Easy Kill

by Lin Anderson

  A wave of nausea hit her as she tried to move away from the wall. When he’d shoved her down the manhole, she’d slipped on the wall irons and fallen heavily, her right leg twisted beneath her. He’d jumped down behind, spitting curses through the mask, calling her a ‘stupid fucking bitch’. Rhona was glad she’d pissed him off, despite the searing pain.

  She reached down, feeling the extent of the swelling. She had no chance of straightening the leg without help. Rhona rolled onto her front and attempted to crawl towards the sound of running water. The CSO was her best chance of getting out before her tormentor returned. He hadn’t restrained her, thinking she wasn’t going anywhere with a broken leg. She would prove the bastard wrong.

  She was almost at the water when she realised he was back. Her ragged, laboured breathing must have covered his approach. A footfall brought her to an abrupt halt. She lay perfectly still, her eyes probing the darkness, her heart hammering in her chest.

  ‘Going somewhere, Dr MacLeod?’

  She could smell him, a musky mix of oil and sweat. Magnus had said a serial killer fed off the scent of his victim’s fear. She would deny the bastard that, at least.

  Rhona waited, sensing his slow walk around her. If he still held the gun, she didn’t stand a chance. But if she was going to die, she would go out like Cathy, fighting and kicking.

  Rhona felt a slight movement of air and made her move, reaching out and grabbing his leg. The speed of her attack caught him unawares. He tripped and fell, screaming curses.

  But his recovery was too swift to roll out of the way. Rhona let out a howl of pain and protest as his body pinned hers to the ground. Then his hands were around her throat.

  Rhona clawed at the air, trying to inflict damage on him before the darkness took her.

  ‘Say you’re fucking sorry, Dr MacLeod.’

  He tightened his grip.

  ‘Say it.’

  Rhona drew in her last breath and spat in his face.

  When she came to, her brain buzzed with light and sound. She knew where she was, what was happening to her, yet no longer seemed to care.

  Pain had been replaced by pleasure. Ripples of it ran across her body, like a lover’s fingers. Rhona tried to pull her mind back, anchor it in reality, but this was reality, this strange mix of pain and joy.

  The rules of torture. Hurt the victim, then give them pleasure. Then bring back the pain. For now she felt only peace.

  An arc light held her in its heat and glare. In her drugged state she imagined it to be the eye of God, watching her. Every nerve in her body tingled. An all-body orgasm, that’s how addicts tried to describe the effects of crystal meth. Somewhere inside the haze, Rhona’s rational brain told her that was what coursed through her body.

  Then a face loomed over her. A voice breathed her name.

  ‘It’s time, Rhona. Time to teach you what I like.’

  Searing agony broke through the pleasure as her right leg was moved roughly and placed at an unbearable angle. Rhona imagined her body being split apart, bone prised from bone. She blacked out again.

  62

  MEN WERE SPREAD out in a line across the waste ground, their torch beams reflecting the steady fall of rain. A small team of firemen, wearing breathing apparatus, had already been led up the culvert by a thrilled Kenny to check the CSO Rhona had been concerned about.

  Inside the building, Bill had split his force. A team was working from the top level down. He and McNab had stayed with the second team, moving from ground level to basement. The discovery of Rhona’s mobile beneath an old sink in the back laundry had been the moment of truth.

  When McNab had handed him the phone, he’d found his number on the screen. Rhona had been about to call him when something had happened to make her drop the phone.

  Bill left McNab searching the laundry and went further in. Above him, the building resounded with noise. There was no way they could search the place quietly, so he’d made the decision not to try, hoping that if the killer heard them, he would try to escape. If Rhona and Magnus were still alive, maybe that would help them stay that way.

  They were in the basement now. Bill remembered it well. The first team had been over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that might be linked to Cathy’s death. What they hadn’t considered was the possibility of a level beneath this one. Nothing in the plans of the building had suggested it. They’d checked every floor visible from the outside. But not the dunny, if it existed.

  The team in the culvert were sending a crawler along the floor of the CSO. A guy from CCTV Surveying was already working this floor, attempting to pick up the whereabouts of the crawler by a sonar detector. He’d already explained the crawler wasn’t good over rough surfaces, a problem if the floor of the CSO was badly encrusted.

  ‘A man can pick his way along, a crawler just gets stuck.’

  Bill hadn’t even thought of dousing for the pipe, but Kenny, who’d taken McNab and Rhona down the culvert, had brought along an old guy they used, called Hunter. ‘Don’t ask me how it works, but it does,’ Kenny had said mystified.

  Bill was counting on good search techniques and an eagle eye, but he watched with interest as Hunter unfastened the catch on his wooden box and unpacked the L-shaped brass rod.

  Hunter paid Bill no heed and made no attempts to explain what he was about, just began his slow walk across the floor. Bill knew there had been experiments using dowsers to find buried bodies, documented in the work of The Body Farm, the scientific facility set up at the University of Tennessee to study human decomposition. Bill prayed that if the old man detected anything, it would be running water and not a body.

  He took a call from Margaret an hour later, when they were no further forward in their search. Bill heard his wife’s worried voice and the words she spoke, but his brain refused to register them.

  ‘I said she wasn’t to go to the bloody concert!’ he shouted.

  There was a terrible silence at the other end.

  ‘Margaret, I’m sorry. How long have you been waiting?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  Bill could hear her voice shaking.

  ‘You tried her mobile?’

  ‘Yes, but she would have switched it off during the performance, so maybe she forgot to turn it on again?’ she said hopefully.

  ‘What about Susie?’

  Then came the bombshell.

  ‘She’s here with me. She says they got split up in the crowds coming out of the Barrowland. When she couldn’t find Lisa, she came to the rendezvous point, hoping she would be here already.’

  Bill let it all sink in. His daughter had disappeared, in an area where three women had been killed and three were missing. He tried to steady his voice before he answered.

  ‘Call Susie’s parents and ask them to pick her up. You stay where you are. I’m on my way.’

  He could feel Margaret’s relief. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let her go,’ she said, her voice breaking.

  Bill couldn’t find the words to answer, so he pretended he hadn’t heard and ended the call. In the few moments the conversation lasted, Bill had convinced himself the killer had his daughter. It all fitted – first Magnus, then Rhona, then, if not him, a member of his family. Rapid images of Terri, Lucie, and the unknown victims flipped through his mind, like shots from a snuff movie, only this time the face on each body was Lisa’s.

  Bill felt a need to vomit. He made for the stairs and the nearest cubicle. As he emptied his stomach, he could only think he was contaminating a possible crime scene. Afterwards, he stood near the broken window, letting the cool air hit his face and tasting the bitter rain on his lips. A final full moon, one hemisphere already on the wane, broke through the clouds. The Gravedigger would kill again before the period of the full moon was over, Magnus had promised. And the victim might be Lisa.

  Bill told himself to get a grip, otherwise he was no use. When he’d composed himself, he went looking for McNab and told him a teenage girl had been r
eported missing after a concert at the Barrowland ballroom, slap bang in the middle of the killer’s playground. They would have to transfer some of the search party to look for her.

  McNab was confused at first. ‘Leanne was seen at a concert?’

  ‘Not Leanne. Lisa, my daughter.’

  63

  ‘RHONA?’

  Magnus’s voice sounded far away. She imagined him on a distant shore, a large stretch of water between them.

  ‘I’m going to straighten your leg, before the drug wears off.’

  She made no response, no longer sure what was real and what wasn’t. There had been pain, then pleasure. Rhona wanted only pleasure from now on. She felt hands on her ankle and cried out, thinking it was her tormentor. Then a face resembling Magnus’s swam before her eyes. Rhona wanted to kiss him, because he was alive.

  A sudden jerk twisted her around, and she felt bones grate horribly inside her broken leg. A scream emerged from deep within her. The return of pain was a terrible thing, made more awful by its previous absence.

  ‘Please,’ she sobbed. Something was being wedged against her leg, something else wrapped tightly around it. Rhona collapsed back, exhausted by the effort of dealing with the agony.

  ‘I’m going to carry you.’

  Her body rose heavily. She was a child again, being lifted by her father, her face close to his, the scent of his skin in her nostrils. He stumbled, readjusted her weight against him, walked more steadily. Rhona heard the splash of water and imagined being carried into the sea off Skye. The scream of the gulls above them, the cool breeze from the water, even on the sunniest day. She wanted to float on the tide, taste its salt on her tongue.

  ‘I’m going to pull you through behind me.’

  Rhona listened to the voice that wasn’t her father’s, yet had a similar lyrical quality. She was being lowered, she hoped, into the sea. The sudden shock as the cold water met her body broke through her dream. Magnus was staring down at her, his face creased with worry. Rhona wanted to reassure him she could swim. There was nothing to worry about.

  Her buoyancy improved as the water grew deeper and Rhona knew she was moving out to sea. The thought didn’t frighten her. She would be carried across the Sound to Raasay. She would come ashore there. She would show Magnus her favourite island. Rhona wanted to reassure him about the chill of the water. Explain it was always this cold, that she was used to it.

  It was the booming sound that worried her, not the depth and movement of water. The thunder and the darkness. The water was moving faster now. Her head kept bumping against Magnus’s legs. She wondered why he was walking and not swimming, because the channel between Raasay and Skye was deep. And why was it dark? Chrissy had called him a Norse God. Maybe Magnus could walk on water?

  They had come to a halt, although the current tried desperately to carry Rhona onwards. It sounded as though Magnus was pounding rock with his fists, cursing. The sound dragged Rhona into the horror of reality. She found herself staring up at the encrusted ceiling of the culvert.

  ‘Magnus.’

  He turned from his fight with the stalactite. The look he gave her was like a man who’d just seen Lazarus rise from the dead.

  ‘Thank God, you’re conscious.’

  Rhona winced as the flow bumped her bad leg against the rough wall. ‘I liked the drugs better.’

  ‘We’ll have to turn back. We can’t get through and the water’s rising.’

  Trying to break the forest of stalactites had reduced Magnus’s hands to a bloody mess. When Rhona had fully regained consciousness, the water had been up to his thighs. Now it was at his waist. The Gravedigger knew they couldn’t get out this way, that’s why he’d let them escape. He had no need to kill them when the rising water would do it for him. The torch Magnus had taken from the upstairs room was still functioning, but there was no guarantee how long it would last.

  ‘We could go back to the chamber we passed. Maybe the water won’t fill it?’ suggested Rhona weakly.

  She could tell from Magnus’s face that he was trying to calculate how long he could keep her head and his own above water. He was a strong swimmer. So was she, but in her current state she might pull him under.

  The ugly wound on his forehead was black with flies. Magnus had given up brushing them away. He anchored Rhona to him and turned her as gently as he could, keeping her injured leg from hitting the side walls. Now they were fighting the current, not walking with it. If Magnus failed to keep his feet, they would both be swept away.

  64

  HUNTER CALLED MCNAB OVER.

  ‘A water course crosses under here.’

  The elderly man looked certain, both his hands and the brass rod quivering with excitement. They were at the end of the building furthest from the burn.

  Hunter walked slowly forward, stepped left, tried again, met a brick wall.

  ‘Below here. Definitely.’

  It occurred to McNab that Hunter had probably found a water pipe that served the building. Just as likely as locating some access to the Molendinar.

  The brick fireplace the old man indicated was a remnant of the building’s former glory. At its base was a heavy metal fire grate. There was no manhole visible. McNab hunkered down and pulled the grate back for a better look. There was nothing there but dirt.

  McNab’s desperation showed itself as frustrated anger. ‘This is shite!’ he exploded. ‘New-age rubbish.’

  Hunter didn’t flinch. ‘The culvert is beneath us.’

  McNab called Kenny over and asked what he thought.

  ‘The Molendinar doesn’t run in this line, not as far as we’re aware. But there are CSOs we don’t know about. Sections we can’t reach.’

  If they hadn’t found Rhona’s mobile in the old laundry, McNab would have said they were in the wrong place. But Rhona had wanted to go back into the culvert, despite the rising waters. Her intuition, if not her scientific mind, had convinced her they’d missed something.

  Hunter ignored McNab’s discussion with Kenny and continued to walk outwards from the fireplace, checking, turning back, moving around by a few degrees, trying again.

  Then he found it.

  Tucked under a narrow metal stairway ending abruptly short of the upper level. The floorboards beneath the metal rungs, even to a good eye, looked undisturbed.

  Hunter stuck the edge of a brass rod between the boards and lifted a section clear. McNab got down on his knees and shone the torch through the resulting hole. An open space lay below, criss-crossed by supporting beams. McNab dropped into the darkness and began to crawl, sweeping his beam in front of him, finding nothing but damp filth and the skittering sound of rats.

  He realised he’d moved far from the hole and turned. This part of the foundations hadn’t been crawled on for decades. He could tell by the sedimentary layers of undisturbed grime that rose, choking him.

  ‘Any luck?’ Kenny called down.

  Fucking luck. They hadn’t had much of that.

  ‘Come back to the opening,’ It was Hunter this time. ‘Try directly west from there.’

  McNab did as he was told. He would have danced naked down Sauchiehall Street if it meant their luck would change.

  There. An opening, some two feet in diameter. The metal of the manhole lay a foot below the surface. McNab whooped for joy.

  He called to Kenny for a manhole key.

  As McNab pulled the metal lid clear, he heard the blessed sound of running water.

  Margaret stood beside the car, scanning the street, looking for her husband. The crowds leaving the concert had dispersed and the road in front of the famous flashing neon sign was empty. Bill had composed himself on the drive. The Gravedigger did not know his daughter, had never seen Lisa. It was nonsense to think she’d been targeted. Both Rhona and Magnus had put themselves in view and challenged the killer. Magnus with the auction, Rhona by going into the Great Eastern. The killer could not, did not know, Bill had a daughter. Yet a niggling fear lingered. That the killer
had been watching them all the time they were looking for him. That he knew everything about them, including the fact Bill had a seventeen-year-old daughter.

  Bill tried to quell such flights of fancy.

  The most sensible explanation was Lisa had gone to the wrong place, given up waiting and gone home. And just in case that wasn’t true, his men were searching the area around the ballroom.

  Margaret turned on his approach and Bill read fear in her eyes. So Lisa hadn’t been in touch yet.

  ‘I checked the house. Robbie says she’s not there.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she’s not okay.’

  Bill put everything he knew, and everything he’d learned from Magnus, into his gestures and voice. If he sounded as though he believed what he was saying, then Margaret might too.

  ‘I want you to go home. Leave this to me.’ Her body seemed to crumple in his arms. ‘Leave the car here. I’ll have someone drive you.’ Margaret regarded him with troubled eyes. ‘Please, Margaret. Call me as soon as Lisa appears.’

  When the squad car left, Bill checked in with the station and put the wheels in motion for another missing girl. Only it wasn’t just another missing girl. This time it was his worst nightmare come true.

  65

  THE LINE OF the CSO curved, exposing a wide opening to the left. McNab flashed his torch over the still waters of the underground lake. Kenny appeared behind him.

  ‘It’s an overflow chamber. It floods when the culvert is under pressure. There are several throughout the water system. The Victorians knew how to manage water.’

  The frantic noise of the culvert was left behind as McNab stepped up and under a vaulted roof. The full circle of light from his camera torch shone on motionless water, like moonlight reflected in a dark loch. He might have missed them entirely had he not swung his torch over the entire surface.

  They were lying together, arms entwined, in a few inches of water near the rear wall. Some childhood memory brought back an image of ‘Babes in the Wood’ and McNab silently willed them to be asleep, or at worst unconscious. His hope didn’t last as long as the few steps from the culvert. For him, death had become something instantly recognisable, even without blood.