by Alex Smith
“Maybe nothing,” he replied, sitting next to her. “But Figg was using his therapy sessions as a recruitment drive for psychopaths, right?”
“Yeah,” said Savage, leaning in. “You think it might not just be Stillwater and Percival?”
“Can we check these names?” Kett asked, handing her the list. “Flag anything suspicious, anything out of the ordinary.”
Savage carried the list to the computer, typing the information into the database. She hit the keys so hard the sound of it echoed around the room.
“Uh, Mayhew’s up North,” she said. “Gatward’s dead.”
“Local?”
“Spain,” she said. “Sanford… Yeah, Alan Sanford is still in Norwich. Well, just outside. Hang on.” She typed a little more and Kett took a moment to rest his eyes. “He attended the group after he was hit by a police car during a chase. They were chasing somebody else, not him. Fractured his femur and his tailbone.”
“Ouch,” said Kett.
“Let me check his social media,” she went on as she drummed the keyboard. “He’s uh, fifty-six, works as a copyright lawyer out in the Broadland industrial park, although he’s halfway retired. Divorced, wife and kids live in Surrey.”
“That’s all on his Facebook?” Kett asked.
“If you know where to look.”
“Doesn’t exactly sound like a serial killer,” said Kett. “Who’s next.”
When Savage didn’t answer he turned to her. Her face was so close to the screen he could see the glow reflected in her eyes.
“Savage?”
“It’s…” she frowned. “There haven’t been any updates on his socials for the last two months, by the look of it.”
Kett got up, walking to her side. On screen was a balding, mutton-faced man in glasses smiling for the camera. There was hardly anything on his page except for cricket.
“The Ashes have just finished,” said Kett. “Seems like the sort of thing he’d brag about.”
“And yet nothing,” said Savage.
“Where does he live?”
Savage hammered the keyboard a little more.
“Trowse, sir. It’s a village south of the city. Very close.”
“I remember,” said Kett. “There’s a broad there, a big one. Boats and canoes and stuff.”
“And an artificial ski slope,” Savage said. “Not much else past that apart from woodland.”
No, there was something else there, Kett was sure of it. He’d passed it once when he was younger and his mum had taken a wrong turn while driving along the river. Savage seemed to remember as well, because she suddenly twisted around in her chair.
“The sewage treatment plant,” she said. “It’s down there.”
“The smell,” said Kett, the revelation blasting the fog from his mind.
“We should tell the boss,” Savage said, scraping her chair back as she stood.
“I’ll do it,” Kett said. “You’re driving.”
As far as hunches went, it wasn’t the best Kett had ever had. He was looking for a house owned by a man who had once attended a therapy group run by their main suspect, a man with no prior convictions who seemed to have lived his entire life by the book.
But a hunch was a hunch, and right now they didn’t have much else to go on.
“Check it out,” said Clare on the phone. Kett heard the man stifle a yawn. “From a distance. If you see anything that leads you to believe our men are there, or the paper girls, then you call for backup immediately. Clear?”
“Clear, sir,” said Kett, ending the call. “He didn’t sound impressed.”
Savage muttered a reply, her attention on the road as she roared downhill at almost sixty miles per hour. She slowed as they neared a red light, but only to about fifty-five, and Kett had to close his eyes as a taxi screeched to a halt while turning the corner.
“I’m not going to ask where you learned to drive,” he said, tasting his pulse on his tongue.
“Dodgems,” she replied.
“What?”
“Dodgems, I used to ride them all the time when I was a kid. We lived out at Hemsby and my granddad used to take me on them. Told me I was a natural.”
“That doesn’t fill me with confidence,” Kett said. “Roundabout!”
She didn’t even slow this time, just shot straight over it, the fire station a blur as they roared by. The car almost took off when it crested the humpback bridge beyond, then a few seconds later Savage steered them onto another road, this one narrower and surrounded on both sides by woods and fields.
“Is it much further?” Kett asked, feeling the chips and chicken balls trying to climb out of his stomach.
“Couple of miles,” she replied.
“Turn the blues off,” he said. “Best that nobody sees us coming.”
She did as he asked and the lane stopped flashing. Luckily she kept the speed down as they wound their way past the lake—the water as black as ink in the night. The car’s headlights turned the trees into a carnival of shape and shadow, weird figures seeming to dance between the trunks and hang from the branches. There wasn’t a soul in sight, but owls screeched from the forest like they were sending out a warning, and the eyes of nocturnal creatures glinted from the riverbank.
The smell hit him as they turned a corner, the deep, rich, cloying stench of treated sewage. His eyes began to water instantly, and for a moment he thought it was the final straw, that he was actually going to be sick. He swallowed it down, breathing through his mouth.
“I’d forgotten how bad it got,” groaned Savage, one hand to her nose. “It’s like the Bog of Eternal Stench. And this is at night. Imagine how awful it is during the day, especially in the summer.”
“Bad enough to linger on somebody’s clothes? Somebody’s hair?”
“If you got close enough to it,” she replied. “And for long enough. It’s… it’s definitely distinctive. How did Stillwater’s girlfriend describe it? Sweet? It’s not sweet.”
She was right, it wasn’t sweet. But there was a strange sweetness to it, an undertone of something floral—maybe the chemicals they used to treat the waste. Kett’s heart was drumming again, and this time it was nothing to do with Savage’s driving. They passed beneath a graffiti-strewn concrete flyover which seemed totally out of place here in the wilderness, cars and trucks rumbling over it at motorway speeds.
“The A47,” Savage explained.
Ahead, the road ended, becoming nothing more than a strip of gravel and dirt. Kett grunted as the car bounced in a pothole as big as a garden pond. To his right was a barn, complete with a silo and outbuildings. It looked abandoned, the windows either boarded up or broken. Most of the walls had holes in them, one side of the barn almost totally collapsed. There was no sign of life inside.
“That’s Alan Sanford’s place up ahead,” Savage said, nodding through the windscreen. The car’s headlights fought against the night, illuminating the front wall of an impressive farmhouse. It, too, looked like it was in a state of neglect, the mortar around the bricks and flint crumbling like rotting gums around teeth. The windows were dark.
“Cut the lights,” Kett said. “And back up a little.”
Savage switched off the headlights, the track instantly swamped by darkness. She reversed slowly until they were under the bulk of the flyover. The farmhouse was a deeper shadow against the night, looking like a whale breaching the surface of a fathomless ocean. But as the echo of the lights ebbed from his vision Kett made out a weak glow from an upstairs window.
“Somebody’s in,” said Savage, squinting.
“Let’s go find out who,” Kett replied, popping his door. The smell from the sewage works instantly flooded his nose and mouth, making him feel like he was drowning. He coughed into the crook of his arm, pushing the door shut behind him. Savage was by his side, one hand on her radio.
“We should call it in,” she said.
“There’s still nothing worth shouting about,” Kett replied as a truck growl
ed overhead. “Let’s check it out first. Any sign of trouble, I’ll call for backup. I promise. I don’t want another Brandon Walker kicking my arse.”
“What happened, sir?” Savage asked. Kett looked at her, frowning. “You said you’d tell me one day, why you don’t like to wait for the cavalry.”
He sighed, then nodded.
“It’ll have to be the short version,” he said. “I was a brand new detective, right off the carousel. I chased a domestic violence call, up in Elephant and Castle. Uniforms couldn’t get there so I took it. There was a guy going crazy, threatening to shoot his wife and kids. Backup was on the way so I waited.”
Kett dropped his head, seeing it now, hearing the screams, the thumps, the sobs.
“Ten minutes, that’s all it was. By the time the squad arrived and knocked the door down he’d strangled both of them. No gun, just his bare fucking hands. The wife survived, but the little boy didn’t. He was three.”
The same age as Evie, he thought.
Savage cleared her throat, shaking her head.
“That wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“All in the past,” Kett lied. “But now you know. Ten minutes is all it takes. Come on.”
Without the car’s headlights the path was treacherous, loose rocks and gravel doing their best to trip them up. Kett stepped onto the dry grass of the verge, brambles tugging at his trousers like a dead man’s fingers until they reached a junction ahead. To the left was the access road to the sewage plant. Ahead, the farmhouse loomed over them. This close, the glow from the upstairs window was barely any brighter than before, and Kett saw heavy boards nailed to the frame. He tapped Savage’s elbow, pointing to them, and she nodded back, whispering a word.
“Weird.”
It got weirder still as they walked along the face of the farmhouse. The front door was original, and only about five foot high. It was also sealed with a monstrous padlock. A handwritten note by the letterbox read: Deliveries and building materials to rear.
“Building materials,” whispered Kett. His Spidey-sense was going into overdrive.
He peeked around the corner, seeing a silver Mercedes parked in the gravel drive between the main building and a brick and flint workshop. Past that the bloated farmhouse stretched back into the night, made up of a cluster of mismatched pieces. Another faint light burned through a window ahead, thick curtains drawn across it.
“That Stillwater’s car?” Kett said quietly, and Savage shook her head.
“It’s not Figg’s either, and Percival didn’t drive.”
“Sanford’s then,” Kett said. “He’s home.”
They kept walking, skirting around the edge of the property. Other than the sewage works and the crumbling barn there were no other buildings in sight. The farmhouse stood like an island in the night, impossibly still.
Not empty, though. Kett could feel it.
They were walking along the side wall when another clue clicked into place.
“Scaffolding,” Kett said, nodding to the back of the farmhouse where a metal scaffold climbed the old wall like ivy. Hulking shapes sat beneath it, making Kett think of immense guard dogs, and it was only when they got closer that he saw they were actually builder’s supplies—tonne bags of sand and hardcore.
“Okay,” said Kett. “I’ve seen enough. Call it in.”
“Yes, sir,” Savage said, and she was reaching for her radio when a scream cut through the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
For a second, Kett couldn’t move.
The scream hit him like a punch to the solar plexus, and he almost doubled up at the force of it.
Then the adrenaline took over and he was running—heading down the side of the farmhouse towards the towering forest of scaffolding. He heard Savage call his name but he ignored her, scanning the house for a way in. The ground floor windows were boarded up, and there wasn’t a door in sight.
He reached the scaffolding just as another scream lit up the dark. There was no doubting it, that was the voice of a young girl. Kett swore, looking up. The first-floor windows were all covered with tarpaulin that flapped lazily in the breeze, and he could see well enough that there was no glass in them.
“… and come now!” Savage hissed into her radio as she caught up to him.
He grabbed a scaffold bar and hauled himself up, bracing his boot on the slippery metal. Savage was younger and fitter, and by the time he’d got himself off the ground she had reached the first level. She offered him a hand, pulling him up. From here there was a ladder and Kett took the lead again, climbing to the platform that ran beneath the windows.
He could hear more voices now, shouts—and was that laughter? High-pitched and cruel. The scream had turned to a hysterical sob, one that drove Kett to the nearest window. He pulled back the tarp, seeing absolutely nothing at all.
“Here,” Savage said, handing him her torch. He beamed it inside to see a bare room, the door ajar.
He paused, but only for a moment. Running in like this would be the stupidest move. It could cost him his life, and possibly even the lives of three children and a young PC. In ten minutes the entire Norfolk Constabulary would be on site, guns and dogs and a hundred people ready to take down Figg and his little posse.
But he’d waited before. He’d waited ten minutes, and somebody had died.
He clambered through the window, the heavy tarp flapping in his face and doing its best to keep him out. He didn’t have a weapon but Savage was right behind him, her telescopic baton gripped in her fist. She caught him looking.
“You want it?” she whispered, offering him the weapon. He shook his head.
“You’re a better shot than I am.”
More laughter from deep inside the house, muffled but close enough that Kett could tell it wasn’t just from one person.
“Please, no, please, no.”
The words broke Kett’s heart, and they stoked a fury inside him that was almost overpowering. He marched to the door, wincing as the hinges screamed.
The laughter stopped.
Kett paused, his heart pulsing inside his throat, inside his fingertips.
“Let me go,” came that voice. “I won’t say anything, I promise, you don’t have to kill me. Please. I don’t want you to.”
Beyond the door was a corridor, its floor bare, its walls crumbling plaster. The voice was coming from up ahead and Kett headed that way as quietly as he dared. There was no more laughter, but he could hear heavy footsteps from somewhere beneath him.
A junction, the left-hand turn leading to the front of the house, the right-hand one ending at a door. Kett looked at Savage, gesturing to the door with the torch. He set off to the left, the ancient floor playing a string concerto beneath him. This stretch of corridor didn’t last long, branching to the right. Kett stopped, barely breathing.
There was another door ahead, light spilling out of it.
He glanced back, seeing Savage enter the room behind him. He left her to it, advancing in a crouch towards the door, seeing a wooden chair draped with wire. He walked a little further—a second chair, more wire, the floor here drenched with fresh blood.
We’re too late.
Taking a deep breath, he peeked around the door to see the rest of the room.
One more chair.
And this one had somebody in it.
Fuck.
Kett ran into the room and dropped to his knees beside the occupied chair, the torch rolling across the boards. There was a girl in it, her hands bound behind her, her feet held tight by wire. She was still, her lank hair plastered over her face, her fingertips black from the lack of blood. The room stank of piss and shit, vomit and blood—and rot, too.
Too late, he thought again, pushing her hair out of the way then pressing his hand to her neck.
The girl was warm—and there, a pulse, as weak as the flap of a butterfly’s wings.
She groaned, her mouth opening. Her lips were as dry as sandpaper, her tongue swollen. Even t
hough her face was streaked with blood and dirt and tears Kett knew who she was.
“Delia,” he said. “Delia, I’m a policeman, you’re safe.”
The girl groaned again. Kett heard Savage enter the room quietly behind him.
“It’s Delia Crossan,” he said. “She’s okay, but she needs—”
Something cracked across the back of Kett’s skull, and for a second he felt his conscious mind break away. The world flashed white, then black, then white again, the pain flooding his head like boiling water. He was on the floor, he realised, and by the time he’d rolled onto his back, his limbs as stubborn as a puppet’s, there was a man standing above him. His vision swam so much he couldn’t make out who it was—it was as if the man’s face was plain, except for two x’s for eyes—but there was no mistaking what he held in his hand.
A crowbar.
The man lifted it, and it was his laugh—as cold as you can get—that gave him away.
“Christian,” Kett said, tasting blood. Just speaking made the room cartwheel around his head. “Christian, you don’t have to do this. It’s not too late.”
Stillwater stood there, the mask bulging then retreating with every breath, his crowbar raised like an executioner’s blade.
“We know Figg made you do it,” Kett said, panting. “You want a get out of jail free card like last time then you know what you have to do. Help us bring him in.”
“You’re nothing,” said Stillwater. “A man like you could never understand.”
Stillwater’s whole body tensed and then released, the crowbar beginning its descent.
Savage entered the room, her baton a blur as she swung it at the back of Stillwater’s leg. It was like watching an old tree snap beneath a lightning strike, a brutal crack echoing from wall to wall as the man folded in two. He fell onto his back, the crowbar spinning out of his hand. He gasped wetly, trying to get a breath in, and when he did he unleashed an awful, howling shriek.
“You okay, sir?” Savage asked, holding out her free hand. Kett took it, letting her pull him up. The room was still moving, and he was almost certain he was going to puke, but he managed to nod.