“Getting my life back on track?” said Kate.
“My mistake. Sorry.”
“Dad. I’ve been sober for ten years. I have a respectable career. No debts. But I always have to be sorry, don’t I? I will never be forgiven . . . I just have to grovel and apologize until the end of time. And that monster Peter Conway, who has committed untold horrors, gets to dictate the terms of this meeting with Jake. Why are you all kowtowing to him? Talk about male fucking privilege!”
Kate could feel herself starting to lose it. She wanted to throw her computer through the window onto the beach below. She loved Jake, but why did he want to see Peter Conway during the precious time they had together during school half term? She’d spent years trying to make up for being a bad mother when he was tiny, and yet Peter Conway, who had done nothing but cause misery and hurt, was being treated to a visit.
“Mum! You don’t need to be sorry, Mum. Never,” said Jake, leaning closer to the camera. Kate felt herself begin to cry. She wiped away a tear. “You are my mum and I love you. And I know you love me. I know Peter will never be a real father to me.”
Kate sat down.
“I just miss you, Jake. I have all this guilt that I wasn’t there for you. I was apart from you so much, and now you’re about to be an adult, and you’ll go off and have your own life . . . Which you should, but I feel like I never got the chance to be your mother.”
There was an awkward silence. They weren’t the most demonstrative family at the best of times.
“Mum. I just have to meet him and talk to him,” said Jake, almost pleading. “For years, I’ve heard how people talk about him and whisper behind my back that my dad is this serial killer . . . They’ve turned him into this legendary bad guy, this celebrity. I’ve got to go through life with that on my shoulders. I don’t want to be afraid of him. If I can just talk to him, and make him real. He’s just a person.”
There was a long silence. Kate still hated the idea of Jake visiting Peter, but she was impressed by what he’d said. Her bottom lip started to tremble.
“Oh, Catherine,” said Glenda. “We all love you. Just know that.”
“I have to get a tissue,” said Kate, feeling the tears and snot on her face. She hurried and grabbed a wad of kitchen towel, blew her nose, and tried to gather herself back together. She took some deep breaths and heard Jake and her parents talking on the computer.
“Okay. I’m back,” she said, sitting down again. “So. What’s your plan to see Peter?”
An awkward glance passed between Jake, Glenda, and Michael.
“Mum, I’d like to come over to yours tomorrow, and then the visit with Peter is booked for Monday. It’s at Great Barwell Hospital, of course.”
“Why are you coming all the way over here when you’ll just have to drive back again?” asked Kate.
There was another awkward pause.
“Peter Conway has only agreed to see me, Mum, if you come too.”
41
The man got in the lift. It was an old service lift, gray and functional. It was operated by a key, which he pushed into a keyhole on the left-hand wall of the lift and turned to the right. The doors closed, shutting out the light, and the lift started its rumbling descent.
The night vision goggles he wore were small and compact, and he slipped them down over his eyes. They activated with a mechanical whir, and he saw the inside of the lift in black and white with a green hue.
Opening the small revolver in his hand, he checked the bullets nestling in the chamber. He spun it around and clicked it back into place. Six shots. He had to use them wisely, and it was easy to panic if they got out of hand. You had to be calm.
He had kept her for a week, and he’d had fun with her, lots of fun, but she was getting weak. He’d kept a couple for longer, and they’d gone completely crazy, harming themselves. One girl had died suddenly, robbing him of any kind of climax. Another girl had gone on dirty protest. Which had disgusted him. It was better that he chose their demise when they were still sane enough to be scared.
His favorite part was at the beginning, when he just watched them, following them in the dark, drinking in their fear. He liked to leave obstacles for them to trip over. He loved their anger at falling, their loss of control. The moment when they started to fall apart mentally but they still had hope. He liked to slap, poke, and prod them in the dark, disorientate them.
He’d abducted a few guys in the past, but they weren’t as much fun. They fought back more readily. He’d used a knife for the guys; cutting the tendons in their knees wasn’t fatal, but it kept them from moving around too much.
As far as sex was concerned, he preferred it with the girls, but the boys were equally thrilling to violate.
He chose to use a small handgun to end them. A shotgun tore through flesh and caused so much damage. He’d shot one of the boys in the head, but they made such a terrible mess, brains.
The lift moved slowly down the two stories to the basement dungeon. Technically, it was only one level down, but it was two stories deep, buried under layers of soil and completely soundproof from the outside world. Despite the depth, he’d put a tape recorder up on the main level to test the sound the first time he’d fired a gun in the basement. The noise had been deafening, and it bounced around the confined space, but the tape recorder had registered nothing more than a faint crack up top, and he was sure this didn’t carry outside the building. It was so well insulated.
The lift came to a juddering stop. He turned the key back to the first position, and the doors opened.
He wasn’t prepared to see her standing outside the lift doors, bathed in the green glow picked up by the night vision goggles. In the green-tinged sepia she now looked thin and weak. Her cheeks were hollow, and her long hair was greasy.
“There you are . . . ,” she said, looking right at him. He faltered for a moment, flipping up the night vision goggles, momentarily making himself as blind as she was. Was there some light escaping out from somewhere; did she see him? The goggles made an electronic whizzing sound when he flipped them up. It was pitch black.
“I can see you with my ears,” she growled. In the darkness he heard her give a yell. He flipped the night vision goggles back down, but she was coming at him with something in her hand. She ran into him, knocking the gun from his hand, and he felt something slice through the flesh on his shoulder.
The gun skittered across the floor, away from the lift. They crashed into the lift together and slid down onto the floor. She stabbed at him, screaming, slicing through his shirt; he felt something sharp slice perilously close to his right nipple.
How the fuck did she do that? he thought. She struck him again in the side of the head.
He yelled, and she caught him again in the ribs before he managed to kick out at her, landing a blow to her belly. The night vision goggles had been knocked to the side of his head, and he adjusted them. He kicked her again, and she rolled outside the lift, groaning.
Panicking, he inserted the key in the lift and turned it to the right. He watched her as the lift doors closed. When it rumbled to life and started back up to the top floor, he leaned against the wall. He was shaking and out of breath. Jesus. He checked himself over. His shirt was slashed at the shoulder and twice on his chest, and he was bleeding. How could this have happened? She was half-starved.
He could feel himself crying, which only angered him more. He started to breathe normally again only when he reached the top floor and the doors opened.
He stepped out into the dim light and sat down on the floor, clutching at his wounds. His shoulder would probably need stitches. How the hell was he going to explain that one away?
“Fuck!” he yelled.
Then he realized.
No, no, no. NO!
The gun. He’d dropped the gun.
42
Magdalena felt the gun all over, rolling it between her hands. It was real. She’d never held a gun before, and this gun had a solid heft. It wasn’t
plastic. She’d heard something skitter to the floor when she ran at him, and she’d imagined a knife. It chilled her to think he’d come down with a gun.
Did he come down here with the safety on or off?
The police at home carried guns, but she’d never even seen an officer pull out his gun. What a sheltered life she’d lived, she thought; well, until now.
Magdalena ran her fingers over the side of the gun, and she found what she thought was the safety catch and clicked it.
She held the gun up and away from herself, and she put a small amount of pressure on the trigger. It didn’t move, and she felt resistance like it was locked in place.
He came down here with the safety off; he was going to shoot me.
She rolled that over in her mind. Why was she shocked? He’d raped her, twice that she knew of, and he had been down here, watching her in the dark. A few times when he’d come close, she’d heard him inhaling her.
She shuddered. He was done with her, and he was going to kill her. Would he have done it quickly? She doubted it, and it depended on how many bullets he’d loaded into the gun.
It took a few tries, but she got the chamber open. Keeping the gun tipped forward, she felt around inside. There were six bullets slotted inside the circular chamber.
Her mind was turning fast. He would come back, and he would try to get the gun or kill her before she could use the gun on him. It was driving her insane that she couldn’t see anything.
A few months back she’d been to watch a play at the university about life in the trenches during World War I. The actors had used a real gun, with blanks, but when it was fired, it had been so loud, and the flash of the gunfire in the dark theatre had made the audience yell out in fright.
If she fired the gun down here in the dark, there could be a flash of light, which would show her surroundings.
Shit, now that’s an idea, she thought. Was it enough time to see her surroundings, in the blink of a gunshot? I have six bullets. It felt so awesome to have some power, after endless hours and days in the dark feeling powerless. She almost didn’t want to give up those six bullets. She couldn’t see them, but in her mind they were silver. Six silver bullets. Six silver chances to protect herself.
The walls were made of plaster, and the lift door at the end of the corridor was made of heavy steel. Her best option was to fire the gun down the corridor to the left into the plaster wall; the bullet wouldn’t bounce back at her off the plaster.
With a shaking hand, she lifted the gun, aiming to the left. She slipped off the safety, opened her eyes wide, and pulled the trigger.
BANG.
It was terrifyingly loud, and the kickback was powerful, but she made herself keep her eyes open. In that split-second bright flash, she saw the hallway, lit up. She’d been in the dark for so long that the image was temporarily burned onto her retinas. She kept blinking her eyes, trying to catch as much information as possible before it faded. It was an empty corridor. The door of the small toilet was on the right side, and it was painted a horrible pea-green color. The wall to the right was splattered with what looked like a large bloodstain. Oh God. She shuddered to think that she’d felt so much of that wall with her fingers and put her ear to it. There had been other victims, who had died down here.
There wasn’t time to be scared. She’d seen something else in that split-second flash, in the ceiling above the lift doors. There was a hatch in the ceiling above the lift.
She had five bullets. Magdalena pivoted on the spot, and she fired a bullet against the back wall of the room with the bed and sink.
BANG.
In the flash of the charge, she saw the outline of the room, and she felt repulsed. The tiles were pale and grimy with blood spatter, and the mattress was stained with huge spots of blood, blooming out in a tie-dye pattern. The room, in her mind, had been white. She’d also seen the bed, in her mind, as being clean. Did this mean she was an optimist? She’d always thought of herself as a pessimist, a glass-half-empty girl. Perhaps being trapped in a dungeon by a crazed rapist helped you to see everything else in a positive light, she thought, darkly.
There was no hatch in the ceiling or hidden door.
She coughed as she breathed in the dust from the exploded tiles. She put the safety back on the gun, tucked it into the waistband of her jeans, and felt her way back down the corridor toward the lift doors.
He would come back; she didn’t know how soon, but he would realize she had the gun. She hoped she’d cut him badly enough for him to need stitches. It could buy her time.
She found the lift at the end of the corridor, and put her arms up. They didn’t reach the ceiling, and from the gun flash she’d seen that the ceiling in the corridor was quite high.
How was she going to reach the hatch?
43
He froze when he heard the loud crack of the first gunshot echo up the lift shaft. He was ready with his hand on the key, about to go back down. His hand hovered over the key. She’d found the gun already, and she’d fired it. What if she’d killed herself? No. She was too feisty to blow her head off.
He removed the key, came out of the lift, and went to the toolbox he kept by the main door. He took out a length of rope, the bottle of angel dust, and a crowbar. He inspected the sharp, curved end of the crowbar. He smiled.
“You fucking bitch. You’ll pay for this,” he said.
He went back into the lift and inserted the key. He should go right back down there. She was still in the dark. He could still overcome her if he was prepared. He would hit the bitch over the head and give her a fatal dose of angel dust. No, he would stab her in the spine. Paralyze her and treat her to a slow and painful death. He looked down at the key. It was spotted with blood.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he hissed. Blood was running down his arm from under his sleeve. He tucked the crowbar down the back of his jeans and went to his bag and rummaged inside for tissues.
He fumbled with a pack of tissues and blotted at his wounds. He tore at the sleeve of his shirt, managing to pull it off where she’d slashed at him, and he used the bottom half of the material to bandage the wound.
The front of his shirt was soaked with blood, and he opened the buttons. The two slashes on his chest were less deep, but he would have to get them seen to.
He wiped his shaking hands and adjusted the night vision goggles on top of his head.
Crack.
He jumped, again, at the sound of another gunshot, and the crowbar fell with a clatter.
Four bullets. What was she doing? Was she trying to bust the lift open?
An image flashed in his head from that movie The Ring, when the scary, gaunt girl with the long, wet, greasy hair climbed out of the well, her elbows and legs all twisted and angular. Was she going to climb up the empty lift shaft?
“Fucking snap out of it!” he shouted to himself. He leaned down to pick up the crowbar, and more of his blood dripped onto the floor. The front of his shirt was now saturated with two spreading stains of blood. He felt faint.
He hesitated, then pulled the key out of the lift wall, stepped out of the lift, and inserted the key in the keyhole on the wall outside. He turned it, and the lift doors locked.
Now she couldn’t get out, even if she climbed up the shaft. And if she got into the lift shaft and started climbing, he would set the lift running back down and crush her freaky, angular body.
He looked down at his blood-stained hands. They were still shaking.
“Stop! Stop!” he said to his hands.
He would have to work out what to do next.
He had to calm down. He had to see a doctor. He would let her sweat, let her get weaker, and he would return with a shotgun. He would blast at her the second he came out of that lift, and screw the mess.
He would only feel safe when her brains were all over the walls.
44
Kate and Jake arrived at Great Barwell Psychiatric Hospital at nine a.m. on Monday morning and reported to the front gate. Th
e hospital was a huge sprawl of Victorian redbrick buildings, dwarfed by a huge expanse of manicured grounds. It was built next to a road of residential houses. One side of the road looked like any other suburban street, but on the other side, the pavement was lined with a twenty-foot-high fence, topped with razor wire.
For so many years, Peter Conway had defined Kate’s life. He had been her boss in the Met Police, and he had taken her under his wing, promoted her, and encouraged her career. They had briefly been lovers—she’d known at the time it was a terrible mistake, even when she just thought he was a police officer—and then she’d made the shocking discovery that he was the Nine Elms Cannibal.
Kate’s greatest triumph, catching Peter, had also been her greatest failure. The story wrote itself in the tabloids. Rookie police officer sleeps with the boss, outs same boss as a serial killer, and then as a juicy conclusion, gives birth to his child.
He was the person she blamed for everything: her downfall, the end of her career in the police force, her alcoholism, and her troubled relationship with her son. She held so much anger and fear and hatred toward him, and those emotions had built Peter Conway, a.k.a. the Nine Elms Cannibal, into an almost mythical creature. A monster crouching in the dark to torment her forevermore.
At the gatehouse, a stone-faced woman sat behind a bank of television monitors, studying grainy images of the road and perimeter fence. As Kate opened her mouth, a wailing siren started up. The woman, who had just taken a large bite out of a pasty, waved a gloved finger.
“SIREN TEST!” she shouted, swallowing her mouthful of pasty. “Have you got any ID?”
Kate and Jake took out their passports and pushed them through the hatch. The woman took their passports and flicked them open, thumbing through with what Kate thought were rather greasy fingers, until she located their photo pages. Jake’s passport was due to expire in a month, and in the photo, he was a skinny, gawky eleven-year-old, grinning into the camera with his front teeth missing. The woman cracked a smile. The siren fell to a low wail and ceased.
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