Then he saw the blackened food on the barbecue and the muddy footprints leading from the open back door, across the decking and to the white tiles at the edge of the pool. He hesitated at the doorway, muzzling his fear. But as he moved into the house the footprints got darker. He realised they were blood and that they’d been sun-dried brown outside. On the kitchen tiles they still had a dull glisten, some of them smeared by a fainter set coming back into the house.
He moved through the large kitchen to an open door and found himself looking down the hallway. To his right were the set of doors he’d seen from the other side and to his left was a turning to the bottom of the stairs. More bloodied footsteps there. A dark copper slick led from the rug, across the hallway and was cut off by the closed door to his right.
His nostrils discerned something his brain had rarely had to process before, the intensity of which he’d only ever had a suggestion of when he’d visited his father’s hospice. It was the aroma every human sense recoils at. His circulation thundered and he put his fingers to the handle and pulled down.
The door mechanism clicked. He put the tips of his gloved fingers against the glazed pine and exerted just enough pressure to swing it inward. He braced himself for what he’d discover the other side, but found himself looking at a framed mural of a cave painting of buffaloes that covered the opposite wall. An ornamental table and chairs were positioned in front of it. He would have to step right inside the room and peer around the door.
Before he moved his body forward he felt the cold presence of the room’s occupants brush over him and sting the sweat patch at his back. He gripped the handle again and turned his body to look around the edge of the door.
The family were seated on the couch as they had been in the photograph. A sudden movement made him recoil. For a split second he thought the bodies had made an abrupt motion towards him, but he realised the flies coating their faces had been briefly startled enough to leave their hosts before quickly returning.
Will’s senses recoiled against what lay putrefying on the other side of the room. He had to move close to them and tried to focus on the coloured beads around the father’s left wrist. As he released the handle and followed the blood path to the couch, the cool neon blue of the pool water glowed beyond the slatted blinds.
He wished he could cover his eyes as they covered their own. They were at least shielded from the spectacle of their own bloodshed. He reached the couch and grabbed quickly for the mulberry coloured beads, grasping a couple against his palm.
The bracelet was tight, pinching into the father’s stocky wrist. The beads were connected by wire. The pudgy fingers taped to the dead man’s face had to be unstuck before Will could pull it over his hand. He briefly considered getting a knife or scissors from the kitchen to cut the wire, but knew if he left the room he wouldn’t return.
He repositioned himself, hearing the blood in the rug crackle under his weight. He moved the beads up to the father’s knuckles. Then he grasped the back of his cold hand and yanked it away.
The tape ripped revealing the blackness of a hollow socket where his left eye should have been. Will could see inside the man’s skull. The hole looked like it had been burnt into the man’s head. He looked down and at the human gristle hanging from his stomach and the caked blood gluing him to his family.
Will gripped the bracelet and pulled it up and over the fingers, all the time the flies landing and taking off from the skin exposed between the gloves and his sleeves. The movement caused the father’s other hand to come unstuck. Another carved out hollow where his eyeball should have been. Both crooked elbows remained stiffly in position.
Will had to get out of the room now, not see the twin craters in the man’s face anymore. He staggered from the lounge and slammed the door behind him as if he were being pursued.
Tam listened with lips clamped firmly shut. The air coming through the grille was cool, but the putrid smell that accompanied it stung his nostrils. He held his breath and listened.
Nothing. He jammed his index finger in his other ear and flinched; pain from the blackened nail he’d been trying carefully not to touch anything with. He turned from the grille to examine it and took a few deep breaths before returning to his position.
There was a sound, a faint puttering underneath the gush of air through the slats. He pushed the flesh of his ear flush against the concrete, but this blocked it and he heard even less. Tam stood up, his bare legs shaking from crouching.
Whatever the sound, it was nothing like the one he’d heard earlier that day. He looked quickly over his shoulder, expecting to find someone looking down at him. He was in a place he shouldn’t be at a time he wasn’t meant to be awake. He examined the grille and the metal shuttered window above it. It wasn’t connected to the Eastern Wish where they made their deliveries. The dirty, mushroom-coloured building had a set of double doors that had been chained shut. Tam’s lips moved as he tried to read the sign pasted inside the dirty glass.
CLOSED PENDING HYGIENE EXAMINATION
There was some other finer print below that, but even when he squinted, Tam couldn’t read it through the grubby pane. He walked the length of the wall, away from the breakfast café, and came to a corrugated iron shed next to it. It looked small from the front, but extended the length of the long, junk-strewn alleyway beside the building. Tam could see the lights of fast flowing traffic at the end. As soon as he thought about going down there, a dog barked a warning from one of the tenements on the right. His bladder felt very full.
Ten steps. That’s all he’d take. Ten steps and he’d turn back.
He counted them loudly in his head, taking a breath between each one. Ten became twelve, twelve became fourteen. At sixteen he could see from the weak light shining out of the windows of the tenements that there were no doors or windows for the entire length of the shed. Up ahead of him, however, was a tripwire of thin yellow light, extending across the path about four feet away from him. He moved forward to investigate, pausing when his foot upset a hubcap full of water.
When he reached the light he could see it was escaping from a gap in the corrugated iron. Tam put his eye to it and saw the circular blue neon of a flycatcher inside and the dark shapes of industrial equipment. Two luminous squares glowed feebly beyond. Tam guessed they must be swing doors and, from their position, he could tell they led into the main building. No other lights were on. If Songsuda were inside, now would be the time to rescue her. But the prospect of trying to find his way around in the dark contracted his bladder even further and he suddenly needed to relieve himself.
He urinated against the opposite wall, all the time looking up at the open, second-storey window above him and the ceiling shadow of somebody using an ironing board. The pee kept coming and he looked down at it gathering up fragments of soil and dried moss the rain had washed from the roof above. It snaked and bubbled around his sandals and he stepped out of the pool as he finished and quickly zipped his shorts back up.
Emptied out, he felt less panicky and looked back to the street he’d entered the alleyway from. Less than twenty steps and he would be back out onto the main road. No distance at all.
The gap in the corrugated panel wasn’t big enough for him to crawl though, but after briefly checking the lit window again, he gripped its edge. Tam wrenched it and it shuddered loosely, the still-warm metal bending towards him like the upturned corner of a page. Three tugs gave him the aperture he needed. Still nobody was peering down into the alleyway to investigate.
He slipped through the gap, metallic edges scraping his skin as he wriggled through. Every sound he made was suddenly on top of him and he wanted to return to the fresher air. The smell he’d detected earlier was overpowering here, and there was the aroma of sawdust mixed with it as well. He could taste it in his mouth.
He stood motionless for a moment and listened, hearing nothing but his own small breaths. He put his palms out in front of him. They immediately touched something cold and metallic.
Realising it was the edge of a worktop; he ran his fingers along it. Tam felt his way to the corner and down the thinner end of it towards the neon flytrap and the swing doors to its left.
His sandals squeaked on tiles and his fingertips butted the door. He pushed and they swung noiselessly open. The area beyond was dimly illuminated. Thick pipes lagged with yellowing fibreglass ran the length of the peeling walls. Dirty, transparent drapes filled a doorway at the far end.
The other direction ended in darkness so Tam turned right and headed for whatever lay beyond the plastic strips. The screeches of his sandals against the polished grey floor echoed loudly, so he removed them and padded down the corridor.
He stopped and peered through the jaundiced and scratched curtain into the gloom. It was a factory floor. More flycatchers glowing blue were fixed up high and extended to tiny pinpricks at the far end. His black nail throbbed. Tam pushed through the drapes.
As soon as he emerged the other side the smell of disinfectant scalded his nostrils and he could hear the sound he’d heard at the grille, only much louder now. Its volume over the buzzing of industrial fans made it easy to identify. It was the rippling sound of many birds; a current of plaints and nervous babble and Tam could see why they sounded so agitated.
Will couldn’t remember scaling the gate again. He just sat in the car wiping at the backs of his wrists, still feeling the legs of the flies there. He’d removed the gloves, but his hands felt tacky. He opened his right palm and the coloured beads of the bracelet lay hotly against it.
He’d intended to drive immediately back to the freeway, stop off at a diner and use the bathroom. But the atmosphere of the lounge was still heavily draped over him. He grabbed the mobile from the dash and got out into the fresh air again. He had no idea how long he’d been in the house.
“Will?” Carla waited for him to reply.
Will looked up and down North Vine Street and then walked towards the grass verge on the other side of it. “I’ve got the bracelet.” He could almost feel the air of her exhalation. “Those people...” His own voice sounded muffled as he focussed on the dried yellow leaves of the hedge in front of him.
There was silence from the other end.
“…I don’t think I can leave them in there like that.”
“You have to.” Carla’s voice barely registered.
Should he tell her what had been done to their eyes?
“Where are you now?”
CHAPTER TEN
Carla stared at Will’s desk telephone, her body perched on the edge of the swivel seat and her weight resting on the tips of her toes. He’d said he would call when he’d got clear of the house. Her eyes briefly shifted to the computer screen to her right. Her damp palm moved the mouse so the cursor slid to the cut out house next to the one Will had just visited. It hadn’t become active yet, no red outline, no address in a box.
She had no doubt the information would appear shortly and that Will would soon be heading there. It looked like whoever was manipulating him had deftly engineered the route.
She glanced at the desk telephone and considered calling the police as she had every other minute she’d waited. The kidnappers’ instructions had been categorical, but Carla doubted whoever was capable of the butchery in the family’s lounge could ever give Libby and Luke back alive.
She drove the thought away before it could get a foothold. Didn’t they have more of a chance of locating them if the authorities were involved? How would she ever forgive herself if she didn’t give them that extra chance?
Her hand shot to the receiver and her fingertips rested on the plastic. Luke’s parents? The police? The touch became a grip and she heard the click as she lifted it from the cradle. It was lightweight, but felt leaden in her wrist.
“Need me for anything else, Mrs Frost?”
The question was like a rivet shot into in her chest and she almost dropped the handset.
“Sorry.” Nissa waited for Carla to share her amusement at having made her jump, but her face blanked when it wasn’t reciprocated. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK. No, that’s all. Please… go on home. Spend the evening with your family.”
Nissa nodded uncertainly. “OK. The other files you wanted are being sent up. Give me a ring at home if you need anything… at all. I’m there all evening.” Her tight red smile was a seal of the promise as she pulled the door shut behind her.
The sound seemed to cut her off her from everything outside of Will’s office. Nissa was going home for a routine Saturday evening with her husband and boys. She wondered if she would ever have the luxury of such ordinariness again. Carla looked across the spotless blue carpet to herself smiling with Libby in the photo on the display cabinet. When she considered the photos that had just been posted, the happiness there seemed fictitious. She thought of the new life inside her daughter’s drugged body and the metal ropes biting into the skin of her shoulder.
She rose and walked unsteadily to the water cooler. She put both hands on top of it and tried to take some breaths. Carla glanced at the daunting stack of folders on the desk. What did she hope to find within them? Anything but the contemplation of how the situation could end. She couldn’t conceive of a world without Libby.
She’d held Jessie for less than a minute, but her absence was still a vacuum within her every time her name was uttered. They hadn’t wanted to know the sex when they’d been given the choice. Had decided to name them Jessie whichever way it had gone.
Her lifeless twenty-week-old body had been placed in her arms and the midwife had persuaded them to have a picture taken. There’d been no camera. The midwife had captured it with her phone. It was the only photo that existed of her. A low resolution snap of a low resolution moment, a tiny face like a shrivelled bud that would never open. Carla had bled internally and only emergency surgery had saved her. She’d lost so much blood she’d been delirious as Will had uncertainly leaned into the pillows and circled them both with his arms.
But they’d both been glad the picture had been taken. Knew why the midwife had persuaded them. Jessie’s existence in the world, however brief, had been recorded and the image had helped them both reconcile themselves with what happened. Less than a minute later the room and everyone in it had drained away and she felt Jessie’s fragile weight lifted from her hands.
Jessie’s brief presence still resonated profoundly with both her and Will. How could they ever withstand Libby’s removal from their lives? She walked back to the desk, opened another file, but couldn’t see the contents. A sense of darkness came at her from all sides and a familiar claustrophobia trickled into the joints of her shoulders.
Even though Will was being manoeuvred on the other side of the Atlantic, he was at least occupied and not imprisoned to envisage what they would have to face. She couldn’t allow herself to think that way; even if the fear of it burnt through everything she tried to occupy herself with. If she folded in on herself now, it wasn’t going to help Libby one bit.
She told herself she had to focus on what she could control, even if that was virtually non-existent. Every minute was valuable. Analyse the people Ingram had dealt with in Chonburi and Rayong, scrutinise the details of anyone who had recently entered their lives. She tried to perceive a presence – define a face that united outwardly harmless moments of the weeks leading to the abduction.
If Libby hadn’t been taken she wondered if Will would have shown her the site displaying the photographs of their home. Would he have concealed it to protect her? And was there anything else he’d protected her from even if his motives had been honourable?
She tried to concentrate on the information in front of her. Libby and Luke had to be imprisoned for a reason. She prayed a ransom demand would be issued soon but, looking at the website, it didn’t seem like one was imminent. If not, there had to be a justification, some locatable motive for all this.
In the suffocated blue light coming through the open ceiling shutters, Tam continued his examina
tion of the machinery. He’d watched his mother dispatch chickens using a cleaver blade to the neck, had seen plenty of them escape headless at the market. But he couldn’t begin to imagine how many hundreds of birds the conveyor of hooks over the metallic troughs in front of him silenced every day.
When his mother’s blade connected with the board it wasn’t the squawk of the animal that unnerved him, it was the moment it stopped. That was when he held his breath; like a split-second prayer.
He looked up, hypnotized by the feathers floating in concentric rings in the currents from the fans, dirty white turning black against the hazy, teal sky outside. They were everywhere, circling the floor, brushing his face and sticking to the congealed blood on the hooks. Tam knew it made no difference how much further he went. He was far enough away from home now – beyond the rescue of his mother and father.
Light outlined a large set of double doors at the far end of the factory floor and he made towards them, his bare feet slapping the warm tiles.
He put his eye to the crack and, when he was sure there was nobody else in the cavernous area the other side, pushed the door slowly open. Tam was in an enclosed loading bay. Two delivery lorries were parked to his right, the large, red shutter behind them sealed. To his left, on a raised concrete platform, were a couple of refrigeration units. Beyond them was a flight of stairs leading down. He scurried along the metal gantry in front of them. The door to the first cold room was closed, but the second was ajar. Inside he glimpsed shelves containing crates of packaged chickens. Then he saw another entrance.
It was a small security cabin tucked at the side and the light and TV within were on. Tam looked around in panic and then heard a door slam. He located the sound. Somebody was emerging from the chemical toilet against the wall behind the parked lorries. He headed for the stairs.
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