The hairs on Maggie’s arms were standing on end.
‘You’ve done well. Better than I would have anticipated. I had no idea what the endgame would be, but you surpassed my expectations. And now you’re one of us, aren’t you.’
‘What do you mean?’ she whispered, dreading his answer but knowing what it would be.
The almost jokey tone had left his voice. Now it had a hard edge.
‘You’re a killer, Maggie. You voluntarily took another life. In cold blood, unless I’m much mistaken. The question is, did you enjoy it? Have you developed a taste for it?’
He let the silence hang, and Maggie felt her body begin to shake, the tremors making it difficult to hold the phone to her ear.
‘The choice is yours now, Maggie. Remember the words of the poem:
“I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.”’
Without another word, he hung up.
Maggie stared sightlessly at the mirror on the wall facing her. She couldn’t focus on her face, and wondered if she ever would again. Would she recognise the person looking back at her. She was a killer, and he knew.
Still shaking she pulled her laptop across from the far side of the kitchen table and typed Frank’s final words into the search engine. A poem came up on the screen, and the first lines took her back to a day just over a week ago. It felt like years.
“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole…”
She remembered Frank reciting those lines to her on the night it all began. Was he trying to tell her something even then?
She glanced at the name of the poet. William Ernest Henley.
William. But William was a common name. It didn’t have to have anything to do with Duncan’s online friend.
Then she saw the title of the poem and she no longer had any doubt.
One word, a word that had haunted her for days, a word she had looked up to find its meaning: unconquered, invincible. A word that she knew represented the man who had manipulated them all, the puppeteer.
The poem was called Invictus.
The Sixth Window
Rachel Abbott
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Prologue
It had been a night like so many others over the past few weeks, and as the woman looked down on the narrow street below her second-floor window, still dark at this pre-dawn hour, she finally admitted that she couldn’t take any more.
She raised her eyes to seek out the stars in the gaps between the buildings, but the sky was never completely black in central Manchester, the heavens polluted with endless street lights and overly bright shop windows. The incessant rumble of traffic created nothing more than background music that she had long ago learned to filter out, but sleep had eluded her once again because she never knew when the cries of the dead would pierce the silence and shatter any semblance of calm.
As the first resident in the north wing of this newly converted building, she had relished the isolation and was almost resentful of people gradually moving into the other apartments in her wing, while the south wing remained practically empty. Perhaps she should have made more effort to befriend her neighbours, to ask if they too heard the voices. But they wouldn’t understand, she was sure of that. They probably didn’t know or even care about the history of this building, a history that had fascinated and horrified her in equal measure.
She grasped the black tourmaline pendant where it hung against the skin of her chest, willing it to protect her from whatever was happening in this room. She felt the spirits around her – the spirits of children who had lived and died here. The building had been leased in the nineteenth century to accommodate the overflow from the huge New Bridge Street workhouse, and now those poor lost souls circled her, trying to tell her something, she was sure.
She had an affinity with the dead. It was something she had always known, but nobody believed her. This time, though, she knew these children wanted something from her and she was unable to help them.
At first she had heard laughter – the faintest echo of the happy sound reverberating around her sitting room. She hadn’t minded that. It had made her smile. But days later it had turned to crying – heart-wrenching sobs that made her want to reach out and touch the poor dead child. And it wasn’t just one voice she heard. Over the weeks she had sensed different cries, always starting with joy but ending with tears.
Only the long hours between nightfall and dawn were strangely silent, the spirits resting perhaps. During that time the woman prowled the apartment, unable to soothe the souls trapped within these walls.
She fingered the tourmaline again, and reached down to rub the smooth blue angelite crystal resting in a bowl on the table, a stone she had selected from her treasured gems to help her communicate with angels. But it wasn’t working, and the effort of trying to make contact, to free the spirits of these children from captivity, was draining her of energy.
It was time to leave them to their sadness.
*
Fifteen miles to the north of Manchester, Bernie Gray turned up the collar of his bright green hi-vis jacket against the thin drizzle that had plagued them for the last two days. He didn’t mind the rain and barely noticed it. He had other things on his mind.
He gave the dog lead in his left hand a gentle tug. Their new puppy, bought for his daughter two weeks earlier as a much-wanted Christmas present, was slightly more reluctant to go for a walk than she had been. Two minutes ago Zena had been prancing around in excitement, weaving between his legs. But that was in the warmth of the kitchen. She obviously had different thoughts now she was outs
ide.
Bernie had been on dog-walking duty each morning since Zena had arrived on Christmas Eve, and although it was not yet 6am, he felt the exercise was doing him good, even though for now it was just a short loop until the puppy’s little legs grew stronger. Most mornings Bernie saw it as an opportunity to prepare himself for the day ahead. It also gave him time to focus on the persistent worry that hardly let go of him for a second.
This morning, though, he was thinking about the conversation he had had with his daughter, Scarlett. Not really a conversation. It was more of an accusation, and he needed to find a way to fix it.
‘Come on, Zena,’ he said softly as he coaxed the little chocolate Labrador along their usual route – following the road, down the path behind the church, out into the lane beyond, then back towards home. The circuit took no more than fifteen minutes and he never met anyone when he was out – the early hour and the chilly, damp mornings saw to that.
He turned left onto the path and looked up at the church tower, standing starkly against the dark blue of a sky that wasn’t going to lighten any time soon. He looked down at his feet, trying to avoid the worst of the puddles, which Zena, now accustomed to the cold, happily trotted through, her brand-new collar with its blue LEDs reflecting off the black water.
He was going to have to decide what to tell Scarlett – how to answer her questions. Not with the whole truth, obviously. But he was sure he could think of an explanation that she might accept, some watered-down version of the truth that a thirteen-year-old might understand. When he had seen her face that morning and heard the disgust in her voice, his guts had knotted. He couldn’t lose Scarlett. He knew he was out of options. He had to put this right and accept the consequences.
Bernie turned onto the narrow lane that ran back towards home. The drystone walls on either side of the single track created a wind tunnel, and he bent forward slightly to keep the worst of the drizzle off his face. He looked down at Zena, and smiled at the sight of her. With her wet fur she looked like a drowned rat. As he watched, she lifted her head and her ears went up. Zena stopped.
‘Come on, Zena,’ Bernie said, raising his voice slightly against the wind. ‘Get a move on.’
What had she heard? Her head was cocked slightly to one side, but it wasn’t until a pale glow relieved the darkness surrounding him that he realised there was a car on the lane ahead, approaching slowly, its dimmed headlamps creating gleaming pools of warm yellow light on the lane.
Bernie lifted his head and held his hand out, asking the driver to stop. There was no grass verge to move to so the car could pass, no farm gate to slip through.
The car drew to a halt about ten metres ahead. Bernie nodded his thanks, hoping the driver could see the small amount of his face that was peering out from beneath the hood of his green jacket. He picked Zena up so they could squeeze through the narrow gap between the car and the wall.
As he grasped her wriggling body he heard a sound he wasn’t expecting. The driver was revving his engine, probably indicating that Bernie should hurry up. Holding Zena close to his chest, he started to move towards the car – but not as quickly as the car moved towards him, its headlamps now on full beam, blinding him.
There was nowhere to go.
Bernie’s last thought before the car hit him and Zena was that now he would never get the chance to put things right with his daughter.
1
Eighteen Months Later
The sound of a door closing upstairs should have given Natalie Gray sufficient warning that she wasn’t going to be alone for much longer, but her eyes were locked on to the computer screen and her heart was pounding.
‘Oh God,’ she whispered as she stared at the images in front of her. ‘Please tell me this is work-related.’
Her words were barely audible, but finally Ed’s cheerful whistling penetrated her consciousness as it grew ever closer and she quickly and silently closed the lid of his laptop and hurried across to the kettle, snatching it off its base and thrusting it under the cold tap, as if she had been standing by the sink all the time.
She shouldn’t have been looking at Ed’s computer, but she had wanted to check the weather for the day. She had gone to his browser history to see if the forecast site was there, and it probably was. But she hadn’t made it that far.
‘Do you want a cup of tea, Ed?’ she asked. Trying for bright and cheerful, her voice sounded brittle to her own ears, but she needed to think about what she had seen before she made any rash judgements. Their relationship was so new, and any accusation right now could fracture it into a million shattered pieces.
‘That would be lovely. Yes please, darling.’
As she composed her face and turned towards Ed she was surprised to see him in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. He was a big man with a broad, muscular frame, and he carried all his clothes well – from today’s attire to his formal police uniform.
‘I thought you were on duty this morning,’ she said, pulling a mug from the rack and adding a teabag, trying desperately to be her normal chatty self. Usually she loved working in this kitchen with its shiny white units and black granite worktop, but right now she would have given anything to be miles away.
‘I should have been, but I told one of the lads I’d do his nights this week. His wife’s just had their third, and he’s volunteered for the midnight feed to give her a bit of sleep. You don’t mind, do you, Nat?’ He gave her a worried glance. ‘I know it means you’ll be on your own at night, but I couldn’t refuse him.’
Natalie gave him a smile and hoped it didn’t look as shaky as she felt. A small voice in her head told her she was being stupid, overreacting. There was bound to be an explanation.
‘I don’t mind at all, but you’ll have Scarlett under your feet during the day. If she’s got friends round or she’s playing her music too loud when you’re trying to sleep, feel free to ask her to keep it down. It’s your house, and she needs to respect that.’
‘No, it’s our house. I love having Scarlett here, and her friends are always welcome. I love having you both here.’
Ed moved around the kitchen island. ‘Come here, Nat.’ He smiled and pulled her gently towards him.
She put her arms around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. Ed’s hugs had seen her through the darkest times, and his broad shoulders had been cried on more often than she could count. There was something about being held in these strong arms that had always made her feel she had reached a place of safety. But not today.
It was eighteen months now since Natalie’s husband Bernie had died when a stolen car of joyriders had ploughed into him and their beautiful chocolate-brown Labrador puppy, killing them both. During months of crippling grief for the man she had been in love with since she was seventeen, Ed had been her saviour in so many ways. He had been hurting almost as much as she had, because Bernie and Ed – different as they were – had been best friends since they were five years old.
She would never forget the dreadful moment when Megan, Bernie’s friend and colleague, had arrived to give her the shocking news. Biting her cheek to prevent her emotion from showing and quieter than Natalie had ever known her, Megan had moved discreetly around the house, answering the phone, calling friends and family to save Natalie that painful process.
From the start, though, Natalie had felt that nobody could comfort her the way Ed could. He had rushed to be with her as soon as he heard, and since then had been there for her every step of the way. But right now, with his arms holding her close, she could feel her body stiffen with tension as alarm bells rang at the back of her mind. What she had seen on Ed’s laptop had left her questioning everything she knew about him.
Why had he never married? His slightly olive skin and high cheekbones gave him an exotic look, and he was a kind and thoughtful man. He would have been a catch for anyone, so why had every relationship he’d ever had ended within weeks, or at best months?
Putting her hands on Ed’s hips, she pushed him gen
tly away.
‘Is there something the matter, Nat?’ he asked, bending slightly so that his eyes looked into hers. At five feet ten inches herself, he didn’t have to bend too far, but Natalie couldn’t meet his probing gaze, and she turned her back on him to reach for a tea towel to wipe her already dry hands.
‘No, it’s nothing. Just thinking about work.’
‘Okay. Well I’ll pop upstairs and have a word with Scarlett, see if there’s anything she’d like to do today. I thought I might treat her to lunch, or maybe there’s something she’d like to see at the pictures if she’s not planning to meet up with her friends. We could make a day of it. I’ll be back for my cup of tea in a minute.’
Ed walked towards the door, and Natalie felt a rising tide of panic.
‘Wait!’
Ed turned, a puzzled expression on his face. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. I just remembered that I said Scarlett could come with me today. A bit of work experience, you know. Look, can you get the eggs on and I’ll go and wake her up? Thanks, love.’
Natalie pushed past Ed and scurried towards the stairs. She couldn’t look at him. He would be wondering what on earth was the matter, and the truth was she wasn’t sure she knew.
*
As she ran up the stairs, Natalie could feel her heart thudding.
‘Calm down,’ she whispered under her breath. She didn’t want Scarlett to see her like this. She would know something was wrong.
She reached the wide landing and turned left towards her daughter’s room. Ed’s house was so much bigger and more solid-feeling than their modern semi, and she had been glad to move here. Since Bernie died, their house had felt cold and empty, and night after night, unable to sleep and missing the warmth of her husband’s body next to hers in their bed, she had paced the floor until the early hours, wondering what the future would hold for herself and her daughter. She worried that she wouldn’t be enough for Scarlett on her own. How could she hope to provide the same amount of love as two parents?
She stopped and rested a hand on a chest of drawers, taking a deep breath to steady herself. Had it all been a huge mistake? Should they have stayed in their own house?
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