by Maynard Sims
The screen switched and bright-eyes was back. “Earlier, we spoke to Mike Preston, bear-keeper at Colchester Zoo.”
What followed was a two-minute talking heads piece, dragging in comments from experts on bear behavior.
Back to bright-eyes. “I think the message is, don’t go down to the woods today, as you could well be in for a big surprise.” She smiled at the last comment, obviously pleased with herself for managing to get her quip into the broadcast. “Sasha Lancaster, BBC News, Epping Forest.”
Harry’s phone rang. “Have you seen the news?” Jason said.
“I’ve just watched it. A four-minute fluff piece at the end of the broadcast, in the humorous stories spot. I don’t think they’re taking it seriously.”
“I agree, but how else could they have handled it without causing panic? I thought the policeman got the tone just about right. Panic is the last thing the police need just now. In all honesty, there’s no real threat to the general public. Alice is targeting specific victims. I don’t see her as a danger to anyone else. Mind you, if I were a member of the Children of Hecate, and knew what was going on, I’d be shitting myself.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Jason said, a shade begrudgingly. “What are we supposed to do? Sit back and do nothing?”
“Pretty much. I doubt they’ll find anything, and if they do, Susan Tyler will hear, and she’ll call me.”
“So we sit and wait for Alice to make her next move?”
“As I see it, Jason, we don’t have any choice. At the moment, Alice is in the wind. She could be anywhere. We have to wait for her to show herself again.”
“And in the meantime, someone else is going to die.”
“I know,” Harry said. “I know.”
By the dim light of his sitting room desk lamp, James Chesterton sat at his PC, trawling through Internet sites, looking for some club, some group to fill the hole in his life that, until recently, had been filled by the Children of Hecate. Not that he was ever a believer, and some of the rituals, especially the kneeling and the chanting, were a bit of a pain, but the naked girls on the altar, the knife and the blood, well… Not even the porn sites he frequented on the Internet could give him that kind of rush.
Chesterton was thirty-two, unmarried, and still lived with his aging parents. He occupied the back part of the house: two rooms overlooking the garden. One room was a bedroom with a pine bed, a wardrobe, a chair and very little else. One wall was given over to Star Wars wallpaper, very old and fading slightly, but that didn’t matter. Color pinups from lads’ mags and “top shelf” periodicals were stuck to the wall, and hid the fact that C-3PO was looking a little tarnished and Chewbacca looked like he was molting.
The other room was what he called his bachelor pad. From the black velvet drapes to the red leather Ikea couch, he liked to think of it as his seduction room. The unpalatable truth was that, on the rare occasion he found a girl to come back to his place with him, she was turned off either by his bookcases filled with Star Wars and Doctor Who action figures, or by his mother, usually wearing her nightdress, who would bustle into his room unannounced to see if Johnny or his “friend” would like a “nice cup of tea”.
He had just opened a page on sci-fi collectables when something tapped lightly on one of the glass panels of the French doors. The house was large. His elderly father was the vicar at St. Bede’s Presbyterian Church, a hundred yards up the hill, and the house was the vicarage attached to it, where the family lived on Reverend Chesterton’s stipend and the small amount of cash James brought home from his job at the local Halfords.
He spun round at the sound at the doors, his pulse rising slightly. He thought it might be Thea, a rather plain girl with mousy, usually unwashed hair who worked at the fish shop in town, who had promised him she would come round to see him one day.
He got up from the computer and cupped his hand to peer out at the darkened garden. He squinted. He could just about make out the rounded shape of the box hedges his mother so lovingly trimmed, the ornamental concrete birdbath, and the stand of five apple trees at the bottom, but not much else.
Blaming his imagination, he pushed away from the doors and went back to his computer. Before he could refresh the screen, he heard another sound. This one was like a fingernail being drawn down a chalkboard. He sprang up from his seat again and went to investigate, unlocking the French doors and yanking them open.
He stepped out into the night, pulling his woolen cardigan tight around him to ward off the chill, and someone whispered his name.
“James.”
It seemed to come from the area of the garden where his father grew vegetables. He looked intently but couldn’t see anything, but then he heard a sound, a kind of shuffling, the sound a hairbrush being drawn over coconut matting would make.
“Is anybody there? Thea, is that you?” he hissed, and glanced back into the room to make sure his mother hadn’t come to investigate.
“James.” Another whisper.
He took three steps onto the crazy-paved path, and had almost reached the greenhouse when something reared up from the vegetable plot.
Huge, with long dark fur, the bear towered above James. It opened its mouth and gave an ear-splitting roar that seemed to rattle his head and caused his bladder to open and expel its contents down his leg, soaking his pants. The bear raised its long claw-sharp arm and brought it slashing down, tearing James’s face from his skull. It slashed again and opened up his chest to the rib cage, several of the claws catching in his ribs and ripping them out of his chest.
With a mewling cry, Chesterton fell to the path and died a few seconds later.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“So far,” Harry said, “there have been three bear attacks and one attack that appeared to be a gunshot wound, but was actually made by, McBride thinks now, an arrow. But lack of any kind of residue in the wound has him scratching his head. All he will say is that the holes are about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, and they pass through the entire body, piercing the heart.”
“Yeah,” Susan said. “He told me the same thing. Frankly, Harry, I’m not sure what to do next. It’s been three days since the last attack and since then, nothing. I was expecting a bloodbath, but it just hasn’t worked out like that. The bear attacks were a fifty-year-old man from Dagenham who was walking his dog in the local park, a middle-aged woman from a caravan park in Clacton, and a vicar’s son from Billericay who was attacked in the back garden of the vicarage and had his face torn off and his chest ripped open.”
“What did Essex police do?”
“From what I picked up on the grapevine, they widened their search to the area involved and found nothing. They’ve called off the bear hunt after complaints from local shops and street traders that the police presence and closure of the forest were having an adverse effect on business. I saw on the news this morning that they’ve reopened the forest to the public.”
“Are they still freezing you out?”
“Oh yes. They think they can solve all this without the help from other areas. Bloody idiots! No fresh leads at your end?”
“No. Nothing. Alice seems to have dropped off the planet.”
“Well, she must be somewhere, doing something.”
“Yes, she must be. I phoned my doctor friend again, and she seems to think that Alice could be suffering from what she called ‘meth crash’. It happens when the body shuts down, unable to cope with the drug effects overwhelming it. It results in a long period of sleep for the person that can last one to three days. So it could be why she’s stopped killing.”
“Like a bear hibernating… But where do you think she could be? Also, where’s she getting the meth from now Markos is dead? She must have a supplier.”
“All questions that have been running through my mind…and I haven’t been able to answer one of them.”
“So we
’re going to have to wait for her to make the next move.”
“It looks like it.”
“Bloody frustrating.”
“But good news for potential victims.”
“True.”
“How about that drink?”
“I was thinking about that too. Tonight?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Same time, same place. You bring the dominos.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’ll do that. See you then.”
The line went dead on the sound of her laughter.
Violet was lying on the deeply cushioned couch in the sitting room of her Chelsea home, with her eyes closed.
The room was large, with a high ceiling and ochre-painted walls. The furniture was eclectic, collected from the many places she had traveled. Middle-Eastern carpets clashed with Moroccan wall hangings. Ethnic-styled furniture in sheersham and reclaimed oak gave the room a rustic, slightly African feel. A teak root mirror hung from the wall over an authentic cast-iron, art nouveau fireplace original to the house.
Candles covered every surface, and incense sticks smoldered in their hand-beaten brass holders, filling the room with the heady scent of sandalwood. The effect of the incense and candlelight combined to make her feel drowsy and allow her mind to drift—exactly the state she wanted to achieve.
She found it relatively easy to reach a trance state without resorting to drink and drugs; the teachings of a swami in Bengal had helped her harness her own astral body and allow it to roam free, while she lay there and absorbed all the images and sensations it experienced.
Now, as she relaxed, her breathing slow and rhythmic, she stretched out her thoughts, searching for her niece—searching for Alice, out there in the ether.
Once it been no problem connecting to her, but since Alice had started using drugs, Violet had found the pathways closed to her, and her niece’s mind an enigma shrouded in mystery and perplexity.
Today she prayed she would finally make a connection with her.
As she lay there, her eyelids fluttered and her eyeballs danced beneath them. Soon images were filling her head, sweeping her away to another place, another dimension.
She was in a field, a lush green space of verdant grass and crimson poppies. A roe deer traversed the space, stopping occasionally to chew the grass, before looking up with startled eyes and gamboling off to stop at another part of the field. In the distance she could hear the discordant baying of a pack of dogs, close by, lost somewhere in the trees beyond the field.
The scene shifted and she was walking through a forest of densely packed ash and elder, the forest floor beneath her a carpet of autumn-shed leaves and bark and twigs stripped and snapped from the surrounding trees. She sniffed the air and smelled something that reminded her of wet copper. Her prey was near, almost within touching distance. The odor of blood grew stronger as she picked her way through thickets of nettles and thorns, her legs protected by the thick brown fur that covered them.
She saw him then, sheltering close to a swathe of rhododendrons, his eyes frightened, sweat beading his body, his smell a palpable, cloying stench. On his arm was a crude image of Hecate’s wheel, drawn in ink, a labyrinth contained within an outer circle, and she knew without any doubt the he was the one.
She approached him, a low growl rumbling deep in her throat, the stink of his fear almost unbearable. She was a yard away from him and he was holding out his hands to protect himself, but they were nothing but a flimsy barrier, no match for her claws, claws that swooped through the air, rending and tearing, ripping the skin from his body, the flesh from his bones. Blood spurted from ruined, torn arteries and painted the trees a glorious crimson, dripping down the ragged bark and forming pools of scarlet liquid on the forest floor.
“Oh, dear Lord!”
Violet’s eyes snapped open and she jerked upright. The sensation she had just experienced bewildered her for a moment, but the clouds of confusion gradually parted and she started see the awful, horrible reality.
“Alice, my precious Alice. What have you become?” And then a searing pain coursed through her chest, and she clutched at it with desperate hands, willing it to pass, to leave her in peace, but the pain only increased, tightening like a metal strap around her heart and lungs. She gasped once and fell unconscious back on the couch, spittle dribbling from her lips as her skin slowly turned from pink to blue.
Jason let himself into the Chelsea house with his own key. He shut the door behind him and stood in the quarry-tiled hallway, calling her name. “Vi? Vi, it’s me. Where are you?”
There was no reply, but he sensed her presence in the sitting room, ran to the panel door and pulled it open. She had collapsed there, half on and half off of the couch. Her skin gradually turning bluish gray, cyanosis setting in as her body was starved of oxygen.
He yanked his phone from his pocket and called for an ambulance, then crouched down beside her and rested his fingers on her throat, feeling for a pulse. It was there, thin and weak, and close to, he could see her chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly. He stroked a lock of russet hair away from her face and held her close to his chest as tears started to trickle down his cheeks.
“Don’t you die on me, Violet Bulmer. Don’t you die on me, you silly cow.” Away in the distance he could hear the mournful wail of the ambulance approaching. “Soon,” he whispered, as he rocked her gently in his arms. “They’ll be here soon. And then you’ll be all right.”
After what seemed a lifetime, there was a single ring of the doorbell. He laid her gently back down on the couch and went to open the door to the paramedics.
“I’m thinking of handing in my papers,” Susan said.
“Leaving the force?” Harry said, surprise registering in his eyes.
“Pretty much.”
They were sitting in the same booth they had shared before at the Wellington. Paul Anka was crooning from the jukebox: “Diana”.
“But why?” Harry said. “I had you pegged as a career copper.”
“Perhaps that’s why. So did I.” She sipped her spritzer. “Twenty-five years with the force and all I’ve achieved is detective inspector. It’s too late for me to climb any higher. I can quit on full pension.”
“What, and spend the rest of your life raising begonias and watching daytime TV?”
“I may have loftier ambitions than that. I used to picture myself on the Algarve, running a bar. Sun, sea and sangria.”
“Sangria’s Spanish. The Algarve’s Portugal.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson, but I knew that. They still serve sangria though.”
“Why now, Sue?”
“Truth be told, the Anton Markos case,” she said.
“I’m sure you’ve handled worse in the past.”
“It’s true, I have, and I don’t mind blowing my own trumpet here. I’ve handled them pretty damned well. That was why it was so galling to be booted off the case by that asshole Mackie. He’s paper pusher, a very highly paid one. He knows nothing about real detection. He couldn’t find his prick in a dark room if it didn’t have luminous paint on it.”
“And does it?”
“What?”
“Have luminous paint on it?”
She shuddered. “Pray to God I never have occasion to find out…but you know what I mean. Take Jake Bartlett. Married, two kids, still living in a police flat in Shoreditch, not pulling in a quarter of Mackie’s salary, and Jake’s ten times the copper than Mackie will ever be.”
“So it’s all down to pay grades and pecking orders. Is that why you want to quit?”
“I’m forty-five,” she said. “Married once, disastrously, no kids to look after me when I’m old and gray, working umpteen hours a day, going home and snatching a ready-meal, then going to bed to sleep for perhaps five hours before getting up and doing it all again. I feel like I’m livi
ng in a permanent loop of hard work for precious little reward.”
“Not even job satisfaction?”
“So, what, we catch the buggers, only for some mealy-mouthed, overpaid judge to let them off with a slapped wrist. I’m beginning to think, is it all worth it?”
“This is beginning to sound an awful lot like self-pity to me.” Harry said.
“Well, fuck you, Mr. Bailey,” she said, but her face broke into a smile. “Get me another drink, before I forget I’m a lady and smack you in the chops.”
He smiled back her, picked up her glass and took it to the bar for a refill.
As he was standing there, waiting for the barman to finish with another customer, his phone rang in his pocket.
When he got back to the booth, Susan said, “What is it, Harry? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“That was Jason on the phone. Vi Bulmer’s had a heart attack. They’ve taken her to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and put her on life support. I’m going to have to go over there.”
“I’ll drive you,” she said.
“Thanks, but no, I couldn’t put you out…”
She had her coat on before he had even finished the sentence.
“I’m happy to wait around as long as it takes. Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty
They arrived at the hospital and found their way to the intensive care unit.
A nurse sat at a desk at the end of the corridor, surrounded by a bank of monitors where she could keep an ongoing check on her patients’ condition. Harry approached the desk. The nurse, a dark-haired girl with large, expressive eyes, looked up at him and smiled. “May I help you?” she said, an Irish lilt to her voice.