by D. B. Thorne
‘It is hidden,’ said Masoud. ‘But it is there.’
‘It’s certainly there,’ said Phil. ‘And you’re not going to tell us what this is about?’
‘Phil,’ said Fran, warning.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Solomon. ‘I really am. I can’t. But this is, it’s …’ It wasn’t often he was impressed by others, but this seemed of another magnitude. ‘Astonishing.’
Fran and Phil said nothing for a moment, then Fran cleared her throat and said, ‘Well. Solomon. Coming from you, that is very kind.’
‘So …’ said Kay, breaking the awkward silence that followed. ‘Do we have a connection? Or at least, put it another way, if you like, I mean, do we have enough of a connection?’ She frowned, thinking back over what had been said. ‘There’s some kind of mind at work here. Shakespeare, yep, we’ve got it. But is that the connection? Or is there more?’
‘Cleopatra, Ophelia,’ said Masoud. ‘They are both tragic heroines.’
‘Yes,’ said Fran. ‘And look at the power dynamic. A man, presumably, arranging a date with a woman. The roles. Mark Antony, Hamlet.’
‘The names,’ said Phil. ‘Who was writing to Cleopatra?’
‘Caesar. Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony’s rival.’
‘And the other?’ said Fran.
‘Tobes,’ said Solomon, again putting it together as he said it. ‘To be. To be or not to be. To be, but twice. Plural.’
‘This is smart stuff,’ said Fran. ‘This isn’t obvious.’
‘It’s taken, what? Fifteen minutes?’ said Solomon. ‘I’ve been looking at this for days.’
‘You’ve got us all here,’ said Phil. ‘We’re a team.’
‘A collective, surely,’ said Fran.
Phil bowed his head, slowly. ‘Such a thing has been proven to work,’ he said.
‘So what have we got?’ said Kay. ‘Somebody who, what? Plays the role of a Shakespearean character and, I don’t get it. Tries to make his date into a, what was it you called them, Masoud? Tragic heroines?’
‘Maybe,’ said Masoud. ‘Very probably, from what I have seen.’ He turned to look straight at Solomon and said, ‘And this is something that the police know about?’
‘They know,’ said Solomon. ‘But unfortunately, they don’t think it’s sufficient to justify a formal investigation.’
‘But you do?’ said Fran.
‘I don’t know,’ said Solomon. ‘I just … It was curious.’ He watched Kay to see her reaction to this lie. She didn’t blink.
‘Well,’ said Masoud. ‘It is certainly that.’
‘So,’ said Phil. ‘Another case solved by the Brain Pool. Are we finished here?’
‘I think so,’ said Solomon. ‘Thank you. Thank you, everyone.’
He watched a general nodding and chair movement, Fran hauling up her handbag, ready to go. Kay stayed seated, looking around the table, then said, ‘Am I missing something?’
‘Sorry?’ said Fran.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Ignore me.’ She waited for the rest of the group to stand, then looked straight at Solomon and mouthed, ‘I’ll call you,’ before the screen went blank as Masoud cancelled the connection.
Solomon didn’t count the minutes, but still noticed that thirty-seven of them had passed before Kay called him. He checked his webcam was disabled and accepted the call.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ said Kay. ‘You know, with everyone there. But don’t you think we’re missing something?’
‘From the messages, you mean?’
‘Not exactly, no,’ said Kay. ‘More …’ She paused. ‘We’ve all been, okay, I haven’t been, but the rest of you, you’ve all been very clever, working it out. But isn’t there, you know, I mean there must be, right, a chance, a big chance, that these poor women who’ve been found, that they’re not the only ones. Right?’
Solomon had been playing with a pen, but he stopped, his whole body frozen. A sense of dread washed through him.
‘Solomon? Are you there?’
Solomon swallowed and took a breath, then said, ‘I’m here.’
‘Well? What do you think?’
What Solomon thought was that the past couple of days had proved to him that he was stupid; more than stupid, way beyond stupid. An imbecile, a simpleton. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said.
‘That there are more?’
‘That there could be, yes.’
‘So what do we do?’
Solomon thought of Fox, her indifference to his sister’s case. Her preoccupation with his brother. He wondered who, if anyone, might actually care.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But something. We need to do something.’
twenty-two
IF IT HAD ONLY BEEN FEAR, OLIVIA THOUGHT, THEN THAT would be … not okay, but better. It was the combination, that was what made it so … so beyond. Beyond anything she’d ever felt before. Dread, and horror. But with it the not knowing. Not knowing why she was here. Why?
She could imagine her mother. I told you so. That’s probably what she’d think, even though her daughter was trapped in a black pit that smelt of oil, a car parked over the grille that covered it. I told you so. That would be about right. Why did you have to move there in the first place? The same question she always asked her. As if Cheltenham was the epicentre of the cultural universe, and Hackney was the end of the world. Her mother, withering away in a seven-bedroom town house, surrounded by meaningless trinkets, memorabilia from a life not worth remembering. You did what? One of those dating application things? Actually, she would never say that, because she would never have heard of such a thing. Not unless it featured in the Times crossword. Oh, Olivia. She’d say that. She’d certainly say that. Because she’d assume that this, her daughter being held captive in a black concrete hole, was Olivia’s own fault. And the worst thing about it? She’d be one hundred per cent right. It was all her own fault.
Olivia listened carefully, stilled her breath to be sure. She hadn’t heard any noise, any sound at all, for a while. A long while. No distant traffic, no footsteps, no unexplained creaks or rustles. Nothing. She had found the metal lid of a paint can and had been using it to chip away at the rusty iron of the grille near one corner of the pit. The pit was the size of a dining table and not high enough to stand up in. Olivia thought it was probably a mechanic’s pit for working on the underside of cars, but she had never actually seen one, not for real. Her kind didn’t really do garages. The grille was made of criss-crossing metal bars as thick as a biro and it was old, the metal orange and flaking at the joints. But the paint lid was made of soft metal and kept folding and cutting into her hands, which had been bleeding for a long time now. She didn’t know how long she’d been there, had woken up in the pit. All she knew was that she’d been put there by Demmy, because he was the evil bastard who’d tricked her into meeting him for a date, drugged her, and imprisoned her in a concrete crypt with only the dark dirty underside of a car to look up at.
And the way he’d trapped her. Her mother wouldn’t believe it. Olivia didn’t believe it. She’d known something was off from the beginning, that message exchange she’d had with him. With Demmy. Ridiculous name to begin with, and then the things he’d written. Just weird. Just weird, and she’d met him anyway. And why? Because she’d liked his photo. Because you liked his photo? Yes, Mother, yes. Because you were always right, I am an idiot, and yes, I liked his photo.
Olivia kept scraping, trying to keep a good grip on the paint-tin lid despite the blood, which made it slippery, and thought back to the message exchange, the memory of it, and her stupidity, giving her an angry motivation.
Want to go out?
Sure. Know anywhere good?
Forest? (bar)
Where’s that?
A barren detested vale.
???
Okay, Hackney.
Hilarious. When?
Tuesodlq
?
I mean Tuesday. Can’t type.
Good for me but I work late … When’s good for you?
At dead time of the night.
?
Any time. I meant any time. God. Hello?
Okay … 9?
9 is good.
See you then.
C u.
At dead time of the night. And no alarm bells had started ringing. She pushed at the bar she was working on in disgust and felt it give, the joint where it met another giving way, rusted and weakened. She stopped and sat down with her back against the concrete side of the pit and looked up at the grille, barely visible in the gloom. The squares of the grille were maybe ten centimetres apart. She’d need a gap of at least forty by forty centimetres to get through, which meant … She counted. Sixteen, she’d have to cut through sixteen bars, four on each side of the square she’d need. She’d counted them before, many times, and every time they’d come to twenty. And she’d got through three. Which left thirteen. Thirteen bars to cut through, using a paint-tin lid that was getting worn away a lot faster than the bars were.
She closed her eyes and tried not to think about the pain in her hands, and whatever lay in front of her, the reason she’d been put in this pit in the first place. She tried to empty her mind, still it, silence it like the silence outside the pit. But she couldn’t, couldn’t, because the second she stopped moving, her mind filled with taped footage of men being decapitated in front of cameras, of women mutilated and left in ditches, of broken people kneeling in cages, meekly awaiting the inevitable. Why was she here? What was planned for her?
Olivia had never been to the Forest bar before, a dark basement down a flight of stairs off a street behind Hackney Road. And it had been a forest, or at least kind of, twisted trunks of trees snaking between the floor and the ceiling, the space thick with them so that even now she didn’t have a good idea of how large the bar actually was, where it began and ended. She couldn’t even work out how the owners had got the trees in in the first place. Demmy had been waiting for her, had stood up from a table near the entrance when she came in. He looked like his photo, maybe a bit older than she’d imagined, but no disappointment. What had she thought? He’ll do. Yes, that’s what she’d thought.
‘Olivia?’
‘Demmy. Hi.’
‘Let me get you a drink.’
‘I’ll go,’ Olivia said. ‘What are you having?’
‘No,’ said Demmy, very solemnly. He had dark hair, and although she hadn’t thought before, she wondered where he came from, what his background was. Greek? Iranian? Some place where male chivalry was still taken seriously, maybe.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘A vodka and tonic.’
‘Take a seat,’ Demmy said. ‘I’ll be back.’
The bar was lit by green wall lights and a large neon sign that said Forest in glowing cursive green. It was nearly empty, Tuesday night not being weirdly-themed-cocktail-bar night, Olivia supposed. Music was playing, but softly, and the bar was kind of … what? she wondered. Peaceful. Weird but peaceful. Okay, so it was some stupid hipster doomed-to-failure folly of a bar, but it was kind of cool, at the same time. She still couldn’t work out how they’d got the tree trunks in.
Demmy came back holding two drinks, made a show of working out which one belonged to who, then handed one of the glasses to Olivia before sitting down.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘Cheers,’ said Olivia.
‘Not been here before?’ said Demmy.
‘No. It’s kind of cool, though.’
‘In a weird way,’ said Demmy.
‘Exactly,’ said Olivia. They were silent for a while, for too long, and Olivia tried to think of something to say, then eventually said, ‘So, what do you do? For, you know. A job.’
‘Oh,’ said Demmy. ‘This and that. You know?’
Olivia didn’t, not really, but Demmy didn’t offer anything else. Olivia drank, to fill the silence, then said, ‘What kind of this and that?’
‘Whatever comes along,’ said Demmy.
Olivia watched his face but couldn’t read anything in it. He seemed comfortable, unconcerned, but Olivia wasn’t about to spend an evening with somebody who wouldn’t answer questions. She didn’t do evasive. She drank some more, then said, ‘For example?’
‘Well,’ said Demmy. ‘For example, I …’ He paused, then said, ‘How’s your drink?’
‘Fine,’ said Olivia. Actually, it was strong, was what she thought, already feeling its effects. She’d need to be careful. She suspected it was a double. ‘So? For example?’
‘Well,’ he said again, ‘I wanted to be an actor.’
‘Tough profession,’ said Olivia.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Demmy. He said it forcefully, ending with a laugh to soften the delivery, take the edge off. ‘So now I do other stuff. How about you?’
‘PR,’ said Olivia. ‘For a start-up.’
Demmy nodded but didn’t ask for any details. Instead he looked at his watch, then said, ‘What do you think about the trees?’
Olivia looked around the bar. Was it her imagination, or were there more now than there had been before? Probably something to do with the lighting. ‘I can’t work out how they got them in.’ This date wasn’t going well, was what she was actually thinking. There was already an undercurrent of tetchiness in their exchanges, some incompatibility in the chemistry. She drank some more. She’d finish her drink and go, she thought. One drink to be polite, then off.
‘The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,’ said Demmy. ‘Here never shines the sun.’
‘What’s that?’ said Olivia. The inside of her mouth felt strange, as if it was swelling, her tongue fat and stupid.
‘Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe,’ Demmy said, ignoring her. He was silent for a moment, glancing around the bar, then looked directly at her. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Olivia, talking carefully, making sure that the words came out right. Enunciating. That was the word.
‘Here never shines the sun,’ Demmy said. ‘Here nothing breeds.’
Olivia had had enough. She tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t move, wouldn’t do what she wanted them to. She pushed her drink away from her and it tipped, but Demmy caught it before it overturned.
‘Do you hear it?’ Demmy said.
Olivia tried to speak but couldn’t. Instead she shook her head and realized that she was crying, from fear of this man opposite her who she didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
‘A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,’ he said. ‘Ten thousand swelling toads. You don’t hear them?’
Olivia pushed at the table with her hands, as hard as she could, but Demmy shoved back and then stood up and said loudly, as if performing for an audience, ‘Olivia? Olivia? Are you feeling okay?’
He came around the table and picked up Olivia’s arm, wrapping it over his shoulder, then lifted her to her feet. Her legs felt as if they were made from cloth, as solid and substantial as flannel. She had no more strength or coordination than a stuffed toy, a patchwork doll. Demmy walked her towards the door and pulled it open, the night air a distant tingle on her skin. And as he dragged her up the stairs, he whispered to her, a hiss as inhuman as a reptile, ‘First thrash the corn, then after burn the straw.’
Olivia didn’t know what Demmy had put in her drink, but she felt nauseous, like a hangover but worse, thirsty and tired and weak, as if she hadn’t eaten for a long time. And a headache, like sharp explosions going off in the back of her skull. The smell of oil in the pit made her feel sick, excess saliva collecting in her mouth and her stomach heaving.
She heard the sound of a door opening, closing, then dull footsteps on concrete. She put the paint-tin lid behind her, between her back and the wall. The footsteps came closer, and then stopped. A dark shape appeared between the lip of the concrete pit and the underside of the car.
‘Why am I here?’ O
livia said. ‘Hello?’
She saw the shape move, but it didn’t answer, just made a clucking sound, a sound of disapproval.
‘What are you going to do to me?’
The shape took a deep breath, then said, ‘First thrash the corn, then after burn the straw.’
Olivia remembered hearing him say that before, a memory associated with trees and toads and darkness and the hissing of snakes. ‘What do you mean?’ she said, her voice more a desperate shriek. ‘What? What do you mean?’
But the shape just made the same clucking sound. It stayed there for some moments, looking down at her, and then disappeared. Olivia heard the sound of footsteps, this time getting quieter and quieter, and then the closing of a door, leaving her once more alone, alone in her pit.
twenty-three
‘WE’RE CLEAR ON WHAT OUR ROADMAP IS, YES?’
‘Yes,’ said Fox. She watched her immediate superior, Chief Inspector Goven, as levelly as she could. He was a good gaze-holder, she had to admit. Hated to admit, but there you were. He just did not give one shit who he stared down, or how he came across as he did it. And how he came across was as one colossal ball-breaker, an overweight, grey-haired, red-faced, almost-certainly-divorced ball-breaker. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘We’re clear.’
‘Good.’ He was standing up behind his desk, looking down at Fox, who had foolishly sat down without waiting to see what he did. She’d knocked on his office door, he’d opened it, then gestured her to sit. She’d sat. And he hadn’t. So Fox had been looking up at him for the last five minutes, and would be for she didn’t know how much longer. However long it took him to make his point. ‘Because I need you to be a team player on this one. I like team players. What I don’t like is coppers who sign up for one thing and then go off on their own little expedition. Understand?’
‘I understand,’ Fox said, ‘but sir—’
‘So if you understand,’ he said, putting his hands on his desk and looming over her, ‘maybe you could explain to me just what you think your mission is.’