by Dane Cobain
Kat’s fist was full of the fine powder that she’d scraped from the gaps between the bricks. While it wasn’t exactly her housemate’s pepper spray, it’d still hurt if it hit her captor while his eyes were open.
It’s not much, Kat thought, but it’s all I’ve got.
She tensed up and pulled once again against the manacles.
* * *
Cholmondeley’s team was starting to flag, and he’d sent several of his coppers home to get some sleep. It was 10PM and they’d had to stop going door-to-door for two reasons. The first was that it was getting late and Superintendent Richards wouldn’t be happy if a disgruntled member of the public filed a complaint. The second was that they were running low on manpower and the public was still coming forward with information.
Meanwhile, the Tower Hill Terror was lying low. There’d been no good lead on Kat Cotteril, but there also hadn’t been another body. Cholmondeley saw it as a case of “no news is good news.”
Even so, he was itching to leap into action. And, like Leipfold, he’d arranged to have each of their suspects tailed on the off chance that they’d somehow incriminate themselves and that they could make an arrest. And there was also a missing person. If there was a chance that geeky Lukas White, unpredictable Marc Allman or smooth-talking Asif Shaktar was behind the disappearance, it was a chance that Cholmondeley thought was worth taking.
So far, none of the suspects had actually looked suspicious, and Cholmondeley wondered if he’d got it wrong. What if Pete Merin, with his dead wife, his big frame and his bushy beard, really was the man they were looking for? And worse still, what if he wasn’t, and what if neither were the three that his team was tailing?
They were questions that haunted him, and the only way to stop them from circling his brain like a rabid dog was to keep himself busy. Unfortunately, Cholmondeley’s job was to keep the machine running and the actual grunt work fell to his ragtag team of constables. The old cop had to settle for wandering between teams and badgering them for updates while simultaneously doing his best to appease Superintendent Richards, who kept calling him and asking for information.
And it didn’t help that he was in the middle of two separate but possibly connected investigations. On the one hand, he was trying to find the Tower Hill Terror before he had a chance to strike again and before the media crucified the police force. On the other hand, he had Kat Cotteril to think about.
Their best lead on Kat was the young woman’s laptop, so Cholmondeley strolled along the corridors towards the tech labs to ask for an update. Luckily, his old pal James Leipfold had delivered the machine while he was helping the civilian team to go door-to-door, and he’d been good enough to provide the password to go along with it.
“Anything?” he asked, as he strolled into the room and leaned against the wall inside the doorway. The computer room was a musty place, and it reeked of stale clothing and the metallic funk of computer hardware. The tech team was almost a law unto itself, and Cholmondeley was reminded of the story he’d heard about the FBI, who’d been forced to cancel their drug testing programme because too many of the top hackers came pre-installed with a dope habit. His boys didn’t touch the stuff, of course. But they also didn’t shower much, and they had the second-rate people skills of an automated call centre.
“Nothing yet, sir.”
Cholmondeley couldn’t tell which of the half-dozen techno-cops that came from, but it didn’t matter much. They were all the same to him, and they even looked the same with their ponytails and unfashionable jackets. And that was just the men. The women were even worse, and yet Cholmondeley always marvelled at how this relatively underfunded and extensively underappreciated department was sometimes able to blow a case right open.
But not this time. Cholmondeley murmured “as you were” and slouched back out, then wandered along the corridor to the mess room, where he expected to find Constable Cohen. The man was the station’s equivalent of a gossip magazine. If there was something worth knowing, Cohen was likely to know it. But Cholmondeley didn’t have his hopes up.
In fact, his hopes were the lowest they’d been since they’d discovered Jayne Lipton in one of the rooms of the Grosvenor House Hotel.
* * *
Kat was tired and hungry. She ached all over, and she’d been struggling with the realisation that she might not be able to fight her way out. There had still been no demands, no threats, and worst of all, no food and no relief. It was starting to look like she’d been chained up and left to die, a thought that had never occurred to her.
For the first time in her life, she was confronted with her own mortality. And worse, she realised that the downhill slope to death wasn’t necessarily quick and painless. She still had a little fight left, but not much. And as the hours drifted slowly by and she was further deprived of food, sleep and water, that little fight was threatening to leave her.
Since first coming to and discovering her predicament, Kat had been visited only twice. On both occasions, her captor said nothing and refused to react when she twisted in her shackles or tried to fight out against them. They simply waited in the interminable darkness, then approached her once she quietened down.
The first time had taken noticeably longer. Kat, fearing death, had fought like a cornered wildcat, but she’d quietened up when she felt a rough pair of gloved hands on her face. They pinched her cheeks tight and forced her mouth open, and then a bottle of water was poured down her throat. It took her by surprise and she started to choke on it, but she was so desperate for it that she swallowed as much as she could. Once the bottle was empty, it was taken away and Kat was left alone in the darkness again.
When she was given water for a second time, she knew that they wanted her alive. It would have been all too easy to leave her there in the dark until she breathed her last and passed on, but they needed her. She tried not to ask herself why.
The second time, she drank slowly, more carefully. She could sense someone standing there in the darkness, watching as they teased the bottle across their prisoner’s parched lips. And then, to Kat’s relief, they left her there. It was horrible being alone down there, but at least they hadn’t hurt her. Yet.
Her arms were tired, but on the plus side, her manacles were starting to come loose. She could feel that the screws had a little give in them.
Kat grimaced. Her body was going through hell, and she wouldn’t be surprised if she’d dislocated one or both of her shoulders. She strained at the manacles again, then slumped down, exhausted, to hang from them. She started to shave away at the brick again, to free up another of the screws that bolted the manacles to the wall. Then she stopped. She thought she’d heard something, some noise, some sign of human life in the distance.
She listened, her ears pricked and primed for anything, anything at all. For a moment, there was nothing. And then she heard it again, and again and again. A footstep, and then another.
Her captor was coming back to see her. And this time, it might not be to give her some water.
It might be the Tower Hill Terror.
Time stood still. Kat Cotteril stayed silent, barely daring to breathe in case it sped itself back up again. All was silent, except…
“Hello.”
The noise of the voice after so much silence made Kat jump, and she instinctively tried to cover her ears and lost a little of her precious dust because of it. It fell down her blouse and onto her trousers, where it clung to the moisture. With no other option, she’d been forced to relieve herself where she stood, and she promised herself a long soak in the bath if she ever made it out of there.
Kat opened her mouth and tried to speak, but nothing came out. She tried again and managed to croak, “You’re a woman.”
“That’s right.”
Her captor was standing closer now, and Kat could smell the woman’s perfume and hear her ragged breathing. This woman was ill, mayb
e dying. And a little voice in Kat’s head told her that she’d die too, unless she played her cards right.
“What do you want?” Kat asked. Her voice wavered a little, but she did her best to keep it as steady as possible. It was still dark, too dark to see, but she’d been in the darkness for so long that it was starting to feel like a second home. The sound of the woman was enough to help her to turn her head in the right direction. After that, it was all guesswork.
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” the woman said. Then she cackled, and Kat forced herself to laugh along with her to try to get on the woman’s good side.
“Then let me try another question,” Kat said. “Why are you doing this?”
The woman laughed again before breaking out into a coughing fit. Kat waited.
“I’m a terrorist,” she said. “A rebel without a cause.” She coughed again, but her lungs still rattled with phlegm and unpleasantness.
“You’re dying,” Kat said, realisation beginning to dawn. It wasn’t a question. She just knew it, and she selfishly started to think about how she could work the knowledge to her own advantage.
“That’s right,” the woman said. “I am. And that’s why I’m here to begin with. This is it, for me at least. My last chance to finally do something worthwhile.”
“Worthwhile?” Kat asked. She managed to laugh, despite herself. She flexed her aching muscles once, then twice, to bring them back to life again.
“Worth remembering,” the woman corrected. “And I like to have a little fun while I’m at it. That’s why I’m not a true terrorist. I’m not a bomber or a gunman. I want to see people suffer before they die.”
“You can see?” Kat said. “In this?”
“Night-vision goggles,” the woman said. “And besides, darkness disorientates. People are scared of the dark, especially when they’re about to die.”
There was another pause.
“Aren’t you scared?”
“No,” Kat said.
But her heart palpitations told her otherwise, and she was starting to smell the reek of her own sweat as it leaked from her pores and settled in the cotton of her T-shirt.
I wish I had deodorant, she thought. And then she was struck by the bizarreness of it, so normal on the streets and so unexpected and out-of-place in the darkness. She started to laugh, and as she did so she was hit by a rush of endorphins and adrenaline that brought some life back to her aching limbs.
And then the woman took a step closer to her and grabbed her by the hair. She pulled at it roughly so that Kat had to tilt her head as the woman whispered something in her ear.
“I was in your place once,” she said. “If you think I’m bad, wait until you see who’s running the show.”
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Racing Time
LEIPFOLD WAS RIDING Camilla, and Maile was on the seat behind him. The weather was finally starting to lift, and the winter seemed like a lifetime ago. He was sweating through his leathers, and Maile was cursing his spare helmet and asking where she could find one in her own size so she could see out of the thing.
They were following up on Leipfold’s informants. The tails he’d set had found nothing of interest so far, and Lukas White in particular had made for a dull report. The kid just went to school and back, breaking the routine once a week to do a paper round on a Saturday morning. Asif Shaktar met with a couple of small-time gangsters, but none of the leads amounted to much. And Marc Allman had continued to buy cocaine and spend hour after hour at his office.
Leipfold was stumped. He had no idea who the killer was, or what they wanted, or even whether they had Kat Cotteril and what their new location was. There was only one thing he could do. He could take a punt and hope that a hunch paid off.
That was why Leipfold and Maile were following Allman. Craig, the third of Leipfold’s three semi-professional stalkers, had called something in.
“Nothing suspicious,” he’d been quick to explain. “Just unusual. This fella is a creature of habit. He does the same thing, day in, day out. Only not tonight, for some reason. He’s taken a different route home.”
“Where are you now?” Leipfold had asked.
“Richmond Cemetery.”
Leipfold had asked him to repeat the location, then plotted it into his phone and hit the road with Maile in tow. Now, as they approached the cemetery, he called Craig back and asked for an update.
“He’s still here,” Craig said. “But it looks like he’s getting ready to leave.”
“What’s he doing?” Leipfold asked.
“Looks like he’s paying his respects.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Yeah, boss. He’s moving. You want me to follow him?”
“Of course!” Leipfold bellowed. The quality of the call was bad and the built-in headset in his helmet was on the fritz, which didn’t surprise him. You get what you pay for, Leipfold thought, and he’d bought his second-hand from a man he’d never met before or since. “Stay on his tail and don’t let him out of your sight. I’m coming.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in the darkness, Kat Cotteril lay limp on her manacles, trying to bide her time. The woman was still talking, and Kat had been able to place both the woman and, more importantly, her surroundings, by the sound that she made as she moved around the room. Right then, they were three or four feet apart.
Kat knew better than to bargain with the woman, to try to win her freedom through words and tears if necessary. That hadn’t stopped her from trying, but her pleas fell on deaf ears and they seemed to spark a newfound frenzy in the woman. Kat had tried twice, and both attempts had ended with the woman getting up in her face and shouting some nonsense about it being too late to change anything.
“I haven’t seen your face,” Kat had said. “I couldn’t identify you even if I wanted to.”
“That’s not the point,” the woman replied. There was something about her voice that sounded familiar but Kat couldn’t place it.
She started coughing again, and Kat could hear her as she made her clumsy way away from her. There was a plastic crackle and the snap of a seal, and then the gulping sound of water running down the woman’s oesophagus. The woman smacked her lips together and slammed the bottle down.
Then there was another sound, and it wasn’t a good one. It was the sound of metal on metal like a butcher sharpening his knives. It sounded again and then again, as though the woman was practicing some sort of manoeuvre. And then it got louder as she made her way back towards her prisoner.
“It’s time,” the woman said.
“Time? Time for what?”
“You’re about to find out,” the woman said. She started coughing again in what felt like something of an anti-climax. Then, as suddenly as she started, she stopped.
Kat felt a flash of cold against her cheek. She shrieked as she knew it for what it was—a knife, a big one, pressed tight to her in the cruellest of taunts, a promise of what was to come.
“That’s right,” the woman said. “I’ve got a knife, and I’m not afraid to use it. Let’s see the colour of your blood.”
“You can’t,” Kat said. “Not without a little light.”
“Goggles, remember?”
Kat could almost hear the creak of the woman’s jaw as her mouth curled up into a smile. Or maybe it was just her imagination. It had been playing tricks on her in the darkness.
“Please don’t kill me,” Kat whispered.
“Oh, you won’t die,” the woman said. “Not yet, at least. But you’ll wish for it. You’ll beg for it. You’ll scream for it, if we’re lucky.”
Kat played along, which was easy. She really was terrified, and the fear made its way into her voice like an unexpected visitor. But she hadn’t given up, not by a long shot. She tensed herself, then shifted her grip and teased the muscles in each of her hands. She
listened closely to discern the movements of her captor as she held the knife to her face in the darkness.
* * *
Leipfold was on foot, pounding his heavy boots against the paved path in the graveyard with Maile a couple of steps behind him, puffing away like a smoker in the middle of a marathon. He marvelled at the fact that she’d managed to keep up with him at all. He preferred to exercise his mind over his body, but if he couldn’t do one then he liked to do the other and some of his best ideas had arrived in the middle of a workout when his mind had wandered off and found an answer for him. He was in pretty good shape. Maile wasn’t, but she was determined.
The two of them raced through the graveyard, then out again through a rear exit and along a suburban street, but there was no sign of either Leipfold’s henchman or Marc Allman. Leipfold was still wearing his helmet, and he was listening and bellowing instructions through the headset.
“You’re close, boss,” Craig said. “Hit a left and then the second right. I’m about halfway down the street, fifty, maybe sixty feet behind him. It’s like he hasn’t got a care in the world.”
“I’m on it,” Leipfold replied. “Stay with him.”
Maile fell a couple steps further behind him as he increased his pace and pushed his body to its limits. He was a short guy, and not as young as he used to be, but he could still hit a decent speed when he needed to.
Maile was a dozen steps behind him, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf on twenty cigarettes a day.
“Why do computer games make this look so damn easy?” she shouted. “I’m on zero stamina, boss. You got a potion?”
Leipfold ignored her. He hit the left and then the second right, but Craig was nowhere to be seen. He slowed his pace a little and asked for an update.
Craig hesitated for a moment before replying. “Shit,” he said. “Boss, you’re not going to like this.”
“What is it?” he asked.