Then she heard a noise. Faint. But it was there. She held her breath so she could hear. And it was coming from above her. It sounded like footsteps. And someone talking. A man’s voice. But not his voice. She was certain it was someone else. Adrenalin coursed through her. Maybe this was her chance to get out? Had someone found her?
‘HELP!’ But she didn’t recognise the sound that came out. The word was lost. Slurred. Not her own. She tried again. ‘HELP!’ But it made no difference. It didn’t sound like her voice. Whatever drug had been used on her was still in her body.
She waited, silent. Desperate to hear the sound again. It was gone. Replaced by what sounded like fingernails furiously scratching against metal. It was then followed by a thumping sound. A loud, ominous banging which reverberated around the damp stone walls. It was in that moment that the panic took hold. She recognised the sound. It was familiar. The first time she had woken up down here she had heard what sounded like fingernails being dragged across metal. Then it had suddenly stopped. She hadn’t heard the noise again until now. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut as she tried to block out the frenzied scratching, intermittently broken by a dull, foreboding thud. Whoever or whatever it was sounded desperate. Frantic.
Chapter Eleven
Saturday: 8:40 p.m.
Brady was freezing. He had been hanging around waiting for Dave the security guard to get his shit together. There was a reason he was a security guard and not a copper.
‘You ready, mate?’
Brady looked up at him. He was six foot four. In his mid-thirties. Overweight, with a flabby stomach that hung over his too-tight trousers. His sandy-coloured hair cropped short. His shapeless face, bloated. Brady wouldn’t be surprised if he had a drink habit. Then again, working the graveyard shift in a place like this would drive even the most hardened temperance followers to drink.
Weary, Brady nodded at him. He’d been stood around freezing his bollocks off for nearly an hour.
‘Yeah, sorry about that. Have to do my job. Sure you understand, being in the police an all?’ he said as he switched his flashlight on. ‘Laser torch, this. Bought it from the States. Cost a hundred and eighty quid.’
Brady nodded. Again. He wasn’t much in the mood for talking. He just wanted to get the job done and get back to his car. Put the heating on full blast. Turn the stereo up and reverse as hard as he could out the car park and off these godforsaken grounds. It was starting to get to him now: the tiredness, the cold and the feeling he was being watched. It had been with him since Mill Cottage. A disquieting sense that someone was following him – stalking him.
‘Do you want me to give you an unofficial tour?’ the guard asked.
‘Yeah,’ Brady replied.
‘What are you looking for then?’
‘Medical records dating back to the sixties.’
‘Shit!’ Dave muttered as he fumbled with the keys for the main entrance. ‘Hold that, will you?’
Brady took the torch and shone it on the lock.
‘Thanks, mate. This one’s always been a bugger!’
He opened up the heavy door, then gestured for his torch back.
Brady looked down the cavernous hallway as Dave illuminated it with his American laser flashlight. Dilapidated didn’t even come close. Chunks of plaster had fallen down from the ceiling and the crumbling walls. The floor was covered in all kinds of debris. Brady looked over at the old sixties-style reception area. Apart from a few broken chairs and the main reception desk there was nothing else there. Graffiti covered the desk and the walls behind it.
‘Trouble with kids then?’ Brady stated as he walked down the corridor taking in the scrawled writing that covered most of the rooms that lead off from the main hallway.
‘Yeah. Little shits! They make my job hell. What they don’t realise is that if one of them stupid buggers gets hurt, then it’s me who gets it in the neck. Could lose my bloody job!’
Brady sympathised. He could see how difficult it would be to keep kids out. If they really wanted in, they would find a way somehow.
‘Can’t afford to lose my job. Not that anyone can nowadays. Came back eighteen months ago from a tour in Afghanistan to find the missus with her bags packed. She’d met someone online. Stupid fucking cow! In Turkey. Some young kid of twenty-two. So she upped and left. That’s where she is now. Living in some squalid apartment with him. Not quite the life she expected. But I won’t have her back. She deserves everything she gets.’
Brady glanced at him. Realised he had misjudged the bloke. But then again, he had been waiting around freezing his bollocks off for an hour. ‘You got kids then?’
‘Yeah. Two. Boy and girl. Benjamin’s six and Olivia’s four. Only fucking two when that mother of hers just upped and left her. Tell me, what kind of mother does that? Eh?’
Brady shrugged.
‘So . . . I ended up taking this shitty job just to keep a roof over my kids’ heads. Couldn’t stay in the army, could I?’ his voice filled with bitterness and regret.
‘Life sucks,’ Brady commiserated.
‘Sure fucking does!’ agreed Dave. ‘If it wasn’t for my mam, I don’t know what I would have done. She moved in with me. Needed someone at night to look after the bairns, you know? She’s more of a mam to them now than their own fucking mam.’
They walked along in silence. Brady could feel him brooding as he flicked the torch across the floor and walls. Checking out the abandoned rooms as he did so. He realised the job suited Dave. Not that the ex-soldier would admit it. But there was no need to talk to anyone. He could just keep his head down and ruminate over why his wife had left him and his kids for a twenty-two-year old Turk, and how that could have possibly happened when he was stationed out in Afghanistan risking his life for family and country.
Brady thought to himself: Yeah . . . life fucking sucks!
They reached the end of the corridor. It was like a maze. The corridor split off three-ways. Then there were stairs further down to the left.
‘What was this building used for?’
Dave turned and looked at him. ‘Mainly kids. Hard to believe really. The west wing was used for the women. Best building of the lot if you ask me. It looks out onto bluebell woods. Beautiful in the summer. East wing was for the male patients. And this one, the kids. The main staff accommodation was located here. Must have made sense considering the patients were children.’
‘Where are the rooms they were kept in?’ Brady asked, curious. He wanted to see where a child such as Macintosh would have been held.
‘Upstairs. First floor. The second floor and the attic rooms were used by the staff.’ He turned and looked at Brady. ‘Why? Do you want to have a look?’
‘If you don’t mind?’
‘It’s all the same to me.’
‘How do you know all this stuff about when the hospital was actually in operation?’
Dave shrugged. ‘Came across some old plans of the main building, that’s all. And I’ve walked these halls and checked these rooms God knows how many times. Reckon I could do it blindfolded by now.’
Brady followed him up the stairs to the first floor. When he reached it, he wished he hadn’t asked. The hallway had an uneasy feel to it. Bleak metal doors lined the walls. Harsh. Unforgiving.
He pushed open one of the doors. It groaned, resisting the movement. He walked inside. Dave followed, moving the light around the small six foot by eight foot room. A small metal bed still remained against the wall. What jarred were the thick, unyielding leather restraints attached to the top and bottom of the bedframe. He turned to the small window. Metal bars obscured whatever view there would have been. It was a prison cell – literally. Or a torture room.
Brady looked around and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a child left, locked, even restrained inside this room. No parents to love him. Just staff. Underpaid. Overworked. Over-zealous in their admonitions.
He shook his head, unable to comprehend what that would have felt like.
To have been left at the mercy of others. Your life – your body – in their hands. Mental illness, until recently, was a medical condition that had been demonised. Initially by the church, then the state. Misunderstood and misrepresented. He thought of Claudia; of the radical difference between her private psychiatric care and the brutal practices that would have been the norm when this building had first opened. And then for the decades that followed.
Techniques such as straitjackets, solitary confinement and sedation such as bromides were used upon patients deemed unruly. By the seventies and eighties many mental hospitals had closed down – St George’s no exception – as political questions began to be raised of these large, unaccountable institutions.
‘Had enough?’ queried the security guard.
‘Yeah,’ Brady answered, his eyes lingering on the leather buckled restraints on either end of the bed.
‘Good! Gives me the willies up here. Don’t mind the adult patient floors as much as this one. Crazy to think they used to treat kids like that, right?’
Brady nodded.
‘Bet they did weird shit to them as well. If you get my drift?’ Dave said, walking out the room.
Brady followed. He got his drift, all right. It was hard not to notice the scratches dug into the walls and on the inside of the metal door. He shuddered at the thought of the desperation the occupants of this room would have felt. Never knowing when, or if, they would ever be released.
The basement was dank, cavernous and filled with obsolete items dating back over a hundred and fifty years. Old psychiatric chairs had been left down here to rot. Bedpans. Countless decades of paraphernalia, stored or dumped.
For what purpose?
‘This place gives me the willies as well. Never come down here out of choice,’ admitted Dave. He ran a large, calloused hand over his scalp’s coarse stubble. Beads of sweat were starting to run down his forehead.
Brady shot him a questioning glance.
‘Shit, man! Like I said, it gives me the creeps. A couple of times I would hear this banging coming from down here. Would echo throughout the whole bloody building. Seemed as if it were travelling up through the chimney breasts right up to the attic.’
Brady smiled at him. ‘Sure it’s not just your imagination?’
Dave’s easygoing attitude quickly changed. ‘I’ve seen some real nasty fucking shit in my time. I reckon I know whether it’s my imagination or not!’
‘Yeah . . . I’m sure you have,’ Brady conceded. As way of an apology he added: ‘Maybe it’s rats or something down here?’
‘Could be . . .’ Dave accepted.
But Brady could see it in the security guard’s eyes. A flicker of unease. Something down here really scared the shit out of him.
‘I checked it out of course,’ he added. ‘Came down here. But there was nothing. Then as soon as you walk back up to the ground floor it starts again. This deep, banging noise. Last time I heard it was about a year ago. Went on for a couple of nights. Like I said, it’s weird shit.’
‘This won’t take long,’ Brady reassured him. ‘Just need to have a look through some patient files stored down here.’
‘You don’t mind if go outside and have a tab then?’ Dave asked, offering Brady his spare torch.
Brady noticed the big man’s hand trembling as he handed it over.
‘Sure,’ he answered, inwardly surprised at the ex-soldier’s reaction to the room. Not that the disquieting feel about the place didn’t get to Brady. But he had a job to do.
He busied himself looking through the stacks of files that had been dumped on the floor. Old wooden and metal filing cabinets stood, obsolete. There were countless patient records left down here waiting to be destroyed. He leafed through a large stack on the floor trying to make sense of their order – there wasn’t one. Different patients’ names, male and female, assaulted his mind. He skipped past the scrawled and typed doctors’ and nurses’ notes detailing patients, disorders, medications and diagnoses.
He soon realised the likelihood of finding James David Macintosh’s records was next to impossible.
He stood up. Stretched his arms out and yawned. His body ached. His head ached.
He felt as if every part of him was protesting from lack of sleep. He checked his watch. He had been rooting around down here for over thirty minutes by torchlight alone. He accepted it would take days to go through this lot. Better to go home and get some rest and then re-evaluate in the morning.
Where the hell has the security guard gone? Brady was about to yell up the stairs for him when he heard it. The banging. A low resonating sound that echoed off the thick walls. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. He didn’t move, he listened. Again, the sound came.
Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . .
As if something – or someone – was down here. With him.
Then it hit him: The security guard was trying to fuck with his mind.
He was about to shout fuck off when the banging intensified. Fear gripped him. He took out his mobile in case he needed to call for backup. But there was no signal. He held his breath as he tried to gauge where the persistent banging was coming from. Flashed the torchlight around the large, dark basement. Then he understood. Saw it. At the other end of the basement. Obscured by the impenetrable blackness. The noise stopped, as suddenly as it had started.
Fuck . . .
Brady held the torch as steady as was physically possible. He stared at the brick monstrosity that had revealed itself to be an industrial-sized furnace. It was a large, Victorian structure that jutted out fourteen foot from the wall. It was twelve foot wide and ran up the entire height of the basement. It was an unsightly construction, built for practicality rather than aesthetics. Even the twin cast-iron doors looked ugly, staring at him with unblinking predatory eyes.
The banging began. Again.
He forced himself to walk over to the disused furnace. To face whatever it was responsible for that unnerving noise. His only fear; the unimaginable cruelty inflicted by people like James David Macintosh upon others. In that moment he dreaded opening the doors. His mind was racing. Questions and answers tumbling over one another.
What if it is Annabel Edwards? What if Macintosh had left her here? But how? How could that be possible?
Brady knew that in the mind of a psychopath, anything was possible.
He steeled himself. Didn’t think to call for help. To order the security guard back down to the basement. Instead, Brady placed the torch at an angle on the ground so he could open the left door of the furnace. The banging was coming from behind it.
He struggled for a moment before managing to yank it open. It took a moment to register. Then he saw her. Kneeling there. Covered in dried blood. Hair filthy. Her eyes. Black. Staring. In shock. Then terror. She started to scream. A bloodcurdling, terrifying wail that sounded like nothing that he had ever heard before. He instinctively recoiled. Stepping away from it – her. From them . . .
Oh Christ! What has happened to her? What the fuck has someone done . . .
He quickly took his coat off. Wrapped it gently around her weak, bony body.
Oh God . . . how could someone do this?
He couldn’t think about it. He reached in and scooped her out of the furnace. There was no weight to her. She was nothing more than a skeleton covered in taut, unnaturally pale bare skin. He held her to him. Her body pressed against his chest. Her head, bloodied, limp, cradled. She was suffering from hypothermia. He needed to get her warm. Adrenalin was coursing through his veins. ‘DAVE!’ he yelled as loud as he could. He couldn’t get a bloody signal down here. He needed to call this in ASAP. She needed medical attention.
Fuck, did she need medical attention.
‘You’re going to be all right. You understand me? You’re safe now,’ Brady reassured her. His voice was low, gentle; as if he were talking to a child. ‘You got a name? Huh?’ he continued, desperate for her to respond. To acknowledge him. The screaming had st
opped. But this was worse. Now she had gone deathly quiet. Her body slack and lifeless. He knew she was still breathing. He could feel the shallow lightness of her breath against his neck. ‘I’m Jack. I’m with the police,’ he assured her. But he wasn’t sure she fully understood.
Oh God! What has he done to her?
He couldn’t get the thought out of his mind. He had never encountered anything like this. In fact he had never even heard of such a horrific crime carried out on a victim.
‘DAVE!’ he yelled, even louder this time.
No response.
He started walking to the stairs. He had to get her out of here. She was in dire need of immediate medical attention.
‘Not long now. We’ll soon have you warm. OK?’ Brady soothed her as he carried her as carefully as he could up the stairs. Her body was so fragile, he was terrified that she would break.
‘What’s wrong?’ called out Dave, laughing. ‘Heard that banging, did you? Hah! You sounded scared shitless back there! Ain’t no rats down there making that kind of noise, I can tell you!’
Brady walked out.
‘What the fuck!’ Dave spluttered as he choked on cigarette smoke.
‘Call an ambulance and the police. NOW!’ Brady ordered. He started to make his way over to the newly built psychiatric hospital located on the sprawling grounds directly opposite the old Victorian asylum. The new build looked more akin to a contemporary motel.
‘Where are you going?’ Dave asked, fumbling for his phone in his heavily padded jacket.
‘Where the fuck do you think I’m going? She’s suffering from hypothermia!’ Brady replied, his voice caustic. Not that he cared. At this precise moment he didn’t give a damn about anything other than this girl’s life. Which was literally, in his hands.
The Puppet Maker: DI Jack Brady 5 Page 10