The Domino Killer

by Neil White

  ‘What about your lawyer friend, Joe Parker. Ask him.’

  ‘I just want her back. Please, Mark, please.’

  ‘So that’s a no? I didn’t realise there was a price you wouldn’t pay for Carrie. Who gets all the blame now, sweet Melissa?’

  ‘Wait, wait!’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Talk to me, Mark, it’s been a long time. We can sort this thing out.’

  ‘What’s this, the big reunion?’ Proctor laughed. ‘It’s over for me, I know it. Either you get the money for me somehow, so I can run, or else it ends now. But I’ll make some noise before I go.’

  ‘Don’t hurt her, please.’

  Proctor went to say something but stopped. Music came through the phone, like a sudden burst, and the noise of people. He clicked off.

  Melissa curled up on the bed, her arms across her stomach, grimacing as if in pain.

  ‘We need to focus,’ Joe said, trying to take the phone from her.

  ‘I just want my baby back.’

  ‘So we need to find out where he is. He clicked off when there was a noise.’

  Melissa looked at him. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘He hung up as soon as there was a noise, as if he was worried it would give him away. He’s somewhere busy.’

  Then something occurred to him. He went to the window and looked out, but all he could see was his reflection. ‘Turn off the lights.’

  Melissa ran to the switch and plunged the room into darkness.

  ‘He knows I’m here,’ Joe said. ‘He mentioned me.’

  ‘He must have heard you in the background.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything, I was too busy listening. No, it’s something else. I think he can see us.’

  Melissa rushed to the window to join him. They scoured the darkness ahead but it was all just that, shadowy brick blocks and the moonlight on the murky ribbon of canal water.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘His place, where he goes to be alone. He had somewhere as a child. Why not somewhere as an adult?’

  ‘But why so close?’

  ‘To watch you, Melissa. Don’t you see? You’re the sibling who rejected him’

  ‘You mean he’s been watching us the whole time?’ she said, her hand over her mouth, trembling.

  ‘He couldn’t just find somewhere to take Carrie and observe you without going there before. It’s too convenient, too quick.’

  ‘He might be in a car.’

  Something occurred to Joe. ‘Get the photographs he’s taken of Carrie.’

  ‘Why, what for?’

  ‘There’s something we should have spotted.’

  Melissa ran through to the living room and came back with the envelope they’d looked at earlier in the day. Joe closed the blinds as Melissa turned on the lamps.

  She pulled out the photographs and scattered them across the bed. ‘What is it?’

  Joe picked up one, a shot of Carrie walking along the pavement in her school uniform, a brick wall the backdrop.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said.

  ‘What, what?’

  ‘Look at the angle,’ Joe said. ‘It’s from on high, looking down, like a vantage point. This wasn’t taken from a car or van. And she’s in her uniform so it must be on her route to school.’

  Melissa picked up another one. ‘This is the same. And it’s got the canal in the background. I can see the towpath.’

  She went to the window as Joe clicked off the light again. They both peered around the blind, looking for something, anything.

  Joe opened the window.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Melissa said.

  ‘That sudden burst of noise made him hang up. If he’s watching close by, the sound must be close too.’

  They sat on the bed in silence, straining to hear something above the light drone of traffic and the occasional chatter of conversation.

  Then it came back. A sudden burst of music, people shouting.

  ‘It’s the pub,’ Melissa said, gripping Joe’s arm. ‘They have a band on every Thursday.’

  ‘He’s so close,’ Joe said, scanning the buildings nearby, trying to see something in the darkness. ‘There!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Top floor of that building. It’s all dark but there’s a glint in the window. It’s faint but it’s something moving.’

  Melissa ran for the door, Joe just behind.

  They were going to get Carrie.

  ‘Shit!’

  Proctor threw the phone off the roof, gritted his teeth as it sailed through the air, landing with a smash as pieces were strewn over the road. The pub was too noisy. He cursed his bad luck. Why then, when he was talking? The sounds might place him.

  He looked across. The light had gone off in Melissa’s apartment. Shit!

  His shoes clattered on the tiles as he scrambled across the roof and dropped down into the hole. Dust flew as he landed with a thump. Carrie was on her knees in front of the window, her wrists against the broken windowpane, rubbing the rope against the jagged edge. Her bracelet twinkled in the moonlight.

  She looked round and yelped when she heard him. She dropped back to the floor and shuffled to the wall, shrinking back.

  He rushed at her and slapped her across the face, a loud crack in the night. He was breathing hard. He had to stay in control. Don’t make mistakes. But his anger was growing, becoming harder to check. He grabbed the rope around her wrists and dragged her across the floor, grimacing, enjoying it too much. Carrie shrieked in fear and pain, muffled only by the gag. He clamped his hand over her mouth, making her cheeks puff red.

  ‘Shut up! Now!’

  She whimpered.

  He yanked her to her feet and pulled her towards the hole in the roof. It was hard work. He lifted her over his shoulder and put one hand on the roof edge, the other arm over Carrie. He was panting through exertion and tried to clamber up on the same pile of bricks he’d used before. It was too hard. He was going to have to push her up and hope she landed properly.

  He got her shoulders through the opening and then put his own shoulder underneath her. With a heave, Carrie dropped over the lip and tumbled down the tiles. Proctor couldn’t see her but he heard the clatter of her body against the roof. He paused to listen out for how it ended, whether there was a muffled scream as she went off the edge, but there was nothing.

  Proctor hauled himself back through the hole, the breeze cooling the perspiration speckled across his forehead. Carrie was slumped in the crevice where the two roofs sloped and met, her ankles over the edge. He took a few deep breaths and then slid down to join her. As he got close, he had a glimpse over. A long sheer drop, too dark to see the ground.

  Carrie was trying to shuffle herself along, snakelike, to get away from it. He grabbed the rope and helped her, pulling her into the middle. He sat her upright. She put her head back against the roof and tried to suck in air around the gag, soaked from saliva.

  He sat opposite and leaned back against the tiles. He let out some long breaths before he chuckled to himself. ‘This is where you say that you can see your house from up here.’

  Carrie tried to swear but the gag muffled it. She stamped down on a tile in frustration. It cracked.

  Proctor leaned forward. ‘You need to stay quiet and calm,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how much I’ve looked out for you. I’ve seen you grow, Carrie, watched you from up here. But for one of us, it ends today.’

  Carrie closed her eyes and sobbed. As Proctor watched, a thin trickle of piss tracked its way down the tiles, her jeans soaked.

  ‘Just let me go,’ she tried to say around the gag.

  He turned away, disgusted.

  It was never meant to work out this way. He was going to come for Carrie at some point, he’d always seen her as his finale, but it was meant to be in his time. He would come back into the family, be there for his poor bereaved sister as she tried to come to terms with her loss, the ripple to beat them all. It might be enough to satisfy whatever drove him so that it wasn’t
there any more. But this was wrong, all too soon. All he could do now was hurt and take the blame.

  He saw something and gasped.

  Melissa and Joe Parker were running out of the front of her building. From the direction of their sprint, both of them looking up, they’d worked out where he was.

  ‘She’s coming for you,’ he said, and he grabbed her by the rope again, pulling her towards the edge.

  Carrie wriggled against him, tried to scream, kicked against the roof tiles, but it was no use. Once Melissa was out of view, running along the side of the building, he hooked the rope that bound her wrists over a drainpipe that protruded above the lip of the roof.

  ‘What will always torture her is that she wasn’t quick enough,’ he said. ‘She’ll replay it, year after year, the time wasted on her bed, how she couldn’t get up here fast enough, or get past me, because your end is like sand in a timer.’

  He grunted with effort as he pushed at her. She slid closer to the edge, her eyes wide, screeching through the gag. She tried to dig her heels into the slates but it was pointless. He strained with effort until her legs were hanging over the edge, her feet kicking uselessly in the air, nothing beneath them but a long fall. He gritted his teeth and gave her a final push.

  Carrie’s body thudded against the side of the building. The rope around her wrists that he’d hooked around the drainpipe had worked.

  He looked over.

  She was hanging by her arms, only the bindings around her wrists supporting her. The ground was a long way below. She tried to dig her feet into the brickwork but there were no gaps to give her a toehold. She was like a worm on a hook. As she struggled, the drainpipe creaked, the long metal screws scraping in the mortar. One of her shoes came off and took an age before it bounced against the ground a long way below.

  ‘If she loves you, she’ll get past me,’ he said. ‘But she’ll need to be quick. Trying to cut through that rope must seem like a really bad idea now.’

  And with that, he was shuffling back across the roof before dropping back into the roof space.

  It was time to say hello to Melissa.

  Sam and Gina were close to Ancoats. Gina was swallowing hard, still in pain from where Proctor had throttled her.

  ‘Why would Proctor set fire to his car if he knew how it looked?’ Sam said.

  ‘Was that as bad as leaving it in the police compound covered in blood traces?’ Gina said. ‘What would the police do when they found out his car had been nearby and it was in their compound, and they knew who’d been driving it?’

  ‘But it drew attention to himself. He could have gone back in the morning with his insurance and reclaimed it, got it cleaned of whatever needed removing.’

  ‘He was panicking. For all of his superiority, it was blind panic, because he wasn’t the one in control.’

  Sam’s phone rang. He looked at the screen.

  ‘It’s Joe,’ he said.

  Sam clicked the answer button. ‘We’re on our way,’ he said. ‘Sit tight.’

  ‘He’s here!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Proctor, he’s here.’

  ‘Joe, where are you?’

  Gina looked at him, detecting something in Sam’s voice.

  ‘Outside Melissa’s apartment,’ Joe said, breathless.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘No time,’ Joe said. ‘Just get here.’

  ‘Where, Joe, where?’

  ‘Some kind of abandoned warehouse in Ancoats, opposite Blake Mill, Melissa’s apartment block. An Irish bar nearby.’

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Sam said.

  ‘Get everyone here!’

  The line went dead.

  ‘Proctor?’ Gina said.

  He’s in an old warehouse near Blake Mill.’ He tossed her his phone. ‘Call Brabham. He’s in the contacts list. Tell him where we’re going.’

  Gina thumbed through his contacts as Sam accelerated along the main road towards Ancoats. He overtook other cars and made ones on the other side swerve to avoid him. The sound of Gina talking merged with the roar of his engine and the occasional blast of a horn.

  ‘Down there,’ Gina said, pointing to a narrow street.

  Sam skidded into it, his back wheels swinging outwards until he corrected it, his engine loud between the brick walls on either side of the street.

  The view ahead opened out, just the dark empty space of the canal basin ahead, dots of apartment windows further away.

  ‘It must be round here,’ Sam said, craning forward, Gina doing the same.

  He turned left so that the canal was to his right. Large dark blocks of stone were ahead, turned into silhouettes by the brightness of the apartments further along.

  ‘There’s the Irish bar,’ Sam said, pointing, slowing down.

  Gina gripped his arm. ‘Shit, there,’ she said, and pointed.

  Sam slammed to a halt as he saw what Gina was pointing at.

  There was a young girl high off the ground, her arms hooked around something, swinging against the wall of a warehouse, her hair wild in the breeze.

  Gina made another call, 999, and barked instructions. They stared out of the windscreen for a few seconds in disbelief, praying that someone else had called the fire service and that a long ladder would arrive any moment.

  No blue lights flickered nearby, no sirens wailed in the distance.

  Neither of them said anything as they ran from the car.

  Joe ran hard alongside the building, Melissa with him, looking for a way in.

  ‘Do you think she’s here?’ Melissa said, between gasps of breath.

  ‘Where else?’

  It was a warehouse, last used for printing supplies. The bricks were dark and old, replaced in places, left to fall away in others, with grilles and boards over most of the windows. Two metal gangways joined the top two floors, visible only by their silhouettes against the night sky.

  ‘How do we get in?’ Melissa said, banging frantically at the bricked-up doorways.

  Joe looked around, trying to see some kind of entrance, but then at one corner he saw a kink in the security fence that blocked off the yard.

  ‘There,’ he said, and ran over, Melissa behind.

  The security fence was just a row of metal screens connected by overlapping brackets at each end. One of them had been pushed away so that it was only joined at the bottom, capable of being pushed to create a gap.

  Joe put his shoulder against the screen to move it. It screeched on the cobbles on the other side. When there was enough of a gap, he held it so Melissa could get through. Once inside, the world beyond the yard seemed to be shut out. Everything was dark, the outline of the roofs the only thing visible.

  Joe grabbed Melissa’s hand and they both edged forward as they tried to get their breath back, reaching out with their feet to sweep for hazards. There were loose stones, small metal brackets, discarded bottles. The ground was uneven, with cobbles breaking free from where they’d been fixed for over two hundred years.

  Joe was looking for a way into the building.

  ‘There,’ Melissa said, and pointed to a darker shadow in the corner of the yard.

  They both ran towards it, their feet skidding sometimes on loose stones, but they wanted to get inside. Any shreds of light were swallowed up as they went into the doorway. Their footsteps echoed.

  Joe put out his hand. His eyes tried to adjust to the darkness but it was impossible. The windows were blocked off by metal screens so that there was not even the faintest glimmer of light to cling onto.

  ‘Mark, please!’ Melissa shouted.

  They both listened out. Nothing came back.

  Joe reached out with his feet, his arms out, stepping forwards, Melissa holding onto the back of his shirt. He was waiting for the sound of sudden movement, the blow, grimacing in the darkness, nerves making his insides churn, but he had to keep moving forward.

  He jumped. Something against his face. He let out a breath. A cobweb, hanging from the cei
ling.

  ‘Mark!’ Melissa shouted again. Still nothing.

  Something fluttered, the sudden noise of wings loud, fast like whistles. A bat, probably, perhaps more than one. Melissa yelped. Joe’s heart thumped. Sweat dripped into his eye.

  His foot hit something. A wall, or something else? He reached out. A wooden block, then another. Stairs.