‘Will you take me there?’
Megan bit her lip, wincing as her teeth grazed raw skin. She must say yes, must say whatever she had to. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this place alive. As her mouth formed the word there was a sudden yell from outside.
‘Ruby! You in there?’ It was a man’s voice: a voice that Megan didn’t recognise.
‘Who the fuck’s that?’ The girl had the knife at her throat again.
‘I don’t know,’ Megan mumbled. ‘I haven’t told anyone, I swear to you.’ She felt the blade move away again. Elysha was in front of her now, crouching, looking at the window. Keeping her head down, she crept across the room to peer through the net curtains.
‘Jesus! What’s he doing here?’ The girl turned to Megan. ‘Keep your mouth shut, or you’re dead,’ she hissed. She darted into the hall, closing the lounge door behind her. Megan heard the man’s voice again, saying something she couldn’t quite make out. Elysha was saying something back: arguing with him, by the sound of it. Megan realised this was her chance. While they were talking she shuffled herself sideways so the chair she was tied to was facing the table. She was hoping against hope that Elysha had left the knife behind when she went to the door. But she hadn’t. Straining at the twine that held her arms, Megan cast about the room for something sharp, her eyes ranging over the mantelpiece, the sofa and the carpet. There was nothing. Then she remembered the nail scissors in her handbag. Shuffling a couple of inches closer to the table she managed to grasp the leather strap with her teeth. Pulling it towards her, she saw that it was still unzipped. She manoeuvred it with her mouth, tipping it over, spilling the contents onto the table. With her nose and chin she sifted through the junk until she located the scissors. Thank God for those bloody prunes, she thought.
All the time she could hear the voices in the hall getting louder. The man shouted an obscenity. Elysha shouted back: ‘Fuck off yourself, Lee!’
Megan gasped. It couldn’t be, could it? Lee Deacon? But of course: he had her address. It was on the visiting order. He must be so besotted with Elysha that he had given his jailer the slip to come and lay claim to her. Christ, she thought, she’s got the knife – she’s going to kill him! With a nudge of her nose she knocked the scissors into her lap. She had just enough mobility in the lower part of her right arm to reach them. In a matter of seconds she had snipped through enough of the twine to release herself. As she ripped the remaining bonds from her legs she heard a roar from outside.
‘You fucking prick-tease!’ the man bellowed. There was a crash and something thumped against the wall dividing the lounge from the hallway. Megan lurched towards the door, her limbs stiff and clumsy. The voice in her head was hissing, Run! Get out of the window while you’ve got the chance! But she couldn’t. She couldn’t leave Elysha. By the sound of it, the bastard was about to rape her.
She burst into the hallway to see a shaven-headed hulk of a man pinioning Elysha to the wall. One of his hands was holding both her wrists above her head and the other was tugging at her jeans. Her hood had come off in the struggle and Megan had a fleeting glimpse of a pale, delicate face framed with short, black, wispy hair. It was a face she had seen many times, bobbing about behind the counter at Starbucks.
‘Get off her!’ Megan launched herself towards him.
Lee Deacon turned a pair of large, surprised blue eyes on her. ‘Who the fuck…’ He never finished the sentence. Seizing her chance, Elysha broke free. Megan saw her whip the knife out of the pouch of her hoodie.
‘No, Elysha!’
She was too late. The girl was jabbing the knife into his groin. He let out a howl of pain, staggering back against the opposite wall. Megan watched, paralysed with horror, as he slid to the floor. A huge stain was spreading down the left leg of his jeans. Both hands were clutching his groin and his face was screwed up in agony.
‘Bitch!’’ he groaned. ‘You fucking bitch! I’m fucking bleeding to death!’
‘Elysha – call an ambulance, quick!’ Megan ran to Deacon, kneeling on the carpet beside him. Pulling off her scarf, she held it to the wound in a bid to stop the bleeding.
‘Get away from him!’
Megan glanced up to see Elysha pointing the knife at her.
‘You think I’m going to let him live? Let him grass me up?’
Oh God, Megan thought, If I try to save him she’s going to kill me. ‘Elysha,’ she pleaded, ‘This isn’t you: you’re no cold-blooded killer. You don’t…’
‘Shut up!’ the girl screamed. ‘Just shut the fuck up!’
‘No, listen to me!’ Megan could see that the hand holding the knife was shaking. ‘Everything you’ve done up to now is the sort of thing a court would understand: a good lawyer would say the balance of your mind was disturbed by the terrible things you’d found out; that what you did to Kelly and Ryan wasn’t technically murder. But if you leave this man to die you’re looking at a life sentence.’
‘Only if they catch me!’ She waved the knife at the walls of the flat ‘Who’s going to know? Ruby Owens no longer exists!’
‘No, she doesn’t – but you do’ Megan rose to her feet and took a step towards Elysha. The girl’s eyes flashed and Megan blinked. It was like looking at Dominic. He’d once been like this: worse than this, by his own admission. And yet he was now, without question, a good man; better than most on the outside. Surely some grain of this would exist in his daughter? There was something in those eyes that made her believe it. ‘You leave him to die and stick that thing into me and that’s all you’re going to do for the rest of your life: just exist. Your real father knows exactly what that feels like: he’s spent most of his adult life in jail because of it. But now he’s made something of himself and do you know why? It’s because of you. The thought of meeting you, of getting to know you, is all he lives for.’
Elysha’s nostrils flared as she grunted. ‘Do you think I care?’
‘You might not now. But how do you think you’ll feel twenty years down the line? You’ve spent the last seventeen years without a dad – now you’ve got the chance to find out what it’s like to have one. Do you really want to throw that away?’
The eyes narrowed. The hand holding the knife jerked forward. Then stopped. The pale, delicate face crumpled like a paper flower in the rain. ‘Help me,’ she whispered.
As Megan reached forward to take the knife a burst of sound ricocheted around the walls. It was the howling feedback of a megaphone. A voice crackled: ‘Lee Deacon: this is the police. The building is surrounded. Give yourself up!’
Chapter 28
Delva Lobelo was with BTV’s news editor, going through last-minute changes to the evening bulletin, when the phone rang.
‘This is DS Willis, West Midlands police. I thought you’d like to know there’s been a development in the Balsall Gate case.’
‘There has? Can you hang on a second?’ Delva put one hand over the receiver and repeated the sergeant’s words to the news editor while grabbing her pen and notebook. ‘Fire away,’ she said into the phone.
‘We’ve arrested a nineteen-year-old female on suspicion of the murder of Carl Kelly. We’re also questioning the suspect about a second suspicious death at Strangeways prison in Manchester.’
‘You did say female?’ Delva was scribbling it down in shorthand and the news editor came round the desk, reading over her shoulder. ‘Is it the lonely hearts girl? The one who was visiting them in prison?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on that,’ Willis said, his voice as expressionless as ever. ‘All I can confirm is her name and date of birth: it’s Elysha Smith. – that’s E-l-y-s-h-a – and the DOB is the twenty-second of the sixth, nineteen-eighty-eight.’
‘What about her address? Is she local?’
‘She is, yes, but I’m unable to give you details at this stage.’
Delva clapped her hand over the receiver again as the news editor bent to hiss in her ear. She rephrased his question to Willis. ‘I didn’t know
the case had got this far. Was Megan Rhys involved?’
She heard him clear his throat before he answered. ‘Let’s just say that she was with the suspect at the time of her arrest. We believed that we were dealing with a hostage situation at an address in the Balsall Gate area.’
‘A hostage situation?’ Delva stopped writing in mid-sentence. ‘Is Megan okay?’
‘She was unharmed and is assisting us with our enquiries.’
Delva let out a sigh of relief. God, she thought, he sounds more like a robot than a human being. ‘Was Megan Rhys the hostage?’ she persisted. ‘Was it the girl you arrested threatening her?’
‘I can’t comment on that,’ he replied. ‘All I can say is that an escaped prisoner – Lee Deacon – was escorted from the scene with stab wounds and taken to Heartland Hospital, where his condition is serious but stable.’
Megan was at number four Coburg Road when the news bulletin went out. She and Detective Superintendent Martin Leverton were sitting with Sonia Smith in the kitchen. Leverton was an old acquaintance of hers – not exactly a friend – but they had worked together a year or so ago on the prostitute murders, as a result of which she had won his grudging respect. To her relief he had been put in charge since Elysha’s arrest and Willis had been demoted to media liaison. She had offered up what she knew about Sonia and her boyfriend on the understanding that she would be allowed to play a part in what followed.
Paul Deboney had already been taken away for questioning but from the look on his face when they arrived, he had no idea that the batch of strychnine in his van had been taken. He had appeared equally baffled when the names of Carl Kelly and Patrick Ryan were read out. Apparently Sonia had told him that Elysha’s father had died in a car accident.
‘That’s what I told Elysha, too.’ Sonia was staring at the orange blind drawn over the window as if it was a cinema screen. ‘I couldn’t tell her what really happened. When she found the baby I…’ she faltered, her eyes brimming with tears.
‘She told me they pushed you down the stairs,’ Megan said gently. Sonia had been in a state of shock after they broke the news that Elysha had been arrested. Megan’s instinct was that, like Paul Deboney, she had played no part in the murders. But she must have known about the baby being found in Moses’ grave. It had been all over the news. She would also have heard about Carl Kelly’s death. There were still so many unanswered questions: How had Elysha known who the men were? Where to find them? Was Sonia really as innocent as she appeared to be? Megan tried again: ‘You must have been terrified when those men burst in like that.’
Sonia’s hair fell forward, hiding her eyes as she nodded. ‘I didn’t tell Elysha everything. I couldn’t.’ Megan saw her lips go white as she pressed them together. ‘They didn’t throw me down the stairs. They raped me.’ It came out in a whisper. Megan heard Leverton clear his throat and swallow. She felt a wave of nausea. It was a horrible thing to contemplate: a woman nine months’ pregnant being gang raped and miscarrying her baby. No wonder Carl Kelly had had nightmares. He must have known what he was doing that night. Or had he been so drugged up he hadn’t realised the consequences of what he and the others were inflicting? Had it happened while they were still there? Was it the dead child who had appeared in Kelly’s dreams, rather than the father he had stabbed to death?
‘I couldn’t let Ben go.’ Sonia’s eyes were still obscured by her hair but Megan saw a tear run down her chin and fall to the carpet. ‘He was the only thing I had to remind me of Mo.’ She shook her head. ‘People thought Mo was bad, but he wasn’t. The only thing he ever took was skunk – nothing else. And he was the only man I’d ever met who didn’t…’ The words trailed away to nothing. Megan caught her breath. So the poor bastard was murdered for the price of a few grams of cannabis. She wondered what Sonia had intended to say next and she thought of Dom, remembering what he’d said about his serial infidelities while he was with Sonia. Then there had been the pimp, Leroy Spinks. Living with a bloke with nothing worse than a dope habit must have been paradise compared to what she’d endured before.
‘Sonia, there’s something I have to ask you. It might help Elysha when this comes to court. When Moses was killed it said in the paper that you didn’t know who they were; that they were wearing masks…’
‘No.’ Sonia said the word firmly, brushing the hair away from her eyes. ‘I knew them. But they said they’d come back and kill me too if I grassed them up. I was so bloody scared I took Elysha and ran. All we had was the clothes we stood up in and Ben.’ She dropped her head again. ‘He was wrapped up in newspaper in a carrier bag. We hid in a doss house for six months with the bed against the door every night to keep the drunks out.’
Megan could see more tears plopping onto the carpet. She fumbled in her bag for a tissue but Leverton beat her to it, offering a large, neatly pressed white handkerchief. ‘What I need to ask you,’ she said softly, ‘is how Elysha knew who to look for. How she knew where to find them.’
‘I told her when I came home and found Ben on my bed.’ Sonia sniffed loudly and blew her nose. ‘It was the day after my birthday. I’d borrowed a pair of her shoes because Paul was taking me out. That’s how she found him. She was looking for those bloody shoes. It nearly killed her, finding him like that.’
Megan could hear Elysha’s voice in her head. I wanted you to feel the kind of pain I felt when I found my baby brother… No wonder she had plotted the most horrible death imaginable for the men who were responsible for his death. ‘So you had to tell her, then?’ she asked. ‘And she wanted to know their names?’
‘Yes. I told her they were all in prison. I thought she’d be satisfied with that. It never occurred to me that she’d go looking for them.’
Megan looked at her for a long moment. No, she thought, I don’t suppose it did. She glanced at Leverton, whose eyes gave a barely perceptible look of assent. He believed Sonia too.
An hour later Megan was at West Midlands Police headquarters. She was in a windowless room, watching through a one-way viewing panel as Elysha Smith was interviewed by Leverton and another senior officer from the Greater Manchester force. The girl was just providing the last piece of the jigsaw, giving an account of how she had tracked down Moses Smith’s killers. Megan was struck by the ingenuity she had shown but was equally shocked by the distant, emotionless way she described it.
Elysha was telling the two policemen that she had handwritten three letters, one to each of her intended victims, signing each one with a different name. She had colour-photocopied the letters so that they looked like originals, sending one copy of each to every prison within a hundred-mile radius of Birmingham. It was that simple: in less than a fortnight she had located all three men and made plans to visit them. The honey trap was laid and the drugs were offered on the second visit. They were delivered on the third.
When Elysha stopped speaking she sat rigid in the chair, staring into space, like a machine that had been turned off. It was as if something inside her had shut down. To Megan, it was plain that she needed help: somebody to support her. Sonia had come and gone, hysterical at the sight of her daughter in a police cell and unable to communicate. David Dunn had been contacted and was on his way back from the conference he was attending. He had agreed to be interviewed but expressed no desire to offer support to Elysha. The obvious person to counsel the girl was Dom. Not because he was her father, but because of his compassion. He was a rescuer of souls and that was exactly what Elysha needed at this moment.
Megan’s thoughts were interrupted by the clunk of the door opening. A young WPC had brought her a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits. ‘You were mentioned in dispatches, Dr Rhys,’ the woman said, as she laid the tray down in front of her.
‘Dispatches?’ Megan looked at her, puzzled, as she reached for the chocolate biscuit in the middle of the plate.
‘They mentioned your name on the news.’
The biscuit stopped midway between the plate and Megan’s mouth. ‘You mean it’s
been released to the media already? What did they say?’
‘Not much. Just her name,’ the WPC said, nodding at the viewing panel. ‘And the fact that Lee Deacon’s in hospital.’
Megan bit her knuckles as the woman disappeared behind the door. What if Dom had heard it? He’d be going frantic with worry. She must phone the prison: try to persuade them to let him out for a few hours to meet his daughter and talk to her, however briefly.
Instinctively she reached for her mobile, then remembered it was lying in bits on the floor of the derelict flat in Balsall Gate. She had to go to the front desk of the police station to make the call, only to be told that the governor of the prison was unavailable. Only he had the authority to issue a temporary leave permit – even for a model inmate like Dominic.
‘Can I at least come and see him, then?’ Megan said urgently.
‘Well, it’s not usual to allow anyone other than staff in at this time of the evening…’ the duty officer tailed off. Megan could hear shouts in the background: the familiar evening chorus of men on lock-up, trying to communicate with each other through barred windows. They were probably passing round the news that some girl had been done for killing one of their mates. Poor Dom, she thought, having to listen to that.
‘It’s very important that I talk to him,’ she persisted. ‘His daughter is in a lot of trouble and I need to explain the circumstances to him.’
There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone, followed by a small sigh. ‘I’ll see if we can make an exception for you, Dr Rhys, as it’s Dom Wilde we’re talking about. Can I call you back in a couple of minutes?’
Megan paced up and down the corridor until the news came back that her request had been granted. Grabbing her bag, she ran down the corridor to the exit that gave onto the car park. It was twilight outside and by the time she had driven across the city to the prison, darkness had fallen. She had never been there at night. Harsh white light bounced off the stone walls and a stiff breeze made the barbed wire hum like a swarm of angry bees. She wondered how Elysha would fare in whatever institution she was sent to: it was highly unlikely she would avoid a custodial sentence but maybe the judge would be lenient.
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