Scare Me

by Richard Parker

  Will tugged the metal firmly against it. He heard an impact downstairs. They’d found the stairwell. It hadn’t taken him long to climb the stairs to the surgery.

  The ring still wouldn’t slide off. Ren’s knuckle was swollen, pumped up from the tension in his hand. It had to be removed. The wire cutters.

  They still hung from the chain holding Ren. He unhooked them, their handles slipping back into the trench they’d already made across his palm.

  Were they on the first floor, second floor by now?

  Will slid the end of the cutters against Ren’s extended finger. He gripped his manicured nail firmly. Screwing his eyes shut, he squeezed the handles again. His wrist shook and the grips slipped and buckled. There was a loud click as the pincers connected.

  He bent the ring where he’d severed it, parting it at the gap and slipped it off Ren’s finger.

  He returned to the reception office. How long before the surgery was an official crime scene? And how would he ever be able to leave Singapore to make it home if he left what was on the wall intact?

  He picked up the Zippo lighter and gripped it between his teeth while he unscrewed the lid of the petrol can. Hefting its full weight he jabbed it towards the wall, clear liquid striking the photos. Will heaved it higher so he soaked every frame. As petrol cascaded off the images he dumped the can and flicked the lid of the lighter, rolled the flint and held the flame to the wall. An orange tapestry unfurled upwards and the heat immediately tightened his face.

  Staggering away from the room he looked at the doctor’s slumped body as the flames hooked under the top of the doorway. Everything was as she’d planned. But as the temperature shaved the hairs off his neck he knew there was one thing he wouldn’t allow her.

  The fire alarm activated. Will grabbed the chair Ren was lashed to and rolled it out of the surgery and into reception. The closed hatch there was already bruised black. Choking, he grabbed his laptop and shunted the body through the waiting area, bursting through the glass doors and out into the cool air of the corridor.

  He could hear two ascending sets of feet reverberating in the stairwell so left Ren where he was and headed for the opposite end of the corridor. He pressed the button to summon the elevator and then hid in the turning beyond the shaft.

  Will watched a pair of black shirted paramedics halt at Ren’s body and exchange a glance before shielding their eyes against the smoke being disgorged by the surgery. One of them shouted through the doorway and waited for a response. He made to enter, but his colleague stopped him. A brief but heated exchange terminated with the first paramedic entering and the other reluctantly following.

  Will emerged to wait for the elevator doors to open. The arrow and red numeral of the digital display indicated it was on its way up from the second floor. How long before they came out again? It was probably only a matter of seconds.

  The numeral still hadn’t changed. He wondered if he’d need a swipe card to get out of the building through the main entrance. Plus there’d probably be other members of the emergency services waiting out the front. He trotted back to the fire exit, taking a last glance at Ren before he took the stairs again.

  He slipped down the first two floors as quietly as he could, but then the door slammed against the wall above him. As he took longer, heavier strides he heard a panicked exchange of male voices echoing down. Will ignored the agony and leapt the bottom steps of each flight.

  Back in the enclosed courtyard he deliberated whether to return the way he’d come. Rapid footfalls hammered behind him. He jumped shakily onto the green plastic garden chair and looked over the creosoted fence to the other side. It was a graveyard of industrial gas ovens and it was at least a ten-foot drop to the yard. He hooked his laptop over the edge and heaved himself over.

  He landed hard. Pain took on a whole new dimension. He limped away from the perimeter and through the metallic clutter. Will looked back and saw black smoke boiling from the surgery window, flames spiking from within.

  His mobile rang. It would alert them to his hiding place. Will scrabbled for it in his pocket as he slalomed round the rusted hulks. He pulled it from his jacket, muffling it with his hand and darted in the direction of an open pair of warped, aluminium gates.

  Nobody spoke when he put it to his ear. He looked about him, half expecting to find Ren’s killer observing him from behind the scrap.

  “Carla?”

  Will jogged through the gates, trying to discern what the sound was on the other end. It had been her name in the display. “Carla?”

  There was the sound again. A constricted breath.

  He vaguely realised he’d emerged into a residential street. “Speak to me.”

  Carla was distressed. “They’ve killed Luke… and posted the picture on the website.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  The image had been posted on the site at 12.33am, Carla’s time.

  She’d been following Will’s progress on the GPS map, but had still kept the row of houses minimised on her screen. She’d seen the top corner of it appear in the partial window and had thought it was going to be another photo of Libby.

  Having been exposed to the earlier screenshot of her daughter, her finger had hesitated on the mouse. When she’d blockaded herself against what she’d expected to find, Carla had opened it. Luke’s dead face had stared at her through polythene and the rest of the office had disintegrated behind it.

  High resolution and vividly illuminated, she could see the droplets of condensation around his face and the dark hairs of his moustache plastered damply to the transparent hood. It was sucked tightly into his nostrils and mouth, his last inhalation holding it in place.

  She’d clicked it away, but had remained immobile.

  It was only light knocking on the office door that had allowed the hum of the hard drive and murmur of the TV back into her ears. She’d got up robotically to answer it, hadn’t considered the hour when she’d released the lock.

  “Just thought I’d check in to see if everything’s OK.” The pockmarked security guard’s guard tried to see past her shoulders into the room.

  “Everything’s fine.” She’d briefly met his cold, blue eyes. He was as convinced by her reply as she was. She’d closed the door on him and sat down to call Will. It was hearing his voice from so far away that had elicited the tears. They were the ones she’d been restraining for all the long hours since they’d found out Libby had been taken.

  When she told him the news, Carla heard him slump to the concrete as he seated himself on the edge of the road.

  “The last time I spoke to them, when I demanded a photo, they asked me to make a choice between Libby and Luke.” She heard him swallow. “They made it sound like I was choosing which one they’d photograph…”

  “Don’t do this, Will. You can’t allow them to make you feel responsible.” She wound the phone wire around the knuckles of her free hand.

  “But I chose.”

  “They never cared about Luke. They weren’t making demands on his life, so why spare it? He was an inconvenience.” She was rationalising, trying to make sense of his murder because of what they had to believe for Libby’s sake. But amongst the myriad thoughts racing through her mind, one selfish consideration was paramount. Luke’s death made the chances of them ever seeing their daughter again slimmer.

  “Why take him? Why didn’t they just take Libby?” It seemed an insane thing for him to say. Wishing Libby had been captured alone. Captured in the first place.

  “Because they always planned to do this, to terrify us into doing what they want.” Cool nausea, prompted by the image trickled through the heat in her face.

  “His parents don’t even know he’s missing.” A motorbike passed him, its vulgar engine buzzing like an insect.

  “He’s the father of Libby’s child.” She barely breathed the words. Was the father.

  "Maybe we should call the police in now.” He didn’t sound sure.

  It was what Carla had
been tempted to do from the start. As more people had been butchered and the TV news highlighted how far from establishing a motive the police investigation was, the authorities’ capacity to intervene seemed pointless. Carla was now petrified by the notion. “Why now? Because Luke’s dead?”

  “Yes.” Anger coloured his response. “The other people – we don’t know who they were or what they did. Luke was just a kid…”

  “Women and children, Will…”

  Had he become desensitised to the abhorrence of that? “There has to be a reason behind the deaths of these families.” But he knew there could be no possible justification. “I’ve just left a doctor disembowelled in his office. I have to believe he wasn’t innocent.”

  The concept of another lifeless face, another brutalised human, was too much for Carla to contemplate. Luke’s death had momentarily dislocated those of the scrapbook street. Will must have looked directly into the doctor’s eyes. Not through a computer screen.

  “When I pulled Libby’s ring from his finger, I still had to believe I’d understand everything at the end of this. How can I continue now?”

  She knew he couldn’t say it, didn’t want him to say it; that Luke’s death was an intimation of what would surely happen to Libby. “This is all about Libby and what you’ve been instructed to do. What they want from us.” Whatever he’d just endured, Carla had to convince him to persevere.

  “And what is that?”

  “Everything else to them is irrelevant. Maybe we could have this woman arrested at the next address, but if she were in police custody it would only take one phone call, or her being out of touch with whoever’s at the end of that mobile number. How can we put that much faith into the hands of people who know nothing about the situation?”

  He exhaled sharply.

  It boomed in her ear. “There’s only one door left before ours. She’s close.” Carla wished she felt the conviction of her words.

  “No police then.” His voice was composed but squeezed of all emotion. “But how can we not tell Luke’s parents?”

  It was a loathsome reality. There was nothing they could do for Luke now and there was never any right time for parents to grieve their child. “We still can’t endanger Libby by telling anyone else. But we will, the moment this is over.”

  There was that word again: over. She’d reluctantly begun to understand what it meant.

  Before they hung up on each other Will told Carla about the nature of the photographs he’d had to burn up and the details he’d memorised from the door of Ren’s surgery. Another name that meant nothing to either of them. The darkness started to close in on her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to push it back. Luke was dead and there was scant hope for Libby and the baby. She couldn’t halt the panic and allowed it to soak through her.

  Voices that had been murmuring for a long time intensified. Voices Carla had ignored over the years she’d been too busy juggling and coordinating the multiple elements of her life. She should have kept Libby closer, but had compensated for her career by giving her daughter everything she wanted. She’d granted Libby freedoms she’d asked for even though she wasn’t actually ready for them.

  She’d got distracted by trying to orchestrate the perfect family environment and filling it with the accessories of happiness. There should have been the same tough love for Libby as her parents had shown her. How could she have expected her daughter to learn hard lessons when Carla always chose the most convenient options for showing affection?

  Randomness? Her own actions had surely influenced what was happening now. She thumbed the moisture from her eyes, blinking it away as she checked the GPS. The woman was almost back at the hotel. Would she immediately pack for another flight?

  She did a search for Dr Zhi Ping Ren CMD and found a rudimentary website for his Traditional Chinese Herbal and Qigong Surgery. There was a low-resolution image of the Doctor peering impassively from his health manifesto page. The site offered nothing more beyond some suspect testimonials and his hours of business.

  She located a few other photographs of him at a charity ball for the Horizon Children’s Hospice. They’d been taken at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island. A spruced-up Dr Ren with shorter hair and sunglasses grinned beatifically between two statuesque women in silk gowns.

  There seemed to be very little else and Carla was about to try a different engine when she realised she’d almost missed one of the links. It was immediately below his website, but her eyes had skimmed it because it was a video result.

  The capture image was just a blank, white square. But there was “Doctor Zhi Ping Ren CMD”, as the title of a YouTube clip with a URL below it. She clicked on it and was taken to the site. Maybe the Doctor had shot and uploaded some instructional or promotional clips. She played it and the dot clock appeared on the black screen as it was cued up.

  The one-minute excerpt started and the shaky first shot was focussed on a red car outside a grey door. A short, balding Chinese man came out of the building carrying a leather case in his hand. He strode purposefully past the car and down the street, oblivious to the fact he was being recorded. It was definitely the man from the images she’d just seen online. The camera zoomed back and it was clear its operator was stood some distance away.

  The clip cut to a market, the microphone not close enough to discern the conversation Ren was having with an old man at a raised counter. Next the camera was panning around some fish tanks and coming to rest on a closed door beside them. Again the microphone couldn’t pick up the low murmur beyond.

  The screen became white, but whatever subject was being shot was outside because Carla could identify the sound of birds. The lens shook, and as darker contours within the white came into focus Carla realised the camera was slowly zooming out from a black and white photograph.

  It was of Dr Ren, more hair in evidence, but still the same impassive expression. Even when his entire head and shoulders were framed, the photo continued to shake. Carla could see why as she glimpsed the top of a thumb holding it in position. The photo was released and it dropped onto three polythene sacks of shredded paper below the camera. They were positioned next to each other on a stone step.

  The camera jolted a few times and a jet of liquid came into frame soaking the image and the bags. Was the operator urinating on the picture? She heard the scrape of a lighter and a hand entered shot and played a flame over the saturated photograph. It went up quickly and the camera recoiled as the fire momentarily bleached the lens.

  When the shot steadied the camera had retreated and was recording the growing bonfire from a safer distance. Carla recognised where it had been set. It was at the front doors of Easton Grey.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Will anxiously watched two fire engines and three police cars part the traffic before he crossed the road from the stadium and headed back towards the Ambrosia Hotel. The humidity was stifling and his hands and arms pounded just out of sync with the low-key sensation in his torso. The pain had spread around to his kidneys and the muscles behind them were becoming numb.

  Since receiving Carla’s call his emotions felt even more gridlocked and he wondered if the accumulation of events would break him before his body gave out. He couldn’t allow himself to think that what he’d said on the phone had condemned Luke to death.

  He had to believe Carla was right, that his cold-blooded murder had always been part of their plan. The bodies in the houses were an irrefutable demonstration of their capacity to see their threats through. They knew for sure that murdering Luke ensured Will’s obedience for whatever awaited him at the end of the row.

  He didn’t know what time of day it was. Hadn’t even the strength to check the laptop, never mind look at the repugnant image that had been posted there. He gripped his abdomen as he hacked some more smoke out of his lungs.

  He kept repeating the name he’d memorised on the doctor’s door to dislocate the spectre of his shackled body and the implications of Luke’s death. Would Ren b
e the significant connection to the other names? As Will’s journey took him further down the cut-out street he was no closer to realising why they all shared the same cobbled-together neighbourhood.

  He and Carla were defenceless. Up until then a small potentiality had lived and breathed. There’d been a tiny hope that the authorities would eventually catch up, step in and absolve Will of having to see the ordeal through to Easton Grey. Now it was undeniable. They were alone to the end. Libby being returned alive seemed less likely to be part of the outcome, but he and Carla obeying her captors was her only chance. However slim it was.

  Just as he got back to the hotel Carla called again. She told him about the YouTube clip. As he spoke to her he realised he was still wearing the gloves. The heat had dried droplets of Ren’s blood on their fingers and over the digits of the phone.

  Will hurried through reception, the woman at the desk quietly monitoring him from the shadows behind the lamp as he carefully climbed the stairs.

  Pope put the phone down on Mrs Frost and relayed her information to Weaver. “She said it’s the victim her husband just found.”

  They stared in silence at the image on the iPad. None of the houses since the Ambersons’ home had depicted the bodies, so the photo of the dead man’s smothered features had been doubly shocking.

  Weaver didn’t move his eyes from the bag sucked into the man’s face. “Do they know him?”

  “No. At least that’s what she said. She seemed very upset though. I think she’s still concealing something.”

  Weaver nodded. “So we now know for sure the phone is planted on the perp…” He left the statement hanging.

  “And?”

  “Just means Mrs Frost doesn’t have anything left to barter with. If she’s holding out on us we can go wherever we want with this now.” Weaver didn’t shift his gaze from the iPad.

  Pope had been anticipating Weaver’s arrival at that conclusion and was surprised he’d taken so long. “We made a deal with her.”