Dark Fragments: a fast paced psychological thriller

by Rob Sinclair

  I traipsed through sodden undergrowth. My feet squelched and sank into a soft layer of mud with each step. When I was level with the house, I squeezed through the tree-line and then stopped on the edge of a lawn.

  Lights were on in two of the downstairs windows at the front of the house. The upstairs was entirely dark. I looked at my watch, squinting in the dim light. It was nearly four a.m.

  I had a choice to make. I could sit and wait for O’Brady to make an appearance. It looked like he was home, and certainly someone was up. Being a club owner, it wasn’t at all unusual for O’Brady to conduct his business well into the small hours of the night. He kept dogs. Perhaps they were due a late-evening toilet break, or he a cigarette.

  On the other hand, did I really want to spend the night in the cold and wet waiting for him to leave the house? I could just walk right up to the door and knock. It was the most direct approach for sure. But doing that I would have no way of knowing what I was walking into.

  I kept on moving along the lawn edge until I was at the back end of the property. A minute later a figure stepped out of a door and the piercing rays of the security lights at the back of the house came on. It was O’Brady’s wife.

  The arc of light swept right around the side of the house. From where I was standing the whole house seemed to be surrounded in a thick white glow. I wasn’t in the full beam, but if she looked in my direction, she would surely spot me.

  She lit a cigarette and took several long drags. After a couple of minutes she simply stubbed the butt out, then walked back into the house.

  The security lights were still on. I took the opportunity to move. I headed right up to the house and pulled to a stop alongside the back end. I crouched down and crept along the back wall.

  I heard voices. Male voices. Female too. The back door was still open, I realised. My heart was pumping out of control. Part of me wanted to cut my losses and scarper. I was scared, no doubt about it. But I’d come this far. I had to see it through. I had to make O’Brady pay.

  I was just two yards from the open back door. A yellow glow seeped out of the open doorway, cutting a stark contrast to the bright white security lights. I focused in on a man’s voice, getting louder. I heard footsteps. I saw the shadow of a figure in the yellow light. I reached inside my jacket and grabbed the handle.

  I pulled out the long knife.

  I’m not sure whether what happened next was deliberate or an accident. Not that I hadn’t wanted it to happen. It was the exact reason I had gone there. But it was pure momentum as much as anything else that caused the actual blow.

  As I reached the doorway, Callum O’Brady emerged. We smacked into each other. The knife, held out in front of me, plunged into his stomach, right up to the edge of the handle. About six inches of sharp metal.

  O’Brady gasped. He stumbled forward. His arms wrapped around me in an awkward embrace.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  I pulled the knife out. O’Brady grimaced in pain. The blade was caked in thick, red blood. As was the handle. And the black leather riding glove that covered my hand.

  I thrust the knife toward him again. There was a grisly slicing sound as the blade pierced his skin and cut through his flesh. O’Brady’s eyes quivered. His face contorted in pain. He stared at me but said nothing.

  O’Brady’s weight bore down on me as his legs gave way. His arms clung to me. He was hanging on for dear life.

  I took the knife out and thrust it into him one more time. Then I drew it out and stepped back and brushed O’Brady’s arms off me. He fell to his knees, one hand on his midriff, the other stretched out toward me, begging for my help.

  No chance. Never. Not in this lifetime.

  My heart was jumping erratically in my chest. My head was spinning. I felt nauseous. It was all too much. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to regain my focus. It did the trick, if only for a few seconds.

  I looked down at O’Brady. Still staring up at me. His eyes were pleading. His mouth was open, but all that came out was a painful gargle.

  His gaze never once left mine as he slowly sank to the ground.

  A few moments later his body, sprawled before me, went completely still.

  CHAPTER 56

  I couldn’t be sure that O’Brady was dead. I was too scared to check his body. Partly for fear that he might suddenly find the strength, a desperate glimmer of hope for survival, and attack me. I was also fully aware of the ongoing noise from the house. It was only a matter of time before someone realised what had happened.

  I ran back to the tree-line, up the side of the house and out into the road. Outside the property I took the plastic bag from my jacket. I stuffed in the bloody knife and the gloves I was wearing, then put the bag back into my jacket. In the cold night air, the implications of what I’d done hit me. I felt the nausea rise again and this time I couldn’t fend it off. I hunched over and violently heaved up my stomach contents – the remains of my night out with Cara.

  I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d never done anything like this before. The attacks on Dove and the man in the club, they were one thing. But this? I’d just stabbed a man. I’d very probably killed him. Not only that, but I’d done it in such a reckless way. I immediately regretted my hastily planned attack.

  I was allowed no more time for deliberation, though. As I stood hunched with my head down, waiting to see whether any more bile was about to come up, I heard a woman scream. Seconds later the front door of O’Brady’s house opened. More voices. Male voices. Shouting. I looked up through the front gates toward the parked cars. Elvis. Egan. Two others.

  I ran.

  I ran as fast as I could back to my bike. It was less than a quarter of a mile away. Back in the day, I could have covered that distance in a little over a minute. Even if I could somehow have used adrenaline and pure desperation to accomplish that feat now, I wasn’t sure it would give me enough time to get away.

  I sprinted down the near-pitch-black road – the only illumination coming from the overcast night sky – doing my best to ignore the agony in my body from the beating I’d taken just hours earlier.

  I heard a loud growl as the diesel engine of O’Brady’s Range Rover was fired up. The noise gave me the impetus to pump my arms and legs even faster.

  Seconds passed and the noise of the engine seemed to disappear. I looked around constantly, expecting to see the twin headlights piercing the darkness right behind me. Nothing.

  Perhaps the electronic security gates had given me some extra time. Better still, maybe the car had headed off in the wrong direction. I willed that to be the case.

  I soon realised I wasn’t going to be that lucky. The roar of the engine suddenly shot through the calm night and almost knocked me off my feet. The monstrous vibrations rocked the road and sent a shudder up through my whole body. I begged myself not to look around again. I didn’t want to see how close I was to being mown down.

  But I just couldn’t resist.

  I shot my head around, a split-second move. I was surprised to see no sign of the four-by-four. But I could still hear the rumbling engine, loud to my ears.

  I had no time to register any relief. As I turned back around I misplaced my foot. It sank into a ditch at the side of the road. The unexpected jolt caused me to stumble forward. I reached my hands out. I fully expected to tumble into a heap on the road. Somehow momentum or determination or sheer luck kept me on my feet.

  My panicked brain was no longer thinking rationally. I looked around again. As I did, the headlights of the Range Rover finally came into view as the car hurtled around a bend in the road.

  This was it. They were almost upon me.

  But my bike was in sight, a little more than fifty yards ahead. A few seconds. I could make it. I had to. I fished in my pocket for the key. The clumsy movement cost me a sliver of a second.

  I jumped onto the bike. Whipped on the helmet. Sank the key into the ignition. The Yamaha roared into life. I wondered whether I might actually make it
.

  The driver of the four-by-four must have thought the same. The Range Rover’s engine whined as the driver dropped a gear and the revs peaked as he tried to eke out every last bit of acceleration. By that point the entire area around me was brilliantly lit up by the lights from the guzzling four-by-four.

  I pulled the throttle hard and fast. The bike shot forward. The acceleration was so sudden and severe I almost slid right off the back. I glanced briefly in my side mirror. Objects are closer than they appear. Really? This object appeared to be up my fucking arse already. I was just grateful I had brought the Yamaha – all power and no weight – rather than my car. Immediately I shot away from the fast-moving Range Rover.

  As I moved up gears the bike wobbled and I wrestled to regain control. When I finally did, I accelerated again. Only then did I look in my mirrors once more.

  I saw I’d already pulled yards away from the heavy four-by-four. I pushed the bike into fourth gear. The speedometer swept past eighty. On the twisting country roads, the Range Rover was no match. I smiled as I realised I was home free.

  The driver of the four-by-four had yet to figure that out, though. And that was his fatal mistake.

  My bike was made for roads like that. It cornered to perfection, its weight perfectly balanced front to back and left to right. The oversized Range Rover was entirely different. Its giant engine gave it plenty of raw power, but it was heavy and ungainly.

  I took a sharp corner at a little over seventy, leaning into it at a dangerously acute angle. The bike stuck to the road like glue.

  When I looked in the mirror to see the Range Rover attempting the same corner at speed, it was quite a different story. It was simple physics. With the driver realising his mistake, I could imagine him frantically pulling the steering wheel this way and that as he tried to right his wrong. Those actions only made the position worse.

  The four-by-four swung viciously from left to right and back again, and then seemed to jump into the air as though it had been suddenly thrust from underneath. It rolled over once, then again. With each half-turn the roof of the car and its wheels intermittently crashed and bounced on the ground, throwing it back up into the air once more.

  The car finally came to a crunching halt on its side. By that point I’d slammed on the brakes of the bike and come to a dead stop.

  For a few seconds I sat motionless, debating what to do. Shouldn’t I just get out of there as fast as I could? Part of me was screaming to do so. But I couldn’t. I had to know who was in that car.

  I had to know whether they were dead or alive.

  I cut off the engine and stepped from the bike. As I walked hesitantly toward the stricken vehicle, the first thing that hit me was the noise. The hissing of the battered engine. The creaking of the crumpled metal cabin being slowly squashed under its own weight.

  The blood-curdling cries.

  As loud as they were, they sounded like just one man’s, I realised.

  The second thing that hit me was the smell. The unmistakable smell of diesel. But as I crept closer to the mangled heap, another smell hit me. At first I couldn’t place it. When I was within a couple of yards of the carnage, I finally realised what it was. Blood. Even in the dull light, the patches of thick wet blood were clear.

  I grimaced when I saw the first of the car’s occupants. It was the driver. The Range Rover had come to a stop at an almost forty-five-degree angle with its roof and the driver’s side of the car crushed into the ground. Amid the wreckage the driver’s bloodied head was hanging at an unusual angle, his neck snapped.

  I looked over at the front passenger. His eyes were wide open in shock, his deathly stare seemingly fixed on me. But there was no movement. No sign of life at all. A shard of metal from the frame of the windscreen had broken loose and was lodged in his chest. Spatters of blood covered his clothes and everything around him.

  He was dead. No doubt about it.

  I stepped cautiously around the vehicle. The great hulk of a man sitting behind the driver was unmistakable. He filled the car, making it look like a toy. Elvis. He wasn’t moving. He didn’t seem to be breathing. But I didn’t dare get close enough to check.

  Which left just one other. The one who was evidently still alive, judging by the noise coming from his lips, although his screams had by then died down to nothing more than a pained murmur.

  It was Mickey Egan.

  He was in the rear seat on the passenger side, hanging upside down, his head bobbing out of the smashed side window.

  ‘Help me,’ he wheezed.

  I walked right up to him and inspected his bloodied and defeated face. He looked back at me, his eyes pleading. I looked in through the broken window. The seat in front of Egan had been pushed back, crushing his legs and his torso. He was wedged in position, the bones in the lower half of his body likely shattered. If he received medical attention quickly, I imagined he would probably survive the crash.

  If.

  I stood there for a few seconds. Maybe it was minutes, I really don’t know. I was in such a daze. Egan was staring at me, trying to speak. Trying to beg for my help. I was frozen. I simply didn’t know what to do.

  Then something caught my attention and I frowned. The hissing noise from the engine had died down, replaced by a quiet but steady roar. The smell too was changing.

  Something was burning.

  I looked over at the front of the car. Sure enough, small flames were leaping up from the crumpled bonnet. With the amount of diesel and oil spilled on the road, I knew it would only be seconds before the whole chaotic scene turned into a fireball.

  Ignoring Egan’s desperate cries, I turned on my heel and ran for my bike, never once looking back.

  CHAPTER 57

  As I rode away from the scene, all of the mistakes I’d made at O’Brady’s house were firing in my mind. My vomit – my DNA – was outside his house. I’d possibly left footprints through his garden. Maybe he wasn’t even dead. I could only hope that the fire would burn away any evidence of me being at the crash scene, though either way it was clear I had been in the vicinity.

  With a bit of luck at least I had some time on my side. It would surely take the police a while to decipher what had happened. But my life as I knew it was over now. I knew that.

  Mickey Egan was surely dead. I hoped Callum O’Brady was too. Including the others in the Range Rover, my actions had killed five men.

  I had acted on impulse, spur of the moment. I hadn’t sought vengeance against them lightly, though. It might have come about quickly in the end, but it wasn’t a moment of madness, or irrational thinking. It was one hundred per cent deliberate – and necessary. The wounds Egan had inflicted had still been fresh. I was angry. I’d wanted to hurt him. O’Brady? Well, he’d been at the forefront of my problems in life for so many years.

  I’d accomplished so much in a short space of time. But my business was still unfinished.

  I had to dispose of the bloody knife and gloves that were nestled in my jacket, but I wasn’t about to just dump them while they were covered in O’Brady’s blood and very likely contaminated with my own DNA.

  Still thinking through exactly how I would dispose of them, I rode back toward my home, keeping to the quieter A-roads that snaked around Birmingham and alongside the motorways. I made it to the edge of Sutton Coldfield before I dumped the bike outside the gates of a scrap-metal yard and then trudged the couple of miles to my house.

  It was only at that point that I felt the buzzing of my phone in my pocket. I took it out to see Dani was calling me. I let the call go unanswered, and then saw I had a half dozen other missed calls from her. Clearly she’d finally heard about the attack on me and Cara.

  Or did she somehow already know about O’Brady?

  Either way I didn’t call her back.

  As I neared my home, I took the turning onto the parallel road that ran behind where we lived, and walked down there. It was too big a risk to head straight for the front of the house. I didn’t wa
nt to run into the police if they were stationed there, waiting for me.

  I found the house that ours backed onto. It was a semi-detached with a side gate that led into the back garden. I looked up and down the road – it was entirely deserted – then made my way up the drive of the house. I couldn’t see any lights on. I crept up to the side gate.

  The gate was locked, but using the adjacent fence I scaled it with ease and was soon creeping through the back garden. I vaulted the back fence into my own garden and stared up at my home. The same feeling of remorse that I’d felt earlier in the evening coursed through me once more as I stared at the bricks and glass and wood in front of me.

  This time I managed to quickly put the feelings to one side.

  The hope, the dreams, they had never been me. This was me. My life had always been intended to run this way. I’d fought it as best I could, but deep down I’d always known that.

  The house was entirely dark and I wondered whether it was empty. Certainly when I’d last spoken to Gemma she’d been spending more and more time at her parents’ house, getting the help she needed in looking after the children. My children.

  I wouldn’t let Gemma take them away from me.

  Suddenly I felt renewed strength and determination. I moved from the fence and over toward the French doors that led into the kitchen. I took the keyring from my pocket and gently slid the key into the lock.

  As I turned the key I heard the click as the latch released, and I slowly and silently pulled down the handle of the door, then began to ease it open. I stepped into the kitchen, moving as quietly as I could. The house was dark and still and quiet. I reached behind me and started to push the door.

  I was careful. And yet as I steadily pushed on the handle, a gust of wind made the door jerk in my hand and it snapped shut against the frame. I stood, rooted to the spot.