Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  Before anybody could move, they heard Amber Carson’s horrific shriek of terror that soared out of the television set and through the corridors outside. Honor’s hand flew to her chest in terrible empathy as she heard the poor girl screaming at the top of her lungs.

  ‘The cathedral!’ Amber shrieked with terminal desperation. ‘Somebody please, Southwark Cathedral!’

  Honor’s heart leaped and she dashed to one side to the nearest phone. She grabbed it even as Danny was scrambling to get the phone number of the cathedral on his mobile. He read it out to her and she punched in the numbers, while beside her MIT 4 poured from the Incident Room and sprinted for the HAT car. Katy Harper got onto local police vehicles patrolling the city, while Danny began dialling the fire brigade to dispatch them to Southwark Cathedral.

  In Honor’s ear, the cathedral’s phone began ringing, but nobody was answering. ‘Pick up the fucking phone!’ Honor yelled, her gaze fixed on Amber, trapped beneath tons of concrete.

  The air was getting hotter.

  Amber could shout no longer, could scream no more, her lungs heaving in her chest, filling with nothing but the carbon dioxide now building up all around her. Typical. She’d feared being buried alive, but now her greatest threat was asphyxiation. Better than the alternative, slowly starving to death or rotting down here. With a bit of luck, she’d pass out in a minute or two. Luck.

  Amber snorted, and was immediately struck by how bizarre it was that she would find amusement in her moment of death. Her rational brain briefly snapped back into gear. Hypoxia. She wouldn’t last long.

  Above her, the sounds of concrete were long gone, but now there was another sound. Something on the lid of the coffin, the sound of something moving. Amber’s mind was too weary to focus on it, drained to the point of exhaustion, but she listened for a moment longer and her heart lifted as she thought that she heard the sound of people scrambling to free her. Hands and shovels were digging her out of the coffin, weren’t they? She tried again.

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me? I’m in here!’

  Her voice was meek, her breathing coming in shallow rasps. Another sound, louder this time, right in the centre of the lid.

  Amber looked down, and she saw the lid bowing down toward her. A fracture line split with a sharp crack, the lid’s curved inner surface bulging downward. She was too exhausted to scream again, but she felt tears fall once more from her eyes as she weakly shook her head.

  ‘Please, no.’

  ‘Please, no.’

  Honor heard Amber’s weary, terminal plea from the television as she held the phone to her ear, still ringing inside the cathedral at the other end. She saw something then, in the girl’s eyes, something that she had never seen before. Amber was not looking at anything, her eyes wide and yet somehow dead already, devoid of the glow of a living being. They stared up into the darkness, blank discs of pale green.

  Honor flinched as a sharp crack as loud as a gunshot split the air in the room, saw something spill onto Amber’s body, and then Amber emitted one last horrendous, tortured scream.

  The coffin lid suddenly plunged down and the feed was brutally cut off.

  Honor felt nausea churn her guts as the phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the office floor. There were several other officers with her in the room but none of them moved, all staring in comatose silence at the television screen as it hissed back at them with white noise.

  ‘Jesus,’ somebody whispered.

  Honor closed her eyes and slumped against the desk beside her, unable to comprehend what she had just witnessed. In her career, she had seen many dead bodies: mutilated corpses, mangled road–crash victims, deceased children; those who had been raped, those who’d had their faces dashed with acid, or new–born infants abandoned to the brutal cold of a winter’s night, found rigid as a board. But never, not once, had she ever witnessed the final moment of life, when life became death, when somebody for the first and last time witnessed their own mortality written starkly before them. Now, right this very instant, Amber Carson was being crushed and suffocated under several tons of wet concrete, and there was nothing that she could do to stop it.

  ‘You sick bastard,’ she muttered.

  ‘What?’ DI Harper asked finally, looking at her, her own eyes brimming.

  Honor sucked in a ragged breath of stale office air, surprised at how emotional she suddenly felt.

  ‘He’s watching them die,’ she said. ‘That’s what he’s looking for. He wants to see their last moments play out, to see the point of death without having to be there.’

  ‘Amber’s not dead yet,’ DCI Mitchell pointed out, refusing to succumb to the horror they had all witnessed. ‘The cars are on their way.’

  ‘They won’t make it,’ Honor replied. ‘We all know that. If she’s been in that thing all night, and they’ve just dumped a few tons of concrete on her, we’ll never get her out in time.’ Honor turned away, winced as she felt needles poking at the corners of her eyes. ‘She’s dying as we speak.’

  The silence in the Incident Room felt briefly as oppressive as the confines of Amber Carson’s tomb.

  ‘There were no cameras at Sebastian Dukas’s death,’ DC Hansen pointed out. Honor shook her head.

  ‘We know that Dukas showed signs of having fought back,’ she replied. ‘He didn’t die the way his killer wanted him to, in utter fear. That’s what he’s seeking, the sight of someone dying from their greatest phobia, the actual moment of death. He’s obsessed with it.’

  The silence deepened, only the hiss of the television filling the room. Katy Harper had been stunned into silence, and no other officer seemed able to break themselves from their horrified lethargy. DCI Mitchell grabbed a file and slapped it down on a desk with a loud crack, pointing one arm like a shotgun at each of them as he gave orders.

  ‘Get in touch with every supplier of coffins in the city. I want to know where the killer got that coffin and any CCTV there might of him. If we find Amber at Southwark Cathedral, I want every last inch of surveillance we have of the area, every witness questioned, no stone unturned. I want the MET informed of what’s happening and all other police forces bordering the city. I’ll call MI5 and SO15: the more forces that are aware of it, the more chance we have of bringing this to an end.’ He turned and pointed to the status board. ‘I want a progress meeting in two hours’ time. Get me everything, all of it, every grainy traffic camera image, question every resident and interrogate every last bloody pigeon in the city if you have to. I don’t care if you have to go to fucking NASA, I want this bastard found and I want him in custody!’

  8

  The room was silent, dark, the air stained with a potent aroma of loose hormones and sweat. He lay on his back, stomach heaving, bare skin glistening. He was at peace. The boil had been lanced, the pressure relieved on the seething cauldron of hatred that simmered deep within the recesses of his soul. It wouldn’t last, but for now it was enough for him just to lay here, his manhood flaccid and spent, the air cool on his skin and his breathing slow as he stared at the sight of Amber Carson’s face, caught forever in time just before she was crushed to death, deep below ground.

  The room was small, his home in a backstreet between Spitalfields and Whitechapel. It was his favourite part of the city, a dense warren of back alleys and narrow streets, of strange scents and dark histories that haunted the city nights. The lair of the Ripper. He heard the sounds of the city return slowly to him as he emerged from his reverie, one hand gently brushing his stomach. His mother used to do that, many years ago, to calm him when he’d swung up into a manic phase. It was the only thing that he could remember about her with any real clarity; her gentle smile, her gaze so full of compassion, the centre of his world. There had been no other who could provide surcease when wayward neurons rampaged through his brain, and now there was nobody left in the world who could assuage the demons stalking the darkened vaults of his mind.

  A shout from the street below yanked him irritably back
into the present. He lay for a few moments longer, but youths outside were trading banter and insults, an unwelcome reminder of the realities of life. The surcease was always brief. He slowly rose from the bed and saw again the image on the television before him, captured just an hour before, of Amber Carson, frozen in time a split second before the lid of the coffin had caved in. The look on her face.

  That look. The “dead–zone”, he called it. That last moment before life became death, the last expression a person would ever have, the last thought in their mind, the last breath that they would take. It wasn’t easy to capture that look – God knows, he’d tried enough times. But now, now he could see it, a dread unmatched by any other emotion that life could offer. The last moment. The last moment. He smiled. It had been the perfect start to his day.

  Sadly, he could not afford to dwell long on his victory, for there was more work to be done. He swung his legs off the bed and cleaned himself before dressing and switching off the television. He was careful to back–up the footage of his victim’s last moment, placing it on an SSD drive that he put in a metal lock box. He reached up to an old ceiling joist and carefully removed a panel, slotted the SSD inside and then covered it up. Then, he deleted all other traces of the footage from his laptop computer. It took him only moments to deactivate the mobile phone that he’d used to carry the signals from the camera inside Amber’s coffin. He knew, of course, that the police would search for the source of the feed, and he knew that they would quickly pin–point the cell towers used by the phone, which would direct them to Whitechapel and Spitalfields as the likely location of the killer they would by now so desperately be hunting. Still, the area was densely populated and it was easy for him to evade their CCTV and other surveillance devices, the routing for the Internet feed he used repeatedly bounced off servers all over the world. As for the phone, before the end of the day it would be sinking in sediment at the bottom of the River Thames, its signal never to be heard again.

  Satisfied, he turned and walked from the bedroom onto the landing. The home was small, one in a row of three–storey terraced houses built just after World War Two. He had inherited the home from his parents, the only reason he could afford to live in the city at all. Well, perhaps inherited wasn’t quite the word.

  He walked down the staircase, which wound to the left through ninety degrees into the entrance hall. The front door opened onto the narrow street outside, but he turned instead and walked to a small door under the stairs. He unlocked it, and stepped inside. The walls here were of cool stone and it was dark, a series of stone steps heading down into a small basement that ran the length of about half of the house. Built back in the days when all homes needed a coal cellar, this one had been converted into a living space.

  He made his way down the steps and flicked on the light.

  A small room, devoid of furniture but for a bed beneath the harsh glow of a bare lightbulb. Partition walls created three such rooms, one at the rear, this one, and a further room at the front of the home. He walked off the steps and turned right, to a door that led into the front room of the basement.

  He stood at the door and listened for a moment to the sounds coming from within.

  It was faint, a distant, keening sound that whistled through aged vocal cords. The sound was too weak to travel far, so it didn’t bother him much. Still, he would have to deal with it eventually. Saving the best until last was what he was all about.

  ‘It worked,’ he whispered through the door. ‘Perfectly.’

  The sounds intensified a little, became more desperate, pleading. He smiled, and then switched off the light.

  The patrol car screamed south through the city, heading for the Thames as Honor grimly held onto her door handle. Danny drove, the car’s blues lighting up the city streets as the sirens screeched, the piercing whine echoing off the Georgian buildings and glassy tower blocks lining Bishopsgate as they rushed toward London Bridge.

  Though Honor knew in her heart of hearts that they must be too late, she was still holding out for a miracle. Maybe an air pocket, something, anything that might keep Amber Carson alive for long enough that the fire brigade could get her out of her macabre tomb and revive her, to deny a sadistic killer the satisfaction of knowing that she was dead.

  The Shard loomed into view on the south bank to their left as they raced across London Bridge, the flecked green waters of the Thames churning past below, while to the right the four spires of Southwark Cathedral poked up into a slate grey sky. They hit the other side of the river, and beneath the London Bridge rail overpass Honor could see the entrance to Green Dragon Court, the whole area swamped with police vehicles and two fire engines, a sea of hazard lights flickering vivid blue and red against dark Victorian brick and ironwork.

  Danny pulled up alongside a police cordon guarded by two MET constables, while other uniforms were busily keeping pedestrians at bay. Honor hurried with Danny toward the cordon, Samir joining them as she pulled out her warrant card. The officers let them through, one of them pointing to a courtyard down below the level of the main road, inside the cathedral grounds.

  ‘Down there, turn right.’

  Honor didn’t break her stride as she descended into the courtyard, where rows of tables were positioned outside a cafeteria, the immense cathedral looming over them. The spires reached up toward the clouds scudding low across a threatening sky, a faint drizzle gusting on the buffeting wind as they hurried toward a cement truck parked alongside the cathedral grounds.

  Two ambulances were parked to the left of the truck, a fire engine to the right of it, and Honor could see firefighters scrambling to get into what looked like some kind of pit right under the cathedral walls. As they reached the fire engine, so they were waved back by the officer who was overseeing the operation.

  ‘Stay back, if this stuff blows out it’ll burn your skin off!’

  Honor stopped where she was and watched as the fireteams frantically dug out lumps of thick cement and hurled them onto the grass all around the pit, while others reached down into the heavy grey mess, trying to get hold of something deep inside. From her vantage point, Honor could see that the pit was around four feet deep beneath the walls of the great cathedral, and that Amber Carson was somewhere at the bottom of it. The firefighters were lying on the grass as they reached down and groped about in the thick gloop, their arms slotted into long, thick gloves that reached almost to their shoulders.

  The fire engine was roaring as a suction hose drew cement out of the pit, spluttering it out of a vent on the side of the truck onto the grass nearby. The level of cement in the pit was reducing only slowly, but it allowed the firefighters to reach deeper into the pit.

  ‘I’ve got something!’

  A firefighter at the head of the pit craned his neck back and stared up at the walls as he sank to his throat in the cement, craning his head back to keep it clear of the mess, and then he began to pull. Two other men moved to his side, reaching down as he was and trying to get their hands on whatever they were hauling up through the muck all around them.

  Honor’s heart seemed to stop beating as she watched the men haul from the pit a large mass of concrete slurry and soil, from which protruded limbs thickly coated in the congealing grey mess. The firefighters strained with the effort of fighting against the weight of the concrete trying to keep the body in place.

  The paramedics rushed in, likewise wearing protective plastic gloves as the grey mass was dragged out of the pit and onto the grass nearby. Honor felt sick as she saw the vague shape of the human body entombed within the sludge. The paramedics held back as two fire officers turned their hoses on the body and blasts of water splattered concrete across the lawns.

  Honor felt her heart breaking as Amber Carson’s tiny form was battered by the water, her limbs flailing lifelessly, but she knew that there was no time left for anything other than drastic measures. The water revealed her bare skin glowing bright red from the burning effects of the concrete, her blonde hair thic
k with grey mess and wet soil, and then her face, twisted into a grimace of terror, her mouth open and filled with soil, her eyes packed with it, her nose, her ears, everything.

  Honor turned away as nausea twisted her stomach, barely able to conceal the horror now ripping at her soul as the water hoses were switched off and the paramedics rushed in with a defibrillator and oxygen mask. The fire crews stood back, sweating from exertion, others stone–faced as they watched the paramedics frantically try to revive Amber Carson.

  Honor looked up to the main road above them, scanned the crowd that had gathered there, mobile phones in hand to take snapshots of the ongoing crisis. She wanted to see who was in the crowd. It was not unknown for killers to visit the sites of their handiwork, often multiple times, reliving their gruesome conquests and killings in macabre pilgrimage. The onlookers stared back down at her, and she quietly moved her gaze from one to the next, taking the time to mentally note details of their faces and… A mobile phone clicked beside her head, and she turned to see Samir taking an image of the onlookers. He offered her a faint smile. ‘A bit easier to remember, this way.’

  Honor would have smiled back at him, but her mood was as dark and foreboding as the turbulent skies overhead as she turned back to the crime scene. She flinched as Amber Carson’s body jack–knifed as the defibrillator jolted her with current, then landed with a splat amid wet concrete, limp and unresponsive. The paramedics tried twice more, but then they leaned back and one of them looked across at her and slowly shook his head.

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  Danny Green turned away, stalked off, his shoulders hunched and his head down as he pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Danny had two daughters not far off Amber’s age. Seeing scenes like this required nerves, but detectives and police officers were not machines.

  ‘I’ll talk to the driver,’ Honor uttered to Samir as she fought to contain violent emotions churning within. ‘Can you get the uniforms on witness reports?’