by T. M. Logan
There’s a black Ford Focus in the driveway, parked at an angle opposite the Mercedes and the Range Rover I saw yesterday. There are no police cars. No uniforms, no flashing lights. No helicopters buzzing overhead. Just the wind high up in the trees, bare autumn branches swaying against a gunmetal grey sky. The sound of dogs barking furiously comes from somewhere around the rear of the house. I jump out of my car, shoes crunching over the gravel, looking into each of the cars in turn. A doll discarded on the back seat of the Mercedes; no movement behind any of the windows at the front of the house. The front door itself is ajar, only a few inches, but it’s enough to see a thin slice of the dark hallway beyond.
Is Dominic Church here? Someone is here.
I stop in the doorway, strain my ears for any sound.
Nothing. Just the wind, tree branches clicking and scratching against each other next to the high stone wall. I reach into my handbag for a weapon but there is only the attack alarm, the noisemaker, which will be useless in a place as isolated as this. My fist closes around my bunch of keys instead.
I take another two steps, pushing on the front door. All my instincts tell me not to call out, not to alert anyone to my presence. Instead, I listen again for any human sound, any movement or conversation.
Silence. Even the dogs have stopped barking.
I push on the door again and it swings noiselessly open. There are no lights on and the hallway is dark even though it’s barely noon. I stand completely still, willing my ears to pick up something, anything from inside, straining to hear the sound of a baby’s cry from somewhere deeper in the house. But the only sound is the insistent, steady tick of a grandfather clock opposite the front door. Apart from that, The Grange is utterly, completely still, as silent as a funeral.
I step over the big stone threshold and move around the door. And that’s when I see him.
Gerald is lying on his back in the hallway. His jaw and the left side of his face almost completely blown away, the thick cream carpet beneath him a mass of red. A double-barrelled shotgun lies on the floor next to his hand.
I know instinctively that it’s hopeless but I force myself to kneel beside him anyway, putting two fingers against the big carotid artery next to his windpipe. His skin is still warm to the touch but there is no pulse, no sign of life. He’s gone.
He’s lying on his back, only a few feet from the front door. I try to picture it, imagine him suspicious, on edge, arming himself from the gun cabinet in the lounge when he hears the ring of the doorbell. Pulling the front door open and being shot immediately, barely a chance to register the gun in Dominic Church’s hands. No chance at all to defend himself.
I’m not going to let the same thing happen to me.
I pick up the shotgun, remembering the first time I met Dominic Church, only five days ago. Can it really be only five days? Don’t make the same mistake twice. With blood thumping in my ears, I press the barrel release lever and the gun clicks open, revealing the circular brass caps of two shells, side by side. Loaded. Neither have been fired. Gerald didn’t even have a chance to get a single shot off. I snap the gun shut again, the polished walnut stock smooth against my palms.
Where the hell are the police?
Still crouching, I lay the heavy weapon across my lap and dial Gilbourne’s number on my phone. An engaged tone comes beeping back into my ear. Shit.
A sound. A voice. What was that? Faint, from somewhere else in the house, from above me, the first floor?
Mia?
I have to move. I slip the phone back into my pocket. With multiplying terror at what I’m going to find in the rest of the house, I heft the gun in both hands and make my way upstairs, my shoes sinking into the thick carpet. On the first floor landing I wait, listen again, straining my ears to pick up the slightest sound.
Still nothing. The master bedroom is empty, the bed neatly made, the room tidy, nothing that looks out of place. Keep going. I go to the spiral staircase to the second floor and move quickly up it, expecting the blast of a gun with every step that takes me higher. There’s a very particular smell in my nostrils, growing stronger the higher I go. Oil-sharp and acrid. Dangerous. The stink of petrol.
A sick, metallic taste blooms on my tongue. Fear.
With the shotgun raised to my shoulder, I go to the first door on the right, the nursery, saying a silent prayer. Please. Just this. This one life. I will never ask anything again, but please let Mia be spared. Using the muzzle of the shotgun, I nudge the door open.
Angela is lying just inside the doorway.
She is on her side, curled into herself. The side of her blouse torn by a shotgun blast, the carpet beneath her stained dark crimson red.
Oh no.
Oh no.
Panic is rising in me, heat flowing up to my face. I kneel by Angela’s side, touching my fingers to her neck in search of a pulse. It feels intimate, almost intrusive, to be touching her as she lies here when we had not even shaken hands yesterday. There is a pulse, weak and thready, but still there. Unconscious but still breathing, her airway clear. There’s still a chance.
I ball up a bedsheet and press it to her wound.
‘Hold on, Angela. I’m here and help’s coming.’
I pull out my phone and dial 999, covering her with a blanket as I wait for the call to connect. A part of me had known I’d find Angela here in this room as soon as I saw her husband’s body in the hall. I knew she would fight to defend her granddaughter, guarding the entrance to the nursery. And so she has. The stink of petrol is stronger here, almost overpowering, the floor and furniture stained dark with it. It is splashed everywhere, up the walls and curtains. The smell transports me back to that day in Libya, seeing the corpses scattered in groups, in ragged lines, in ones and twos, dark blood soaked into the dust beneath them. Civilians, all. Men, women. Children.
The call connects and I ask for an ambulance, giving the details as fast as I can.
‘Is the attacker still in the house?’ the operator is saying. ‘Are you in immediate danger?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How many victims?’
‘Two. One dead, one injured. Both gunshot wounds.’
I realise as I say it that they won’t send paramedics in now until armed police have cleared the house and neutralised any threat.
‘Anyone else hurt?’ the operator says.
‘Not sure.’
I step over Angela’s prone form and move further into the room but it is a wreck, everything turned over, drawers emptied, baby clothes and sheets and bottles of formula milk strewn across the floor. My eyes search out the wooden crib in the corner. It is on its side, broken in on itself, the wooden bars snapped, the mattress upended and laying beneath the frame. Something else. Small. Delicate. Pinned beneath the cot, motionless. Lifeless.
The 999 operator is still talking but I can’t hear him anymore.
No. No. No.
A sob rises in my throat as I realise what it is.
A tiny arm sticking out from under the bedding.
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I stumble to the overturned cot, my eyes blurring with tears.
A drumbeat hammers in my head, Kathryn’s unspoken plea and my own promise. Please protect Mia. Please protect Mia. I knew there was danger, and I’ve failed her. We’ve all failed her. So many wasted lives. Kathryn, who sacrificed herself to protect this child, all that she had left of her sister. Angela and Gerald, shot by the man who almost killed their daughter a year ago. Zoe, locked in an endless sleep in the white room two floors below.
Less than twenty-four hours ago I was here with Mia while she giggled and smiled, Angela cuddling her granddaughter, talking to her, feeding her. I held Mia myself, felt the warmth of her little body, the touch of her tiny fingers on my cheek.
Now she’s gone. All gone.
I let my phone fall to the floor, pulling the frame of the upturned cot away as gently as I can to reach the tiny body beneath. Moving the broken slats and shifting the frame of th
e cot to the side so I can lift the mattress away. Touching her arm as gently as I can, I feel for a pulse at her wrist but there’s nothing, the skin waxy and smooth, the fingers already stiffening in death. I push the mattress away to move more of the weight off her. This most innocent victim, the only innocent one among all of us.
I wipe more tears away with my sleeve and reach under the bedding with one hand to pull carefully on her arm with the other, not wanting to look at her but knowing that I must. I slide her body gently out.
A gut-punch of disbelief, of horror and grief and confusion all mixed together.
Not Mia.
Not a body. A doll. Just a baby-sized doll dressed in a white sleepsuit, blue eyes staring up at the ceiling, tufts of synthetic blonde hair brushed neatly to the side.
I collapse back onto my heels, the relief rushing over me like an avalanche, blanketing me, a held breath bursting from my lungs. The relief is so powerful it’s almost unbearable, a high more intense than any drug. Mia is not here, which means there is still a sliver of hope. I shift the rest of the bedding to double-check she’s nowhere beneath it. No.
I go over to check Angela again. Her pulse is still there but the sheet next to her wound is soaked with blood. I pull out another clean sheet from a drawer and press it on, slide a cushion under her head.
The 999 operator is still on the line when I retrieve my phone.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I tell him. ‘Second-floor bedroom, female victim in her seventies, critically injured. Please hurry.’
I hang up and lean down close to Angela’s ear, hoping she can hear me.
‘Hold on, Angela. I’m going to find Mia.’
It’s what she would want me to do. What she would do, in my place.
I grab the shotgun and stand up. The smell of petrol is overpowering, sharp and oily and burning into my nostrils. Mia’s nursery is soaked with it, the cot, the chest of drawers, dark splashes on the carpet. One spark and this whole room would go up like a bomb, everything ablaze within seconds.
So why hadn’t it been lit?
I look into the other rooms on this floor. Spare bedrooms and a bathroom. All untouched. As far as I’ve seen, the nursery is the only room that has been turned upside down and soaked in petrol. Not methodically but fast, rage-fuelled destruction as he searched in vain for the one thing he’d come here to find. I stand in the middle of the debris, trying to make sense of it. There’s enough petrol poured in her room to turn it into an inferno, her guardians dead or injured, and no sign of Mia.
So why not light the fire to cover up the crime?
Then it hits me.
Because he wasn’t finished.
He hasn’t found her. He has to find her, to be sure the job’s done before he lights the match. Even a burned body would yield DNA, wouldn’t it? Unless it was completely incinerated, and he could never be sure of that in a house fire. Too many variables. He can’t risk leaving a body to burn. He has to be sure that no trace of her is ever found. Take the baby and burn the rest, the clothes, the sheets, the muslin cloths, the bottles of formula, anything that might hold a trace of her DNA. Extinguish all traces of her, as if she never existed.
But if he hasn’t started the fire, he hasn’t found her. I pray that I’m right. Had I disturbed him when I arrived a few minutes before? Had he fled before he could finish what he came here for?
I go across the hall into a spare bedroom. Check under the bed, behind a desk. Nothing.
The urge to shout Mia’s name is almost overwhelming, but I can’t risk it. Instead I will search every inch of this mansion if I have to.
Think.
Angela was doing what Kathryn did when she got off that train five days ago. Drawing the danger away from Mia. Away from the baby. Right from when Mia was born, Angela had been doing exactly this – consciously or otherwise. That was why the nursery was on the top floor of the house, rather than next to their own bedroom on the first floor, or next to her mother below that in the annexe. They had done what parents have always done, put the precious child in the topmost branches of the tree, to be further away from predators on the ground. In their walled estate in the middle of the countryside, as far away as possible from a predator they knew was out there. But it hasn’t been far enough.
I turn to face the stairs and drop into a kneeling position, the shotgun tight into my shoulder. Close my eyes and listen for five seconds. Ten.
There. Was that something? I stay perfectly still, my breath held, turning my head slowly from side to side. For a moment I think my ears are playing tricks. Then I hear it again, faint, muffled, almost inaudible. But unmistakeable.
A cry.
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I run to the bedrooms at the end of the hall. Two doors opposite each other, both ajar. I push the right-hand one open, looking all around for the source of the noise. A double bed, untouched. A dressing table and stool. A big oak wardrobe. Empty. I drop to all fours and look under the bed. Nothing.
Across the hall, the other room is a mirror image of the previous bedroom save for two twin beds rather than a double. The beds are covered with yellow and black tartan blankets, flat and untouched, nowhere to hide a baby. No ottoman base, nowhere that might open to reveal a hiding space. There is a slatted door into a walk-in closet, empty rows of hangers, old shoe boxes stacked high against the wall. None of them big enough.
She’s not here. Did I imagine it? No, no.
The noise comes again. Muffled, again, and I feel helpless frustration start to boil up inside. Mia is close by, I feel her. In a roof space? There’s no trapdoor to the attic here, not in this room anyway. Memories strobe through my mind. Images of Mia in her cot yesterday, Angela opening the blinds in her room, warming a bottle of milk in the microwave, telling me about her daughter and her granddaughter. Angela wasn’t at all what I expected, very down-to-earth despite how far she’d come from her own upbringing. Or perhaps, because of it. Her soft Liverpool vowels pushing through a little stronger when she talked about her own bedroom, as a young girl growing up.
Two in each bed and the littlest in the bottom drawer.
My eyes are drawn to a chest of drawers taking up one half of the far wall, solid dark oak with four wide drawers. An oval brass-framed mirror above it on a stand, cream lace doilies and porcelain figurines beside it.
I pull open the bottom drawer.
Mia stares back at me, big blue eyes glistening with tears, blinking against the sudden light. She gives another startled cry and I feel as if my heart is about to explode with relief.
‘Hey, you,’ I say, feeling the weight of tears behind my eyes again. ‘Hello Mia.’
She is lying on a soft white blanket, one half of the drawer cleared to make a little nest big enough for her to lie in. She has a yellow muslin cloth clutched in one little hand, damp from where she has been sucking it. I pick her up, blanket and all, and lay her gently onto the carpet, turning her this way and that to check for any blood, any cuts or signs of injury, but there’s nothing obvious. I wipe her tears gently away and her small hand closes around my finger.
‘Come on, little one,’ I say. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
I sling the shotgun over my shoulder, wrap Mia up in the blanket and carry her down the back stairs. They must have been designed for use by the domestic staff back when the house was first built, they’re much narrower and darker than the main staircase that leads up from the hallway. The back stairs run all the way down the rear of the house with only a few windows, the bottom section deep in shadow. I stop halfway down to listen for any other noise, any sign that Church is waiting for me in the scullery below, but hear nothing apart from Mia’s low gurgling and snuffling. Now I have her, safe, unharmed, my only thought is to get her out of here as fast as possible. But there is one more stop I have to make before we can leave.
I reach the bottom of the stairs and creep through the scullery, converted into a walk-in larder, its walls lined with shelves and cupboards. To the right is the m
ain house, to the left, the annexe. I slip left and creep down the corridor, the creaking of wooden floorboards horribly loud in the silence. I unsling the shotgun from my shoulder and hold it one-handed, the stock tucked against my elbow, finger on the trigger. The door to the room at the end of the corridor is closed. Zoe’s room. Dominic Church’s ex-wife. I have a horrible, sick feeling in my stomach that he will have taken his revenge on her, too, finished off what he started a year ago while she lies helpless in bed.
I push open the door to the white room.
Zoe’s here, her head turned slightly to the side, wires and machines and clean white sheets, the monitor next to her bed still beeping its slow and steady rhythm, her body somewhere between life and death. No wounds, no sign of injury. She seems the same as she was yesterday.
‘I have to take Mia away from here,’ I say, standing by her bed. ‘I’m sorry, Zoe.’
If there was a way of taking her with us, I would. But she needs the machines, she needs this room. I check the machine’s monitor. Her pulse seems regular, no alarms or warning messages. The police will be here soon and—
A reflection in the glass of the monitor. Movement. A flash of something in the garden behind me. A figure?
I turn, dropping into a crouch by the bed to scan the windows that give out onto the lawn, cold creeping over my skin. My phone rings in my pocket and I flinch in alarm, laying the shotgun on the floor to snatch it up with my free hand, still clutching Mia in the other.
Stuart’s number shows on the display.
‘Ellen.’ His voice is tight with worry. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here, at The Grange, you have to get everybody here as fast as—’
‘I told you to stay at the hotel!’ It’s almost a shout. ‘We diverted the team, we had a strong positive sighting on the target but it turned into nothing.’