One Bad Turn

by Sinéad Crowley

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Daly looked puzzled.

  ‘You all right, mate?’

  Fine, Flynn wanted to answer, but the word simply wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  She didn’t know what he looked like. That was the really terrifying thing. If Leah ended up having to do one of those identity line-up things – actually, no, make it when she ended up doing that (she had to believe there would be one in her near future or she’d go mad) – so, yeah, when she did, well, she was starting to worry that she wouldn’t be able to pick him out. He was just a bloke, an ordinary average bloke around her stepdad’s age, but with a little less hair than Fergal and carrying less weight around the middle. There had been nothing interesting about him at all, that time she saw him on the side of Kennockmore Hill. Until he’d shoved her into a van and taken her away.

  She should have fought harder. That was the main thought that had been spinning around Leah’s head since the man had tossed her into this filthy little room. She should have pushed him away, screamed for help, kicked him in the nuts, found a way out somehow. But she had been too shocked, or too frightened, or too stupid to struggle when she’d had the chance. And now she was stuck in here.

  Leah extended her hand and pulled a thread from the carpet, looking in disgust at the dust that puffed into the air when it came away in her hand. There was a sofa on the other side of the room, but she couldn’t bring herself to sit on it. She didn’t have the energy to pull herself onto it and, besides, it looked even dirtier than the floor, if that were possible. So she sat where she had fallen when he’d pushed her through the doorway, her legs tucked under her, taking up as little space as possible.

  She shivered. The sweat had dried into her running gear, leaving her back and chest disgustingly cold and clammy. God, she must look horrendous, and smell worse. Not that that mattered, of course, but still . . . Leah raked her fingers through her hair, wincing in disgust as she felt the grease that had already built up at the roots. Usually after a run she locked herself into her bathroom for an hour or more, giving herself the works, conditioner on her hair and a hot oil cleanse for her face. Figuring she might as well pamper herself, she had nothing else to do. So this was the longest Leah had gone without a shower in – well, for ever, possibly. She just couldn’t remember ever being this dirty before. Not that it mattered right now, but, you know, it would soon. When she was rescued, there might be TV cameras and shit. People shouting her name, ‘Leah! Leah! Can you tell us how you feel?’ One of those vans with a satellite dish on the top, even. Lost in thought, Leah tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. She’d have to keep her head down, run for the car. With a bit of luck the old dear would remember to bring her a hat along with a change of clothes.

  She had to get out first, though. Leah shivered again and pulled the damp fabric of her running top away from her chest. She might die of cold, if they didn’t come for her soon. That was if nothing worse happened to her in the meantime— No. Leah bit her lip hard. Panicking wasn’t going to help her now. She had to think. Think, Leah, concentrate. Like her teachers used to tell her. Use your brain, young lady. Patronizing old biddies. But this wasn’t maths or German or any of that useless crap. This was important. This time she really did have to focus, no matter how cold and alone and scared she felt. She coughed, and looked around the room again. It was important, she decided, to commit all of its details to memory so she could give the guards a good description of it when she was rescued. When she was rescued. She would be rescued. She had to be.

  Right, so. Where was she? The room looked, she decided, like an old person’s sitting room, very like the house where her stepdad’s mother lived. Leah had only met the old lady once, when Fergal had dragged her there on a duty visit a few weeks before he’d married her mum. His own mother wasn’t well enough to be at the ceremony so he’d insisted they all call out to see her and sit by her chair while he made this lame speech about how they were ‘all family now’. In the end he’d looked as uncomfortable as Leah had been and, after only twenty minutes, had made up some story about having to head for home before the traffic got bad. But Leah had never forgotten the house or its smell: a nauseating mixture of cabbage, small dog and unopened window. This place was the exact same. In fact, if it turned out that someone had, like, actually died in this awful room, she wouldn’t be surprised. The carpet was brown with orange flowers just visible under the dirt and the stained wallpaper had weird little bumps in it under layers of manky blue paint.

  The lack of light didn’t help the atmosphere – there was no way of telling whether it was night or day outside because the room’s windows had been boarded up and she was completely dependent for illumination on a dim light bulb that hung without a shade from the discoloured ceiling. The boards, which had been nailed outside the glass, were also doing a good job of blocking sound from getting in or out. That hadn’t stopped Leah screaming, of course, when the man had first thrown her in and locked the door. But after a while her throat grew sore and she realized she was only upsetting herself, so she’d stopped shouting and settled back on the floor. It would be best, anyway, to save her energy. She’d need it, as soon as she’d worked out what to do.

  It had happened so quickly. Leah had heard people say that before, in films mostly, and she had always thought it sounded completely pathetic. Like, what sort of person just sat there and let bad stuff happen to them? Without at least trying to fight back? When her turn had come that was exactly what she had done.

  She had been so shocked by the attack, and the realization that the old lady was in fact someone far younger, that the door to the van had been shut before she found time even to scream. Then it had pulled away so quickly that she’d had to jam her feet against the side to stop herself falling over, and then simply staying upright and not getting hurt had taken so much effort that she hadn’t had time to come up with a plan. After a short while they’d stopped again and the man, whoever he was, had slid open the door, but she still hadn’t been able to do anything useful. The contrast between the dark interior and the bright day outside had blinded her, and before she could stop him he’d grabbed her arm.

  ‘Give me your phone.’

  She was crying at that stage, but trying to be brave as well so she gave him the first answer she could think of.

  ‘Fuck you. Let me out of here.’

  He was wearing a scarf on the bottom of his face now, but above it, his eyes narrowed.

  ‘I told you to give me your phone!’

  Telling him to fuck off felt so good that she did it again. Then, very slowly, he’d begun to twist her wrist backwards, increasing the pressure inch by inch until she’d thought the bone was going to snap right there in his hand.

  ‘Leave me – aaah!’

  Her words had disappeared in a long wail of agony and all of her anger, all of her determination, faded in that one hot blast of pain.

  ‘Your phone. Now.’

  And the pain was so bad, so white and hot and terrible, that she’d thought she’d do anything to make it stop, so she’d taken her phone out of her pocket with her other hand and given it to him, her breath coming in terrified sobs.

  ‘And the code?’

  Another quick twist of her wrist was all it took to make her give that to him too. God, she was feeble. Then he released her and while she was still sniffling and rubbing her arm he took a photograph, slammed the door and, within moments, they were on the move again. And she had done absolutely nothing to stop him. What a fool she was. Sometimes she wondered if she deserved exactly what she got.

  They must have gone onto a motorway then. Leah had kept that piece of information fixed in her mind. Yeah, it must have been a motorway because they were travelling so fast and they didn’t stop once. That was the sort of information the guards would need when they finally rescued her. And they were on the road for at least an hou
r, or so Leah thought anyway. She didn’t have a watch, didn’t need one – she used her phone to tell the time and for pretty much everything else, really. There were days when she didn’t speak to anyone other than her mum, but she was in contact with people all the time, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook, although she used that less and less now. But she hadn’t been without a phone for years.

  Had anyone missed her yet? she wondered. Apart from her mum, maybe her dad, maybe, a distant third, Fergal. Would anyone else miss her at all?

  When the van stopped for a second time she felt she was finally ready for him. Surely she’d be able to hit him, to escape or, at the very least, to scream. But instead, as soon as the door had slid open, he’d thrown a cloth over her head, a manky old towel or something, then grabbed her arm and tugged her out. And her arm was so sore, and the whole thing was just so terrifying and so completely random and wrong that she wasn’t able to do anything other than focus on her feet and try not to fall over. There was light and she could feel grass under her shoes, but she couldn’t hear anything distinctive, no traffic, no other people or anything like that, and he was dragging her so quickly it was all she could do to keep moving. Then the light changed again and she was inside a house, and then she’d felt a shove in her back and she was in this room, in this awful room, and he’d locked the door behind her and she was alone. Alone, and she had done nothing to help herself. Locked into this boarded-up room with its filthy sofa and dusty carpet and two litres of water and a supermarket sandwich thrown onto the floor.

  Which was good because it meant he wasn’t planning to starve her. And terrifying, because it meant he was going to keep her there for a while.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘You could have punctured a lung!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t, did I?’

  The response came out narkier than he had intended, but the pain in his side was relentless, and Flynn didn’t feel like being nagged, not even by someone he respected as much as Claire Boyle. In fairness to his sergeant, though, she must have understood how he was feeling because she didn’t snap back, just buried her face in her phone, flicking through old texts, while he lowered himself gingerly onto the chair that had been wedged in next to her hospital trolley.

  After waiting to make sure he was settled she looked up at him again.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway? By the look of you, it’s you should lying here, not me.’

  Flynn gave a small shrug, careful to move only his shoulders and keep the rest of himself as still as he could.

  ‘They’re sending me home. There’s nothing more they can do with a cracked rib apparently. Painkillers, home to rest and no mountain-climbing for a few weeks. I’m as well off in my own place anyway. Sure, what would I be doing in here only taking up a bed? And I hate hospitals.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  Boyle flung out a hand and tugged at the thin curtain that was separating her little space from the rest of A and E.

  ‘I feel totally useless, stuck in here. I mean, I wasn’t even injured, not really. But the doctor who checked me over got called away on an emergency and they say I can’t leave until he signs off on me. That was hours ago. I’m going mad, lying here.’

  Flynn began a sigh, then changed his mind rapidly as pain shot though his torso. Instead he exhaled, with a wince. He’d change the subject. That should take his mind off it. ‘So how’s the little one? Did they keep her in?’

  ‘Anna?’

  Boyle’s face relaxed into a smile.

  ‘She’s fine, thank God. They let Matt take her home an hour ago. She was exhausted, but she wasn’t injured. Wet, hungry and upset, but other than that, grand. Tell you what, though. I can’t imagine what she must have been thinking all that time.’

  Flynn looked away as his sergeant’s eyes filled with tears. He shifted awkwardly on the chair, raging that his own phone had run out of juice ages ago and he had no small screen to fiddle with. After a moment, though, he heard a hard cough and deemed it safe to look up again.

  Boyle’s eyes were bright, but mercifully dry.

  ‘So, yeah, thanks for asking. She’s grand. They gave her a full going-over. No harm done. Please God, she’s so young she won’t remember anything either. I just want to get home and— Sir!’

  They both started as the curtain twitched and the tall, broad-shouldered figure of their boss, Superintendent Liam Quigley, edged into the narrow space. The area felt positively claustrophobic now, but not even the pain in his side could stop Flynn leaping to his feet and offering the older man his chair. Claire, meanwhile, pulled herself up straighter on her trolley and arranged the blanket as formally as she could over her knees.

  ‘Sit down, sit down, folks. No need to, er . . .’

  Quigley patted Flynn on the shoulder, waited for him to sit down again, then perched himself gingerly on the side of Boyle’s trolley. It was hard, Flynn mused, to estimate which of them looked the more uncomfortable.

  ‘So.’

  Quigley was almost dislocating his neck trying to look at them both at the same time.

  ‘How are ye both, er, feeling?’

  ‘Grand!’

  ‘Great!’

  They spoke over each other in matching high-pitched, nervous yelps. Exhaustion and nerves must have made Boyle giddy and Flynn could see she was fighting to stifle a giggle as she ducked behind their boss’s back and signalled frantically at him to keep talking. For his part, the pain in his side was keeping any levity well under wraps, and he gave his boss a small smile.

  ‘Grand really, sir, thanks. Broken rib. It’s not that sore now they’ve strapped it up.’

  ‘Right.’

  Quigley frowned.

  ‘Bit foolish of you, wasn’t it Flynn? Going out hunting for Boyle after that business at the off-licence.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  It would be safest, Flynn decided, not to remind Quigley that he had sent him on the hunt for Sergeant Boyle in the first place, and that there hadn’t been any arguing with him about it. Anyway, the doctors reckoned it was impossible to tell if the eejit in the shop had done the real damage to his ribs or if the guy in the surgery corridor had finished off the job when he’d shoved him out of the way. The end result was the same anyway: bloody painful. And attending what felt like a mini case conference in Boyle’s little cubicle wasn’t making his pain any easier to bear. He looked at his sergeant to see if she had recovered her composure – it was about time she did some of the work here.

  As if she’d read his mind, Boyle cleared her throat, and when she spoke, her voice was steady.

  ‘I’m fine, Superintendent, no harm done. Just waiting on the paperwork so I can go home. Sir, do you have any details of how the victim is? This Eileen woman? And how about Dr Gilmore?’

  Quigley’s face brightened. He was happy to chat now the ordeal of having to ask his staff personal questions had ended.

  ‘Dr Gilmore is fine – I’ve just been talking to her. Well, physically anyway. As you know there was only one shot fired, the one that hit Eileen Delaney – that’s her full name, according to Dr Gilmore. She’s known her for years, apparently.’

  ‘And how is she?’

  Again Flynn and Boyle had spoken at the same time.

  Their boss shook his head, and his face clouded. ‘Not well at all. Ah, you know what the medical people are like. Too early to say, basically. You did your best, both of you, all three of you in fact. If you hadn’t acted so promptly she might have died from loss of blood before we ever brought her here. But she’s still very ill. She went straight into surgery when she got here and she hasn’t regained consciousness.’

  Boyle bit her lip.

  ‘And do we – do we know what it was all about, sir? What was going on, I mean. I tried to figure out as much as I could when I was in there, but I can’t say I understood everything.
’

  Their boss frowned.

  ‘There’s more bad news, I’m afraid. It looks like the, ehm, the incident wasn’t confined to the surgery. Dr Gilmore’s teenage daughter, Leah, is missing and we’re pretty sure her disappearance is linked to whatever was going on this afternoon.’

  Boyle nodded slowly.

  ‘Yeah, of course. The girl in the photo.’

  Boyle’s voice betrayed none of the exhaustion she must have been feeling. She was some operator, Flynn thought, marvelling at her ability to sound both detached and completely professional. She had been in the thick of the thing, which must have been incredibly stressful, especially given that her baby was there too. But here she was, acting like she was getting a normal update on a case in the super’s office, rather than sitting in a hospital gown on a trolley with a blanket over her knees. She was a class act, all right. He hoped, though, for her own sake, that she’d be able to let off a bit of steam at home later on.

  Quigley returned the nod.

  ‘That’s right. Miss Delaney had a photo on her phone of the young one, Leah, bound and gagged in the back of what looked like a van and Dr Gilmore says it had been sent from Leah’s own phone. She noticed the number when the woman showed it to her. But I’m afraid we don’t have much more to go on. I interviewed Dr Gilmore myself, just before I came in here, but she’s very upset and she wasn’t able to say much. She’ll have to be spoken to tomorrow after a night’s rest. What we do know . . .’

  He shifted position on the trolley slightly and cracked his knuckles before continuing.

  ‘What we do know is that the girl, Leah, hasn’t been seen since early morning. She lives out in Fernwood with her mother – that’s your doctor, Sergeant Boyle, Heather Gilmore – and her new partner, Fergal Dillon. Husband, actually – they married a couple of years ago, but the doctor still uses her original married name. She says it makes things handier for professional purposes. Anyway, the young one, Leah, is “taking a year out”, according to the doctor. She’s not working or anything at the moment, but she’s in the habit of going jogging at the same time every morning, around ten. The mother leaves for work at half eight and knocks on the door to wake her before she leaves. Leah gets up, eats, goes for her run and gets back half an hour later. She sticks the details up on Facebook afterwards apparently. That’s how the mother knows what she’s been up to. Then she comes home, showers and potters around the house for the rest of the day. “Chilling out”, or whatever it is they call it.’