‘Murgatroyd?’ he asked Thackeray.
‘I’ve never met him, but I guess so,’ Thackeray said, his mouth dry. ‘I’ve seen photographs.’
‘He’s been here some time,’ Mower said. ‘We don’t need to be heroic and try to drag him back to life. No chance.’
‘So where’s Laura?’ Thackeray said so quietly that Mower could barely hear him. Mower glanced around.
‘There’s another door,’ he said. ‘This is like one of those puzzles, boxes within boxes.’ He tried the next door and it swung open easily revealing an even smaller space with little more than a bed and a table, where another immobile body lay. Thackeray pushed past the sergeant with a strangled cry as the light went on revealing Laura strapped to the bed, face ashen, eyes closed, with a dark pool of blood at her neck, dripping steadily onto the floor.
‘She’s alive, guv,’ Mower said, feeling for a pulse. ‘Just.’ He turned to the officers crowding in behind them.
‘Get a fucking ambulance!’ he yelled. ‘Quickly.’
Michael Thackeray sat beside Laura’s bed watching the steady drip making its way down the long plastic tube and into her hand, as he had for hours, long after the doctors had finished the blood transfusions which they hoped would save her. Prayers from long ago came unbidden into his head as he watched her immobile body under the hospital sheet, at first barely breathing. With memory beyond control, he recalled sitting by his mother’s bed as she slipped into final unconsciousness, leaving him bereft and his father embittered, after watching the slow ravages of MS take her, inch by inch, away from them. If that happened again, to another woman he loved, he could not bear to even contemplate the consequences for his own life.
Laura had not opened her eyes since they had found her in Murgatroyd’s cellar, although the doctors had been encouraging after they had treated her. The slash to her neck had nicked an artery, but she had been found in time, they said, the transfusions would do their work. And her breathing, he noticed at last, had perceptibly become more regular, until he had begun to tell himself that she was now sleeping more or less normally. She was still a deathly white, and he could barely bear to look at the dressing beneath her ear or at her head, where her hair had been hacked away. The nurses had gently wiped away the smears of blood and brushed what was left over her bare scalp, but he felt the loss of her cloud of copper curls as much, if not more, than he knew she would when she saw herself again in a mirror.
He felt rather than heard someone behind him, and turned round to find an anxious-looking Kevin Mower hovering by the door to the private room they had given Laura.
‘How is she, guv?’ the sergeant asked quietly.
‘As well as can be expected,’ Thackeray said. ‘You know they never commit themselves.’
‘I came to give you a quick update…’
Thackeray got to his feet wearily and followed Mower out into the corridor.
‘There was another room beyond where we found Laura,’ Mower said. ‘Empty, but with a very patchy concrete floor. I’ve got them started on breaking up the floor and they’ve already found one body, not far down. It’s pretty obvious there’ll be more. Six, at a guess. It looks as if he took them back to Sibden, killed them in the room where we found Laura, and then buried them in the one beyond that. He could have gone on indefinitely, I guess, if he hadn’t attacked Karen Bastable before he got her indoors.’
‘Any theories about why he might have done that? What does that bastard Sanderson say now?’
‘Still says Murgatroyd was incoherent beside the body when he found him, but thinks he said something about her struggling free and he had to use the knife to stop her getting away. Presumably, once he’d started on her, he couldn’t stop, he was out of control, and killed her where she lay, instead of taking her indoors. If he hadn’t done that, we’d never have got near him. He could have carried on indefinitely.’
‘You’ve charged Sanderson?’
‘Oh, yes, guv. He’ll go away for a very long time.’
‘He was nearly as warped as Murgatroyd himself,’ Thackeray said. ‘How could you cover up a crime like that and actually feel good about it?’
‘All part of God’s higher purpose, according to his latest statement,’ Mower said. ‘Some God.’
Thackeray glanced back into Laura’s room, and Mower put a hand on his arm.
‘Get back to Laura, guv,’ he said. ‘Everything’s under control back at base. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Thanks, Kevin,’ Thackeray said. And to his joy, when he turned to take up his watch beside Laura’s bed, he found her green eyes were open and she was watching his approach with every appearance of relief.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
She shook her head slightly.
‘Tired,’ she said faintly. ‘Have I been asleep for long? I’m very tired.’
‘Quite long, yes,’ Thackeray said, his mouth dry. ‘But you’re all right now. You’re going to be all right.’ Laura nodded, and winced as she tried to move her neck.
‘And the baby?’ she whispered. ‘Is the baby all right?’
Thackeray nodded wordlessly.
‘They say the baby’s all right,’ he said. He took her hand, unable to speak, and she seemed happy to lie for a while with her eyes half shut.
‘Have you caught him?’ she whispered at last, almost as if she had been reviewing what had happened, and Thackeray wondered how much she actually remembered. He did not want to push her back into the horror. There would be plenty of time for that later, much later, he thought.
‘We’ve got him,’ Thackeray said. ‘He won’t ever hurt anyone again.’
‘And Debbie? Is she all right? He did a vicious job on her as well, you know.’
‘She’s recovering,’ Thackeray said. He took her hand.
‘And with you? What made him stop short?’ he asked. ‘Have you any idea?’
‘It was the baby. He couldn’t kill the baby at the end,’ she said simply. ‘I reminded him of his mother, and the baby must have reminded him of his sister.’
‘Is that what he told you?’ Thackeray asked, astonished into asking one more question.
‘I told him,’ Laura said, with a crooked attempt at a smile. ‘I told him he couldn’t murder us both. That wouldn’t be right.’
‘That was very clever psychology,’ Thackeray said, kissing her hand. ‘The baby saved your life. You have no idea how good that makes me feel.’
‘Really?’ Laura whispered.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘For all three of us.’
About the Author
PATRICIA HALL is the pen name of journalist Maureen O’Connor. She was born and brought up in West Yorkshire, which is where she chose to set her acclaimed series of novels featuring reporter Laura Ackroyd and DCI Michael Thackeray. She is married, with two grown-up sons, and now lives in Oxford.
By Patricia Hall
Ackroyd & Thackeray series
Skeleton at the Feast
Deep Freeze
Death in Dark Waters
Dead Reckoning
False Witness
Death in a Far Country
By Death Divided
Devil’s Game
Other novels
The Masks of Darkness
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
13 Charlotte Mews
London W1T 4EJ
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2009.
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
Copyright © 2009 by PATRICIA HALL
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1292–2
Devil's Game Page 25