The cut section was at the far end, where the gardens of Helen’s street butted onto those of the next street over. Just as dark and deserted. Which explained how they’d got in without anyone noticing. Have to hope they hadn’t got out the same way.
We slipped between the unchained sections, over the boundary wall, and into the back garden of the house next to Helen’s. Sticking as close to the building as possible for shelter. One more short wall and we were on Helen’s property.
The wind was stronger here, punching into my chest, trying to steal my legs out from underneath me. And oh, how the sea roared.
A huge chunk of the garden had already surrendered to the waves, leaving the far edge of the house sticking out into the void. Only by three or four foot, but still … Wouldn’t take much for the entire thing to go crashing over the edge.
Yeah, this was a really stupid idea.
Maybe we should keep an eye on the place instead? Hang back and wait to see if Gordon and Leah came out? Jump on them then?
And give up the cover of night, the element of surprise, and any chance of killing the pair of them. There’d be a police presence back here by seven, doubt whoever got the early shift would look the other way while we did what needed to be done.
So it was this, or nothing.
And with any luck, the house would stay in one piece till we’d got out of there.
Shifty pointed at the kitchen door, and I nodded.
He took Helen’s car keys, then worked his way through the bunch till one slid home into the lock and turned. We crept inside. Closed the door, nice and gentle, behind us.
Stood there, dripping on the linoleum. Trying not to breathe too loudly.
46
The outline of work surfaces and kitchen units lurked in the gloom, not enough light filtering in through the window to make out any detail. Breath a dark grey fog, cold biting at my wet skin.
All around us the house creaked and groaned in the wind. That sizzling hiss of rain smashing itself against the kitchen window.
I slipped the gun from my pocket, gloved fingertips exploring the metal above the handle, till the safety catch clicked off. Keeping my voice barely audible. ‘OK. We search each room, slow and careful.’
Shifty’s reply was equally quiet: ‘Why are they lurking in the dark if this isn’t a trap?’
Now that was a very good question.
‘Well … it’s what, half two in the morning? Maybe they’re asleep.’ In a house that could fall into the North Sea at any minute? Not exactly likely. ‘Look, just be careful, OK?’
I crept out of the kitchen into the hallway. It was even darker – not so much as a sliver of natural light to chisel shapes out of the blackness. Inching forwards, using the walking stick to find the edges of obstacles before I barged into them.
The first door opened on a smallish room with tiled walls, going by the way my scuffing feet echoed back at me. A rectangle of dark grey against the black was probably a bathroom window …
This was stupid. How were we supposed to search the place if we couldn’t see anything? ‘Shifty, where are you?’
His voice was a whisper at my back. ‘Here.’
‘Can you turn the torch down on your phone, or is it full pelt or nothing?’
‘Don’t know …’ Some fumbling noises, then a hard white light lanced out, pulling a circle of detail from Helen’s bathroom. Black and white tiles, a shower curtain with cartoon characters on it, a neat array of shampoo and conditioner bottles along the edge of a salmon-pink bathroom suite. Then the beam faded to a soft yellowish glow, and darkness reclaimed most of the room.
We tried the next door: a faded bedroom, the double bed rumpled and unmade. No sign of personal items or touches in here. Helen’s prison cell was probably more homely than this.
The room next to that was another, smaller, bedroom. But where Helen’s was bare, this one was festooned with posters – boybands and popstars I’d never heard of, for the most part, with the occasional kitten-and-inspirational-quote to break up the monotony. A row of kids’ and YA books. A wicker hamper overflowing with mildewed dirty washing. A single bed with a unicorn bedspread, the sheets cold and damp to the touch. Didn’t look as if anyone had stayed here for months.
So much for catching Gordon Smith and Leah MacNeil asleep.
That left the lounge.
I crept after Shifty, following the thin waxy beam of torchlight.
The multigym’s stainless-steel framework glinted in the dark, still huge and taking up a third of the room. The same ratty furniture lurking around it. The only thing different was the living room rug. It’d been draped over the top of Helen’s coffee table, exposing the edges of a trapdoor.
Bet all the houses round here had one. Oh, some homes might be bigger than others, some might be semidetached, some might have an attic conversion, but in the end they all shared the same DNA. And that DNA included genes for a basement …
Shifty whispered out a cloudy breath. ‘Sod.’ He pulled his shoulders in. ‘We gotta go down there, don’t we?’
‘Yeah. We do.’
He turned on the spot, sweeping the torch’s beam around the room again. ‘Be the perfect place for an ambush. Soon as we’re in the basement, the trapdoor’s nailed shut and we’re stuck there while the whole place collapses.’
Right on cue, the roof growled above our heads, followed by the rattling clatter of what was probably a roof tile coming loose and being swept away.
‘OK.’ I tightened my grip on the gun, took a deep breath, and nodded.
‘Off our bloody heads …’ Shifty bent down, grabbed the ring set into the trapdoor, and pulled. The thing hinged open with a Hammer-House-of-Horror creak. He pointed the torch beam, illuminating a steep flight of wooden steps. ‘Try and not get me killed, OK?’
‘Do my best.’ The steps moaned beneath my feet as I edged my way down into the darkness.
The musty scent of a long-abandoned room mingled with sour dampness and something sharp and metallic. The air tasted of it too.
Impossible to see anything in here, but swinging my walking stick from side to side drew a hollow thunk from something on either side. Cardboard boxes?
Could really do with a light down here.
Sod.
One barely functioning hand for the walking stick, one hand for the gun. How was I supposed to work the torch on Alice’s phone at the same time?
Unless …
I unzipped my jacket, put the .22 away, then started up the torch app on Alice’s phone. Slipped it into the top pocket of my blood-stained shirt. A good inch protruded from the top, letting LED light spill out onto stacks and stacks of sagging boxes. The gun came out to play again, my breath steaming out around my head, caught in the harsh white glow.
Everything the torch beam touched jumped into focus, but everything else was completely and utterly swallowed by the dark. Inky black and impenetrable. Where the light was bright enough to see by, the beam was no wider than a beachball, but anything more than six feet away stubbornly refused to emerge from the gloom.
Still, it was enough to get a feel for the place, and where Gordon Smith’s basement had been empty – except for his killing apparatus – Helen MacNeil’s was littered with the debris of three lives. Kids’ bikes rusted away alongside collapsed boxes of plastic toys. The remains of a teddy bear going mouldy where it poked out the top of a box full of vinyl records.
No point sneaking around now – if they didn’t know we were in here, they never would.
Deep breath. ‘GORDON SMITH! ARMED POLICE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!’
The only sound was my breath and the distant mourning gale.
Then Shifty’s voice hissed down from the living room. ‘Anything?’
Back to normal volume: ‘Don’t think they’re here.’
‘Bugger.’ His heavy feet thumped down the stairs. ‘We’re too late, then. It’s …’
When I turned, he was standing with one foot on th
e bottom step, chin up, nostrils flaring.
‘Can you smell that? Sort of … butcher’s shoppy.’
Which probably meant Gordon Smith and Leah MacNeil had got their hands on another victim. Shifty was right: we were too late.
‘BASTARD!’ Bellowing it out, eyes screwed shut, knees bent, walking stick and gun clenched in aching fists.
And now we had yet another crime scene to manage before the damn thing fell into the North Sea.
‘Great.’ Shifty scuffed a toe through the dust. ‘You want to call it in, or sod off out of it? Either way, they’re not here.’
The rubbish didn’t fill the entire basement, Helen had left a meandering path through the boxes. Tempting though it was to get the hell out of here, it meant we’d never know who they’d killed. More importantly, the family would never know what’d happened to their child / brother / sister / parent. So I hobbled along the path, taking my little ball of bright-white light with me. Past rows and rows of long-forgotten crap, the top surface of everything clarted in a thick layer of gritty brown dirt – probably drifted down from the floorboards upstairs.
The basement opened out at the final turn. Not into a wide-open space, but a hollow, not much bigger than a double bed.
I stopped where I was and stared.
The rear wall, the one closest to the devouring waves, the one that stuck about four feet out from the crumbling headland, had a body spread-eagled against it. Her arms were tied to the floor joists of the room above; legs more than shoulder-width apart, ankles tied to the barbell from Helen’s multigym. Head hanging forward, blood … everywhere.
‘Jesus …’
Strips of skin hung from long ragged wounds, showing off the dark glistening muscle beneath, the occasional flash of bone where they’d dug deeper. A wide pool of shining burgundy seeping across the concrete floor.
I stepped closer, and slow-motion ripples spread out from my boot.
David Quinn, back in Stirling, had been bad enough, but this was much, much worse.
A muffled rumbling shook the basement and fresh dust drifted down from the floor above, shining like dying stars in the torchlight.
Cut her down. Cut her down and get her out of here.
With what? They took Joseph’s cutthroat razor off you, remember?
‘Shifty, you got a knife?’
No answer.
‘Shifty!’
Still nothing.
I jammed the gun in my pocket, reached forward, took a handful of dyed-blonde hair and pulled her head up. Nothing but hollow sockets stared back at me, but there was no mistaking that heart-shaped face, the long sharp nose, or the broad forehead.
Just like her grandmother’s.
Leah MacNeil.
47
I huffed out a breath and stepped back, letting her chin fall against her chest again.
How could Smith …? She was like a granddaughter to him. OK, so Leah was a monster, but she didn’t deserve that.
‘Shifty?’
Another rumble, and this time the floor trembled beneath my feet, sending slow sticky ripples spreading across the bloody pool.
I turned, but there was no sign of him. Nothing but darkness where the torch’s beam couldn’t reach. ‘SHIFTY: STOP SODDING ABOUT!’
Maybe he’d done the sensible thing and buggered off out of here, before everything collapsed into the sea? Maybe that wasn’t a daft idea at—
Alice’s phone rang in my top pocket: David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. The ringtone she’d set so she’d know it was me calling.
Which could only mean one thing.
I pulled out her mobile and answered it. ‘Gordon Smith.’
‘Ah, Mr Henderson, I’m so glad to hear your voice again!’ It was little more than a whisper, barely audible over the creaks and groans of the storm-battered house. I turned the phone’s volume up full. ‘You’re not a man who likes to stay dead, I like that about you.’
‘You killed Leah.’
‘Yes, well …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Turns out you were right about that, so credit where it’s due. You tried to tell her, remember? But would she listen? Teenagers, eh?’ Putting on a singsong voice for, ‘What ya gonna do?’
Another rumble, and this time a sound like ice cracking on the surface of a very deep dark lake joined it. The torch hadn’t switched off as the call came through, so I held the phone in front of my face, swinging it around. That pool of blood had got a lot shallower around my trainers.
‘Where are you?’
‘You see, I know a lot of people look at someone my age and they think, “He can’t be any good with modern technology and stuff; dinosaurs were roaming the earth when he was a wee boy, for goodness’ sakes!” But you can’t be a Luddite and work in the theatre these days, it’s all electronics and software.’
That cracking noise sounded again.
I backed away from the end wall.
Actually, sod backing away, I turned and hurried through the maze of boxes and family crap. ‘She looked up to you like a grandfather, Gordon. She loved you!’
‘So I had a dig through your phone and discovered the tracker app. Did you know, if you agree to be traced, you automatically get to see where the phone tracing you is? It’s rather sweet, really. An exercise in trust and mutual surveillance.’ Still no louder than a whisper. ‘At first I thought you were this Alice woman, but then I saw you and your fat friend creeping into Helen’s house and I have to admit, it was quite the shocker. I could’ve sworn you were dead when we dropped you in that inspection pit. I clearly need to work on my garrotting skills.’
I turned the last corner, before the stairs, and stumbled to a halt.
‘Anyway, as you’ve come all this way, it would’ve been rude of me not to pop in and say hello.’
Shifty lay facedown on the concrete, one arm twisted beneath him, the other hand still clutching his collapsible baton. The back of his bald pink head was stained, wet scarlet.
‘And I’m sorry Leah couldn’t be with us – not in spirit anyway – but I simply couldn’t cope with her foul language any longer.’
I spun around, torch brushing the nearest boxes with its narrow beam of cold white light. ‘If you’ve killed Shifty, I’m going to tear you to pieces.’
‘So I gave Leah the starring role in her own production: A Delicate and Terrible Death. She was excellent, Mr Henderson, screamed like a professional. Her mother would’ve been so proud.’
I hunkered down beside Shifty, dropped my walking stick and felt for a pulse. Still there. As I stood, something glittered in the torchlight – halfway up the wooden steps to the trapdoor. Like a granite thermos flask with silver handles fixed to it.
The funeral urn from the barn. The one Gordon Smith had been talking to.
That’s why he was whispering down the phone at me: he was in the basement. I swapped the mobile into my bandaged hand and yanked the .22 out again.
‘Do you ever go to the pantomime, Mr Henderson? You should: it’s one of the finest theatrical traditions we have in this country, certainly the purest. People think it’s silly, with its dames and its principal boys and its call-and-response, but it has rules and conventions, traditions and truths that stretch back into antiquity. They connect us with the fairy tales our ancestors told as they cowered in their caves in the night.’
‘Where are you?’
‘After all, what is life if not a pantomime?’
I hung up and turned again, torch sweeping around like a lighthouse. The gun following it. ‘COME ON YOU BASTARD, LET’S SEE IF YOU’VE GOT THE BALLS!’
A laugh slithered out in the basement. ‘He’s behiiiiiiiiiiind you!’
48
Something hard and heavy cracked across my shoulders. I staggered forwards, stumbling over Shifty, the phone flying out of my ruined hand to bounce against the nearest boxes. Its torchlight swinging and tumbling – then thump, it hit the floor, beam shining straight up into the dusty air.
A line of sharp-edged g
rey whistled towards my head, shining bright as it passed through the LED beam – hooked, like a hockey stick, but longer. More solid looking. And coming in fast.
I got my arms up just in time for it to crack across them instead of my face. Sending me crashing over backwards against the stairs.
The gun hit the ground and skittered away, came to rest with a dull metallic clank.
‘Don’t you play shinty, Mr Henderson? It’s a great game. Very physical. Keeps you fit!’
Another whistling crack and the stick battered into my arms again, hot and numb at the same time, the muscles howling, bones creaking. Wooden steps groaning against my spine.
DO SOMETHING!
Smith loomed out of the darkness, pausing above Alice’s phone so the torch caught him from below. Lit like a monster in an ancient film – his lined face slashed with shadows, eyes glittering in the hollow of their sockets, Santa beard turned into something a lot less wholesome. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have more time, Mr Henderson, I’d love to stay and play, but the house is hungry.’
Another rumble, and this time the cracking noise didn’t stop, it built and grew, thin and cold, snapping and pinging. Concrete and brick giving way, then: WHOOOOOM …
The back wall disappeared. One moment everything beyond the torch’s beam was utter darkness, and the next a pale grey light snarled into the basement – borne on the wings of a howling wind. Sucking the air from the room, sending it spiralling out into the night, as what was left of Leah MacNeil vanished into the North Sea.
Waves booming and roaring right outside that ragged patch of grey.
Gordon Smith leered in his DIY monster-light. As if he wasn’t already horrific enough. ‘Time to say goodnight, children.’ Edging closer, shinty stick in one hand, Joseph’s cutthroat razor in the other.
I scrabbled backwards, up the bottom couple of steps. And something bumped against my shoulder. Something about the size of a thermos flask with silver handles. Cold and smooth against my palm as I grabbed it. ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
‘That’s the spirit!’ The razor’s blade glinted in the narrow torch beam. ‘OH YES IT IS!’ Lunging for me, cutthroat sizzling through the angry air.
The Coffinmaker's Garden Page 44