Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller)

by James Carol

  The speakers stayed silent.

  ‘What do you want?’ she whispered.

  Rachel slid down the wall onto her knees and curled into a ball. Hot tears slid down her cheek and she swiped them away with the back of her hand. The reality of the situation suddenly hit her, and it hit hard. She was never going to see the sun again, never feel it warm her skin on a summer’s day, never feel hot sand between her toes. She would never again waste time gossiping with her friends, sharing laughs over a bottle of wine, never eat in her favourite restaurant.

  Then there was the future she would never have. She had taken it for granted that she would have children one day, maybe even two or three. Jamie had led her to believe he wanted the same thing, but whenever she brought up the subject, he would come up with some lame excuse why it wasn’t the right time.

  She wasn’t going to miss Jamie, she realised, and this made her cry even harder. Tears for all those wasted years. Her father was right. She could have done so much better. At the time she thought he was being overprotective, but now she saw he had a point. She wiped away the last of her tears and lifted her head. This was her world now. A twenty-metre-by-twenty-metre cell with a cold tiled floor, a stained mattress and that bloodstained chair, her future defined by Adam’s whims.

  ‘Stop it,’ she hissed to herself. ‘Stop it, stop it. Stop it!’

  Rachel realised she was talking out loud and stopped as abruptly as she’d started. Things were really bad when you started talking to yourself. Only crazy people talked to themselves. Did that mean she was going crazy? And if she was, would that be a bad thing? If things got so bad that her mind snapped, maybe that would be the next-best thing to escaping. She considered this for a minute, then decided it wouldn’t be better, it would just be the next-best thing to giving up.

  The dog flap clattered and Rachel looked over to see a bucket being pushed through. She waited for her instructions, gave it a long couple of minutes, but the speakers remained silent. She gave it another minute because she was worried that Adam was toying with her.

  More silence from the speakers.

  Rachel got up and made her way tentatively across the room. She gave the dentist’s chair an even wider berth than usual, but couldn’t stop herself glancing at it, her eyes hypnotically drawn to the bloodstained armrests. There were more stains than before. She reached the door and looked down into the bucket. It was filled with soapy water, a sponge floating amongst the bubbles. There was a towel and a change of clothes next to the bucket, and a tube of antiseptic cream.

  ‘You’ll feel better after you’ve had a wash,’ Eve whispered. ‘There’s some cream to stop your cuts getting infected.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m sorry Adam hurt you. I asked him not to, but he just laughed at me. He says I’m stupid.’

  ‘You’re not stupid, Eve.’

  ‘I am stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ Eve’s voice was edged with inwardly directed anger.

  ‘Does your brother know you’re here, Eve?’

  The silence went on long enough to convince Rachel that Eve wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘He’s gone out. He told me to make sure you were cleaned up before he got back. You need to wash or I’ll get into trouble.’

  Rachel heard the distress in Eve’s voice. She could imagine how horrific Eve’s life with Adam was. She’d been here a couple of days and had started talking to herself. What would it be like to be with Adam for years?

  ‘It’s okay, Eve. I’ll get washed.’

  Rachel undressed and began sponging herself down. The water was hot and smelled of lavender. She scrubbed away the dried blood and grime, moving carefully around the cuts so she didn’t knock any stitches out. She washed her face, paused, then ran the sponge over her bald head, the heat from the water quickly turning cold. She dropped the sponge back into the bucket, towelled herself dry, then smeared antiseptic cream on her wounds, wincing when they stung. Rachel got dressed in clean clothes that were identical to the dirty ones she’d taken off. A grey sweatshirt, grey jogging bottoms, plain white panties. No socks or shoes or slippers. She wondered how far she should push things and decided she should just go for it.

  ‘If I met you away from here I think we could be friends, Eve.’

  ‘No we wouldn’t.’ Each word was clipped. Eve sounded angry, only this time all that anger was aimed right through the door. ‘We would never have been friends because you’re beautiful and I’m ugly.’

  ‘You’re not ugly.’

  ‘And how do you know? You’ve never seen me.’

  Before Rachel could respond, the basement lights went out. She heard Eve stomp angrily down the corridor, heard her footsteps on the wooden stairs, heard a distant door open and close.

  Great.

  Rachel was furious with herself. She’d pushed too hard too soon. She’d always been impatient. Always. The best she could hope for now was that she hadn’t done too much damage to her relationship with Eve. Without Eve on her side she didn’t see how the hell she was ever going to get out of here. Rachel was just about to head back to the mattress when she realised there was one sound missing from the series of sounds she heard when Eve left.

  She hadn’t heard the click of the dog flap being locked.

  39

  I shook a cigarette from my pack and wedged it between my lips. A sharp wind was blowing south from the Arctic and I had to shield the Zippo to keep the flame burning. The clouds were darker and greyer, lower, too. It was like being trapped in a concrete tomb. There was a promise of snow on the breeze.

  The Jag was parked in the same place as earlier, the driver hidden behind the pages of a tabloid newspaper. The words CUTTING JACK were printed in big bold letters on the front page. It wasn’t a surprise that they’d picked up on the nickname so quickly. The media loved that sort of thing. The linebacker saw me and nudged his buddy. The driver snapped the newspaper shut, folded it in two, tossed it over his shoulder. I walked over to the Jag and got in the back.

  ‘Take me to your leader,’ I said.

  The two guys up front shared a dopey look. This scenario obviously hadn’t been part of their briefing. They’d been told to follow and observe, they hadn’t been told to play taxi driver. The skinny guy shrugged at the linebacker, and the linebacker shrugged back. The skinny guy was obviously the brains of the operation, the one who called the shots. He glanced back at me one last time then made his decision. He fired up the car and we pulled out of the parking lot and bumped along the drive to the main road.

  I killed time by flipping through the driver’s newspaper. The unsub had laid claim to pages one through four, and I recognised my own voice in some of the words. The only logical explanation was that the leak had come from one of Hatcher’s team. My money was on the grizzled old detective. His glory days were long behind him and he would have got a buzz from seeing a story in print and knowing it had originated from him and that he’d got one over on everyone. It was sad and pathetic, not to mention counterproductive.

  The front page was taken up with a large photograph of Rachel Morris and the only text was the capitalised headline: CUTTING JACK’S LATEST VICTIM. I hadn’t seen this photograph before, which meant it probably originated from Donald Cole rather than Scotland Yard.

  The picture had been touched up using a computer. Rachel’s skin was as smooth as a model’s. The colour had been played around with to give her a healthy glow. This was a mistake. You wanted to humanise the victims, not dehumanise them. It’s the imperfections that make us human. The stories of our lives are told through the lines and wrinkles we accumulate. Aside from that, it was a typical shot. Rachel was smiling a happy carefree smile for the camera, eyes shining. Everything about the picture shouted out that this was someone with everything to live for, someone with a whole world of possibilities stretching out in front of them.

  We pulled up in the lot behind Cole Properties’ Stratford HQ and parked next to Cole’s Maserati. The skinny guy and th
e linebacker accompanied me to the third floor. We walked along the corridor side by side, the skinny guy on my left, the linebacker on my right. Cole’s PA took over when we reached the office. She knocked on the door and a deep, muffled voice from the other side told us to enter. The aroma of cigar smoke drifted under the door.

  The driver had called ahead so Cole was expecting me. The big man dismissed his PA with a nod, and the door gently closed. He was sitting on one of the leather sofas, which told me he wanted to keep things informal. There was a pile of paper on the glass-topped table and my name was on the top sheet. He’d checked me out, and wanted me to know it. Interesting.

  Cole was smoking a cigar, something big and expensive. Given his love of obvious status symbols, it was probably Cuban. I lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa that formed the bottom part of the L. There were pictures of Cole’s racehorses on the walls behind each sofa.

  Donald Cole had aged a decade in the last twenty-four hours. He looked like crap. I’d seen this before. It was the cumulative effect of shock and stress, and the sorrow of being stuck in an endless cycle of what-ifs. He was hurting and the only thing that could take that hurt away was the safe return of his daughter.

  ‘The Met are a bunch of muppets,’ Cole growled. ‘I wouldn’t trust them to find their arseholes with a map.’ He stabbed the air in front of him with the cigar. ‘You, on the other hand, you get results.’

  ‘Call off your bodyguards. I don’t need babysitting.’

  ‘This isn’t about what you need, this is about what’s got to be done to get my daughter back.’

  ‘I can look after myself. I don’t need any bodyguards.’

  ‘Yes you do, and I’ll tell you why. Anything happens to you and I’ll never see my little girl again. So, what’s being done to find Rachel?’

  ‘Everything that can possibly be done.’

  Cole made a disdainful snorting noise. ‘And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Look, I understand how frustrating this is for you. I get it. You’re used to calling the shots and now you’re in a situation you can’t control. To make matters worse, you’ve got money. Not a good combination. At the moment, you think you’re helping, but you’re not. What you’re actually doing is sabotaging this investigation.’

  ‘Are you a father? Have you got kids?’

  I shook my head, flicked the dead ash from my cigarette into the crystal ashtray on the table.

  ‘Then you don’t know anything.’

  Cole gave me the hard stare.

  ‘Are you done?’ I asked.

  ‘I want my little girl back.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s something we agree on.’ I took another drag on my cigarette. ‘Look, I’m going to get Rachel back, but to do that I need you to back off and let me do my job. That means no more rewards and no more babysitters. You get an idea in your head of something that you think is going to help Rachel, I want you to forget it straight away, because whatever you’re thinking is not going to help her. I can guarantee that. In fact, I’ll go one step further. You’ll probably end up killing her.’

  Cole stared at me and there was nothing of the hard man in this stare. For a second he looked like the hundreds of other stunned parents I’d met over the years. I wondered when anyone last talked to him like that, wondered if anyone had ever talked to him like that. If they had, they probably weren’t breathing.

  ‘If you don’t get her back safe, I’m holding you personally responsible. You realise that, don’t you?’

  ‘Are you done?’ I crushed my cigarette out in the ashtray and nodded to the pile of paper on the table, acknowledging it for the first time. ‘You’ve done your homework. You know I get results.’

  ‘Not all the time.’

  ‘More often than not.’

  ‘Let’s hope this is the rule rather than the exception,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  I got up to leave.

  ‘Wait a second.’

  Cole went over to his desk and took a business card from one of the drawers. He wrote something on the back with a gold-plated pen, then handed me the card.

  ‘My personal number,’ he said. ‘You can get me on this twenty-four/seven. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just call me.’

  40

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Good to see you, too, Hatcher.’

  ‘Seriously, Winter, where have you been?’

  We were in Hatcher’s office, a small cubicle on the fourth floor that was within shouting distance of the incident room. The office was as cluttered as Professor Blake’s, but without any of the bookish charm. The desk was covered in files and paperwork and there wasn’t an inch of laminated wood showing. The furniture was cheap, practical rather than aesthetically pleasing, the styles tracing a visual timeline stretching from the eighties onwards.

  Templeton was hovering near the doorway, ready to make a quick getaway. Her body language made it obvious that she didn’t really want to be here, and her puzzled expression made it obvious she had no idea why I’d brought her along.

  ‘I want you to call a press conference,’ I said.

  ‘You’re kidding, right? Have you seen the papers today? A press conference is the last thing we need.’

  ‘Sarah Flight’s dead. This is now a murder investigation.’

  ‘What are you talking about? If Sarah Flight was dead, I’d know.’

  I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket and handed it to Hatcher. Hatcher read what was written on it then frowned.

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘No joke. What you’ve got there is written permission from Amanda Curtis saying that we can tell the press her daughter is dead.’

  ‘And why the hell would we do that?’

  ‘To drive a wedge between the unsubs. They’re already escalating. It’s time to up the pressure.’

  ‘We can’t say someone’s dead when they’re not.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘It’s unethical.’

  Another shrug.

  ‘We’d be lying to the press.’

  ‘Which is bad because the press never, ever lies about anything,’ I said.

  Templeton chuckled. She tried to hold it in, but it was out there before she had a chance to stop it.

  Hatcher looked at Templeton like he’d just noticed her. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘She’s doing the press conference,’ I said.

  ‘No way,’ said Templeton. ‘Absolutely no way.’ In the space of those five words the pitch of her voice had gone up by half an octave.

  ‘You’ll do fine.’

  ‘Read my lips, Winter. No way. I’m not doing it.’

  ‘Templeton!’ Hatcher said sharply.

  Templeton glared at him.

  ‘Go. Now. I need to talk to Winter. Alone.’

  Templeton looked from Hatcher to me, then back to Hatcher again. Her face was tight, lips pursed. The look in her eye could have been anger, or it could have been hate, or fear. It was difficult to tell. She sighed and shook her head, then left the room. Hatcher watched the door close then turned to me.

  ‘Remember what we were talking about this morning? All that stuff about me being taken off the investigation? If I pull a stunt like this, I won’t just get taken off the investigation, I’ll end up fired.’

  I took out my cigarettes and Hatcher flashed a warning.

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  He looked as serious as he sounded, so I pushed the pack back into my pocket, then moved a pile of folders from the office’s only spare seat and sat down.

  ‘You’re not going to get fired, Hatcher. Worst-case scenario, you’ll go through a disciplinary and get busted back down to detective constable and bang goes your chance of ever being commissioner.’

  ‘This press conference isn’t going to happen.’

  ‘You brought me in to advise on this case. Okay, I’
m advising you to hold a press conference so you can tell the media that Sarah Flight is dead, and that this is now a murder investigation.’

  Hatcher sighed. ‘Have you tried this tactic before?’

  ‘It’ll work,’ I assured him.

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘These unsubs are devolving. They’re vulnerable right now. If we apply pressure in the right place, then we can destabilise their relationship. Keeping the victims alive is important to the submissive partner. If she believes one of her dolls has died, she’s going to be devastated. The guilt will push her over the edge.’

  ‘And what’s the risk to Rachel?’

  ‘It’s negligible.’

  ‘Define negligible.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘So there’s a risk we could make things worse for Rachel?’ said Hatcher.

  ‘Of course there is. Every move we make has some risk attached to it. Even doing nothing comes with an element of risk. This can work, Hatcher. You’ve got to trust me here.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hatcher. ‘Let’s do it. Maybe being a DC again won’t be so bad.’

  ‘It’s a lot less responsibility,’ I said. ‘So who gets to break the good news to Templeton?’

  ‘That’ll be you.’

  ‘By the way, the old guy who was giving me grief at the briefing, you need to transfer him to whatever your equivalent of Alaska is.’

  ‘Why? Because he was giving you grief?’

  ‘No. Because he’s leaking information to the press.’

  ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘Because someone’s leaking information, and it’s him.’

  ‘I’m going to need proof.’

  ‘No you don’t. As far as your team is concerned you’re God, which gives you licence to smite with impunity.’

  Hatcher laughed.

  ‘You know your team,’ I said. ‘If anyone’s going to leak information, who’s it going to be? That young DC with her whole career ahead of her? Or someone whose career stalled at detective sergeant, and who would do anything to get back at the organisation that screwed him over, particularly if it’s going to earn him a few quid in the process?’