Chapter Seventy-Seven
Back in the Kidnap Unit incident room in Lewisham Row, the team congregated around one laptop as one of Superintendent Paris’s officers went through the steps of transferring the £200,000 into the bitcoin coded account. It was a complex process, and had several steps, and different screens where codes had to be input.
‘It all comes down to this: fifteen highly trained police officers peering at a website,’ said Melanie, who was next to Paris.
‘Gone are the days when we leave holdalls full of cash,’ said Paris.
‘How do we know he’ll release the girls?’
‘We don’t.’
There was silence. Melanie turned away at the crucial moment when the funds were sent. She didn’t want the team to see her cry.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Max hung around on the frozen moor. He had climbed to the top of a tor, and he was standing beside a huge stack of flat stones. They reminded him of the game, Jenga, and he imagined that giants had once walked the moors and had been playing with the stones, leaving this huge pile. The cloud was coming in low, and the air was filling with a cold swirling mist. He heard, far off to the south, the low drone of a helicopter, but looking up the visibility wasn’t good. The cloud was giving him the advantage.
He heard the mobile phone beep in his pocket and he pulled it out, and he opened the text message. The code was there. The money had arrived.
He whooped and crowed and punched the air, an ecstatic feeling of euphoria running through his body. He had been confident that his plan would work, but in the back of his mind he’d always thought he could be left empty-handed. He had made a contingency plan to run with the ten grand, which would have cut down his options… but Jesus, he had two hundred grand. Two hundred fucking grand.
He didn’t wait to celebrate. He set off back to the cave. Now he had the money, he didn’t need them anymore. He didn’t need to be the good person. He wanted to teach those fuckers a lesson. Those little kids were the spawn of a policeman and his whore wife. He checked his gun. He had two bullets left. One for each of them.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Nina drifted back into consciousness. She wasn’t sure how long she had been out; she had tried to sit up but the pain had been too much. The sound of a helicopter droned in the far distance as she came to. The ground was cold underneath her, and she was light-headed.
‘Nina?’ said Sophie. ‘Nina?’
‘She’s asleep,’ said Mia.
‘I’m not asleep,’ said Nina thickly, her voice slurring. ‘I’m not, I’m just hurt and I can’t move.’
‘Daddy once hurt his back and he had to lie on a plank on the floor in the living room,’ said Mia.
‘It wasn’t a real plank though, was it? It was a piece of wood from Grandad’s old sideboard, and he brought it over for Daddy to lie on,’ said Sophie.
Nina smiled and swallowed blood. ‘My dad hurt his back once, and he had to lie on the ironing board.’
‘How did your mummy do the ironing?’ asked one of the girls, and, despite the pain, Nina laughed.
‘It wasn’t upright; he lay on it on the floor. The legs were tucked under.’
Nina saw it for a moment, the image of her dad on the floor, and her mother trying to tuck a cushion onto that wiry bit where the iron sits. It was now so clear in her mind… The smell of the living room, her mother on her knees by her father’s head as he moaned for her to bring more cushions. Her father looked up at her and smiled, and she knew she had drifted off again and was dreaming.
Nina had a sudden impulse of energy, and she came back to her senses. She was on the floor of the cave; she turned her head and saw that she was a couple of metres from the entrance. She could try and drag herself outside, and wave at one of the helicopters, but there was a huge slope upwards, filled with rocks and boulders.
She turned her head, and she saw that Max had taken his backpack with all the tools and twine. He also had the black case which was filled with the matches, torch, scissors and wire cutters. They just had the rucksack with the stove and where they kept the rolled-up sleeping bags. She thought about what she could do if he came back. She could throw a tin of baked beans at him, or two. This made her laugh, but it came out as a nasty wet gurgle.
‘Are you laughing?’ asked a small voice. Sophie.
‘Yes, I am,’ she said. Nina shifted, and then she forced herself to sit up. The darkness in the cave started to overwhelm her and she saw stars, but she breathed through it. She felt her chest. He must have missed her heart; surely, she’d be dead by now. She tried not to think about how much blood she had lost, the blood seemed to have eased from her chest. Well, the blood that she could see. She had a funny feeling, a fullness which made her think she was bleeding pretty badly inside. It was her leg that continued to pour with blood. What if she made a tourniquet? If she managed to get the bottom of her jeans, and roll them up tight, high above her knee, that could work to stop the bleeding. She reached down, and felt her insides slosh and burn. Her fingers brushed the bottoms of the jeans and she could tell they were too tight for it to work. She wished that the bottoms were wider so she could have rolled them higher.
Shame I’m not wearing flares, she thought, not that I’ve ever owned a pair.
She froze.
Flares.
Distress flares.
In the rucksack, with the stove and bedding, in the side pocket, were the distress flares. Please, she thought. Please don’t let him have remembered about it. He took the stuff that I could use to cut the girls free and the first aid kit, but my rucksack, which had bedding and the maps, that has the red distress flare in the pocket.
She felt another burst of energy and started to drag herself over to the rucksack.
‘Nina, are you okay?’ asked a small voice. Sophie, she could hear it was Sophie.
‘Yes, Sophie, you sit tight, I’m going to get us out of this,’ she said. The pain was agonising but she made it across the rough stone floor to the rucksack. She felt around, running her hands over the pockets. Yes! There they were in the outside pocket; she could feel the outline. She unzipped the pocket and pulled out the two long red distress flares.
The original plan was that when they received the money, they would leave the girls out on the moor and make a call to Marsh with their exact location. Then they had planned to make their way across the moor to a town on the edge, near Plymouth. Here they would get a cab, and make their way to the port, which was only a few miles. It was then he was going to fire the flare as a signal. Max had arranged for a bloke he knew from the young offender’s centre to be waiting to pick them up in a boat. They had been planning to pay him £25,000 to take them across to Europe.
She propped herself up on the rucksack and took stock. It was ridiculous. Everyone was looking for them. Even if Max managed to get the money, their chances… his chances of making it were slim.
He shot me. He shot me, and left me for dead, why would he come back? Would he come back?
Nina gripped the two distress flares and unscrewed the base, feeling the pull string drop down. She had been planning to drag herself out to a spot by the waterfall where she could see the sky, wait for a helicopter to come close and fire it into the air.
And then she had a better idea.
Chapter Eighty
Clouds were rushing across the sky in fits and bursts as Max drew close to the place where the ground banked down towards the waterfall. He hadn’t heard a helicopter for almost half an hour, but the cloud was lifting, and he would have to wait for dark until he started to hike down the ten miles to the edge of the moor. The boat was due to meet them at 3 a.m.
Not them, him, he corrected himself. He figured the helicopters would continue to search until nightfall, so he had time to kill. Time, and other things too.
He stopped at the top of the slope and checked the gun. It was loaded; he felt the weight of it in his hand. He wanted to show that bastard police commander wh
o was in control. He’d avoided hurting the girls in front of Nina, but now she was dead he could do what he liked. It wouldn’t be quick. He would strip the girls naked, and cut off all their hair, and torture them a while with his long hunting knife. He had never been into kids, but maybe for the commander he would have to make an exception.
He moved down the slope, through the banks of heather and past the waterfall. It was freezing cold and he thought if the temperature dropped much more it would freeze and suddenly fall silent.
He reached the small slit in the rocks, and stood to one side and listened, his gun cocked. There was no sound from inside. He closed his eyes for a few seconds to get his eyes used to the darkness in the cave. Then he opened them and stepped through and inside.
The twins now looked filthy and dishevelled and were still tied to the steel ring in the rocky shelf. There was a vast pool of blood, but Nina wasn’t where he’d shot her. He followed the trail of blood, and saw she was propped up against the rucksacks.
‘You worthless piece of shit. Eat this!’ she cried.
Max only realised that she was pointing the distress flare at him a millisecond before a flash of red came shooting out towards his face.
Nina knew the charge from the distress flare was designed to travel to a height of 100 metres in a matter of seconds, but the force of it detonating threw her back against the rocky wall. The rocket hit Max in his open mouth, and the white-hot temperature of the charge burnt through the flesh of his face and into his brain. At the same time, he was thrown back towards the mouth of the cave, but missed, and slammed into the wall. Nina shouted for the girls to duck down, and she covered her face as the flare exploded in a fiery burst of red, igniting his body and clothes and filling the cave with thick smoke. Nina grabbed the second flare and pointed it in the direction of the mouth of the cave and fired.
Chapter Eighty-One
The Met police helicopter containing Erika and Moss had been in the air for a couple of hours, flying in a grid formation across Dartmoor.
Erika’s hopes of finding Mia and Sophie alive had started to fade a couple of hours into their search. They had listened to the police radio, linking up with pilots flying over other sections of the moors, and they had all reported nothing. They were about to have to turn back and fly back to the base in Plymouth to refuel when Erika saw a thin plume of thick black smoke, and then a red distress flare sailed into the sky in a bright red pinprick of light before arching over and beginning its descent.
‘There,’ she cried, speaking into her radio. ‘We have to go there. We can’t turn back yet.’
The pilot turned sharply to the right, and the plume of smoke came closer, clumps of cloud moved past and briefly enveloped them before they seemed to sail apart and give them a perfect bird’s-eye view of a small depression in the moor filled with water. As the grass came closer and they descended down towards the edge of the waterfall, they could see down below the blood-spattered body of a woman lying on a piece of grass next to the waterfall.
As soon as the helicopter touched down, Erika, Moss and the air ambulance paramedic jumped out, ducking down under the blades, and they ran down the slope to the woman, who was just barely alive, still clutching the yellow cylinder of the distress flare in her bloody hands.
‘In the cave. He’s dead, and the girls are there,’ she croaked.
Erika and Moss left the paramedic with Nina, and found the entrance to the cave. Erika hurried to the girls and saw them tied to the rock. They were grubby and filthy and crying hysterically. Then Moss noticed the charred figure slumped in the corner, with a burnt-out hole where the face should be.
‘He’s dead; she killed him!’ cried one of the twins.
‘Please help us, get us out,’ shouted the other.
Erika worked on the cable ties with the sharp edge of her house key, and she managed to cut one of the cable ties and then the other.
‘Let’s get them out of here,’ she cried, and she and Moss scooped them up and ran out of the cave, past the paramedic and up to the top.
Erika left Moss with the girls and came back down to the paramedic.
‘Please, leave me to die,’ whispered Nina hoarsely.
Erika crouched down at her side and looked at the paramedic, who shook his head.
‘Stay with her. I need to run back and get supplies. Hold here,’ he said, taking Erika’s hand and pressing it onto the blood oozing from Nina’s leg. He ran off back to the helicopter.
‘There’s a boy, buried in the well over there,’ said Nina. She winced at the pain.
‘What?’ asked Erika.
‘His name was Dean. Please look in the well, find his body. Give him a proper burial.’
Erika nodded.
‘I never got to do so much of the things I wanted… I never got to have babies… Please make sure they get back safe to their parents… Mia… Sophie.’
Erika could see the life was draining out of Nina, and she looked back at the helicopter, to where Moss was wrapping the girls in blankets and giving them water. Erika could feel the blood slowing from where her hand lay on the wound, and Nina was taking ragged breaths.
‘I’m sorry for everything. Tell my mum I love her…’ She then looked at Erika. ‘I never meant any of this to happen…’ With a throaty wheeze, the light left her eyes and her skin rapidly changed from white to a waxy yellow.
The paramedic came running back and reached her side with a UV line.
‘She’s gone,’ said Erika softly. ‘She’s dead.’
The paramedic looked over at Moss waiting by the helicopter with Mia and Sophie.
‘We need to get those girls to a hospital and have them checked over,’ he said. ‘I’m going to call one of the other helicopters to come and get you.’
Erika didn’t have the chance to respond; he ran off up the slope and bundled the girls and Moss inside the helicopter. She closed her eyes against the air pressure as it took off, flattening the grass and heather around her. It sheered up into the sky, grew smaller and then vanished up through the clouds.
Erika looked down at Nina’s body and felt an overwhelming sadness. How could a young girl with so much promise stumble down such a dark path? She looked back to the cave, and could just make out Max Kirkham’s feet through the gap in the rocks. It was quiet, and the light was fading, and she shivered. With her free hand, she closed Nina’s eyes.
The wind whistled across the heather and the air was bitterly cold, and Erika paced up and down to keep warm. She thought how long she had hunted for these two people, and of the trail of destruction they had left in their wake. And now she was alone, guarding their bodies. She was relieved they had been stopped, and even more relieved that Mia and Sophie were safe and would be reunited with Paul and Marcie, but a big part of her wished she could have locked Max and Nina up and thrown away the key. Death seemed too light a sentence for them.
Finally, another helicopter appeared on the horizon.
Epilogue
Friday, 18 December
It was three weeks later, and Erika was just returning home from a long day which had ended with a doctor’s appointment when she finally had the cast on her wrist removed. It was cold, and had been threatening to snow for the past few days, but she doubted they would have a white Christmas. As she put the key in the lock, she saw how emaciated her wrist looked after wearing the cast for so many weeks. She opened the door and stepped inside, picking up a pile of cards on the mat.
She went through to the living room, taking off her coat, and the first thing she did was open the eighteenth door on the Advent calendar Jakub and Karolina had sent her. She popped out the chocolate, and saw behind it was a Santa and Mrs Claus, both fat and jolly with beaming red faces. Santa was holding a piece of mistletoe above Mrs Claus’s head, and she was coquettishly leaning up to kiss him.
‘You just remember, love, Santa only comes once a year. Make the most of it,’ said Erika to the calendar. She popped the chocolate in her mouth,
and went to the fridge and poured herself a large vodka. She took it to the sofa and started to open the cards.
There were Christmas cards from Moss, Crane, and McGorry, and even Peterson had sent her one with a rather ambiguous ‘best wishes’. She had seen them all that day, apart from Peterson, whose return to work loomed in the new year, so she wasn’t sure why they had all posted their cards. She felt a little stingy for slipping her Christmas cards into everyone’s pigeon holes.
Erika was about to order a takeaway when there was a knock at the door. When she opened it, she was surprised to see Marsh on the doorstep. They hadn’t spoken since the dramatic events on Dartmoor.
‘Hi…’
‘Hi, Erika,’ he said. He looked thin.
‘Come in, you fancy a drink?’ she said, adding quickly. ‘A coffee or tea?’
He came in and wiped his feet, but he didn’t take off his coat as she led him through to the living room.
‘I won’t have a drink, thanks,’ he said, tapping his fingers on the back of the sofa nervously. There was an awkward silence.
‘How are you... doing?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Okay-ish.’
‘How’s Marcie?’
‘She’s been better. Taking it one day at a time.’
‘And Sophie and Mia?’
‘Surprisingly upbeat. They are happy to be home. Very clingy and cuddly. We’re going to have to see about getting them some counselling, perhaps, down the line, but they’re more upset about Nina Hargreaves… She did so much awful stuff, killed all those people, yet she’s the reason my girls are alive.’
Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away Page 29