Maybe. A big maybe.
But it’s something. Even if all she does is rule it out, it’s a contribution.
She looks at the clock again. Still too early to go knocking on someone’s door, especially on a mere hunch.
She decides to leave it a little bit longer.
It probably won’t make any difference.
74
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.
She has no answers. She doesn’t know what to believe, whom to trust.
What she doesn’t believe is that Malcolm is giving Mr Cody a nice new home in the garage. She thinks he plans to kill him.
She doesn’t know how she feels about that.
If she could be certain that Mr Cody came here to hurt her and Poppy and Ellie, then Malcolm should do what he needs to do.
But if Mr Cody came here to rescue them, then that’s different.
Or is it? Because what can she do about it anyway? Mr Cody has already said that nobody else is coming for him, so how can his death be prevented? She can’t be expected to stop a big, powerful man like Malcolm. He would kill Mr Cody and then he would kill her too. Even if she were willing to take the risk of setting Mr Cody free, she has no way of removing those cable ties.
He said he’s a policeman. But he doesn’t look like one. He seems too young, and he doesn’t dress like one either. He didn’t act like a policeman when he came here, sneaking into their bedroom like that.
So is it all lies? Is he just trying to save himself?
But he was nice to me, she thinks. He tried to save me in the darts game. He didn’t even ask me to help him when I came to see him last night.
And he cried.
She hasn’t seen a man cry before. Not even her father. It was one of the saddest things she has ever seen.
Best not to get too emotional about this. Whatever she would prefer to happen, Mr Cody is going to die, and that’s that. No use crying over spilt milk. Or spilt blood, for that matter. Forget about him.
Except that she doesn’t think she can forget. Doesn’t think she will ever forget Mr Cody.
*
Hard to believe, but this is it. This is the end of his short, tumultuous life.
He finds himself filling his final moments with goodbyes. To Devon, to Webley, to his family, his colleagues; to all the people he has known and loved; to the three girls in this room. He also apologises to the girls. He regrets not doing more for them. His only hope is that someone else will rectify that one day.
And when he’s done, he wishes to be kept waiting no longer. He wants no time for fear to creep up on him, for self-pity to start gnawing at him.
Bring it on, Malcolm, he thinks.
And Malcolm responds.
He draws the curtain back with a wide, almost ceremonial sweep. In his free hand he carries a full hypodermic and a pair of scissors – larger and stronger this time, to cut through the cable ties. He brings no cotton wool or duct tape – he has no further need for them.
He looks over his shoulder at the children huddled together on the bed.
‘I’m just going to give him something to make him sleep now,’ he tells them. ‘So he won’t struggle when I move him.’
Cody knows differently. He knows that the contents of the syringe are likely to be much more potent this time. Lethal, in fact. He won’t wake from this particular sleep. He will die, here in this chair, and the girls will be none the wiser.
Malcolm approaches. He puts the scissors down on the shelf. Pushes Cody’s sleeve further up his arm.
Malcolm utters no last words. He simply wants to get on with the job.
He raises the syringe, looks carefully at its deadly contents.
And then he touches the tip of the needle to Cody’s flesh, and Cody holds his breath in preparation for nothingness.
75
Damn!
Of all possible times, why does it have to be now?
Malcolm freezes. Starts to count. If he gets to ten, he’ll assume they’ve gone away.
But no. There it is again. A more insistent ringing at the door this time, followed by a rap of the knocker.
It will have to be answered. It will have to be dealt with. Only, he can’t trust Harriet to handle it. Not the way she’s been acting lately.
He looks Cody in the eye. ‘Back in a minute,’ he promises.
He lays the hypodermic down on the shelf, next to the scissors.
And then he leaves the room, locking the door behind him.
*
Daisy gets off the bed.
‘Daisy,’ says Poppy. ‘What are you doing? You mustn’t.’
Daisy ignores her. She moves steadily across to Cody.
‘Daisy! No! You’ll get into trouble.’
She stands inches away from Cody. She stares him in the eye. He stares back.
And now she’s the one who starts crying.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what’s right.’
Cody shifts his gaze. She follows it, sees that it alights on the syringe. Then he turns his eyes on his exposed arm.
‘No,’ she says. ‘You don’t mean it. You want that to happen?’
He breathes out heavily through flared nostrils. Turns his head towards the shelf again. Nods. Says something.
She looks once more.
Scissors.
He wants me to use the scissors. And now he’s looking at his arm. The ties around his arm.
She takes a step back.
‘I can’t. I’m so sorry. I can’t. Malcolm will kill me. He’ll kill us all.’
Cody stares at her. And then he nods, closes his eyes, and bows his head.
*
Malcolm recognises her as soon as he opens the door.
It’s the woman detective. The one who came here with Cody.
He feels his heart hammering in his chest. Is she alone? Are they about to raid the place?
‘Hello,’ she says, showing her ID. ‘Detective Constable Webley. I don’t know if you remember me, but I was here the other day, with DS Cody?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ he says. ‘Something about vans.’
‘That’s right. Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be alarmed about, but I just want to ask whether my colleague has been back to see you since then?’
Malcolm forces out a laugh. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just ask him?’
Webley smiles. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The problem is, we’re not quite sure where he’s got to.’
‘What, you mean he’s disappeared?’
‘Er, yes. It’s looking that way.’
‘A copper has disappeared?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, now I’ve heard it all. And you think he might have come here? Why on earth would he do that?’
‘We’re just trying to work through all the possibilities at the moment. I thought that DS Cody might have accidentally left his warrant card when we were last here. Bit like this one?’ She points to her own ID.
Malcolm shakes his head.
‘You haven’t seen it, then?’
‘No. I’d have phoned you if I’d found something like that.’
‘And DS Cody didn’t call round asking the same question?’
‘No. Sorry.’
He sees her shoulders slump, and he almost smiles.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Thanks anyway.’
And then she walks away, and Malcolm closes the door, and he lets that smile find its way out.
Stupid coppers.
He heads back upstairs. Unbolts the door. Enters the bedroom.
The girls are still on the bed, still uncertain. Daisy in particular looks terrified.
Cody is still in his chair, still bound and gagged. The scissors and hypodermic are where Malcolm left them.
All is well.
He moves across the room to stand in front of Cody, then he bends at the waist.
‘Thought you should know,’ he says. ‘That was your woman friend
. Webley. She’s gone now. She won’t be back.’
He watches Cody’s eyes for a reaction. Some sadistic streak within him wants to see the pain of abandonment there.
But he doesn’t find it.
Something is wrong here. Very wrong.
And then he sees that the cable ties around Cody’s wrists are much looser than they should be.
They have been cut through.
76
He knows, Cody realises. Malcolm knows.
He seizes his opportunity, because it’s the only one he’ll have.
It’s not like in the movies. In a film, he would demonstrate the power of good over evil by finding a sudden enthusiasm to win, and then boxing the bad guy to the ground with his superior fighting skills. Every strike would be a resounding cymbal-crash in the name of right versus wrong.
This isn’t like that.
In this version, Cody’s arms and legs are weak and ineffective after several days of inactivity. What is supposed to be a spring into action turns into more of a flop forward, and the intended rapid-fire battery of blows becomes a sequence of pathetic slaps that are easily batted away.
It becomes messy then. The two men grapple with each other, scrabbling for an advantage as they whirl around the room, bouncing off walls and knocking furniture over. The television topples and smashes. Books and toys tumble to the floor around them.
Cody feels Malcolm’s power. Realises he could lose this.
It’s driven home to him when Malcolm finds an opening, hammering Cody with a roundhouse punch that splits his cheek and sends him reeling backwards.
Cody hits a wall, and then Malcolm is on him again, and he tries to retaliate with a blow of his own, tries to do something, anything, to stop this bulldozer of a man. But his arm is slapped away and Malcolm lands another punch, this time into his empty gut. It is so powerful it seems to drive through his abdomen and connect with his spine, and Cody collapses to his knees and tries to find oxygen even though his mouth is still taped, tries to find energy and willpower and luck and anything else that will help him survive this onslaught.
But Malcolm isn’t done. Malcolm has already decided Cody will die, and die he will, by injection or by being physically torn apart – it’s all the same to him.
And then he is standing over Cody. Applying a headlock. Crushing his windpipe and twisting his head until it feels as though his neck will snap like a twig.
And what Cody focuses on now is the girls’ screaming. Because he knows he has failed them. Worse, he has endangered them. Malcolm will finish him off, and then he will turn on his own brood. That is the kind of animal he is.
And then the screaming begins to fade, and the dark mist rolls in.
*
‘Stop! Stop it!’
Daisy’s yells go unheard. Alongside her, Poppy is also screaming, but to no avail.
She watches Malcolm pummelling Mr Cody. He’s going to kill him, she thinks. And then he’s going to kill us. And it’s all my fault. I’m the one to blame. I shouldn’t have interfered. I should have stayed out of it.
She glances at the other girls. They are scared out of their wits. Even the usually impassive Ellie looks terrified.
They don’t deserve to die, she thinks. Please, God, let him punish me, but not the others. They did nothing wrong. It was me, only me!
And then Malcolm is squeezing Mr Cody’s neck, just as he did with Poppy that time. She managed to stop him back then, managed to make him listen to reason. But that won’t work now. He won’t listen to her ever again.
And suddenly she is moving.
She hears Poppy shouting at her, but she doesn’t stop. She has to do something.
She grabs the scissors. Opens them up. Launches herself at Malcolm’s back.
The blade sinks in deep. Malcolm howls and releases Cody, who collapses to the floor like a bag of bones.
Malcolm reaches behind him, first around his waist and then over his shoulder, but he can’t quite reach the scissors embedded between his shoulder blades.
He turns, his face a spittle-covered mask of fury and hatred, his eyes burning with a passion for death and destruction. He lumbers towards her. She runs, heads for the door, yanks it open.
And on the other side she sees Harriet, brandishing a rolling pin and screaming at her like a banshee.
Daisy dives back into the room, but the change of tack has cost her. Malcolm grabs hold of her long hair with one hand, and slams the door closed with the other. He pulls hard, spinning Daisy and slamming her into the wall. He takes hold of her dress below the neck, bunches it in his hand, begins to slide her up the wall until her feet are inches above the ground. He brings back his other hand and forms the biggest fist Daisy has ever seen – a sledgehammer of a fist that will smash her skull and spread her brains across the wall.
Daisy closes her eyes and waits for the inevitable.
Which doesn’t come.
She opens her eyes again. Sees that Malcolm’s face has taken on a curiously puzzled look.
He lowers her almost tenderly. Then he turns around and looks down.
Daisy stares past him, sees what he sees.
The tiny, pale, waif-like figure of Ellie.
Malcolm takes a step towards her, but Ellie stands her ground. He takes another step.
Daisy cannot believe what she is seeing. Cannot understand it either.
But then her eyes shift again to Malcolm. The scissors are still buried between his shoulders, but further down, protruding from the back of his leg, is the hypodermic syringe.
And it’s empty.
Ellie has injected the whole contents of the syringe into Malcolm’s bloodstream.
One more step from Malcolm, and then his knees buckle. His kneecaps slam into the carpet. He reaches a hand out towards Ellie, who stares dispassionately back at him. He remains in that kneeling position for a full five seconds, and then he tips forward, his nose making a cracking sound as his face connects with the floor only millimetres from Ellie’s feet.
77
Cody drags himself to his feet. The scene around him is like a battlefield – the dead, the wounded and the lost strewn among the rubble.
He grasps the tape covering his face. Rips it away from his mouth, leaving it still hanging from one cheek. He breathes again, he coughs, he splutters.
The girls stare at him, waiting for his guidance. The king is dead; long live the king.
‘Wait here, girls.’
He heads for the door, but before he can reach it, it is flung open and Harriet rushes in – too terrified to enter earlier, but now wielding her rolling pin and emitting a cry shrill enough to shatter glass.
Cody grabs her arm, wrests the weapon from her grasp, then pushes her up against the wall.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he tells her. Then, as an afterthought, he pulls the duct tape from his cheek and plasters it across Harriet’s mouth.
She sees then. Sees her husband lying prostrate on the floor, the scissors and the hypodermic firmly stuck in him as though he has been turned into one of his own dartboards. Harriet loses what little fight she had in her, and she slumps and sobs in Cody’s grasp.
‘Go,’ he tells the girls. ‘Knock on the neighbours’ doors. Get them to call the police. Tell them a police officer needs urgent help. Go!’
*
It’s hard enough for Daisy to leave the bedroom. She has never done this before. Never stepped beyond this threshold. Poppy has to grab her hand and lead the way.
They head downstairs. It seems so strange to Daisy that she has lived in this house for three whole years and never seen the landing, the stairs, the hallway, the pictures on the walls, the carpets.
And then they’re at the front door. The way out of this prison.
‘Come on!’ Poppy cries. ‘We need to get help.’
Daisy finds herself rooted to the spot. She cannot move.
‘For God’s sake,’ says Poppy. She opens the door herself, goes running outside, hand in han
d with Ellie.
Daisy lets them go. She knows they won’t travel far. They’ll try next door, and if that’s empty, each one after that until they find someone.
Daisy has other things on her mind.
She stands in the doorway, on the line between here and there, between incarceration and freedom, between the small and the large.
And just look at how big that world is! It’s enormous. It’s gigantic. It’s heaven.
She sees real grass, flowing like waves. She sees the spiky skeletal fingers of trees, denuded of their leaves. She sees sculpted shrubbery, in a thousand shades of green. Beyond a line of perfectly geometric hedge she can see parked cars and streetlamps and a road and litter. In a window across the street sits a grey cat, staring curiously back at this stranger in its territory. How she longs to stroke a cat or a dog.
And, above it all, the sky. The colour of pewter now, but still making her blink to stare at it. And look! An aeroplane! Showing her just how limitless her boundaries are now.
All this movement. All this life.
She takes a deep breath. Steps forward.
A breeze flicks at her hair, rustles her dress and caresses her cheek and legs. And it makes her want to laugh and cry at the same time.
She is free, and the world is welcoming her back.
78
This makes it all worthwhile, thinks Oxo. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s magical.
The best he can usually hope for is that a perpetrator is brought to justice. The murderer of a loved one is found and arrested. It can bring a little relief, a little closure, but it can never bring back the dead. It can never mend broken hearts.
But this – this is almost a resurrection. It has to be the best news ever.
And he gets to deliver it.
He rings the doorbell. Maria Devlin answers. She wears the expression of someone who has come to expect at best promise but no substance from these updates. A possible lead, a shiny new nugget of information, but not her child standing on her doorstep. That would be too much to hope for.
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