“Ready?”
She wasn’t. “Brad, I’m a little – tired. You go. I might stay here a bit. I’ll pay the bill on the way out.”
He looked at her with faint concern. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Nearly giggling, Ruby told him, “No, not at all, dear. I’m just tired. I’ll have a little rest. You hurry off and get your train.”
There was only a dribble of wine left, and Brad swallowed this cheerfully, nipped into the bathroom, came back, and waved a little boy’s goodbye. “You’re a darling,” he said. “You will see me again, won’t you? I’m looking forward to it. I’ll write again as soon as I can get away from school and everything.”
“Don’t miss any important lessons on my account,” said Ruby at once. “I mean – of course I’d love to see you again. But honestly Brad – you’ll find pretty girls your own age at school.”
He looked back at her. “I don’t fancy silly little school girls.”
Ruby wasn’t fully naked, he hadn’t bothered undressing her entirely, but now she pulled the sheet up to her chin and felt ridiculous. “So you fancy hundred-year-old mummified ruins?”
“Actually,” Brad grinned, “that sounds quite interesting. He walked back to the bed, bent and kissed her cheeks, one at a time. “Don’t chicken out on me, lovely lady,” he told her gently. “I don’t want to lose you.”
It took her some time to swing her arthritic legs from the bed, dress herself, and toddle back out into the street. She paid the bill, which wasn’t high, and she ignored the curious glances from the staff. Then she hailed a taxi, fell in, and took it all the way home. Once back at the manor, she went straight to bed.
With a slowly increasing headache, a lurch of a sudden stomach ache, and a rush of unexpected diarrhoea, Ruby staggered from bathroom to bed, and back again. Then she vomited, while the diarrhoea continued. Back to the loo. And once more, bed. Ruby wondered what on earth she had eaten to create this toxic attack from the blue. She’d actually eaten very little that day and couldn’t remember anything unpleasant. Now the headache was pounding. One more visit to the loo, a handful of Ibuprofen, and certainly no desire for dinner. Not even cake. She managed to smile at herself. Admitting she didn’t even want cake meant she must be on death’s door. Or perhaps the shock of having sex with a kid brought its own punishment. She didn’t have a dribble of hunger, nor wanted wine nor conversation.
That was rare for her. But so was having boring and embarrassing sex with someone young enough to be her great-grandson – almost. She decided it was the stress, tension, and guilt which were working their own natural effect.
Then, at last, the comfort of her bed began to feel sweet. It was just six o’clock in the evening. But Sylvia was still away anyway, on another of those pointless trips to Nottingham, or Bunny, or whatever it was called. So there was no one to sympathise or look after her. She was starting to feel just a tiny inch better, but Ruby settled to a long night of troubled dreams.
Chapter Twenty-One
A white Honda, shiny and clean, sped along the country lanes between Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, heading towards the tourist attraction of Stone Henge. Although it was a bright warm day in mid-May, the driver was wearing a rain mac with the hood up, shadowing his face. But he stopped, offering a lift to a young woman who appeared to be staggering under the weight of two parcels.
The woman looked up. “No thanks. Very kind, but no.”
The Honda remained parked at the side of the road. The driver nodded. “Yeh, I know you shouldn’t accept lifts. Too much danger around. But I’ll offer again, just in case, since those parcels look as though they weigh a ton. What you got there, lady? Bricks and mortar? Or rifles for the army?”
“Books, as it happens. And I can manage, thanks.”
“Fine, I understand,” said the man, and revved up the motor. But then he stopped again. “Tell you what I could do, you walk – which doesn’t put you in no danger. And I’ll carry them parcels. Where you heading? I could leave the packages outside the shop, or the house or the station, wherever. You pick them up when you get there.”
“Most kind.” The woman kept walking. “A kind idea. But I’d arrive at least an hour later, and they could have been stolen by then. I’ll manage. Please just drive on.”
The man drove on as asked, but Lionel Sullivan was peeved. Finding any female willing to have herself abducted was becoming more and more difficult. He muttered every curse as he drove, and passed no other woman walking, even though he drove for several hours. Getting back to the tented cottage was a longwinded and irritating process, being unable to drive close to the door, involving hiding the car under a tree, and then a long scramble through bushes.
He threw off the coat, slung off his boots, swore at the world and his surroundings in particular, and sat down on his low bed near the woman who lay on the floor nearby. This was his erstwhile wife, but she did not move. Joyce had moved several times over past hours, but this was due to the maggots and cockroaches, the decay and collapse of bodily tissue, and the wind in the trees outside.
“Stupid bitch,” Lionel muttered. “Reckon I got more fun out of the first one, even though she didn’t like the straight bedding. Stupid slut got so pink and swollen from her work as a slut, she couldn’t take me afterwards. The mighty Sullivan prick needs respect. But the bitch was good in other ways. Shame about Karyn, but that was her fault too.”
With a long handled corkscrew, Lionel sat forwards and pondered a more interesting game. Eventually, he inserted the corkscrew up one of the corpse’s nostrils and shoved it around a bit. It came out covered in maggots and white slime. “Brains, perhaps,’ he decided. “Not that the bitch had any.”
He found a few other places to poke the corkscrew, but without the screams of the victim, it failed to amuse him. The body had been around too long. Even the smell had changed from spiced intoxication to plain filth. He’d found several of her inner organs already missing, presumably taken during the autopsy. What was left had almost entirely rotted away and he wasn’t keen on maggots. Fucking a corpse was a good game as always and naturally popular amongst necrophiliacs the world over, but although pleasant enough, not his favourite occupation since the body had already fallen into broken pieces.
Leaning back on the straw-filled bed, Lionel felt considerable sympathy for his predicament. After years of practising his pleasures in freedom and privacy, he now had to hide, and his pleasures were so few, he spent more time with Olga than with the victims he adored. He wondered if prison, with a proper bed and proper food, might be preferable. But it wasn’t, since at least freedom meant no one shouted at him to tell him what to do, and he was able to amuse himself with a few small pleasures. Small indeed. But not utterly missing.
“Stupid twat,” said Olga through her teeth. “Think you’re free? This is freedom, is it? Skulking and hiding? Scurry down the road on a hot day in your big coat, scared to show your face while trying to steal one rotten potato? Oh, great freedom this is!”
“No one orders me to wash the shit bowls. No one yells at me to get up and get out. No one sniggers at me or tells me I’m not allowed to watch TV.”
“Oh,” sneered Olga. “You watch a lot of exciting TV now, do you? The last time was a month ago when you sneaked into a shop and watched five minutes of football. You had to run off so quickly you didn’t even know who was playing, let alone who won.”
“Piss off, dragon bitch,” Lionel told Olga, who was wrapped right around his neck. “You’re even more of an unsatisfied idiot than I am.”
With the white Honda still parked a short walk down the slope, Lionel collected all the various parts of his late wife, and stuffed them all in a plastic bag once holding a large number of worn out potatoes on sale, breaking some of the bones into smaller pieces, so they fitted more easily. The head would not even partially fit, but he dumped that on the floor of the boot, put the plastic sack on top, and drove out of the forest, heading north. He had not eaten for
some time and felt light-headed, but the exercise and determination were enjoyable anyway, and Lionel kept driving. Since it was already evening, the darkness soon fell around him except for the thin halo of the moon, part hidden behind clouds. Few stars peeped beyond their hiding places. “Like me,” Lionel sniggered to himself. “We’re all slaves to nature. My nature ain’t the best sort, but I never asked for it. I do what nature asks. So piss on that, Olga bitch.”
The road was almost empty of traffic as the night grew darker, and Lionel felt safer and drank in his freedom. He drove through the night.
It was dawn when he stopped and looked around. A sign just a half hour previously had announced West Staffordshire. There was a long flat field bordered by a low hedgerow on his left. He threw Joyce’s head over first. An early morning scavenging crow was startled, and then interested. The head bounced and rolled. In the long shadows, it was quickly invisible. Then Lionel tossed over the bag of human scraps. It landed heavily and sank like a brick into the long ploughed soil.
Searching the car for any possible spillage, Lionel spent the next few minutes at the roadside, but there was nothing left in the boot, not even any leakage of decay, and no other car passed him. So he climbed back into the driver’s seat, turned the car around, an illegal move where he was since the road was narrow, but he didn’t care and soon headed back south. He was smiling.
As the pale rosy light lit the roofs of the farmhouses, the tips of the leaves and the puddles along the roadside, Lionel began to enjoy himself. He knew it would be sometime before he got back home, but hoped he might be able to steal some sort of food along the way. It was too early for the cops. It was too early for almost everyone. Just one or two cars passed him, and a few long-distance lorries roaring in both directions. He didn’t drive fast, and he wasn’t going to risk being caught on camera for speeding or crashing through red lights. As for CCT cameras, he couldn’t avoid every one, but beneath the hood of the raincoat, he could not be recognisable. He intended dumping the white Honda once he reached Gloucestershire within walking distance of home.
But then it happened – one of the things he’d least expected. A young girl, barely into her teens by the look of her, was scurrying barefoot along the grassy ditch beside the road. Hardly believing his luck, he slowed, calling out, “You want a lift, love? You look tired.”
She stopped, staring. He could barely hear her as she said, “Yes please.”
The car screeched to a halt, and the girl ran up. He saw that her bare feet were bleeding. The sight turned him on, and his crotch tingled in anticipation. “Where are you heading?” he asked.
Her voice was soft and exhausted. “Wales. But anywhere a bit south would be great.”
“Hop in,” he opened the front passenger door and pushed it open for her. “You look bloody tired. Run away from home, have you?”
She nodded. “Yes. But I won’t talk about it and don’t try telling me to go back. I’m going to my granny’s.”
“Fair enough.” He caught his breath, stifling excitement, and said, “Your dad hit you, did he? Miserable sod.”
But the girl shook her head. “I won’t talk about it.”
Lionel had already locked the doors from the inside, but the girl made no attempt to escape. She curled on the blue cushioned seat, and looked ready to cry, “Do you mind if I go to sleep?”
“You carry on, love,” Lionel told her. “It’ll be some time before I get into Wales and need directions to your grandmother’s house. Snooze away.”
Within minutes, she was asleep. The blood from her feet stained the car seat and dripped a little onto the floor.
“I feel bloody sorry for the whole family,” said Harry, but as usual it’s been a waste of time.”
“It was you who wanted to come,’ Sylvia pointed out. “And at least we were able to give five minutes comfort.” She finished the glass of wine she was holding and leaned back. “So we stay another day or not?”
“You choose.”
“Oh, bother,” Sylvia decided. “OK, let’s stay just one more day for the sheer hell of it. But let’s find something to do. Zoos or fish markets or local villages.”
“Too exciting,” Harry said. “I couldn’t stand that much entertainment. And I don’t want to drive under road bridges either. Nor spend the day with Daisy and her dreary son. OK, that’s a bit mean. They’re both sodding miserable and I’m sorry. But there’s nothing we can do to help. We’re not even family.”
“I’ll order flowers sent tomorrow.” Then Sylvia shook her head. “No, that would look like anticipating the funeral. And I can hardly send chocolates or something. I’ll write a note. Fair enough.”
It was the following morning when Harry and Sylvia were still making the most of their comfortable hotel, that Ruby was sitting alone at the breakfast table she usually shared with them. The scrambled eggs tasted considerably less attractive. The toast was going cold and the butter no longer melted.
Lost in her own dreary and drifting thoughts, Ruby didn’t hear the first time that Derek Major called to her from two tables away. Deafened by the crunch of her own toast, Ruby decided that she would refuse to see Brad again. She liked him. He was a nice boy, reasonably intelligent and certainly full of personality. He was kind, chatty and obviously, he liked her just as she liked him. But pushing it as far as sexual encounters wasn’t sensible. It felt sordid, and it was more dreary than fun. Apart from being no good at all at either seduction or pleasing a woman towards climax, it just felt creepy to climb into bed with a boy young enough to be her grandson. Perhaps even her great-grandson! Well, if they all started young. Brad had certainly started young.
Now it had gone too far to tell him he was useless in bed, and agree to see him socially without any attempt at sex. So she’d have to turn him down altogether. No more being together in the altogether. Ruby giggled to herself and nearly choked on crumbs. Then she realised that Derek Major was standing over her table and staring down at her.
“So Sylvia and Harry aren’t here again? They on holiday?”
“Not exactly.” Ruby looked up in surprise. Derek wasn’t a close friend of either Sylvia or Harry. “They texted me this morning. They’ll be back later tomorrow.”
“Bugger,” Derek muttered to himself. “It’s already twenty-four hours, just about, maybe thirty-six. Shouldn’t be waiting this long..”
Ruby surrendered. “Go on then. What’s so important?”
“That disgusting killing machine of course,” Derek said loudly so that the entire breakfast room turned to look. “I saw him. Well covered up with a blue mackintosh, even though the sun was shining. He was grabbing some bananas and stuffing them in his coat pocket. That greengrocer up on Tewkesbury Hill Road, where they keep their displays outside in good weather. I saw that huge hand come spinning out, grabbing bananas, and then a couple of apples. Then he nipped off. Straight out of sight around the corner.”
“Gosh,” said Ruby, “if you’re sure it was him, then yes, it’s important. Phone the police. Ask for Detective Inspector Morrison. He’ll be extremely grateful.”
“I haven’t finished,’ Derek said, tapping one foot on the carpet. “Fact is, he wasn’t alone.”
She stared. Everyone stared. “A – victim? Or a man?”
“An innocent victim,” Derek declared. “Clearly had no idea who the thug was. A young girl, pretty enough. A bit plump. Dressed OK. Once they got around the corner, he gave her a banana.”
“Heavens above, Derek, phone the police now.”
“I did,” he replied crossly. “I spoke to the girl on the switchboard and she put me through to someone. A cop called Gunter or something like that. He said the public had been most helpful since the situation was televised, and they’d had more than a thousand calls. Thanked me for my help and hung up. Heard nothing since. So I hoped to tell our cosy little pair of police assistants.”
It was hard to know what to say, but Ruby nodded, thinking hard. Derek wasn’t known as an exagge
rating idiot, nor as a media-keen liar. He never sought out notoriety nor wanted special attention. It was known that he wandered a lot during the day, finding places for a good coffee where he could sit and read without too much disturbance. So Ruby wiped Brad Peacock from her thoughts, dressed suitably, handed the puppy over to Amy, and set off for the police station.
The desk sergeant did not seem impressed. “Yes, I shall pass it on, Mrs Pope. But if your friend has already phoned, it’ll be in the file. You see, ma’am, ever since the situation was publicised in the papers and TV news, we’ve had sittings and other information from as far as Glasgow. A thousand calls at least. We’ll get around to them all, Ma’am, I promise you.”
Ruby leaned over the desk, even though it was rather high for her. “You don’t understand. Do you know Mr and Mrs Joyce? Friends of Darcy Morrison? Well, I know him too. And I can tell you this sighting, right here in the danger zone, is accurate and damned important.”
“I’ll pass on your information to the Inspector, Mrs Pope,’ said the uniform politely. “No doubt the Inspector will get back to you as soon as he can.”
“What about everything else?” demanded Ruby. “I was sorry to hear about one of your men killed. So you know Sullivan must be around here somewhere. What about CCT cameras?”
“Not in the forests or on the hills,” said the cop, getting impatient. “But I assure you, we’re doing all we can.”
“Obviously not enough,” muttered Ruby with no attempt to make friends. She left with a swish of deep grey jacket, wishing that Sylvia and Harry would hurry back. She phoned. No one answered. She left a voice message but was cut off half way. So she left a text message. “Answer your bloody phone.”
Daisy Chains Page 19