Firetrap

by David Hodges

  Despite the cold, she was smiling as she reached into her pocket for another extra-strong mint, but her smile froze like the muscles in her legs, first because she discovered that she had run out of mints and second because she had detected the approach of a slow-running engine.

  Ordinarily, she would have taken little notice of the vehicle, merely shrunk back into the shadows beside the wheelie-bins until it had passed, but when she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that it was actually creeping along the road towards her without any lights. Her curiosity now well aroused, she watched from a crouched position as the car pulled up on the opposite side of the road just a few yards beyond the entrance to the cul-de-sac.

  Seconds later the driver, dressed in an anorak and woolly hat, climbed out into the night air and, shutting the door carefully behind them, pointed what was obviously an infra-red central door-locking device at the vehicle. Then, as the car’s indicators flashed twice, the dark figure turned and walked briskly across the road towards the mouth of the cul-de-sac, pausing briefly a few feet from where Callow crouched to glance quickly in both directions. For one agonizing second Callow feared she had been spotted and her hand closed on the warrant card in her pocket in readiness for the anticipated challenge. That challenge never came, but for an instant the face of the new arrival was clearly visible in the moonlight and the DCI’s jaw practically hit the pavement when she saw who it was. Before she could say or do anything, however, the other had moved off again, turning into the cul-de-sac and stopping before the undertaker’s gates. There was a clinking sound as a set of keys was apparently produced and then the figure was gone, ducking through the small pedestrian door in the right-hand gate and closing it to behind them.

  Callow was in shock. She could hardly believe what she had just seen – and, more importantly, who. She could not have imagined anyone less likely to be slipping into the back of a local undertaker’s at this time of the night than the individual in question, yet that is exactly what they had just done – and used a key to gain entry too, which suggested that they had to be on pretty good speaking terms with the undertaker himself. First Hamblin scaling the wall and now this. What on earth was going on? Suddenly what had started out as a simple tailing job had turned into something a lot more complicated and Callow’s curiosity, stimulated by years of detective work, was at fever-pitch. She had to satisfy the twitch in her nose and get to the bottom of it all, whether that was against the rules or not.

  Quitting her hiding-place, she followed the wall closely all the way round to the double gates, wondering grimly what one of the local residents might think of her antics if they happened to be looking out of the front window of one of the terraced houses opposite. To her surprise, the pedestrian door was ajar – the nocturnal visitor had apparently not shut it properly afterwards – and she hesitated. If she went any further and was discovered, she would be seen as a criminal trespasser and tarred with the same brush as Kate Hamblin. Yet standing out there in the cold, she was no good to anyone; she might as well be at home in bed.

  She pushed the door open and ducked through into the yard beyond.

  After the police had left, Twister’s first move was to recheck the chapel of rest. He didn’t expect to find anyone there and he wasn’t disappointed. The space under the table was empty. If someone had been hiding there, they were long gone, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. His main concern was where they had gone. It was unlikely that they had fled altogether as the police would have spotted anyone trying to exit via the yard wall. That meant they still had to be on the premises – no doubt having slipped past him into one of the other rooms while he had been preoccupied with Old Bill at the front door. Excellent! A nice little game of cat-and-mouse, with the prize of a kill at the end of it. What could be better? Once more flexing his powerful hands, he smiled to himself as he crossed the room to close the window. Hayden Lewis could wait; this issue was much more pressing and he was conscious of the fact that he hadn’t felt so alive for years.

  Returning to the hallway, he stood for a moment listening to the loud ticking of the ancient grandfather clock in its alcove at the foot of the stairs as it thudded on relentlessly through the night like the timer on an explosive charge. There wasn’t another sound.

  He checked the cellar next, smiling again when he saw the look of dread in Hayden Lewis’s eyes the moment he appeared. ‘Patience, Mr Detective,’ he murmured close to his ear. ‘I’ll get back to you again shortly, I promise.’

  At the top of the stairs he gently pushed the cellar door to behind him rather than closing it completely, conscious of the sound the door would make when the catch was engaged, then quickly crossed the hallway to the old embalming room and mortuary.

  Flashing the torch round inside, he saw at once that the room was empty, the broad beam reflecting back at him from the stainless steel table and fridges and glittering on the bottles and surgical instruments in the glass-fronted cabinets.

  Returning to the hallway, he pushed through the door into the workshop, satisfied himself that it was also empty and flicked on the lights in the big garage. The two Daimlers stood out black, shiny and sinister under the strip-lights, contrasting with the battered green van and his mud-plastered Land Rover. He walked round each vehicle in turn, even looking under them, but there was no sign of anyone.

  Frowning, he switched off the lights and made his way back to the hallway and it was just as he was closing the workshop door that he heard the distinctive crack of rafters and a couple of soft footfalls above his head. His smile returned and, moving with almost cat-like grace, he headed for the staircase leading to his flat.

  chapter 26

  TWISTER PAUSED FOR a moment on the landing before pushing the door of his flat open. The noises he had heard had not been repeated, but instinct told him that he had not imagined them – someone was definitely inside – and the confirmation came when he snapped on the light of his living room and saw the figure in the dark overcoat standing at the single window, looking down into the street.

  Even before the figure swung round to face him, he knew who it was and he scowled as he relaxed his tensed muscles. ‘How the hell did you get in?’ he demanded.

  His visitor shrugged. ‘You gave me a set of keys, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but I told you not to come here tonight.’

  ‘Good job I did – what were the boys in blue doing outside as I arrived? I had to park my bloody car further down the road until they’d left.’

  Twister lit a cigarette. ‘They said they’d spotted an intruder climbing over the yard wall.’

  A disparaging snort. ‘Why would anyone want to screw an undertaker’s?’

  ‘How should I know? Anyway, the only person I’ve been able to find in here so far is you.’

  The other’s mouth tightened. ‘Probably because there wasn’t any intruder in the first place.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Use what little brains you’ve got, Twister. It was a ruse, can’t you see that? An attempt to get into the house. They’re on to you.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘So how come they just happened to be on the spot to see this so-called intruder?’

  ‘No idea. The bitch detective told me she had clocked the guy personally.’

  ‘What detective?’

  ‘Some inspector – Cannow or Carlow, I think her name was.’

  A sharp intake of breath. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Rozalind Callow? She’s the last thing you need – where’s Lewis?’

  ‘In the cellar.’

  ‘You dick-head, you should have got rid of him by now. Callow will be back, you can bet on it – maybe with a search warrant next time – and a dead copper on the premises would be a bit difficult to explain away.’

  ‘He’s not dead yet. He’s’ – and he grinned – ‘helping me with my inquiries.’

  His visitor failed to see the joke. ‘The way you’re going, you’ll be helping the police with thei
rs pretty soon too and I can’t let that happen.’

  Twister raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning what exactly?’

  ‘Meaning, I’m terminating your contract. Cutting you loose. You’ve become too much of a bloody liability.’

  Twister couldn’t help sniggering as he towered over his visitor. ‘And how do you propose doing that?’ he sneered.

  ‘Easy,’ came the confident reply and he felt a tongue of fire rip through him as a long-bladed knife was driven hard into his abdomen.

  Roz Callow was nervous – very nervous. She had followed her quarry right inside the house via a convenient back door, which had been carelessly left ajar like the pedestrian door in the gate. The place was in total darkness. Even the probing fingers of moonlight had suddenly been withdrawn as the moon itself was swallowed up by the beast of the night, but a ghostly glow emanated from a doorway at the top of a wide staircase and she glimpsed the smudge of a figure on the landing, though she couldn’t identify it before it was absorbed by the light.

  It was obvious that the nocturnal visitor knew exactly where they were going, indicating a familiarity with the place that, to the DCI’s mind, was more than a little unsettling and she hesitated before the ‘Private’ sign and loop of chain that blocked her way. As she had already recognized, she was well out of order entering the property in the first place, but to compound that felony by penetrating further could prove to be a serious error of judgement. In her present obsessive mood, however, reason held little sway and what had started out as a vengeful opportunity had now become much too personal to abort.

  The stairs drew her on, but as she climbed, she couldn’t help thinking with a shiver of Hitchcock’s cult-horror masterpiece, Psycho, and the scene where the private detective was attacked on the landing of a very similar staircase by a nightmare figure with a knife.

  As it transpired, there was no knife-wielding madman waiting for her in the upper gloom of this landing, but when she stepped cautiously through the open doorway of the flat above, she walked into a nightmare that was even worse.

  Kate felt a tremendous sense of relief when she heard the door of the embalming room open then close again with a dull clunk, indicating that her mystery visitor had left. Even then, however, despite the intense cold that was rapidly solidifying the blood in her veins and seemed to have already slowed her heartbeat almost to a stop, it was several minutes before she managed to pluck up the courage to push the door open.

  The room was deserted, although the lights had been left on, suggesting that someone would be back before long. She needed to get out of the room as quickly as possible, but that was easier said than done. Easing herself from the refrigerator with great difficulty, she found that her legs were incapable of supporting her and, slumping to the floor, she was forced to remain there for several minutes while she waited for the feeling to return to her frozen muscles and sinews. From somewhere above her head she heard heavy footsteps and waited for the embalming-room door to be thrown open again with the yell that meant discovery, but it never happened and as the building settled into a strange heavy stillness, she at last began to feel the uncomfortable burning sensation in her legs and feet as the circulation was slowly restored.

  Using the edge of the mortuary table for support and wincing at the sudden painful surge of hot blood through her veins, she finally managed to stand up and after a few more minutes make her way slowly to the door. She opened it very carefully. Silence. The hallway beyond was now pitch black. A warning voice in her brain told her to get out of the place as quickly as possible, but she ignored it. Lewis had to be somewhere in the building and she was determined to find him. The problem was where to look next.

  A grandfather clock ticked loudly in an alcove at the foot of the stairs – a quick flick of her torch beam revealing its pale sombre face before passing on to fasten on another door on the other side of the alcove. She was actually turning towards the door when she spotted the light. It was just a tiny gold thread reaching out across the floor, but in the darkness it was plain enough and, moving closer, she saw that it continued as a vertical line up the wall beneath the staircase. She ran her fingers down the wall, found a small knob and gently pulled.

  The small door was only ajar and it opened easily. Beyond, she glimpsed steps leading down to some sort of dimly lit cellar. She hesitated, recognizing the folly of going any further. Anyone could be down there and she could find herself trapped with no possible way out. But what if that was where Hayden was being held? She couldn’t leave the place before she had satisfied herself one way or the other.

  She ducked her head and began the descent, conscious of the slight movement of the wooden treads beneath her feet, as if the stairs were not as secure as they could have been.

  She saw the seated figure even before she had reached the bottom, bound with so much tape that he resembled a partially unwrapped Egyptian mummy. She didn’t need to see his face to know it was Lewis – his mop of unruly blond hair was a dead give-away – and when she went round to the front of his chair, the look of relief on his battered bloodied face was immediate. ‘Hi, old girl,’ he said in a weak slurred voice. ‘What kept you?’

  Callow stopped short just inside the small living room, her eyes widening when she saw the man she had only been speaking to a short time before lying on his side in front of the settee, a pool of blood forming under him and one hand gripping the handle of the knife that protruded from his belly. The figure standing over him cast her a sidelong glance and, bending down, roughly yanked the knife from his body, allowing his hand to drop back to the floor with a thud, before straightening up again.

  ‘Hello, Roz,’ Pauline Cross said quietly, stepping over her victim to within a couple of feet of her. ‘Sorry you had to see this.’

  Callow gaped at her in horror. ‘Pauline?’ she gasped. ‘What have you done?’

  The other shrugged. ‘Terminated his contract, that’s all,’ she said, glancing back at Twister with contempt. ‘He was becoming a bit too much of a liability.’

  Callow seemed to have difficulty comprehending what she was saying. ‘His contract?’ she echoed in a strangled voice. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Pauline smiled indulgently. ‘Said he was ex-SAS, you know,’ she went on, ‘not just a simple undertaker, but a trained killer no less. He did my brother’s funeral, you see – that’s when we first met – and we had a bit of a fling afterwards.’

  ‘A fling?’

  Pauline threw another contemptuous glance at Twister’s inert body. ‘If you can call it that,’ she said. ‘Turned out he was no better between the sheets than he was doing what I’d hired him for—’

  ‘You – you hired him?’

  Pauline made a rueful grimace. ‘’Fraid so,’ she said, ignoring the point of the question, ‘and, to be fair, he did show a bit of promise at the start. It was his idea to frame Terry Duval for the Transit job. Seems he’d nearly walked in on the little pervert torching a farm near Glastonbury, and he thought that, with his history, Duval would be the perfect suspect – especially as he was already under police surveillance.’ She sighed. ‘He was right about that too. Trouble was, poor old Twister just couldn’t help cocking things up and in the end I decided I couldn’t risk him leading your mates to me.’

  Callow felt her legs start to shake and she gripped the arm of the settee to steady herself. ‘You murdered Alf?’ she gasped. ‘You killed your own husband?’

  Pauline sighed. ‘Not personally, but I suppose it amounts to the same thing.’ She sniggered, a chilling unbalanced sound. ‘Funny really, but poor old Alf’s a lot more use to me dead than when he was alive – at least he will be when the insurance company pays up. Pity Andy had to fry with him, but then a bit of collateral damage can’t be helped sometimes, can it?’

  Callow stared at the bloodstained knife, as if mesmerized by it, then began to back slowly towards the door, shaking her head in disbelief and choking back the bile rising in her throat. ‘All t
hose times we were together you were actually planning his murder?’ she whispered, then retched. ‘On – on that last night, while we were having sex in Alf’s bed, you knew he was about to be blown to pieces?’

  Pauline snorted. ‘Don’t moralize with me, girl,’ she retorted. ‘You wanted him out the way as much as I did. What was it you said – if only he wasn’t around, we could be together for good?’

  Callow shook her head several times, a look of horror in her eyes. ‘Good God, I didn’t mean it that way.’

  Pauline shrugged again. ‘What does it matter what you meant or how he was got rid of? Means justifies the end and all that.’

  ‘But – but you used me.’

  Pauline sighed. ‘Had to, Roz. Needed someone like you on the inside to let me know what was going on, didn’t I? How else would I have found out all the detail about good old Operation Firetrap and been able to keep ahead of the inquiry team afterwards, eh?’

  Callow was just a couple of feet from the open doorway now, gripped by a terror she had never known before and trying to put her revulsion to one side as she realized the deadly peril she was in. ‘But you said you loved me,’ she blurted, desperate to keep Pauline distracted while she felt behind her for the door handle.