by Mark Roberts
Sarah brought the liquid to her face.
As she smelled the liquid on her finger, a single drop fell between her lips and onto her tongue: the unmistakable taste of salt and the undeniable presence once in this enclosed space of another person.
With the taste came the aroma of Julia.
With taste and aroma came the realization that she was in a place designed to block out the senses. The utter dark and total silence had not been provided merely in order to disorientate. She began to shake. With each passing second it felt colder and colder. Her teeth banged together, setting off the nerves deep inside the enamel. Pain traced down her jaw.
She knew that she had three days to live, at the outside. But she guessed she had considerably less time, that she and her child were the last souls and that, in closure, his actions would accelerate.
She clasped her hands together for a moment to stop them shaking, laid them over her womb and clutched her elbows into her ribs. She took the longest, slowest breath of her life through her nostrils and held it in her lungs as deeply as she could.
She hung on to the breath until the shaking subsided a little as she felt the blood rising in her face and head, imagined the darkening of her skin as the pressure within her rose.
She hung on until she couldn’t hold on any longer, then allowed the air out through a paper-thin gap between her lips. She realized that this was how he incapacitated his victims before the kill. The deprivation of sensory stimulation over three days and nights was not enough on its own to render the flesh unresistant. But there was another factor in the equation.
Oxygen.
He starved them of air.
She touched the lid of the chamber and estimated the distance between the surface of the water and the lid, the length and width of the tank, finding a bleak calm but no comfort in the act of mathematical calculation that told her just how few cubic centimetres of air were available to her.
She raised both hands to the lid. It was bound to be locked, but she pressed her palms upwards and pushed hard.
The lid gave slightly, opening on her left-hand side, a tiny crack, a sliver of red light in the room outside the chamber. And a wisp of air. She pushed. But it was as far as the lid would go. She breathed, blinked and focussed on the dull light.
And then she heard a sound. Feet descending a ladder. She lowered the lid so that it would allow sound through if not light. And she waited. But nothing happened.
He was in the room. He was outside the chamber. But nothing happened.
She just waited in the dark.
Suddenly, there was a noise like thunder inside the tank as a sudden, angry weight slammed down on the lid above her face.
Sarah froze. To scream is to die, to be silent is to survive.
She waited, afloat on the saline water, wondering whether he was standing over her, unable to detect any other sign of his presence beyond the darkness in which she was suspended.
She waited. The air was thinning and she needed to make a decision. If he was still there, to raise the lid was to alert him; to leave it closed was to run out of air.
57
Sarah hadn’t returned home. The phone in the house remained unanswered, and two local beat constables confirmed that there was no one in the Rosen residence.
She wasn’t at St Philomena’s School. A complete search of the building and grounds showed no sign of Sarah Rosen being on the premises; the day’s CCTV footage showed no record of her entering the building.
As bald reality became inescapable fact, Rosen recalled a moment in time, some twelve years earlier, when the darkness in the barrel of a gun was inches from his face.
‘If she has been abducted—’ said Baxter.
‘If ?’
‘I have to ask you, David,’ continued Baxter over the interruption, ‘has she been well, in herself, lately?’
‘Has she gone mental and run away? Is that what you want to know?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
It was gone noon, over two hours since the hoax call to Picardie Road and since Sarah had gone missing.
‘What have your instructions been?’ asked Baxter. ‘David?’
‘Carol Bellwood’s in charge at St Thomas’s. Corrigan and Feldman are viewing CCTV footage from the hospital. I’ve got officers talking to anyone who had an appointment on or around the first floor, North Wing.’
Baxter patted Rosen on the sleeve. He didn’t look up from the picture of Sarah on his desk.
‘We’ve got three days, tops—’ started Baxter.
‘Do you believe that?’
‘That’s the precedent; let’s go on that.’
The phone on Rosen’s desk rang. He sat up and snatched at the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Corrigan. Boss, listen, we’ve got something on CCTV from St Thomas’s. It’s a brief sequence covered by two cameras, one interior, one exterior.’
‘Get to the point, Jeff.’
Rosen got to his feet and the solemn noise level in the incident room dipped.
‘Is it my wife?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. Yes, it looks like it is.’
Rosen felt his face fall as the last of his hope ebbed away.
‘Talk me through the footage.’
Rosen walked up and down behind his desk as he listened impatiently.
‘An ambulance pulls up at the front doors, only it’s a slightly old ambulance. It’s there for ten minutes. A woman is pushed out of the front entrance in a wheelchair by what looks like a man in a standard paramedic uniform.’
‘Is it Paul Dwyer?’
‘Yeah, it looks like Paul Dwyer.’
‘And the woman’s my wife?’
‘Yes, it’s your wife. Paramedic puts her in the back of the ambulance, closes the doors, gets in the cab, drives off. He heads off in the direction of Lambeth Palace Road.’
‘OK, Jeff,’ said Rosen. ‘Get the pictures down here straightaway.’
‘Johnny Mac’s on his way right now.’
‘Change of plan.’ He spoke to Jeff Corrigan but looked directly at Baxter. ‘We’re publishing Flint’s picture asap, and we’ll release this CCTV footage from the hospital as well. But don’t approach either man. Corrigan, you there?’
‘Yes?’
‘How did she look? My wife?’
‘She appeared to be asleep. She looked peaceful.’
Rosen wondered whether Dwyer had used Pentothal as he had with his other victims.
‘Was there no one else around?’
‘There were dozens of people coming and going, but the scene didn’t look odd. Aside from the slightly dated ambulance, but that’s not that obvious . . . I guess no one took any notice.’
An ambulance? Rosen felt the rush of an oncoming revelation. As he’d come away from the hospital, leaving Sarah alone for the attentions of Dwyer, he’d seen an ambulance cutting out of Dodson Street. It had passed within metres of the bonnet of the car he’d been in, but going in a different direction.
If I’d released the picture of Dwyer sooner, the thought mocked him, maybe, just maybe, someone in that hospital would have noticed him . . .
58
On the morning of Julia’s abduction, Phillip Caton had turned off his mobile phone usually left on 24/7.
The last time it had rung, at seven o’clock in the morning, Phillip had picked up the call partly from instinct but mostly through raw desperation. It had been an emergency, a request for a plumber to help with a flooded nursery school. As Phillip had faltered and stuttered through his apology for being unable to take the job, the lady on the other end of the line had persisted, in a gentle and kindly manner. She had all those babies to think about, all those toddlers and their mums and dads, and then she had paused as she put two and two together. She apologized to Phillip. How insensitive she was to mention babies, and she was genuinely sorry if she’d hurt his feelings but how was he feeling? She wanted to know. She cared, see. She realized who he was and wh
y he sounded so, well, devastated. Had he heard anything about Julia? From the police? From the abductor even? Had he? She didn’t know how he was coping. Did they have a name for the baby? It was a boy. Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Phillip had been overtaken by the only moment of clarity he’d experienced since discovering Julia had been abducted.
‘Which newspaper are you from?’ he had asked.
‘The one you read, according to your newsagent,’ she replied. ‘So, come on, Phillip, I want to help, I—’
At that point he had switched off the phone and poured himself a large whisky.
When the coroner released Julia’s body, her mother took over the arrangements for the funeral, much as she had done for their wedding, much as she would have done for the christening of their baby.
He tried to work, which he enjoyed, to finish off a central heating installation in St John’s Wood, but he couldn’t. He went to the pub, a place he didn’t much like.
He could drink. He could pump money into the fruit machine and find a strange comfort in those spinning icons, a welcome ritual in the ‘nudge’ and ‘hold’ decisions that the machine seduced him into.
Best of all, though, no one talked to him. In the pub, at the fruit machine, it was as if he had an invisible wall around him. No one could see through that wall, and a man with a Calvinist work ethic, and a knowledge down to the last penny of what he had in the bank, happily dropped coin after coin into the belly of the fruit machine.
When he did move away, it was only when the alcohol started to wear off and he needed another drink from the bar.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the barmaid, a well-preserved blonde with kind eyes and a wedding ring on her finger. ‘I can’t serve you any more.’
‘Why?’ As he asked the question, he felt a little absurd because he heard the answer in his own voice. He was drunk, categorically hammered.
‘Go home,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you a taxi. Go home and get some sleep.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Sleep.’
On a television set above the bar, the six o’clock news began on the BBC. He tried to turn away but couldn’t and, in looking up, he saw a face, a frozen image that went offscreen to give way to some CCTV footage from the front of a big building, with a commentary he could barely hear above the noise of the bar.
He walked backwards, his gaze fixed on the TV screen, and barked, ‘Shut up!’ to a couple whose table he wobbled into, almost knocking over their glasses.
‘OK, that’s enough,’ said the barmaid.
The face came back on the screen, behind the head of the newsreader. Phillip pointed at the TV, straining to hear, as the newsreader said something about the police issuing two sets of CCTV footage: one from the British Library and one that had been taken that day outside a hospital.
Where from? Where did he know him from?
The newsreader gave way to library footage of a tree-lined street in suburban London.
‘That’s my house,’ said Phillip. The man the police wanted to talk to was called Paul Dwyer. ‘But his name’s not Dwyer.’ They wanted to talk to a priest as well, a fresh-faced young man by the look of him. But Phillip didn’t have a clue who the priest was.
‘His name’s Paul but it isn’t Dwyer. I did a job for him.’
Phillip’s realizations made perfect sense to himself but he had enough presence of mind to know his speech sounded slurred beyond recognition.
He took out his mobile phone and, in trying to switch it on, realized he’d forgotten his pin number.
He turned to the couple he’d just shouted at.
‘Can you help me?’ he said, showing them the phone in the palm of his hand. They turned away as the manager arrived.
‘Out you go, come on!’
‘I’m going.’
There was a numbness in his limbs that made walking from the bar to the door an ordeal; the pretence of sobriety and dignity was a tall order under the judgemental eyes of the drinkers who chose to watch him.
But he ignored their staring eyes and tried to recall Paul’s surname.
‘I know where he lives.’
He had Detective Rosen’s direct number stored on his phone.
Outside, the fresh air made him giddy. He recalled his pin number, 1204, 12 April, Julia’s birthday, but in typing the digits in, he slipped on the step, falling heavily on the tarmac, cracking his skull and knocking himself out.
59
Sarah counted back from ten, both hands pressed flat against the underside of the lid. As she reached three, she felt sick at the prospect of pushing the lid up, fearing the sight of his pupils peering at her through the crack. Her chest tightened in the stale air that grew thinner with each breath. But she had to do it, she had to hear and see as much as she could. When she whispered, ‘Zero!’ she kept her promise to herself and softly pushed the lid.
Red light in a darkened room. No sound. No sign of him but such a tiny gap. The trickle of air was close to pleasurable, but the weight of lifting the lid caused her arm muscles to burn.
The lid was loose at the top, near her head, but showed no sign of shifting near her feet, where it seemed to be tightly locked. She raised a foot to test it and felt like crying when the resistance was just too strong. She wasn’t going to be able to lift the lid and climb out. The best she could hope for was air . . .
Then there was a sound. Above her head and outside the walls of the building in which she was confined. She listened hard as it came closer. Two noises. Voices and scraping. But the voices weren’t human and the scraping was made by the friction of two hard surfaces. It was the sound of cattle lowing, their hooves clattering on tarmac. Cows ambling back from their pastures. The gentle sound of cattle calling relieved her loneliness for a moment and then made her compulsion to weep sharp and unbearable.
How far away? How far away from home am I? she wondered, as the sound of the cattle passed by on the road outside. The sound had come from above. It occurred to Sarah she was being held in a basement.
She lifted the lid a little higher but could push no more than to a ten-degree angle. She held on, allowing fresh air into the chamber, and felt the tightening in her chest ease.
Slowly, she lowered the lid because she just didn’t have the strength to keep it up.
She thought deeply and for a long time. Then she started to count.
She would count to a hundred and raise the lid for ten seconds.
As she counted, she bit at the tips of the nails on her right hand, making the smooth edges jagged and raw. If she raised the lid and he was there, watching, his pupils peering at her, with a ten-degree angle she had enough room to thrust her fingers through the gap and scratch his eyes.
She recalled Rosen telling her of the autopsy reports and the effects of oxygen deprivation on the lungs and brains of the other women. She lay still and counted. As she passed the fifty mark, for the first time in a long time she felt an alien sensation inside her: a gentle fluttering.
Her baby was moving. Since the death of her daughter Hannah, she had dreamed for so long of this moment and, when it came, it came with the knowledge that the man who had her trapped was going to starve her and her baby of air.
As she reached one hundred, there was a black hatred in her heart.
She raised the lid to hear footsteps descending wooden stairs and above this the sound of a tuneless tune, a joyless yet lightly whistled improvisation.
She lowered the lid, holding in her lungs the fresh air she’d taken from the basement. She felt the ragged tips of her nails and pictured his eyes in the lift at St Thomas’s Hospital, imagining them streaming with blood.
He was in the basement and she wondered whether he was ready.
Sarah closed the lid completely and composed herself in the pitiless blackness.
60
She raised the lid. It was by the slightest amount, but the light and noise were astonishing.
The room was full of what sound
ed like a huge machine, as if the room had been eaten alive and she was listening from within the belly of some mechanical beast. Wheels clattered across a rough stone floor.
The noise was getting closer. She raised the lid a little more, a fraction more light. Something dark was swinging in and out of the path of light. The noise stopped, to be replaced by another sound. His breathing was fast and uneven, the sound of exertion.
Through the walls of the house and the ceiling of the basement, a car engine was coming closer. She willed it to slow down and stop but after it passed the nearest point, the sound started fading away into the distance.
He was close at hand and there was a foul smell.
He stopped. And then quickening footsteps, moving away from her, told her that he had been suddenly called away.
He was heading up a flight of steps and then she heard his feet on the ceiling above her. Hurrying, hurrying, hurrying.
She was alone again, in the tank, in the basement.
She lifted the lid a little more, then raised her head, looking through the crack from as many angles as the confined space allowed.
A vertical metal pole and what looked like a saddle suspended in midair. She pushed hard and the small crack became wider. There was a metal arm connected to the cradle. It was a lifting device. Was it the thing on wheels that had made a racket on the concrete floor?
He was going to use it to lift her.
If she was incapacitated through lack of air, he wasn’t going to kill her in the tank. He was going to take her somewhere else to do that.
She would lift the lid only for air now.
She knew enough.
She needed to conserve all her strength for what was coming.
61