Authors: Drew Cross
She thought about where his face would be when he opened up to fetch her out and planned her spring, but no matter how hard she tried to force it, she couldn’t make her mind show her winning the physical confrontation. He was not a big man by most people’s standards, but he was bigger than her and deceptively strong, and therefore much more than a match for anything she might throw at him. The only thing she had on her side was a fraction of a second’s head start before he realised that she’d managed to get her hands and feet free, but she was weak from blood loss and sick to the stomach with motion sickness, hardly at her fighting best. She scoured her brain for some other kind of advantage she could manufacture, thinking about the sharp bit of plastic and wondering whether it could be pulled loose, before it finally hit her. There was a heavy metal jack in a compartment underneath the carpet in the back corner of the boot.
The roads got progressively worse as we drove further away from the comforting glow of the maze of city streets and out into rural emptiness. I was forced to slow the car to a crawl in places to avoid scraping the underside on yet another hidden hollow. I was already half convinced that I’d caused some kind of catastrophic damage to it anyway, due to the metallic clang that had accompanied my overenthusiastic rallying back where the tarmac had given way to a patchwork of cracks and potholes. I’d not given consideration to how hard it was going to be to navigate our way up to a remote cottage on narrow unlit and unfamiliar country lanes in the dark either, and I was starting to lose the firm belief that I was on the right track.
‘So I’m guessing that you’ve committed the turns we’ve been taking to memory somehow?’
Lee was wearing a look of pure mischief, so I knew that he’d recognised my growing uncertainty, but I wasn’t about to admit that my knowledge of the area extended to a glance at an internet map and little else.
‘We’re going the right way; it’s set back slightly from the road in woodland judging by the maps that I viewed, and it’ll be completely in darkness, so we’re not going to see it until we’re right on top of it.’
I injected a note of confidence that I didn’t truly feel into my voice and nodded enthusiastically as if to emphasise the point.
‘Actually I was thinking more about how we find our way back down again afterwards. I don’t really fancy having to choose between spending the night in the car, or in a killer’s holiday home, when we realise we can’t retrace our steps.’
He was grinning as he said it, but he had a point, and I scrabbled for a comeback.
‘We’re higher up here, in case that’s escaped your attention? Which means that we’ll be able to see where the streetlights begin again. If we’re not a hundred percent on the turnings to take then we simply head for the light.’
I made a motion with my hand as if I was wafting him away from me, and grinned in triumph, taking my eyes off the road for a moment.
‘Okay, okay, I’ll give you that one. Say, watch out for that…’
He didn’t get to finish the sentence, and I hit the brakes as we were both violently jolted around in our seats and a loud bang followed by disconcerting rattling came from underneath the car.
I’d been concentrating too hard on getting one up on Lee, and not enough on the fact that my speed had begun to creep steadily back up again. As I’d looked at him to deliver my killer line, I’d failed to notice a monster of a rut in the road where the last broken up fragments of tarmac finally gave way to hard earth. The result was that the bottom of the car had smacked down hard against the solid ground, and judging by the sounds that were now coming from it, the damage was probably terminal.
‘Shit.’
I said and brought the car to a standstill, switching off the engine and getting out to have a look, closely followed by Lee. Not that either of us knew enough about the mechanical workings of cars to do anything for it if the news was as bad as I was expecting, but still I wanted to see what we were dealing with.
‘Ouch! That doesn’t look too promising, does it?’
Lee gave a low whistle and pointed at a section of something hanging down at the front of the car, visible in the radius of the headlight beams.
‘No, it doesn’t. you know what you were saying about spending the night up here?’
I tried to make light of the situation, after all, police vehicles got damaged on frequent occasions and we both had our phones to arrange a lift back to civilisation if we needed one.
‘Za?’
Something in Lee’s voice made me look up sharply, and I followed the line of his gaze along the track in front of our damaged car.
‘Oh,’ was all I could manage as I spotted it too.
Parked at the dark roadside a mere fifty yards away was the rear of another car, a silver Jaguar with its boot lid open. Beyond the Jaguar, surrounded by trees that hung their branches down over the roof, was a small stone cottage. A weak but conspicuous light was visible in one of the windows.
Chapter 80
‘Okay. What do we do now?’
Lee looked at me helplessly, knowing that this new development could mean one of many things.
‘Call it in and request urgent back up. We’ll worry about making fools of ourselves later.’ I replied.
My mind raced with possibilities. Was the presence of the silver Jaguar innocent, somebody staying out here in a holiday let, completely unaware that the landlord was a vicious murdering psychopath, or was this the Grey Man himself, and if so did he have the girls up here too?
I searched my memory banks for the make and model of his car but came up blank. I’d had no reason to remember those details, as far as I’d been concerned he was on his way into police custody at the end of several gun barrels now. I dithered and hesitated, changing my mind repeatedly while Lee calmly communicated our position and discovery to control. His voice carried for some distance in the absence of other background noise, and I was hyper aware that anybody in the cottage would probably have heard the car approaching and now the sound of our voices. We’d well and truly lost any element of surprise, but we hadn’t thought that we’d need it.
‘If it’s him and they’re in there…’ I began, feeling sick and panicky.
‘Look, we don’t know that, and even if he was up here that’s not to say that he’s got the girls with him. From what we’ve come to understand about him they’re not his type either.’
He pulled a face at the clumsiness of the words and apologised with his eyes.
‘Why the fuck haven’t we been updated on what’s going on at the main residence? This is my damned investigation, and now I’m sat here utterly in the dark and facing an impossible situation.’
I couldn’t stop the bitterness in my tone, even though I knew I was being completely unfair. The armed officers hadn’t known what we were planning, and the decision to come up here had been my call. If we were in a dangerous predicament the blame for that rested squarely and exclusively on my own shoulders.
‘I won’t ask you to come in with me, Lee, but I can’t just stand here and face the possibility that a maniac is inside butchering my nieces.’
I turned and began to walk towards the cottage, not daring to check if he was following, but absurdly grateful when I felt him drop into step on my right shoulder.
‘It’s not going to be him. We’re going to burst in on a young couple out here for some private quality time.’
He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and I heard the tremor of apprehension where his voice strained at the end of the sentence. I knew he was attempting to convince himself as much as me, and that no matter how much we both wanted it to be true it seemed farfetched. Unlike our counterparts overseas and our colleagues on armed response, we did not have guns to unholster and tasers to render an attacker senseless in seconds. We’d be walking in without even a set of handcuffs between us, having left them locked up at the HQ at the official end of our shift, and that could be a costly mistake.
We walked the remaining distance to the silver car in silence, trying to keep our footsteps as quiet as possible by walking on the sparse grass lining the sides of the dirt trail, even though it seemed unlikely that our presence had gone unnoticed. Lee produced a key fob with a small intense torch beam built into it when we were ten yards away, and shone it directly into the open boot.
‘Oh God, please no.’ I whispered softly to myself, like it might make what I was seeing magically disappear.
The body carpet inside the boot had once been a shade of light grey I guessed, but it was now almost entirely covered in a dark liquid that stained the fabric black. As if any doubt remained about what that liquid was, streaks of bright red ran down the back of the car itself and small pools had formed and then clotted in various places on the ground below. What we were looking at was a significant amount of somebody’s blood.
Chapter 81
Madeleine was in the bathtub to keep the mess to a minimum, she was not yet dead, but the usual rhythmic rise and fall of her chest had been replaced by a weaker fluttering motion that experience told him meant it was just a matter of time now. Even if she did wake up fleetingly she was not going to be in any kind of state to attempt a repetition of what she had managed when he’d opened up the car boot earlier. There’d been a fleeting moment as his eyes transmitted the information to his brain in which he’d failed to realise that she’d somehow managed to get free of the ties that bound her hands and feet, and that she was swinging the heavy metal car jack towards his head with blurring speed. Only the instinctive flinch away at the recognition of unexpected motion had saved him from having his head smashed open, but she’d still managed to connect solidly with his collarbone, and now one arm hung limp and useless at his side and a tidal wave of pain swept through him every few seconds when he moved.
He’d been unarmed when she’d attacked him, but the force of the swing with the weight of the metal object had pitched her head first out of the car and onto the hard floor. In momentarily indescribable agony he’d only been able to muster sufficient force to stamp once on her wrist to force her to release the weapon, feeling the delicate bones cracking underneath his foot, and then twice more on her bloodied face as she’d rolled over to look up at him, all of her strength utterly spent.
Once the girls were safely stowed in the locked metal shed at the rear of the property, he’d been able to return to her in order to drag her indoors and clumsily into the bathroom. He wasn’t concerned about the possibility of her battered body drawing attention, since it was vanishingly unlikely that they’d be disturbed out here, particularly at this hour; but he hadn’t wanted to risk her coming back to a state of sufficient consciousness to mount another attack when he least expected it. After all, there was still work to be done. He’d expended a huge amount of energy in getting her limp from inside the cottage, and even more when he’d stopped part way and lost control of himself, kicking and stamping her in a frenzy until the feelings of rage had passed, and it was that which had put her in her present rapidly deteriorating condition.
‘Don’t die on me yet, dear. Not before I finish preparing the girls anyway.’ He said, watching her closely, half anticipating that her eyes would suddenly flick back open despite her injuries suggesting otherwise.
He left her then, gritting his teeth against another sweeping wave of pain and cursing the stupid woman, taking time to lean against the doorframe before finally getting a handle on it and heading back out to the locked metal shed in the garden. As he got closer he could hear one of them sobbing again, while the other one whispered gently to her, the sobbing getting louder as he fumbled with the lock one handed and opened the door.
‘Almost time to eat girls, so let’s have you out of there now.’
He watched as neither of them moved, huddling together in the corner and staring at him with wide eyes.
‘What have you done with Grandma?’ Asked Lexie in a loud obstinate tone.
‘She’s in the bath at the moment, but she’ll be joining us later. Now get up and come outside.’
This time he didn’t disguise the menace in the instruction, leaving them under no illusions that they would be risking his wrath if they didn’t comply. The youngest girl ignored him and looked at her sister for guidance, who slowly nodded as she climbed to her feet.
The drone of an engine reached his ears and he held up a hand for them to stay where they were, cocking his head to one side to be sure. Definitely the sound of a car approaching. As he continued to listen he heard a loud bang, the vehicle bottoming out on a rut in the road, followed by the noise of the engine dying. He quickly shoved the girls back inside, pushing the door back to with his shoulder while he manipulated the lock back into place. It was probably nothing, but it was late and he’d never been disturbed out here before, which limited the likely options for who it could be.
Chapter 82
The front door was slightly ajar, with textbook bloody drag marks running all the way from the rear of the car into the hallway, which lay in darkness. The only illumination was provided by the beam of blue-white light from Lee’s miniature torch. Somebody had moved the body of another person who was either dead or dying through this way, and since I was pretty sure that the property was owned by one of the worst serial killers in living memory, I was willing to take a wild stab at John Reimoore being somewhere inside waiting for us.