by Mark Tilbury
‘She said some guy called the Wolf reckons I’m a cop. Who’s he?’
‘Haven’t got a clue. She talks about him all the time. He’s like some sort of imaginary friend.’
‘Perhaps he’s the bogeyman.’
Hannah laughed and then stifled a sob. ‘What’s the date?’
‘December twenty-first – I think.’
‘Jesus Christ. Time sure flies when you’re having fun. The baby’s due in two weeks.’
They sat in silence for a while. Maddie tried to imagine what it must have been like for Hannah to spend so much time locked away in this stinking basement. Locked away with a tiny life growing inside her. A life she was responsible for. A life she could do nothing to protect.
‘Connie told my partner you fell ill and left work early the day you went missing.’
Hannah took a deep breath and let it out between clenched teeth. ‘She did, did she? I suppose that’s one way of describing it.’
‘We believed her. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Anyway, it’s partially true. I felt like crap. I’d already been sick twice after lunch, and my tummy was hurting like hell. I went to Connie’s office, and she let me sit there for a while. She was being nice, which was odd, because she’s never nice to anyone. Apart from her precious dad and the relatives of paying guests. She certainly knows how to suck up, the two-faced cow.’
‘My partner met her dad. He kept going on about whizz-bangs.’
‘Oh, yes, the famous whizz-bangs.’
‘What are they?’
‘I think they’re just headaches. When he gets really stressed about something.’
‘He talked about a blue baby as well. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘He usually goes on about the blue baby after the whizz-bangs. I don’t think it means anything. The poor sod’s got dementia.’
Maddie wondered if it had anything to do with why Connie wanted Hannah’s baby. ‘So, you went to the office...’
‘Yeah. A while later, she brought me a drink. It looked like orange juice and it smelled like orange juice. She told me it was good for sickness and stomach cramps. To be honest, I’d have swallowed anything to make me feel better. After about ten minutes, I felt light-headed. And I needed the loo. Really bad. Like a bloody river about to burst its banks. But she told me I had to wait. I reckon she was waiting for the staff to do the shift change. That way she could get me to the loo with no one seeing.’
‘So she drugged your drink, knowing full well you were pregnant?’
Hannah nodded. ‘I was really out of it. So tired. My head felt detached from my body, like it was going to float away. She got me onto the loo somehow.’
‘That must have been terrifying.’
‘It was. I’d get a few moments when I was aware of my surroundings, and then, BAM! I was out of it again. Somewhere else. At one point, I thought I was in a movie. When Connie spoke, her voice echoed inside my head.’
‘Sounds like she gave you one of those date rape drugs.’
‘Christ knows. Could’ve been anything. My legs felt as if they belonged to someone else. When I was finished on the loo, she lifted me off. She was getting shitty with me by then. She had to drag me back to the office. I wanted to call out, tell someone what was happening, but my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. Then the world went black.’
‘Thank heavens for small mercies, eh?’
Hannah didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Next thing I know, I’m in her car. My grandma Jane’s face pressed up against the window. But she’s been dead for years. She told me I must save the baby. I guess that had to be an hallucination. Anyway, I felt sick soon after we set off. Really sick. She eventually pulled over to let me throw up. That’s when I ripped off my name badge and put it behind a stone on the grass verge.’
‘I found it,’ Maddie said.
‘Really?’
‘We thought you might have lost it in some sort of struggle.’
‘It was just my way of saying, hey, I passed this way, don’t forget me.’
‘You did well, Hannah. Really well.’
‘Next thing I know, I’m locked down here and she’s telling me to get plenty of rest for baby Jacob.’
‘Baby Jacob?’
‘Search me. By then I had flu-like symptoms. I could barely move.’
Maddie tried to digest everything that Hannah had told her. As usual, the truth was unpalatable. ‘It might help if we could actually find out why she wants your baby. Give us an insight into how her mind works.’
‘Her mind doesn’t work. That’s the whole point. The only way out of here is through that door at the top of the steps. And before you get any bright ideas about trying to overpower her, I’ve already tried that. I broke the lightbulb and attacked her with it when she opened the door.’
‘That must have taken a lot of guts.’
‘Guts? Stupidity more like. I got a tea tray slammed into my face for my troubles. And then I spent the next Christ knows how long shut down here with no food or water. The only light I had was from that poxy fire. By the time she got around to leaving me a torch and a new bulb, I was imagining all sorts of things. Monsters. Voices. The only time I ventured out from beneath the duvet was to use the shit-bucket. Thankfully, I was constipated, but my need to pee seemed to increase tenfold.
‘God. I can’t imagine—’
‘No, you can’t. So don’t bother me with any stupid plans to escape. The only way out of here is in a body bag. If you think different, then you’re as dumb as she is crazy.’
Unfortunately, Maddie didn’t have any argument with that.
Chapter Thirty
Connie fed the disc marked ‘Golden Egg’ into the DVD player.
The Golden Egg. Laid by the biggest chicken who ever walked the face of the earth. It might be prudent to crush up fifty sleeping tablets and mix them with half a bottle of whiskey when the time comes for Captain Cluck to meet his maker.
‘What if he won’t drink it?’
He will. A gun is a wonderful motivator. Once they are all dead, you can take the bodies back to Crowley’s caravan and lay them out. And don’t forget to put plenty of samples of his blood, spit and hair onto the bodies.
Connie couldn’t wait. Crowley deserved everything he had coming to him. She’d never forget the day he’d marched into her office, bold as brass, and told her he knew all about Hannah. How he had ‘evidence’. At first, Connie had tried to dismiss him. Told him to go away, unless he wanted to collect his cards and spend the foreseeable future looking in the job centre. Without a reference. But Crowley hadn’t been so easily dismissed.
The disgusting lowlife had secreted a camera in the toilets at Sunnyside. ‘I see Hannah all drugged up to the eyeballs, and you virtually dragging her on and off the bog. I don’t care what you’ve been up to. It’s none of my business. But I do know the cops have been searching high and low for that girl.’
The Wolf had suggested telling Crowley to fry his head in a chip pan. The bag of wind was bluffing. Had to be. Connie wasn’t so sure. If he was bluffing, how come he knew all about Hannah in the first place?
Crowley looked like a cockerel about to have a batch of hens released into his care. ‘I have to say, it shit me up a bit when Hannah went missing, because I thought the cops might search the bogs and find my gear. So I went back a couple of nights later and took it all out.’
Connie’s heart dropped into her stomach.
‘So there you have it. What the fuck did you do? Shoot her with a horse tranquiliser dart?’
Connie had tried to sack him on the spot for gross misconduct.
‘I ain’t listening to no threats. You’d better pin back your ears and listen. Unless you want me to go to the cops, that is.’
Connie had spent the next half an hour alternating between idle threats and bribes. She’d finally agreed to pay him a small amount of money. Just to shut him up. But Crowley had proved to be every bit as greedy as he was stupid. Well, it hadn’t g
ot him very far, had it. Chained to a bench in the garage and with all the prospects of a pig in an abattoir.
Twenty minutes into the ‘Golden Egg’ DVD, Connie found what she’s been looking for: a small section of film showing Connie helping Hannah on and off the toilet. The girl looked zonked. It was a miracle she was still awake after the amount of sedative Connie had put into her drink.
Hannah had been a good worker. Trustworthy. No bother. Good temperament. Willing. The perfect person to carry baby Jacob. She fed a square of Galaxy chocolate into her mouth and savoured its smooth, sweet taste. She wound the film back and watched it again. She then stopped the DVD and ejected the disc. A surge of satisfaction passed through her. It had been a long haul. By God, it had. There’d been a good many times when she’d considered giving up. It was only because of the Wolf’s dogged perseverance that she’d managed to overcome her problems and finally deal with Crowley.
The road to paradise is paved with broken glass, Sweetcakes.
And there was still a good distance to go. A lot of dirt to dig. She turned off the TV and scooped up the discs. She didn’t want to watch the rest of Crowley’s filthy stash. Not now. Not ever. She couldn’t cope with any more depravity. She threw the DVDs into the fire grate. They could burn along with the whore’s handbag on Christmas Day.
Ashes to ashes.
‘Quite.’
Lust to lust.
Connie wasn’t sure Crowley’s perversity fell into the category of lust. It was in a league all of its own. She switched her mind to more positive things. Like next year. The best year ever. She’d waited so long for this. For the day she could start again with Da and baby Jacob. Her father would be cock-a-hoop when he found out they were going back to Yarmsworth. They could buy a nice little cottage, right back in the heart of the village where they’d all lived so happily before the tragedy.
They’d also have a decent amount of money left over from the sale of Fourwinds. Connie wouldn’t have to work. She’d be able to devote all her time to looking after Da and baby Jacob. Watching them bond. Reading baby Jacob bedtime stories until he fell asleep in Da’s arms. Taking Da into the garden and letting him sit in the shade. They could have a lovely flower bed. Pansies, tulips, daffodils. Even a vegetable patch. Nothing too big. Just carrots and parsnips and onions. Da loved his casseroles in the winter. You couldn’t beat fresh vegetables to give them that extra bit of flavour. They could even keep chickens and have fresh eggs for breakfast every morning.
Da was seventy-four now. He wasn’t in the best of health. His lungs were shot due to his years down the mine. And you didn’t need a degree in psychology to tell you his mind was no longer capable of processing proper thoughts. The Wolf had suggested a mercy killing might be in order sometime in the future. And so it might, but for now she just wanted to savour the time they had left. Anyway, baby Jacob would help to recover the missing pieces of Da’s mind. Complete the jigsaw, so-to-speak.
After the tragedy, Connie’s parents stopped communicating. Her mother banged doors a lot. Once, Connie had seen her smash everything on her heart-shaped dressing table. She’d thrown bottles of perfume at the wall. Her solid-silver hairbrush had smashed into the mirror. Her jewellery box had crashed against the wardrobe and spilled its contents all over the floor. Several pictures had been thrown against the wall. Connie had watched all this through a tiny gap in the door. The outburst had ended with her mother throwing herself onto the bed and beating her fists against the mattress. Again and again and again.
Connie had never been close to her mother. She was what you might call a functional mother. About as welcoming as an electric fence. But Connie didn’t care. She was a daddy’s girl. And a tomboy. She didn’t like dolls and prams and dresses. She loved going fishing with Da. They’d take sandwiches with them and cross over the railway line to get to a good spot where they could catch perch and carp and more minnows than they’d care to admit. They’d laugh and joke about how mother wasn’t there to make them wash their hands and mind their manners.
Connie loved her father so much it made her heart hurt. Especially when he took her to the disused mine and let her shoot at tin cans with his airgun. They would take two cans of coke. One for drinking, one for shooting. Connie used to squeal with delight as the can jumped and spilled its Coca-Cola guts in a frothy spurt. Sometimes her father would let her hold his Browning handgun, but always with the safety catch on and pointing at the ground. Just to get the weight of it. Learn to respect it.
They would sometimes go shooting rabbits. ‘One for the pot’, her father would say, laughing with that throaty laugh carved from years of accumulated coal dust. Even now, when she held the gun, she felt as if she was holding her father’s hand. She could smell the tobacco on his breath, and the faint whiff of grease in his hair.
Two years after the tragedy, her mother had moved out of the cottage. She’d never returned. Never sent Connie a Christmas card or a birthday card since, which was just as well, because Connie would have only ripped it to shreds and fed it to the fire. Apparently, her mother had ‘shacked up’ with someone else.
Da had told Connie not to think bad things about her mother, but Connie thought she was a heartless bitch who deserved to die a slow, lingering death. Sometimes, in the moments just before sleep, she would imagine cutting out her mother’s heart and feeding it to next door’s dog.
Da had tried to explain to her that people dealt with tragedies in different ways. And so it proved. His way was to go into a shell. He never took her fishing again. Hunting rabbits. Shooting down at Blackett’s Mine. He started drinking heavily. Connie would do her best to stay positive and upbeat, but it was like trying to chew milk. He still went to work, payed the bills, kept a roof over their heads. But more often than not he didn’t come home after work. He’d turn up late at night reeking of booze. Fall asleep in his old moth-eaten armchair. Connie would take off his work boots and cover him up with a blanket, and then go upstairs and cry herself to sleep.
She would sometimes kneel beside him and hold his hand. She would imagine walking through the fields again, breathing the clean country air, hunting rabbits and shooting tin cans. Her heart ached so much for those days.
Her Da put Connie in mind of a broken puppet. He still loved her, but he didn’t show that love anymore. Once, she’d made the mistake of mentioning the tragedy. Tried to tell him how sorry she was that baby Jacob had died. Her father had squeezed her hand so hard she’d thought he was going to break it. He’d then sobbed for ages. Watching her father cry had made Connie want to jump off the edge of the world.
On the night of the tragedy, Connie had been grounded for not coming straight home from school. She didn’t tell her mother she’d been down at Blackett’s Mine; that would have been tantamount to pouring petrol on a fire. She told her she’d been at a friend’s house. Her mother didn’t seem to like that excuse any better than she would have liked the truth. Connie was ten years old, for God’s sake. She had no right disappearing like that. She was a selfish little girl who only thought of herself.
Connie didn’t know what was so selfish about wanting to go to the mine and pretend everything was just like the old days. The fun days. The days before baby Jacob had arrived kicking and screaming into the world, demanding everyone’s attention.
She’d even found some of the old Coco-Cola tin soldiers lying in the slagheaps. She’d picked one up and turned it over and over in her hands like a mystical artefact from an archaeological dig. Which, in some ways, it was. It represented a time when everything was all right in Connie’s world.
Connie only ate a few mouthfuls of her tea on the night of the tragedy. Her mother’s constant criticism had killed her appetite. Apparently, she needed to grow up. Which was as daft as duck’s feet, considering she was only nine years old. She’d thrown her knife and fork down on the table and run to her bedroom.
Why didn’t her parents understand that she had feelings, too? Why did they treat her like she was invi
sible? Why couldn’t they see baby Jacob had ruined everything? It was as if Connie didn’t exist anymore. Even Da had lost interest in her. She’d heard him one night in the baby’s room, telling Jacob how he was looking forward to taking him down to Blackett’s Mine to shoot at the tin cans.
Every word had hammered a nail into Connie’s heart. If there was such a thing as baby-Jacob-coloured paint, then her father would have surely painted the house from top to bottom in it. Some nights he would come home from work and virtually ignore Connie. Yes, he’d smile at her and call her ‘Princess’. But she didn’t want to be a princess. She wanted to be a prince. A prince, just like baby Jacob.
As for her mother, she seemed even more grouchy after the birth. It was as if baby Jacob’s constant yelling and hollering at night had sucked all the energy out of her. Not that Connie cared about her mother’s wellbeing; that heartless witch could wear away to a whisper for all she cared.
God, that kid had lungs like bellows. Connie would often lie awake for half the night listening to her mother trying to soothe him and get him back to sleep. By the time he reached six months, baby Jacob was crawling. Da reckoned the boy was going to play for Newcastle United when he grew up. Connie didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. So what if he could crawl? Wasn’t that what babies did? Next thing, they’d be saying it was a miracle if the little runt walked.
As far as Connie could tell, all baby Jacob did was eat, make a nasty smell and wake everyone up at night. Which would have been just about bearable if he hadn’t stolen all her father’s attention. Da was besotted with him. It was as if nothing had existed before baby Jacob had arrived in the world smelling like a portable toilet.
Connie hadn’t been able to sleep on the night of the tragedy. As usual, she’d been lying awake waiting for him to start hollering and kicking up his usual fuss. At just past 2 a.m., a deep male voice had spoken in her head. A voice she would come to know as the Wolf. The Wolf had promised her that if she killed baby Jacob, everything would be all right.