He returned to the garage. Sometimes there was an inner door that connected to the house. He slipped inside, found the light switch, and turned it on.
No door.
He crept around to the back of the house, stepping on the planks of the ruined boardwalk as close to the walls as he could so they wouldn’t creak and groan. Even so, he made more noise than he would have liked.
He approached a filthy window, half-drawn tattered curtains hanging on either side, and dropped into a crouch so he could peer through one of the dirty panes of glass at the bottom.
He was looking at Woods. The man was standing profile to him, digging into a can of baked beans with a spoon and cramming them into his mouth.
Lee’s mind raced. He could carry on trying to find a way in, or he could . . .
Fuck it. He’d shoot the bastard where he stood and argue the toss later.
One, two, three . . . he stood upright and swung into the firing position.
Woods had left the kitchen.
Lee swore under his breath. Then he told himself to get a grip. He still held the element of surprise. He knew Woods was inside. Woods did not know that he, Foster, was outside.
He had to find a way in, and fast. God willing, Stella might still be alive and unharmed.
He sidled along the back of the house. Reaching the corner, he looked down at a manhole cover with a raised handle. It was half-buried under dead leaves but when he swept them clear away he decided it wasn’t actually bolted down.
Bracing his feet either side, he tugged at it as hard as he could with both hands. After a few moments it suddenly broke away from its seating, almost sending him toppling backwards.
He was looking at a wide metal chute that sloped diagonally down into what he assumed was a cellar. A moment later a dreadful smell wafted out and he fought back the instinct to retch. He’d encountered the smell of death before and in all likelihood Charlie Booker had to be the source of this appalling stench.
But he had found his way in, and Lee’s hopes lifted. Holstering his gun, he lowered himself into the stinking chute.
He slithered, bounced and crashed down and landed, bruised and half-winded, on his side. After a few moments he was able to look around him. Enough light was coming through the shaft above to make things out reasonably well. There were a few empty apple boxes scattered around and some old sacks piled up at the foot of a precarious-looking wooden staircase in the far corner.
Lee crossed to the stairs and kicked the sacks to one side. The stench intensified tenfold as he exposed the upper torso of a man. The face was black with blood – it looked to Lee as if the guy’s teeth had been knocked out – and the throat was livid with bruises.
Charlie Booker’s last role. Murder victim.
Lee climbed the stairs as quietly and as quickly as he could, praying the door at the top wasn’t locked. He eased back the handle and the door opened a fraction. Lee put his ear to the crack. He could hear nothing.
He drew his gun again and moved silently into what turned out to be the hall. The kitchen where he’d seen Woods was to his left, and there were two rooms ahead of him to the left and right of the stairs.
Lee crept forward, gun extended, and cleared both rooms in turn.
The bastard must be up on the first floor. With Stella.
He began to climb the stairs, carefully keeping to the sides of the treads as he had outside on the boardwalk. This time he made absolutely no noise and as he passed the halfway point he could hear the sound of a voice talking in a steady drone. It had to be Woods. And if he was talking, it could only be to Stella. She was still alive.
He had to pause for a moment to allow a wave of sheer relief to pass through him. Then he was moving again. When he reached the landing, Woods’s voice was a little more distinct and he could make out what someone was saying.
‘. . . you won’t, you won’t. Just don’t say I didn’t give you the chance for some friendly conversation, Stella.’
Lee heard him laugh.
The voice was coming from his right, a double doorway leading into what he assumed was the master bedroom. He edged along the passage towards it.
Now, Woods was clearly audible.
‘Well, of course you can’t say I didn’t give you the chance because you won’t speak to me, will you? At least, not until now. Although you won’t be forming what you and I and most people would recognise as actual words, Stella. Far more primitive noises than that. Oh, and on that point, feel free to make as much racket as you like when I get started. The houses opposite and on both sides of this one are abandoned, so there’s no one to complain. Nobody to hear you but me. And as you figured out a long time ago, the more noise you make, the more I like it. So, if you’re ready, we’ll begin. We’ll start with the nails.’
Lee stepped into the doorway and simultaneously cocked the hammer back on his pistol. Woods was ten feet in front of him, a mallet in one hand. He heard the metallic double-click of the gun and spun round.
Directly behind him, Stella was hanging grotesquely from the wooden cross he’d tethered her to. She was still fully dressed, but at her feet Lee could see a box cutter, which he instantly realised was intended to slice the clothes from her body.
Woods was staring at him in disbelief, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. He had dropped the mallet.
Lee moved into the room and took a step to his right. He didn’t want the bullet he was about to put through this animal’s head passing through and hitting Stella.
‘It’s time to die, you piece of shit.’
Without a shred of compunction he squeezed the trigger.
There was the faintest of clicks, but nothing else. Both men stared at each other in disbelief.
Fuck! The safety got knocked back on when I fell into the cellar!
Lee thumbed the catch down but he was too late. Woods was on him like a panther, knocking the gun out of his hand and delivering a vicious karate chop to his Adam’s apple.
Lee went down hard and the killer delivered a tremendous kick to his solar plexus. Lee thought his heart might explode. He almost passed out.
Next moment Woods was dragging him across the floor and propping him up against the wall next to Stella. Then he picked up Lee’s gun from where it had skittered all the way across the room.
He checked that the safety was off before pointing the barrel at Lee’s right leg, and without hesitating put a bullet through his shin. Lee bucked and writhed in agony and for the first time Stella spoke. ‘Leave him alone, you bastard!’
‘Piece of shit, am I?’ Woods sneered at Lee. He turned to Stella. ‘Found our voice, have we? A bit late in the day for that, my sweet fucking English rose.’
He grinned at them both. ‘Well, I couldn’t have counted on my day ending like this. A lovely rose to prune to pieces and an audience to watch me do it.’
Lee somehow managed to stand up. Incredibly, he seemed to be bracing himself for an attack on Woods.
The killer laughed. ‘Oh, please. You think I’m gonna let you die a hero? Not a chance, Agent Foster.’
He raised the gun again, this time pointing it at Lee’s stomach.
‘I’m gonna gutshoot you. I saw plenty of guys gutshot in Korea. Did a little of it on my own account, as it happens. It takes about twenty agonising minutes to die. Roughly the same time the lovely Stella will hold out for. You might even live long enough to see me stick my knife in her eye.’
He took a step back from Lee, steadied his aim, and thumbed back the hammer.
‘Party time.’
The explosion was louder than Stella’s despairing scream, but not much.
Woods stood still for a moment, a puzzled expression on his face. Then he toppled forward, arms outstretched towards Stella as if in an act of worship. Or abasement.
Ben Moss stepped into the room, breathing heavily, his smoking gun still in the firing position. He moved switfly to the body, hualing it roughly over onto its back. The gaping exit wound s
poke for itself.
He turned to the others. ‘Jesus H Christ. You guys OK?’
‘No,’ said Lee, still propping himself up against the wall. ‘I’m shot and Stella needs cutting down from that fucking monstrosity, now. Use the knife on the floor there.’
Ben moved swiftly into the room and began releasing Stella while Lee called up an ambulance on the radio.
As soon as Stella was free she hobbled over to him as best she could. Her legs were stiff, while her arms, from which she had been suspended for so long, had almost entirely lost all feeling.
‘Lee . . . your leg . . . Ben, you need to tourniquet this right away!’
The sergeant was ripping up a sheet from the bed.
‘I’m on it, ma’am.’
Lee, trying to ignore the pain that blazed like fire, pulled Stella tightly to him.
‘I’ll never forgive myself for this. How could I have let you fall into that maniac’s hands?’
She tried and failed to hug him; her arms simply would not respond to the messages from her brain.
Instead she kissed his throat, red and swollen from Woods’s brutal blow, and rubbed her head on his shoulder.
‘Lee, you saved me. You found me, and you saved me.’
‘I didn’t. My gun—’
‘Lee, you did just enough. You bought me just enough time. You would have died for me.’
‘He will die for you if you don’t let me get this tourniquet on him,’ said Ben grimly, striding across the room with his improvised bandage and firmly moving her to one side. ‘Sir, I need you to lie down for me.’
As Ben expertly tightened the ligature around his boss’s shattered leg, Lee considered his sergeant-turned-doctor.
‘I thought I told you to stay back until further orders, sergeant.’
Ben Moss looked up at him and, for the first time since he had entered the room, he smiled.
‘And I figured that was the most goddamned stupid command I’d ever been given, so it coming from you and all, I reckoned I’d plain misheard it. I was just comin’ over here to check with you, sir.’
‘Good job you did,’ said Stella unsteadily, suddenly sliding down the wall into a sitting position. ‘I was beginning to think we might be getting into difficulties.’
Ben squinted up at her as he tied Lee’s tourniquet off.
‘Is that the famous British stiff upper lip I’ve heard so much about, ma’am?’
Lee shook his head.
‘No, Ben. That’s just Stella.’
Epilogue
Three months later, Stella thought she might finally be getting over the worst of it.
She’d had to miss the entire autumn term, of course, although as she wryly told Lee more than once, she’d probably learned more about psychopaths in a single afternoon in Key West than she might in an entire year at Smith.
But even after Christmas she was not ready to begin her doctorate and reluctantly postponed her studies to the start of the next academic year.
Lee had been wonderful. He was owed weeks of furlough, plus sick leave to recover from his gunshot wound, and he had insisted on flying with Stella to England so that she could be with her mother and grandparents at the Dower House in Kent. The Arnolds quickly took him to their hearts.
They had been horrified to learn of her ordeal. Diana, in particular, was completely against her daughter ever returning to America.
But Stella was determined. ‘I can’t let that creature change my life,’ she said defiantly. ‘It’s bad enough that he’s managed to interrupt my plans to this extent. If I don’t go back to Smith, he’ll have won.’
Lee was supportive. ‘You have to let her do this her way,’ he gently told her mother and grandparents one evening after Stella had gone to bed. ‘It’s vital to her that she gets back to where she was, before any of this happened.’
Stella took Lee on long recuperating walks in the Kent countryside that surrounded her grandparents’ home. The FBI agent was bewitched by the English orchards, meadows and hedgerows. One afternoon, as they stood on the high Weald looking down at the garden of England, he had a sudden change of heart; almost an epiphany.
‘You know, honey . . . you don’t have to go back to America. You have nothing to prove to anyone. We could stay here. I’d leave the FBI . . . get some kind of job in England while you do your doctorate at Cambridge.’
But Stella shook her head. ‘No, Lee, that’s not what I want,’ she said firmly. ‘I had lots of reasons for going to Smith in the first place and they haven’t gone away. I have to go back, I don’t have any choice. It’s the only way I’ll exorcise him.’
When Stella fully regained consciousness, Woods had been downstairs. As the terrifying reality of her situation dawned on her, she found herself fighting a fierce, choking panic.
She repeatedly told herself that she was an expert on psychopaths, she could get inside their minds. She must observe this one, as dispassionately and professionally as she could.
When she heard Woods coming up the stairs she tried to imagine that she was part of an experiment; she must make a mental note of everything that took place as scrupulously as she could. That meant not interfering with the proceedings in any way, if she could possibly help it. It would take every ounce of her courage and strength, strength that was draining away by the second as she endured the physical agony of being tied to the makeshift, splintered crucifix. Her wrists and hands were already numb and dreadful cramps were beginning to spread across her shoulders.
When she spat in Woods’s face, she regarded it as a professional lapse and silently reprimanded herself.
Managing to maintain a steady, neutral stare as he tried to bait her was another way for her to keep a tiny element of control. She could tell that her silence was infuriating him, but he seemed determined to break her down with words rather than admitting failure and torturing her to get her to speak to him. He clearly saw himself as her intellectual equal, if not superior. When he started talking about Milton she hoped he’d read out some of the interminable verses from Paradise Lost. Anything to buy more time.
Strangely, she’d hadn’t been all that surprised when Lee appeared at the door with his gun drawn. She’d trusted instinctively that he would somehow find her in time.
But the violent events rapidly unfolded, culminating in Woods being shot dead right in front of her – she saw his heart explode out of his chest – triggered the beginning of a swift mental collapse.
She’d just managed to keep it together until she and Lee were in the ambulance. Then the world beneath her had fallen away and she’d wept helplessly for hours.
It was impossible to remember with any clarity now, but she must have been under heavy sedation in the hospital for at least two weeks. Lee was constantly by her side.
‘Stella! Lee! What are you doing up there? We’re going to miss our flight to Washington! Dinner with the Kennedys waits for no man.’
Dorothy turned to Diana and Jeb, who were standing next to her in the hall of the house on Bancroft Road. ‘Honestly, those two have been behaving so strangely today. All whispers and giggles. Diana, do you have any idea what’s going on?’
Diana shook her head. ‘Not a clue, but if Stella is still behaving like this when she starts at Smith next week, they’ll probably suggest she forgets all about her doctorate and goes back to kindergarten. And Lee’s not much better. Something must have happened when they were out at lunch today.’
Another burst of laughter floated down from above and then the couple appeared at the top of the stairs. They saw the others staring up at them, and began laughing again.
‘What is going on with you guys?’ Jeb demanded, hands on hips. ‘At this rate Jackie’s gonna send you straight to the White House rumpus room to play with her kids.’
‘We’ll have to tell them, honey,’ Lee whispered to Stella as they came downstairs hand in hand. ‘I know you wanted to keep it a secret until after the dinner tomorrow, but this lot are onto us.’
Stella nodded. The two of them turned to her mother and the Rockfairs. Sylvia had drifted out of the lounge. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
‘What’s going on,’ Lee replied, slipping his arm around Stella’s waist and holding her close, ‘is that I subjected my chief suspect, Miss Stella Arnold here, to intense interrogation at lunchtime today and would not desist from questioning her until I got the answer I wanted. Which was, I am pleased to report, an unequivocal “yes”.’
Diana’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘You don’t mean . . .’
Stella nodded happily.
‘Oh, but we do.’
Acknowledgements
Novelist Stephen King advises aspiring writers to trust their editor. Indeed he goes further, bluntly stating: ‘Your editor is always right.’ Living proof of this declaration is my own editor, Suzanne Baboneau. My thanks to her for her unfailing guidance and wisdom, and to my literary agent, Luigi Bonomi, for his endless enthusiasm and advice.
I should also like to thank Rory Kennedy, youngest daughter of Bobby Kennedy who was assassinated months before she was born. I have never met her, but her affectionate and riveting documentary tribute to her parents was a fascinating source of material. The private family footage of the Kennedys at play were powerful influences on the scenes in Martha’s Vineyard in Part One of this book.
And finally the Florida Keys, where my wife and I have spent many happy, sunny days. It was great fun to revisit them, if only on these pages.
About the Author
Richard Madeley was born in 1956. He joined his local paper at 16 as a cub reporter and moved to BBC local radio three years later. He spent time as a television reporter at both Border and Yorkshire TV before joining Granada, where he met Judy Finnigan. They presented the nightly news programme together before launching ITV’s This Morning in 1988. After thirteen highly successful years, they joined Channel 4, where their eponymous early-evening TV show ran for seven years, becoming one of the station’s most-watched programmes. Richard’s first book, Fathers & Sons, is a moving account of three generations of the Madeley family. Some Day I’ll Find You, his debut novel, was a Sunday Times bestseller. The Way You Look Tonight is his second work of fiction. Richard Madeley has four children and lives in London and Cornwall.
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