Don't Tell Meg Trilogy Box Set

by Paul J. Teague

  I stumbled towards him, screaming now, ignoring the terrible pain in my leg. He struck at me with the knife, one of the serrations catching and slicing my cheek. Instinctively, I backed away again. He’d got me cornered, there was no way I could move. He raised the knife and held it to my throat. This was it. I was powerless to stop him, he was too strong for me, but at least I had given Alex a chance.

  ‘You can go and join your buddy down there, and then I’m going beat your TV pal over here into a pulp. Great! I’ve been on her TV show and now I get to kick the shit out of her. Nice one.’

  He moved his arm to slice my neck, but the pain didn’t come. I was waiting for it. Nothing. Then I saw it. I’d heard it, but it took me a while to see what had happened. A crossbow bolt had come straight through his skull and out of his left eye. He fell against me, I almost lost my balance over the turret, but quickly steadied myself.

  I looked towards Alex, who was moving once more, after Lee’s violent kick. The man who’d saved me from the bells was there, he must have been waiting in the doorway, picking his moment to come to her rescue. But the look on Alex’s face told me otherwise. I rushed over to her and tore the tape from her mouth. The man with the crossbow was reloading it, readying another bolt.

  Alex was desperate to say something. The minute I ripped off the tape, the sentence flew out.

  ‘That’s him, Pete, keep away. It’s him ... it’s JD!’

  For an instant I thought we’d made it, only to have victory snatched away. So this was JD. Finally he’d decided to show his face.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, pointing the crossbow directly at me. I’d had enough of that thing waving in my face.

  ‘May I untie my friend?’ I asked, anxious to help Alex. Her face was badly bruised and bloody. I hated to think what I looked like, covered in blood and reeking of urine.

  He nodded. That was a good start, but the crossbow was still aimed at me. How long did we have until the police arrived? They had no way of tracking us from the storage warehouse, not unless somebody had spotted us driving out of the industrial estate.

  ‘How have you been tailing us?’ I asked. I wanted to know where this was all heading.

  ‘It’s surprisingly easy, especially with your friend here in tow. Social media provides a very useful map most of the time. You might want to think about removing location information from your social media posts, you daft buggers.’

  I wasn’t in the mood for a social media how-to session.

  ‘Was that you in the warehouse, or the police?’

  ‘That was me. But the police arrived about two minutes afterwards. That DCI Summers, she’s a right tenacious cow.’

  ‘Did you follow us here from the warehouse? Is that how you got here?’

  ‘Got it in one. You’re a great journalist, you are. I can see why you’re on the radio.’

  ‘So what’s this about? What do you want?’

  ‘I’m pleased you asked,’ he smiled. The crossbow didn’t move one inch. It was aimed right between my eyes. I’d seen what he’d done to Lee, I wasn’t going to risk anything. Besides, he’d saved my life twice already. I needed to know what this was all about. I helped Alex to her feet, although I could barely stand on my own.

  ‘We need to move, fast. It won’t be long until somebody spots our flying lady down there. I think she’s still alive, you know, and she’ll begin to scream shortly. Falls aren’t nice. When she comes round and realises she’s going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, she’ll get a bit loud. That and the spinal injury should do it.’

  ‘Let Alex go. Lock her up here, leave her out of it. It’s me you want.’

  ‘Actually, it’s both of you that I want. Our two crazy friends here did a fine job bringing you together. Now I’m going to finish it.’

  He waved the crossbow and indicated that we should leave. I moved slowly, and JD picked up the knife before following behind us.

  ‘You okay?’ Alex asked. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to feel a bit out of it--’

  ‘Hey lovebirds, mouths shut!’ JD said.

  He wasn’t like Lee. JD was calm and in control. There was no visible anger there. He was patient, he could wait for the right time to come.

  JD was right about Becky. She wasn’t dead. Her legs were both bent in ways that they shouldn’t be able to reach; her hand was snapped back too. She’d narrowly missed the paving slabs, landing awkwardly on some small shrubs below. Because Lee had thrown her, she cleared the area that had instantly resulted in Sally’s death. She was beginning to come round, shrieking wildly. It was the most horrible sound I’d ever heard.

  ‘We’ve got to help her. At least call an ambulance,’ I urged JD.

  ‘They’ll be here soon enough with all that noise going on. It won’t be long until someone comes along to find out what’s up. But now we’re going to get in the car.’

  Another vehicle. Another journey. Across the city, in darkness. Where were we heading now? And what was JD’s intention? He made me sit on a plastic sheet in the car. It was the sort that you get from DIY stores, to cover the floor when you’re painting.

  ‘Don’t want any blood on the seats, do we?’ he’d chuckled. That didn’t sound good. I’d seen the shows on TV. I knew how useful plastic sheets could be.

  As we drove through the city, I began to get an idea of where he was taking us.

  ‘Are we heading to the cemetery?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer, but I was right. He ushered us out of the car, and we began to walk along the path, past the graves. The cemetery was dimly lit and we could barely see where we were going. I couldn’t feel my leg by that stage, and Alex had to support me so I could carry on walking.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Alex asked. ‘What do you want?’

  No answer. JD was worse than Lee, his silence was sinister.

  We stopped at a gravestone. I’d lost my bearings, but I knew roughly where we were. I recognised Alex’s flowers from our visit there a few days previously.

  ‘What’s this about, JD?’ I asked. My voice was weak, I was slurring my words.

  ‘I’m not JD. This is JD.’ He pointed to the gravestone. ‘While I’m touched by the flowers, I think we have something else to talk about.’

  So JD were the initials of Jason Davies, our old contact from Special Forces. Alex had sent him over to help Meg when she was being held hostage in our house by that other nutter, Tony Miller. So how was this connected? I got my answer, but it was Alex who saw it first.

  ‘You’re his brother, aren’t you?’

  ‘Got it in one!’ he replied. ‘I’m Ian Davies, younger brother of Jason. I loved my brother, you know, I really looked up to him – I followed him into the Special Forces. So you can imagine how pissed I was to find out that he’d been murdered, seemingly by a housewife who’d never killed anyone in her life. Funny that, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s nobody who feels guiltier than me about that--’ Alex began, but Ian spoke over her.

  ‘I know how guilty you are. I checked out Jason’s emails and phone messages. I know that you sent him over there. I know he was doing you a favour: Alex Kennedy, TV personality – that part of the story got buried, didn’t it? But I know what you did. I know you sent my brother to his death.’

  ‘Look, there’s not a day goes by when I don’t agonise over Jason’s death. Don’t you think I know that already? The police know, they checked his emails and phone records--’

  ‘But your involvement was suppressed, wasn’t it? Contacts in high-up places I assume? Who did you have to sleep with to get that matter quietened down?’

  ‘I ... I ...’

  ‘Alex?’ I asked. ‘That didn’t happen, did it?’

  She was silent. I could feel myself slipping away, I’d lost too much blood. I was tuning in and out of the conversation. I felt my leg giving way, so I slipped down to the floor on my knees. I could sense Ian wav
ing the crossbow around.

  ‘What are you intending to do about it?’ Alex asked. ‘Is that what all this has been about ... to get back at me in some way?’

  ‘I want you to know that I loved my brother. I want you to understand that he survived all sorts of horrors in the forces: imprisonment, torture, weeks alone abandoned in the desert. My brother was a good man. There was no way he deserved to die like that.’

  ‘I understand,’ Alex answered. ‘I know he was a good man. We heard his stories, we talked to him a lot on Crime Beaters. I’m sorry, I know how you must--’

  ‘You do not know how I feel!’ he snapped back. This was the first time he had shown any emotion. He was getting angry now. I wanted to tell Alex to tread carefully, but I was too weak. I desperately wanted to pass out, to let the pain end.

  ‘I want to know who killed my brother!’ he shouted.

  ‘It was that woman who got the blame, there was no way she could have killed my brother. I want to know who did it!’

  This was why he’d brought me to the graveyard. He thought that this was a secret that I held. I was in no state to tell him, and Alex didn’t know the answer.

  ‘Who was it, Pete? I know that the official version can’t possibly be the truth. It was covered up, just like your friend here made sure that nobody knew she’d sent Jason to his death. You tell me what happened there. I have a right to know.’

  I sensed Alex moving towards me. JD was getting angrier now, coming closer to us, waving the crossbow around. I was struggling to hold myself upright. It moved between us, he was getting closer.

  The shouting continued. His body suddenly tensed, ready to hit one of us. I heard the release of the crossbow, then there was a scream from Alex whose hand had moved quickly towards my leg. She tore out one of the bolts that had sunk deep into my flesh and I was aware of her lunging with it before I passed out. The pain was more than I could take, I’d had enough. The last thing I remember was crashing onto the ground, to the sound of screams and shouting.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She might have seemed tough to her team, but DCI Summers was a pussycat when you met her over a cappuccino and carrot cake. If only the criminal fraternity had realised that she could be so easily bought.

  It was two months almost to the day that I’d been recovered from the graveyard. In that time, I’d become an expert in the femoral artery, the large blood vessel that runs down the leg. When Alex had pulled that bolt out as a weapon to use against Ian Davies, she had selected the one that was lodged precariously close to that artery. I was bleeding profusely by the time the medics arrived, and I almost didn’t make it.

  I was given a blood transfusion, it was touch and go for a while. I battled on, as the doctors would have you believe, and I made it out the other end. What really happened was that I slept for several days in a hospital bed while medical professionals on very low wages worked hard to keep me alive and comfortable. I then woke up and took credit for the whole thing.

  I was disorientated when I came round, I couldn’t get the timescale right. How long had I been out of things? How can you be unconscious for a week? Did Diane know I wouldn’t be coming into work?

  My memories were all over the place, and it was some time until I remembered the important stuff. I think it was the hospital mashed potato which finally reminded me that horrific things had happened.

  Of course, the doctors couldn’t tell me anything, other than how my leg wound was healing and what a lucky fellow I was. I was too weak for visitors, other than my mum, so even that connection to the outside world had to wait. There was a bit of malingering on my part too. I’d discovered that near-death experiences really take it out of you.

  It seemed to take ages for me to get back to a place where I could walk a reasonable distance, aided by a stick, of course. The first time I tried standing up, I got one of those frames that old people use. The shame of it, it felt like a taste of the life awaiting me in thirty or forty years’ time.

  That was one thing the experience had taught me. I desperately wanted to live. I was not ready to die at the hands of some crazy man like Lee Taylor, or from some potentially deadly leg wound. My life had got a bit shitty, but I was ready to move on and rebuild, it was time to put all of the bad stuff behind me. I was renewed, the experience had been cathartic. I wanted to get back to my life.

  I was soon strong enough to walk around the hospital grounds and join the packs of long-term patients in their pyjamas smoking outside the front entrance. There were people who’d got cancer there, men and women who’d had heart attacks and strokes, yet still they gathered for their fags.

  Every day I’d have doctors, nurses and the occasional consultant peering at my wound, examining my vital signs and making positive noises about my recovery. I’d received some head trauma too, plus a few other damaged bits and pieces. It was all very sore for a while, but like everything, I soon healed. I had a nice scar on my cheek too, that was the doing of the Zombie knife. I have to admit to quite liking that. It had needed three stitches, but I was out cold so wasn’t even awake to whimper embarrassingly while they sewed it up. Instead I got this macho mysterious face scar like some dark hero in a Hollywood movie.

  The problem of my release date was caused mainly by me having nowhere suitable to go for rehabilitation. With Vicky dead, the caravan park was going to close at the end of the season. With that wonderful woman no longer at the helm, things quickly turned bad and the site closed down and laid off the staff at the end of the summer.

  I cried for Vicky. The shock of her death hadn’t really hit me when everything was beginning to turn sour – I was too concerned about Alex and getting her away from her captor. But that woman had been good to me, she’d given me a home when I needed one, she’d given me extra work when I desperately needed the cash, and I’d got her killed by way of thanks.

  I knew that I hadn’t actually done the killing. Counsellors like Martin Jarvis and Blake Crawford would paint me as a victim in all of this, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was poison in people’s lives.

  The caravan park was going to be turned into a seaside complex for elderly people; that’s where the boom time was apparently, nobody wanted seaside holidays anymore. Particularly not Vicky’s trustees.

  I found my recovery frustrating. I wasn’t given the go-ahead to drive for some time, there was some issue with healing and nerve damage. I worked hard to build up my walking strength. I was eager to spread my radius of travel, and I worked hard at my physio sessions. I was now getting still more benefit from the health insurance I’d been paying for with automatic monthly deductions from my salary.

  Diane had negotiated a paid leave of absence for me, but reminded me that HR were on her back, using phrases like ‘phased return to work’ at every opportunity. One of the advantages of being an old boy was that I had a good package. I’d get up to six months before the HR guys could finally swoop and insist on my return to work. I didn’t want the full six months, but I needed a decent break. I’d figure out what to do later.

  My meeting with DCI Summers was my first expedition out on my own. I was still using a stick to help me walk and I had supplies of painkillers, just in case. I’d seen her already, of course. The police had been in and out of my room as soon as the medical staff would let them. But this was a social call, an opportunity to find out what had really gone on that night. The police had kindly assembled all of the missing pieces while I’d been in my hospital bed.

  I took the bus into town. While I was sitting there, watching the world go by, I thought back to what Steven Terry had said. He’d been right again. The man had some gift, that was for sure, if it was only the ability to get lucky with his bullshit. It worked, he’d been absolutely correct in his predictions. He’d said that there was evil in our house. That was true, it had been the focus of much of the weird stuff that had gone on. Glenn Elliot had lost his life there.

  Steven Terry had warned that the lies had to stop. I knew
that. I had to change, I needed to get my life back on track. It had to begin with my poor choices in sexual partners. My encounter with Ellie had been my own fault; she was a wonderful woman, I was the party who was not free for a one-night stand. I brought that one on myself, but I’d also got unlucky with Ellie having a crazy stalker.

  What about Becky? Maybe that was my fault. Poor judgment perhaps. I’d thought that Becky was okay, but she could have done the right thing when I was tied to that bell wheel. She was perfectly happy to leave me to a horrible death for her weirdo snuff movie or whatever it was. Even so, I still didn’t feel as if she was made of the same evil stuff that Lee Taylor was forged from.

  It was Steven Terry’s final words that really stuck with me.

  ‘The women you choose to be close to are what determines your path, Peter. There are some poisonous people coming into your life. You will need to decide who to trust. Your choices will determine the outcome, Peter.’

  I had to make some serious life choices. I needed to get back on course. I had time off work, I’d put things back together again.

  ‘You’re looking better!’ DCI Summers welcomed me as I joined her at the table.

  ‘I couldn’t have looked much worse,’ I laughed. My face had been a bloody and bruised mess the first time that we’d spoken after those events.

  ‘Can I call you Kate now?’ I asked. ‘DCI gets a bit wearing after a while. And call me Pete, please, we’re a bit far removed from formalities now, aren’t we? You’ve seen my groin area, after all!’

  She laughed at that one, agreed to the informality, and kindly got me coffee and cake. My leg was hurting badly. I might have overstretched myself coming into town.

  ‘So where are we up to?’ I asked. ‘Have you put it all to bed yet?’

  ‘You know what it’s like – paperwork, procedures and all that. But we’ll get there.’