Scare Me (28 page)

 

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

 
 

It was just over fifteen minutes later that Carla realised what he'd done. She'd prepared herself to leave, checking the news sites for signs of a bomb scare story. But she assumed that what invariably turned out to be hoaxes weren't worthy of coverage.

She'd tried his mobile, but it went to his answering service.

Carla maximised the GPS map. The dot told her Will was already outside the airport. He'd never deceived her in all the years they'd been married. It made the realisation doubly devastating.

She immediately grabbed her mobile and handbag and left the office, her prison door bumping wide as she hurried to the lift. As she headed down to ground level, anger at his betrayal burnt through her.

She couldn't summon the police. Not after having obeyed the kidnappers' instructions until now. They'd done everything they'd been told. Her presence had been demanded. They both had to be there.

In the downstairs car park, Will's blue Audi Q7 was parked in its space. She deactivated the alarm and had the door open before she noticed the front tyre was flat.

The back one was deflated as well. Carla moved round to the passenger side and found the same situation there. How could it have been vandalised when the car park was so secure?

A pair of hands slid around her waist.

 

“She's almost on top of us.” Weaver shifted in the driver's seat and looked up from the iPad across the tarmac to the main gates of Easton Grey. Their Lexus was parked twenty yards away from them on the opposite side of the road under an overhang of trees. Pope had wanted them to position themselves further back, but Weaver wanted to be as tight in as possible.

The red dot shifted. It was heading north of their location.

Weaver started the engine. “Looks like she's going to come in through the back.”

Having surveyed the boundary it was evident that access could easily be gained to the grounds from most points using only a ladder. The north wall bordered secluded farmland, however, and had collapsed in several places making entry even easier.

Pope put his hand on the wheel. “She can't know we're following her.”

Weaver chewed faster, nodded dismissively and accelerated hard.

 

Minutes later, Will stepped out of a black taxi in front of the same gates. The first cabby he'd found at the airport had been bemused by his request to drive without a passenger. Will had handed him the first GPS phone and said he had to deliver it to Sloman's farm. He was to wait outside until somebody came to collect it from him. His second ride had brought him to Easton Grey.

How many cabs had he used in the last four days? He looked up the length of the empty lawns flanking the gravelled driveway that led to the house. The cloudless blue sky of a drowsy afternoon allowed the sun to bathe the sandstone bricks and glint off the mullioned windows.

“Thinking of breaking in?” The driver remained stationary with his engine puttering while Will stood at the towering electric gates.

He knew how it looked to him. Had he really only been away four days? But it wasn't just absence and the state of his clothes that made him feel like an intruder to his own home. He sensed a deviation in the normal atmosphere.

She was waiting for him.

He paid and fished out his keys. His jacket was still saturated from his visit to the house in Stirling Crescent, but every item he'd collected was safe within the inside pocket.

Crows squawked in the nearby copse. The cab driver lingered to watch him activate the gates with his fob and then pulled away. Will strode up the gravel, lobbing the laptop to the side of the drive.

 

Carla twisted onto her back and slammed both heels of her hands repeatedly against the ceiling of her prison. She'd almost escaped her attacker, but had been forced into the boot of the car beside Will's. She should have recognised it. Should have questioned its presence.

“Let me out!” Every fibre pumped the scream from her, her temples buzzing with the exertion. She continued hammering the lined metal, not caring if she broke her wrists. She thought of Will surrendering himself. “Help!”

Somebody had to hear. It was late afternoon, but too early for people to be leaving the building.

She tried to focus in the dark, but couldn't even see the backs of her hands above her. She'd dropped her bag. Her mobile had been inside. She started kicking with both feet, driving the pointed toes of her high heels into the lid. She tested with her fingers above her head and then down the sides of her body, searching for any object that might have been left in there. Was there something she could use to bash her way out? Her fingertips only brushed the carpet lining the bottom. She kicked harder, pounded harder, screamed harder.

Then she listened. Nothing. But the car hadn't moved yet. She had to attract someone's attention before she was driven away. She felt her own laboured breath bounce back hot and acrid on her face.

Somebody had once told her if you were locked in a boot you should try to poke your hand through the rear light. She angled her body so she could make a space to manoeuvre her arm and clawed in the corner above her. Her nails rasped against metal. Was the light unit sealed in?

She started kicking again, shouting at the lid and battering it with her fists.

There was no mistaking who had locked her in.

 

Will bypassed the front door and entered the house through the back, but was puzzled when he had to deactivate the alarm inside the kitchen. No way in left open for him? Perhaps she thought it unnecessary. But how could she elude the movement detectors?

He couldn't have beaten her back here. He wandered cautiously around the rooms, the office a suspended moment in time reminding him of the life he had lost. The swivel chair was still in the middle of the floor, pushed back after they'd hurriedly left on the morning he'd found the site.

Nothing downstairs was out of place.

He headed upstairs. Their bed was still unmade. He entered Libby's room, something he hadn't done for some time as she'd insisted on privacy for her and Luke. Photos of her nuzzling him were arranged in a clutch of frames on the dresser. He was relieved that no black-framed pictures were present. The last image he'd seen of Luke popped into his memory.

An oil-effect shot of Will, Carla and Libby at her eighteenth birthday party was mounted on the wall over the bed. He remembered Luke taking it. It had been a distraction while Will had been trying to install their new gas-fired deck barbecue.

He went back downstairs again, opening each door and taking in the emptiness of the rooms. Spaces embellished with every conceivable lifestyle appliance. He recalled how his home had looked like a showroom when he'd seen it broken down into flat images on the site.

Although he'd spent his life in disavowal of the figure that had stood over him on the beach, Will recognised he'd been replicating him in every way. He'd applied the cosmetics of a happy family life here just as his father had incessantly painted the outside of the house and neglected what was at the heart of it. And, like him, he'd been unable to hide his disapproval from his only child, had shut them out for not becoming the person he'd envisaged.

He didn't know anything about Libby's world even though she'd existed so close by. He'd ignored everything that jarred with his own perception of her. All of his positive recollections of her were from the time she'd been a child. It was his own expectations at fault, his projections of who he wanted her to be. Her life had always been there for him to participate in, but he'd been in denial of the woman she was becoming.

Even though he'd been so happy when Jessie had been about to join the family, he disapproved of Libby's pregnancy. He hadn't kept that a secret from her and he wondered if she'd been waiting for him to forgive her.

Consequences. That's the word he'd used. Had he been so secure in his own immunity from them?

He padded onto the landing and listened to the stillness of the house. Nobody was here. Had this been a diversion? He thought about Carla and how he'd tricked her into being excluded.

He suddenly remembered the new security installation and went to the utility room where they'd set up the monitor. He switched it on and a black and white mosaic display of different camera angles allowed him to survey the interior and exterior of the house. No sign of her. But as his eyes skimmed over the summer house he recalled the picture of Carla there that had been hung in the Chicago apartment. They were drawn back to it again. Candles flickered in its window.

 

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

 

As he made his way down the incline of the lawn, a cool breeze played against his ears. The wind rippled in the ring of yew trees beyond, but he knew the serenity of the scene belied what was hiding within it.

His mind returned again to the one victim he knew: Eva Lockwood. He'd rarely thought about Eva let alone uttered her name in such a long time, but at eighteen she'd briefly been the epicentre of his universe.

He'd first caught glimpses of her on campus at Brunel in his first year. She was tall and pale and nobody else seemed to notice her. Will had been drawn to her; she was quiet, demure. She'd worn her tight brunette curls in a selection of colourful headscarves and seemed to be a willing outsider.

His own background had made him feel like an impostor at Brunel, so he'd felt an immediate affinity towards her. Soon after he'd been more familiar with her timetable than she was. Having discovered that her anthropology and his engineering curricula were never likely to unite them inside the same building, he took to attending parties at human sciences.

He managed to engage her at the department's Christmas Punch Ball. She was half-Dutch with wealthy parents and had been sombre and indifferent about her education. She'd wanted to travel, but her family had tethered her until she'd completed her studies. Will had been besotted and had rationalised her apathy. To him her aloofness had been enigmatic. He'd thought about nothing but her during the intervening holidays.

When he met her again, the following term, she had no recollection of him or their previous conversation. He'd been devastated, and it was Eva's detachment that precipitated events a few months later.

By then he was casually involved with Jenny Sturgess. He'd already heard Eva had personal problems; that she was dropping out. But after an all-night campus party ended with his new girlfriend dumping him, it was Eva that persuaded him to allow her back to his room.

He'd already convinced himself that the two of them were never destined to be together, but her abrupt interest allowed events to develop at a speed he'd never envisaged. There had been some impromptu, drunken passion, but when he'd woken up she'd been clothed and asleep on the couch. He'd assumed they'd both been too drunk to perform, that his virginity was still maddeningly intact.

Alcohol ensured he remembered little of the night they spent together, and Eva repeated her talent for selective amnesia afterwards. He'd played down the fact to himself that he'd barely registered on her radar by discovering that nobody else had either. Will found out why she'd been such a willing pariah. She was addicted to amphetamines.

He still looked for her on campus, but one day realised she was no longer attending. He'd met and fallen in love with Carla soon after and Eva had dissolved into his past. Carla knew of her, but had never encountered her during her own time at Brunel.

Did everything end at a woman he'd briefly known over twenty years ago? Or did it begin there and he'd been working his way back along the website's street towards her?

Twenty-five years ago. There was one possibility, one he'd been desperately trying to dismiss, that had been terrifying him since he'd walked out of the rundown house in Stirling Crescent.

As the distance between him and the hexagonal wooden building diminished, he could hear the sound of Libby's glass wind chimes gently striking each other.

He knew no lights had been left on the night he'd been in there with Carla. They'd blown out the candles and lanterns before they'd returned to the house, they'd have burned out by now in any case. The double doors at the front hadn't been left open either.

He stopped at the threshold, as he had at the other addresses, squinting through the doorway into the gloomy interior. He could see flames newly lit and their light bouncing from the reflective, coloured glass hanging from the ceiling.

He opened his mouth to speak, but decided against it. She knew he was here. She had Libby. He had no leverage. He was at her disposal now.

He took the three steps into the summer house and, for a moment, his eyes had to readjust from the glare of the sun outside. The inside had its familiar aroma – cut grass and citronella – but there was a different scent here. One he'd first encountered on the plane.

As the details of the room defined themselves, he saw her. She was standing to his right, glinting mirror shards obscuring her expression. For a split second he was walking in as he had four days ago. Carla had been waiting for him then, naked as this woman was now.

She padded forward on her bare feet. This was no seduction. Her pallid, bony body exhibited scars like constellations, raised blisters and circular black blemishes scattered from her shoulders, between the gap in her tight breasts and down to the tops of her legs.

She darted through the winking glass and Will felt a punch to his sternum. It was hard, but not enough to force him backwards, but the sensation that chased it fastened the muscles across his chest and dropped him onto his side.

Will could hear his body spasm and knock the wooden floor with the heel of his shoe. He saw the Taser in her hand as she bent to examine his convulsions.

Her pencilled eyebrows rose. “No stepmother?” she enquired amicably.

 

Carla felt the muscles in her shoulders throb with the exertion of her screams. She kept knocking and kicking, not daring to stop in case someone was passing by.

Her toes tingled painfully, bruised. Her caustic breath gripped her face and, as her own situation elbowed speculations about Will's aside, delayed panic rapidly inflated.

She was a child again, curled up on the bed when she knew her parents would never return to pick her up. Strange space, strange smells, no chance of her waking up to find it was a nightmare.

Carla squeezed her eyes shut against the blackness, coloured patterns swirling in them as she tried to inhale slowly. She wondered if it was airtight in here and how much oxygen she had left. Her fear of suffocating threatened to quickly devour the scant supply around her.

 

Skinny Man wasn't breathing. As time had passed and he still hadn't risen from his position in the chair, Tam had become bolder with the glances he'd snatched at the figure seated in the shadows beyond the cage.

He hadn't shifted in all the time he'd been there. The other man was gone with the girl. Was it him that had injected him? Had Skinny Man been dead all this time?

Tam decided the only way to find out was to attempt to escape through the gap he'd left in the wire. He snaked his body to the corner of the cage and looked back. Skinny Man's silhouette didn't budge. He pushed his bound wrists against the corner and it gave. He hadn't had time to remove the staple from the bottom, however, so the gap that opened was very small. Could he push it out far enough to crawl through?

He looked back at Skinny Man again, expecting him to be crouching and smiling at the front of the cage. He still hadn't moved. Tam crawled as close as he could to the opening and started pushing his body against the wire.

 

Libby struck metal. When the space around her had lurched, she thought the needle had been pushed back into her vein, but she quickly realised she was lying inside the van again. The gears ground and the engine snarled and rattled as it rapidly accelerated. She could hear the axle turning under the warm floor as they sped over uneven terrain. Her teeth vibrated, head bounced and body rolled as they took each sharp turn.

The motion shook away some of her stupor. Her eyebrow pulsated where she'd been hit. Where were they going? She howled through the gag in case anyone could hear her as they passed. The radio came on. Loud, pneumatic rock engulfed her feeble cries.

She weakly lashed out with her feet, trying to strike the doors of the van, but they failed to connect. The vehicle rounded another corner and turned her again. The bridge of Libby's nose struck a sharp edge and her vision flared white.

Her body was too weak to react to the motion. She couldn't escape, couldn't defend herself against whatever awaited at their destination. Unconsciousness returned, like black bricks rebuilding themselves into a wall that shut out the world.

 

Pope and Weaver waited at the entrance to Sloman's farm. A mud track led through the open gates and wound out of sight beyond the forest.

“Fuck this. We should drive in there.” Weaver's hand was on the ignition.

“No. We hang fire.”

“But what is she doing in here?”

Pope shook his head and studied her stable position on the GPS. “We wait. But reverse further back. She might return this way.”

 

Poppy jabbed Will with the Taser again, two hundred and fifty thousand volts to his central nervous system. His body bucked, his brain's attempt to send signals to his muscles shorting out a second time. She quickly bound his hands behind his back with chain and left him lying on his side.

It wouldn't take long for him to recover. Then they had the whole afternoon together.

She patted his jacket and then reached into the inside pocket. Her fingers clasped the contents and pulled out the silk he'd wrapped the other items in.

There was a wicker table by the sound system. She swiped the stack of CDs there to the floor and unfolded the violet material across its top, revealing the jewellery and scarf.

 

Carla heard a voice outside the car. She slid her ear to the metal and listened to a low exchange of male dialogue.

“I'm locked in here!” The words tore the last volume from her throat and she tasted blood.

She waited. The conversation stopped.