by Jane Holland
‘Easy,’ I warn him when he nearly slips. ‘Watch your step. Take it slowly.’
We reach the bottom step and pause, letting our eyes adjust. There’s just enough light filtering down from the trapdoor above to see a few feet in front of me. But further into the cellar there is nothing to see but shadow. I try to assess the size of the place. Maybe twenty-five feet wide, the ceiling about eight foot high, but how far back does this pitch darkness go? Impossible to tell without speaking to test the acoustics.
I smell oil and dust and mildew, just as you would expect in any cellar, any general utility room. But something more pungent on top of those. The stink of acrid sweat, of unwashed flesh. I half close my eyes, concentrating on my other senses. There’s a low hum somewhere in the deepest shadows at the back. Something continuous and mechanical. The sound I heard from above.
‘What is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he whispers.
A voice speaks from the shadowy interior of the cellar. ‘It’s a generator. It used to be powered by the wheel, now it runs on oil.’
A shaft of blinding light bounces off damp stone walls, feels its way towards the steps, seeking us out. Tris takes a hurried step back, colliding with me. I tighten my hold on his wrist and he stops, rigid.
Connor steps out of the darkness, a torch in his hand, wearing a grey hoody, the hood pulled up to partially obscure his face. ‘Hello, Eleanor.’ He shines the powerful torch beam directly into his brother’s face, temporarily blinding us both. ‘Did you bring her here, Tristan? That wasn’t very clever, was it?’
‘Connor,’ he begins urgently, and I twist his arm higher up his back.
Tris yelps, then mutters, ‘Fuck,’ under his breath. I can hear the pain in his voice. He’s not going anywhere, not while I have him trussed up like this.
‘What do you need a generator for?’ I demand. Like the torch beam, my voice bounces off stone, echoing everywhere, distorted. ‘I thought the mill was disused.’
‘Do the police know you’re here?’ Connor counters with a question of his own, interrogating me with that bloody torch beam. ‘Are they on their way? Tris?’
His brother says nothing, standing passively in my grip now. I duck my head behind Tris’s shoulder, blinking, knowing my eyes will retain the after-image of the light for several minutes if I let him dazzle me.
‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters much,’ Connor says, surprisingly calm. ‘Not now you’re here at last.’
He switches off the torch and we are plunged into darkness again, this time all the more complete because our eyes have no longer adjusted to it. I stiffen, fearing an attack. But the dark shadow that is Connor merely turns and gropes his way along the wall, then another light comes on above us. It’s an unshaded bulb, one of the old-fashioned types, hanging from the roof on a thin electric wire, and its illumination of the room is harsh but patchy.
When I stop blinking at the sudden light, I realise that I’m looking directly at Jenny.
She’s hanging opposite us on the far wall, attached by her wrists and ankles to some kind of metal frame. The frame looks rusty, but strong enough to hold her weight. I remember Sarah McGellan in the shallow grave, the fading bruises on her wrists. I thought she must have been manacled somewhere before death. Presumably here.
‘Oh my God, Jenny,’ I say.
Jenny is pale but clearly still alive. There’s silver tape across her mouth, though I don’t imagine many people would ever come close enough to this wilderness to hear someone shouting for help. Above the tape, her wide eyes stare back at me in apparent horror. No doubt she thinks I’m about to become their next victim. And perhaps she’s right, but I intend to get her out of this place first if I possibly can. One of us has to survive.
Her clothes have gone, but she is wearing knickers and bra, and, to my relief, does not appear to be marked or cut anywhere. Dawn Trevian and Sarah McGellan were both found naked, with signs of bruising, and I had worried that the brothers’ tastes as torturers might be extreme. She’s filthy and unkempt though, hair hanging greasily about her face. The place stinks of stale urine, and I can guess the reason. The stone floor is clean though and looks damp in places, like it’s been washed down recently. There’s a hose on a reel against the wall, attached to an ancient green-crusted tap that must connect to the water course outside.
I shudder to think why he would need a hose down here.
‘Oh Tris,’ I mutter, ‘what have you done?’
Connor turns to put the torch away on a low table at the back, pushing down the hood of his grey hoody. I squint round the cellar while he’s bending, and spot a narrow shelf near the metal frame, bracketed into the walls at an angle across a corner. It’s dusty but holds a useful selection of tools: screwdriver, pliers, saw, hammer, a few glass jars of nails and screws. Connor the workman, with his tools. I can readily imagine him making this sturdy metal frame. To keep women like Sarah McGellan and Jenny Crofter prisoner.
When Connor turns back, he has a shotgun in his hand. I remember seeing it in the farmhouse, chained and locked up for safety. Now it’s levelled towards me, and he’s smiling.
‘Welcome to the old mill,’ he says, apparently without irony. ‘It’s good to have you here at last, Ellie. I’ve been waiting for you.’
I remember the face I saw in the dark waters when I was drowning, the man holding down the board, trying to prevent me from rising. The eyes that watched as I fought and struggled to be free. Not their dead father, as I’d thought at the time, my head muddled with lack of oxygen and vile, repressed memories. Not Pete Taylor, my mother’s secret admirer. Maybe her lover too, I don’t know.
No, it was his son, Connor Taylor, that tried to drown me in the ocean. And his dark figure I have been seeing at the foot of my bed, watching me while I sleep.
Shadow man, shadow man.
My grip on Tris’s arm must have slackened, because suddenly he twists away and I am knocked sideways, taken off guard.
I am back on my feet in seconds and crouched, ready to fight. But Tris is shaking his head, staring at me as he backs towards Connor and the shotgun.
‘Run, Ellie,’ he says urgently. ‘And don’t stop running until you’re clear of this place.’
Run, Ellie, run!
I stare at him, struck by his wording. Almost exactly the same words my mother used eighteen years ago in Eastlyn Woods. I hear her voice in my head again. Run, Ellie, run! I ran that day, ran for my life, ran like the devil was after me. But then I could not run any further. Not without Mummy. So I came creeping back through the crowded trees, and saw the face of her killer.
I straighten out of my defensive crouch. I refuse to run this time. As I should have refused to run in the woods. Though I would probably have died too. Perhaps Mum was right. She saved my life, and not just by telling me to run. She saved my life when she made me promise never to tell anyone about the man I saw in the woods that day.
And it was my silence that has kept me safe all these years.
‘It was your father,’ I say clearly, ‘Pete Taylor, who killed my mother in Eastlyn Woods eighteen years ago.’
Tris makes a strangled noise, shaking his head.
Connor sidesteps his brother, pointing the shotgun directly towards me. ‘Yes,’ he agrees, looking almost relieved that he can finally admit the truth.
‘Pete Taylor strangled her because she refused to keep seeing him and he couldn’t bear it. Or maybe she wouldn’t go to bed with him and was threatening to tell my dad that he wouldn’t leave her alone. I suppose we’ll never know. But it was Pete Taylor who killed her. I remember everything now. How he followed us into the woods, how he strangled my mother, the flash of his trainers as he ran away …’
‘I knew you would remember eventually,’ Connor says. ‘But when did you guess about me, and this place?’
‘I only knew for sure today when I found Jenny’s ID badge in the pocket of Tris’s coat.’ I put my hand in the pocket of the coat I’m stil
l wearing, and produce her ID badge. ‘See? He lent this to me yesterday after you tried to drown me.’
Tris turns to stare at his brother. ‘That was you? You tried to drown her?’
Connor shrugs.
‘I don’t understand.’ Tris sounds distraught. ‘Why would you want to kill Ellie? I thought you wanted her for yourself, that you loved her.’
I stare at the two brothers, bewildered. ‘What are you saying, Tris? That you had nothing to do with this?’
‘Eleanor was always going to be my Number One,’ Connor tells him coolly, ignoring me. ‘I just didn’t know how it was going to happen until yesterday when you told me she was surfing out at Widemouth Bay.’ He looks across at me, his eyes intent. ‘Drowning is so easily seen as an unfortunate accident. I wasn’t happy about it though. I had wanted to talk to you first. Talk properly, like we’re doing now. Only you were making too much of a nuisance of yourself. It wasn’t fun anymore. I knew I had to end you, and quickly.’
‘Okay,’ I say, glancing at Tris in apology. I pause to adjust my thinking: Tris not guilty of anything; Connor guilty. It takes some doing. ‘So you were never involved in any of this?’
‘I tried to tell you,’ Tris says flatly. ‘You wouldn’t listen.’
‘It wasn’t your coat.’
‘Connor’s,’ he agrees. ‘Though it used to belong to Dad.’
‘Sorry, my mistake.’ I stare at Connor, hating him more than ever. ‘But why did you have to kill Hannah? And I want the truth. She was my friend.’
‘I didn’t want to. But she saw me. In the water. I couldn’t let her live.’ Connor looks regretful. ‘A pity too. I liked Hannah.’
I dig my fingernails into my palms, resisting the urge to spring at him. The double-barrelled shotgun between us would make any attack suicidal. ‘Hannah wasn’t wearing her glasses in the water. She probably didn’t even recognise you. Didn’t have a clue who you were. You could have let her live.’
He stares, a flicker of emotion in his face.
I press him. ‘You wanted to kill Dawn Trevian and Sarah McGellan though.’
‘I didn’t mean to kill Dawn. It was an accident.’
‘So you panicked and tried to hide what you’d done by storing her body in a freezer.’ I tilt my head, listen to the mechanical hum in the background. That was why he brought a generator down here, to run the freezer and the light. At last I begin to understand his twisted logic. ‘But then you remembered how close it was to the anniversary of my mother’s death. Tris and I were getting too friendly, weren’t we? And you didn’t like that. So you decided to play a little trick on me, see how fragile my mind really is.’
Connor nods slowly, his gaze on me. ‘I enjoyed watching you suffer.’
‘But why?’ Tris exclaims, moving towards him.
The shotgun, which has been wavering, comes up at once, aimed at my heart. ‘Get back, or I’ll shoot her. You don’t understand. How could you?’
I can see that Connor is beyond reason. Worried he will shoot one or both of us, I try to distract him, to keep him talking.
‘You must have moved quickly to shift her body before the police arrived, then get home before Tris missed you.’
‘It was a close call,’ he agrees. ‘I nearly made my first mistake then. Tris walked in while I was scraping mud off those white trainers, telling me he’d had a phone call and we had to get up to your place immediately. But he’s so obsessed with you, he didn’t even notice what I was doing.’
‘And then you killed Sarah, I’m not sure why.’ I frown. ‘But you couldn’t stand seeing me dancing with Tris in Newquay, so you spiked my drink, then stole my anklet. You left that note on Denzil’s windscreen.’
Connor is unable to stop himself smiling. He’s proud of what he has done. ‘Very good,’ he agrees. ‘That’s pretty much how it happened.’
‘But if I’m your Number One,’ I say sharply, ‘then why is Jenny here? If this is supposed to be a serial killer’s countdown, you’ve fucked it up. You started your countdown at three. If I’m number one, what number is Jenny? Or isn’t maths your strong point?’
Connor looks at me with distaste. ‘Have I killed her yet? Have I? No, and for that very reason. Jenny was never part of my plan. But she had to be got rid of.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she called me on Friday. Mentioned the old mill. She knew the police were searching empty properties in the area and wanted to know if they had searched here. Well, I couldn’t risk her going to the police with that suggestion. They might have found this cellar, checked it for DNA. Then I would have been screwed.’ He shrugs. ‘So I told her to meet me in the woods.’
‘You think I never suspected you, Connor?’ Tris demands angrily. ‘I did, trust me. I just didn’t want to believe it. But I couldn’t keep my eyes closed forever. Your constant disappearances, the way you kept warning me off Ellie, and that photograph I found here … ’
He is breathing heavily, staring at his brother. ‘I mean, shit, Connor. Two women are dead. You’ve got Jenny tied up. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
‘I could ask you the same question. How can you choose Eleanor Blackwood over me? Your own brother?’
Tris is beginning to look dangerous. His big hands clench into fists, and he starts towards his brother. ‘You’re not my real brother. You never have been.’
‘Not another step.’ Connor swivels, pointing the shotgun directly at his brother’s stomach. ‘She’s not worth your life.’
Tris laughs wildly. ‘You going to shoot me, Con?’
‘I don’t want to shoot you. I promised Dad I’d look after you when he was gone. And I’ve always tried to do that. Kept you at home on the farm where you couldn’t get involved in the kind of drinks and drugs scene that messed up Denzil. Stopped you from making a fool of yourself over Eleanor when she came back from university.’ He glances at me, a sudden hatred in his face, then looks back at his brother. ‘But you know she’ll never love you, right? Never marry you, never settle down, never have kids. She’s too restless. She won’t stay in Cornwall either. And I couldn’t bear it if she took you away with her.’
‘I’m going to break you in half, you sick bastard.’
‘You don’t want to do that. Anymore than I want to hurt you. Think what you’re doing. It’s not too late to be on my side.’
Tris lunges wildly for the shotgun. But Connor is ready for him. He turns, smashing the butt end down on his brother’s forearm, then runs towards me, his face intent, straightening the barrel. He’s planning to shoot me, I realise too late. Only Tris staggers after him and kicks him in the back of the knee, just as I did with him.
Connor overbalances, grimacing with pain, and drops the shotgun almost in front of me. ‘Fuck.’
I run forward and kick the shotgun away as he tries reaching for it. It’s heavy, heavier than I am expecting, but goes skidding away across the stone floor.
Connor turns. ‘You bitch.’
I charge forward and tackle him, but he grabs at Tris, bring all three of us down at the same time. My head smacks into the stone floor, and for a few seconds I’m dazed, the world a dark blur. Beside me I feel Connor stir, groaning. Then he staggers to his feet and thuds across the cellar.
Tris bends hurriedly over me. ‘Ellie? Are you okay?’
‘My head … ’ I mutter.
‘Leave her,’ Connor shouts from across the room. He sounds half out of his mind. ‘Get away from her.’
I look up through Tris’s legs to see Connor standing directly under the naked light bulb. He’s staring at us both with madness in his eyes. In his hands is the double-barrelled shotgun.
‘Look, it’s over,’ Tris tells him flatly. ‘You’re never going to stop me leaving home. Not with that,’ he says, gesturing to the shotgun, ‘or with anymore of your lies. So you might as well put the gun down and let Jenny go.’
‘No,’ Connor says, shaking his head. ‘I’m not going to prison. And you’re not going to g
et the Blackwood girl.’
Someone has to stop him, I realise. He won’t stop on his own. But even as I scramble up onto my knees, there’s a deafening explosion. I hear Jenny jerk against the metal frame, the whole thing jangling, and for an awful moment I think Connor has shot her.
I look through the acrid drift of gunpowder filling the cellar. Tris is lying on the stone floor a few feet away, clutching his leg. There’s blood already spreading out like a dark halo around him.
Connor levels the gun at me as I stumble towards Tris, but to my surprise he does not fire. If both barrels were loaded, he has one shot remaining. But perhaps he’s hoping to hang me up beside Jenny and have some fun with me before he kills me.
Like Tris said, a sick bastard.
I kneel beside Tris. I expect to find his whole leg shattered, maybe even blown away. A shotgun makes a hell of a mess of a wild animal at close quarters, and I dread to think what it does to a human being. But it looks as though Tris has been lucky. Connor appears to have only nicked the front of his right thigh, both men standing far enough apart for the lead to have dispersed a little before impact.
I feel my way along the bloodied leg, and Tris watches me, speechless, clearly in agony. Miraculously, it looks like only one or more pieces of lead shot have passed through the front of his leg. But perhaps Connor unconsciously aimed to miss his brother, despite his worst intentions.
‘I don’t think the leg’s broken. He needs an ambulance though,’ I say, ‘or he’s going to bleed out.’
‘No ambulance,’ Connor says raggedly, coming towards me with the shotgun. ‘No police.’
Tris makes a rough noise under his breath. I meet his eyes, and see him shake his head. He doesn’t want me to push Connor. He’s white with shock though and needs medical attention urgently.
I stand up, blood smeared on my hands, and walk past Connor to where Jenny is bound to the wall. Close up, the structure she’s attached to looks like part of an old metal bed frame. She stares at me, wide-eyed behind her gag, while I tidy the greasy strands of hair obscuring her face. ‘Sorry, Jenny. This is going to hurt.’