Her Silent Obsession: An addictive and gripping crime thriller (Detective Arla Baker Series Book 6)

by ML Rose

  Rhys called out to her again. She turned to look, glad she had put some distance between them. He appeared out of breath, holding on to the railing as he stumbled towards her. Blood was still pouring from his left eye, and she hoped she had hit a major artery. The blood loss was making him weaker. Otherwise, she knew he would be sprinting for her.

  “Feeling tired, Rhys? You’re weak and stupid.” She shouted out the words in a taunting voice, baiting him. Rhys had an inflated ego and he would hate her jibe. She was correct. With a snarl, he increased his pace. He was still noticeably slow, and every time he moved his left hand from his eye, blood trickled out. His right arm was soaked in blood too, injured by the screw.

  She ran across a staircase. There was no point in going downstairs. He had locked both the exits. At the same time, could she really keep running around the walkway, hoping to tire him out? It might work, but she would become exhausted as well. No, there had to be a better way.

  She kept running, doing a semicircle around the perimeter. She was out of breath soon, and exhaustion drove her to her knees. She knelt on the walkway, staring at the floor far down below, visible through the grill. She panted, then glanced quickly to her left as his footsteps caught up with her. A crooked, devilish grin played across his lips as he came forward, sensing his advantage. Rebecca got to her feet and willed her legs to move, noting she was slower than before. However, she hadn’t lost blood, and she was still faster than him. She came across the next staircase and looked down. The first zigzag landing was a good three to four metres below her. A thin railing was the only protection against falling to the floor, way down, more than ten meters.

  That gave her an idea.

  She collapsed on the walkway, gasping. She clutched her back and cried out in pain. The clanging sound of Rhys’s boots grew louder as he closed the gap between them.

  She was positioned directly opposite the gap of the staircase. When he was within touching distance, she slid her hands along the back wall, hooking her hands on the railing.

  Rhys appeared in front of her, leering. He was a ghastly sight, left eye now so swollen and large it was protruding from the socket. Blood still spasmed, turning into reddish-black clots that slithered down his hand, staining his shirt.

  “Not that easy, is it, my darling Becky?” The smile became a snarl as his voice rose. “You can try, but you can’t win.”

  She said nothing, only watched him carefully, gasping like she was out of breath.

  Rhys bared his teeth. “If I can’t have you, no one can.”

  He launched himself at her, but Rebecca was ready.

  She gripped the railing tight, flexed her lower spine and back against the wall, and high-kicked with both legs, levering her entire torso off the floor. She used the strength of her shoulders to lift up her legs, crying out with the effort. It took Rhys by surprise.

  Her feet smashed against his chest, knocking him backwards. His arms wheeled in the air as he tried to regain his balance. Rebecca let go of the railing and kicked his legs as hard as she could. Rhys had created a puddle of blood, and his boots were slick on the metal surface. He fell through the gap, sliding down the stairs.

  He tried to hold on to the railings but failed. He screamed, the weight of his body losing to gravity. His left hand clawed at the metal railing and held on to a rung. But his body overbalanced, and he fell over the staircase, dangling several metres off the factory floor.

  “Becky . . . Becky . . . please, help me.”

  His face was contorted with pain as he held on to the railing with both hands, his feet wheeling in the air. Rebecca rushed to the staircase. She knelt over the hand that was gripping the railing, sinking her teeth in till they pierced flesh and she could taste blood. She didn’t stop, and kept her jaws clamped, increasing the force.

  Rhys screamed, a primal, animalistic howl of rage and pain. Rebecca let go and stood. She wiped the blood off her mouth and kicked at his hand as hard as she could. Rhys kept screaming, but his hand came loose.

  “No!” Rhys screamed one last time as his fingers gave way. He plummeted to the floor, his body meeting the cement surface with a sickening thud. Rebecca leaned over and winced as she watched the body come to a rest. His legs jerked a couple of times, then he was still.

  Her ears pricked up at a sound in the distance. It was the wailing of police sirens.

  CHAPTER 51

  Speckles of blue and grey floated across a placid black surface. An unyielding miasma of total darkness. The speckles coalesced into larger blobs, like a lava lamp, but they remained black. There was no sound, no glimmer of light, nothing at all. Harry couldn’t even hear the sound of his own breathing. He wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead, departed to the afterworld. Maybe death was supposed to be like this, a blankness where the senses didn’t operate, submerging him in a strange, ethereal world of nothingness.

  But how did he know he was in this state?

  Or was he imagining the whole thing?

  He tried to do something. Move a part of the body he couldn’t feel anymore. Contract the eyelid muscles. Twitch a finger. Nope, he couldn’t feel or do anything. He began to panic. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he really dead? It confused the hell out of him. How could he be dead, and still be aware of his own mind? Of his own thoughts?

  A wave blew across the blue, black, and grey blobs. Like a shoal of fish in the ocean, the blobs changed shape and moved en masse. The wave came again, stronger this time, moving the blobs again but not shifting the darkness. Then he heard it. It wasn’t a wave. It was a voice.

  A voice he knew. He knew it very well.

  It was Arla. At that moment, he felt the blackness jerk and twitch, like a piece of paper being torn. He frowned. The blobs vanished, replaced by peaks and troughs, black hills and valleys. He tried to speak, and was astonished at the sound of his own voice.

  “Arla?”

  His ears picked up another sound: It was a sob. He felt something warm and wet on a part of his body, and with some effort, realised it was his hand. He tried to open his eyes, but they just wouldn’t do their job. It was bloody infuriating.

  “Arla?” he whispered again. At least he had his voice. It felt good to be able to use it. This time, he heard her more clearly.

  Her voice was tremulous, like she’d been crying. “Harry. Harry, can you hear me?”

  His lips were parched dry and his voice cracked. “Yes, I can.”

  He heard a soft bell above his head and felt a tighter grip on his hand. Footsteps. To his right. Another female voice said, “He’s awake. That’s good.”

  He heard a rattle from the foot of the bed but didn’t feel any movement. The blackness was receding, he realised. There was a rim of whiteness, pushing the black circle down. His breathing picked up as he felt pain for the first time, tiny cannonballs playing ping-pong against his skull. He grimaced and a soft moan escaped his lips.

  “The morphine’s wearing off,” a female voice said. “We need to dose him up again.”

  Arla asked, “What did the MRI scan show?”

  A male voice answered. “He has a skull fracture. But the brain is unharmed. There’s no fluid causing pressure and there’s no bleed in the brain. He had a lucky escape.”

  Harry felt a weird sensation, cool liquid trickling up his arm. It disappeared after a while, absorbed into his bloodstream. The pain was still there, but the whiteness was expanding faster now. He realised then, he was staring up at a white light in the ceiling. His eyes were open. He couldn’t move his head and his lips trembled as he sweated with the pain.

  Then a shadow appeared from his right, blocking half the light. It was Arla’s face, cheeks stained with smudged mascara. She whispered his name. Despite the pain ripping his mind apart, Harry smiled. He smiled because he had seen the woman he loved. He was not afraid to die, and knew it might well be in the line of duty one day. The memory of what happened was coming back to him in a series of rapid flashbacks.

  If he had
died, his only regret would’ve been he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Arla.

  And to his baby, whom he would never see.

  But now, he had no regrets. He could die in peace. His smile grew wider as Arla’s face swam in his eyes, becoming hazy, diffuse. His eyes flickered, closing down again. The pain was receding, and he was floating back into that dark oblivion, where nothing mattered anymore.

  *****

  “What’s happening to him?” Arla asked the nurse. “His eyes are closing.” She gripped Harry’s large hand in both of her own, pressing them to her chest.

  “Don’t worry,” said the nurse in a soothing voice. “The morphine is just taking effect again. He’ll be like this till tomorrow. It all depends on how bad the pain is.”

  Arla felt tears bud in her eyes again and she squeezed them shut. Her heart was broken into so many pieces, picking them up was futile. The jagged shards would only make her bleed again. Her life had come to a complete halt. At the back of her mind, she was glad that Rebecca Stone was safe and back home. She was a remarkably brave woman, and a survivor. But for Arla, the victory had turned to ashes. She was all cried out. She felt empty inside, her soul a vacuum. For the first time she was faced with the question she didn’t want to answer. How could she live without Harry? After Nicole, Harry was the only person she had loved. Would he now be taken from her as well?

  The tears came anew. Her body shook with sobs as her head touched Harry’s chest, her tears soaking into the bedsheets.

  What would she do if Harry died? The father of her child. Her best friend and partner in crime, and what a pun that was. If he’d been awake, he would’ve smirked at her, made a joke about her horrendous sense of humour, which would get her angry. They knew each other so well, it was like they lived in each other’s minds half the time. She couldn’t think of a better father for her child. . . . The tears were ugly, big drops, making her nose run and eyes swell.

  “There, there now.” The Afro-Caribbean nurse pulled Arla towards her ample breast. “He’s going to be fine, honey. Don’t you worry now.”

  Another voice cleared its throat behind her, and she heard him say her name when he laid a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at the weary, sunken-cheeked face of Timothy Baker. Behind the square-framed glasses, his blue eyes were dulled. Surprised, she momentarily forgot her predicament.

  “Dad? How did you. . . ?”

  “I was watching the live news and saw Harry on the stretcher. I was worried you were hurt as well, God forbid.” His eyes flickered to her abdomen, warmth igniting in his eyes, dissolving the deeply carved sorrow lines in his forehead and cheeks.

  Arla had told him about his impending grandchild, and despite the years of distance that her father had carefully cultivated, he had been overjoyed at the news. It was the first time in decades Arla had heard him excited about anything, and it made her cry. He was no longer the only living relative she had left. There was a new life to look forward to. Maybe he or she would bring her father back into the fold.

  Timothy said, “I called the station, and told them who I was. They let me know which hospital. What happened?”

  Arla told him the story as Timothy pulled up a chair and sat down. When he put his arm around her shoulders, she sobbed like a little girl.

  CHAPTER 52

  Commander Wayne Johnson picked up one newspaper from the stack on his desk. Arla and Harry sat opposite him. They were in his spacious fourth-floor office, spindly blocks of grey council apartments surrounding their view.

  “Grant Stone explodes!” Johnson read from the paper, then slapped it down on the table with a harrumph of disgust. He picked up the next, biting the words out, face turning purple.

  “Police clueless about Grant’s death.”

  He flung the paper to the floor, cursing under his breath. “Unbelievable.”

  Arla said quietly, “When should we do a press conference? They’ll keep asking about Grant till we talk to them.”

  Johnson ignored Arla and picked up the next paper. “Terrorist attack in Tooting.”

  He sagged back in his red gilt leather armchair, then stood rapidly, pacing the room.

  “The biggest mess I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve seen it all,” he thundered.

  “In order to tie up Grant’s death, the explosion in Tooting, and the baby killer, we have to expose Rebecca Stone,” Arla said patiently. “And you don’t want that.”

  Johnson swung around to face her. “Jeremy Stone has requested to keep it quiet. So has Mr Cummings. I mean, I can see it from their point of view.” He swirled a finger in the air, making a circle. “But you obviously think something else.”

  Harry coughed and cleared his throat. Arla snapped her attention to him. Harry had been out of hospital for two days. He was back to his normal self, but still had a dressing on his left temple, which he proudly proclaimed made him look like Frankenstein. His scalp had several lacerations, all of which had been stitched. Arla had warned him she would pull them out if he carried on with his crap jokes.

  Harry glanced at her and she smiled warmly at him. She drunk him in with her eyes, just happy he was here, right where she could touch him.

  Arla asked, “We have to address the media sooner or later, sir. Is it not easier to get it out of the way?”

  “Which part? The fact that Grant Stone was a paedophile, or that his daughter-in-law’s former lover was one of the children he abused, who then came back to kill him?”

  Rhys Mason’s notebooks and diaries were found at his old house, and he had also mailed a letter to the station, addressed to Arla. They were nothing but allegations at the moment, but Rhys had provided intimate details of his life with Grant. The journals had made Arla physically sick.

  Harry raised both hands and let them fall. “How about all of it? We can’t lie, sir. We can’t tell the media Rebecca wasn’t involved when she’s at the heart of it.”

  Arla nodded. “Harry’s right, sir. Besides, I’m going on maternity leave soon. If you want me to sort this out, then we do it now, not later.”

  Johnson folded his hands behind his back and straightened his spine. His eyes softened as his jaw relaxed.

  “Anytime you want to take time off is okay with me, Arla. Both of you have been through enough. You need some downtime.”

  “Then let’s speak to Rebecca now, sir. You know what I want.”

  Her boss regarded them in silence for a while. “Okay,” he sighed. “Do what is necessary.”

  CHAPTER 53

  The black BMW crunched gravel as Harry drove it down the farmhouse drive in Weybridge. Rebecca was staying with her parents and Jeremy was also present.

  Harry helped Arla walk on the gravel. He rang the bell and they waited. Christine Walton opened the door, and a brief, tight smile appeared on her lips before vanishing. She was expecting them.

  Arla and Harry followed her inside, into the living room. They declined tea and coffee. Christine went out to get Rebecca, and they came back presently, with Jeremy.

  Rebecca was wearing jeans and a pullover, hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had no injuries, but her hollow stare and gaunt cheeks told of the suffering she’d endured.

  “Have you told the media?” Rebecca asked as soon as she sat down. She had already been to Clapham Police Station and given her statement. Rhys Mason lay in the morgue, and Arla awaited Dr Banerjee’s verdict, but there was no rush. For once, Rhys had nowhere to hide.

  Arla said, “Not yet, no. They don’t know about Rhys’s death, but everything else is already in the papers.”

  “Please protect my daughter.” Christine leaned forward. “She’s been to hell and back. You people have witness protection programmes, right?”

  “But she’s not a witness,” Arla said gently. “If anything, she’s the victim. And yes, we do have victim protection, but now that Rhys Mason is dead, Rebecca should be fine. The media attention will blow over in a few weeks.”

  Harry said, “The papers will ha
ve some new juicy scandal to feed their readers.”

  Arla settled back in the sofa and placed her hands gently on her baby bump. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

  She looked at Jeremy, who rubbed his hands and moved a foot. He looked pensive, but his movements came to a sudden stop when Arla got his attention.

  “Why was the nursery room warm, Jeremy?”

  He frowned at Arla. “What do you mean?”

  “When baby Reggie was stolen from the room, the curtains were raised. That’s what Rebecca found. And they had to have been open for a while, because Rebecca was downstairs. The intruder didn’t shut the window, did he? So on a cold day, the windows were open for a while. But why was the room so warm when you walked in?”

  Silence.

  Jeremy frowned at her, but she broke off eye contact. She stared at Rebecca, whose eyes were wide, fixed on her face.

  “Is it possible the window was never actually open, until you opened it, Rebecca? Then you screamed and your husband and Miss Mildred came running?”

  Rebecca opened and closed her mouth a few times, then cleared her throat. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you had left baby Reggie in a plastic bag in the Common, when you went for your walk. Didn’t you?”

  Rebecca’s eyes bulged, and a mauve colour engulfed her face. She couldn’t speak.

  Arla continued. “Dr Banerjee said Reggie was killed by strangulation, twelve hours ago. Not by asphyxiation inside a plastic bag. That makes the time of death the early hours of the morning, around four, five a.m. Only you had baby at the time.”

  She turned to look at Jeremy. “And you said Rebecca slept in her own room that night, with baby. And the CCTV inside your house proves you correct. Rebecca can be seen taking baby Reggie into her room, and coming out in the morning. She went downstairs where the cameras show her going out for the walk.”