The Taken: DI Erica Martin Book 2 (Erica Martin Thriller)

by Alice Clark-Platts

  ‘Don’t even think about touching your radio, Sergeant Jones,’ Sera said, pushing the edge of the knife against her jawline. ‘If they want to find us, they can come and get us.’

  Jones was mute, her mind racing to discern their destination. She had no intention of touching her radio. Martin would find her.

  The car carried on in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. You want to know what’s going on.’ Sera nodded from the back seat, propped forward between Violet and Jones. ‘It’s a bit of a mess.’ She stared flatly out of the windscreen with a small smile. ‘But I’ve got it now. I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  Violet threw a glance back at Sera before looking again at the road. Her mother seemed keyed, alive like an electric fence. There was a wild, frenzied quality about her; she buzzed with an energy unfamiliar to Violet, making her feel as if she were dealing with a stranger. ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand. What happened to the man?’

  ‘The man?’

  ‘The man that held us prisoner. The one in the basement? I hit that policewoman thinking she was him.’ Violet shook her head in disbelief.

  Sera glanced at Jones, who kept her breathing level, staring straight ahead at the tarmac of the road ahead of them. ‘Don’t pretend, sweetheart.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who’s pretending?’

  Sera gave a soft laugh. ‘You know I made him up, Violet.’

  Violet swallowed, shocked. ‘No I didn’t! I don’t understand.’ She paused, thinking. ‘So then . . .’

  It had been her mother who had brought her to that basement. Her mother who had tied her up and drugged her.

  Sera frowned, moving her gaze as houses gave way to countryside. ‘I’m sorry about all of that. But I had to think fast. I had to get you away, out of that hotel.’ She shivered in her seat, her face pale. The energy bouncing off her felt feverish in the small space of the car interior. ‘I didn’t want you to fight me, Violet. I knew you’d stay there quietly if I frightened you.’

  ‘But you hurt me,’ Violet said in a small voice. She felt sick: ideas and explanations bouncing uncontrolled inside her head. It didn’t make any sense. If – and she still had no idea why this would be the case – her mother had wanted to escape with her, why hadn’t she talked about it? Told her what was going on?

  And now they were here, having kidnapped a policewoman.

  ‘We had to move,’ Sera said, as if reading Violet’s mind. ‘I had to keep you with me. And then you hit the Inspector, and dragged her off.’

  ‘I thought she was the man you’d made up – who you’d said was holding me there! When I realized who she was . . . I panicked.’ Violet threw a glance at Jones, whose expression was unreadable. ‘And then I was trapped,’ Violet said, bewildered. She eased her foot off the accelerator, thinking perhaps she could turn back and explain everything. Make everything better. ‘But it was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do it. We can explain . . . Take her back.’

  ‘Assaulting a police officer? On the back of what you’d already done?’ Sera smiled again. ‘They would take you away, darling. I can’t lose you like that. Not like I’ve lost everyone else.’

  Violet bit her lip but said nothing. The fact of Jones sitting next to her became suddenly real. ‘Shut up, Mum.’

  ‘What you did,’ Sera said. She leaned forward a little to whisper into Violet’s ear. Imperceptibly, Jones moved to catch what she said. ‘What you did to Antonia’s face. I was so proud of you, Violet. So proud of your loyalty. You don’t know how happy it made me.’ She gave Violet an inscrutable smile. ‘We’ll always be together, won’t we?’

  Her expression became purposeful. ‘We’ll need to come off soon. We’re nearly there.’

  ‘Nearly where? Where are we going?’

  Sera didn’t answer but continued to stare out of the window, a peaceful expression on her face. ‘It’s always good to keep moving, Violet, in times of trouble. Don’t ever forget that.’ After a minute, she pointed. ‘There. Just up there. Take a right into the estate.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Stop here,’ Sera said. ‘By that bridge, see?’

  ‘What is it?’ Violet asked. ‘It looks like a spaceship.’

  Sera rubbed one hand over her face, the other still holding the knife against Jones. Her hand trembled as she reached for the door handle.

  ‘This is home, baby. We’ve come home.’

  Violet turned, then, to look at her mother. Something in her face had altered, in the dull light of the approaching summer storm. An alchemy was taking place in Sera.

  And, as she realized this, Violet was suddenly afraid.

  50

  Martin could hear the police helicopter churning the air above them as they drove. ‘She said she was going home just now.’ Driving fast out of Durham, she whipped her head to look at Tennant. ‘Home . . . Do you remember, Tennant? From the interview notes? Her accent . . . she grew up in Peterlee. Look it up on the GPS. Are we going in that direction?

  ‘God, I think she’d planned this all along. Bringing them all here. Who knows what horrors lie in that woman’s wake?’ Martin shook her head, her eyes on the road. ‘At first, it seemed all about Tristan Snow. But, I wonder . . .’ her voice trailed away. ‘She banished her own father. Stood up in front of a whole congregation and told terrible lies about him. Brought him down.’

  ‘So he says, anyway,’ Tennant answered, holding the GPS and typing instructions as the countryside flashed by.

  ‘True.’

  ‘Peterlee’s not far from here, but where, Boss? Where will we find her? Peterlee’s not big but . . . it’s not small either,’ he finished, somewhat lamely.

  Martin gave a quick grimace of agreement. ‘I don’t know, but let’s get there and we’ll see.’

  They lapsed into silence as the car sped onwards. Black clouds shifted without warning across the horizon as if transfigured by the passing helicopter blades. The scent of approaching rain floated in through Martin’s open window, the air damp with expectation. Jones . . . Jones, I’m coming. I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt her, Sera. Please don’t . . . Sera’s face flashed into Martin’s head, the vision of her holding the knife to Jones’s throat. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe and wound down the window further. They were driving fast, past fields of rape flowers and the curdled aroma of the stacked-up silage bales rushed in along with that strange sense of the unrelenting nature of life despite things hanging in the balance; that portion of time that never seemed to move while you were in the midst of it, although everything around you continued unawares, as cruelly as normal.

  Martin still couldn’t shake that nightmare she’d had where Mercy had been screaming for help. But had it been Mercy calling out? Or was it really Jones? Had she foreseen this happening? Had she really let this happen? Let down the one person she depended on to always be there?

  The crackle of Martin’s radio suddenly jerked her into the present. She bent her head to listen, and murmured, ‘Sunny Blunts.’

  ‘What?’ Tennant asked.

  ‘Sera Simpson – as she was then – lived in Sunny Blunts. It’s an estate in Peterlee. That’s where she’ll be heading, I’m sure of it. Well, at least, it’s our only option.’ One eye on the road, Martin spoke again into the radio. ‘That’s where we need to go.’

  Tennant began to scroll down the screen on his iPhone, tapping on it, reading the information. ‘It’s a new town, it says here, is Peterlee. One of those built after the war. Bunch of collieries around it, in the day.’

  Martin said nothing, thinking about Jones. Thinking about Sera being here with Antonia. Not so far from where Martin spent her formative years. ‘Here we are,’ she said, slowing down as the car reached the outskirts of the town. ‘Peterlee. Where Sera and Antonia grew up.’

  At the GPS’s robotic instruction, Martin turned right into a housing estate and slowed to a snail’s crawl. The helicopter still whirred above the
m, puttering in and out of the clouds. A few spots of rain began to hit hard on to the windscreen. The estate was neatly divided by roads and blocks of grass, bleached brown and hard by the summer. The houses were boxy, slotted in next to each other as closely as molars. Some were brick with pitched roofs but others appeared from another time, their first storeys elevated by square pillars. They had flat roofs and what looked like frontages of white and brown clapboard.

  ‘Looks like a Butlin’s holiday camp,’ Tennant observed.

  ‘God, it’s run down,’ Martin said. ‘Bloody hell, what on earth is that?’

  Ahead of them, over a patch of man-made lake, stood a dirty-white horizontal structure. It was thick and straight, stretching over the water like a pair of upturned, abstracted buffalo horns.

  ‘It’s a bridge, isn’t it?’ Tennant suggested.

  The ends of the bridge stood upright like the struts of a hospital bed. In between them, the walkway across the water was half-hidden by a complicated jumble of worn-out and mildewed concrete blocks that seemed to slot together. Underneath, whatever lake had once existed had now disappeared to leave a dried-up quagmire, home to a three-wheeled shopping trolley and scattered debris from the surrounding houses.

  ‘I guess so,’ Martin said, surveying what lay before her. If this was where Sera Snow had grown up, it was a fairly miserable beginning. Rain began to spatter on their heads, causing her to wipe her brow as she read an information sign. ‘The Apollo Pavilion, it’s called,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Let’s go for a walk on the moon, Tennant.’

  They got out and moved towards the marshy puddle under the bridge. At once, Martin saw the silver hire car that Violet had driven, parked at an angle on the kerb.

  ‘They’re here,’ Martin said.

  Sera pushed Jones up the stairs and on to the bridge, the knife held tight to her back. Jones still had said nothing, her eyes fixed upwards, seeking out the whirr of a helicopter’s blades in the rapidly darkening sky.

  ‘Mum?’ Violet called, them behind. ‘Stop for a minute. Tell me what we’re doing here.’

  Sera waited, breathing hard, as Violet caught up with her. ‘We lived in that house,’ she said, jutting her chin towards a boxy terrace on the other side of the bridge. ‘See that window? That was the bedroom that I shared with Antonia. That’s where we lived – me and your aunt.’

  ‘I think the police know where we are. I can hear a helicopter,’ Violet exclaimed, looking up at the sky. ‘We need to think about what we’re doing. We’re in trouble, Mum. We need to let her go, please?’ She turned to face Jones, seeking reassurance from the policewoman as her voice trembled with confusion. ‘We can explain everything. Can’t we?’

  ‘It’s not too late, Sera,’ Jones said, reaching out to her, her tone neutral. ‘We can work it out.’

  Sera didn’t answer, continuing to talk to herself, a look of puzzlement on her face. ‘It waits at the edges, Violet,’ she said. ‘It flutters there, you can’t see it. But it’s on the fringes of everything.’

  ‘What is?’ Violet asked, looking desperately over the concrete struts, expecting to see any minute the police cars and cavalry.

  ‘It’s not madness, Vivi,’ Sera said. ‘Don’t believe that. I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  Without warning, Sera spun and slashed the knife across Jones’s upper arm. Jones cried out and bent over, her hand glued over the wound. At once, Sera’s strong arms twisted Violet down and around. The girl wept as Sera pushed her down, kneeling with Violet’s head in her lap. ‘I just wanted her to stroke my hair. Like this, see? To love me like . . .’

  ‘Mum!’ Violet struggled in Sera’s grip but her arms were iron and she held Violet fast. ‘Stop it. You’re hurting me.’

  ‘Let the girl go, Sera,’ Jones managed to yell. Her face had turned white and blood seeped through the fingers of the hand pressing into her arm, running rivulets down the sleeve of her jacket. She let go of the injury for a moment to grab her radio.

  ‘Do that and I’ll use this on her,’ Sera said, her voice thick as treacle, her eyes fixed on her daughter.

  ‘You don’t want to do that, Sera. Not really,’ Jones said, dropping her hand.

  Sera began to cry throaty tears, her voice hoarse with emotion. ‘I just want you all to stay with me. Is that so much to ask?’

  Violet tried to turn around, to look her mother in the eye. ‘Mum, it’s me. Please.’

  ‘But then, I got it, you see? With Peter and Michael, the boys. I understood. I saw how I could keep you.’

  A rattle of thunder preceded the rain as tears ran down Violet’s face. She heard the sound of approaching car engines. ‘The twins? What did you understand? Mum? Tell me. I love you. Please don’t hurt me, Mummy.’

  ‘She went away. She left and never came back. And it was because of him. I know it. Once I remember . . .’ Sera breathed in sharply, wiping her hand across her face. ‘She’d made dinner. Like she did every single night. And he tasted it. And he had this . . . this look on his face. Like what he was eating was poison. He just stared at her. Never spoke. Just put his knife and fork down and left the room.’

  Jones watched her carefully, weighing up the odds of grabbing her. But the knife was at Violet’s throat and her left arm was useless. The rain had started to pelt, making it difficult to see; drops of water kept running into her eyes.

  ‘We sat there. All of us. You can’t understand it, if you weren’t there. The weight of it. How . . . vile we felt. Always it was about him. The man of the house. We were nothing but subordinates to him – us women. He knew best about everything and if he wasn’t pleased, it was as though we had so utterly failed. That we had failed him and ourselves. The way he’d looked at us before leaving us all sitting there . . .’ Her voice cracked. ‘Such disdain. Like he could never love us again, if he ever had. And all for a pork chop!’ A dot of spittle flew from her mouth and was subsumed by the rain.

  ‘Then, after a while,’ Sera wiped her mouth, ‘my mother went after him. And when they came back down – hours later – we had just been waiting there, frozen. When they came back down, he’d painted a black eye on her with her make-up. It was purple and blue and came halfway down her face. He thought it was funny. That it could make us forget. And she just looked at us, like, she knew it was wrong, but what could she do? This is why she left. Because of him. But why didn’t she take me with her? I would have gone. I would have run alongside her. But she didn’t . . . she just went away.’

  ‘Mum, I know. But you grew up, left all that behind. You met Dad. And had me. All of that’s behind you now. You’re a different person,’ Violet said, her voice sweet like the opening violin of a concerto.

  ‘Have I, Vivi? Have I left all that behind? Look at me. Look at what your father was. I meant to change, I really did. I swore I’d be different. But, in the end, wasn’t I just the same? What you said in the hotel – you had the same thoughts about me that I had about my mother. And so you want to leave. And I can’t bear it . . .’

  ‘You can be different,’ Jones said, faltering a little as her knees buckled. She sank down to the base of the bridge, the sudden downpour plastering her hair to her forehead. ‘Let us help you.’

  ‘You can’t help me, Sergeant Jones,’ Sera said sadly, raising her face to the heavens, letting the rain wash over her face. ‘You can’t keep Violet here with me. Only I can do that.’

  She bent her head to her daughter. ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m so sorry. But the only lesson I ever learnt from this place,’ she said, as she carefully sliced into the flesh below Violet’s chin, ‘is that the only way to keep you, is to give you eternity.’ The warmth of the blood flowed over Sera’s fingers in rivers as she moved Violet lovingly to one side and got to her feet.

  Martin and Tennant moved forward through the rain, scanning every inch of the grey surroundings for any signs of life. Two more police cars pulled in next to where they’d parked, and their occupants jumped out.

  ‘Anyth
ing?’ an officer asked.

  Martin waved her hand to indicate that they should keep quiet. ‘Seems that’s the car she used,’ she said. ‘Fan out round the estate. She’s pretty good at hiding, if the basement episode’s anything to go by.’ Martin touched her nose gingerly; it still pulsed with pain. ‘I’m going to go up on the bridge.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Tennant said in a no-arguments tone, moving ahead of Martin.

  They crossed the wet grass to the edge of the lake, which curved around and out of sight under the bridge, framed by another row of white and brown clapboard houses.

  A crack of thunder bellowed as Martin pulled Tennant sharply back by his sleeve. ‘Stand down,’ she whispered fiercely into her radio. ‘One suspect seen. Stand down but keep positions.’

  Tennant flashed a look at Martin, who gestured with her chin down ahead of them in the direction of the ground. He turned back towards the bridge, straining his eyes through the rain bouncing off the concrete path before them. A lock of dark hair curled around the foot of a pillar guarding the stairs leading upwards. As Martin edged closer, she saw that the hair belonged to Violet. Signalling to Tennant to flank her, she moved forward, adjusting her eyes to the murky space underneath the stairwell.

  It was then that the gash on Violet’s neck became visible. Her eyes were open as she lay cold on the walkway, blood being washed away by the rain from the gaping wound in her throat, as fast as it could thickly ooze.