The House of Killers

by Samantha Lee Howe

  ‘I don’t know it, Beth, but I feel it. All these crazy coincidences and accidents. It’s contrived. And that takes some major planning.’

  ‘We still have some options. The security company must have records of who was working and who had access to the footage at the hotel. We bring them in and question them. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll crack.’

  I nod, but I’m expecting this to be a dead end as always.

  ‘Why was Olczak killed?’ Beth asks. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Why were any of these people killed? Other than Aidan Bright, they’d all been off our radar. I’ll speak to MI6 and see if they’re in a sharing mood. More than likely Olczak was a spy,’ I say. ‘At least that might give us a clue as to who would want him dead.’

  ‘It’ll be a relief if we actually get an answer to one of our questions. We just keep on coming up with dead ends. I can’t help thinking this case is linked to others we’ve been dealing with, but I have no idea why.’

  ‘My gut tells me the same,’ I say. ‘Maybe the DNA of the killer will tell us what we need to know.’

  ‘I hope so. But … the planning that goes into these deaths. Who has those kinds of resources?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know, Beth, but I really want to find out,’ I say.

  They reach the car and I climb into the passenger seat as Beth gets behind the wheel.

  ‘We’ve had no other leads on our mystery female, have we?’ Beth asks.

  ‘You know we haven’t,’ I say.

  I feel Beth’s eyes on me but don’t look at her. I imagine the inquiring expression I’ve seen many times on her face. Despite all my efforts, I haven’t found Anna. She’s simply disappeared.

  ‘You’d tell me if she made contact?’ Beth says.

  ‘What? Of course! Why wouldn’t I?’ I say.

  Beth turns the engine on and pulls the car away from the kerb into the slow-moving London traffic. I use the switch of her attention to glance at her; she has a small frown on her face as she concentrates. I can’t help feeling guilty, even though I haven’t lied about any further contact with Anna. She hasn’t been back to my flat, I’m sure of that. The day after I discovered she’d been there, I installed camera surveillance all over my home. I wish she would contact me, even though I don’t know what I’d do if she does.

  A few months earlier, my only lead, the brandy glass with her prints and DNA, drew a blank. As I suspected, the glass had been washed. It confirmed that Anna had returned, found the glass, and judiciously removed all trace of herself from it. Maybe that was why she’d broken into my flat in the first place.

  The lack of evidence is disappointing but it removed the necessity for me to admit my indiscretion to the team. Even so, I regret what I’ve done. Finding Anna is all I can think about. So much so that I’ve pulled the files of her probable parents, the Arquettes, and I now have their DNA to compare with Anna if and when we ever find her. If she is Amelie, I can only imagine what she’s been through to turn her into what she is now. We should give someone in that situation a break, shouldn’t we?

  ‘How’s the investigation going with the stolen kids, otherwise?’ I ask.

  ‘The only thing I’ve discovered so far is that the Arquettes met some of the other parents.’

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘I have a meeting with Simone Arquette this afternoon if you want to tag along. Maybe she can tell us something we don’t know,’ Beth says. ‘But let’s not give anything we suspect away. I mean, your suggestion is the best lead I’ve had in months. I’d like to follow that before we make any real assumptions.’

  ‘Sure. Makes sense.’

  This is the first time I’ve heard about Beth’s visit, and I wonder how long she has been planning to speak to Simone.

  ‘You hadn’t mentioned you were going to speak to the parents,’ I say.

  ‘I know this is a bit of a leap,’ Beth says. ‘But. Well. Without any leads, I’d been thinking about your mystery woman. This Anna. About her possibly remembering who she is. It occurred to me she might try to contact her parents.’

  I don’t say anything, thinking it unlikely. If Anna is the missing child then her life will be so far removed from her past that she’d never look back. But the idea of the parents meeting together does intrigue me. I don’t know why. They probably just did it as a support-group thing – common grief shared – so I’m a little surprised that Beth has read into it. Even so, Beth’s instincts are usually grounded. For that reason, I feel an urge to see Simone Arquette.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come with you. Give you my take on her,’ I say.

  ‘Good. I’d appreciate that!’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  MICHAEL

  The house is situated near Kingston about ten miles south of London. Commutable but out of the centre. It’s a huge house, maybe six or seven bedrooms, with at least four large reception rooms and a downstairs office. We’re led into the office by a formal butler. It seems that Simone and Anton Arquette are living the country-squire dream, enjoying all that their diplomatic position can afford.

  Simone Arquette is tall and willowy. A former ballerina, she moves gracefully as she crosses her long legs. She sits on a sofa opposite us. Her grace does remind me of Anna but that could still be a coincidence. Behind her is the ambassador’s desk, clear of any paperwork, though I notice a fountain pen is lying on the desk as though it has just been used.

  I let Beth do the formal introductions while I find myself looking for Anna in Simone’s features. Her eyes are slightly more upturned and they are green not blue. But then, I realise, Anna could have been wearing coloured lenses when I saw her.

  ‘You’re investigating Amelie’s disappearance?’ Simone says. ‘You have a new lead?’

  I give her the formal description for the taskforce but don’t reveal more about our work than necessary. Simone’s cat-like eyes study me.

  ‘We look at old crimes with new eyes. We’ve had some success in solving them,’ Beth adds. ‘I’m hoping that some new things that have come to our attention may help in this case.’

  ‘What new things?’ Simone asks.

  ‘A connection perhaps with some other missing children’s cases,’ Beth says. We’ve agreed to discuss only this with Simone, not any other possible links.

  ‘You are a little late learning that. My private detective discovered the link in the case with other missing children. But still Amelie was not found,’ Simone says.

  ‘We know. And that’s why we’re here. We’d like to have access to everything your detective discovered and to know about your meeting with the other parents,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll have my secretary send you everything, of course. But you should know I found out about the other missing children very quickly. I reported what I knew to the police, but they didn’t take it seriously at the time.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Beth says. ‘Can you tell us what you know?’

  ‘It will be in your file, I’m sure,’ Simone says.

  ‘We’d just like you to tell us from your perspective what happened,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry if this is painful for you.’

  Simone looks at me again as though assessing how serious I am about the case. Then she seems to make a decision; a slight nod of her head gives her thoughts away. She sees no harm in telling us what she knows.

  ‘Amelie went missing from her school. She asked to go to the bathroom and never came back to class. There was no sign of her, or of a struggle, and no witnesses. When I learnt that more children had vanished, I tried to discover the connection. I learnt that all disappeared in similar circumstances. Yet each child was from a different part of the country.’

  ‘So, you met the other parents?’ Beth prompts.

  ‘Yes. It didn’t help much. The only thing we had in common was our clever children.’

  Simone barely has an accent. Despite being born in Paris, her English is almost flawless. She is composed, overly so for a woman whose child had been
stolen and never found. Maybe twenty years was enough for you to get over such a terrible tragedy. Not being a parent, I didn’t know.

  ‘Did you notice anything strange about any of the other parents?’ I ask.

  ‘Strange? No. All I saw were grieving families.’

  ‘One last thing,’ Beth says. ‘Are you still in touch with any of the other couples?’

  Simone blinks, and just for a second I see a rupture beneath her calm veneer. I stow it away in the back of my mind to analyse later.

  ‘Occasionally one of them contacts me. They still have hope…’

  ‘And what about you?’ I ask. ‘Do you have hope?’

  ‘I don’t think I will ever see Amelie again,’ Simone says. ‘I came to terms with that a long time ago.’

  ‘That poor woman,’ says Beth as we walk back towards the car.

  ‘Poor isn’t how I’d describe her. Cold is a better label,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think she was … odd?’

  ‘She lost her kid, Mike. Now she’s just trying to hold her shit together.’

  ‘She didn’t react how any normal person would. We’ve reopened the case. You’d think she would ask more questions. I expected us to be managing her expectations but instead she managed ours.’

  ‘I see what you mean. She was very definite that she wouldn’t see her child again. With no corpse to confirm Amelie is dead, you’d think she would still hope for a miracle. I would. If it was one of my kids. At least she answered the question we really wanted to ask, without us having to open that can of worms,’ Beth says. ‘Amelie hasn’t been in touch. So maybe she isn’t this woman after all.’

  ‘Or maybe she doesn’t yet remember who she was,’ I say.

  But Simone’s guarded expression concerns me. At one point I almost thought she was going to smile when she said she knew she wouldn’t see her daughter again.

  I have no understanding of what it’s like to be a parent and I don’t ask Beth how it feels, not wanting to open our relationship up to our personal lives. It’s something we try to avoid talking about amongst ourselves at Archive.

  Beth’s phone pings and she takes it out of her pocket. ‘The PI file has already arrived. She’s efficient – or her secretary is, at least.’

  ‘Forward that to me, will you?’

  I open the private investigator’s folder as soon as I’m back at my desk but it’s not very helpful. It appears that Simone had spent a lot of money for nothing more than we already knew.

  I think about Anna again. I still believe she could be Amelie, which means that Simone might see her daughter again one day. But what good will it do to reveal that Amelie may have become a trained killer? Would any parent want to learn that?

  I close the folder and stare at the blank screen as I recall the strange meeting with Simone. Was her coldness merely a defence mechanism? Did she cry as we walked back to the car parked in her driveway? Somehow, I can visualise her laughter more than her tears.

  I try to picture Anna again. But my memory of her is warping with time. Instead I see Simone’s cold green, cat-like eyes looking back at me as I hold out the brandy glass.

  ‘Where are you, Anna?’ I murmur, before I realise I’ve spoken aloud.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  NEVA

  Neva watches Michael as he leaves the office that evening. She’s been back in London for the past week. Tonight, unlike other nights, Michael does not go straight home. Instead, he heads into the tube. She watches him at a safe distance as he leaves Borough and makes his way to Covent Garden.

  At a Japanese restaurant, he eats sushi alone and drinks Tsingtao beer direct from the bottle. By 8pm he’s heading back to his lonely flat.

  Neva doesn’t know why she follows him, except that she has an urge to fill the void inside her. That emptiness is eased when she looks at Michael. When she studies his isolation. There is no partner – male or female – and no suggestion that he’s looking. He doesn’t appear unhappy as he wears his solitude like another layer of skin: familiar and comfortable. He is, in many ways, just like her.

  Throughout her months in hiding she has been searching the dark Web for answers. But today she learns more about Michael and what he’s investigating. It’s not difficult to discover whose home he and his colleague visited. The French Ambassador is not a low-profile figure. And neither is his wife. At some point, Neva had a file on them as potential targets but at the last minute it was pulled.

  To prevent discovery, she moves hotels every day. At this night’s choice, Neva looks for answers and finds them on her laptop: Simone and Anton had a daughter.

  A little girl who was abducted.

  She looks at the pictures of Amelie and those of six others presumed to be taken by the same perpetrator.

  With a thudding heart, she recognises the young faces.

  ‘My name is Peter. What do they call you?’

  She remembers Peter because he was so formal. The oldest of the group, he thought it was his place to take care of them all at first. Neva had looked up to him.

  ‘You’re not Peter,’ Tracey Herod had told him. ‘You’re Kurt now.’

  They were all given new names, but when they were alone, they recited their real ones to themselves in a form of meditation. They never wanted to forget who they were. It was somehow important. But after the treatments, their minor rebellion was quashed. Their former names no longer mattered, ceased to be repeated, and they became who and what the trainer and doctor wanted them to be.

  Neva still does not know her real name, though she looks through the four familiar girls’ faces. One of whom she thinks must be herself. They are all strangers and yet all too familiar. She sees a name now, listed as ‘missing’, and it feels like a world away. Like the moment when they told her she was Neva. She tries the other names on her lips but it feels as though they belong to someone else – another child in another dimension. Never hers. It’s an abstract dream that sometimes she remembers while she’s awake.

  She closes her eyes and forces the memories to surface. It’s painful and her head aches with the effort, even as she forces down a swirl of nausea. There they are: Katie, John, Melanie, Toby, Amelie, Peter (who became Kurt), Jennifer. Why didn’t she pay more attention to the others? Why did she just let those minor friendships slip away? She thinks it’s to do with the room. The mantras. The instructions forced on them day and night. Especially when they were so exhausted they could barely walk. After those times, Neva recalls rest periods. Days when they ate and slept and were sometimes allowed to watch television. But the films they watched were nightmares in themselves. Brutal, blood-filled visions of death were put before them until they were so desensitised that it neither scared nor disgusted them.

  ‘I’d like to stab that knife into someone’s ribs,’ Kurt/Peter had said as they watched the footage of a vicious murder. He mimed the action, enjoying the killing as he watched it unfold.

  Katie and John stared at the screen with dead, unemotional eyes. Melanie (what did they call her in the end?) watched Kurt, a slight smile on her lips. ‘You’ll do it soon enough,’ she said. ‘We all will.’

  By then the training had been underway for the best part of ten years. Neva was the expert with a knife, something that rankled with Kurt. He was seventeen then, Neva almost fifteen. But she was taller than the other three girls, not much shorter than Kurt and just as strong because she never let emotions fuel her actions.

  Now Neva remembers their final spar. She was placed with Kurt, knife in hand. Within minutes, Neva had broken Kurt’s hold on his knife, expertly knocking it from his clenched fingers. She stepped back as she was supposed to, to allow Kurt to accept defeat, but anger got the better of him. He leapt towards her, grabbing Neva’s knife.

  ‘I’ll kill you!’ he said.

  They fought. Neva held onto her blade, but only just. Tracey, Callan, and one of the other instructors pulled Kurt away. He was hauled out of the training area and taken down the corridor.

 
; ‘He’s history,’ Katie had said.

  ‘No, they’ll just give him treatment. He’s too emotional,’ John told them.

  Tracey came back into the training area then and the sparring resumed. Afterwards, Neva was taken into Tracey’s office.

  ‘You have your first assignment,’ she said.

  Neva felt a surge of excitement kindled by fear but she kept her face still.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You’re going to retire Kurt.’

  Neva nodded but the thought of killing her sparring partner for real made her feel odd. Going too far, hurting each other seriously, had been against the rules; she knew that. But did Kurt deserve to die because of it? She had always been taught control and restraint and had won all of her spars because of her ability to do this. Kurt struggled to keep his emotions in check, even though the conditioning should make him capable of it. Neva vaguely wondered what it would feel like to end a life. Wasn’t this ultimately what they were training her for?

  ‘How do you wish to do it?’ asked Tracey.

  ‘Knife,’ said Neva. ‘I will cut his throat.’

  Later she was taken to Kurt. He was strapped into the chair, having spent time with the doctor. He was quiet, drugged, and in the state they all were after intensive treatment.

  Tracey gave her a knife. ‘Kill him,’ she said.

  ‘No fight?’ Neva asked.

  ‘You don’t have to win a fight to score a victory for the Network,’ Tracey said. ‘When you finish an enemy, or in this case a disappointment, you do it for the best reasons.’

  Neva stepped forward. She had listened to Tracey’s view on Kurt all afternoon. Reading between the lines, she knew she had to do it. It was Kurt or herself. Any failure now would make her a liability too. She couldn’t be the one to die. They had almost retired her once before. Tracey, at that time, had saved her but Neva understood this was a one-time-only deal. She never lapsed again, and never would.

  Neva looked at Kurt’s drugged face. She thought he was unlikely to feel anything in this state. This was easy – a no-brainer. Even so, she hesitated. She was going to take a life, something they had trained her for all these years. Shouldn’t she feel something about that?