‘Chris,’ said his father, lowering the gun, and he was suddenly terrified. He braced himself for the onslaught, the beating, the accusations of spying and betrayal, but none of that came.
‘It’s okay,’ said his father. ‘I was going to tell you anyway. It’s time you knew about the work.’ Both of them stared at the girl lying on the bed. ‘God’s work,’ he added quickly, as if he was likely to undertake any other kind: ‘Now you are old enough to understand.’ Chris noticed there was what looked like a fresh tear in the arm of the young woman’s blouse. The skirt she wore had been pulled up to her waist and her tights and underwear wrenched down.
Perhaps Chris looked scared then, because his father said, ‘It’s all right, it’s okay.’ Then he smiled at Chris. ‘I’m saving her.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
That night Jenna insisted on buying Tom a meal. ‘It’s a lot cheaper than paying a blackmailer,’ she told him when she had finally exhausted his protests. He relented then, partly because he enjoyed Jenna’s company but also because he had no desire to go back to an empty house with Helen away.
‘I can’t believe it’s over,’ she said when they’d finished their meal and she had paid the bill. ‘I haven’t slept properly in ages. I want to thank you, Tom. You’ve been very kind.’
‘Nobody should be allowed to get away with blackmail, especially a police officer. He had to be stopped.’
‘It’s not just that,’ she said. ‘You never judged me.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘You know why.’
‘Well, Jenna, I hadn’t seen you for a long time and it wasn’t as if you chose that life while I was seeing you. Things just happened to you.’
‘Well, anyway, thanks for not judging.’
‘You secret is safe with me,’ he told her, but she still looked troubled.
‘Is it, though?’
‘Of course.’
She shook her head. ‘I know you wouldn’t tell anyone, but that detective isn’t the only guy who knows about my past life.’
‘Your clients, you mean?’ He wasn’t sure if that was the right word.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I thought coming to a small village would mean I was less likely to bump into someone who’ ‒ it was her turn to search for the right phrase ‒ ‘knew me, but now I keep wondering.’
‘Wondering what?’
‘I went to the pub the other night,’ she explained. ‘They had an event on for charity. I usually enjoy things like that. Now when I look around the room I keep thinking someone might know me. It’s silly, I know, but it doesn’t feel quite the same.’
‘You’re a little unnerved at the moment, understandably so.’ Tom knew her fear of exposure might be an irrational one, but he empathized with it. How many times had he parted the curtains in the upstairs bedroom so he could look down on to the street below to check there were no strangers loitering there? ‘But that will pass, in time.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, ‘because I’m not planning on going anywhere.’
‘You decided to stay?’
‘If that’s all right with you, Mr Carney?’
‘It’s more than all right with me, Miss Ellison.’
‘Good, because this is my home now.’ She added: ‘And it’s nice to know I have at least one friend around the corner I can turn to if I need him.’
‘You do,’ he assured her. ‘Always.’
‘If your girlfriend doesn’t mind, that is?’
‘She’ll be fine with it.’
‘Really?’ She smiled then. ‘Did you tell her you were coming here tonight?’
Reluctantly, he admitted the truth, ‘No,’ he said. ‘You got me. I probably should, though.’
‘Yeah, you probably should.’ She placed her hand on his for a moment. ‘And I’ll see you around, Tom.’
Tom thought about Jenna on his way home. He hoped and believed he’d been able to help her, but bad experiences lingered long in the mind. He understood that more than most, because he carried the scars from the cases he’d investigated that had ended badly, sometimes with a murder or suicide.
That stuff stayed with you and you couldn’t really talk about it to anyone. There was only one person Tom could share the burden with, because she had been through it herself. Helen understood. Who else could he talk to when the costs of his decisions came back to haunt him, as they often did, and he wondered, for the umpteenth time, What if I had done things differently?
Bradshaw had his demons, too, but they never talked about them together. Men didn’t do that generally, but Helen could on occasion coax it out of him just by asking, ‘Are you all right, Tom?’
In the same way, Helen could talk to Tom when she was gripped by a panic attack or woke shouting from a nightmare about her former editor’s murder. What would he do if she ever left? Was she really contemplating getting back with the odious Peter? He hoped she would see sense. He told himself he was only looking out for someone he cared about, but he had a selfish reason, too. If Helen ever left, something big would be missing from his life.
Jenna would need someone to talk to from time to time, too, and Tom wanted to be that person. Despite everything that had happened to her since they broke up, she would always be special and he was pleased she had no plans to leave. He wasn’t sure how he would manage to continue their friendship and keep Penny happy, but he resolved to make it work somehow, even at the cost of lying to his girlfriend, a prospect he did not take lightly.
By the time he returned home Tom was exhausted and the empty house cold, so he went straight up to bed. He read for a while until his eyes began to burn with tiredness then put down the book and turned off the light.
He was woken from a deep sleep after what felt like a few minutes but must have been hours because sunshine was streaming through the curtains. There was a sound coming from somewhere. It was a phone ringing. The landline. Tom stumbled from the bed to answer it. His alarm clock told him it was 6.30 a.m.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Put Helen on the line,’ the furious voice demanded, and Tom, still groggy from interrupted sleep, took a moment to work out what was going on.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Peter.’ When Tom didn’t immediately respond, he added: ‘Helen’s Peter. Now put her on the phone.’
Tom resisted the temptation to say, You are not Helen’s Peter. ‘She’s not here,’ he said instead. ‘She’s with you,’ and immediately realized how stupid that sounded, because Peter wouldn’t be angrily calling him at such an early hour if she was. Had they had some sort of a row? Had Helen told him she was going to take the last train back to the North-East? ‘Isn’t she?’
‘You bloody know she isn’t!’ raged Peter. ‘She was supposed to meet me last night and she didn’t show. I’ve been calling her and calling her.’
‘I thought she was with you,’ said Tom, trying to work out where she might be. ‘Have you tried her folks?’
‘Of course I’ve tried her parents! She’s not there. You know where she is!’
‘I don’t, and you need to calm down.’
‘You do know! She’s with you. She’s always with you! Now put her on the line!’
Tom didn’t even bother to answer the idiot. He just hung up.
Immediately he dialled Helen’s mobile number but was diverted straight to her voicemail. ‘Hi Helen, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Could you give me a ring as soon as you get this message? Peter called and said you never made it to him, so I just wondered where you are. Bit worried about you, to be honest, so, you know, give me a call, okay?’
As soon as he finished he called Bradshaw and silenced his protestations about the early hour.
‘Ian,’ he said, ‘we have a problem.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY
1996
Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death.
‒ John 8:51
There was an eleventh commandment. Not
one of the ones on Moses’ tablets, which had all been written by the finger of God, but this one was just as important. Chris had to learn it from a young age and repeated it whenever his father called upon him to do so. There were to be no police and no doctors. His father made him recite this almost as often as the Bible commandments he had been made to learn by rote.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness.
No police and no doctors.
Police and doctors were bad things because, though they claimed to protect and help people, they could take Chris away. If they disagreed with the way he was being brought up, for example, then they would steal him.
Father had drummed this in to him time and time again, particularly when he detected concern or fear in Chris’s eyes. The more ill Father had become, the more scared Chris had been and the more he had wanted to do something to help, but the man would hear nothing about it. He would get well without the doctor.
Calling a doctor would mess everything up because non-believers would be jealous of them and try to end the special way they lived. And they had to live like this if they were to survive the coming Apocalypse that would purge the world with its fire, before the long-awaited Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Chris certainly did not want to miss that. He yearned to be one of God’s chosen few, like the Israelites or Noah and his family, and so he obeyed his father, even as the man’s voice grew weaker and his body more frail, before he took to his bed and stayed there for days and days. Even as he failed to get any better, no matter how many of the Aunty Botics he swallowed from the old pill bottles in the bedside cabinet, still Chris did not break their eleventh commandment.
No police and no doctors.
Then one day his father gave him a special task. He had to fetch something from a locked store cupboard in the bunker.
‘Did you find it?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Show me.’
Chris took the revolver from the bag and held it up.
‘Is it loaded?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Then put it down on the bedside cabinet.’
He watched Chris do just that and nodded in satisfaction. ‘Good,’ said Father. ‘Now it’s time to die.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Helen woke with a sour taste in her mouth and no idea how long she had slept for. She struggled to remember the sequence of events that had led her to this bed in a locked room in the bunker, then it gradually came back to her.
She could recall the man with the balaclava and the gun, the deep, barked instructions to walk and the march across the fields, shielded from view by the ancient farmhouse, until she reached the hatch in the ground that was concealed until they were almost on top of it. He made her wait while he turned the wheel that opened it and forced her to climb down, still at gunpoint, until she reached the bottom. Helen had to stifle her fear that she might never come back up as he prodded her with the gun and made her walk along the corridor until she came to a door, which he opened, gesturing for her to enter. He commanded her to lie face down on the bed with her hands behind her back and she wondered if he would simply shoot her right then. But why go to all that trouble to get her down here just to do that? The sound would be muffled by the bunker and maybe that was reason enough.
He must have put the gun down because next thing he was astride her, sitting heavily on her back and hands, lifting up her head painfully then forcing a soaked rag over her nose, against her lips and mouth. Helen tried to struggle, to fight him, but he was powerful and strong. That was all she remembered.
How long had she been down here before she awoke? She couldn’t tell. He had taken her watch and her useless phone and had stripped her of her normal clothes and dressed her in these … what were they? Army fatigues? Prison garb of some kind? None of it made sense, least of all the relative comfort of this cell. She had a bed, a bedside cabinet, a shelf with books on it. She went over to scrutinize them.
They were children’s books, old-fashioned titles from the fifties, and there were two copies of the Bible, one old and battered through use, and a newer one. There were also two wooden bookmarks, and Helen immediately wondered if they could be of use somehow, so she eased them out of the books they were in.
Holding them, Helen realized they would be useless as a weapon or a tool to scratch at the walls with. They were made of the lightest, flimsiest balsa wood. She started to feel nauseous then and the smell of whatever drug she had been given seemed to fill her nostrils anew. She gave up on the books, went back to the bed and lay heavily down on it again. All she could do now was wait ‒ for her captor to return, for the nature of her fate to be revealed.
They were both rational men, so each offered up reasons why Helen might have innocently disappeared off the grid. She’d changed her mind about seeing Peter and wanted to avoid conflict; she was really at her parents’ house or with her sister and had told them not to admit this to Peter; she had gone off on some spur-of-the-moment trip without telling anyone. None of these actions sounded remotely like the Helen they both knew.
Bradshaw made some calls inquiring about traffic accidents that might have resulted in serious injury or death and was relieved to find there had been nothing involving a young woman around Helen’s age.
Tom contacted as many people as he could, including her sister and her parents. No one had seen her and he made light of the situation to avoid alarming them while becoming increasingly concerned himself.
‘That’s okay. She said something about maybe seeing you soon and I just needed to get hold of her about a story.’
They contacted all the organizations Helen had worked with on newsletters and even drove down to see Marie from the hearing-dog charity, but she hadn’t seen Helen either. While the rest of the country concentrated on an historic polling day, with the likely election of a new government, Tom and Ian ignored it and instead focused all their energies on finding Helen.
‘Where to next?’ asked Bradshaw.
‘That’s everyone I can think of that she has regular contact with.’ Tom wracked his brains for any ideas of where Helen might be. ‘You don’t think that Jimmy McCree …?’ he asked, fear in his voice.
‘McCree is up for parole soon,’ said Bradshaw firmly. ‘Why would he risk it? Besides, I kept your name out of it for that exact reason. I didn’t want anyone inside HQ knowing you were involved in case it leaked back to him. Only Kane knows about that and, if I can’t trust him, then I can’t trust anyone.’
‘Then this must have something to do with the missing women,’ Tom decided. ‘Helen thought of something or worked a bit of it out – but why the hell didn’t she tell me?’ He felt guilty then. ‘We had a bit of a falling-out,’ he admitted, and he told the detective about their argument over Peter. He wondered now if Helen hadn’t felt like sharing a confidence with him because of it. Maybe he had been too preoccupied with Jenna and her blackmailer for Helen to involve him. Either way, he bitterly regretted it now and was determined to find her.
‘Where the hell could she be?’
‘I know she didn’t buy that whole white-slave-trade theory.’
‘I’m not sure we did either, if I’m honest. Do you think she tried to do something about it?’
‘On her own? I doubt she’d start poking about in those other scrapyards or anywhere else, do you? Not without us.’
‘In case she accidentally discovered the man behind this. No, not on her own.’
‘Exactly. Helen is a brave lass, but she wouldn’t do that unless she …’ He thought for a moment: ‘… felt safe.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Just something we said before, about someone not looking like a killer.’
Helen’s captor wouldn’t talk to her. He had been in her cell twice since she had come round from her drugged sleep. She thought of it as a cell, because that’s
what a locked room was, no matter how many books it contained.
It didn’t matter what she said to the masked man, he never once acknowledged her, and his brooding, silent presence oozed menace. She asked him why he was keeping her here and what he wanted from her. She explained that people would be looking for her, that they would know where she was, but it didn’t seem to provoke any reaction, though it was hard to tell with him wearing the balaclava. When he came he brought her food on a tray and some water, but even that was in a plastic glass so she couldn’t use it for anything else.
It was his second visit that gave her hope.
Helen had noticed something. It was the way her captor quickly locked the door behind her and immediately marched away. Helen heard the door lock, but there was no scraping sound as the key was withdrawn. Was he leaving the key in the lock? She went to the keyhole and checked. It was blocked. The key was still in there, she was sure of it. It wasn’t that he was careless, exactly, just hasty and preoccupied, perhaps, or he didn’t want to carry lots of keys around with him. He would naturally assume it was safe to leave them in the locked door if she was on the wrong side of it. Helen heard his footsteps retreating back down the corridor almost as soon as he had turned the key, and that made her think of a way out.
Not careless, she thought. Just not careful enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
‘Helen thought this place was weird,’ Tom explained as they got out of Bradshaw’s car and walked towards the cottage. ‘I’ve seen a lot of weird in my time, though, and my tolerance for it is higher than hers. Maybe it was just female intuition.’
‘You really believe in that?’
‘Not really, but I do believe in trusting your instincts, so perhaps I should have trusted hers. I don’t know why she would come back here, but I can’t think of anywhere else she could be.’
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