by Rohan Gavin
Then his secure phone rang and he glanced at the screen: Alan Knightley. He swiftly placed one of his exceptionally large hands over the display so as not to alert Fiona, who was sitting across from him with her legs neatly crossed.
‘Sorry, Fifi . . . It’s the office.’
‘I understand,’ she replied.
Bill glanced at his huge coat and homburg hat, which were draped over a chair nearby, and hoped he wouldn’t have to put them on again quite yet – perhaps not until taking a walk of shame to his waiting Ford saloon. Casting these thoughts aside, Bill palmed the phone and raised it to his ear.
‘Uncle Bill ’ere,’ he grunted. ‘Aye. Aye. Aye-aye . . . Aye.’ He lowered the phone, looking crestfallen. ‘As I suspected, Fifi. I’ve been called away on urgent business.’
‘What a shame,’ she purred. ‘I thought you might stay for dessert . . .’
‘Well, I . . .’ Bill mumbled. If they’d consumed chocolate digestives for their main course, he could only imagine what she had in store for dessert.
‘I was just going to pop upstairs,’ she added, ‘and slip into something more . . . comfortable.’
Bill’s cheeks inflated involuntarily. ‘Christ on a bike, zarrafakt.’
‘Are you all right, Monty?’
‘Nae problem, Fifi,’ he said, regulating his breathing. ‘One of mah men . . . is waiting . . . in a car ootside the gate. They’ll make sure yoo’re perfectly safe.’ He scooped up his heavy coat and hat and headed for the door, feeling positively woozy.
‘Wait . . .’
She grabbed Bill’s meaty arm and drew him into a lingering kiss on the lips.
‘Until we meet again,’ she whispered.
‘Mammy . . .’ Bill wheezed.
‘Sweet dreams,’ she responded and sent him on his way.
‘Aye.’ Bill backed out of the doorway, doffing his hat and nearly tripping backwards over Fiona’s Hunter boot collection. ‘Cheerio for nou.’ He half fell on to the gravel driveway as she closed the door behind him.
Bill straightened himself out, hoisted on his coat and hat and found himself all alone. The electric gates whirred open, ushering him out. He marched indignantly through them and scanned the street for the Ford saloon, feeling the sobering effects of the cold.
Behind him, the Knightleys emerged from the shadows, giving him a start.
‘Aye mah auntie!’
‘It’s OK, Bill,’ whispered Knightley, moving him out of sight. ‘We had to get you out of there to begin the next phase of the operation.’
‘What?’
‘Moby Dick’s parked just round the corner,’ added Darkus, holding Wilbur next to him on a short lead attached to the K-9 tactical vest. ‘They’re watching the building.’
‘What operation . . . ?’ asked Bill, still trying to regain his senses.
Darkus took out his secure phone, opened the email from Tilly and tapped on the link. An activity wheel revolved on the screen, as the signal was sent.
‘OK. Let’s hope she doesn’t disappoint,’ Darkus murmured.
He glanced up at the security camera pointing down on the gate. Its red light winked once, then went black. Darkus approached the biometric fingerprint sensor by the intercom. He gently pressed his forefinger against the pad and it illuminated green. The electric gates quietly whirred open, granting them access. Darkus led Wilbur through the gates and on to the driveway.
Knightley gave Bill an earpiece and put one in his own ear also. Then he handed the Scotsman a brown paper bag filled with coffee beans.
‘Would ye mind tellin’ me what’s going on?’ Bill demanded.
‘Ask him,’ said Knightley, nodding towards his son.
‘Dad and I are carrying them too,’ explained Darkus. ‘It’s to put our opponents off the scent.’
Darkus and Wilbur led the way, taking cover behind a tree and surveying the front of the Gothic-looking house. Knightley and Bill huddled behind them. A light flicked on in a second-floor bedroom surrounded by dense ivy and wisteria branches. Fiona entered the lit bedroom and quickly closed the thin voile curtains. Her silhouette moved casually back and forth across the room.
‘All right, Bill, it’s simple. Don’t let her out of your sight,’ said Darkus. ‘We’ll be in radio contact at all times. If she leaves that room, you must let us know immediately.’
‘I cannae see anything from doon here,’ complained Bill.
‘Then go a little higher,’ said Darkus, pointing at a drainpipe leading straight up past the bedroom window.
‘Aye, and then yer bum fell aff,’ blurted Bill, indicating that he thought Darkus was joking.
‘It’ll give you a bird’s-eye view,’ agreed Knightley.
The Scotsman raised his eyebrows. ‘This feels wrong,’ he muttered, then ambled off towards the drainpipe. ‘I could ne’er live with mah self.’
Bill grabbed hold of the drainpipe, then positioned his orthopaedic loafers on either side of it. He started breathing heavily, similar to a champion weightlifter prior to a raise. He tested his weight on the fittings, then miraculously began shuffling up the pipe at a surprising rate of speed.
The ivy and wisteria branches shook violently as he crawled up the side of the house, looking like he was threatening to pull the entire wall down.
Fiona walked to her window and peered between the curtains.
‘Hold on, Bill –’ Knightley whispered into his earpiece, as he and Darkus watched unseen from the shadows.
Fiona looked around, finding nothing of note, then left the window again.
‘All right, Bill. Proceed,’ instructed Knightley.
Bill continued his shuddering ascent, leaving a growing pile of leaves on the ground below him.
‘We don’t have much time,’ said Darkus and led his father briskly towards the front door of the house.
Wilbur whined anxiously, sniffing the air.
Knightley stopped his son’s arm. ‘OK. But would you mind telling me exactly what’s afoot here?’
‘It’s too early to say –’
‘Ah-ah,’ snapped Knightley. ‘I think it’s precisely the right time to say.’
‘OK,’ conceded Darkus. ‘On this rare occasion, you and I are in agreement. The lunar cycle does affect the tides, the elements, possibly even people’s emotions. Many things in fact. And I fear we will witness a terrifying transformation of some kind before the full moon.’
His father glanced up at the bedroom window. ‘You’re not telling me Fiona Connelly is a werewolf . . . ?’ demanded Knightley. ‘You’re more certifiable than I am.’
But Darkus had already returned to his singular state of mind, focusing only on the facts. ‘First I need to take a closer look at the basement.’
He approached the fingerprint sensor by the front door and gently pressed his finger against the pad. Again it lit up green and the lock disengaged.
Darkus gently opened the door as Wilbur and Knightley stayed in single file behind him. The light of the doorway fanned out over a sea of sleeping dogs. Fiona’s four-legged family were all stretched out on the floor, snoring.
‘Remember the saying?’ Darkus whispered.
‘Don’t worry . . . I’ll let them lie,’ answered Knightley, gently closing the front door behind them.
Wilbur continued sniffing the air, detecting smells that he couldn’t immediately identify.
The trio crept across the entrance hall, past the slumbering canines and towards the door under the stairs that led to the basement.
Meanwhile, Bill was clambering up towards the prize, wincing as the ivy brushed against his face. A large pile of leaves and debris had collected on the ground below him, but he dared not look down for fear of losing his nerve. The light of the bedroom window shone like the pearly gates just above his head.
A spider’s web stretched across his face, catching on the brim of his hat, and he shook his head violently to try to untangle himself. A large, hairy spider crossed the web, arriving at Bill’s n
ose. Bill huffed and puffed, attempting to dislodge it, but it wouldn’t move. Bill continued upwards, now drenched in sweat and with a spider on his nose, then swung his prodigious leg on to the ledge of the window, gracefully balancing himself in mid-air and allowing his right hand freedom to pinch the spider by its hind legs and cast it off into space, web and all. As Bill watched it fall, he saw the view below him, which was so far down that the perspective appeared to shift and elongate before his eyes.
Bill cursed and grabbed hold of the drainpipe with both hands, returning his attention to the window. Just at that moment, Fiona passed by the curtains, which she’d closed in a hurry a few minutes earlier, inadvertently leaving a convenient centimetre gap through which Bill could now observe her.
‘OK, Alan,’ he breathed into the earpiece. ‘I have the birdie in mah sights.’
Fiona was relaxing in her floral wallpapered boudoir and had already removed her tweed jacket and was currently shuffling out of her tweed skirt.
‘Crikey . . .’ Bill murmured as the large piece of fabric flopped to the floor, along with its oversized safety pin, leaving Fiona wearing only a blouse and some very thick, winter tights.
Bill’s hands went clammy and he had to wipe them one by one on the sleeves of his coat, in order to keep from sliding down the pipe. His eyes misty with perspiration, he followed orders and continued to watch.
As Darkus, Knightley and Wilbur crept down the carpeted staircase to the basement, Darkus explained himself to his dad in a whisper.
‘During our site visit, several things caught my attention that I couldn’t rationally explain. The soundproofing in the basement. The reinforced glass. The two treadmills.’
Darkus held up his hand to indicate a halt, as they heard the distant whirring of machines of some kind.
They reached a white corridor that led from the staircase to the private gym. Wilbur bobbed his snout around, sensing something, then he instantly sat down: to signal danger.
Darkus slowly moved along the corridor towards a white door with a small perspex window in it.
The mechanical whirring got louder and louder as he approached.
Knightley watched nervously as his son sidled up to the window and peered inside. Darkus spotted the source of the noise through the glass: the two treadmills were running at almost maximum speed with two fans providing air circulation. But the athletes on the running machines weren’t human.
Two Rottweilers were galloping at full pelt, their muscles straining and tensing with the exertion, drool cascading and threading from their mouths. In front of the treadmills were two strings dangling from the ceiling of the gym. Both strings had objects tied to the end of them.
One of them was Darkus’s lost hat.
The other was the piece of tweed from his father’s jacket.
Both were hung like bait for the dogs to learn the scent. The hounds ran relentlessly towards their prey, despite not gaining any distance.
Darkus flinched, noticing the two hoodies from Victoria Station reclined on chairs behind the treadmills, both preoccupied with their smartphones. Lined up next to them were the other four Rottweilers, confined in locked cages.
Darkus turned back to his dad and used a hand signal to indicate: hostiles inside. Knightley nodded then retreated, hearing Bill’s voice coming through the earpiece.
Three floors above, Uncle Bill had managed to wedge himself between the drainpipe and the window ledge, as if he was settling into the best seat in the house. He unconsciously reached in his coat pocket and took out a coffee bean which he popped in his mouth and bit down on with a crunch.
‘She appears tae be getting undressed, Alan,’ he panted into his earpiece.
Through the gap in the curtains, Fiona could be seen crossing the boudoir to sit at her dressing table with a large mirror in its centre. She sat perfectly upright and began tracing her fingers over the contours of her face, then took several cleansing wipes and began wiping away her blusher.
Strangely, she then began to speak. Uncle Bill placed his ear close to the window to try to hear exactly what she was saying, but could only make out snippets.
‘Yes. Even a bad dog like you . . .’ she appeared to say, then paused. ‘Don’t you take that tone with me,’ she replied fiercely.
Bill adjusted his position to stare more closely through the gap and saw from the reflection in the mirror that there was no one else in the room. She was completely alone.
‘She appears tae be talking to herself . . .’ whispered Bill into the earpiece.
Fiona wagged her finger at the mirror, then stood up abruptly, causing Bill to flinch. She then crossed the room again and casually began unbuttoning her blouse.
‘O-oh. The clothes are comin’ aff again,’ reported Bill.
Fiona left her blouse half undone and started hauling off her winter tights, hopping on one sturdy leg.
‘She’s takin’ her tights aff . . . Aye-aye-aye . . .’ Bill whispered.
Fiona stepped out of her tights, revealing two very hairy legs.
‘Alan, she’s . . . hairy,’ said Bill, unsure whether this was a plus or not.
Fiona then completely removed her blouse and let it drop to the carpet . . . revealing a bizarre, padded outfit underneath with a heavy-duty zip running up from the waist to the armpit.
Bill rubbed his eyes, not quite believing what he was seeing.
‘Haud on . . . She’s . . .’
In one quick movement, Fiona unzipped the layer of padding and stepped clean out of the outfit to reveal an extremely hairy – and obviously male – torso.
Bill lurched violently, nearly falling backwards off the ledge.
‘She’s a he!’
‘What?’ Alan’s surprise could be heard through the earpiece.
‘Fiona’ then removed her granny spectacles, her coloured contact lenses and her wig, then roughly tugged on her prosthetic nose, which stretched and snapped off to reveal her true, brutish face.
‘She’s . . .’ Bill struggled to mouth the words. ‘She’s Barabas King.’
‘Extraordinary,’ responded Knightley.
Bill tried to breathe but found his lower lip wobbling. ‘I feel verra hurt and confused right nou.’
Free from the confines of ‘Fiona’, Barabas puffed up his furry chest and marched back to the mirror, shouting at it so loudly that Bill nearly fell off again.
‘I told you to stop interfering, Fiona!’ King snarled at his reflection, then felt something in his mouth, and remembered the set of gummy dentures, which he extracted to reveal his sharpened fangs. ‘You’re always trying to trip me up –’ King suddenly punched the mirror, shattering it to pieces. He licked the blood from his hand and pointed an accusing finger at the dressing table. ‘And don’t come back, ya follow me?!’
Bill hung on to the drainpipe, his eyes wide and his cheeks palpitating.
‘Alan?’ he whispered desperately. ‘I’m scared.’
Knightley responded into his earpiece from the basement. ‘Darkus wants you to hold your position.’
‘Aye, well, it’s either tha’ or fall aff,’ Bill wheezed.
Knightley turned to his son, looking betrayed.
‘Mind telling me how long you’ve known Fiona and Barabas King are the same person?’
‘They’re not the same person,’ replied Darkus. ‘They’re two separate personalities inhabiting the same brain. King suffers from “split personality disorder”. Fiona and King have been trying to outwit each other. One is continually trying to get rid of the other. They’re at war for control of his mind.’
‘How, Darkus?’ his father insisted. ‘How did you know?’
‘The indentation on Fiona’s side of the mattress topper was not consistent with a female. The contour was wrong, the shoulders were too pronounced, the hips too modest.’
‘I see,’ said Knightley.
‘That and the partial footprint in her bathroom. It was clearly a man’s foot, although she claimed not to have had
any bedfellows. And the time she allegedly spent qualifying in Kenya, it coincided exactly with the years King spent in psychiatric institutions. That’s where “Fiona Connelly” was created. She’s the civilised side of Barabas. The side that wants to be good. An upstanding member of society. A good dog.’
‘Whereas the real Barabas is bad to the bone.’
Darkus nodded. ‘Fiona lives by the rule of law. Barabas lives by the law of the jungle. Which brings me to my next observation.’
‘Whatever next . . .’ said Knightley, caught between admiration and dread.
‘The partial footprint in the bathroom shared some disturbing similarities with the paw print we found in the clearing – and in the back garden.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I never said I had a complete theory,’ admitted Darkus.
They were interrupted by a single bark from the gym. Followed by another and another. Suddenly, the basement erupted into a cacophony of furious barks as the two Rottweilers leaped off the treadmills and raced to the perspex window, jumping up and covering it in slobber.
‘They’ve got the scent,’ said Darkus, rummaging urgently in his jacket pocket. ‘Our scent.’
Wilbur started barking back ferociously, trying to ward them off. The hoodies could be heard shouting, trying to work out what was going on.
One of the Rottweilers reared back on its hind legs, using its front paw to depress the metal handle and open the door. Then both dogs exploded out of the gym and raced up the corridor side by side towards them, preparing to leap.
Knightley grabbed his son, ready to run, but Darkus finished inserting a pair of earplugs into Wilbur’s bat-like ears, then held up the ultrasonic dog whistle and pressed the button.
The dogs appeared to freeze in mid-air, then collided with each other and fell in a heap, writhing on the floor. Upstairs, the entire family of dogs woke up, whining and crying.
In the bedroom, Barabas jolted, putting a hand to his ear in pain. He could hear the ultrasonic frequency as well. Then he whipped his hand out in rage, clearing the dressing table of its contents, sending perfume bottles, cleansers and moisturisers clattering to the floor.