Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  Constable Harris hurried back into the IR, a mobile phone to his ear, which he covered with one hand as he sought out Honor.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘Amber Carson is highly claustrophobic, ever since a childhood accident when she was partially buried by a landslide near her parent’s home in Cornwall.’

  A rush of whispered exclamations rippled through the crowd of officers.

  ‘Get her family down here as soon as possible,’ DI Harper ordered. ‘I want to know where Amber was last night, who she was with, everything. If the person who did this to her knew about her phobia, then he must know her well enough that the family might know him too.’

  ‘Will do,’ Harris replied as he hurried back out of the room.

  DCI Mitchell took one last look at the television screen before he turned to Honor. ‘What do you need?’

  There was a moment when Honor again felt the eyes of the room upon her, but now things were different. Now, she had not only been vindicated, but the DCI was clearly handing her control of the investigation in a public manner. There was to be no more bickering or whispering behind the scenes: Honor was back, and the onus was being placed on her to track down and apprehend this killer before he could strike again.

  ‘As soon as we find out where Amber was last night, I’m going to need officers trawling through all and any CCTV we can find. Somebody, somewhere, must have seen something. We’re going to need a canine unit,’ Honor added, ‘as soon as we figure out where Amber was taken from. It hasn’t rained hard yet, but the forecast isn’t good over the next couple of days so we risk losing what trail our killer might have left.’

  The thought of the weather crept into Honor’s mind again. The fog had hidden Sebastian Dukas’s murder from view until it was too late to conceal the crime from the media. There were storms forecast for the following day, great downpours as a violent weather front rushed in from the Atlantic.

  Water.

  ‘She could be near a river,’ Honor suggested. ‘There are floods forecast within the next forty–eight hours. If she’s buried beneath the water table…’

  Nobody needed to ask what that meant. London was a low–lying city, and the government had built the enormous Thames Barrier out near Woolwich to protect the city from storm surges and weather depressions that would otherwise flood the entire square mile and the length of the Thames.

  ‘Get on it,’ DI Harper urged. ‘Report back the moment you find anything.’

  7

  The heat was stifling.

  Amber’s skin was slick with sweat. Her wrists were still pinned behind her back, the plastic stubbornly refusing to snap despite the hours she had spent rubbing it against a metal stud on her back pocket. The loathsome pain that throbbed through her wrists told her that she was bleeding, but right now she couldn’t tell the blood from the sweat. Her heart was hurting in her chest, her breath coming in laboured gasps through her dry throat, trying to suck in enough oxygen to stay conscious. The stale air in the coffin was heavy around her, pressing in even more than the walls that touched her shoulders and the lid that was inches above her nose.

  She had long ago lost her sense of balance, the coffin seeming to move and sway around her in the pitch darkness. Amber knew that she was slowly suffocating, the amount of air getting to her through the miniscule breathing tube insufficient to keep her alive. No doubt the bastard who had put her in here had done this intentionally, and somehow, she knew that he was watching her through the optical fibre tacked to the lid of the coffin.

  She had stared into that soulless blue light as she fought to free her hands from the bonds. Her captor was obviously seriously ill, an unstable psychopath who wanted to watch her die here in this horrendous coffin. Maybe that was what excited him? Weren’t there people who got their kicks out of watching other people die? Snuff movies, they were called, or something similar.

  Amber tried to look down the coffin at her feet, her eyeballs aching as she did so. A headache was raging through her skull, adding to her misery, but she knew that she had to keep fighting. Keep trying.

  Amber turned her wrists to one side again, pain searing her skin as it tore, trying to pull the plastic ties across the edge of the metal stud. Every now and again the plastic would catch, suggesting that she had managed to tear it a little. Now, she had to split it and finally get the damned thing off.

  She shifted position and pushed her wrists into the small of her back. She felt the plastic cable catch on the stud and she pulled, writhing this way and that, the muscles in her back exhausted from endless hours of squirming within the confined space. The plastic caught and then slipped over the stud, and she was forced to try again.

  Amber’s frustrated tears flowed with the grimy sweat now caking her cheeks, exhaustion and defeat crowding in on her like the walls of the coffin. She twisted her hips to the opposite side and pulled her wrists up to try to find the stud on the other side of her jeans, and then she heard the noise from outside.

  She froze in the hot darkness, listening. The sound was muted, something like stones falling on a tin roof. For one dreadful moment she thought that it might be the concrete falling on the lid of the coffin, but then she recalled that her abductor had shovelled soil onto that already, so she wouldn’t hear the same kind of noise again.

  She closed her eyes, listening, and then she realised that it was the sound of metal chains being pulled through security gates at the entrance to the cathedral. Panic ripped through her as she heard the distant sound of voices, and then a rhythmic beeping sound that seemed to come from even further away.

  Then a voice spoke, soft, distant, repeating a monosyllabic sentence over and over again.

  CAUTION: THIS VEHICLE IS REVERSING

  No!

  It was morning already. In the darkness she’d lost track of the passing of time. Amber writhed and yanked her wrists up against the stud in her jeans, felt the plastic catch against it. This time, she pulled harder, pain tearing at her skin, and she began frantically rubbing her wrists from side to side as she fought to escape the bonds.

  The sound of the reversing truck grew steadily louder through the coffin and the soil concealing it below the foundation pit. The metal studs of her jeans tore at the plastic and the flesh around her wrists. She knew that she was bleeding badly now but she had no choice, her heart thundering within her chest as though it were trying to beat its way past the bars of her ribcage.

  The recorded voice–warning suddenly cut out, but she could hear the cement truck’s engine still toiling, making it hard to hear other voices. If she could just break free now, yank the gag from her parched mouth and scream loud enough for the rest of the universe to hear her, she might, just might, get out of this alive.

  The plastic bonds caught on her stud again and she arched her back and hauled with all of her might. The skin on her wrists tore on a wave of white pain that soared up her forearms and she screamed through the gag, sweat blinding her eyes, waves of heat washing over her body as she thrashed back and forth.

  The plastic cable ties suddenly parted and her fists slammed into the walls of the coffin either side of her. Amber twisted her arms up over her body and clawed at the gag in her mouth, pulling it aside. In the light of the camera she could see blood streaming from raw wounds up and down her wrists, her flesh on fire with pain as she sucked in a breath and screamed out loud for the first time in hours.

  ‘Okay mate, bring it over here!’

  Ian Jenkins grabbed the end of the metal chute that swung out from the rear of the cement truck and guided it over the pit, one eye on the site manager as he prepared to open the mixer and dump the cement. The towering walls of the cathedral soared above him, replete with stained glass windows and scowling carved gargoyles.

  The weather was shit, grey clouds scudding low across the city, obscuring the Gherkin’s angular glass and steel. The wind gusted in off the river in squalls, Ian already damp, cold and miserable. He’d known that it was going to be a hell of
a day – multiple drops across the city, lousy traffic, and he’d had one beer too many last night after a tough day filled with breakdowns and pissy customers, who acted as though the world revolved around their contract alone.

  He heard kids screaming and shouting on their way to school somewhere nearby, and wondered briefly how anybody could feel so energetic on such a shitty day.

  ‘How’s that?’ he called above the truck’s engine noise to the site manager. ‘Two ton, yeah?’

  The site manager, a rotund man with thick forearms and a florid complexion that suggested too many takeaways and nights out with the lads, nodded from beneath his hard hat as he signed off on the delivery. Two tons of wet cement, to be covered before the forecast storms blew in from the Atlantic. Ian could see large boards leaning up against nearby walls, ready to lay over the pit, and tarpaulin sheets that would be tied down over it protect the drying cement from the downpour. Underpinning the cathedral’s immense walls, section by section, was a major operation.

  ‘Let her go!’ the manager called, standing back to watch.

  Ian turned to the controls at the rear of the truck. He yanked a lever to spin up the engine revolutions, which powered the slowly rotating cement container mounted on the rear of the truck. The engine’s growl rose to a level suitable for Ian to pull his ear–protectors down as he waited for the cement to mix a little more before opening the valves.

  Her time has come.

  He sat in front of a monitor and watched, pensive, as he saw Amber thrash and scream. She had done well, very well, to break free of her bonds, but he could also hear the sound of the vehicles above her and he knew that she had only seconds to live.

  Now, he watched her closely, her face twisted with terror, frantic, desperate.

  He waited, for that final moment, that last instant of existence. He squirmed in his seat, the leather smooth beneath his naked body as he watched Amber’s face and her panicked eyes. His gaze was transfixed, as though he were there with her in her grotesque prison, facing that exquisite moment of realisation that life, her life, was going to be extinguished in the way that she feared the most.

  One hand formed a hollowed fist and reached down to his crotch, moved in slow rhythm as he stared, eyes wide and dry, waiting for the moment when Amber would die. The other hand reached out to a mobile phone that was lying on the bed beside him, and he barely glanced at it as he lightly touched one finger to a button. The mobile phone beeped and data began to flow as he returned to watching Amber Carson’s final moments.

  Honor McVey rushed to her office, sat down in front of her monitor and began playing back the footage of Amber’s desperate plight as she started dialling numbers across the city, begging for access to CCTV from around the area of both the pub where Amber was last known to have been, the Crosse Keys, and her apartment in Hackney.

  Samir hurried into her office, right behind her.

  ‘I’ve got some images on the way from the pub,’ he said. ‘Danny says he’s got some from about the half–way point between there and Amber’s home.’

  Honor nodded, one hand over her phone’s receiver.

  ‘He’s got to have grabbed her somewhere along the way, or maybe even at her home. I’ll take Hackney itself and work backwards. If people can’t get the footage to us, beg them to check it where they are for any sign of Amber.’

  Samir whirled and hurried out of the office again, Honor finishing her call and setting the phone down as she stared at an image of Amber, her face wrought with terror. Jesus, who the hell would do something like this? The more she thought about it, the more appalled she was.

  ‘Why the hell would somebody go to such lengths to murder innocent people in such an appalling way?’

  The question slipped past her lips without her really realising it. If the killer hated these people so much, then they must have some kind of connection to each other. But, so far, there was nothing to suggest that Amber Carson and Sebastian Dukas had ever heard of each other, let alone met. The only thing that they did have in common was their…

  ‘Phobias,’ Danny Green said as he hurried into her office and tossed three pages of printed A4 right in front of her. ‘Sebastian and Amber were both members of an on– line forum called “Face Fear”, dedicated to sufferers of extreme phobias.’

  Honor picked up the sheets of paper, saw on them comments from a forum post about fear of spiders, Arachnophobia. A scattering of people was offering comments in support of a woman who had just spent three hours standing on a chair in her kitchen, while a common house spider casually made its way across the floor. Honor realised guiltily that even she would have found the story vaguely amusing, were it not for the terrible situation faced by Amber right now. And there, commenting in the threads, were both Sebastian and Amber.

  ‘Could be a source for the killer to target victims,’ she agreed. ‘And that means that anybody on that forum could be a target.’

  Danny nodded.

  ‘I’ve sent an e–mail to the site warning them of our concerns, but they haven’t got back to me yet. It also means that our killer could be on the site. It’s not something that you can view from outside, publicly, if you know what I mean? You have to be signed up to get in there, because many of the members are ashamed of their phobias.’

  Honor was surprised to hear that, but she couldn’t think about anything other than finding Amber Carson before it was too late.

  ‘They won’t be keen to send us their data without a warrant,’ she replied. ‘Get DI Harper onto that, we need to stay with the CCTV and try to find Amber.’

  Danny Green hurried back out of the office as Honor ran a hand through her hair and tried to put her thoughts in order. Amber Carson had been out drinking, and after some calls to people identified as having been with her that night, her friends had said that she’d headed off sometime just after nine–thirty. Hackney was a twenty–minute walk from the Crosse Keys pub, and her friends were sure that she’d walked and had not got a taxi. Twenty minutes. Somewhere on that journey she’d been abducted, and she would have had to have been restrained too, most likely – not something that was easy to do on a busy street, even at night.

  Honor turned her attention to the narrow streets near Amber’s home. She could more easily have been snatched from those areas, with poor CCTV coverage and few pedestrians at that time of night. Likewise, a quick glance at Google Earth gave her the location of Amber’s flat, and it was clear that although it was in a well–trodden part of the city, there were numerous alleys and through fares where anybody could have been waiting to grab her and…

  ‘Honor!’

  The call came from the Incident Room, Samir’s voice pitched high with alarm. Honor bolted out of her office and ran down the hall to see several people gathered around a computer monitor. DCI Mitchell lumbered into the room right behind her as Danny called out.

  ‘It’s live!’

  Honor’s heart skipped a beat as she saw a grainy image of Amber Carson. The sound came through a moment later, and her screams pierced Honor’s ears and made several of the team flinch. Amber’s terror was alive within that cry – slithering, evil, the sound of a person facing their utmost fear with no hope of escape.

  Amber heard the truck’s engine wind up and she screamed again. The air inside the coffin was so thick and hot that she could barely breathe, stars flashing in front of her eyes as she tried to suck in more air. She felt as though her head was wrapped in clingfilm, the heat a physical thing pressing against every inch of her skin, pushing into her, crushing her in the humid darkness.

  The concrete would flow into the pit within moments, so she clawed at the lid of the coffin, began to push against it, picked her legs up and pinned her knees against it as she tried to push against the weight of the soil above and lift the lid. The soil above her was damp and heavy, but she pushed anyway, strained with the last of her strength to free herself before it was too late. With a final scream of effort, she pushed one last time, and the coffi
n lid shifted upward an inch.

  A sudden rumbling noise filled the darkened space and she felt the coffin shudder, vibrations rippling through it from top to bottom, and the coffin lid slammed shut. With a terrible certainty Amber knew that the concrete was tumbling onto the soil above her. She let out one final, defeated cry, and then she stopped pushing.

  The heat around her clogged her skin just as anxiety now clogged her arteries, labouring her heart. I’m going to die. There was nothing that anybody could do for her, nobody that could save her; no shining knight, no last–moment miracle. Suddenly, there was no longer a reason to fight. An image flashed unbidden through her mind in the darkness, that of a broad blue sky, flecked with white summer clouds. A meadow, open and airy, warm sunlight on her face, a cool breeze caressing her skin with nature’s gentle touch. A place from her childhood, far away, when she was younger, when summers were longer, when life was safer.

  The sound of tumbling concrete faded away, Amber uncertain of just how much was being poured onto the coffin. Then, something landed on her chest. In the dim light of the camera, she looked down and saw a lump of damp concrete. Then, more followed, spluttering through the breathing tube.

  Terror rose through her like a black wave and she looked at the camera as she screamed.

  ‘There’s something on her!’

  Samir spotted the grey ooze falling into the coffin, and for a moment nobody knew what it could be. Then Honor thought about all the horror stories of mafioso killings, of bodies buried beneath the foundations of large buildings, back in the day when organised crime had controlled much of London’s building trade.

  ‘Concrete,’ she gasped. ‘She’s being buried under concrete! Get on the phone to every building site in the city, shut them down right now, no matter what!’