by Adam Nevill
‘Kat,’ Lewis answered quickly, his voice taut, breathless. He was driving.
‘The police need to be here . . . get here.’
‘What’s wrong?
‘They killed Steve. I saw it.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Some of the people who killed him are in my house.’
‘I don’t . . . Where are you now, Kat?’
‘Home . . . near there. They’ll need an ambulance.’
A long pause ensued. All she could hear was his breathing. ‘I’ll get a car out to you. I’m on my way too. Stay where you are.’
And then she thought of the tall blonde woman, Helene. ‘She was only looking for her brother. They took her too. They made me give her to them.’
‘Kat, you’re not making sense. I need you to calm down and to stay right where you are.’
‘You have to find her. Helene. They have her too.’
35
A distant, muffled roar: the crash of water against rock. A sound Helene had not heard since being carried out to the boat, hooded and bound.
Stiff and racked with shivering, she righted herself in the black sea. Her feet and hands might have dropped away into the darkness below so she tipped her head back to keep her face clear of the surface. If she went under she’d never make it back to the air. There was too little movement remaining in her depleted, dragging legs.
Her eyes flicked around, looking for where the sea met the rocks to create the muted impact at its border, before the land began. Only then did she see the light to her right. Small, bright, not unlike a star in the far distance. It returned a sense of perspective to a mind lost in the watery expanse, amidst beacons that never drew closer.
She wafted her arms harder so that her whole head might break free of the water and see this light better. When enough water had run from her ears, Helene heard distant laughter. One man, then another. Wheezy, hearty laughter travelling through the stillness.
She called out. And she called out again. She called, ‘Help’. Her voice was thin and even quieter than the slop of the small waves in the windless air. But she kept on calling despite the shudders shaking her jaw. She fluttered her hands at her side. She was beyond swimming and only wanted to stay afloat a little longer.
As horrid as the sensation was, at least she was shivering. The muscle convulsions had started when she’d left the last buoy. Her exhausted limbs had slowed and her blood had cooled too quickly. Her body’s engine was no longer able to generate enough heat to combat the permanent, withering, debilitating cold.
This is the end of me, the end of myself. I just want it to stop.
The laughter stopped and Helene cried, ‘No! Don’t . . . go away!’ She dipped under.
Fighting the water to get her head back above the surface; if she stopped moving she would go down fast. A pull from below, a freezing magnetism between her body and a black depth.
Overcoming the shaking of her jaw, she cried out, ‘Help!’ again, as loud as she possibly could. The cry doused one of the few remaining embers of life in her.
The voices returned. They were no longer laughing. She heard the voices talking hurriedly, as if they’d been frightened by something. Two more lights joined the first. The first was stationary. The new lights moved through the air, sideways, along what must be the shore.
‘There!’ a man cried out. A thin band of greyish light flicked over the black surface so near to Helene’s face. A torch. Under its beam, the seawater looked like thin oil.
An uneven silhouette moved behind the light, behind the silhouette, the sudden outline of what might have been a hill. Dull glimmers of stone suggested themselves. The shore. She’d come in much closer than she anticipated. So long had she been in the cold water, the textures and idea of land had erased themselves from her mind.
She’d almost made it. A moment of fascination gripped her; a wonderment at herself. She’d been dropped into the middle of the sea and swum so far, so close to the land. She’d nearly done it all by herself. ‘Valda,’ she whispered.
A second tiny orb of light followed the first. More of the vague, greyish illumination appeared on the water near her head. ‘Christ!’ a voice said. ‘There’s someone in the water.’
‘Can you hear me?’ a second voice called.
Helene nodded. Then remembered she needed to keeping making noise. ‘Cold.’
A new sound entered the worst night of her life, but one that offered an outcome she’d never considered. And it took Helene several seconds to understand that the noise she heard closing on her position was that of a human body wading through water.
‘Baby. Mommy’s coming.’
36
A car engine revved. Headlights appeared and disappeared as the road twisted beneath the vehicle. It sped along a lane shielded by stone walls and unkempt hedgerow.
As familiar as Kat was with the road, the speed of the vehicle hurtling in her direction forced her to retreat from the bend. A speeding car on a narrow, unlit, B-road could easily swing round a corner and destroy a pedestrian. It had happened out here. After all she’d been through, the possibility of being knocked down by a police car was ironic but too horribly plausible to dismiss. She pushed her body into the foliage.
She’d covered no more than half a mile since leaving the cottage. A few lights outside the distant houses of Ivycombe were visible ahead. If this car carried the police, she could easily return home and begin what would be the first of many explanations. But Headscarf had also managed a phone call while half-blind. The woman’s phone had been active when Kat caught up with her at the foot of her bed.
I got the cancers. All over. Don’t. Don’t. They made me do it so I can have more time.
The screen of Headscarf’s phone had been glowing, so Kat had smashed the device from the woman’s hand, breaking her thin forearm with a muffled, sickening crack. So fierce had been her hate for the birdlike creature who’d watched her shower and use the toilet during her captivity that she’d proceeded to belabour the woman into total silence, knocking her about the head, shoulders and neck, before leaving her crumpled down the side of the bed and leaking into the carpet.
As Kat crouched inside the hedge, what was foremost in her mind was who Headscarf had called and notified of Kat’s unexpected insurrection. She feared the swift arrival of brutish reinforcements before the police lights turned the night blue and red.
The red folk, she assumed, would travel from Redstone. Red country and thirty minutes away by road if a car was driven as if in a rally. But it shouldn’t take the police more than fifteen minutes to get to her from Divilmouth, if they got a move on. Ten minutes had passed since she’d called Detective Lewis.
The vehicle whipped past Kat. The occupant hadn’t seen her. But when the car braked hard for the corner she caught a glimpse of the driver. Lewis.
He must have been driving when she’d called him: maybe on duty and using local roads. Uniformed police and an ambulance would surely follow the detective once he’d looked inside the cottage.
Kat forced herself out of the hedgerow and headed back to her house.
The police would be forced to detain her on account of what she’d done to Beard and Headscarf and for using an illegal weapon. But no matter, she’d explain everything. She wouldn’t be a criminal for long. She’d soon be labelled a victim who’d survived a terrifying ordeal. And the revelations that she’d hit the local authorities with would return this small plot of hilly land to the nation’s headlines. The role and reputation of the Brickburgh caves would be revised because the horrors of its history were not the preserve of the distant past.
A new elation at simply being alive was matched by the prospect of telling the police all she knew. Together, she and the rule of law could put an end to the despicable scourge that emanated from Redstone Farm. She’d be instrumental in killing it before anyone else was murdered.
Kat’s eyes moistened as she began to realise she had a future again, and how import
ant a role she must play in the days ahead.
As she wiped away her tears and gathered her wits to explain the awful scene that Detective Lewis was about to discover in her home, Kat realised something else: she was a much stronger person than she’d ever known herself to be.
She smiled. The expression felt unfamiliar around her mouth, like sticky food or a tickling stray hair.
37
Two night fishermen found her, fifteen metres out from the shore. Larry and Ian were local men who’d decided to fish that night because of the clement weather. With their tackle, stove and the live sand-eels they favoured for bait, they’d set up at a favourite spot accessible by foot from deeper inland.
Over the years they had walked from their cars to that same spot to haul flatfish, bass, mackerel and pollack from a pebbly shoreline, from spring right through the summer.
That night they had arrived at their preferred spot just before dusk’s indigo light had vanished like a ghost. Two hours later they’d seen the lights of the boat that had taken Helene out to sea. Three white dots in the distance. They’d judged the craft to have left a beach half a mile down the coast from where they found the girl in the water.
Almost imperceptible to Helene as she’d ploughed headfirst and onwards and seemingly for miles into the black freeze, a northerly current had caused her to drift to where the men had chosen to fish.
Many other things had conspired to save her too, as if the natural world had compelled her to live: a calm sea; warmer than usual spring temperatures at play upon the surface during the day for the previous two months, following a mild winter; an incoming tide that had turned in her favour; and the presence of two fishermen who’d wanted to take advantage of the fair evening weather. It had all added up.
The stamina she had built up by swimming regularly to avert her own melancholy, frustration and the anxieties that life seemed intent on heaping upon her shoulders had also made a significant contribution. Had she not swum so hard for so long she would have drifted past the fishermen. Had the buoys marking rows of crab pots not appeared, her sodden remains might have been picked over by the very crabs the pots were designed to trap. Every variable had coalesced favourably, fortuitously saving her life and her daughter’s future.
But her love for her child had played the biggest role. If she’d believed in such things, and she was tempted to, Helene would have concluded that she was not destined to die that night, because of Valda.
When Helene’s story was shared at the hospital, the fishermen were even more surprised at how far the pale woman must have swum than they had been when they heard her voice near the rocks where they’d been standing to cast their lines.
Ian was forty-six. He’d fished her out. Before walking into the sea, he’d stripped down to his underwear so that he’d have warm clothes to cover a cold body when he came out. Without much thought about his own safety he’d waded up to his shoulders, adjusting his body to the water’s temperature to prevent cold-water shock. He’d then swum another few metres, slipped a hand beneath the young woman’s chin and pulled her to shore, swimming on his side, scissor-kicking for propulsion.
Later, he’d said that just getting her to the rocks had taken most of his strength, but he added that his endeavour was truly put into perspective by what she’d endured and achieved on her own in open, wild water for so long. In her hospital bed, Helene had managed a smile. She’d said, ‘You get used to it.’
She’d been moments from losing full consciousness and was only half awake when Larry and Ian pulled her out of the water. Had she lost consciousness and sunk any further into the hypothermia she’d already succumbed to, the two men would have needed to attempt CPR on the rocks, amidst their tackle, and continue the treatment until the arrival of an ambulance. During the time it would have taken an ambulance to reach that part of the shore and return Helene to the specialist unit at Divilmouth Hospital, she’d probably have passed out and sunk away from this life.
Even if she’d still been alive when she’d been admitted to the hospital, the doctor had told her, she wouldn’t have been far from needing a cardiopulmonary bypass. This would have required the extraction of blood that would then have to be warmed before an emergency transfusion. Extracorporeal membranous oxygenation: that’s what the doctor had called it.
But Helene had avoided that eventuality, just, and side-stepped weeks of convalescence, because the fishermen had acted so quickly following the miracle of hearing her crying out from the offshore darkness.
Ian and Larry had torn off her wet clothes and dried her with a blanket. Beside their camping stove, they had hastily hauled a spare fleece and the second fisherman’s combat trousers onto her body.
Larry had forced hot coffee into her mouth after telling her to cough. She’d not known why, but had obeyed him and coughed. Larry told her later that he’d needed to make sure that she could still swallow before giving her coffee. When she’d coughed gently, he’d wasted no time giving her the hot drink from his flask. The coffee had streaked warmth through her chest like new blood.
The men had then tugged two hats over her head and pulled two pairs of socks over frozen feet that had begun to resemble new marble. Ian’s extreme-weather jacket had covered the fleece when zipped to her shivering chin. Around the coat had gone their second blanket.
Their swift actions had begun the steady return of warmth to her body; they’d headed off the coma that had only been moments away.
Supporting her body in the crooks of their elbows like an injured athlete, they’d taken it in turns to carry her up a hill and along two dirt tracks to their pickup.
‘She’s a weight.’
‘Don’t say that to a lady.’
‘She’s tall is what I meant.’
And so it had gone, brief exchanges between the men’s hard breathing as they’d struggled from the exertion of getting her up that hill.
Eventually, with her body between them – one holding her legs, the other her arms – they’d stumbled to Larry’s Mitsubishi.
Neither man had stopped checking to see if she was awake, or telling her to stay awake. When they’d reached the vehicle, Larry had needed to sit down; he was pushing sixty-three and had exhausted himself getting her that far. Even in darkness, Helene had noticed the sickly pallor of his face against the dark vehicle.
An ambulance met them before they had time to leave in the pickup.
In that part of the country, people knew what to do when someone was pulled from the water. They weren’t all bad, Helene had since decided. Three strangers might have taken her out to sea and thrown her over the side of a boat. But two other strangers had fished her back out again and saved her life. Odder things might have happened to a girl during a weekend away from home, but never to her.
38
Lewis came out of the cottage unsteadily and it appeared to Kat that he might be sick. His handsome features had no colour beyond an ashen grey. When he paused to grip the porch post under the carriage light, Kat stepped out of the darkness.
As if electrocuted, Lewis flinched. He seemed frightened of her. No one had ever been frightened of her before, but Kat sensed his struggle to connect the carnage inside the house to the tearful woman he’d met in Sheila’s office.
‘What the fuck did you do?’ he said.
Kat didn’t answer. As if to prompt a response, Lewis pointed at the open door. He was wearing a fashionable suit. Hugo Boss. She recognised the cut from a recent feature she’d written in Devon Life and Style. It looked like the sample they’d been sent that had been too small for Steve.
‘I’d say the response was proportionate.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve kept me captive for four days. In there. My home. They were going to kill me.’
Lewis remained speechless. His eyes worked hard at her face. Comprehension was losing out to shock.
‘Have you called an ambulance?’ Kat asked. The unnatural calm in her voice surprised her.
The detective nodded.
‘Where are the others?’
‘Who?’
‘The police.’
Lewis finally stood taller, straighter, as if she’d reminded him of his role. ‘On their way.’
‘I need to make a statement. I know what happened to Steve, my boyfriend.’ She nodded at her house. ‘They killed him. I saw them do it. They had to wait a while before they could fake my suicide as well.’
Lewis finally came out from under the porch canopy. He looked drained and sick. One of his eyelids spasmed. He was fairly young and Kat assumed he’d little experience of serious crimes.
‘I’m afraid you’ve got your work cut out, Detective. For the next few years, at least. I’d say –’
‘I’d say you’ve said enough.’
And Kat’s arm was up and behind her back. He’d moved so quickly, turned her round and pressed her thumb so far into the palm of her hand that the pain immobilised her. ‘Hey!’
Her left arm was snatched from the air and brought about to join the other.
Kat tried to kick her heel into the detective’s shin. In response, he depressed her thumb further into the palm of her hand and she screamed from a lightning bolt of agony, shooting up her arm to dazzle her brain. Her strength withered as his muscular hands tugged her wrists to the small of her back. Aftershave engulfed her head as Lewis pushed her down, face-first into the tarmac.
Her ribs impacted with the unforgiving road surface. She moved her head to the side at the final moment and issued a thin scream.
A broad knee thumped between her shoulders and knocked the breath from her lungs. A bracelet looped her wrists. Plastic clicked. The band tightened, cutting into her flesh. A plastic tie.
As the knee was withdrawn from her back, his hand slipped inside the collar of her hooded top and clenched. Kat was yanked to her feet, choking as the fabric noosed her throat, bruising the cartilage.