The Mayfly: The chilling thriller that will get under your skin

by James Hazel

  Priest stuffed the sock into the attendant’s mouth, tying a shoelace around his head to keep it in place. Then he grabbed him by the chin, forcing him to meet his gaze:

  ‘The odds are even. But if you’re lying about the wine cellar, I’ll know where to find you.’

  *

  Jessica walked out of the double doors past a small gathering of hooded figures talking in low murmurs. One of them looked over. Jessica ignored them and headed left along the corridor. She had no idea where she was going, but she didn’t dare go back into the same room as McEwen. Good job the alcohol had clouded his judgement.

  When she had got far enough away from the party and the sounds of people enjoying themselves had started to fade, she removed the hood. Her face was too hot and it was difficult to breath properly. Her hair was a mess. People paid tens of thousands of pounds to be here?

  She rounded another corner, more certain now of where she was. An idea had started to take hold; a sense that this house wasn’t as unfamiliar as she had originally supposed. At first, she had dismissed the feeling as déjà vu – this was the same corridor lined with old paintings and thick, velvety wallpaper that you would see in any number of grand houses open to the public.

  But this feeling was more than that.

  She stopped at a door. Looked at it carefully. Behind this, there’s a staircase leading down. She was sure of it. She tried the handle, pushed open the door. In front of her, wooden stairs disappeared into a gloomy space below. Jessica swallowed. A sensation of uneasiness washed over her. She knew this house. She recognised the layout.

  Slowly, she descended into the darkness.

  She fumbled for a light switch. At the bottom of the staircase, another oil painting loomed over her. A mother holding a baby clad in ridiculous frills. Time had worn the paint away so that only the mother’s face remained clearly visible. A pale, melancholy stain on a black canvas.

  A memory from her childhood surfaced: that of a six-year-old girl who had played in the large room that lay beyond this one, through a set of double doors.

  A door. An insect carved into the top panel.

  Jessica froze. This was not déjà vu. She had been here before.

  *

  Priest couldn’t risk going back for Jessica. A premium seat holder who gave up such a prized place would attract the wrong sort of attention. She would have to look after herself now: there was twenty-two minutes left by his count.

  He kept close to the walls, where the floorboards creaked less, moving as quickly as he dared down another hallway before he arrived at an iron spiral staircase. It only went upwards. He stepped back, infuriated.

  He had to focus. Lift the fog. There was some detail he was missing, a blurred edge he needed to straighten. What is it? Think!

  He tried to rearrange all the details he had collected, strip them apart and put them back together again. The photograph of Miles Ellinder’s ritualised death, Sandra Barnsdale’s Mayfly list, Bertie Ruck’s bitterness, Eva Miller’s will.

  His counter-terrorist contact Giles had said something almost offhandedly during their last conversation. What was it? ‘The devil’s in the detail, Priest.’

  He reached for his phone and brought up the post-mortem report Giles had sent him. Then the Mayfly list. He typed a name in Search. Then . . . Yes, it matched. Of course!

  Priest knew what he needed to do. He looked right to a set of double doors. A way through . . .

  Removing his hood, he tossed it in a plant pot and smoothed his ruffled hair. He turned through the doors, following the distant sound of clattering and the rumble of talk. Eventually, he came to another pair of doors. They swung open in front of him and he almost collided with a waiter who only just managed to prevent a tray of canapés crashing to the floor.

  ‘Be careful!’ the waiter cried.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Priest, sliding past clumsily but whipping away the white cloth dangling from the waiter’s trousers and stuffing it into his own back pocket.

  In the kitchen, food was being prepared. The smell of fish was overpowering. Lemon sole, if he wasn’t mistaken. Where this whole sorry affair started.

  ‘Be careful not to get the oil too hot,’ he commented to one of the chefs who was steering a frying pan around the hob. ‘It burns easily.’

  ‘Who are you?’ the head chef shouted across the silver range. He was a tall man with frown lines as deep as trenches across his face.

  ‘Mr Ruck has requested two bottles of the Château Mouton Rothschild,’ Priest replied.

  The chef clearly sensed something was amiss; this was a waiter he had never seen before. But Priest was gambling on the human instinct to avoid alarming conclusions when faced with uncertainty. It was a principle his father had taught him.

  ‘We don’t have two bottles of that,’ the head chef said curtly.

  ‘Then something similar?’ Priest waited.

  ‘Fine. Marco, you go.’ The chef nodded to a waiter standing over by the door. The man had a military haircut, his shoulders were broad and his biceps bulged from beneath his black suit.

  Twenty minutes, maybe less.

  Marco led Priest down a series of staircases and hallways. He walked quickly but every step represented another few moments of lost time. Priest had kept track of how long he had left before the lecture began, almost to the second. He doubted it was going to be enough.

  As they rounded a corner, Marco stopped so suddenly that Priest almost ran into the back of him.

  ‘What?’ Priest said, trying to disguise his panic.

  ‘You don’t work here.’

  Priest’s stomach lurched. He had managed to negotiate past the head chef, but not the bloody bottle washer.

  ‘You don’t work here,’ Marco repeated.

  Priest braced himself.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the guy that’s going to break your neck if you don’t do what I say.’

  Marco nodded, as if he already knew. Priest felt uneasy – something wasn’t right.

  ‘You’re here for the girls?’

  Priest did a double-take. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did someone tell you they’re in the wine cellar?’

  Priest hesitated. Marco looked totally unfazed. Priest said nothing.

  ‘They’re trained to say they’re in the wine cellar. If, you know, someone breaks in undercover,’ Marco said.

  Priest thought about the attendant tied to the sink upstairs. It was conceivable he had lied but Priest had had nothing else to go on. Wait -–

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Priest.

  Marco looked at Priest for a moment and something passed between them. Then he turned back the way they had come.

  ‘Hey –’ Priest grabbed him by the arm.

  ‘Down there,’ Marco nodded to a door on the left. ‘That leads to the great hall. Go across it to the other side. There’s a set of steps leading to a cell. The girls are there. But you’ll need to be quick. I’ll tell the boss you got the wine and you’re going to deliver it now.’

  Priest turned to the door. It was marked – like a gang tag – with the outline of a black insect with long wings.

  When he looked back, Marco had vanished.

  51

  The great hall of the House of Mayfly was circular, with six giant stone pillars supporting a domed ceiling. The only illumination was provided by the moonlight that filtered through thin windows cut into the base of the dome and a series of dim, artificial lights set around the edge of the room.

  On the far side, the waiter had told him that there was a door leading to a cell where he would find Georgie and Hayley, but the room was occupied. Priest stopped short.

  In the centre stood a round table and twelve seats. In one of the seats a figure sat with its back to Priest. The noise of the door opening resonated round the bare walls, but the figure in the centre did not stir.

  On the far side of the room stood another figure, handgun trained on Priest. His
face was hidden behind a white hood, but Priest recognised the masked man who had invaded his family home. He nodded at Priest and gestured with the gun to a high-backed chair in the corner. Priest sat down. For the first time in days, his head felt clear, a strange sense of peace had descended on him. This is the end. The final solution.

  Another door close by, hidden by the gloom, opened. Nobody moved. Jessica took a few cautious steps forward. Her eyes darted around, taking everything in – the giant table, the masked man on the other side, Priest sitting in the corner, the sombre figure staring ahead.

  ‘What is this?’ Her voice shook but whether it was from fear or anger Priest couldn’t be sure. Like him, she had removed her hood.

  The sight of her panicked face looking at him expectantly was too much to bear. Priest looked away. He knew what was to come, what she was going to see unfold. The betrayal would be unforgivable.

  The figure at the table rose slowly, chair legs scraping across the marble floor. The noise was amplified tenfold in the cavernous room.

  Jessica stopped dead.

  ‘Jessica,’ the figure said.

  For a moment, nobody moved.

  Lucia Ellinder turned and faced her daughter. At the Dower House, Priest had met a fragile, ghostlike woman, whose meekness was as pathetic as it was pitiful. This, in contrast, was a woman at the height of her powers.

  ‘What – what are you doing here?’ Jessica stammered in shock.

  Lucia Ellinder smiled. ‘In a sense, I have always been here.’

  ‘But . . . Daddy . . .’

  ‘Is very ill, dear. Very ill. But we soldier on, don’t we?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you do, Jessica. You do understand.’

  Jessica looked at Priest. Her face had changed from one of confusion to defiance. Again, he struggled to hold her gaze.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jessica,’ he said. ‘She’s the one. The Mayfly.’

  ‘You seem unsurprised, Mr Priest.’ Lucia Ellinder turned towards him. She was almost the same height as Priest and presented a commanding figure, in a plain black gown with a high neck line and white frills around the wrists. Her stare made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  ‘I knew it was you,’ Priest said simply.

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘You’re . . .?’ Jessica spoke so quietly it didn’t sound like her voice.

  ‘Oh, come on, Jessica!’ Lucia shouted. It was a tone Priest suspected Jessica hadn’t heard often. She stepped back a few paces in surprise.

  ‘But of course!’ Lucia’s tone was bitter. ‘How could it be me? Your pathetic mother? For whom you have not an ounce of respect!’

  Jessica stepped back in shock. ‘Mummy, I –’

  ‘Shut up! I do not resent you for it, Jessica. Why should you have known? Your father was such a great man, and I was but a small part of his long shadow. Or so he thought.’

  ‘But – he loves you . . .’

  ‘Oh, how feeble! Do you really think, child, that marriages amongst the privileged are founded on such ridiculous notions? Your father no more loved me than he loved his cars.’ She waved her hand in dismissal. ‘Now –’ She turned to Priest. ‘I’m very interested in hearing the conclusions to your investigations. My family did, after all, pledge to pay for your services. Perhaps we should see if we have value for money?’

  ‘You did,’ Priest agreed. ‘But of course I was retained to find out what happened to Miles. And you knew all along, didn’t you?’

  Jessica opened her mouth but no words came out.

  ‘Well, come on then, Mr Priest,’ Lucia Ellinder taunted. ‘Jessica deserves the truth, don’t you think?’

  Priest took a moment to consider this. Making him tell the story was all part of the show; it had been meticulously planned. At the back of the room, the hooded observer shifted his weight from foot to foot. He had not moved from his position since Priest had entered the room. He had a painful sense of foreboding: this was the moment before judgement was passed.

  He tried clearing his throat but something was stuck there. The air in the room was stagnant, oppressive. A smell familiar to him from his early police work: death and decay.

  He regained his composure.

  ‘There was once a woman called Eva Miller,’ he said slowly. ‘She was a typist, a stenographer of sorts, during the war, assigned to an intelligence officer in the murky aftermath of VE Day. She was assigned to Operation Mayfly, the British government’s dirty secret. In the days that followed the war, Europe looked about its ravaged lands for answers. It wanted to know why. The Holocaust was the greatest single act of ethnic cleansing ever to have taken place and yet nobody understood what lay behind the Nazi obsession with death on such a massive and focused scale.

  ‘Eva Miller was one of those unfortunate people who was exposed to that dark world at a very young age. It corrupted her. Wove its way under her skin. She learnt the thrill of fear and the value of that thrill. She was the one who started the chain of events that eventually led to this evil. She was the first Mayfly.

  ‘Over time, Eva built up a network. A unique club, the members of which may have had differing motivations for their participation but who all shared a common interest – they wanted to see the work of the Nazi doctors continued. The Allies may have thought the human experimentation that took place in those concentration camps was consigned to history – a tear in the fabric of normality – but it was something far more significant to those twisted minds. Something of value. And they came in significant numbers waving their cash at Eva to witness it.

  ‘But a secret network rarely remains secret for ever. The Attorney General Sir Philip Wren established a task force to investigate the activities of the Mayfly. You threatened his family to pressurise him into calling the investigation off and that was working, until Sandra Barnsdale sent him the list of Mayfly names. You found out about that; not hard, if you have people in the right places. So you gave Wren an ultimatum: hand over the names, or you would take his daughter. How am I doing so far?’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Lucia said. ‘Perhaps not a complete waste of money after all.’

  ‘The problem was that by then Wren had already sent the flash drive to me. That’s what Miles discovered. So Wren had nothing left to bargain with except the name of the person who he sent the data to. Me. He gave you that, but you took Hayley anyway.’

  ‘Wren had been a thorn in our side for a long time. He needed to be taught a lesson.’

  ‘But then you still had to recover the data.’

  ‘It was very upsetting to learn that our records had been compromised.’

  ‘So you sent Miles to reclaim it from me.’

  ‘What?’ Jessica broke in. ‘You sent Miles?’

  ‘Of course she did,’ said Priest, getting up from the chair.

  ‘Indeed,’ Lucia confirmed. ‘After Miles failed initially, we tried to get the data back from you via Hayley – given her connection to you – but she turned out to be quite useless.’

  ‘Charlie . . .’ Jessica choked on her words. There were tears in her eyes and her voice, fragile, barely audible in the great hall, seemed to have lost all its grit. ‘Charlie, what are you saying?’ Her eyes were fixed on her mother.

  Priest ignored her. He had to get to the end of this. Time was short. ‘And how does Eva fit into all of this?’ he asked.

  Lucia Ellinder smiled again. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jessica,’ Priest said gently.

  ‘What?’ she stammered. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Eva Miller is your grandmother.’

  Jessica didn’t move.

  ‘Eva Miller and Bertie Ruck had a child, Jessica,’ Priest said. ‘Ruck didn’t want to expose Eva, not because his name was on the list, but because he knew their daughter had taken over her mother’s role. You saw the picture on Ruck’s bedside table and you recognised the family resemblance, didn’t you? Lucia is the daughter of Eva
and Bertie.’ Priest looked at Jessica. He was worried. The clarity that had descended upon him when he’d first entered the great hall was beginning to dissipate. The dark veil had returned. Not now, please God, not now. Not with only ten minutes left . . .

  Jessica broke the silence. ‘You brought me here.’ She addressed her mother. ‘To this house. When I was a child, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucia, her eyes lighting up. ‘Yes, Jessica. You remember!’

  ‘I remember this house and this hall. You said it was our legacy. Our family’s gift to the world.’

  ‘I brought you here to show you. You played, over there by the table.’

  ‘You lied,’ Jessica cried. ‘This is no gift. It’s poison. You’re poison!’

  ‘You cannot escape your destiny, Jessica.’

  ‘You’re sick, Mother. You need help . . .’ Jessica tailed off as if something had occurred to her. ‘You said Miles failed. Did you kill him?’

  Lucia lowered her hands slowly, carefully, and sat back down at the table, turning her back on them both.

  ‘She didn’t kill Miles, Jessica,’ said Priest. Come on. He fought to keep himself in the present, pinched the end of his nose hard. Come on! Here and now. The pain grounded him, but for how long?

  Nine minutes.

  Jessica shot her head around and he felt her fierce eyes bore into him again.

  ‘Then who in God’s name did?’ she whispered.

  ‘No one.’ Priest let the words bounce off the stone like a ricocheting bullet.

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, no one?’

  ‘Miles is still alive.’ Priest nodded in the direction of the hooded figure. ‘He’s standing over there.’

  The figure had stood stock still throughout the proceedings, arms folded, chest rising and falling with slow, rhythmic breaths. Now, he moved, slowly at first, peeling away the hood that covered his face and letting it fall to the floor beside him.

  Jessica gasped, staggered backwards, and grasped at a pillar for support.

  ‘Hello, Miles,’ said Priest.

  Miles Ellinder smiled broadly, a row of teeth spreading across his face. He looked better groomed than he had the night he’d threatened Priest with the drill. His dark hair was clean, swept back; his eyes were pinpricks, barely visible from this distance. There was something reptilian about them, Priest thought: dead eyes. He thought back to the Bagman. He hadn’t made the connection quickly enough.