Who Dares Wins

by Vince Vogel

  “Because he’s protecting the killer.”

  “But Stevie McDonald? If you knew him, you’d know he isn’t the type. Last year a cow got hit on one of the roads. The guy threw up everywhere when he had to help clean it up. He may be a mouthy little shit, but he couldn’t be helping a killer.”

  “Then what?”

  Conner gazed at Dorring and something played in the latter’s head. Dorring figured there was something Conner wanted to say but was afraid to.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “Nothing,” Conner said.

  “No. You’ve got something to say, so come out with it.”

  “Okay then. But don’t get cross.”

  “I won’t.”

  Conner took in a deep breath and said, “You don’t think this has something to do with what happened after it all kicked off in Helmand?”

  A burst of anger leaped up inside of Dorring like a gas explosion, his assertion not to get angry burning within the wrathful flames. He reared up in the chair and his hands gripped the arms, making the wood creak between his fingers.

  “What do you mean?” he said, trying to control the rage.

  “Well, you know, your breakdown. The one that got you in the DCMH.”

  DCMH stood for Department of Community Mental Health. It was a collection of facilities on British military bases which monitored soldiers experiencing psychological problems stemming from conflict.

  “I was cleared after three weeks,” Dorring said.

  “I know. But you were acting really weird before they put you inside it.”

  Dorring’s face screwed into a scowl, his hands gripped the arms of the chair tighter and he feared he’d rip them off. He felt unable to gaze at Conner anymore. Feelings he’d long buried were brought back to the surface by the sight of his former comrade’s face. So he turned his vision to the window over Conner’s shoulder and gazed at the beating rain.

  “I was hurt back then,” Dorring said in a hollow voice. “Out there it was hard enough without…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “I’m sorry, partner,” Conner said in a regretful tone. “It was a terrible time.”

  Dorring moved his eyes from the rain and looked back at Conner. He reached into his pocket and pulled the phone out. Then he held the old Nokia up to his former comrade while pressing his thumb into the power button.

  “What’s the phone about?” Conner asked. “You know they’re useless here, right?”

  “It’s not for using,” Dorring said as he waited for it to turn on. When it was, he put it on loud speaker and played the recording of the message.

  “I don’t know if you’ll ever receive this,” the voice of Kevin Yates went, and Dorring could recite it easily. “I’ve been unable to trace where you went after you left the unit… Come find me…”

  As they listened to it, a frown grew ever larger on Conner’s face. It appeared that the message irritated him rather than touched his curiosity. By the end he looked almost horrified by it.

  “That was Kevin Yates, wasn’t it?” Conner said when the message had ended.

  “Yes,” Dorring said, placing the phone in his pocket. “The message was sent a year ago. In truth, I probably should have never got it.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yes.”

  Conner stared at him for a few seconds and then said, “So Kevin Yates came to McGuffin a year ago?”

  “Yes,” Dorring said. “That’s what he claims in the message.”

  “Then why didn’t I see him? Why’d he not come to see me?”

  Dorring looked deep into Conner’s eyes. He was looking for a sign of dishonesty. But his old comrade wasn’t budging. A blank look doing its best to hide his feelings.

  He always did have a good poker face, Dorring remarked in his head.

  “So you never saw him?” he asked Conner.

  “I swear to God I never saw him. I haven’t seen Kevin Yates since Helmand over fourteen years ago. After what happened to him…” He gazed into space for a few seconds before going on, “Are you sure he came here after the killer?”

  “I’m not sure if Kevin made it here or if anything happened to him if he did. Nevertheless, I’m certain the killer is here. The body I found on the beach confirmed it. The one mutilated with the insignia. The one possibly loaded into a Toyota pickup.” Dorring stared into Conner and let this linger for a moment before adding, “The killer’s here alright.”

  “And you’ve no idea who?”

  “No. That’s why I’m going to ask you again. Is there anyone else here from our old unit?”

  “And I’m telling you again: no.”

  Dorring shook his head and got up off the chair.

  “He’s on this island,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve made a big mistake telling you, but I swear he’s here. Be careful, Conner. Be real careful.”

  And with that he left, leaving Conner to stare after him with wide eyes.

  At the hallway, Dorring took his rucksack back and left the house. Outside, he found Tony leaning with his back up against his Toyota, smoking a cigarette.

  “You want a lift back into town?” he asked Dorring.

  “No. I’ll walk.”

  12

  On the road leading away from Appleby Manor, Dorring was passed by the fire engine coming back from the Chalmers’ place. Inside were the soot covered and desolate faces of the firemen. The death of a fellow islander had hit them hard.

  The rain and wind beat severely against Dorring, but he felt not one iota of the bitter cold or the harsh weather. In his head he was going over everything.

  Kevin leaves a message on an old phone of Dorring’s. Did he ever expect it to be listened to? After all, he sent it a year ago to a phone Dorring had given him the number to fourteen years before. Not long after that, he’d left the SAS for MI6 and the phone had lain abandoned in his locker until they’d boxed his possessions up and sent them to his mother.

  Dorring took it as complete luck that he’d gotten the message at all.

  Then there was Conner’s presence in McGuffin.

  Dorring began wondering how true it was that his old comrade hadn’t been the killer in the first place. No, he said in his head. It can’t be him. He searched his mind back to that time and could think of at least three occasions when he knew beyond a doubt that Conner wasn’t able to commit the murders. But could he be sure? Were there two killers at work in Helmand? Using each other’s MO and signatures to give the impression of one.

  Typically, it made him think about Jane.

  Oh sweet Jane, he used to call her, after the Velvet Underground song. He would sing it to her when they were all alone. She was too smart not to notice that there were two killers. Way too smart. She would have picked up on the slightest discrepancies between the murders. Seen a slight change or difference in one. Because two men can’t repeat each other’s techniques to the absolute letter. There’ll always be a flaw in one. Plus, the lettering was always the same. The lines of Who Dares Wins almost identical from one body to the next. No, it couldn’t be two killers.

  Then why was Conner here while the killer was too?

  He went back to an earlier question: had Kevin contacted Conner as well?

  But their conversation a minute ago dispelled this. He’d given Conner ample opportunity to come clean. After all, he’d shared things with Conner, so why couldn’t Conner share things with him? No, it was clear that he’d received no call from Kevin. And anyway, he’d been here for years already.

  Then Dorring asked himself why Kevin hadn’t approached Conner when he’d gotten here. If he’d been to the island, he was sure to do it. But Conner was adamant that he hadn’t seen Kevin.

  “I haven’t seen Kevin Yates since Helmand fourteen years ago,” he’d said. “After what happened to him.”

  After what happened to him, Dorring repeated in his head.

  He was suddenly standing within the insides of a half built room—a constru
ction site. Standing over something. The air illuminated by flashlight beams, shadows moving about the walls. There was blood everywhere, handprints running through it. He could smell its metallic scent in his nostrils. He’d smelled it many times before, but it was the first time that it actively made him nauseous. Keeling to the side and having to hold himself up by a wall, he sent a stomachful of vomit onto the concrete floor.

  Dorring felt nauseous now as he walked down the road and had to stop beside a grass verge for a few seconds. When the image of the room had cleared, he continued walking and his thinking went on.

  Whatever was happening, he had to find out what Kevin had found out. Had to look for why he thought the killer may be on McGuffin. So he went to the only place he could think of. With no internet or mobile signal, it was his only choice.

  McGuffin library stood nestled into the center of town. As with its surroundings, it was made of blocks the color of the craggy cliffs the island was covered in. Two columns at its entrance and large latticed windows set it apart from the rest of the buildings. But it was all very similar.

  Going inside, he found the aisles of bookshelves empty of people and walked up to an old woman sitting reading at a small reception desk.

  “Hello?” he said.

  She immediately jumped and almost threw the book at him.

  “Oh my!” she exclaimed and held a hand over her heaving chest. Her eyes gazed up at him and he got the impression she was as afraid of him as everyone else appeared to be.

  “Is there an archive of old newspapers here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said in an eloquent voice that sounded slightly nasal. “It’s in the back. Follow the shelving.”

  She pointed a crooked finger along some bookshelves that disappeared into darkness. It appeared she only kept the light over her desk alive.

  “There’s a lamp beside the monitor,” she said as he stared in the direction of her finger.

  “Thank you,” Dorring said, and he followed the dusty shelving, the smell of old books invading his nostrils the deeper he got into the darkened library.

  At a back wall, he found a microfilm monitor. You didn’t really see them anymore since the internet nowadays stores everything on it. When he sat down, he found that they still added the latest editions of the local and national newspapers to it.

  Dorring was more interested in the local newspaper, the McGuffin Post. Though he scanned through the nearest nationals, too. Newspapers such as the Daily Record, a Scottish tabloid.

  Without knowing where to start, he simply went backwards from now and scanned the pages for murder. At first inspection, it appeared that murder wasn’t something McGuffin did. In fact, it looked like the body he happened to find that morning was the first victim on McGuffin in its history.

  What luck, Dorring thought.

  As he searched through the reported history of McGuffin, he wondered how true it was that there’d been no murder. Because there was one thing that he did find in lieu of homicide: disappearances.

  By the time he was twenty years back through the history of the island, he’d found three women and four men, all of them between fourteen and forty, that had gone missing. And he could find no evidence that any of them had ever been found.

  Then he spotted something. Or didn’t spot something, as would be more truthful. Because between 1995 and 1997, every single edition of the McGuffin Post was gone. Checking the nationals from those years, he found the odd article that baffled him more than explained anything.

  Body Snatched from Morgue on McGuffin Island, proclaimed the headline of a small article in the Daily Record.

  Police are hunting for the body of a teenager found washed up on a beach after it went missing from the funeral home it was being kept in. Local police from the small isolated island in the Outer Hebrides are liaising with mainland authorities as to the missing body’s whereabouts. McGuffin Detective Constable Simon Mclaughlin had already called in the assistance of mainland police after finding the female washed up on one of the beaches four days ago. She was supposedly the victim of horrific injuries.

  That one was written in the summer of 1995. May. A few weeks later, a short follow-up story in the Daily Record stated: Body of teenager found. Apparently misplaced by local authorities. After autopsy, it was determined that the girl—fifteen year old Stacey McKenzie—died after hitting rocks. Local teens came forward to explain that they were diving off cliffs that day when Stacey misjudged her jump and hit the rocks. They claimed that they had been too afraid to come forward earlier.

  In a copy of the Daily Record from the next summer, June 1996, Dorring found another small piece that appeared strange.

  Tragedy on McGuffin. Teenage couple found dead in field after being hit by combine harvester. Two teens were apparently enjoying a romantic picnic in the middle of a cornfield on McGuffin island when they fell to sleep. Local Detective Constable John Chalmers stated that the tragedy would leave lasting wounds on the quiet island community but he hoped to help them in healing their burden.

  There were more spurious snippets in the Daily Record, always people going missing in summer, but nothing that gave Dorring a clear picture that there was a predator at work. Perhaps the local journal had been much more comprehensive in trying to find out what was behind it all. Maybe that was why it was gone.

  Dorring decided to try and find out.

  Leaving the monitor, he revisited the old librarian, who had fallen to sleep. Leaning over her desk, he touched her shoulder and, once again, he made her jump.

  “Oh my!” she shrieked. “You should’nay frighten an auld woman like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” she grumbled, adjusting herself and wiping sleep from her eyes, “what do you want?”

  “I’m looking for copies of the McGuffin Post for the years 1995 to 1997. I was wondering where they are.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re the second person to ask for those dates in the last couple of months,” she said.

  Dorring almost burst.

  “Who asked for them before?” he said, leaning forward with his palms on her desk.

  “Now why should I go telling you?”

  He was sure that it was Kevin.

  “Please,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t go telling strangers everyone else’s secrets.”

  “It’s hardly a secret.”

  “But it’s still gossip.”

  “What? Asking about missing newspapers?”

  She glanced furtively over his shoulder at the door and then back at him, her dark eyes staring up. It was like she was trying to read him. Look inside his soul and see if he could be trusted.

  She decided he could.

  “On McGuffin,” she said, “asking questions like those can get a boy hurt.”

  “Then just tell me if it was a man or woman.”

  “Woman,” she said.

  Dorring was disappointed. He had been sure that it would be Kevin.

  “Do you trust me enough to say who?” he asked.

  “I’ll nay give you her name,” the librarian said, holding her chin up high when she did.

  “Okay then,” Dorring said. “Can you at least tell me where the newspapers are?”

  “I’m afraid all the copies of the McGuffin Post covering… that time are gone.”

  Before she’d said the words that time she’d paused and her old blue eyes had gone blank. As though the thought of that time brought back a whole host of dark memories. Dorring wanted to know what those memories were.

  “Covered what?” he asked.

  Her expression darkened even more and she once more glanced furtively over his shoulder.

  “I don’t like to say,” she said, returning her eyes to him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was a very bad time for the island and folk here on McGuffin prefer to forget. They share the gift of collective amnesia.”

  “Please, I’d like to know what
you’ve tried to forget.”

  “So did she.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who came asking before.”

  “And what did you tell her?” Dorring asked.

  Again she looked over his shoulder.

  “I’ll talk,” she said in a hushed voice, turning her eyes back to him, “but not here.”

  She got up from the desk and walked past him to the front door. There, she took a key from the pocket of her long green cardigan and locked it. Then she walked past Dorring going the other way and unlocked a door that was behind the desk.

  “In here,” she said, turning back to him.

  On the other side was a small staff room with a little kitchenette in one corner. Having closed the curtains of a window, she made him a cup of tea and they sat down around a table. He noted that there was an alleyway on the other side of the window. He observed that, before she’d closed the curtains, the librarian had been sure to gaze both ways along it.

  “There's been three recent disasters on McGuffin that folk still alive have experienced,” she said once she sat opposite. “Painful memories that linger on with the living. When we die, we will take some o’ those painful times with us. But as sure as I am that we’ll eventually die, I’m sure that more bad will happen to this place.”

  “Bad?” Dorring asked. “What like?”

  “Huh!” she gently scoffed. “People here like to pretend nothing bad ever happens on McGuffin. Their memories only go back as far as when all the money from the pharmaceutical company came. So long as they’ve got a little money and don’t go hungry, they couldn’t care what happens.”

  “So tell me,” Dorring said, “three disasters.”

  “In the sixties there was a landslide on Bishop’s Hill,” she said in a low voice. “It ended up burying the local primary school. We lost fifty little ’uns that day. Then in the eighties there was a great storm which claimed fifteen fishing boats and over fifty of our best men. My Barry along with them.” Her fingers reached up and began rubbing a locket that rested on her chest. “Then came the worst,” she said and her voice became darker. “But this one were nay natural disaster. Nay force of nature. This one were manmade. A monster of our own.”