by E C Deacon
Then he turned abruptly on his heel and was gone. Helen was staggered. It was the closest she’d ever been to true madness and it had shaken her to the core. Her knuckles were white from gripping the baton and she realised she’d been holding her breath. She sucked in a huge, shuddering lungful of air but the awful sense of dread still clung to her.
“Get a grip,” she whispered to herself.
She stood and plotted her way through the maze of empty cages towards the exit – and was hit by 2.3 million volts of electricity.
Joshua switched off his cattle prod, kicked her baton and pepper spray aside, knelt and removed the brass knuckles from Helen’s twitching fingers. Then he grabbed her by her hair and dragged her out into the central corridor, towards the door.
The sea of chickens parted in silence to allow the prophet to pass.
Laura kept her head down, not daring to look as he staggered in with Helen and dumped her onto the studio floor like a carcass.
“Crisis over, and she didn’t bring any back-up,” he grinned, tossing Helen’s mobile beside the cattle prod on the bench. “She hasn’t used her phone in the last two hours.”
He removed some plastic cable ties and a pair of pinking shears from his metal toolbox on the bench, hauled Helen onto her back and sat astride her, chuckling as he fastened her wrists to the iron rings on the floor. “I’m going to enjoy giving you whores absolution.”
He turned to check on Laura’s reaction. But she said nothing, simply remained curled in a foetal position beneath the dressing gown with only the back of her bald head visible. He reached over and gave her a slap on the rump.
“Not so cocky now, are we?” He picked up the pinking shears and began to scissor through Helen’s leather jacket. “Don’t think that will save you. It will be your turn next.”
Reaching inside the jacket, he pulled out a faded newspaper. “Ah, here it is,” he said and tossed it beside Helen’s mobile on the bench. “Now let’s see what other secrets you’ve got hidden in here,” he said, ripping open Helen’s blouse and sliding the blade of the shears under her bra.
“Leave her alone!” Laura’s interjection took him completely by surprise. He pivoted around to confront her. But something was wrong. She hadn’t moved. She was still lying inert in the corner. “Move and I’ll kill you.”
He was bewildered. It was Laura’s voice but it didn’t seem to be coming from her body.
It wasn’t. He was staring at the body of Gina. Laura was stepping out of the black body bag behind him. He turned quizzically towards her.
She lifted her home-made shank like the sword of an avenging angel, saying, “I told you not to move,” and stabbed him in the neck, puncturing his carotid artery.
Joshua flapped like a wounded bird, attempting to stem the fountain of blood. Then slowly toppled off Helen and rolled onto his back on the floor.
“I warned you.”
His eyes brimmed with tears as he stared up at Laura in disbelief. Her naked body was spattered in his blood and white down. He watched in awe as a tiny feather fell from her hand and floated slowly down to land on the bloody cross on his chest.
“I thought you were my Gina,” he whispered. “Risen again.”
Then with a smile of infinite sadness he closed his eyes and died.
A cockerel still heralded the new day at Dark Water Farm, but now its flock ranged free, scavenging around the police vehicles and the tent that had been erected to shield the chicken pit and its precious human remains. Helen watched the SOCOs going about their grim work, clutching Joshua’s faded newspaper and its final secret to her chest. She’d refused to leave with Laura in the ambulance, insisting that it was her case, she’d cracked it and she would see it through to the end – and nobody apart from PC Everton Bowe was going to take any credit for it.
Three days later, Everton was woken from his induced coma with the news that he should make a full recovery. A week later he was moved out of intensive care onto a general ward.
He was sipping his lunch, a watery banana smoothie, through a straw when the sister interrupted him to ask if he felt well enough to have a visitor. It wasn’t his wife who entered the ward, nor Laura Fell, but Acting Detective Sergeant Helen Lake.
He was delighted by the news of her pending promotion and told her it was fully deserved, but he still didn’t understand Joshua Moon’s obsession with his sister. It had to be more than just genetic sexual attraction. He seemed to genuinely care for Gina and blamed himself for her suicide.
“That’s because she wasn’t his sister. Joshua wasn’t Gina’s brother. He was her father.”
Everton was stunned.
“Her father?”
He watched in silence as Helen pulled out an evidence bag containing the faded newspaper she’d found at the farm.
“Yes. And there’s more. I found this in his briefcase,” she said, handing it to him, “along with an MMS selfie Gina took of her suicide.”
The newspaper was dated 1979. The headline read:
15-year-old Boy accused of Rape
“Joshua Moon raped her mother. A woman called Jennifer Allen. She had an illegitimate child. A girl called Gina. She gave her up for adoption.”
“Christ. That’s why he was so obsessed with Gina. She was his own daughter. He slept with his own daughter.”
“Yes. And when Gina found out who he really was, and what he’d done, she was horrified; she couldn’t live with it. She hung herself, filmed it and sent him the video.”
“It was an act of retribution. She wanted to punish him.”
They talked for over an hour, replaying the elements of the case and reviewing the mistakes they’d made. It felt good to Everton to be included as an equal. But he knew that Helen would have to leave.
She was almost out of the ward when he noticed the Warrant Card and tube of peppermints on his bedside table, and called after her, “Hey. What’s this?”
“They’re for you, from DCI Teal, if you want them.”
Then, with a smile that lit up her face, she was gone.
Everton jerked awake at 3am. He’d been replaying the tragic story of Gina Lewis in a dream and had felt the crushing blow that Joshua Moon had delivered to his head again. He groaned and tried to wipe the thought from his mind, and something remarkable happened. He realised that his tinnitus had disappeared, that the mosquito inside his head had gone.
Mrs Bauer, his ENT consultant, explained that the blow to his head had probably reversed the damage of an earlier trauma. Everton couldn’t remember having suffered one but was happy to accept what she said.
Being free of the perpetual whine took some getting used to. For years, he’d never experienced true silence, even in his sleep or moments of deep concentration or relaxation, and now the sudden realisation of the empty space in his head startled him.
Like his body, his mind would take some time to heal, but he was content. He’d found himself and, hopefully, his family again.
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