by T M Creedy
‘Please! I don’t know what it is you want.’ I cry, my eyes and nose streaming with tears of pain. I have a flashback to finding Sara’s body in my bedroom. The broken fingers, the snapped-off teeth, the shorn earlobe. There’s no way I can tolerate that kind of deliberate torture. ‘Just tell me what I’m supposed to have taken!’
He drags me forcibly up the stairs.
‘She didn’t have them on her when I found her, and I know you went to that storage place where she had a lock-up, so you must have them. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ He is talking calmly and reasonably, as if dragging a woman up a staircase at knifepoint is something he does on a regular basis. ‘Not to mention the money! You must have had that away or else you wouldn’t have been able to get here, would you?’
‘Look. OK. I have the money. I found that in an old satchel in the locker. That was the only thing that was in there I promise. I did spend some of it but most of it is still in my room.’
‘Your room, is it? Fair enough. Then that’s where we’ll start.’ He resumes his tugging on my arm. There’s no way I am willingly going to let him get me into that room. I know, once I go in there – I’m never coming out. Taking a deep breath, I purposely let myself go limp, heavy as a stone, and fall to the floor. He fumbles his grip on my arm but recovers quickly enough to pull it up sharply and we both hear the crack as my shoulder dislocates. I scream with pain but all he does is chuckle.
‘Oh dear! That was a silly thing to do wasn’t it?’
We’re on the first landing where the stairs turn back on themselves to the first floor. I lay on the carpet whimpering, my damaged shoulder twisted and my arm dangling uselessly. I’d never known anything could hurt so much. He’s whistling cheerfully as he looks down at me, as if the sight of me in agony is the best entertainment yet. As my body slowly gets used to the pain I’m able to lift my head up a fraction.
‘You do know the police will be here any second?’ I manage to rasp. ‘I don’t know how they knew but the people who own this place phoned me a second before you got here. They knew you were in the house so they’ve phoned for help.’
He frowns as if I’ve spoiled his fun.
‘Well, in that case, I guess we don’t have that much time, do we? Get up!’ He kicks me brutally in my side, right below my ribs, and I can’t breathe, can’t move. I can’t make my legs obey me. He leans over me, flashing the wicked looking blade in front of my eyes. ‘Get up, or I will take you up there piece by piece.’ It’s all I can do to roll over onto my back and try to sit up, but the pain from my shoulder and now the pain in my ribs is too much and a wave of dizziness shoots through me. Reeling, I turn my head to one side and vomit up a pool of stringy yellow foam. I’ve had nothing to eat for so long there’s nothing in my stomach to bring up and I retch painfully for a few minutes, nausea and light-headedness threatening to overwhelm me. He growls deep in his throat at my inability to move.
‘Looks like I’ll have to search for them myself. Think you can behave yourself and stay here?’ He crouches down next to me and deliberately pokes my injured shoulder hard. A scream tears up my throat and I think I pass out for a few seconds because when I next open my eyes he’s positioning my left leg so it lies flat on the floorboards. ‘No matter. This should make things easier.’ And with that he hammers the tip of his knife into the soft, fleshy part of my calf, ripping straight through the muscle and skin. He pounds the knife hard enough for it to go right through my leg and imbed itself deeply into the boards underneath the carpet. I stare in disbelief where I’m pinned to the floor. Blood slides down my leg around the knife blade and drips onto the runner, mingling with its bright jewel colours and soaking into the wool. The darkness rears up and takes me with it and I sink gratefully into its velvet embrace.
He’s shaking me hard and slapping me around the face none too gently either.
‘Wake up, stupid bitch! Where are they? No more messing about or it’s no more Mr Nice Guy.’ He grips my face hard until my eyes lose their cloudiness and focus on his pudgy features. ‘You got one last chance. Where are the drives?’
I don’t know what he’s talking about and all I want to do is go back to sleep. A noise, faint and distant, stops me from losing consciousness again altogether. He hears it too because he cocks his head, listening hard. I can’t help myself. I start to laugh.
‘See? Sirens! The police are here, just turning into the track by the sound of it. You’re for it now!’ I crow. He spits with fury, his eyes dead and cold.
‘Enough time to snap your scrawny neck though!’ His hands, iron strong and big as shovels, grip me around my throat and begin to squeeze. He’s right. He could break my neck in an instant. Pinpricks of flashing light dance before my eyes and a red mist begins to descend. I can feel him tense, ready to deliver the final twist and snap the vertebrae in one powerful wrench, and I close my eyes in surrender.
Nothing happens.
A crash from below us makes me open my eyes, in time to see the front door being smashed open with such force that the lock is splintered into fragments of metal and wood and scattered on the floor. A black and white blur flies past me and flings herself at the man, sinking her teeth into the side of his neck and clamping down hard with her powerful jaws. Bonnie! She growls menacingly and shakes the man like a rat, spraying blood over both of us. The man screams, a high-pitched squeal and releases his grip on my neck, batting his arms out in a vain attempt to free himself from Bonnie’s unyielding jaws. I’m dimly aware of another figure beside me and turn my head painfully to see Drew crouched beside me, looking into my eyes with such tender concern that my heart lifts.
‘Drew!’ My voice is a strangled whisper, the pressure on my neck from the man’s hands has caused my vocal chords to swell and bruise. ‘Drew.’
He lays a warm hand on my cheek.
‘Sshhhh. Don’t try and talk. You’re safe now.’ He smiles down at me and I try my best to smile back, albeit a bit tearfully. Drew gives a sharp whistle and Bonnie immediately releases her hold on the man’s neck, retreating backwards and looking up at Drew with a pleased expression on her blood-flecked face. He is rolling on the floor, moaning and gibbering incoherently, and Drew grabs one of the man’s hands, twisting it up and back so the man is forced up into a kneeling position. Without letting go of the man Drew pulls his right arm back and punches the man once, twice, hard in the face. I’d clap if I didn’t have a ruined shoulder and wasn’t skewered to the floor like a kebab. The man’s nose bursts like a balloon, spraying blood everywhere.
‘Stop! For the love of God, stop! Get it off me!’ His voice has a thickened quality, like someone with a bad cold, and with his free hand he feebly slaps at the air. ‘Call it off, whatever it is.’
The sirens scream to a halt outside the house and Pindari, in full uniform this time, sprints up the concrete steps and through the ruined front door, not even pausing as he takes in the bloodbath on the stairs. Several other uniformed officers follow, guns drawn as they sweep the rooms on the ground floor.
‘It’s just him. He’s alone.’ I manage to mouth and Pindari shouts into his radio for the air ambulance, his normally enigmatic expression a mixture of anger and sympathy as he takes in the foot-long blade stuck through my calf. Another officer steps over us to reach the man behind me, who is now a crumpled bloody heap on the floor, and handcuffs him tightly, securing his hands behind his back. I can’t see where Drew, or Bonnie, have gone but I assume they’ve moved further up the stairs out of the way, to allow the police officer to do his job. I want to thank them both for saving me, thank Bonnie for launching herself at him and forcing him to let go of my neck. Darling Bonnie. Bonnie, who never ever came into the house, put her own fear aside just to get to me.
‘Where’s Drew? Where’s Bonnie?’ I whisper to Pindari. He motions me not to try and talk. The darkness is there again, at the edge of my vision, and the last thing I see before flaking out for good is a tall man in a battered Akubra hat and a waggy-tailed she
epdog, both smiling down at me from the staircase.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Her name wasn’t even Sara. It was Bryony, Bryony Jones. The police in London did think it was me at first, tortured and murdered, but subsequent investigations – fingerprints, DNA samples – proved beyond doubt that the body found in my Peckham flat was that of Bryony Jones, aged twenty-three, and wanted by the police in four different countries for theft and fraud. The man who killed her, and tried his best to kill me, was her husband. This information is relayed to me matter-of-factly by the grim faced detective from Melbourne, who has been assigned to my case while the police in both England and Australia decide what to do with me. They’re considering charging me with concealment of a serious crime, travelling on a false identity and handling stolen goods but the shark of a lawyer Mac and Margie found for me is pleading mitigating circumstances, so now we’re at a stalemate. Nothing will happen for a while anyway, not until I’m completely recovered.
I do my best to picture pretty, delicate Sara/Bryony, married to that ugly, short and stocky man who had to be at least twenty years older than her, but it’s hard. The housesitting business was all a scam – they were in on it together. Sara/Bryony would find housesitting jobs, all over the world, in the most luxurious places she could find and then pass on information to her husband, who would be staying somewhere else close to the property. She would make notes of things like alarm codes and family schedules, and draw elaborate floor plans indicating where the best entrance points to the houses were. She would make extensive inventories of goods worth stealing and have copies of keys made, sending everything on to her husband who would stay on for a few weeks after the housesitting job was completed before breaking in with ease, and turning the place over. No one suspected the innocent young woman for a while; the break-ins all took place long after she’d left but, eventually, police in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA put two and two together, and figured out that the common factor in each of the robberies was that the owners had recently returned from abroad, and had all hired the same house sitter. The drives the man was so desperate to find contained information on seven of the robberies he had committed in the last two years, and there was enough proof to get him put away for a very long time. Sara/Bryony had done the dirty on him after their last job, stealing a large amount of cash from the house and keeping it for herself, before setting up the year-long job with Margie and Mac. She was leaving him. Reckoned she had learned enough to set up business on her own, and the information she had on the drives was enough to blackmail him into letting her go. Or so she thought. She paid for that assumption with her life.
Turns out I had the drives he was looking for all along, I just didn’t know it. The flash drives I found in Sara’s satchel were what he was looking for, what he had tortured and murdered her for. I’d hidden them in the empty water bottle on Sara’s backpack, to keep them safe, and then promptly forgotten about them. My intention to look through them was eclipsed by the whole evil doctor/ghostly children thing. The police had found them, rattling merrily away in the steel container, whilst searching through all of Sara’s belongings. They’ve also confiscated her laptop, and taken my phone from me while they piece the case together.
My leg healed surprisingly quickly and, although still a bit tender, my shoulder is almost back to normal. So while my physical wounds are on the mend it’s fair to say that my mental state has taken a bit of a battering, and I’ve been moved to the psychiatric ward at the hospital in Ballarat to be put under the care of Doctor Stephen Hay M.D., an eminent psychiatrist with a private practice in Melbourne.
I don’t like him. He has a beard for a start. I don’t think I can look at any man with a beard now and not be reminded of the way Dr Silas Baldwin’s own bushy facial hair grew in patchy diseased bunches over his mummified skin. Dr Hay spends a lot of time just looking at me, holding his chin in his hands and waiting for me fill the silence with my own thoughts. I’m wise to him now though, although when I first got here I made the mistake of confiding in him. I told him everything. From my flight from London to the first time I experienced the ghostly happenings at Crowlands House, I held nothing back. I even told him about my gambling addiction which I have never been honest about to anyone, not even with myself. I told him about the diary, which has never been found, and how there are the remains of many, many children secreted underneath the roses behind the house.
I told him about Drew and Bonnie, how they saved me that day, and about everything else – Dolly, Nurse McKay, Gregory – all of them. He gave me a sketchpad and told me to draw them all so I did. I drew poor Alice and Malinda with their pregnant bellies, Nurse McKay with her blown apart head, Gregory’s blind eyes and the doctor. I drew the doctor as I saw him last, being pulled to pieces by a thousand crows. They’re quite good, the drawings, if I say so myself but whenever I finish one I catch the look which passes between Dr Hay and whichever shift nurse is looking after me that day. They don’t believe me; I know they don’t.
Margie and Mac come to visit me quite often. Margie spends the whole hour wiping tears from her eyes and clutching at my hand, while Mac sits on the other chair and regards me silently and steadily. They’ve cut short their time overseas. They rushed back as soon as they could. I think Margie was relieved to have an excuse to get back, to be honest. Mac will continue to work on his engineering project overseas, commuting every couple of weeks, but Margie is staying right here. I was right – they did call the police after phoning me to tell me to get out of the house. Turns out they had a whole bunch of cameras installed all over the lounge and kitchen, more in the verandahs and in the main hallway. They accessed them frequently, just to make sure I wasn’t trashing the house or neglecting the cats and didn’t half freak out when they saw a man holding a large knife to my throat. Mac was quick to assure me that there were absolutely no cameras in my bedroom or any of the bathrooms. They were sorry they didn’t tell me they say, but at the end of the day, they entrusted their home to a complete stranger, and it seemed like a good idea to them. It goes a long way to explain why I was feeling watched all the time, whenever I was downstairs. I don’t think they’ll ever get over the fact that I’m not the real Sara, well, not the one they thought they were getting anyway.
‘You must have seen the ghosts then?’ I press. But they shake their heads. They never saw anyone but me on the cameras. ‘What about Drew? He was with me in the lounge quite a few times.’ They glance quickly at each other, like I’ve noticed they all do whenever I mention Drew.
‘No, love.’ Mac says gruffly. ‘There was no one else. We, Margie and me, just thought you talked to yourself a lot.’
'The thing is, sweetie, we're not sure who you're talking about. We don't know anyone called Drew.'
'Don't know...?' I burst out laughing. 'Don't be silly. Of course you do! Drew! Your stockman? The one who looks after your farm for you? The one who lives in the caravan in one of the bottom paddocks?'
Mac and Margie exchange worried looks. Margie picks up my hand in hers while Mac taps his foot absentmindedly on the floor.
'Sara. Our stockman is called Ian. He swears blind he's never even laid eyes on you, let alone had a conversation with you. And what's more, no one has lived in that caravan for more than fifty years. It's just a rotten shell.'
'But I went there! Drew was there, and Bonnie. I took them a cake.' I'm getting upset and agitated, and they start to look about for one of the nurses. 'You can't tell me he doesn't exist! They saved me! They saved my life!' Several of the ward staff rush over to calm me down, while a sedative is prepared. Another shot in the arm. Margie and Mac back away slowly, like I'm an unpredictable wild animal, and I doubt they'll come to visit me again. The chemicals work their magic quickly and I'm swallowed up by a black, dreamless sleep, waking ten hours later into the semi-darkness of the hospital ward. My throat is parched and I ring for some water, the night nurse helping me to sit up so I can drink without dribbling it all down my fron
t again.
'You're quite the popular one today!' She remarks. 'Had another visitor while you were out for the count. He said to say he's coming back tomorrow.'
It must be Drew. He'll come and see me tomorrow and I can prove he's not a figment of my imagination. Still groggy from the sedative, I loll in bed, dozing on and off until the sunshine and chatter from the ward tells me it's time for breakfast. All morning I wait on tenterhooks, staring at the door for that familiar face, craning my neck for that first glimpse of those sharp blue eyes and broad smile. Eventually, just before the eleven o'clock tea trolley ladies do their rounds, a nurse announces that I have a visitor. If he sees the disappointment on my face he doesn't let it show. Pindari takes a seat on the plastic chair next to my bed, twisting his police cap in his hands. He's sorry for everything that's happened, he says. Sorry that my case got moved to the bigger force in Melbourne, and sorry he can't be the officer assigned to me.
'To be honest, you were ranting something chronic when we found you in the house. You weren't making a lot of sense. Neither was the guy who attacked you. He was shouting and screaming like a little girl about invisible beasts and men who weren't really there. He was begging us to take him away and lock him up - said he wouldn't be safe until he was locked in a cell. Well, he got his wish, and he's been singing like the proverbial yellow bird ever since.'
The man who killed Sara and came after me is called David Jones. He's pleading guilty to the first degree murder of his wife, Bryony Jones, and to the attempted murder of me. He's ex-special services, Pindari tells me, and had access to all sorts of classified information including passenger lists on flights, which was how he tracked me to Australia - through Bryony's fake passport. He had all sorts of surveillance equipment and techniques, not that he'd needed to use them for hacking into her emails. He'd done exactly the same as I had - logged in with her incredibly stupidly easy password and figured out where she was heading. Poor Bryony. She thought she was being so clever, taking the money and running away. She must have known her husband had all the skills to track her down. That was why she was so adamant about not leaving my flat, and why she needed to hide in a run-down part of London until she left for Heathrow airport.