The Chosen Ones

by Howard Linskey

  Had that blow to his head been more serious then she had thought? Perhaps he had gone back up to the surface and collapsed. Maybe even now his body was lying in the fields. She wished she had shot him when she had the chance or struck him harder with the heavy shower head, then she would be free. She cursed herself for her weakness.

  Hours later she started hearing voices – one voice, at any rate, a high-pitched, whispered, keening sound, but it was so soft the words were inaudible. The sound was inside her own head. She was hallucinating due to dehydration. That was the only explanation. There was no one else in this room, nobody else down here with her. Or so she had always thought.

  Eva shook her head to clear it and sat up on the bed. When the sound continued she began to question her sanity, then she started to entertain the slim possibility that it was real ‒ but where was it coming from? She walked unsteadily to the door and pressed her ear against it. She could hear something, but it wasn’t coming from the corridor. Where else? Eva forced herself to concentrate and scanned the room. The pipes in the ceiling were too solid surely? The air vent, then. It had to be.

  She walked over and stood beneath it. Was the inaudible sound clearer here? She couldn’t tell; the vent was too high up for her to listen clearly. She went to the armchair and used what was left of her strength to drag it towards the vent. Once the chair was in place, with its back against the wall, she stood on it then climbed higher by placing a foot on one of the arms, which wobbled alarmingly, then she put her other foot on the highest point at the back of the chair, stabilizing it with her weight, and reached for the vent. There was no way she could remove it, and it was far too small to climb through even if she could, but she could place her ear against it.

  It was like opening a window. Now she could make out the sound far more clearly. It was reverberating down the air vent towards her but she still couldn’t understand what was being said. Then she realized it wasn’t words at all but screaming. Someone was crying. Somebody was in a room nears her and they were crying out in despair. Someone else had reached breaking point.

  Despite the awful, gut-wrenching sound, Eva’s heart lifted. She was not alone.

  ‘Hey!’ she called down the vent, not knowing if the other woman would be able to even hear her above the sound of her own cries, which must have been loud and insistent to carry all this way. ‘Hey! Heeeeyyyyyyyy!’

  She called for more than a minute but got no reply. She belatedly realized the sound of the screams had stopped. Eva stopped, too, then she waited and listened.

  The sound was very faint and some way off, but she could make it out: a muffled, distorted, echoing reply of ‘Hey.’

  Even though this changed nothing ‒ she was still a prisoner, couldn’t do anything about it and was starving and dying of thirst ‒ the presence of another woman, a prisoner like herself, filled her with a burst of hope and energy, just from the simple fact that she was not the only one down here. She wasn’t even sure why it gave her hope, but it did.

  If another woman was missing, she reasoned, then people must be looking for her too. She wasn’t the only one, and perhaps this other woman was not the only other one?

  ‘What’s your name?’ Eva called.

  The reply was lost in the vents but at least the other woman had tried to tell her. ‘I am Eva!’ she called back, her dry throat cracking through lack of water. ‘Eva! My name is Eva!’

  She called it again, as much for herself as the other woman, who was trying to call back to her, but the words were echoing in the air ducts, rendering them inaudible. ‘Eva!’ she called.

  I am Eva and I am still here.

  To Ian Bradshaw’s considerable consternation, another very familiar figure was standing next to Deputy Chief Constable Edward Tyler. It was Chief Constable Newman himself. It was like being summoned to the headmaster’s office.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Bradshaw reporting, sir,’ he told the deputy chief constable. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Tyler. ‘DS Bradshaw.’ His eyes narrowed, as if he was committing the detective’s face to memory as well as his name, to make it easier to enact his future revenge. ‘Now, what’s this all about, eh?’ He let out a humourless chuckle. ‘As you know, I’m rather busy at the moment.’ The allusion to his imminent confirmation as Chief Constable was offered at the earliest possible point in the conversation, Bradshaw noted.

  ‘Sir,’ said Bradshaw, but he didn’t go any further. He was waiting to see if the current chief constable was going to vacate the room and leave them on their own.

  ‘I’ve asked the chief to stay,’ Tyler explained. ‘I try not to keep anything from him, since we work so closely together.’

  ‘Don’t mind me, Bradshaw,’ said the chief constable. ‘I’ll just sit in and hear what you’ve got to say.’ Bradshaw wondered if that was meant to sound as threatening as it did, then decided it was. They were closing ranks already. Siberia was looming.

  ‘Very well, sir.’ Somehow he managed to compose himself long enough to explain the reason for their appointment, then to ask his deputy chief constable if he recalled Sarah Barstow, the woman he had interviewed years earlier.

  ‘I do recall her, yes,’ said Tyler, and he directed the second part of his answer to his chief constable: ‘Bit of an odd case, to say the least.’

  ‘I understand she claimed to have been abducted?’

  ‘She did.’

  Bradshaw tried to choose his words carefully. ‘But that claim was not considered … credible?’

  ‘We had no evidence to support the accusation that she had been kidnapped.’

  ‘Apart from the state she was in,’ countered Bradshaw.

  ‘The state she was in,’ bridled the deputy chief constable, ‘was the reason why she wasn’t taken seriously. She was rambling and incoherent and we had concerns about the state of her mental health. Look, you have to understand this wasn’t a woman who was rescued from somewhere who could then explain how she had been abducted or why. There were no witnesses who could corroborate her story, no one who saw her bundled into a car or anything like that. She was missing for a year and yet no one was approached for a ransom. There were no signs of physical assault on her person or any marks to indicate that she had been forcibly restrained. Her injuries could be accounted for by the fact that she walked out into a busy A-road and received a glancing blow from a car. She received multiple fractures, but it wasn’t that which led to her death. The physical symptoms that did the most damage, and ultimately finished her off, were quite damning, but only against her.’

  ‘How do you mean, against her?’

  ‘She was very pale, extremely undernourished and talking utter nonsense, then she lost consciousness, and drifted in and out for a while before dying quite suddenly. The post-mortem revealed hepatic and renal failure. You know what that is?’

  ‘Her liver and kidneys gave out.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Tyler. ‘Which means she was a bloody alkie, amongst other things.’

  ‘What do you mean by amongst other things?’

  ‘We had very strong reason to believe she was also a druggie and possibly even a prostitute, living on the street for the previous twelve months. She probably invented a story to explain this to her family. It was just a shame she couldn’t come up with something more plausible. I felt sorry for the parents. They got her back, but only briefly, and they couldn’t face the truth. She had completely lost her way in life. They couldn’t accept the evidence we gave them from the post-mortem. When we told them about the liver damage they said she was teetotal. If that ever was true, she must have gone through one hell of a transformation in twelve months, as well as a lot of booze.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever entertain the thought that she might be telling the truth? About being abducted, I mean?’

  This was too much for the deputy chief constable. ‘She was talking utter rubbish, man. She kept saying she’d been trapped in a box’ ‒ he paused to let Brads
haw contemplate the sheer lunacy of that statement ‒ ‘for a whole year, and when we asked her how that could be possible, she told us a man with no face had held her underground and that there were others down there, too, though she didn’t actually see any of them. She heard them, apparently. When we asked where this was, she couldn’t tell us. Instead, she started banging on about lions in his garden and fields full of pink trees. Do you see what we were up against?’

  ‘Pink trees?’ queried Bradshaw.

  ‘Pink trees,’ snapped Tyler. ‘She might as well have been talking about pink elephants or Pink bloody Floyd, the amount of help that was to us. How do you even begin to investigate something like that?’

  ‘And lions walking round the garden?’

  ‘In the North-East of England! This from a woman who swore blind she’d been kept underground the whole time,’ he protested, ‘so how could she have seen trees and lions, unless they were inside her addled mind?’

  ‘When she escaped?’ offered Bradshaw.

  ‘Escaped from whom? Escaped from where? A circus, perhaps, or a zoo? No, it was all nonsense. We all thought she’d had a bust-up with a boyfriend, she’d run off and was too ashamed to come home with her tail between her legs, so she made up this cock-and-bull story about being held captive underground.’

  ‘When you say we all, what exactly do you mean by that, sir? Were there others who interviewed her?’

  ‘I reported my findings back to my superiors at that time and they agreed with my assessment.’

  ‘That she was perhaps hallucinating? As a result of drugs?’

  ‘What else could it have been but acid?’

  ‘You think she’d taken LSD?’

  ‘Well, if you can come up with a better explanation, then be my guest. Her brain was fried.’

  Bradshaw nodded slowly at this. The deputy chief constable must have thought he was agreeing with him. ‘But then she died. Wasn’t that suspicious?’

  ‘Not under the circumstances. Whatever chemicals she had been imbibing affected her body as well as her brain. When they cut her open afterwards her internal organs were a bloody mess. That young woman had been partying hard, and I defy anyone to come to a different conclusion.’

  By that, he clearly meant he was defying Bradshaw to. Even if he could have, at this point, Bradshaw probably would not have attempted it.

  ‘Thank you so much for your time, sir,’ he said, then nodded towards the chief constable and said, ‘Sir,’ again. Christ, he was like some nodding donkey. Neither of them said a word and the deputy chief constable didn’t bother to disguise the contemptuous look he gave his DS as he departed.

  As soon as he was in the corridor Bradshaw felt his whole body sag. The Siberian chill followed him all the way along it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The voices continued long after Eva was forced to stop because of dehydration. Were there two of them now, maybe more? The sound travelled down the air vents like whispers on a breeze. Although the actual words were lost and all she could make out were the high-pitched pleas from the other woman and her screams, at least she knew she was no longer alone. What was it her captor had said? ‘There have to be five.’ Which meant there might be four other women just like her trapped down here.

  The desperate sounds went on so long she began to fear he might come back and catch them trying to communicate with each other. What would he do to them then? Finally exhausted and weak through hunger, she had just enough energy to slide the chair back in place, then she fell down on the bed and slept for a while.

  When Eva awoke he was standing over her, his masked, emotionless face like something out of a nightmare. She started. When he made no move towards her, Eva managed to compose herself, and her spirits lifted when she realized the reason for his visit. He was not here to strangle her or shoot her. There was a tray on the table with a plate of grey lukewarm food and a large plastic bottle of water.

  ‘Eat, drink,’ he commanded sullenly, as if he really didn’t want her to do either. And she willingly obeyed. He stayed in the cell watching her. Eva had never been more grateful for anything, even though she was horrified to admit she was relieved to see him, even to herself.

  When she had finished he gestured for her to stand away from the tray and picked it up in his free hand ‒ the other still held the shotgun ‒ and he made to leave.

  ‘I’ve been reading the Bible,’ she told him instinctively, and he stopped and stared at her. She wasn’t lying. There had been nothing else to do for days so she had examined all the books to try to take her mind off her hunger ‒ the children’s stories and then the ragged, much-thumbed copy of the King James Bible. She had been surprised to see notes in the margins on many of the pages. The scrawl was spidery and almost impossible to decipher but it looked as if someone cared enough about the Bible to attempt to understand certain passages. If she could convince the man to sit with her and teach her about the Bible and his twisted world view, maybe she could make some form of connection with him. Then perhaps he would lower his guard or, at the very least, see her in a different light and then he might be less likely to kill her when it came to it.

  ‘And I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to look earnest and contrite, ‘that I tried to leave. I should never have struck you. That was bad, sinful. God will judge me. I know that now. I can only beg for His forgiveness … and yours.’ She was winging it, hoping he would appreciate her contrition and respond positively to it. Wasn’t the Bible always going on about women being obedient and repenting their sins? Was that what he wanted from her?

  He straightened at this and seemed to be regarding her more closely. She braced for the onslaught that would likely follow if he thought she was lying or committing some form of blasphemy by invoking his precious Bible, but he didn’t move. Was that uncertainty she could sense? Did he really believe she had somehow seen the light?

  ‘I read lots of it,’ she said eagerly, ‘but I didn’t understand it all, though I want to.’ It made her feel sick to be talking to him on this level, like a little girl seeking guidance from a wiser person rather what she actually was – a prisoner who hated her captor – but she would do anything to get away from here, and maybe this is what it would take.

  Absolute silence while he watched her.

  ‘Perhaps you could help me to understand,’ she pleaded.

  More silence from him, and she cursed the balaclava that hid all his emotions from her.

  ‘Please,’ she urged him.

  No reaction. Was he thinking this through?

  Make a connection, Eva, she willed herself.

  ‘Rest.’ That deep, unnatural-sounding voice betrayed no emotion, then the man looked towards the Bible and said, ‘And read the good book.’

  Before she could even ask what passage of the Bible she should focus on, he turned and abruptly left the room, locking her in once more.

  It was Tom’s turn to cook. They ate together because it saved money and were meant to do it on alternate nights so that every evening one of them would get a night off from the chore. It didn’t always work out that way, though. Sometimes Tom would be out with Penny, so Helen wasn’t expecting the pan of Bolognese sauce that was gently bubbling on the hob when she got in. Tom had even bought fresh, crusty bread to go with it. Meals together at his kitchen table were always a good time to catch up and she was glad he had made the effort.

  Then Tom said, ‘Great timing. Sit down, Helen. I’ve made enough for everyone,’ and she heard the toilet flush and the sound of the bathroom door being opened and closed upstairs. A moment later Penny appeared. There would be three of them for dinner tonight.

  ‘Hi, Helen,’ Penny greeted her.

  ‘Hello, Penny.’

  The younger woman joined Helen at the table and they watched Tom drain the pasta. ‘He’s quite domesticated, isn’t he?’ beamed Penny, as if Tom had prepared a banquet.

  ‘I suppose he is.’ Despite herself, Helen couldn’t suppress a smile at the sight of
Tom dutifully dishing up dinner for them both before sitting at the table himself.

  That smile vanished when Penny said, ‘Tom’s been telling me all about the latest case.’

  ‘Has he now?’

  ‘Well, mostly just what’s in the public domain,’ said Tom quickly, ‘and Penny’s not going to tell all her mates, is she?’ Then he added: ‘I always think it’s useful to have a different perspective, in case we miss something.’

  Helen bridled at the notion they could somehow miss something that Penny might be able to spot.

  ‘It’s really creepy,’ said Penny, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Penny,’ replied Helen, ‘it is.’

  ‘Those poor women.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about Sarah, the woman who got away,’ said Tom, recalling Bradshaw’s chilling briefing to them following his meeting with the deputy chief constable. ‘How she said she knew there were other women with her, even though she didn’t see them.’

  ‘Maybe she heard them,’ said Helen. ‘Perhaps it was a big basement, with separate rooms? A very large house in the country maybe, or an abandoned office of some kind. We could look at plans for buildings like that?’

  ‘Needle in a haystack, wouldn’t you say?’ said Tom. ‘Where would we start?’

  ‘Within a few miles of where the woman was found. She was weak ‒ she can’t have got far.’

  ‘Inquiries were made in that area,’ Tom reminded her. ‘According to Ian, they found nothing, though I’m assuming the inquiries might have been half-hearted, if the woman’s story wasn’t believed.’

  ‘I’m starting to believe her now, though,’ said Helen, ‘since we have a second victim, who has only just turned up after all these years.’

  ‘You couldn’t keep people underground for months, unless there was water connected and a power supply. It would have to be secure and insulated somehow, so no one hears them or ever sees them. I don’t see how you could do it.’