by S J Bolton
Then the dummy opened its eyes and smiled at me.
When I came to myself again, I was leaning against one of the plywood walls, muttering it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real, into hands that were damp with sweat.
Shit, it had looked very real. Fighting back the fear that the dummy had risen from the floor and was even now peering over my shoulder, I made myself look. Exactly where it had been, eyes closed, lips still, but for the first time I wasn’t sure how much of this I could cope with. What they had to throw at me, possibly. What my own mind was chucking in for good measure was another matter entirely.
At that moment, the dim lights went out and I was staring into darkness so thick and heavy it could have gone on for ever. Then, some way ahead, a beam of light shone down from the roof. In the pool it made on the dusty warehouse floor stood a man in dark clothes holding a long, gleaming knife.
Ridiculous, I said to myself, as something cold trickled down into the small of my back. Ridiculous, ridiculous. The figure before me – I couldn’t take my eyes off it even to blink – would be nothing more than a plywood cut-out, like the clowns I’d seen earlier in the day.
The figure was moving. OK, real or hallucination? Real or not? I couldn’t tell but I really had to make my mind up fast because he was coming for me. I closed my eyes. Still there when I opened them. Real enough. I turned and ran into blackness.
A second later, I stopped dead. Another spotlight had appeared in the ceiling and a second dark-clad figure was standing right in the middle of the tunnel. Everything about him was in shadow, except the steel of the knife blade that shone in his right hand. I turned again, just as darkness fell once more.
I ran on, arms outstretched, knowing I’d lost all thought of finding a way out. I didn’t care. I just had to get away from the men with knives.
Suddenly, I could see my room. To either side of the door were brick walls – that I knew weren’t real. I stepped up to one, pushed it hard and felt its feet slide along the floor until there was a gap large enough for me to squeeze through.
The first thing I saw on the other side was the carousel. Close by and on its side was the fortune teller’s tent. The Test Your Strength machine had been dismantled and lay in pieces on the floor. This was definitely somewhere I wasn’t meant to be.
‘Laura!’ called a voice, masculine but high-pitched and giggly. ‘Lacey-Laura! Where are you?’ Then the dim lights went out again.
Instinct wanted to run, common sense told me to take it slow, get to the wall and follow it. The window I’d broken that morning might not have been repaired. If I could find that, I’d be out of here.
I crept forward. To my right I thought I could make out one of the scary clowns. It was leaning backwards, as though against … yes, I’d reached the wall.
As I made my way along the side of the building, I wondered why they hadn’t turned on the big warehouse lights. Expecting to be flooded with powerful light any second I made it to the corner. Keep going. While the lights were out, I had a chance. A doorframe. The door opened, I slipped through and couldn’t believe my luck.
I was back in the storeroom that I’d broken into earlier. Light was shining in from street lights outside. Against the window I’d smashed was a piece of heavy cardboard and it took less than a second to pull it from the wall.
It was dark outside. I landed on the flagged path just as Scott Thornton appeared at the corner of the building, blocking my escape. He was dressed exactly as he’d been when he’d burst into my room just days before, naked from the waist up, ninja mask covering his eyes, his long dark curls unmistakable. I looked the other way, more in hope than expectation, to find one of the others at the opposite corner, similarly dressed. Impossible to go back inside. No choice but to go over the fence and into the woods.
I wasn’t able to run fast. Or far. The sedative they’d given me still had too hard a grip. And the hallucinogen really kicked in when I hit fresh air. All around me, colours glowed, the stars were great lanterns hanging close enough to touch and fabulous creatures watched me with huge eyes. The trees took on twisted, torturous shapes, branches reaching down for me as I passed. And with every step I took into those woods, it seemed I was going back in time. My years as a detective slipped away; the new life I’d built for myself from the wreck of my past existence vanished.
I wasn’t Lacey Flint any more, I was that terrified sixteen-year-old girl again, in an open space at midnight, and they were coming.
My last thought, as a hand caught hold of my hair, was that somehow, completely impossible although I knew it to be, they knew after all what scared me the most. Somehow they’d managed to unearth the one memory that I could never allow to come to the surface because everything good and normal and safe that I hold on to would shatter.
I screamed once, a shrill cry that went up through the treetops. Somewhere, from way up high, a bird of prey echoed it back to me.
THE DARK-BLUE SALOON car pulled up and the passenger door opened as if by itself. Joesbury climbed inside. The driver was dressed in the uniform of a porter from the college of St John.
‘Thanks, mate,’ said Joesbury. ‘What’s happening?’
George indicated and pulled out into traffic, causing the driver behind to jump on his brakes and throw both hands in the air.
‘Hammond’s been on to the local chief constable requesting immediate uniform back-up,’ replied George. ‘Locals aren’t happy but they’re going along for now. We’ve put warrants out on Nick Bell and Scott Thornton but no sign of either of them yet. Our application for a warrant on Megan Prince was turned down on the grounds that she died last night. Accident at home, according to the CID report. Fell down the cottage stairs with three-quarters of a bottle of red wine inside her. Interestingly, though, her boyfriend is a fairly senior member of the local CID himself. Bloke called John Castell, another Cambridge graduate. Ring any bells?’
‘Can’t say it does but you’re right, that is interesting. Anything suspicious about Prince’s death?’
‘Not according to initial reports, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Joesbury agreed that it did, indeed, make you think. ‘So they still have us on the run?’ he said.
‘The only one we’ve picked up is Jim Notley, DC Flint’s psycho farmer. He’s in the local nick now, insisting he did nothing more than rent out a piece of land, that he knows nothing about anything and he wants a solicitor. He could be telling the truth. To be honest, he doesn’t seem that bright. We have cars outside 108 St Clement’s Road, Notley’s farm and Dr Oliver’s house. They can’t go in until the warrants are signed. Same at the industrial estate and Bell’s farm. We’ve also got a call out on Talaith Robinson, DC Flint’s room-mate.’
The sharp sideways glance sent a spasm of pain through Joesbury’s head.
‘Your car was ambushed less than an hour after you turned up at college claiming to be related to Flint,’ said George. ‘Who else saw you together?’
‘Jesus, she’s just a kid.’
‘She’s twenty-six, Sir, older than she looks. And she wasn’t born Talaith Robinson, either. She was born Talaith Thomas. Robinson was her stepfather’s name. Her own father blew his brains out when she was three. She and her elder brother, the Iestyn Thomas you asked us to trace, found the body.’
‘You’re going to have to tell me about Lacey sometime,’ said Joesbury, and her name seemed to cling to the inside of his mouth.
George took his eyes off the road for the first time. ‘Her car’s still parked in the Backs,’ he replied. ‘No sign of her anywhere in college, but her car keys and bag are in her room.’
The traffic lights in front of them changed to amber. George pressed the accelerator and the car shot through as they flashed to red.
‘No one’s seen her since this morning,’ George continued, turning the corner and picking up speed. A wave of nausea washed over Joesbury. He closed his eyes, opened them and focused on the night sky rather than
the headlights speeding towards them. The moon was low and a pale orange, almost full.
‘She wasn’t well, according to a couple of the girls on her corridor,’ said George. ‘About half past nine, a doctor turned up at her door – off her own bat, as far as we can judge, nobody called her – and they had to wake Lacey up. The doctor was young and female, in a wheelchair, so we can assume it was Evi Oliver. They both went over to the Buttery for breakfast and we lose track of them after that. Dr Oliver hasn’t been seen at the clinic she works at, or in her college rooms. Her colleagues have been trying to contact her all day and she isn’t answering the door at her house.’
Joesbury’s brain felt like an engine in need of a major overhaul. He wasn’t taking this in fast enough.
‘DC Flint and Dr Oliver could be together,’ continued George. ‘Hiding out somewhere.’
‘Lacey’s with Bell,’ said Joesbury. ‘We need to get into that farm. Where’s your phone?’
‘In the glove compartment, if you must, Sir. But with respect, if she is in there and we go in half-cocked, we could put her in more danger. DCI Phillips has requested hostage liaison.’
Detective Constable Richards of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary was sitting in his unmarked police car outside Evi’s house. He’d been there for forty minutes when the roar of a motor-bike engine startled him out of the daydream he’d been having about a recent skiing holiday, a chalet maid from Blackburn and a Jacuzzi in the snow. The large performance bike pulled up behind his car and he watched in his rear mirror as the rider switched off his headlight, climbed off and marched up the path. He was hammering on the door before Richards was out of his vehicle.
THERE ARE TIMES when just waking up can feel like the hardest thing anyone could ever ask you to do. The first morning after your child has died, perhaps. Or after the man you adore has walked out. You would give anything, certainly the rest of your life, to stay down in the darkness of not knowing.
It never happens, though, does it? You always come back to yourself. The world is still there. You are still there. But death has taken root inside you and you know it will grow, like a cancer with a voice, from now until the day it consumes you whole.
I took a deep breath, just to check I still could. I was in pain, they’d been pretty rough, but it wasn’t too bad. Through my eyelashes, I could see the outline of my room at St John’s. There was light. I was hot and wet and sticky, and that would be sweat. The drugs they’d given me had worn off and now absolute clarity like silver light was flooding through my head.
I could not be in St John’s, I knew too much. They couldn’t risk sending me back. I was still in Unit 33, in the replica of my room they’d mocked up, and it was where I would stay. I would not survive to tell anyone what they’d done to me. Sometime in the next few hours they would kill me and I would never tell anyone about the hour I’d spent in the woods behind this building. If I were lucky, I might not have time to relive it for myself.
I opened my eyes, saw the whitewashed ceiling. My real ceiling at St John’s had been Artexed.
Perhaps they would let me write a letter, as long as it seemed like a real suicide note. I could do what I’d thought I’d never be able to. I could tell Joesbury what he meant to me. Dear Mark, I’d write, and the name would feel so unfamiliar, so separate from the man in my head. Dear Mark, and then I’d probably leave it at that, because what I felt for that man I could never put into words and it would have to be enough that the very last thought in my head had been of him.
The room was cold and the sweat on my body cooling down, starting to itch. Instinctively, my hand went down to my stomach. I touched something solid, slick and wet. A split second later I was sitting up, staring at the mass of bloody tissue in my hands. My whole body was covered in blood. I could hardly see my skin, and strewn around me, around the bed, were organs, intestines, bodily tissue, a heart, even what looked like lungs. They’d hacked me open and pulled out my insides and left me, still alive, to see what they’d done.
I hit the floor hard and it was cold beneath me. There was a keening noise in the room that could only have been me but it seemed to be coming out of the walls. Right by my blood-slicked left foot was a triangular piece of tissue that I knew was my own uterus and a long-handled, steel-bladed, gleaming sharp knife.
End it now.
I think I might have spoken out loud, the thought was so clear.
A bit more pain – you’ve gone through so much already, what difference can a few seconds more make – and it’s over. They can never hurt you again, you’ll never have to think about what they did to you. You know you can do it, you did it once before, you held a knife in your hand and you held out your wrist and …
… the knife was in my hand. I was on my knees, shivering with cold, or maybe shock, and the knife handle felt warm and smooth in my palm. Five letters had been etched crudely into the blade. LACEY. My knife.
A moment’s courage and it’s done. Deep breath now.
A thought. A tiny, half-hearted protest, barely able to make itself heard. If I’d been ripped open, why wasn’t I in agony?
I was staring down at the scar on my left wrist. I remembered the white-hot searing pain of the moment when flesh parted and blood burst out, I remembered the screams ringing in my ears.
You can do it again. You won’t even feel it, your body’s already full of sedatives and anaesthetic, the cut will be little more than a tickle, a mother’s kiss, sending you sweetly to sleep.
My arm was outstretched, my palm facing upwards like an offering, the knife handle felt like an old friend, and I was ready.
And yet, like a late-night knock on the door, there was that nagging thought struggling for attention. If I could feel the floor beneath me, cold and hard, and the wood of the knife handle, and the wet stickiness of the gore covering me, why couldn’t I feel any pain?
Do it! It’s over. Your life was nothing anyway. Has there been a single day that wasn’t cold and heavy and lonely? Who will even know you’ve gone?
Could a sedative take away pain yet leave other sensations? Somehow I didn’t think so. I made myself look properly at my mutilated body for the first time. What I saw gave me the courage to touch.
I was unhurt. Oh, Jesus, I was absolutely fine. I put my hand to my left breast and felt my heart beating. And I was breathing, of course I was, my lungs were exactly where they’d always been. Beneath the blood that I knew now wasn’t mine, my stomach was whole and unmarked. They’d laid me naked on the bed, covered me with gore that probably wasn’t even human and hoped it would be the final straw that sent me over the edge.
You could still do it. It’s always easier the second time.
‘No,’ I said, and put the knife down on the floor beside me. It lay in a crimson pool, its blade gleaming with promise. And a tiny voice whispered inside my head: Are you sure?
DC RICHARDS GAINED Entry to Evi’s house by breaking a small bathroom window. A few seconds later, he opened the front door.
‘Stay in the hallway, please, sir,’ he told Harry. ‘Don’t touch anything.’
Harry could hear Richards speaking softly into his radio as he opened first one door and then another. He caught a glimpse of a kitchen, in which everything seemed lower to the floor than usual, and then what looked like a bedroom.
Evi’s house. Alice had given him her address months ago. He’d looked at it many times on Google Earth, had tried to picture its interior. He’d imagined it cosier, somehow, wide hearths and soft gold light, not this cold, tiled, grand hallway.
There was a slender-framed wheelchair to one side of the door. He reached out to run a hand along the armrest but remembered in time. He wasn’t supposed to touch anything. Directly in front of him were stairs. There was a stairlift. He couldn’t imagine her ever using such a thing. The Evi he knew would climb the stairs herself if it killed her.
A sound from upstairs. A scuffling. Then a low-pitched whimper.
‘She’s upstairs,’ he c
alled out. He took the stairs two at a time. At the top, he stood listening.
‘Don’t go any further,’ came the instruction from below. ‘In fact, come down now.’
Hearing the sound again, Harry ran along the carpeted corridor. Guessing, he pushed open the last door and stopped dead.
Staring up at him were scared, bewildered eyes. The whimpering sounded again. Footsteps behind told him Richards had caught up.
‘What the bugger?’ said Richards, who was peering over Harry’s shoulder.
Harry stepped forward, knelt down and unfastened the muzzle from the dog’s face. Free to pant again, the dog didn’t move, just lay still, its mouth hanging open, tongue dry and furry. Harry pulled at the knots and managed to loosen the bindings around the dog’s front legs enough to slip them off. He did the same thing with its back legs and the dog scrambled to its feet.
George and Joesbury arrived at Endicott Farm just as the sergeant in charge of the attending special operations team received news that a warrant had been signed and he was authorized to enter the property. He was hammering on the front door, shouting out a warning to anyone inside, as Joesbury and George climbed out of their car. George produced his warrant card and vouched for Joesbury to the constable who met them.
Properly handled, a tubular steel police enforcer can deliver three tonnes of pressure to a locked door. The centuries-old, half-rotten wood of Nick Bell’s front door would have crumbled under the pressure of a strong shoulder. The young constable wielding the enforcer broke through with his first attempt and half staggered over the threshold.
As George and Joesbury, kitted out in protective clothing, followed the sergeant through the front door, they heard the shattering of glass that told them other officers were entering the property elsewhere. A dog began barking.
The search team fanned out through the house, calling out warnings, kicking open doors, switching on lights, checking each room before moving on. As instructed, Joesbury and George stayed at the rear.