Whispers of the Dead dh-3

by Simon Beckett

  There were two loud cracks.

  They were deafening in the tiled confines of the room. York seemed to trip. He stumbled sideways, falling into the big wall mirror. It shattered as he collapsed on to a drinking fountain, dragging it to the floor in a cascade of plaster and silver fragments.

  The echoes of gunfire and breaking glass slowly died away.

  My ears rang painfully. A faint blue mist hung in the air, a bonfire reek of cordite overlying the stink of decomposition. York didn’t move. Gardner hurried over. Still pointing the gun at him, he kicked at the hand holding the knife to knock the weapon away, then quickly knelt and felt at York’s throat.

  Without urgency, he stood up and tucked the gun back into his belt clip.

  Jacobsen was still holding her own gun outstretched, although now it was pointing down at the floor.

  ‘I—I’m sorry,’ she stammered, as colour rushed back into her cheeks. ‘I couldn’t…’

  ‘Not now,’ Gardner said.

  There was a sudden sob from the treatment room. I turned to see Paul helping Sam to sit up, trying to calm her as she coughed and gasped for breath. He’d cut the windlass strap, but a livid red line circled her throat like a burn.

  ‘Oh, G-God, I thought… I th-thought…’

  ‘Shh, you’re all right, it’s all right, he can’t hurt you now.’

  ‘I c-couldn’t stop him. I told him I was p-pregnant, and he said… he said that was good, that he wanted to wait until, wait until… Oh, God!’

  She doubled up as a contraction rocked her. ‘Is she OK?’ Gardner asked.

  ‘She’s in labour,’ I told him. ‘You need to get an ambulance.’

  ‘On its way. We were heading back to Knoxville when I got your message. I put the call in for back-up and paramedics right away. Christ, what the hell were you thinking?’

  But I’d no time for Gardner’s indignation, or to ask how they’d managed to find us so quickly from my garbled directions. Sam’s face was screwed up in pain as I went to her.

  ‘Sam, an ambulance is on its way. We’re going to get you to a hospital, but I need you to tell me if you’ve any other wounds or injuries apart from your throat.’

  ‘N-no, I—I don’t think so, he just put me in here and left me! Oh, my God, all the bodies outside, they’re all dead…’

  ‘Don’t worry about those. Can you tell me when your contractions started?’

  She tried to concentrate as she panted for breath. ‘I don’t… in the ambulance, I think. I thought it was some mistake when he came to the door. He said I should call Paul but when I turned my back he… he put his arm round my neck and… and squeezed…’

  She was describing a chokehold, I realized. Done properly it could cause unconsciousness in a matter of seconds, with no lasting after-effects. Misjudged, it could kill just as easily.

  Not that York would have cared about that.

  ‘I couldn’t breathe!’ Sam sobbed. ‘Everything went black, and then I woke up in the ambulance with this pain… Oh, Lord, it hurts! I’m going to lose the baby, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re not going to lose the baby,’ I told her, with more confidence than I felt. ‘We’re going to get you out of here now, OK? Just sit tight for two more minutes.’

  I went out into the spa, pulling the door to the treatment chamber closed behind me. ‘How long till the paramedics arrive?’ I asked Gardner.

  ‘Out here? Maybe another half-hour.’

  That was too long. ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Parked out front.’

  That was an unexpected bonus. I’d thought they’d have come across the hillside as Paul and I had, but I was too concerned about Sam to wonder about it for long.

  ‘The sooner we get Sam out of here the better,’ I said. ‘If we get her to your car we can meet the ambulance on its way.’

  ‘I’ll get the wheelchair from upstairs,’ Jacobsen offered.

  Gardner gave a short nod, and she hurried out. Grim-faced, he considered the corpses in the plunge pool.

  ‘You say there’re more outside?’

  ‘And in here.’ With a pang of regret, I told him about Summer’s body lying in the other treatment chamber.

  ‘God almighty.’ Gardner looked shocked. He passed a hand over his face. ‘I’d appreciate it if you stayed behind. I need to hear what happened.’

  ‘Who’s going to drive them?’ Paul was in no fit state, not with Sam as she was.

  ‘Diane can go. She knows the roads better than you do.’

  I looked at the corpses lying on the floor of the spa. I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I already had. But I’d trained as a GP, not an obstetrician. I knew Sam would be best served by someone who could get her to the ambulance as soon as possible.

  If I belonged anywhere, it was here.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  Gardner and I stayed by the unbolted French doors after Jacobsen left with Sam and Paul. It had been decided it was better for them to go out that way rather than risking carrying her up the rotting staircase. Gardner had phoned to check on the progress of the back-up and ambulance, then gone to see if there was another way out through the spa. He reported that the rooms beyond the archway were blocked off.

  ‘Explains why York didn’t just take off,’ he said, dusting off his hands. ‘Must’ve been down here when you came in and couldn’t get out without going past you. Looks like half the floor above has collapsed through there. Whole damn place is being eaten by termites.’

  Which in turn had attracted the swamp darners. York’s own hiding place had given him away in the end. There was a poetic justice there, but I was too tired to spend long thinking about it.

  Jacobsen said little before they left. I guessed she was still reproaching herself over her failure to shoot York. Hard as it must have been, for a field agent that sort of hesitation could be disastrous. If nothing else, it would leave a black mark on her record.

  If not for Gardner it could have been far worse.

  When they’d gone neither he nor I made any move to go back inside. After the shuttered horrors of the spa, emerging into the sunlight was like being reborn. The breeze carried the smell away from us, and the air was sweet with grass and blossom. I breathed deeply, trying to clean the foulness from my lungs. From where we stood, the trees screened what lay in the garden. With the green mountains rolling to the horizon, it was almost possible to think this was a normal spring day.

  ‘Do you want to take a look down there?’ I asked, looking down at the pond glinting through the trees.

  Gardner considered it without enthusiasm. ‘Not yet. Let’s wait till the crime scene truck gets here.’

  He still showed no inclination to go back inside. He stared down the hillside towards the pond, hands thrust deep into his pockets. I wondered if it was to stop them shaking. He’d just killed a man, and no matter how unavoidable it might have been that couldn’t be easy to deal with.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  It was like watching a shutter come down across his face.

  ‘Fine.’ He took his hands from his pockets. ‘You still haven’t told me what the hell you thought you were doing, coming in here by yourselves. Do you have any idea how stupid that was?’

  ‘Sam would be dead if we hadn’t.’

  That took the heat out of him. He sighed. ‘Diane thinks York was waiting till the last minute, right till she was actually giving birth. He would’ve wanted to make the most of the opportunity. Two lives for one.’

  Christ. I stared across at the mountains, trying to dispel the images that had been conjured.

  ‘You think she’ll be OK?’ Gardner asked.

  ‘I hope so.’ Providing they got her to hospital in time. Providing there were no complications with the baby. It was a lot to hope for, but at least now she had some sort of chance. ‘How did you manage to get here so fast? I wasn’t sure you’d heard my directions.’

  ‘We hadn’t. At least, none that made sense,’ h
e said, with a touch of his old acerbity. ‘We didn’t need to, though. After York left the skin on the windscreen we put a Bird Dog on your car.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A GPS tracking device. We knew where you’d left the car, but the old road you took isn’t on any maps. So I took the one that seemed nearest and it led us right to the front gate.’

  ‘You put a tracker on my car? And didn’t bother to tell me?’

  ‘You didn’t need to know.’

  That explained why I hadn’t seen anyone following me the night before, and how the TBI agents had arrived at Paul and Sam’s so quickly. I felt a flash of annoyance that no one had seen fit to let me know about it, but under the circumstances I could hardly complain.

  I was just glad it had been there.

  ‘So how did you know you’d got the right place?’ I asked.

  He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t. But there was a new padlock on an old gate, so someone obviously wanted to keep people out. We’d bolt cutters in the trunk, so I cut the lock off and came to take a look.’

  I raised my eyebrows at that. Breaking into private property without a warrant was a cardinal sin, and Gardner was a stickler for protocol. His face darkened.

  ‘I decided your phone call constituted probable cause.’ His chin came up. ‘Come on, let’s get back inside.’

  The cloying odour of decomposition wrapped itself around us as we went back down the corridor. The light from the French doors didn’t reach into the spa, and after the bright sunshine the dim chambers seemed more dismal than ever. Even though I knew what to expect, it didn’t lessen the impact of seeing the corpses heaped in the plunge pool like so much rubbish.

  York’s body lay as we’d left it, as unmoving as his victims.

  ‘Lord, how did he stand the smell?’ Gardner said.

  We went into the small chamber where we’d found Sam. The severed ends of the leather strap that Paul had cut from her throat lay like a dead snake on the old massage table. The windlass bolted to its head had been crafted with obvious care. The ends of the strap fed into an intricate arrangement of finely machined cogs, operated by a polished wooden handle. Turning it would cause the strap to tighten, while the cogs would prevent it from slipping when the handle was released.

  A much simpler construct would have been just as effective, but that wouldn’t have been good enough for York. Narcissist that he was, he wouldn’t have been satisfied with a cord twisted round a piece of wood.

  This was his life’s work.

  ‘Helluva device.’ Gardner sounded almost admiring. Suddenly, he stiffened, cocking his head. ‘What’s that?’

  I listened, but the only sound was the still-dripping tap. Gardner was already out of the treatment room, hand poised on his gun. I followed him.

  Nothing in the spa had changed. York still lay unmoving, the blood pooled around him as black and still as pitch. Gardner quickly checked through the archway leading to the blocked-off rooms. He relaxed, letting his jacket fall over his gun again.

  ‘Can’t have been anything…’

  He seemed embarrassed, but I didn’t blame him for being jumpy. I’d be relieved myself when the back-up arrived.

  ‘You better show me the other bodies,’ Gardner said, all business again.

  I didn’t go with him into the small chamber where Paul and I had found Summer. I’d already seen more than I wanted. I waited in the spa, standing by York’s body. It lay sprawled on its side in the shards of broken mirror, the jagged fragments like silver islands in the blood.

  I stared down at the unmoving form, struck as ever by the gulf between its utter immobility and the roaring energy it had possessed a short while ago. I felt too empty for either hate or pity. All the lives York had sacrificed had been a futile attempt to answer a single question: Is this all there is?

  Now he had his answer.

  I was about to turn away, but something stopped me. I looked back at York, uncertain whether I was imagining it. I wasn’t.

  Something was wrong with his eyes.

  Careful to avoid the blood, I crouched beside the body. The sightless eyes were so bloodshot that they looked scalded. The skin around them was badly inflamed. So was his mouth. I leaned forward and flinched back as acrid fumes made my own eyes water.

  Darkroom chemicals.

  My heart was thumping as I tugged York’s body on to its back. The bloodstained hand with the knife flopped limply as it rolled over. I remembered how Gardner had kicked at it before checking his pulse, yet the knife remained clenched in the dead fist. Now I saw why.

  Clotted with drying blood, York’s fingers had been nailed to the handle.

  In that instant, everything fell into place. The agonized keening and York’s unintelligible screams; the frenzied slashes of the knife. He’d have been in agony, the toxic chemicals searing his mouth and all but blinding him as he’d tried to pull the nails from his hand. We’d seen only what we’d expected, the crazed attack of a madman, but York hadn’t been attacking us.

  He’d been begging for help.

  Oh, dear God. ‘Gardner!’ I shouted, starting to scramble to my feet.

  I heard him emerge from the chamber behind me. ‘For Christ’s sake, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  What happened next unfolded with the treacle-slow helplessness of a dream.

  The remains of the big mirror that York had broken was still fixed to the wall in front of me. In its fragmented surface I saw Gardner pass the plunge pool. As he did, one of the bodies in it moved. My voice died as it detached itself from the others and rose up behind him.

  Time started up again. I gave a shout of warning, but it came too late. There was a strangled cry, and I came to my feet to see Gardner struggling to pull free of the arm that was clamped vice-like round his throat.

  Chokehold, I thought, dumbly. Then the figure standing behind him shifted its grip, and I felt a shock of recognition as the dirty light from the shuttered windows fell on to its face.

  Kyle was breathing raggedly through his open mouth. The round features were the same, but this wasn’t the amiable young morgue assistant I remembered. His clothes and hair were clotted with fluid from the putrefying bodies, and his face had a deathly, consumptive pallor. But it was his eyes that were the worst. Without the usual smile to disguise them, they had the flat, empty look of something already dead.

  ‘Move and I’ll kill him!’ he panted, tightening his hold.

  Gardner was clawing at the constricting arm, his face congested, but he didn’t have the leverage to pry it loose. I felt a surge of hope as he dropped one hand to the gun at his belt. But he was already losing consciousness, his coordination failing as his brain was starved of blood and oxygen. As I watched his hand limply fell away.

  Stooping under the agent’s dead weight, Kyle jerked his head towards the treatment room where we’d found Sam.

  ‘In there!’

  I was still trying to force my mind to work. How long had Gardner said it would be before the first TBI agents arrived. Half an hour? How long ago was that? I couldn’t remember. Broken pieces of mirror crunched underfoot as I automatically took a step towards the small chamber. Then I saw the massage table, its leather straps open and waiting.

  I stopped.

  ‘Get in there! Now!’ Kyle roared. ‘I’ll kill him!’

  I had to moisten my mouth before I could answer. ‘You’re going to kill him anyway.’

  He stared at me as though I’d spoken a different language. The pallor of his face was even more noticeable now, shockingly white against the black stubble and bruised skin under his eyes. A greasy sheen of sweat filmed his skin like Vaseline. He was wearing what looked like a medic’s uniform, although it was so filthy it was hard to tell.

  It could easily have passed for a security guard’s.

  ‘Do it!’ Kyle yanked on Gardner’s neck, jerking the TBI agent like a doll. I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing, but if the pressure was sustained much longer th
ere’d be brain damage even if he survived.

  I bent and picked up a piece of broken mirror. It was long and thin, like a knife. Its edges gouged my palm as I gripped it tightly, hoping Kyle wouldn’t see my hand shaking.

  He watched me uneasily. ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Let him breathe.’

  He tried to sneer, but it was as brittle as the shard of mirror. ‘Think you can hurt me with that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But do you want to find out?’

  His tongue darted out over his lips. Kyle was a big man, fleshy and heavily built. Just like York. If he dropped Gardner and rushed me I doubted I’d have a chance. But his eyes kept going to the glass shard, and I saw the doubt in them.

  He slackened the chokehold enough to let Gardner draw a few rattling breaths, then tightened it again. I saw him flick a look at the doorway.

  ‘Just let him go and I promise I won’t try to stop you.’

  Kyle gave a wheezing laugh. ‘Stop me? You’re giving me your permission?’

  ‘His back-up’s going to be here any second. If you go now you might—’

  ‘And let you tell them who I am? You think I’m stupid?’

  He was a lot of things, but not that. Now what? I didn’t know. But I didn’t think he did either. He was sucking in breaths, stooped and flushed with the effort of supporting Gardner’s weight. From the corner of my eye I could see the gun on the agent’s belt. Kyle obviously hadn’t thought of it so far.

  If he did…

  Keep him talking. I gestured towards York’s body. ‘Did you enjoy it, mutilating him like that?’

  ‘You didn’t give me a choice.’

  ‘So he was just a diversion? You did that to him just so you could get away?’ I didn’t have to try to put contempt into my voice. ‘And it didn’t even work, did it? All that for nothing.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ The shout made him wince, as though in pain. He glared at the undertaker’s body. ‘Jesus Christ, do you have any idea how much time I spent on this? How much planning? This isn’t how it was supposed to be! York was my way out, my happy fucking ending! he’d have been found with Avery’s wife, some loser who’d committed suicide rather than be caught. End of story! I’d have left Knoxville afterwards, started out somewhere new, and now look! Goddammit, what a waste!’