Dead Memories: An addictive and gripping crime thriller

by Angela Marsons

  ‘Hey, guv, who’d you say?…’

  It didn’t take him long to realise he was talking to an empty room.

  He moved to the hallway and glanced into the lounge.

  Of course, she was heading upstairs to check Alison’s bathroom.

  ‘Hey, guv,’ he called, from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘She ain’t up there, mate… sorry… I mean…’

  ‘So, where is she?’ he asked, turning to one of the constables who had broken into the house.

  ‘Tore off in an Astra Estate just a few—’

  Bryant swore and headed back to the kitchen, taking out his phone.

  He dialled her number and quietly seethed as it rang and rang before depositing him at voicemail. He ended the call and tried again. Same.

  ‘Damn it,’ he growled, calling Stacey. What the hell was she playing at?

  ‘Hey Stace, the guv call in?’

  ‘Err, no… aren’t you?…’

  ‘Did you call her for anything?’

  ‘Nope, not a—’

  ‘Stace, we had anything through recently from Keats?’

  ‘Hang on… nope nothing. I can—’

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, looking around.

  The squad car already here had to stay to keep the premises safe until they could get it re-secured.

  ‘Stace, send a squad car out to fetch me.’

  ‘Okay, Bryant, but what the hell is?…’

  ‘It’s the guv, Stace. The guv has gone AWOL.’

  One Hundred Twenty-Four

  Kim ignored the seventh call to her mobile and pulled over.

  She knew some of those calls would be from Bryant and some probably from Stacey.

  Yes, she felt bad running out on her colleague like that and not least because she’d taken his car but the text message had been specific.

  She took out her phone and read it again.

  ‘You know who I have and you know who I want. Come alone or she dies. You know where I am.’

  Enough people had died this week because of one person’s sick vendetta against her. She couldn’t risk one more person getting hurt.

  And the person who had sent the text message was right.

  She did know where Alison would be.

  She just didn’t know who she was with.

  One Hundred Twenty-Five

  Alison tried to stem the feeling of panic rising within her, but the fear inside her body wanted to get out.

  She knew that she was outside; she could feel wisps of her hair blowing in the breeze and the freshness of the air around her.

  She knew that she was lying on her back and that storm clouds were passing overhead.

  She could feel brick biting into the bare skin of her arms and her scalp.

  She knew she was on some kind of ledge because her right arm had fallen over the side and hung limply, uselessly, against the brick.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been here, but none of these things were causing the terror to surge around her veins.

  That was coming from the fact that she couldn’t move.

  Not one muscle in her body was responding to the commands in her brain.

  Her mind was clear, sharp, focussed. But no matter how forcefully she told it to send messages along her nerves, communication had been severed.

  She had no clue of the time and her last memory had been early morning.

  She remembered getting out of bed, drinking a green tea, heading upstairs and changing into her running gear. It was enough to ease the guilt for her constant grazing habit while desk-bound and her adrenaline had still been high from the night before. She’d needed the exercise to expel it from her system.

  She’d left the house just before 7 a.m., turned left to the end of the street, shortcut through the trading estate to the park. Joined other morning joggers, taken a rest at the halfway point close to the bins and then…

  Her thoughts came to a standstill. It was what she did every morning, knowing the circuit was approximately two miles. And she could remember it from that morning.

  She closed her eyes and thought harder, trying to get past the brick wall of the bin rest.

  Leave house

  Turn left

  Cross Road

  Trading Estate

  Enter Park

  Man with poodle

  Joggers

  People sitting on benches

  Lady on bike

  Stop at bins

  Bend over, catch breath

  Ouch

  There it was, the brick wall again but there was something else first. A pinprick, like a sting to her back as she’d bent forward hands on knees, breathing heavily.

  And then nothing.

  She had no recollection after that.

  Had she been assaulted, raped? What the hell was going on?

  Knowing she’d been drugged did nothing to calm the fear because now she understood why she couldn’t move and she also understood there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  One Hundred Twenty-Six

  ‘Come on, guys, talk to me,’ Bryant urged from the top of the room. ‘What the hell do we think is going on?’

  ‘The text message must have been from the killer,’ Penn said, more to fill the silence, he thought.

  ‘But why no contact?’ Bryant asked in frustration.

  Stacey put down the phone. ‘Nothing. I reckon the battery is out,’ she said.

  Damn, they were trying to track someone who did not want to be found.

  ‘I’ve got nothing on CCTV,’ Penn offered. ‘It’s a mile to the first camera and three traffic islands in between. She could be anywhere.’

  He hadn’t yet informed Woody that the guv was MIA but he had no clue how long he could cover. She was a phone call away from a whole heap of shit which, right now, was the least of his worries, but if they didn’t have some kind of breakthrough soon it was a phone call he was going to have to make.

  What was she walking into and against whom?

  ‘Maybe the killer told her to come alone? That’d explain why she legged it,’ Penn said.

  Bryant knew he had a point. If the guv thought she was putting anyone else in danger she would have gone it alone.

  ‘Should we have listened to Alison?’ Stacey asked, quietly. ‘She urged us to consider other potential suspects but we’ve been stuck on Duggar this whole time. Maybe we should have—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, Stace,’ Bryant said, staring at the board. ‘Knowing who it is doesn’t help us at all. Just like earlier, all that matters is following the crumbs, the logic of the killer. It’s the only thing that will tell us where she is.’

  All three of them fell silent and stared at the board for a few minutes.

  Penn broke the heavy silence. ‘Everything about these incidents is as close as it could possibly be to the actual event. The young kids in the identical flat, just a few floors below. The handcuffs, the radiator, the cracker packet. All accurate.’

  ‘The middle-aged couple, respectable, likeable, burned alive in front of the place that was important to them all,’ Stacey said.

  ‘And the assault,’ Bryant added. ‘In the exact same place that the bastard used to take… the girls to abuse them. The five pound note, ripped in her pocket. So, what does that tell us?’ Bryant asked, frowning.

  ‘That it’s all in the detail,’ Stacey said. ‘Our killer has to remain as close as possible to actual events to cause the maximum amount of pain.’

  ‘So, Dawson’s death,’ Penn said. ‘He’s using Alison as the work colleague who fell—’

  ‘So, it has to be somewhere high,’ Stacey finished. ‘Alison has to fall from a great height.’

  ‘And the place has to mean something to the boss,’ Penn said.

  A memory from earlier in the week clicked in to Bryant’s brain. Something the guv had said.

  ‘Come on guys,’ he said, grabbing his jacket. ‘I think I know where we have to go.’

  One Hundred Twenty-
Seven

  Kim parked the car, looked up to the sky and shuddered. It was a long way to fall. No one would survive.

  She tried to push away the night-time eeriness of the place as she began to climb the stairs to the top.

  She knew without a doubt that this was where Alison had been taken. It was the only place that made sense.

  Every fibre of her being urged her to go faster, to take the stairs two at a time, but she had to pace herself. It was a long climb and despite her beating heart she had to force herself to remember that the floor show would not start without her. The floor show was for her.

  The killer wanted her to witness the death of her colleague and then meet her own end, as that had been her most recent torture and one where the wound was still open.

  But how the hell could she hope to save Alison or herself when she didn’t even know who she was fighting?

  Her opponent knew everything about her and she knew nothing about them.

  She could feel her own momentum growing faster. Her feet trying to keep up with her thoughts.

  She had to go back to the beginning. She had to know who she was dealing with, who she was up against so both she and Alison were not going to wind up dead.

  Her gut had told her Duggar wasn’t behind the killings despite the evidence. Both her meeting with him and everything she’d learned since had confirmed that feeling despite the presence of his footprint all over the case.

  As she climbed, Kim thought about Amy and Mark, young and addicted to drugs, without family support and desperate for somewhere to belong. A home of their own.

  The Phelps family had been good people, forced to visit their son in a place that was completely alien to them, uncomfortable in an unfamiliar landscape.

  John Duggar acting against type, simply doing what he was told by someone who had probably been nice to him.

  Billie Styles lured to a place by her ex-boyfriend who probably had no clue how she was going to be assaulted.

  Ernest Beckett, blackmailed and threatened with ruin of his life and reputation.

  Symes and his hate club with a reach far beyond the prison walls.

  And still Kim didn’t know who had ordered the book. Her gut told her that one single fact was important.

  But from what she had seen she knew this person hated her with a blind passion. She knew they were ruthless, cunning and had ice running in their veins. They were able to murder without a second thought yet charm to get what they wanted.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Kim said out loud as lines began to appear between the dots in her mind.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she repeated as her pace up the steps quickened.

  She finally knew who she was going to meet.

  One Hundred Twenty-Eight

  ‘How many steps to the top?’ Bryant asked, as the three of them tried to remain together as they climbed the watch tower of Dudley Castle.

  The space was narrow and claustrophobic, forcing them into single file for the ascent as all of them shone their torches on the ground.

  ‘Around two hundred, I think,’ Penn said from behind. Stacey was sandwiched in between.

  ‘Good job getting us in, Penn,’ Bryant whispered.

  ‘Everyone round here knows about the shortcut.’

  They had parked on the car park just down from the main entrance to the site.

  ‘I used to do the Ghost Walks in my teens,’ he said. ‘I was a skeleton but had to get back down to the pub to be the Grey Lady too,’ he whispered back.

  Penn had guided them through the darkness, up the hill and past the cannon on the north side of the castle.

  ‘You really think she’s here?’ Stacey asked as Bryant felt some air from the top. They were getting close.

  ‘Guv mentioned it earlier in the week. Keith and Erica used to bring her to the zoo and castle all the time. The place is significant for her. The killer has to know that. And it’s bloody high,’ he added.

  Besides which, he thought to himself, she has to be here because otherwise she’d be dead.

  One Hundred Twenty-Nine

  Kim took the last step which led to the top of the building.

  She took a deep breath, back where it all began.

  She pushed open the door to the roof of the tower block called Chaucer House.

  Her eyes quickly adjusted to the altered light as her gaze rested on the figure who was waiting.

  Kim stepped onto the roof.

  ‘Good evening, Mallory, and, how are you?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you, Stone,’ she said with a coldness that chilled Kim’s blood.

  ‘Where’s Alison?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice even. ‘You have me now, so it’s time to let her go.’

  A light laugh came from her lip. ‘Oh, you really don’t want me to do that?’ Mallory asked, looking to the ground.

  Kim followed her gaze and saw a rope, a fucking bell rope, like the one that had given way on Dawson.

  For a second she was right back there, on the ground, crawling across gravel, screaming warnings when the frayed rope snapped and sent her colleague plunging to his death.

  She caught her breath and focussed on the woman before her who had taken out a knife.

  ‘I’ll let her go when I’m ready.’

  Kim followed the trail of the rope across the flat roof from where it was double tied around the fixings of a heating unit, coiled in the middle of the roof like a discarded fire hose and then trailed to the edge of the building where Alison lay, unmoving, on her back.

  Kim knew the width of that edging and one false move would send her tumbling over the edge and to certain death. Kim had no idea how securely the woman was tied to the rope.

  All she knew was that she had to stop this final outcome. If Mallory wanted to remain true to form, then she would push Alison over the edge to torture her before killing her. Another life lost because of her.

  She had to find a way to trade Alison’s life for hers.

  ‘I’m the one you want,’ Kim said, taking a small step forward.

  Mallory did the same, towards Alison.

  ‘If you try to come near me, I’ll push her,’ she warned. ‘You should know that I’m the one in control here and I will get what I want.’

  Kim stood still. ‘You know, Mallory, if you wanted my attention that badly you could have called. We could have done lunch. Did you really have to kill all those people?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and even. Right now, Mallory held all the cards. She was only a few steps away from Alison.

  She had done exactly what Mallory had asked of her, in an effort to save Alison’s life, but now she was here she honestly didn’t know if she could, and no one knew where she was.

  Mallory was right about two things: she was in control and Kim was very much on her own.

  The woman smiled at her in a sickly sweet way as she took two steps backwards. The evil glinted at her; the menace stilled the breath in her chest.

  Mallory reached out one delicate, manicured hand and pushed Alison over the edge.

  One Hundred Thirty

  ‘What’s the time?’ Bryant asked, as they hurried towards the car.

  ‘Ten to eight,’ Stacey answered.

  ‘And Dawson died at?…’

  ‘About three minutes past the hour,’ Stacey answered.

  Bryant cursed himself for having called it wrong. If anything happened to either Alison or the guv he would never be able to forgive himself.

  ‘So, we’re agreed?’ he said, as they got back into Penn’s car. ‘The flats where the guv lived at Hollytree.’

  ‘It’s the only place left,’ Stacey said, breathlessly, as his phone began to ring.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said, seeing Woody’s name flashing on the screen. He had the feeling of being out of time in more ways than one.

  ‘Sir…’

  ‘Bryant, please tell me that an incident on the roof of Chaucer House has nothing to do with your boss, yourself or the current investigation into�
�’

  ‘What type of incident?’ he asked.

  ‘No detail as yet. Officers are en route now what the hell?…’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Bryant said, ending the call and switching off his phone.

  Bryant did a quick calculation of the time and distance that stood between them and the guv.

  ‘Okay, Penn, let’s see how you can make this thing go,’ he said, putting on his seat belt.

  As his colleague tore out of the car park Bryant had that feeling of rushing and speeding to work when the clock was telling you that you were already too late.

  One Hundred Thirty-One

  ‘All those people died because of how much you hated me?’ Kim asked, as they stood facing each other. Her eyes were now focussed on the taut rope that strained against the heating equipment, saving Alison from certain death.

  ‘Don’t try and distract me, Stone. I’m sure you’ve put it all together.’

  ‘By my reckoning, if you want to do this right we’ve got a few minutes to kill. What the hell am I going to do to stop you?’ Kim asked, throwing out her arms. ‘I have nothing to fight you with and Dawson fell at three minutes past the hour, so talk to me. Why so many people?’ she asked, trying desperately to think. She had nothing. No weapon. No way to distract her opponent to gain the upper hand.

  All she could do was play for time.

  Time… she realised, suddenly.

  She deliberately looked down towards the straining rope. Mallory watched her every move. She took a step closer to the heater knowing that the woman would do the same.

  ‘You were the outreach worker,’ Kim said. ‘You offered Amy and Mark blankets, a meal. You gained their trust. Told them you could help them with a flat. You called and lured them there with the key Duggar had cut when he viewed the flat?’