – they didn’t deserve to die, but you still did it. You’re not even sure if they’ve done anything wrong, really. Holly didn’t want you and you couldn’t handle that. It doesn’t leave much room for freedom, does it? No room for people to make their own decisions. All of this was just a mask to put off what you wanted to do last year. You wanted to kill Holly Edwards because she turned you down, but you didn’t have the capacity to do so.’

  ‘I killed Holly Edwards because she deserved it. All of them did.’

  Mark stopped, as John tightened his grip on the rope. ‘No one deserves to die for not loving someone. That’s just life.’

  ‘Like that’s all they did. These people needed taking care of. That’s just life? That’s a simple way of looking at it. It doesn’t mean a thing though, really. You want to know the dirty little secret, Mark?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  John grinned and now Mark saw him for something else than he’d seen in the bedroom the previous day. He wasn’t a scared little boy. He wasn’t weak. He was stronger now. He had power, probably for the first time in his life.

  ‘I enjoy it,’ John said, a sparkle in his eyes. ‘This is the greatest feeling in the world. The fact that I can do this. Set myself free of these people. It’s incredible. And it’s not just me. There’s hundreds of us out there; so many people you will never know. You can’t stop us all. We’ve all found the truth and now there’s no turning back. The days of hurting people with no recourse are over. It’s our time now. The forgotten ones. Men and a few women too, the whole world over. All finding a truth you can’t ignore.’

  ‘This isn’t the way, John,’ Mark said, but he knew there was no way of getting through to the boy. And that’s all he was. A boy. One who had suffered some kind of mental break but a boy all the same.

  Which meant, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to stop him doing whatever he was planning to do.

  ‘I’ve been talking to her, you know,’ John said, winding the rope closer to him and pulling Natasha closer. He angled the light so it illuminated her face. ‘She used you. She wanted to find us and that’s why she was with you. She thought she could find us through someone in the police and maybe that’s true. She knows what you’ve been doing and what you were prepared to do for her and she doesn’t care. I bet you think you’ll save her and all of this will be over. Then you can ride off into the sunset with a beautiful young thing on your arm. You don’t care she’s so much younger than you and that your entire relationship so far is based on her giving you sex and that’s it – you want her, so you’ll have her. She’ll come running to you because you’ve saved her life. Is that right?’

  ‘Let her go, John…’

  ‘Tell the truth,’ John replied, his shout echoing around the empty park. ‘You think she’ll fall for you, just as you’ve fallen for her. It’s wrong. You’re wrong. She doesn’t like you. You repulse her. No matter what you’ve done for her, she thinks you’re just a weird bloke, who even though he’s good-looking, is smarmy with it. She’s thought that from the beginning. She was playing with you. Just so she could get what she wanted.’

  ‘That… that doesn’t mean anything,’ Mark said, but he could feel something building inside him. A feeling of betrayal, of jealousy.

  ‘Of course it does. I can see it written all over your face. The only reason you have ruined your career, your life, in the past twenty-four hours, is for her. And she doesn’t even care.’

  ‘That’s not why I did it.’

  ‘And this isn’t even the first time,’ John said, his voice dripping with a mixture of pleading and derision. ‘This is what these types of people do. They bleed us dry. I mean, look at you. You have everything, but you’re still the same person you always were.’

  ‘We can talk about this…’

  ‘Tell him, Natasha. Tell him you don’t want him and never would.’

  Mark opened his mouth to talk, but Natasha raised her head to look at him. Her eyes were glassy and she was shivering against an unseen wind. Her body was shaking, even as she tried to look at him.

  ‘He’s… he was just a way for me to find you and stop you,’ Natasha said, her voice stilted and breathless. She sounded unfocused, seemingly out of it, but was somehow still standing. ‘I was only with him to get what I wanted.’

  Mark listened as Natasha began to sniff and chuckle, trying to ignore the knot in his stomach that began tightening. In her place was another woman. And another. A long line of teenage girls and, then, women in their twenties. All who had laughed at him. All who had dismissed him easily.

  And he didn’t care.

  Because he was better than that.

  He watched the rope around her neck pull her back, saw her face contort in dull pain.

  He couldn’t ignore the anger, but he could beat it.

  He was aware of more breathing, of more eyes. There were faces appearing in the darkness, but he ignored them.

  They weren’t alone there.

  Fifty-Five

  The feeling of anger dissipated, but Mark still felt bitter and desperate. He was a young boy again, being talked about behind his back. A lonely teenager, shunned by the pack.

  Then, that feeling was gone. Years of hurt, blinked out with experience.

  He was better than this.

  He wasn’t going to let John see that.

  He had one chance.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who you are now,’ John said. ‘You’ll always have the same thoughts as you did then.’

  ‘You don’t know a thing about me.’

  John chuckled softly, then sniffed. Beside him, more people appeared. More boys. They were as young as John and one significantly older. Mark ignored them. The light from the phone in John’s hand drifted across Mark’s face for an instant.

  ‘I know more than you realise. We all do,’ John said, the phone in his hand revealing the five men who now stood in line with him. ‘I watched you, looked into your past. You shouldn’t be surprised the amount of information we
were able to gather about you. I’ve seen who you were when you were my age. You were just like me. Like all of us. You’ve changed a bit now, but it doesn’t matter, does it? You’re still the same person you always were. You sleep with women and then discard them just as quickly. Why do you think you do that?’

  Mark shifted closer to him, his insides churning as the words hit home. ‘I grew up. That’s all. I became a man and things changed.’

  ‘Oh yeah, a new man,’ John replied, his voice breaking a little as he spoke. ‘They’ve convinced you that’s what you had to be. You discard them because you still want to punish those girls from back then. All those who turned their back on you. Going to the gym, getting your hair cut, paying over the odds for clothes… these are all the things they want us to think make a difference. It’s not true. What makes a difference is getting rid of them. That’s how we punish them.’

  ‘Killing them,’ Mark said, taking another step closer. He scanned the faces of the silent men standing with John. He was vastly outnumbered, but it didn’t stop him. ‘That’s what you’re doing. Because you can’t get women out of your league to sleep with you, you kill them. All of them. Is that what you’re really telling me?’

  ‘Punishing them. This isn’t about killing them. This is about taking back control. Without the punishment, it wouldn’t mean anything. They pay for what they did to us.’

  Mark didn’t believe a word he was saying, but he knew John believed it. Every word. ‘And that’s what they deserve?’

  ‘Of course,’ John said, surprise in his voice now, as if he couldn’t believe he had to explain it. ‘Look what they’ve done to us. For years and years and years. How have we let them get away with it for this long? And it’s only getting worse. They hold all the power and they know it. It’s not right. This is about taking it back. I know you’re like us. I know you won’t stop me.’

  This was never about blackmail. This was simply about power.