Killing You Softly

by Lucy Carver

  And what can I say about Jack’s mother? That at first glance she didn’t seem to have a maternal bone in her beautiful, sleek, fashionable body that everyone on the ward – both staff and patients – was staring at her either in envy or admiration, or both. That, if you looked beneath the surface, she was in fact horribly frightened for Jack and trying to cover it up with light banter.

  ‘Jack tells me you were the person who called the ambulance,’ Julia said to me when we were both settled on either side of Jack’s bed. He’d reached for my hand and held it.

  I nodded. ‘Jack was cycling back to St Jude’s, trying to warn me that something bad was about to happen, but the car ran him down before he had the chance.’

  ‘So anyway the police say that they got the person who did it – the driver of the Mercedes,’ Julia said quickly. ‘We can all relax now.’

  Jack’s grip tightened – a sign for me to agree.

  ‘Yes, thank heavens,’ I said, and wondered how long it would be before Jack’s mother gave us some time alone.

  It turned out she was a mind reader. ‘I’ll leave you two together,’ she went on, standing up suddenly and smoothing the front of her dress. ‘I’ll go down to the cafe for the worst cup of coffee in the world, no doubt.’

  I gave her a grateful smile.

  Julia came round to my side of the bed. ‘Thank you, Alyssa,’ she said quietly and seriously. Then she switched back. ‘The worst coffee and even worse tea. Plus, I’ll get lost in these endless corridors or be run down by a porter’s trolley, and I won’t have enough cash for the parking-machine token when I eventually come to leave. Hospitals – don’t you just love them!’

  And she was gone, her cloud of Chanel fighting and losing to the antiseptic smell of the ward, the click of her heels growing fainter.

  Jack sighed and I cupped my free hand over our clasped ones. For a long time we just looked into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said as he tried to lean forward to kiss me.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ I cried. I leaned forward instead. We kissed gently on the lips.

  ‘So they’ve got Marco,’ he said afterwards. ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘Exactly?’ For a few seconds I debated editing events, wondering whether to give a sanitized version, minus the chase through the oak wood in the dead of night and especially taking care to omit Marco’s death-wish dash along the country lanes.

  ‘Don’t leave anything out,’ he warned. More mind reading – it must run in the family.

  ‘OK. But promise not to be mad.’

  ‘You went against what we agreed?’

  ‘A bit, but not on purpose.’

  ‘You were meant to stay clear of trouble – you swore.’

  ‘Jack, please!’

  ‘No, Alyssa. You did – you promised me. Because I was chained to this stupid bed, you said you wouldn’t risk going anywhere alone.’

  ‘And I meant it. But then I remembered …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The video – part of it was filmed in the back of Marco’s car. We called the police and Charlie went to fetch Molly, but when they didn’t come back, we realized what Charlie had done.’

  ‘She warned Marco?’ Jack guessed.

  ‘Yes, but I still didn’t split from the others – I went out with Connie to look for Marco and Charlie. We found Charlie in the woods, but she was injured and I had to go back to school for help. Marco was still on the run. He hid in his car. I wasn’t expecting him to jump out …’

  Jack closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘And I was stuck here,’ he groaned.

  ‘It’s OK – I survived. I’m still in one piece and Marco’s in a police cell.’ Should I go on? Should I tell Jack about me resisting Ripley’s advice and holing up in Ursula’s flat above Five-a-Day?

  ‘They want to keep me here over the weekend then discharge me on Monday. But even then I’ll have to go slow because it’ll take six weeks for the ribs to heal properly.’

  ‘It’s OK, it’s all over.’ Except for Galina and the ticking clock, which meant that every hour that passed her situation grew worse. I pictured her in a small, dark room down a back street in Ainslee without food or water. Or worse – held prisoner out in the countryside, hidden away in an unoccupied cottage or barn. Then I tried not to picture it because it was too horrible.

  Again Jack echoed my thoughts. ‘But now Galina’s in an even worse situation than before.’

  ‘Yes. From what Zara tells me about Marco’s psychotic disorder, he’s not about to give the police the information they need – he won’t break; he’ll just keep on playing the game.’

  ‘And you’re dead set on finding Galina yourself?’

  ‘I can’t lie to you – so, yes. But honestly, Jack, it’s not dangerous any more, not with Marco safely locked up. I just need time and patience to figure it out, to go back in my mind to the very beginning and pick up clues to where he’s hidden her.’

  He thought for a long time, all the while softly stroking my wrist. ‘I can’t stop you, can I?’

  ‘No. And you wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘I love you,’ he sighed, stroking my skin with the pad of his thumb. ‘Remember that.’

  That afternoon, just before dusk, Jayden came with me to search the grounds of the ruined abbey. It was an obvious place to start – too obvious, probably – but then Marco didn’t know the Chartsey area very well and perhaps he would choose a landmark like the abbey to hide his victim. After all, there were the cloisters and outlying buildings, still intact, where visitors seldom went at this time of year.

  We tramped down from the road through about three centimetres of snow – enough to give a wondrous white covering to the fields and mounds of fallen stone that had once formed graceful gothic arches, enough too for us to see that we were the first people there since the snow began to fall.

  ‘Baa-aa!’ Jayden said to a lone, black-faced sheep shivering under a spindly hawthorn tree.

  ‘Baa!’ the sheep said back.

  Bolt chased it down to the river then circled back to join us. We checked the row of gloomy cloisters then went on across a graveyard to a Victorian lodge at the back entrance to the abbey estate. We rattled the rusty iron handle on the front door, found that it was locked then went round to the back and peered through panes of filthy glass. The lodge looked empty and undisturbed.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like Galina’s here,’ I told Jayden.

  ‘We need more than a feeling,’ he argued.

  So we called out for her as we searched a barn with only half a roof and found more sheep, and after that a ruined cottage with roof timbers exposed to the elements, without windows and doors. The snow kept on falling. If Galina was here, the poor girl would probably be dead from hypothermia before morning.

  We left the abbey and trudged on up the hillside and along the bridle path towards Upwood House. We met Ursula after work and got her to let us into the parts of the estate that the public weren’t allowed to see – the old stables, a store for farm machinery, even a disused greenhouse in the walled garden. We found nothing – not a single clue that Marco had even considered the National Trust property as a hiding place for Galina.

  It was almost four o’clock. We were running out of daylight and fresh ideas at about the same time.

  ‘Let’s try again tomorrow,’ Ursula suggested. ‘It’s my day off. I can spend all morning and afternoon helping you look.’

  ‘Unless we take a bus into Ainslee and keep going,’ I suggested weakly, even though it seemed a needle-in-a-haystack situation, searching randomly for a missing girl.

  ‘Not me,’ Jayden decided. ‘I’m out of here.’ And off he lurched with Bolt to heel in the direction of Upper Chartsey.

  ‘They’ll stop the buses because of the snow,’ Ursula reminded me. ‘You’d be stranded in town.’

  ‘OK, let’s leave it till tomorrow.’ I hated to give in, but I had to admit it made sense to go back to Ursula’s.
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br />   ‘And hope that the cops have more luck than us,’ she added. ‘You never know, Marco might do a deal with them – tell them where Galina is in return for a lesser charge. They do that sometimes.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘Crims on cop dramas – it’s called plea bargaining.’

  We followed Jayden into the village, stopped at his gate for Ursula to arrange to meet him in the Smith’s Arms in half an hour, then walked on to Chartsey Bottom.

  ‘I’ve got a sleeping bag you can use,’ Ursula told me once we were back in her flat. ‘Feel free to watch a DVD. Here’s the remote.’ Chucking it in my direction, she disappeared into her bedroom, re-emerging after ten minutes with her hair taken down from its dark-rooted, blonde ponytail and frouffed up in every direction like an untidy haystack. She’d lashed on the mascara and slicked candy-pink lip gloss over her lips. Transformation – ta-dah! ‘Fish fingers in the freezer,’ she said as she left. ‘Baked beans in the cupboard. See you!’

  I went through Ursula’s stack of DVDs – Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter – relics of a more innocent childhood than I’d expected – and chose Johnny Depp. I was only half watching it, noticing how skinny Keira Knightley was, when a message came on to my phone.

  Unknown number.

  Hah, gotcha! I read.

  Who was this? What was happening? My mouth went dry and my heart practically jumped out through my ribs.

  Sent you another video. Check it out, why don’t you?

  Oh God, oh no! My fingers fumbled as I opened the app and played the short, jerky footage.

  I saw a dark room with rows of rusty tools hanging from racks on the wall – dozens of spanners of various sizes, three hammers, another row of spanners and wrenches. Cut. Open on red graffiti dribbling down a rough, whitewashed wall.

  PLEASE HELP ME!

  Cut. Open again on a close-up of a girl’s face, duct tape across her mouth, eyes terrified, a damp lock of dark hair across her cheek. A voiceover of Galina breathlessly croaking the words to the children’s rhyme.

  ‘All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing …’

  Cut. Open on a longer view of her sitting with hands tied behind her back on a wooden bench under the PLEASE HELP ME! message.

  Red, like blood, trickling down the wall. PLEASE HELP ME! Red, red, red.

  A man’s voice talking. ‘Hey, Alyssa, you never really thought it was Marco, did you? Well, you were right – it wasn’t. I give you twenty-four hours to get the right guy. Twenty-four hours – OK?’

  chapter thirteen

  I ran down the back stairs of Five-a-Day out into the snow, unable to make sense of what I’d just seen.

  ‘Twenty-four hours – OK?’

  That was the phrase that echoed inside my head. Light-hearted in tone, as if it was a bet he was making with me – inconsequential, disconnected from the terror I’d seen on Galina’s face.

  So where was I planning to go at six on a January evening, in the middle of a snow storm?

  As I say, I was so mixed up inside my head that I didn’t even think to call Ripley and it must have been instinct that took me to the house where Raisa had been staying.

  I only knew one thing without any shadow of doubt and it was that unless I found Galina she’d be dead this time tomorrow.

  ‘PLEASE HELP ME!’ in red letters dribbling down the rough, unplastered wall. I had a day to make the difference between Galina living or dying.

  My phone beeped to tell me I had a new message. Unknown number. My head told me to prepare for more shocks to my system.

  Hey, Alyssa, did you see the new video? Filming isn’t as easy as it looks, but it’s cool, isn’t it?

  I resisted the urge to drop the phone, to fling it over a garden wall and never open another flesh-creeping message.

  Beep. He was back with another gloating message – a voicemail this time – firing his sharp, deranged arrows from the safe distance of a stolen phone.

  ‘I see you right now, Alyssa – no, don’t worry, not for real. In my mind’s eye I imagine you panicking, your lovely red hair flying loose, skin pale and pure as snow. Did you ever see a headless chicken running around? I did. It’s hilarious actually. You chop off its head and it leaves the bloody thing – beak, beady eyes, tiny bird brain – lying there in the dirt, but its body keeps on running. Then suddenly it drops down dead. That’s you, Alyssa. Bye for now. Cluck, cluck.’

  Oh Jesus! Oh God! I slid and skidded on the snowy footpath until I reached Raisa’s door. I had no idea if she would still be there or what she would be able to do to help – but, as I said, I was desperate.

  It wasn’t Raisa who answered the door but off-duty Mikhail. I could tell he wasn’t working because he was minus the Men in Black suit, dressed instead in navy blue sweatshirt and jeans, with bare feet and three days’ worth of stubble on his chin. Despite some bruising on his forehead and cheek, plus a cut under his right eye, he looked relaxed and totally at home.

  He stared at me as if he was trying to remember who I was then Raisa came up from behind, pushed him to one side in spite of his bulk and dragged me into the cottage. She brushed snow from my shoulders. ‘You have news?’ she begged. ‘You have found my Galina?’

  I shook my head and her round face puckered with despair. ‘You have to help me!’ I told them.

  Mikhail clicked into professional mode and while Raisa led me into the living room he ventured outside barefoot to check that I was alone.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ I hissed. The last I’d heard he’d been taken out of the checkin queue for a flight to Moscow by members of Anatoly Radkin’s private army.

  ‘He came back to be with me.’ Raisa was defensive, refusing to meet my gaze.

  ‘Does Mr Radkin know?’

  She shook her head and looked up from under hooded lids. ‘You won’t tell?’

  ‘No.’ Something clicked in my head as I took in her evasive response, a slow adding up of two and two to make four. ‘You and Mikhail … ?’

  She switched from defensive to defiant, chin up. ‘We are married for ten years.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t … !’ I just hadn’t realized. It had never crossed my mind until now, and why should it?

  ‘That’s why he is here. They hurt him and punish him for letting Galina vanish. He loses his job but he is still my husband and I am still his wife.’

  ‘What about Sergei? I bet he got more than a black eye.’ Not for failing to protect Galina, but for moving in on Salomea behind Anatoly’s back. He was dead in a ditch probably, or entombed in the concrete foundations of a major building development near Heathrow.

  Raisa shrugged. ‘For Sergei I don’t care.’

  ‘No – me neither.’ We agreed on that. By this time Mikhail had stopped scouting around outside and had come back into the house. ‘So you’ll both help me to find Galina?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘How?’ he asked. ‘It is not so easy. Anatoly Radkin, he has ten men working on this. He offers money, a big reward.’

  ‘But nothing happens,’ Raisa sighed.

  In out of the snow, I was starting to breathe more normally, getting over my latest panic but feeling exhausted and wrung out as the fear subsided. I took my phone from my pocket and laid it gingerly on Raisa’s table, ready to show them the recent Vine video.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ I offered. ‘And, Raisa, I warn you – you’ll be shocked.’

  Mikhail and Raisa watched the tiny screen, saw the rows of tools in the dirty workshop, the red letters on the wall. Raisa put her hand to her mouth as Galina appeared, gagged by silver duct tape, eyes staring in terror, and we heard the sound of her recorded voice attempting to sing the words to the first verse of ‘Cock Robin’. Mikhail clenched his fists.

  ‘Listen. He’s giving me twenty-four hours to find her,’ I warned. ‘That’s before six o’clock tomorrow night.’

  There was the final image of Galina sitting on a rough wooden bench and then the voiceover. It was
too much for Raisa, who collapsed sobbing on to a chair.

  I spoke to Mikhail instead. ‘You see what he’s doing? He’s giving me my final test – one last chance to prove that I’m as clever as he is.’

  Mikhail looked helplessly from me to his wife, who, between sobs, translated what I’d said.

  ‘The ultimate challenge,’ I whispered.

  I can’t stop Psycho Man. I’m not good enough. Galina will die.

  I thought it but I didn’t confess any of this to Raisa and Mikhail.

  He’s winning. He’s in control.

  Mikhail picked up my phone and reran the video. A new message arrived in the middle of it. He quickly handed the phone back to me.

  It was a message from Jack, not my psycho.

  Call me soon as you can.

  I called with fingers that fumbled. I had to tap and re-tap until the call went through. ‘Hi. Jack, are you OK? What’s happened? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ I plunged in and he talked over me. Our voices drowned each other out.

  ‘Alyssa, wait. I need you to listen – it’s important.’

  I stopped mid sentence. ‘OK. What?’

  ‘I’ve just had a visit from Hooper.’

  Ah – hospital-visitor Hooper who always does the right thing. ‘OK, good. I’m listening.’

  ‘It’s just something he dropped into the conversation – it started me thinking.’

  ‘What’s he been saying now?’ I sighed. I didn’t have time for this – I really didn’t.

  ‘A few things actually.’ Jack spoke slowly, hesitating between words and repeating things as if negotiating his way cautiously through each sentence. ‘It was about Marco. You know, we were talking, Hooper and me, and I was saying I was glad the nightmare was over, really over at last, and all we needed now was for the cops to force Marco to say where he’s been hiding Galina. Anyway at this point I figured there was something Hooper wasn’t telling me. He was shuffling his feet, clearing his throat, you know how he does.’