Her pencilled eyebrows rose. “No stepmother?” she enquired amicably.
Carla felt the muscles in her shoulders throb with the exertion of her screams. She kept knocking and kicking, not daring to stop in case someone was passing by.
Her toes tingled painfully, bruised. Her caustic breath gripped her face and, as her own situation elbowed speculations about Will’s aside, delayed panic rapidly inflated.
She was a child again, curled up on the bed when she knew her parents would never return to pick her up. Strange space, strange smells, no chance of her waking up to find it was a nightmare.
Carla squeezed her eyes shut against the blackness, coloured patterns swirling in them as she tried to inhale slowly. She wondered if it was airtight in here and how much oxygen she had left. Her fear of suffocating threatened to quickly devour the scant supply around her.
Skinny Man wasn’t breathing. As time had passed and he still hadn’t risen from his position in the chair, Tam had become bolder with the glances he’d snatched at the figure seated in the shadows beyond the cage.
He hadn’t shifted in all the time he’d been there. The other man was gone with the girl. Was it him that had injected him? Had Skinny Man been dead all this time?
Tam decided the only way to find out was to attempt to escape through the gap he’d left in the wire. He snaked his body to the corner of the cage and looked back. Skinny Man’s silhouette didn’t budge. He pushed his bound wrists against the corner and it gave. He hadn’t had time to remove the staple from the bottom, however, so the gap that opened was very small. Could he push it out far enough to crawl through?
He looked back at Skinny Man again, expecting him to be crouching and smiling at the front of the cage. He still hadn’t moved. Tam crawled as close as he could to the opening and started pushing his body against the wire.
Libby struck metal. When the space around her had lurched, she thought the needle had been pushed back into her vein, but she quickly realised she was lying inside the van again. The gears ground and the engine snarled and rattled as it rapidly accelerated. She could hear the axle turning under the warm floor as they sped over uneven terrain. Her teeth vibrated, head bounced and body rolled as they took each sharp turn.
The motion shook away some of her stupor. Her eyebrow pulsated where she’d been hit. Where were they going? She howled through the gag in case anyone could hear her as they passed. The radio came on. Loud, pneumatic rock engulfed her feeble cries.
She weakly lashed out with her feet, trying to strike the doors of the van, but they failed to connect. The vehicle rounded another corner and turned her again. The bridge of Libby’s nose struck a sharp edge and her vision flared white.
Her body was too weak to react to the motion. She couldn’t escape, couldn’t defend herself against whatever awaited at their destination. Unconsciousness returned, like black bricks rebuilding themselves into a wall that shut out the world.
Pope and Weaver waited at the entrance to Sloman’s farm. A mud track led through the open gates and wound out of sight beyond the forest.
“Fuck this. We should drive in there.” Weaver’s hand was on the ignition.
“No. We hang fire.”
“But what is she doing in here?”
Pope shook his head and studied her stable position on the GPS. “We wait. But reverse further back. She might return this way.”
Poppy jabbed Will with the Taser again, two hundred and fifty thousand volts to his central nervous system. His body bucked, his brain’s attempt to send signals to his muscles shorting out a second time. She quickly bound his hands behind his back with chain and left him lying on his side.
It wouldn’t take long for him to recover. Then they had the whole afternoon together.
She patted his jacket and then reached into the inside pocket. Her fingers clasped the contents and pulled out the silk he’d wrapped the other items in.
There was a wicker table by the sound system. She swiped the stack of CDs there to the floor and unfolded the violet material across its top, revealing the jewellery and scarf.
Carla heard a voice outside the car. She slid her ear to the metal and listened to a low exchange of male dialogue.
“I’m locked in here!” The words tore the last volume from her throat and she tasted blood.
She waited. The conversation stopped.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Carla opened her mouth, but the words couldn’t form. She sat upright.
“Mrs Frost?”
She propelled herself out of the boot, rooting her legs to the car park for fear of being shut in again. Her leg skated out to one side and the security guard supported her.
“I was just coming off my shift and heard you.”
She coughed and tasted the blood in her mouth again. “Anwar locked me in,” she croaked.
The security guard nodded uncertainly.
“I have to go, but call the police immediately and let them know what happened. Anwar Iman,” she repeated for his benefit. She’d recognised the sleeves of his olive suit and his tanned hands. It was his car she’d been locked inside.
“But Mr Iman is here.” The security guard nodded behind her.
She turned from the security guard to where Anwar was leaning apprehensively against a concrete pillar clutching her handbag.
“I’m sorry, Carla.” His palms were out again, like he was anticipating aggression.
Carla yanked her arm from the security guard’s grasp. “Anwar?”
“I was acting under Will’s instructions.” Her incomprehension prompted him further. “He called me. Told me to stop you from leaving. After you’d thrown me out. You’d taken my pass so I had to wait for you here. He knew you’d try to use his car.”
Will had known she’d make her own decision and had tried to intercept her using Anwar. She didn’t have the energy to be angry with him. “You know what’s happening?” she whispered through vocal cords that felt frayed.
Anwar shook his head once. “Just that it was a matter of life and death and that I had to do everything in my power to keep you here. Please… tell me what this is all about.”
There was no time for further exchange. Even though his actions had been misguided, he’d been protecting her for Will. She made for the exit, but Anwar blocked her path.
“Carla, I can’t let you go.”
“Anwar, step aside,” she said, meeting his eye.
The summer house was hot and stuffy and Poppy had been relieved to be free of her clothes. But having waited for Will to recover, she dropped the flimsy dress over her head again, arranging the thin straps on her shoulders and pulling down at the waist-high hem to straighten out the wrinkles. She slipped on her beaded bracelet, her amethyst pendant and ring. Then she re-attached her Emile Chouriet watch, the one she’d left on her mother’s body.
Poppy knotted the red scarf retrieved from Strick’s mouth around her neck, covering the rope burn at the base of her throat. There was no mirror, but she could see herself in multiple mobile reflections gently swaying in the draught through the door.
Will watched her from his position on the floor. She had her back to him and he could see a mottled burn mark on her right hip and blackened welts down her spine and across her buttocks.
As her figure shifted in the violet dress it evoked the purple background colour of the website. The amethyst pendant, ring and other accessories belonged to her. She hadn’t lied. He’d collected them and his daughter had made it to the party.
Beyond her, on the summer house wall, was a chain of black-framed photographs. The one of Libby and Luke he’d found in Ellicott City, the baby scan from Bel Air, Carla’s image from Chicago, a copy of one of the snaps of Will he’d burnt in Serangoon, the university group shot of him with Eva Lockwood that had been fixed over her bed in Dundee and, to finish the row, a pensive portrait of her. She hadn’t just been taunting Will and the police with the pictures; she’d been assembling her family.
&n
bsp; It couldn’t be the truth. But the hours of the blackout he’d suffered the night he’d spent with Eva Lockwood were irretrievable. Had his first intimacy not been with Carla as he’d thought? This obscene possibility revolved in his brain.
He felt the cool metal chain cutting into his wrists and remembered Dr Ren.
She didn’t turn. “As you weren’t there, I thought I’d show you how I was when I came into the world.” Her voice was sedate and composed. “And the medals I’ve earned since.” She angled her body to display the brands and disfigurements.
Will rolled onto his back, crushing his hands. Then he painfully levered himself so he was sitting up.
She turned, biting her pronounced bottom lip. Not as if she was internally debating what to do with him, but when to do it.
“You’re Eva’s daughter.” He couldn’t implicate himself.
Her facial reaction was almost imperceptible. “I only really got to know her these past few months. Looking after her. Taking her what she needed….”
Will recalled the drug paraphernalia in the kitchen. “She abandoned you?”
She ran her fingers round the scarf about her neck. “Who would have thought a junkie’s womb would be so fertile.”
“You think I’m the father.”
She flushed then, pinpricks of red radiating at her pale cheekbones.Your father. Will couldn’t bring himself to say it, couldn’t accept he could be bonded by blood to the death he’d witnessed. He looked into her collected, barren expression, terrified of seeing a glimpse of himself there.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“Eva had no one else,” she continued with the same hollow tenderness. “She slept only with you at Brunel. Said too much drink meant you weren’t really present at my conception. Remembered your name though. You were easy to find.”
“Eva never told me. She just disappeared.” The stunned defence was as much for his ears as hers.
“Eva decided to deal with me on her own.” She left the magnitude of what that had meant for her suspended between them for a moment. “Her recreational habits ended her studies. She’d already started training as an air stewardess when she moved up to Class A drugs.”
Will remembered what she’d said about the irony of meeting on a plane.
“She met Dr Ren during her stop-offs in Singapore. Ren wasn’t as respectable then, more a back street practitioner. No surgery, but plenty of demand for his prescriptions. They had a relationship. He was only too eager to dispose of me for her.” She ran her fingers down the edge of her bare arm and touched the watch on her wrist.
Will looked round for her knife. He couldn’t see it, but located the Taser on the wicker table.
“I was a premature, junkie baby born in Ren’s kitchen. My mother had eclampsia and had severe seizures throughout the birth. The toxins in her system nearly killed her.” She paused, as if in respect for the woman she’d bled out on the mattress. “Dr Ren cut my umbilical with a fish knife. Then, while he helped my mother shoot up, he left me too near the stove and my blanket caught fire.
Her words evoked Ren’s suffocated curses and what she’d done to him in the surgery. “Ren didn’t burn like you wanted him to. I pushed him out of the fire.”
Her dark brown eyes didn’t flicker, but restrained his. “Eva said I looked like something that had fallen from a burning nest.” She showed her teeth as if in affection for the description. “By the time she’d recuperated, Ren had sold me.”
Will watched her lips move, her head dipping with the words and their connotations. He sensed nothing, but the mechanism of her speech. There was no bitterness to the account. None of the words were imbued with anything more than civility.
“He sold me to a man named Li Shanchi. Shanchi used child labour in the textile factories he operated in Geylang. He called me his Poppy. I had no shortage of father figures.” She gently tapped one of the pieces of coloured glass with her fingertip so it spun on its wire. “When I was twelve I was put to work in the brothels. I watched Shanchi cave a man’s head in. Soon after he helped me dispose of a customer I had to deal with myself.” She showed him the watch, offering it like a hand to kiss. “This was a birthday gift. I don’t know my real birth date, but Jake decided on today.”
“Jake?”
“Jacob Franks. He was a regular visitor to Geylang. I was a profitable commodity at fourteen. I even got to leave the district when Shanchi drove me to the exclusive hotels in his car. I was blessed.”
Will’s regard shifted from hers to the red scarf at her neck, he didn’t want to see the memory in her eyes or the scars of her ordeal.
“Shanchi sold me to Jake. I didn’t know then how much influence he had. Jake gave me a birthday and a passport. I never saw Shanchi again. I would have arranged for you to meet him too, but he died of bowel cancer in 2008.” She briefly closed her eyes as if in quiet reverence.
“Would you have murdered his family as well?”
Her features didn’t fluctuate. “I lived in the Chicago apartment Jake bought me. He didn’t need to imprison me there. I knew how fortunate I was. I was safe. Then I began to understand who he was. How powerful. The people he was connected to.” She paused and something guileful glimmered in her eyes. “His mistake was allowing me to educate myself. He wanted me to learn. Sometimes Jake said he thought of me as his daughter. Like he would have choked his own daughter while he sodomised her.”
Will realised he couldn’t allow the revulsion of her testament to restrain him. He had to remain as removed as she was.
“For nearly a decade he showered me with what he thought I wanted. I used his money to enable myself. He even helped me locate my mother through Shanchi and Doctor Ren. But I was his currency. There was a VIP club in Chicago called the Lupus Rooms, an exclusive drop in for high-profile clientele. It was how Jake met Holt Amberson and Richard Strick. A lot of men came to visit me at the apartment. Faces without names; I learnt how to block out a new sort of pain there.”
If she was his daughter how could Will have prevented what had happened? How could he have when he didn’t know she existed?
“Amberson and Strick were regulars. Always called when they were in town. Amberson used to stub cigarettes out on my spine. Strick liked to watch Monro slowly fracture my arms with a G-clamp.” She offhandedly itemised the abuse, a treadmill that had become the everyday. “I left one of the recordings at Monro’s place for you.” She worded it as an enquiry, as if soliciting approval for its contents.
The footage the two bodies had been sat in front of in the lounge – Monro had been behind the mask. It was her screams of agony that had led him into the room.
“I ran out on Jake five months ago. He’d given me insight. I’d extracted as much as I could from his intellect. I didn’t need him any more.”
Will could still hear the sound of his empty skull as he’d pulled out the polythene package of silk she now wore on her body.
“He panicked when I killed Amberson and Strick. He was in town for the Alper’s Benefit so I knew he would try to dispose of the rest of the discs. There were hundreds of them. They sat on the shelves right next to all the books he bought for me about political science and philosophy.”
Will understood now that every spark of who she was had been systematically ground out. But there was no doubt in his mind. What she’d forced the people she believed wronged her to endure was the work of a calculating monster. “And their abuse justifies the deaths of innocent women and children,” he said. He thought of Eva and all the blood leading back to a night he couldn’t remember.
“How could men like that live at the bosom of their families and never be suspected? They were all in denial. They didn’t think twice about sacrificing my innocence.”
How could she be so contained? Will guessed it was the only way she’d survived, hiding within the abused vessel of herself. He was back in the Monro house, controlling his limbs from a place removed from the horror he witnessed, moving his legs up the stairs.
>
“I met Amberson’s son online. Tried to see past the father that had visited me in the apartment. But there was the same predator. That’s when I decided they all had to be rubbed out. Every trace. They were inhuman.”
“No human being could possibly take lives in the way you have.” He met her eye now, found his own brown irises there.
“Those men did. All principled members of society, but they needed somebody like me. The civilised can’t function without having their real nature serviced. I was bred for it. A cheap fuck, it’s what I started out as and what I was made to aspire to.”
Will had no answer. Her words, as carefully constructed as everything else had been, obviously led to an ultimate act of penance.
She picked up the Taser.
“So how are you going to butcher me? Do I get extra irony with my death?” He staggered upright, confronting her, a creature so far removed from him because of what had happened to her. But there was nothing in her story he could discount, nothing that allowed him to deny who she was.
“Relax.” Cordiality suffused her voice again. “Make yourself comfortable for a moment.” She was mimicking what she’d been her whole life. “Have a think about what you’d like me to do.” She held out the Taser and smiled, but her lips hardened white.
Will stepped back and dropped onto the couch. Once he was seated, she jabbed his chest. His body stiffened into painful paralysis again.
CHAPTER FIFTY- SEVEN
Will trembled as he watched Poppy wander out of the summer house and sit with her back to him on the step. The breeze picked up her hair and she wiped one side of it behind her ear.
“I’ll let you decide. Summon Carla or I’ll give the word for Libby to die like her boyfriend,” she proposed matter-of-factly.
He couldn’t speak; his jaw was still locked against the convulsions.
“You can make the call to your wife or not. Your choice.” The fringe of her hair lifted as she blew breath into her face to cool herself down. She stood and moved out of sight and into the garden.
Scare Me Page 30