Authors: Cari Hunter
“Do you mind if I use your loo? We’ve been stuck out there for a while.” Her voice sounded alien to her. Nervousness made her hop from foot to foot, adding unintentional credence to her request.
Joan took a long drag on her cigarette. Smoke obscured her when she exhaled. “There’s one just here. I’ll show you where it is.”
“Cheers.” Sanne followed her down the corridor, furious that she had forgotten about the grubby little cloakroom next to the kitchenette.
Joan stopped in front of it. “Is someone coming to pick you up?”
“Uh, I think so.” Sanne didn’t have the faintest clue. She knew Meg would still be at work, and she had intended to phone her about a bed for the night but had ended up sidetracked. “I’ll double-check with a friend when I’m done.”
“Billy can’t be taking you to Meg’s,” Joan said, identifying the “friend” without hesitation. “He’s running things on his own at the moment. He needs his rest.”
Sanne felt her face redden. The Cotters had done her a huge favour, and yet here she was, snooping around and thinking the worst of Billy. “I’ll call a taxi,” she said. “We’ll be out of your hair in no time, I promise.”
Joan gave her a thin smile, showing yellowed teeth clenched around her cigarette. “Use the phone at the desk. You can wait there for your taxi.” She left Sanne and went into the house, shutting the door behind her.
Sanne poked her head into the bathroom, grimacing as the odour of urine hit her. The cubicle was probably not somewhere Joan frequented. The seat had been left up, the sliver of soap on the sink was oil-smeared, and there was no toilet paper. Leaning back on the corridor wall, she stared at the carpet. Years of greasy boot prints had left a blackened trail across the red and gold pattern. She longed to follow those prints toward the light still glowing in the reception, to phone Meg, and to radio Nelson and make sure he was okay. They could come here again in daylight, with backup, a search warrant, and Eleanor’s blessing.
Instead, she went in the opposite direction, knocked hard on the door Joan had gone through, and pushed it open.
“Joan?” She raised her voice, making sure it carried. “It’s only me. Have you got any loo paper?” It was a feeble excuse for going into the house, but she wasn’t sneaking around. If Joan came and told her to leave, she would leave. “Joan? Geoff? You there?”
She walked down the narrow hall and stopped when it widened. Remnants of the business gave way to homeliness—a telephone table holding a lamp beside a china bowl of dusty potpourri, a picture of Billy, his arm flung around his dad’s shoulders, hanging next to a slightly askew
Bless this Mess
sign. Three doors led off the vestibule. Sanne knocked on the first.
“Joan?” She went through the door as she spoke. “Don’t mean to barge in, but there’s no loo paper.”
A well-worn leather couch took up much of the room’s floor space, while used mugs and car magazines surrounded a single armchair pulled close to the television. Something was emitting a slightly rotten scent, although the single visible plate contained only a few crumbs. Joan was nowhere to be seen, but a second door, leading off the living room, had been left ajar. Maintaining her strategy, Sanne knocked again and called out as she ventured onward. She hesitated at the bottom of a flight of stairs. They were in darkness, but she assumed Joan or Geoff must be up there, since they hadn’t heard her shouting. Using the handrail as a guide, she began to ascend.
“Joan?” Her voice fell away, and she put her hand over her nose and mouth. “Jesus.”
The foul smell she had noticed in the living room was now intense, and it hit her full force. There was no mistaking it: something or someone up there was dead.
“Fuck.” She hurtled up the remaining stairs, no longer caring about procedure or how she might explain her actions to her superiors.
To the left of the landing a clock ticked, but not loudly enough to muffle a scrabble of movement in the only room showing a strip of light beneath its door. A harsh, phlegm-rattled cough from behind the door told Sanne she had found Joan. She looked around the landing, struggling to distinguish shapes in the gloom. There was nothing she could use as a weapon, so she pulled her CS gas from the pocket of her combats. Her hands shook as she primed the canister, and she had to take a breath to calm herself. Then she kicked the door open, catching a glimpse of a bloodstained double bed and a pink sheet on the floor in the instant before the light snapped off.
Disorientated, she made a blind grab for the doorjamb. She whipped her head from left to right, trying to gauge where a potential assailant might be, but no one attacked her, and nothing leapt out from the shadows. With her hand still in contact with the wood, she inched forward, willing her eyes to adjust, even as she readied the CS gas.
“Joan, put the light back on,” she said.
There was no reply, but she could hear stifled wheezing from the near side of the bed. The vile smell was more distinct, breaking down into its component parts—faeces, blood, and decomposition. She slid her hand over the wall, feeling in vain for a light switch. The squeak and rasp of Joan’s breathing stayed constant, a lure just out of reach.
“I’m going to come over to you. I don’t want you to move, okay?” She left the relative safety of the door and moved slowly toward the bed, her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the light, allowing her to make out Joan’s profile, black and featureless as she stood waiting.
“I didn’t mean to do it!” Joan’s frantic hiss made Sanne’s skin crawl.
“Didn’t mean to do what?” Sanne was close now, not quite within touching distance but close enough to see that Joan’s eyes were wide glints of grey-white. “Joan, I can’t help you unless you tell me what’s going on.”
Completely focused on her target, she stumbled as her foot jammed against something solid. She tried to draw back but wavered, off-balance, her trainer snared in the sheet she had forgotten about. She lurched forward, and her hands touched the bed, springs bouncing beneath her fingers and loosening her hold on the gas canister. Sensing movement, she glanced up and saw Joan’s raised arm.
“Don’t!”
She dropped instinctively, twisting to the side to land in an awkward crouch. She felt the rush of air as a heavy object swung past her ear. Missing her completely, it hit the bed, and she heard Joan grunt with anger and with the effort of lifting it again. Sanne hurled herself forward, colliding with Joan’s midriff and then moaning in pain as Joan brought the weapon down across her shoulders. The shock of the blow made her arms and hands numb. She kicked out instead, aiming for Joan’s knees and scoring a solid hit on a bone that collapsed beneath her trainer. Joan screeched, flailing for leverage, and Sanne kicked again, hearing the clatter of metal as Joan lost her hold on her weapon.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Joan didn’t have the energy to scream, but she was trying, her voice rising and falling in a shattered wail. A cough became an uncontrollable bout that racked her thin body.
Folding one of Joan’s arms behind her, Sanne shoved her against the bed. Too distracted by coughing, Joan offered no resistance as Sanne found her handcuffs and eventually managed to fasten them around Joan’s wrists.
“Where’s the fucking light switch?” She hauled Joan closer to her.
Joan spat in her face.
“You’re under arrest,” Sanne said, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand and retrieving the canister from the bed. “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.” She recited the Miranda by rote, leaving Joan to curse and rage and demand an ambulance for the hip Sanne had probably broken.
There was a lamp just visible on the bedside table. When Sanne flicked its switch, Joan screamed and buried her face in the mattress. Poised to radio for backup, Sanne froze with her finger on the priority button.
“My God.” She looked down at the pink sheet that covered the floor. “What did you do?”
There was a body beneath the sheet. It lay motionless, its distended abdomen an ominous mound. Fluids had seeped into the cotton, creating an obscene Rorschach blotch.
“Is that Rachel?” she whispered, even as she knelt at the head and gently lifted the sheet. She rocked back on her heels as she recognised the face.
“He was going to tell on my boy.” Joan’s voice, calmer now, cut through the silence with measured precision. “I couldn’t let him do that.” She held Sanne’s gaze, refusing to look at her husband’s body. “I couldn’t let him do that.”
Sanne scrambled to her feet, ignoring the shooting pain across her back and the acrid taste of bile in her mouth. “Where’s Rachel?
Where is she?
”
Joan had started to rock back and forth, her eyes glazed. Giving up waiting for a response, Sanne raised her radio instead.
“Nelson?” she shouted over the open channel. “Nelson, please come in. Nelson?” Bypassing priority, she hit the emergency button instead. “I need backup now! Cotters Garage, Lower Bank Road, off the Snake Pass. Officer down. Repeat, officer down!”
Confident that Joan was incapacitated, she sprinted down the stairs. On the radio, a police unit called out an ETA of twenty minutes. She hooked the handset onto her belt as she shoved the living room door open and dodged past the furniture. She slowed as she approached the reception area. It was the most likely place for Billy to launch an attack. She strained to listen for him, her hand tense around the gas canister. All she could hear was her own laboured breathing and panicked heartbeat. The door creaked when she pushed it, the noise grating on her nerves, but the reception was empty. She snatched up a wrench abandoned by the desk, the cool heft of the metal giving her the impetus to go through into the yard.
Keeping to the side of the building, she jogged around to the main garage. Rain and mist obscured the yard, forcing her to dry her eyes every few seconds. Ahead of her, the automated shutters on the garage gaped wide, and a light blinked like a warning beacon as it swayed in the wind. She sobbed quietly when she caught the faint hum of Nelson’s radio coming from somewhere beyond the threshold. She could be walking into a trap, she knew, but the thought of Nelson lying injured or worse compelled her to take the quickest route, straight across the yard toward the garage entrance.
She had only covered a fraction of the distance when she was blinded by a sudden flare of light. She stopped dead, unable to pinpoint its source, shielding her eyes and bracing herself for whatever was going to happen. An engine roared, impossibly loud, and tyres spun on the wet gravel, the sound bouncing back off the cavernous building. She had no time to turn. From the corner of her eye, she saw the van bearing down on her, its tyres jumping through potholes and puddles, giving it the appearance of a living thing.
“Oh, fuck—”
Her body responded before her brain could process the danger. Hurtling out of the van’s path, she lost her footing almost at once, momentum carrying her forward until she landed sprawled on the gravel. Her forehead thumped against something sharp-edged and unyielding, and for an instant, all light and sound was gone.
When she opened her eyes again, the van was thirty yards away, its rear lights casting a red hue on the mist as it sped past the reception. Gasping, with blood hot on her face, she managed to get to her knees and then stand. The abrupt movement made her retch, and she spat a thin stream of vomit and blood into the dirt. With more caution, she raised her head again. The taillights were still visible, the bumpy track slowing the van to a crawl. She limped after it, determined to see its registration plate and in which direction it would head at the main road, but it gained speed as it approached the junction, the driver not seeming to care about traffic. It swung right without pausing, and a split second later, a tumultuous crunch of metal slamming into metal made Sanne weave precariously. Pulling up short, she watched through the rain as the van folded in on itself, its side buckling under the impact of a ten-wheeler lorry. Smoke poured off the lorry’s tyres and its brakes squealed as its momentum took it past the junction, forcing the van ahead of it, its trailer juddering violently, before it finally came to a halt.
Blood trickled from Sanne’s forehead, clouding her view of the carnage on the road. The din had set her ears ringing. She set off running toward the crash, rubbing at her eyes, trying not to think about what it might have done to anyone dumped, unrestrained, in the back of the van. As she got closer, she could see the lorry driver in his cab. He was conscious and seemed to be trying to release his seatbelt.
“Are you okay?” she yelled. He nodded, looking dazed. She nodded back and darted round the cab to the van. An anguished cry through its smashed windscreen told her that Billy Cotter had survived the collision. He wasn’t her priority, though. The lorry was crushing the driver’s side, so she ran around to the far side and wrenched the rear door open. She bent double, her guts aching, when she saw the empty compartment. She took her frustration and relief out on the van, rattling its bodywork as she slammed the door shut.
Billy didn’t seem to have noticed her at first. Through the shattered passenger window, she could see that he was trapped, his right leg pinned beneath the steering column. His only other obvious injuries were two deep slashes across his face and neck that were bleeding profusely. He didn’t have a weapon. His hands were empty. She opened the passenger door.
“Sanne, help. My leg’s stuck.” His entreaty came out as a pathetic whine, and she could see teeth gleaming through the laceration on his cheek as he spoke. It wasn’t clear what he’d cut himself on, but the wounds were severe.
“I don’t give a shit about your leg,” she said, and her vehemence made his head jerk. “Where are they?”
“Who? I don’t know what you mean. Please, Sanne, get me out of here.”
She batted away his hand. “Nelson and Rachel,” she said clearly. “Tell me where they are, and I’ll radio for an ambulance.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He was wasting time. She wanted to grab his neck and smack his face into the steering wheel until he told her the truth. Instead, she yelped, as a hand touched her shoulder.