by Max China
‘I asked you to hold my hand.’ Her eyes met his, and she slid her hand across the sheet towards him. Kotlas took it, surprised at its softness, how cold it felt. He laid his other hand over it to provide warmth.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
After all she’d been through, she managed a smile, yet Kotlas detected an infinite sadness. She seemed remarkably calm. ‘It’s George. Help is on its way,’ he lied.
‘I’m beyond anything anyone can do,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been gang-raped. Brutalised. My insides are on fire. There isn’t an inch of me that doesn’t hurt. And I’ve lost my child.’ She closed her eyes and wept softly.
‘You were pregnant?’ Kotlas squeezed her hand. ‘Oh, Fleur. I’m so sorry.’ He bit his lip in anguish for her. ‘I know you can’t see it now, but we’re going to get you through this.’ Her hand relaxed in his. Lost its grip. He moved close to her face. She’d stopped breathing. ‘Fleur? Fleur!’ he cried. Yanking back the sheets to begin CPR, he saw three empty syringes tucked between her legs.
Oh, God, Fleur. No!
Chapter 25
Priestley police station. 11:25 a.m.
Trent walked through the open door into Emerson’s office. ‘Sir, someone else involved with that prison bus crash has just turned up.’
Jordan got up from the corner of the inspector’s desk. ‘Where is he?
‘In Reception—’
‘Bring him in, Trent,’ Emerson barked. ‘This’ll be interesting, Jordan. Oh, and Williams, get Lara to bring us some tea.’
Williams gave a tight smile as he replied, ‘Sir, all that joking about Croft, calling her Lara, is getting her down. And even if there was a way to make tea—’
‘I know there isn’t, Williams,’ Emerson said, red-faced. ‘It was a joke. Some people around here need to get a sense of humour, Jesus.’
Williams bit his tongue. If all went to plan, he wouldn’t be working with Emerson for much longer.
The group of men in the inspector’s office listened intently as Styles paced the room, describing what he’d discovered at the scene of the accident.
‘Are you absolutely sure he got away?’ Jordan said, shaking his head.
Styles echoed his head movements. ‘You never went down and checked, did you?’
‘Christ, mate. You saw how far the drop was? We looked over the edge. The van was smashed to fuck and then it exploded—’
‘Just say no,’ Styles said. ‘I’m not judging.’ He looked to Emerson. ‘I don’t know how we do this without effective radio communications, but we have to warn people about Wolfe.’
Emerson held the other man’s gaze. ‘Don’t you think it’s bad enough without adding this news to the mix? People are barely coping with the effects of the power outage.’
Styles stood still for the first time since he’d entered the room. ‘This man lives to kill. Unchecked, who knows how many will die.’
‘We haven’t got the manpower to organise a search,’ Emerson said. ‘He could be anywhere. Can you imagine what will happen if I announce there’s a cannibal killer on the loose?’
‘In the absence of TV or radio, you’ve no choice—’
‘I know that. Jesus.’ Emerson scrubbed his head with both hands. ‘Any idea where he’d go? Relatives, friends?’
‘There isn’t anyone he’d go to,’ Styles said. ‘He’s a lone wolf.’ A half-grin acknowledged the irony of his observation. ‘But let’s see. There’s ten in my detail. You’ve got four including you, Jordan. If we can get some strong men together, split into individual parties headed up by two guards in each group – You said not all vehicles are affected? If we can grab some transport, we can cover a fair bit of ground.’
‘You had ten men to handle him,’ Emerson said. ‘That means you’re looking for what, fifty-six people to join you for maximum effect, and they’re not trained. Regardless of the situation we find ourselves in now, realistically, who do you think is going to leave their families to go and look for him?’
‘He’s got a point,’ Jordan said.
‘I agree, but at least people will see we’re doing something.’ Styles began walking the room again. ‘If we can’t make my proposal work, then at least tell residents to be on guard, lock their doors, that sort of thing.’
‘Transportation is a big issue,’ Williams said.
Emerson laughed drily, and said, ‘Traffic Officer Williams reporting for duty.’
Williams tensed, but ignored the remark. ‘So far, we’ve got a motorbike at our disposal and at least one car. The truth is, we haven’t tried to, um, borrow any others yet.’
‘I’d make that a priority,’ Jordan said.
Emerson glared at him. ‘I really wish you wouldn’t try to steal my thunder at every opportunity, Jordan. I was about to say the same thing.’
Styles cut in. ‘I don’t care who suggests what to whom. I’m only interested in recapturing Wolfe. So, if I can put forward an idea? Let’s get out there and appeal for volunteers to give up their vehicles for police duty.’
‘That won’t work,’ Emerson said. ‘Can you see anyone doing that?’
‘The professor just did,’ Williams said.
Emerson picked up a pencil. ‘To get a posse together as Styles proposes, we’d need at least enough to carry seventy people. It won’t work,’ he said with a hint of one-upmanship.
Style stopped in front of the inspector’s desk, and placing both hands on it, leant forwards. Close up, his bulk was intimidating. ‘Then we’ll just have to fucking commandeer them, won’t we?’
Chapter 26
St Michael’s Church. Midday.
The colours streaking the sky had made Timothy wary of going out. Concerned, he dressed in Father Raymond’s hooded black habit, the one that the priest had always reserved for Easter weekend, to mark the three days that were so revered in the Christian calendar. Already warm, he considered removing his boiler-suit undergarment, but that meant he’d have no pocket in which to carry his sister’s Bible. Wearing the priest’s garments, Timothy was sure he had God more on his side. Otherwise, he reasoned, why did the holy men wear them?
It was a question he had scribbled on his pad and passed to Father Raymond one night. The priest put his whiskey down and squinted at the words in the dim light. ‘What the devil does this say?’
Timothy shrugged, held his left hand out and stared at it while wiggling two fingers of his right over the top of his palm.
‘I have fucking read it, Timothy; your punctuating is crap. Whoever taught you to write was useless.’
Timothy snatched his notebook from the startled priest and stormed out.
Later, Father Raymond knocked at his room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, speaking close to the wood. ‘Can I come in?’ A moment later a note appeared under the door.
‘No!’
The priest shook his head. Walking away, he murmured. ‘Nothing wrong with the punctuating there, boy.’
Timothy barely remembered the first few days spent with Megan, the woman who’d looked after him for ten years, but he did recall how she’d said to him, ‘You can’t talk, I accept that. I’ll bet you can’t write either. Well, I’m going to teach you. You know what writing is?’
He’d nodded.
She’d shoved a pencil and a piece of paper at him. ‘Write your name down for me.’
He still sometimes stuck his tongue out when he wrote, and he had done so that day, almost chewing it off as if it would help control his shaking hand. Finally, he succeeded. Timothy.
Megan read it out loud. ‘Tim-o-tee . . . see this?’ She pointed to her nose and wrote a single word on a scrap of paper. ‘Copy that down.’
Timothy painstakingly copied what she’d written. Nose.
Little by little, Megan taught him to write. Schooled him on everything she knew about life – why people often behaved the way they did, the order of things, and the beauty of nature. ‘And there’s symbolism to be seen everywhere if only you have an eye for
it. You’ll learn, as you grow older, that what goes on in the heavens affects us down here. As above, so below, Timo.’ She smiled at his confusion. ‘One day you’ll understand.’
Over the years, what she’d taught him blended with Father Raymond’s warped and drink-fuelled philosophical ramblings.
After Father Raymond had died, Timothy wore the Easter robes on his own special occasions. Deep in thought, he picked lint from the front of the gown. He was closer to God than the old drunk had ever been.
‘It’s a question of faith,’ the priest had told him during another lecture.
It was why he carried the Bible close to his heart.
Timothy walked out into the churchyard and took a detour past his family’s grave. He bent to pluck a blade of grass, the broadest stem he could find, and then made his way down through the woods towards the railway track.
Chapter 27
Hilltop Cottage. 12:07 p.m.
Anderson floated weightlessly in a world he’d never been to before. Disoriented, he spread his arms and legs like a spaceman tumbling through the infinity of space, the Earth disappearing below him, becoming no more than a dot.
‘Not all behaviour is learned,’ he heard Ryan say.
Anderson searched for the source of the voice. It was close. ‘Where are you?’
‘There’s always a pattern if you know how to look.’
The book. Problem Child. Anderson recalled reading the words. Or did he?
‘I’m talking about genetic blueprints,’ Ryan said.
That wasn’t in the book. The blackness of space and the stars all around him vanished, and he found himself sitting opposite Ryan, watching the light play along the length of the polished silver pencil the elderly psychiatrist held between the thumbs and forefingers of his hands. Anderson blinked.
‘You’re not with me, are you, Anderson? I’m talking about traits passed between identical twins, separated at birth, by accident or design, perhaps.’
‘But Ryan, who would do that?’
‘Twins, who despite being separated for twenty years, often discover once reunited that they share exactly the same traits.’
‘Your point, Ryan?’
‘It would seem our lives are mapped out for us from the start.’
Anderson felt as if he were stretched out at the limits of an elastic band. He could float no further. He experienced a brief moment suspended in time and then he was snatched back, hurtling through blackness, the Earth growing bigger and brighter. He smashed through the atmosphere, closer and closer, scattered houses and open fields, forest. He braced himself. He had to wake up. If he didn’t, it would mean he had died.
His olfactory senses came alive. Dampness. The sweet, pungent odour of rotting leaves. Confused, Anderson struggled to remember where he was. The dream had turned into a nightmare. He woke, breathless and half-blinded by pain. This can’t go on.
Insight settled on him. He knew what it was. Self-diagnosis to the nth degree. He knew beyond doubt. He felt it. Thousands of tiny eggs coursed through his bloodstream, log-jamming, clogging in the bends and bottlenecks of his veins. Soon they would be hatching.
Adrenaline surged. Get to a doctor.
But he couldn’t rouse himself.
Chapter 28
Signal House, Churchend. 12:27 p.m.
Wolfe lumbered along the railway track, gauging the length of his step to fall on the evenly spaced sleepers. It had taken a few minutes to get accustomed to walking with shorter strides, but now that he was used to it, he had no need to watch where he placed his feet. Where are the trains? Still no sign of anyone. Apart from the people in the church, he hadn’t seen a soul, hadn’t heard any vehicles. Instinct told him it had something to do with the lights in the skies. They shimmered in ways he’d never seen before. Birds perched in the trees on either side of the track, shuffling nervously as he approached, seeming to be as wary of him as they were the shape-shifting lightshow playing out above them.
Distracted, he stumbled, cursing as one of his feet fell short and crunched heavy and hard, down onto the gravel bed of the track. Shockwaves sped through his aching body.
His focus shifted to watching the position of the sleepers. Counting with each step, he resumed his cadence. The rhythm lulled him. He lost all sense of time and his thoughts drifted back to his early interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr Kotlas.
‘I have these recurring dreams, and in them, I’m seeing through the eyes of a killer.’ Wolfe grinned at the irony. ‘I know what you’re thinking, doc, I am a killer, but this is someone else. And I think I know who it is.’
Kotlas stared. The patient, restrained in a straitjacket and flanked by guards, appeared sincere. The lengthy pause that had developed didn’t encourage him to speak further. Wolfe, knowing silence was one of the tools the doctor used, kept a victorious grin locked deep inside.
Kotlas rolled his hand, gesturing for him to continue.
‘I think it’s Jack the Ripper,’ he said. ‘I know you’ll think I’m crazier than you did before, but I’ve a psychic connection with him.’
The psychiatrist leaned forwards. Placing his elbows on the desk, he steepled his hands and rested his chin on his thumbs. ‘Because you dream about him?’
‘No, it’s more than that. I feel it, here.’ His arms jiggled beneath the heavy canvas. ‘In my guts.’
‘Tell me, what it is you think you see through this killer’s eyes?’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I’m just asking questions,’ Kotlas said. ‘Believing or not isn’t relevant at this point. All right, let’s try this. What do you think the dreams mean?’
Wolfe shrugged. ‘I’m seeing through the eyes of the Ripper. I’ve told you all this before. The missing body parts. What do you think he did with them?’
The psychiatrist shook his head. ‘No idea. Tell me.’
‘He ate them, that’s what he did. I knew he was related to me somehow – why do you think we share the same tastes? I told my last quack all this, but no one takes me seriously.’
The cables overhead hummed as the wind rose, drawing Wolfe back to the present. He glanced up. The sky had become predominantly pink, the atmosphere eerie. An unearthly screech cut across the tracks. It reminded him of how, when he was a child, he’d blown breath across a piece of grass held between his upright thumbs, his hands cupped to amplify the noise. Turning in the direction the sound had come from, he caught a glimpse of some indefinable shape, large and dark, moving among the shadows of the trees.
‘You don’t think making that stupid racket scares me, do you? Or is it you want to play games with me?’ he shouted. ‘Come on then, come over here.’ Greeted with silence, and seeing no further movement, he dismissed what he’d seen as a trick of the light. The shriek? Just the wind. He strode on.
On the left-hand side of the track, two hundred yards ahead, a signal box. Would there be anyone in it? Would they have seen him? Wolfe cut down the steep bank, aiming to approach on the blindside. His lips were dry; he licked them. Maybe he could get something to drink from there.
The way ahead blocked by a level crossing, Wolfe clambered up the bank and crossed the railway lines.
There was no sign of life in the first-floor windows of the half-timbered building. Arranged under a slate roof, the upstairs was supported on a solid brickwork base, designed, he imagined, to elevate the structure for good visibility both ways down the track. He followed the footpath through a white gate, climbed a short flight of stairs, and tried the door. Locked. About to stove it in, someone yelled from inside, ‘Who’s there?’
‘Couldn’t get a train. I’ve walked up from the last station miles back,’ Wolfe said, directing his voice at the door. ‘I wondered if I could have a glass of water. Find out what’s going on.’
‘There’s no trains. Power failure, I think,’ a man shouted from inside the signal house. ‘I can’t let you in. Regulations. Sorry.’
Wolfe bent to look through the fish-eye
lens of the door viewer. An eye stared back.
‘Don’t you trust me? Come on,’ he pleaded. ‘All I want is some water and somewhere to rest.’
‘Okay, go around the trackside. I’ll drop you a bottle out of the window, and then you can go. You can’t rest here.’
‘Just open the door.’ Wolfe knocked on it gently. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’
‘Scared? I’m seventeen stone. Why would I be?’ the signalman said. ‘Look, mate, I’ve been up all night, my shift is over, but I can’t leave because the day-man hasn’t shown up. There’s no power. There’s no phone or radio. In other words, I don’t know what’s happening.’
‘Got anything I can eat in there?’ Wolfe said, grinning. ‘I’ll bet you have.’
‘No, I haven’t. Now I told you, I’ll drop a bottle of water down to you. Take it or leave it, but I want you to move on.’
Detecting anxiety in the occupant’s voice, Wolfe’s grin widened. He tested the door with his shoulder. Bump.
‘I’m telling you. I’ve got a baseball bat in here. Now fuck off.’
Wolfe’s voice lowered to a growl. ‘You shouldn’t have said that to me.’ He stood back and kicked the door just below the lock. The timber frame split, but held. His foot poised to stamp down from a higher angle, he heard the tinkle of a bicycle bell coming from down the lane.
The signalman shouted from the window, ‘Mum, don’t stop! Turn around quick. Ride away. Don’t argue. Just do it!’
Brakes squealed. An elderly woman came into view, slowed to a stop, and dismounting, called out, ‘What did you say, Ronald?’
Wolfe thundered down the stairs.
‘Mum! Run!’
She saw the hulking figure of the stranger bearing down on her, and desperately scooted the bike, trying to get back on.