Sinclair blinked. Time must have passed because when he tried to move his arms they were tied tight behind him; his feet were bound too. He realised that he was in the back of the BMW. Gall was beside him. Bound and gagged with a thin trickle of blood running down his face. His mocking eyes reduced to those of a child, shocked and frightened. The car was moving slowly along the road on its burst tyre. Doc Slate was in the passenger seat, half turned, watching them with an expression of distant amusement, while the little girl, barely able to see over the dashboard, was driving.
Time moved in strange fragments, and a moment later he was being dragged into a hole in the mountain. More fragments. Down a tunnel, into a room. Tied to a bed. He screamed. Screamed and screamed. A hand covered his mouth; something was pulled roughly over his head. When Sebastian screamed again the sound echoed back into his ears. He tried to move his head and felt the cold metal against his cheek.
‘Are you going to stop being silly?’ The voice was difficult to gauge. Male or female? Young or old? ‘The Doctor says we’ll have to keep that thing on you if you don’t stop screaming.’
Sebastian stopped screaming.
‘You’ve made a fucking big mistake.’ He tried to make his voice intimidating, inject more of the Scottish accent he used when he was negotiating. The words echoed with a metallic edge to them. He tilted his head and caught a glimpse of light. As if through a small hole. With a sense of horror he realised that he was wearing some sort of metal helmet. He felt the condensation forming on his face. ‘I know people. They’ll be looking for me.’
The person didn’t reply, but Sebastian felt a hand on his wrist. He tried to jerk it away, but his arms and legs were still tied. He felt the sleeve of his shirt being rolled up to above the bicep, then something being tightened around his upper arm.
‘What are you doing?’ Sebastian hated the weakness in his voice. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The Doctor thinks you’re going to need an operation.’ Sebastian felt the needle slide into his arm, the cold spread of the liquid. Felt his consciousness begin to slide. ‘You might need more than one operation …’
CHAPTER 98
When Annabelle woke up the cold seemed to have risen from the rock floor and through her thin tracksuit top into her flesh and bones. She blinked rapidly, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness before slowly, with dawning horror, she remembered. Marcus, Scott, the Doctor, the chase through the tunnels. His grip on her ankle. How she had stabbed his arm. She lay very still and tried her best to breathe silently as the pain throbbed incessantly from her leg. Listening, because surely the Doctor was nearby. Maybe he was waiting? Maybe he was listening too? There was only silence though and the pulse in her ears, the pristine blackness lying heavy all around her.
He could be there in the dark waiting for the fun to begin again. She remembered what Marcus had told her. The Doctor could see in the dark practically, could smell the difference between a man and a woman, could hear how heavy someone was.
Annabelle listened and listened to the silence. How long had it been now? How long since she found Scott in that room? She had promised to help him, promised to go back for him. And what about Mr Pepper? It seemed like months since she’d taken him out. He would be so bored now, stuck in the flat with nothing to do. For a second Annabelle couldn’t stop herself from imagining that the little dog was there with her. She would have given anything to feel that soft warm fur on her face and up her nose as he made that little growling sound of proud contentment.
The thought was too sad though as the ache from her missing leg intensified and the cold spread through her body. Imagining herself anywhere else, imagining she could be anyone but someone alone and forgotten at the bottom of the world, was too much.
Finally she had to shift, and felt the torch press painfully into her chest. After a minute the temptation was overwhelming. Despite her fear of the Doctor she switched it on. The bulb was dim, batteries running low, but just that moment of light was a comfort. The roof in this section of the tunnel was about five feet from the floor. The space had more of the feeling of a natural cave than the cut tunnels she had crawled through and was far wider too. The light from the torch was swallowed up in every direction. For just a moment she allowed herself to accept the reality of her situation: deep underground, lost in a labyrinth of caves and tunnels. First the light will fail. And then you’ll slowly go mad.
Annabelle somehow managed to push away the thought. ‘You need to switch the light off to save the battery, and you need to move,’ she whispered. ‘Even if there’s nowhere to go, you have to try.’
CHAPTER 99
Monica and Crawford sat down in the interview room opposite Karen Sinclair. DC Khan’s news hadn’t been about Annabelle but the man they’d found mutilated in the tunnels, so far still unidentified. He’d died that morning, his body unable to cope with the massive trauma, blood loss and infections. Monica had watched Khan’s lips as she relayed the information, struggling to feel something. But numbness seemed to be the only response her body and mind could summon up.
‘At least he didn’t die down there. At least he was with people who cared,’ Khan had offered. Still young enough, new enough in the job to take comfort from such sentiments. Still certain that existence tilted towards the good.
Monica tried to put the man out of her mind. Annabelle might still be alive. While there was even the tiniest chance of finding her she had to focus all her efforts on her. Whatever had happened to Annabelle and the other victims seemed to be tied to the whole of the Slate family, not just one member. Marcus was still unconscious and Marjory Slate clearly wasn’t about to share anything. While Karen’s brother Hamish, the man in the kilt at the Slates’ house, had a very limited vocabulary and struggled to communicate in the most basic way. Karen seemed like their only chance.
Monica looked at the woman opposite her in the interview room. Karen Sinclair showed none of Granny Slate’s self-assurance. Her face was pinched, eyes rimmed red and arms folded around herself pathetically. Well, you won’t be getting any sympathy in this room, Monica’s inner voice suggested as she remembered Karen’s blank face when she had virtually begged her for help in finding Annabelle. Another memory came with it: Lily, pushing her face into Karen’s side in the room at the Slates’ house.
‘Lily’s your daughter, isn’t she?’ They hadn’t been able to find any record of Lily Slate’s birth ever having been officially recorded, and as far as they could tell she’d never been enrolled in school.
Karen didn’t reply but dipped her head in a barely perceptible nod. Monica remembered the Sinclairs’ mansion above Inverness. There had been a recent photograph. A portrait of the perfect family: Karen, Sebastian and their teenage son, who was away at boarding school. No sign of Lily, so where did she fit in? ‘Sebastian didn’t know about Lily, did he? He wasn’t her father, was he?’ Monica guessed.
This time Karen shook her head. ‘It was nine years ago. I told Sebastian that my parents were ill, and I had to stay in Glen Turrit for a few months to help the family …’
‘And Sebastian didn’t miss you? Didn’t want to come and visit?’
Karen shook her head. ‘He’d stopped speaking to my family by then, didn’t want anything to do with them. He was busy with work anyway, probably hardly noticed I was gone. My son had just started boarding school. Sebastian’s sister had just come back from America, she looked after our son at weekends and during the holidays.’
‘Did you meet someone? Have an affair? You were worried Sebastian would find out?’ Monica asked, softening her tone. Pleased just to have Karen talking.
‘No, it wasn’t like that. I never meant … I never wanted …’ Her eyes met Monica’s with some kind of desperation. And Monica realised her own hand had gone to the address book in the pocket of her coat. She could feel the dry paper under her fingers. The phone numbers of her mum’s friends and family. John Kennedy’s way of symbolically and practically cutting her off fro
m them.
‘Someone forced you?’
‘My dad, my brother Doc, they said we needed another one for the family to survive and carry on.’ Karen stared down at the table as she spoke.
‘Where was your mum when all this was going on?’ The words were out of Monica’s mouth before she remembered Marjory Slate’s cold, mocking grey eyes. Clearly there would have been no support against the family system from her.
Karen shook her head. ‘She told me I shouldn’t be selfish,’ she whispered. ‘That I should shut up and get on with it. Doc drove me to some bars – in Aberdeen so Sebastian wouldn’t find out. I hoped I wouldn’t get pregnant … It isn’t always right for a family to go on how it is … Doc delivered Lily at the house. They wouldn’t let me go to hospital, even though I asked. He said he’d studied how to do it in his textbooks.’
‘Tell me about Doc, about your family,’ Monica said softly, starting to feel some empathy with Karen. ‘Why wasn’t it right that it went on? What was wrong with the family?’ As if everything Karen had just told her wasn’t wrong enough, Monica thought. But Karen shook her head again, stared at the desk.
Monica tried a different question. ‘You sent your son to boarding school to keep him away from your family?’
Karen nodded quickly.
‘You said Doc Slate’s your brother?’
‘That’s right, older.’
‘What about Marcus? Is he your son too? Another brother?’
‘Marcus was a foundling.’
‘A foundling?’
‘Dad brought him home when he was about two. Said he found him by the side of the road, that most likely Gypsies left him there. Mum said they might come looking for him, so she dressed him as a girl at first.’
Monica couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.
‘Does Marcus know this?’
Karen shook her head quickly. ‘Bad luck, Dad said. Telling him. It would only bring trouble. They kept him down in the tunnels mostly – to help with the dam, all the work Doc had to do to maintain it.’
‘There was a man,’ Monica said slowly, ‘in the tunnel beside your house. He’d been badly mutilated. Half an hour ago one of my colleagues told me he’d died. We still don’t know his name.’ She let the silence lie for almost a full minute. ‘I can’t believe what was done to him.’ She leaned a little closer across the table and Karen quietly began to cry.
‘The media are calling Turrit the “Glen of Horrors” already,’ Crawford said from Monica’s elbow. ‘Whatever your family were doing down there, it’s over.’
Monica continued: ‘If you talk to us now you might get out of this with some kind of life. You might even get to live with Lily again. I’ve got a daughter a few years younger than her. I’d do almost anything to keep her out of social services.’
‘It was the dam,’ Karen whispered. ‘Sebastian wanted to sell it, went down there with Theo, some tough guy he’d met and got working for him. I tried to tell him. Hints about what Dad had done to Colin Muir all those years ago when he wanted them to leave … But Sebastian wouldn’t listen. Said he needed the money.’
And there it was: Sebastian Sinclair and Theo Gall’s murders as good as solved. Monica wished she could feel a moment of satisfaction.
‘What happened?’
‘I never … I never knew about any of it. It was Doc.’
‘What’s his real name?’
‘It’s Doc. Dad chose it for him. When he was born he said he was going to teach him to be his wee doctor. My dad had a metal plate in his skull. He’d have these turns. Doc would drain fluid from him, do other procedures. He has a whole library of textbooks, all these tools and surgical instruments he keeps – they became sort of an obsession. He’d buy them, steal them, spend hours playing with them, arranging them in his room before deciding which ones he liked best and wanted to keep.’
Monica shivered as she remembered the neat row of tools laid out on the bloody groundsheet in the garage. Wished she could feel a moment of professional satisfaction that her detective’s instinct about the importance of the tools had proved correct.
Karen went on, mercifully interrupting the thoughts, ‘Once I moved to live with Sebastian I could see my dad was a strange man … Doc stayed down there and ended up almost stranger. He got much worse after Dad died last year …’
‘What did Doc do to Sebastian?’
‘He said that if we didn’t do something they’d take the dam and the house. The Sinclairs would take it all. That’s why he put the bodies in the river.’
‘He put the bodies in the river so the Sinclairs wouldn’t take the dam?’ Monica said back to her, trying to make sense of what Karen was saying.
‘The dam and our house in Inverness were both in Sebastian’s name. Doc said that once he was dead they would come to me. That’s why he left the bodies out. So the police would know Sebastian was dead, and there wouldn’t be any confusion about who owned the dam. We’ll still have the house in Inverness at least? Won’t we? For when Lily’s older?’
Monica was aghast. Even after a lifetime of hearing the stupid and banal reasons people committed murder, Karen’s matter-of-fact explanation was shocking. And still none of it explained where Annabelle or the other unnamed male victim came in.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied finally. The absurdity of giving housing advice to a woman who had a good chance of spending the best part of the next decade in Cornton Vale prison for conspiring to commit murder was almost overwhelming.
‘Where’s Doc now?’
‘I don’t know. He works on his own mostly, occasionally with Marcus. Fixing things in the dam. Sometimes he doesn’t come out for days at a time.’
‘What happened to Annabelle?’ Monica asked. The details of the other victim could wait for now.
‘It was a mistake. Doc got Lily to stop Sebastian’s car … She wasn’t meant to do it again with Annabelle. It was a mistake. It wasn’t meant to happen with her.’
‘Lily stopped Annabelle?’ Monica remembered the lone tree in the middle of the open glen. Marked with blue from the impact with the car.
‘She saw the car and thought it was Sebastian again.’
‘And then you decided to keep Annabelle captive?’
‘No! I thought they’d taken her to the hospital. I only found out later. Lily saw her outside …’
Monica remembered Annabelle’s hurried text message to Fisher. Had she tried to escape from the tunnel? Been caught and taken back? What then? Was she killed? Had she really managed to escape from Marcus down into the tunnels?
‘Tell me where Annabelle is. Tell me how to find her.’
‘She must be down in the tunnels. Doc and Marcus know them better than me,’ Karen whispered. ‘That’s the only place Doc would keep her. But no one ever comes back from down there.’
CHAPTER 100
Annabelle moved slowly through the darkness. Without crutches her technique was to feel the ground in front of her with the palms of both hands, before laying them flat and hopping her remaining leg forward. It was slow and exhausting. The tunnel seemed to incline gradually upwards, making her progress even more tiring. The skin on her hands stung constantly. Her leg and back were cramped and aching, and there was a deep throbbing pain from her amputation. She could feel a dampness in the dressing as if the stitches had begun to open up.
Despite the discomfort it was good to focus on the challenges of moving because all around her the darkness seemed infinite and terrifying. All that was real was the pain. And increasingly her thirst. What had started as a dry discomfort in her mouth soon evolved into a furious craving.
Repeatedly her mind ran back over the previous days. She tried to recall her last drink. The moment of the tea spraying against the wall when she’d hit Marcus with the mug. How could she have wasted that precious liquid? Couldn’t she have drunk the tea before hitting Marcus?! Then she became aware of the smell of fresh water. Maddeningly it seemed to come from all around – from unde
r her hands on the rock floor, from above her in the cave roof. She swung her head side to side, trying to home in on it. Finally she stopped and clicked the torch on. Shone the weak light around, convinced it would land on a trickle of water somewhere. There was nothing though. Just dry rock and the darkness beyond.
For what seemed like hours she repeated the same routine, her desperate thirst even overriding her fear of the Doctor as she sniffed the cool air for water. Moving on, praying for the blessed relief when her hand would touch a puddle and she could lean in to drink. Switching the ever-weakening torch on to see dry rock in every direction, finally forcing herself to click the torch off again. Her mind began to play tricks too. She would feel the cool damp of a puddle on her hand, think that she had found water. Joyfully she’d collapse forward to drink, only to taste the familiar dry rock.
The voices started soon after. Calling to her from distant corners. People she’d known years before. Her parents. Her classmates from school, shouting to her, laughing and calling her towards a Soda Stream dispenser they’d set up. Only to move it when she drew close and send her off in the opposite direction until she bumped up against the wall of the cave. They seemed to enjoy mocking her. Sniggering at her missing leg, chuckling at her begging.
Finally she collapsed into a heap, too exhausted and ground down by pain to force herself on. Her hand went to the torch around her neck for a moment’s comfort against the dark and the cruel laughter. But when she pressed the switch Annabelle realised that it was already on. She had forgotten to switch it off. The battery was dead, and now the darkness was absolute.
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