by Helen Fields
If that had been hard, pulling himself up into the cavity had been almost impossible without his legs assisting. The next wooden beam was too far away simply to reach out and pull himself forward. Xavier had turned his head to the side to make entry easier and strained inch by inch to get into the gap. One elbow over the joist meant more stability, but he’d had to twist his upper body to achieve that. Then it had been even harder to get the rest of himself into the space.
Fergus had disappeared. There had been silence from below. Elspeth seemed to be unconscious, and Meggy was bound with her face away from him.
‘Don’t lose hope,’ he’d whispered down to them. ‘Not yet. If I can hide until he’s gone again, then maybe I’ll have a chance to get help. Stay strong Meggy, and look after Elspeth.’
She’d given a nod of acknowledgement, accompanied by a sob. Of course, why would she have believed him? There was no one to lower him to the floor to go for help, and no way out if he went back up. It was useless. He’d simply given the girl false hope.
Spreading his arms wide so he could keep his shoulders flat, he’d pulled himself further in. Once he was through as far as his waist, his body weight tipped the balance, and it had become easier. He’d hauled himself all the way into the cavity, hips scraping the top and bottom painfully, legs and feet catching on bones and skulls. Xavier didn’t allow himself to think about the stench.
Echoing blows had reverberated through the floorboards above his head. Shouts, more blows, increasing in pace. The noise of wood splitting, then caving in. And finally, footsteps, right above his head. He’d moved, lizard-like, through the space, keeping his face turned from the little light, knowing that if anyone had looked inside, it would be his skin that reflected. His jeans were dark blue and his top was black. If he could just get into the far corner.
Xavier’s face bumped something. Fabric. He shook it away, bile rising in his throat. He was out of time, and there was nowhere to hide.
He’d pulled the corpse past his face, alongside his body, and sheltered behind it. Wasn’t that the ultimate act of cowardice? Hiding behind a dead woman.
The footsteps had paused near the edge of the hole. Xavier had risked a glance back as a hand had reached in, fingers patting the area until they’d found something, grasped it, pulled it back out. He hadn’t breathed. The darkness had begun to swirl and create its own light before his eyes. Fergus muttering, walking away, stopping, shouting, stamping. Returning to shove his head inside the hole.
Discovery had seemed certain until Fergus had begun talking to the poor soul whose lifeless body was providing him with camouflage, then there had been the sweet relief of disappearing footsteps and blissful silence. The deep breath he’d finally been able to drag into his lungs, full of the cells of dusty bones or not, was nectar.
‘Fuck,’ he’d muttered to himself, letting his head drop onto a wooden beam and resting.
Somehow, bizarrely, in the gloom, regardless of the stress and adrenaline, he’d begun to fall asleep. That wouldn’t do. He needed to get into position to exit when an opportunity came. For now, he’d avoided Fergus. Mission accomplished. But he hadn’t thought further ahead. When your sole intent was to survive the next hour, consequential thinking wasn’t the priority.
He managed to bend himself at the waist, then lifted his legs further away, pushing them towards the rear corner of the space. It wasn’t until he began trying to crawl forward again that he found himself tethered from behind. Tugging at each leg in turn, he became frantic. Finally giving in and hauling his upper body back down to meet his ankles, the pitch-black in the corner behind him, he felt down his leg until his fingertips reached his right ankle. It was wedged firmly into an acute angle formed by two joists and twisted horribly. He could neither reach it in the confined space, nor drag the leg out.
‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.’ Xavier thumped the nearest rafter, achieving nothing more than adding a painful bruise to his knuckles to his list of problems.
From the floor below came Fergus’ voice, issuing commands, complaining, swearing. Then the shush – halt – shush – halt of heavy objects being dragged for short periods. Elspeth cried out and Meggy’s tears added to his misery. He was just feet away from the edge of the hole, with no hope of getting there to see what was happening. He wanted to call out to them, but that was only going to remind Fergus that he existed – a fact he seemed to have entirely forgotten for now.
Had he been able to do anything to help, he would have done. It was practicality. It was the need to keep one of them safe a little longer to get help. Not fear. Not fear for his own safety. No more than any other person would have felt, anyway. Warm water washed down over his cheeks and penetrated the edges of his lips. They were still alive. There was still hope. While they were crying, they were breathing. Meggy was tougher than she knew, and Elspeth … Elspeth needed medical help and Xavier knew it. But perhaps if Fergus was moving them, then something dramatic must have changed. He told himself they were much more likely to be found outside the house. Really, they were better off than him now. As long as they weren’t simply being brought back up the stairs to the flat. Although at least then someone would be there to help pull him out.
Xavier focused on regulating his breathing and listened. He could hear the pipes in the walls delivering hot water for the morning and footsteps heavy on the stairs. Those were getting fainter. Going down to the ground floor, not up towards him. Banging, half a second behind each step. He was pulling their still-bound bodies down the stairs, Xavier realised. Elspeth wasn’t up to that. Her arm was undoubtedly dislocated from her shoulder and the wet rasping sound as she breathed was almost inevitably an injury to her lungs or her throat, and either of those possibilities raised the spectre of internal bleeding.
A door closed downstairs, then another, much more distant.
What was he doing to them? If he were planning on killing them, why not just do it where they lay? Too messy, too much evidence. Perhaps he was moving them to a bath, where the blood could be flushed down the plug or onto plastic sheeting, which could be wrapped and put straight into the boot of his car.
Stop it, he yelled inside his head. You’re as bad as him. You’ve killed them already.
More footsteps in the lower part of the house. A pause. The sound of furniture being dragged. Silence. Footsteps, much slower this time, walking away. A door shut, gently, carefully. He imagined he could almost hear the click of it in the latch.
There was a new sound below him now. Like waves rolling onto a beach on a stormy day. A soft, roaring whoosh. Then crackling and a sense that the air had come alive, of …
The smell hit him before he could fit the final puzzle piece into the image. It was just a memory in the air at first. Late evenings sat at his father’s side in the summer, burning off the clippings from the garden. Lobbing sticks onto the bonfire from a safe distance. This aroma was neither woody nor so pleasant, though. It was man-made fibres and fabric, paper, and carpet. The noise was louder now, the sound of consumption, of the fire below flicking out its tongue to taste the room.
Ripping his top as he fought to pull it over his head in the fourteen inches of space, Xavier wrapped the material around his head. There was no heat yet, but the first tendrils of smoke were curling in through the hole, seeking him out. The smoke would kill him before the flames could get to him. The thought was both terrifying and comforting.
He pulled madly at his ankle to get free, knowing he was kidding himself. Suppose he could get to the hole, what then? Was he going to let himself drop to the floor below? By that stage, there was every chance another floor would simply give way and he’d drop into the heart of the fire on the ground floor. Going up into the flat left him behind a locked door, waiting for a slower death. Getting hotter now, and the crawl space seemed smaller and darker than before. His eyes were tearing up.
‘Help!’ Xavier screamed. ‘Somebody help me!’
A window smashed somewhere below. There
was still real glass on the ground floor, then. A loud bang, possibly furniture, maybe a door giving way. Not mains gas, please, he thought. If there was mains gas, he could be counting the time he had left in the world in seconds rather than minutes.
‘Please,’ he yelled, aware of the dryness of his throat and the chemicals entering his system. ‘Please, I’m trapped. Help me!’
He began coughing. The air was thicker. Grey.
Xavier screamed and coughed and cried until he began to choke.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Connie heard the sirens before she saw the fire engines. Two had overtaken them en route, and her taxi driver had pulled over to allow them to pass. As a result, the road they wanted to go down was closed off.
‘No way I’m getting down there, love,’ the cabbie told her. ‘Doubt you will, either. Is there somewhere else I can take you? It’s a few miles if I go round and approach from the other end of the road.’
‘Just let me out.’ She thrust cash into his hand and jumped out.
It was only a few miles out of the city but already rural. This was farming land, one side of the road lined with trees, the other nothing but fields with the odd farm building peeking above the flora in the distance. With a name rather than a number, Tamar House wasn’t identified on her mobile phone maps. Grateful she was wearing trainers, Connie shifted gears, ducking under the first piece of tape fluttering across the road to stop traffic from turning into the junction. A police car appeared from behind her, an officer getting out to release the tape and allow the vehicle entry then remaining in place next to the tape to control vehicular flow.
Connie embraced a dawning nausea. A column of smoke was just visible above the treeline ahead, not that she needed the visual. The smell of burning formed a brilliant orange colour in her imagination. If that was the house, then maybe everyone was in there.
She raced towards the flashing emergency services lights.
Set back from the road up a gravel track was a disjointed-looking building, three storeys high, with an amateur-build porch starting to fall down at the front, and a garage with one door hanging half off its hinges at the side. No vehicles to be seen. No one hanging out of the windows, either, shouting for help. Smoke billowing from the ground-floor windows.
She knew better than to waste time on yet another argument with a police officer. Going to the farthest end of the driveway from the police guard, she slipped between vehicles, the temporary ID she’d been given by MIT held out in front like a cross in a horror movie, in case anyone should approach.
No chance of that. All eyes were on the house.
Clutching the arm of a firefighter, she didn’t waste a moment.
‘Is the property on fire called Tamar House?’ she demanded.
He nodded.
‘Listen, it belongs to a man in his mid-thirties, but I think there might be other people inside. I need you to make sure they’re not locked up somewhere like a basement or an attic, possibly inside wardrobes or other large items of furniture. They’ll probably be restrained in some way, unable to get out, maybe unable to even call out for help.’
‘All right.’ He beckoned to colleagues and they circled around. ‘More information … how many people are we looking for?’
‘Thirty-year-old man, might answer to Fergus. A girl aged twelve, a woman also in her thirties called Elspeth, and a paraplegic male.’
‘The people from the news reports?’ one of the firefighters asked.
‘Yes. I don’t know what sort of shape they’ll be in. They might not all be alive. If not … if not, it’ll be important to the families to get the bodies out in good enough shape to know exactly what happened to them.’
‘Step back, miss. We’re making an entry with hoses. The area needs to be clear.’
Connie did as she was told. She retraced her steps to a distance behind the fire engines but stayed within the police cordon. Dr Ross’ description of a man presenting himself with Cotard’s delusion over the course of three years and matching the rough physical description of the man they were hunting was reason enough to have come here. The fact that the property was on fire, just a day after Elspeth had been outed as an adulterer, couldn’t be a coincidence.
The blinding glow from the first-floor windows indicated either that the flames had penetrated the hallway and up the stairs, or that the ceiling had caved in. Probably both. She wondered how long the fire had been raging, but there was no one around to ask. She’d never been so close to a house fire before. The different odours were cloying and sickly. The chemicals that made the furniture, fittings and possessions combined to render the air hard to breathe.
If there were people still inside, how long would it take for them to perish from smoke inhalation? There was an ambulance on the scene already, not that paramedics would be able to assist if Fergus Ariss had decided to use a house fire as a mechanism for disposing of evidence and destroying the corpses. If Fergus Ariss was even the man they were looking for.
Water was being blasted into the ground floor now, and clouds of thick grey smoke were hissing out in response. Connie turned her face away and put her sleeve over her mouth. A firefighter raced out of the property towards a vehicle and began to unload two lengths of rope, a large axe, a saw, and a flashlight. He was joined by a colleague, who took the tools and ran back inside.
‘Did you see anyone?’ she yelled, but they were gone already.
Connie knew when to stay out of the way and shut up. She wasn’t going to see anything for a few minutes. In the meantime, all she could do was find out more about the property.
The front door, only partially obscured from the road, wasn’t a safe enough bet for moving bodies from a car boot into the house. A passing tractor or dog walker could easily see too much. That meant there had to be another access to the property for a car to draw up. Connie skirted around the edge of the garden fence and made her way around to find the back door.
Tyre tracks in the long grass proved her right. It would be just a few short steps from the vehicle into the house, completely hidden from the road. Firefighters had bashed in the back door, and a kitchen table was just visible, as was the edge of an ageing cooker. The house was ideally positioned. Not far from the city as the crow flew. No close neighbours to get suspicious. The sort of thick farmhouse walls that lent themselves to natural soundproofing as long as the windows weren’t accessible. Connie stepped further away from the house and looked up to check. There were no obvious signs of life behind the upper-floor windows. In fact, there was nothing visible in the upstairs windows. She shielded her eyes. No curtains, no wallpaper. Just darkness behind each pane of glass. As if …
‘This is it,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Definitely fucking it.’ She pulled her mobile from her pocket, getting voicemail in response to dialling Baarda’s number. ‘Baarda, you’ve got to get here right now. I’m at Tamar House, Whitehill Road, Niddrie Mains, and it’s on fire. I have no idea who’s inside.’
Firefighters began sprinting from the back door, waving at paramedics. Connie approached as near as she could without causing an obstruction, trying to catch the conversation. A stretcher was being taken inside, but there was much shaking of heads and shrugging. An oxygen face mask was carried through, and paramedics stood by tense, ready to act.
Connie could wait no longer. She had to know if this was the right house.
‘Excuse me, they only took one stretcher in,’ she said to the paramedic. ‘Does that mean they only found one body?’
‘You are?’ the paramedic asked.
‘With the police,’ Connie replied.
The paramedic nodded, her eyes on the back door of the property. ‘Just one, a male. They’ve done a full sweep now. It’s proving difficult to get him out, and they’re concerned about the level of smoke inhalation. The police certainly won’t be able to speak with him tonight. We’ll have blues and twos on getting him to hospital. If he survives, you can expect him to be there several days, and
that’s before we assess any burns.’
‘So no one else at all in there?’ Connie sighed.
The paramedic gave her a sharp look. ‘Not that we know of, thank God. Just one victim in a fire like this is something to be pleased about.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean …’
The paramedic strode away to talk to a firefighter. Connie stared up at the house. The flames had been extinguished, but a river of smoke ran from every window on the ground floor.
Perhaps she’d been wrong. If Fergus Ariss had been in there alone, there was no evidence that he was Elspeth’s abductor and Angela’s killer. Still, she thought, it was worth waiting and taking a look. She had a pretty accurate image in her head from Meggy’s abduction. Almost skeletal had been the witness’ description. If Fergus Ariss looked like that, Connie would know it was him when she saw him.
When the stretcher finally appeared from the rear door of the house, Connie could see virtually nothing of the man on it. Covered in a blanket, face obscured entirely with a mask and breathing apparatus, all she could tell was that he was Caucasian with brown hair. It wasn’t as if she could ask to have the mask taken off for a better look. He was loaded into the ambulance.
Police officers were taking over now. The ambulance doors closed, and the cordon was lifted momentarily to allow it out. Connie stood feeling useless, staring into the house, where there may or may not be vital evidence remaining. Baarda would have the authority to take charge. Without him, she was merely a hired-gun psychologist with no licence to act.