“I hope,” Sylvia said, raising her glass, “your wealthy brother brought you wildly extravagant gifts, and meals out.”
Kate giggled. “He bought me a bottle of duty-free perfume, and two bottles of posh wine, one of them you’re drinking now. As for meals out, he says my cooking’s better anyway, and he likes staying at home with us.”
Harry turned to Maurice. “Fishing trips? Golf weekends?”
“One of those I expect .” Maurice nodded vigorously. “He’s a nice man, my big twin. But he’s forgotten about family life. Half the time he speaks Arabic by mistake, and Kate and I sit staring at him with our mouths open.”
“So back to Dubai tomorrow? He wasn’t here long.”
“He can’t afford to be.”
“And his own house?” Morrison had explained that the team sent to trace Mark Howard and arrest him, had not been able to trace him. He evidently owned a house of some value but had never appeared there. No glimpse of him had cropped up at a single hotel across the entire area. His arrival had not been reported at any airport, and his flight out was also unknown. Golf courses, both public and prestigiously private, had not seen him. The man had melted, always supposing he had ever arrived at all.
Maurice helped Kate top up the glasses. Harry put his hand over the top and shook his head. “Or I won’t be able to drive home.”
Sylvia smiled. “I love your brother’s posh wine. I’d gladly drink all you give me. It’s a shame we couldn’t meet him. I was looking forward to seeing this perfect replica.”
“I’d hoped so too,” Kate said between sips. “But it’s a long way from Cu - um Cumbria. That’s where he has another cottage. And he’s off tomorrow. Such a shame.” Her glance at her husband seemed less casual than usual, but she smiled, adding, „he never talks about business, of course. He says we’d be bored.“
In the car on the way home, Sylvia pulled up her coat collar, begged Harry to increase the heating, and said, muffled by wool, “Well, we didn’t learn much, if anything. Did this monied brother go through duty-free in Dubai or just buy the stuff before he left?”
“Is there even duty-free in Dubai? Everything’s tax-free anyway, isn’t it?”
Sylvia momentarily sat up. “There was a new unopened bottle of Taliska on the dresser by the glasses. Does that mean he went to Scotland?”
“They sell Talisker Scotch all over the place. We should buy some ourselves. I expect. And the good wine too.”
Sylvia interrupted. “Buy whatever you like, my love. But first, what about this fellow having a house in the Lake District? Kate saying Cu – and then knew she shouldn’t say it – and changed it to Cumbria. Why on earth would a money-launderer go boating on Windermere?”
“So what starts with Cu in or around Gloucestershire?”
She couldn’t think of any. They stumbled out of the car at the Rochester Manor garage and ran to the house. “They should build direct access. A tunnel.”
Once indoors and hurrying to the smaller living room, Harry said. “Tunnels. That wretched cellar in the mock Tudor house. You know, with the chimney. We have to go back there. What about scratches on the walls from girls kept there? Yes, I know, the police scrubbed the place from top to bottom, but what about in the tunnel? Under the bed? And could there be a ‘C-U‘ nearby?”
“The only place I can think of is Cumlistdowns. It’s almost in Wiltshire, I think. Forest, hills, streams, no town anywhere near.”
“Are we looking for Mark Howard or Eve Daish or the serial killer burying his corpses up the chimney?”
“Never mind. Let’s go back to the Tudor place tomorrow.”
“Safer than searching for Lionel bloody Sullivan,” Harry mumbled. “He could be anywhere by now and if you or I stumbled over him, we could be dead in minutes. I had a nightmare about it. Blood on your navy silk. Leave that butcher to the law.”
Her fingernails were long, tough, but broken. Eve gazed with strange curiosity at the back of her hands. They appeared to belong to someone else entirely. The dark and grazed knuckles, the cuts and burns, and the misshapen nails had never been hers and could not be hers now. She was on the floor where Master had left her. He had whipped her so hard, she could not stand and doubted she could walk. Yet she was so accustomed to pain now, that she divorced her mind from both the terror and the agony, and switched her brain to its meandering lassitude.
One thumbnail had grown claw-like, hooked over and as thick without even turning brittle. She crawled, not on her knees but on her elbows, and pulled herself across the floor to the bed. A sudden splinter in her buttocks made her bite her upper lip, and that swelled too. Once beside the bed, she grabbed the iron base and hauled herself half onto the sliver of foam mattress. The whole bed moved, and she fell back. Now she was more beneath the bedstead than on top of it, and the pain had reintroduced itself. She began to cry, then gulped and stopped. Crying exhausted her and gave no benefit except an increase to the misery. She had been teaching herself not to cry.
Beneath the bedsprings, the floorboards were filthy with dust, cobwebs, and stains. The stench of the room seemed far stronger. Eve saw lumps of grit and wondered if they were faeces. She didn’t touch anything, and breathed deeply, fighting for energy. When energy did not come, Eve knew she must allow herself more time. The wall beneath and behind the bed was near enough to touch, so she scratched at the old plaster, using her clawed thumbnail to write her name. The darkness was complete as usual since Master could switch her light off from outside, and usually did unless he wanted to play. But Eve was accustomed and saw better in the dark now than she had ever managed in her life before. EVE DA - , she heard footsteps and turned over, rolling as far as she could from the rusty bedstead.
But Master did not come in. She heard his voice and knew he was talking to someone else. Another voice answered, “Not now. Eat first, little one.”
Eve closed her eyes, heaved, and managed to pull herself onto the bed where the blankets and the woolly rug cradled her welts, cuts and bruises. She heard no more voices, and whatever Master was eating, it was not shared with her.
At least, severely constipated from lack of food, she was saved from the difficulty of shitting in the corner bucket.
It was the dream that woke her.
In the darkness, she had seen a face bending over her. Then the same face reappeared. Smiling, familiar, easily recognised. As she woke, the face remained. Immediately she remembered.
He had opened the car window and peeped over the rain splashed glass.
“Why, it’s little Evie. Here, hop in, I’ll give you a lift home. This weather is frightful, you must be frozen in those clothes.”
Trusting him completely, she had opened the back door and scrambled in, trying to wipe all the mud from her heels on the car’s nice clean floor.
The same man had leaned over from the front passenger seat with a half-filled bottle of what looked like red wine. “Have a drink. It’ll make you feel better and wake you up. I’ll have you home in five minutes.”
The whizz of the windscreen wipers was like a buzzing and repetitious warning. She thankfully took the half-empty bottle and drank.
It did not make her feel better, nor more awake. She felt suddenly worse and fell sideways into a deep unnatural sleep. She was not taken home in five minutes. She had never got home at all.
44
The barn was small and had clearly sat unused for a year at least. Dust hung in necklaces from the beams, spiders nested in the old broken hay bale. It smelled of dirt, damp and lost memory. Yet the hay, however prickly and dust riddled, made a good bed and far better than hard wet ground. The old bent bucket outside was an overflowing supply of fresh rainwater. The roof neither leaked nor housed rats’ nests, but there were certainly mice. Lionel, hungry, ate one alive but disliked the squirming bones and tasteless chewable hair. So he went scrounging for both food and money. He was easily able to steal the occasional wallet. One handbag proved uselessly empty, but fruit from the villa
ge greengrocers and pies from the bakery were a good source of stolen food. He ate less than he would have liked, but starving was no threat.
There seemed to be no hurry. Both his wife and Harry Joyce would be difficult targets, but he considered himself so experienced in such matters, he was confident in his own success. The escape from prison had been a great achievement, but not really hard for someone of his exceptional abilities.
So he enjoyed himself and his freedom and the cold fresh air while he nurtured his plans. His wife would be first, he decided, unless he just happened to bump into Harry Joyce without effort. But finding his wife would not be as easy as throwing her off the Eiffel Tower. He managed, well disguised by a hooded rainproof coat, to check his old home. Locked up. Empty. No police and no wife. She was in a safe house somewhere and safe might actually mean safe from him.
The vile weather made his disguise so apt that he ran little risk of being recognised, but if he was caught stealing, then the situation, and the hope would be over. He was careful. He had always been careful.
Risk was no longer on his list of self-confident games, and he did not lie naked to remember past glory, but with no woman to rape, he was satisfied to play the old games with coloured pins. So he lay back on the stale and broken stalks of straw, savoured the prickle and prick of this new bed, and stuffed one very large and long-fingered hand into the front of his trousers while remembering the past. He remembered his favourites and what he had done. He thrust one poppy-tipped hat pin into his thigh, grinned at the pain, and squeaked one guttural and then high pitched cry. No one came. He pulled out the pin and sucked the blood, scraping the point against his tongue.
When Olga flew like the bat from hell into his daydreams, he closed his eyes and told the bitch to back off, since he was now stronger than she was. She showed her teeth, but he showed his, and she flew away into the back of his mind.
He had proved his strength escaping from prison. His size had intimidated as he wanted, and although some had been easy, like the squalid little thief who had shared his cell, and there had been luck too for that same thief was at the point of his release, others had been more difficult to win over. The small guard Pim was a pig disliked on both sides of the bars, a short but experienced sadist with a bottom twice as prominent as his head, and a special delight in spitting into the cells, and telling the inmates to clean it up.
He had waited for more than a year, but the opportunity arrived when the fool George Pim, having intentionally arranged this situation with the intention of kicking Lionel in the groin amongst other pleasures, unintentionally had left himself vulnerable. Lionel Sullivan had raped him up the arse and threatened worse. That had sealed the possibility of an eventual escape. And after some time waiting, this had worked.
Wondering whether he might one day take another girl, and dreaming of what he would then do to her, Sullivan then slept each night in peace. The house close to the barn was clearly uninhabited. Life was improving. But he missed his long collected souvenirs.
Sylvia waved to Stella Anderson, who was sitting alone at a nearby breakfast table. Harry called, “How’s the house?”
Benjamin hobbled over, having been up to the buffet bar collecting boiled eggs and toast for himself and his wife. “Seems it belongs to the police,” he answered Harry. “We’re not allowed in. Can’t even lurk on a moonless night.”
“But it’s still legally yours.”
“Oh, we’ve signed all sorts of stuff, and they’ve promised the house will be returned to us eventually. In the meantime, Debbie and dear Brian have found another house over the other side of the village. We promised to help with the mortgage.”
Sylvia thought a moment. “We’re off there for another dig around. Coming?”
Stella shook her head with a sigh. “Must admit, dear, we’re both a little tired of the whole thing. Half our savings tied up in crime. Well, honestly. Not what we could ever have expected.”
Harry smothered a snigger. “Enjoy your soldiers.”
Stella waved a long wedge of toast. “Your pal Morrison doesn’t go there anymore. He has a team of fifty, would you believe, all searching the countryside. Tramping through mud, snow and bog, poor souls.”
It was later that day when Sylvia asked Morrison, “Darcey dear, what are you hoping to find?”
D.I. Morrison peered at her as though from a distance. “What do all good coppers look for? Crime and criminals, my dear. Naturally.”
“More houses with chimneys full of bodies?” Sylvia leaned forwards over Morrison’s desk. “A friend told me you’ve increased your team. There’s five thousand detectives scouring the land. What for? Well, I suppose whoever it is has been frightened away from the mock Tudor place, and must now be practising their disgusting game in another sound-proofed cellar.”
“Precisely,” Morrison smiled. “But abduction and murder can take place next door without anyone knowing a thing. It’s been done. Soundproofing cellars, even sheds. Attics. Girls imprisoned, and nobody knows for years. It often seems ludicrous after discovery, and yet some poor girl could have sobbed her heart out for months within a few feet of your nice quiet bedroom.”
Harry remembered reading about several. “But no one bothered soundproofing that last place. It was too isolated to be risky. So will the killer use the same tactics again? They usually like a modus operandum, don’t they?”
“Eve Daish has been missing for more than a month.” Sylvia tapped her fingers on the desk. “She’s been kidnapped too, hasn’t she? Same man?”
“It seems likely.” Morrison sighed. “But we can’t be sure. She was on foot and could have had an accident, fallen and still not been found. Or – which seems probable – she’s been taken by our local monster.”
“And Lionel Sullivan escaped at about the same time.”
But Morrison sighed again. “Eve Daish disappeared on the same day as Sullivan’s escape. That would have been an unlikely piece of luck for him if he’d encountered his next victim within minutes of escaping. Besides, the bodies in the chimney had not been treated with the savage mutilation that Sullivan doled out, and had been there for years. A different criminal without doubt.”
“But you haven’t found Eve?” asked Sylvia.
“And you haven’t found Sullivan?” asked Harry.
“I haven’t even found my basic common sense,” Morrison said, tipping back in his chair. “Discovering someone who hasn’t left the slightest clue, is remarkably difficult. Well, clues, yes – perhaps. DNA, and that’s the best clue of all. But it has to fit someone. And for your interest, it doesn't fit Sullivan or anyone else on the computer records.”
“I suppose,” said Sylvia with faint accusation, “you couldn’t do a door to door DNA test?”
He shook his head. “Who did you have in mind, Sylvia dear? All two million men in Gloucestershire? Or just the ones we don’t like the look of?”
“Are there really that many people in Gloucestershire?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Morrison told her. “But if we narrowed the search down to a village or a street, we might do that. But we can’t even be sure he’s still in Gloucestershire. He could have moved on anywhere. Even abroad. He has no passport, but a false identity is easily bought. I expect you know we lost Mark Howard as well.”
Nodding, Sylvia said, “We came about that really – more than the other. We went to dinner with Kate and the twin brother. Even when you told us about the brother, I assumed Kate didn’t know a thing. She’s sweet and really innocent. Maurice too. Very popular with the kids at school, I gather. But over dinner, Kate sort of let things drop. She kept on that Mark was going home today. True? But she seemed too adamant, as if it was so we’d pass it on. And she said Mark has another house in ‘C – U’ – and then quickly covered up and said Cumbria. Maurice didn’t really say anything. More astute. But I couldn’t help disbelieving Kate, even though I like her. I mean – I suppose she’d just be loyal to her brother-in-law.”
With a stare of curiosity, both Harry and Sylvia waited, and within five minutes a slim man pushed open the door, pulled up a chair and leaned both elbows on Morrison’s desk. Morrison made the introductions. “DCI Archibald. Mr and Mrs Joyce are friends of mine, and recent friends of Mrs Howard, had dinner with her and Maurice last night. I think you’ll have a lot to say to each other.”
“I’m sure we could all do with some decent coffee,” said the DCI. “I’ll ask someone to make it, and then we can start.” The coffee at least smelled of coffee. “I’m here for a few more days before the new man gets sent down from the Met,” he continued through slurps. “Cramble. Not a friend. I want to cover as much as possible before he gets here. So let’s begin.”
With increasing doubts, Sylvia explained how innocent she knew Kate to be. „She obviously knows who the brother is. But maybe she’s been told not to talk about him since he’s in big business and there’s always danger of inside trading and all that stuff I don’t understand.“
„Perhaps,“ Archibald raised an eyebrow, „she could have been threatened with some kind of punishment if she talks out of place?“
It was Harry who shook his head, then scratched his earlobe. „She doesn’t strike me as someone easily frightened off. And Maurice wouldn’t threaten a mosquito.“
The Games People Play Box Set Page 40