by Roz Watkins
‘Jesus Christ. And this is why you have to check every room when you get home.’
‘Oh, you noticed that. I thought I was being subtle. I know it’s ridiculous and not rational, but I have this urge to check them. The ceilings.’
‘It’s okay. I understand. Well, kind of.’
‘So, when I saw Rosie—’
‘My God, you handled it so well.’
‘I think it did me good. I had to focus on her, and it forced me to just get on with it. But I’m thinking now, why were we so desperate to save her? She’d chosen to kill herself.’
‘It’s natural I suppose,’ Jai said. ‘To want to rescue people.’
‘I’m not sure Mark sees it like that. He doesn’t seem to think life as such has any value. Avoiding suffering is his thing. But, I mean, everyone suffers, maybe we’d all be better off dead.’
Jai shifted Hamlet higher up his knee. ‘I suppose most of us end up slightly on the positive side, on balance.’
‘Probably not when you look at the whole world, and the whole animal kingdom.’ Hamlet purred like a power tool. ‘Although cats must push up the average contentment levels.’
‘But think of the mice they torture.’ Jai looked down at Hamlet and touched one of his neat, white front paws. ‘You were right, you know. When I said it was wrong to kill people, it was a knee-jerk thing from my upbringing. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay. I’m sorry I told you to fuck off.’
‘The whole religious objection doesn’t stack up anyway, does it? It should be about avoiding pain, not prolonging it to make some stupid point.’
‘That’s what Mum says. She still believes in God. I don’t get it though. If there was a god and he was a nice guy, why would he have arranged the whole deal like this? I mean, like the set-up with prey animals and predators. You’d make everyone a herbivore, wouldn’t you? Unless you were a sick bastard.’ I smiled. ‘But now I’m sounding like Mark.’
‘Well, maybe he has a point.’
A wave of affection swept over me as Jai sat there in my terrible clothes with the cat drooling on him and kneading his legs. He was tactfully trying to rearrange Hamlet to minimise the effect of the needle-sharp claws.
Suddenly ravenous, I stuffed porridge into myself. ‘Kate’s not the killer,’ I said. ‘Should we be worried about Mark? Where is he? I remembered he had cut-up wellies in his pantry.’
‘You think it could be him?’
‘Could he have attached smaller soles to bigger boots like the Unabomber, so he left medium sized footwear marks, even though he had size twelve feet? And he had a machine for sealing plastic food bags. He uses it to make dog food.’
Jai spoke quickly. ‘After what happened to his mum, he was desperate for his family not to suffer, and also Kate.’
‘If he doesn’t think death’s a bad thing, only suffering, then killing him would have done Peter a huge favour, saving him and Kate from the next few years, which were going to be horrific. Beth had the gene too. Could he have killed her as well, to save her from suffering? He was very quick to say she’d committed suicide. And look at how he behaved with Rosie. Do you think he let her walk off into the night to kill herself?’
‘The set-up would make sense – he wouldn’t want Peter’s death to look like suicide because he wants Kate to get the life insurance. So, he’d try to make it sufficiently unclear that there’d be an open verdict.’
‘He goes geocaching,’ I said. ‘And he could easily have known Peter’s password. And he knew about the history of the house.’
‘Oh my God, it really could be him.’ Jai stroked Hamlet faster.
I paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth. ‘I think Kate’s in danger.’
Chapter 41
Jai clearly wanted to leap up, but Hamlet had him pinned. He stayed perched on the chair. ‘Would Mark harm Kate?’
‘Only to protect her, and future generations, from suffering,’ I said. ‘I think something’s going on at her holiday cottage in Bakewell.’
I rushed to the living room and grabbed the laptop, prising it open as I dashed back into the kitchen. A converted windmill near Bakewell had been for sale two years ago. I scrawled the address on a scrap of paper.
I was still officially suspended, pending being sacked when they found out what else I’d been up to. I shouldn’t have been rushing around trying to rescue people. But I had to do something. I called and asked Richard if they’d been up to the mill to see if Kate was there.
‘We’re checking it out, Meg. Calm down, you’re supposed to be having a break.’
I’d thought I was calm. So much for that performance.
I smacked the phone down and turned to Jai. ‘They’re not taking it seriously.’
‘Come on then.’ Jai looked like a special kind of superhero in my appalling clothes. ‘Let’s go. Bring your crazy scarf, we’re going to be cold. Have you got the address? Where’s your radio? Mine’s in that bloody cave, somewhere.’
I grabbed my scrap of paper. ‘It’s at the Station, charging. I wasn’t thinking straight when I left…’
‘Oh.’
We paused and stared at each other. ‘We’ll have to rely on the mobiles.’ I tried not to think about the state of the signal in the wilds of the Peak District.
‘We’ll phone in and tell them where we’re going,’ Jai said. ‘Just in case.’
‘Let’s take your car,’ I said. ‘My hand’s all torn up.’
We bustled out of the house and ran to Jai’s car. I shot round to the passenger side and Jai threw himself into the driver’s seat and eased us out of the tiny parking space and off down the cobbled street.
Unlike a traditional hero racing to save the damsel, I put the address into the sat nav. ‘Jai, I’m going to be sick. You can slow down a little bit.’
Jai pulled out onto the A6, way too close to the front of a quarry lorry. ‘Just how desperate is Mark that Kate doesn’t have a baby with Huntington’s?’ he said.
I pictured Mark’s black eyes. ‘He can’t cope with more suffering. He doesn’t value life for its own sake. And Rosie heard him arguing with Kate on the phone. He was angry. It sounded like Kate was refusing to test the baby.’
Jai glanced round at me. ‘Why wouldn’t she want the test?’
‘You have to agree to an abortion if it turns out positive.’
‘Oh God. And Mark’s determined to wipe Huntington’s out of his family.’
‘Okay, you can speed up a bit.’
The rain turned to sleet and the roads were slick with water. We’d lost five degrees since we left Belper. I wrapped Carrie’s scarf around my neck and sat quietly as we drove through the night. My brain whirred. Snippets of conversation and disjointed images flashed through my mind, as if I was in a cinema watching a film made by a madman. I shut my eyes and let everything shift and juggle in front of me. The cave house in the woods, Olivia’s face in Peter’s photographs, Sebastian under the railway bridge, the godly business woman everywhere, Hannah saying it got nasty at the religious group, Felix pushing a man off a roof onto spiked railings, Edward being arrested at an anti-abortion march, GR scratched into the dirt…
‘Oh God,’ I whispered. ‘Maybe it’s not Mark after all. Maybe—’
‘There,’ Jai yelled.
A rutted lane led off to the right over the moor, and in the distance a windmill stood out against the night sky. Jai swung the car onto the lane and accelerated.
Lights were on in the top of the old mill tower. They cast a glow through the wet air onto the surrounding hillside, through huge windows.
A shape came into view in the pool of light around the base of the tower.
‘Mark’s car’s there,’ I said. ‘And I think that’s Kate’s behind it. And is that another car?’
Jai looked ahead at the mill, and sped up abruptly.
A flash from the headlights shone onto stone. Right in front of us. I gasped. The dry-stone wall ahead had collapsed onto the lane. ‘Watch o
ut!’ I shouted.
Jai swerved. The car slewed sideways, tyres screeching. I slammed my right foot to the floor in an imaginary braking action. The car bounced and jolted under me with shocking force, throwing me up so my head smacked onto the roof. Finally we pitched down and smashed to a halt, the noise of metal on stone filling my ears. Something smacked me in the face – hard, like I’d been punched – and then everything went quiet except for an ominous hissing.
I groaned and clawed the spent air-bag away from my face. An acrid smell filled the car and a thin powder lay on me like fine snow. The car was making a strange clanking noise like expanding metal.
I rubbed my head. ‘Jai, are you okay?’
‘Get out of the car.’ His voice was muffled and I could barely see him through the dust.
I unclipped my seat belt and levered myself sideways. My head was spinning as if I’d had too much to drink. I staggered forward and clutched onto a collapsed part of the dry stone wall we’d ploughed into. The front of the car was strewn with rocks and concertinaed into half its previous length. And it was still producing that unnerving hissing and clanking.
I looked up and saw Jai’s head emerge from the far side of the car, but then it dropped out of sight. I stumbled over to him, and found him slumped on the ground.
‘I think I might have broken some ribs,’ he said.
‘Oh crap. Can you stand up?’
Jai levered himself up, with much wincing and shallow breathing. He wasn’t normally a wimp, so it must have been bad. I helped him hobble away from the car and we sank onto the wet grass. The cold ground bit into me, and I realised I was shivering. I wrapped my coat and scarf tight, and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Not even the sniff of a signal. Just the no-entry sign that indicates you’ve got no chance.
I tried 999 in case I could get through on another network, but there was nothing.
I pictured my radio sitting charging. It had an orange button on it. If I’d pressed that button, it would have used its GPS to radio my precise location to our colleagues, who would have absolutely floored it to come and save us. I cursed myself.
‘I think we’re on our own,’ I said. I typed a text anyway, in case a temporary signal appeared.
Jai sat clutching his chest. ‘Jesus, we’ll have to wait for backup. You can’t go in.’
‘But—’
‘Seriously, Meg. How many times have you screamed at the TV when Morse goes in alone?’
He had a point.
I rubbed my head and inspected my hand. ‘I think I’m okay. I’ll just go and take a look. We need to get help for your ribs anyway. If they’re badly broken, you could puncture a lung. There’ll be a landline in there. And we’re probably over-reacting – Mark and Kate could be settling down for a nice cup of tea.’
‘I don’t like it.’ Jai prodded his ribs. He let out a tiny gasp.
‘Don’t try to move, Jai.’
He groaned. ‘Be bloody careful. You don’t have to be a hero. You’ve got nothing to prove.’
Jai was so wrong. I had everything to prove.
I made sure my phone was on silent, and limped towards the base of the tower. A raw wind sucked the warmth from me. I leant and picked up a fist-sized rock, which I gripped with my good hand.
The tower was cylindrical and an oak panelled door faced me as I approached. I reached out and pushed it. It resisted, but I gave it a harder shove and it opened, tipping me into the room. I caught my balance and edged forward one tiny step. Inside was a gloomy, cavernous space, about thirty feet across. I crept in, the door thudding shut behind me. I shivered and tried to keep my breathing steady.
The floor was laid with old flagstones, so cold I could feel them through my boots. I took a step forward. Something lay in the centre of the room, hard to make out in the dark. As my eyes adjusted, I could see it was a wooden board about three feet square – like a trapdoor up to an attic. It sprawled on the floor, its edge shattered as if it had crashed down from above.
My gaze was drawn upwards. There seemed to be only two rooms in the tower – the one I was in, which was at least forty feet high, and another room at the top, above this one. The light we’d seen flooding over the moors must have been coming from the room at the top, which was reached by stairs which spiralled around the cylindrical inner wall of this room.
Was that the sound of someone above me? I peered up into the darkness.
Hairs prickled on my neck and arms, and I could hear my own breathing, ragged and fast. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.
The ceiling of this room must have been the underside of the floor of the upper room, but something seemed to be hanging from it. As far as I could make out, there was a hole in the middle of the ceiling and a bundle draped down through it.
I saw feet. Something hanging and feet. I took a step back, ready to scream, not daring to look up in case I saw Carrie’s face. My heel caught on the edge of a flagstone. I fell back and crashed to the ground. My brain resisted what my eyes were telling it. There was a person hanging from the ceiling.
Chapter 42
I stood again, legs wide apart, taking deep breaths. It wasn’t Carrie. I inched towards the centre of the round room, craning my head upwards. It slowly came into focus – a bundle hanging from the ceiling. A person in it, encased in netting. Not Carrie. It was Kate Webster.
There was no way I could access the bundle from this room. It was far above me. The only way to it was through the hole in the floor of the room above.
I had to go up. I knew I was being reckless and stupid and I should wait for back-up, but I couldn’t just leave Kate hanging in the net.
The stairs wound their way up the inside of the tower. They were stone, built into its structure, cantilevered out over the drop and only about two feet wide. My left ear was buzzing. I wasn’t scared of what was up there – only at the thought of going high.
I pushed my shoulders back and clutched my rock tightly. I wouldn’t be controlled by this fear. I started to tip-toe up, trying to keep my breathing quiet. Only a flimsy wooden banister separated me from the ever more dramatic drop to the right. Something seemed to be congealing in my throat. I gulped it away. Didn’t look down. I pictured the steps in my living room and the tin of chocolates. Just some steps, one at a time.
A soft moaning came from the bundle. Kate was trapped in the net and dangling from the ceiling like a fly in a spider’s web. There was something else in there with her. It looked like a rug, crumpled underneath her.
The net hung about six feet down from the ceiling. It was too low for Kate to reach the rim of the hatch in the floor above her, and the net was too fine to provide any purchase to climb up it. Kate seemed to be frozen, terrified to move in case the whole net ripped apart.
I inched higher and made the mistake of glancing down. The flagstone floor was far below me now, glistening like ice. My vision went fuzzy and I cringed away from the edge and pressed myself against the outer wall. I closed my eyes and sank down into a sitting position, my face on my knees. My head was full of the sight of my dead sister, myself falling from the ladder, screaming, knowing it was my fault. I ground my knuckles into my temples.
I opened my eyes and saw Kate staring at me, her pupils vast in the darkness. I took a huge breath, right down into my stomach, stood up and put my foot on the next step up. And the next.
I was okay. I was doing this. I crept up the steps, higher and higher, not looking down, concentrating on the feel of the stone under my feet, staying right there in the moment, not picturing the depth below me. I heard muffled voices from the room above – a man and a woman.
The stairs led to the circular room at the top of the mill, the one with the huge windows from which light had been flooding out over the moor. I crept up the final few steps, trying to see whoever was in the room before they saw me.
I gulped. Mark stood with his back to one of the vast, curved windows. His face was distorted and his expression wild. I froze. He turned t
owards me and looked straight into my eyes. Sweat trickled down my back.
I tried to read Mark’s expression. He flicked his gaze towards the centre of the room. I looked where he’d gestured with his eyes. A waxed wooden floor, a couple of leather sofas. A person.
I felt a glimmer of relief at the familiar clothing. My first instinct was that this was a friend. Someone wearing the protective suit of a crime scene investigator, kneeling by the hatch in the middle of the floor, looking down into the dangling net in which Kate was trapped.
She raised her head to look at me. The relief flooded away like water through a broken dam.
‘Grace,’ I said. ‘What are you…’
She held a ten-inch hunting knife, its silver blade sparkling in the light. It was next to the top of the net. By her side were three small wooden trunks, each about the size of a hand-luggage-approved case. On top of one of the trunks were a couple of dice, also wooden. I blinked, trying to work out what she was doing. My heart thudded to a fast rhythm.
‘Please, Grace.’ I inched closer to her. ‘Put the knife down, and help us get Kate out.’
‘No!’ She shifted the blade down slightly. It was millimetres away from the netting. ‘I’m doing God’s work. These people have been committing murder.’
Mark’s gaze was fixed on the knife. ‘We were helping people,’ he said. ‘Stopping them suffering.’
My eyes flitted side to side, looking for options. I placed my rock on the floor. It wasn’t going to help.
Mark turned to look at me. ‘She’s playing some weird game with the dice,’ he said quickly. ‘If I try to move closer, she threatens to cut the net.’
Grace kept the knife by the net, but with her other hand, she gently stroked the top of one of the trunks. I could see numbers cut into its lid: ‘1, 2’. The second trunk had the numbers ‘3, 4’ on its lid, and the third the numbers ‘5, 6’. What the hell was she doing?
I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘Grace, we’ve got to get Kate out of the net.’
She gave me a furious look. ‘No! They’ve been playing God. By killing them, I’m saving others.’ Her arm was rigid, the knife hovering by the top of the net. One flick of the wrist and Kate would fall and be smashed apart on the slabs beneath us.