by D C Vaughn
‘If you find anything out, would you let me know?’ Carter asked. ‘Neuray’s employees are often questioned about their experiences here and we’ve never had an issue like this before. I’d be extremely concerned if Sam or anybody else was considering any kind of corporate espionage.’
‘We’ll let you know as soon as we can,’ Stone replied.
Stone led the way out of the office and down the hall outside. He waited until they were in the elevator and on their way down to the ground floor before he spoke again, and even then he did so under his breath just in case they were being monitored.
‘Take a look at Sam’s work history here, and Dylan Carter’s too. See if anything crops up between them, anything that might be a reason to collaborate in any way.’
‘You think Carter’s involved somehow?’
‘I didn’t get that from him, but he said that Sam was shot. It could be a slip of the tongue or just like he said, a cultural assumption. Either way, I’m not letting it slip by.’
Stone’s mobile phone buzzed in his pocket and he answered it right away. Kieran waited as Stone listened to the call, and then he whirled and beckoned Kieran to follow.
‘The silver car, it’s been spotted on an ANPR camera!’
***
XXXII
The cold was the first thing that she felt.
Rebecca’s body was stiff, unresponsive. She tried to open her eyes but could not. Her senses began to reconnect themselves one by one. She could smell damp air, rotting wood and cold stone. The sound of rain hammering in the distance. Timbers creaked, wind bustled through trees somewhere nearby and she could hear what she thought might be footsteps crashing through puddles.
Voices reached her from afar, calling out. Coming closer.
She tried to move again as her eyes dragged themselves open to reveal ceiling timbers in the darkness. Her skin was frigid with cold despite the blanket draped over her body, and her breath caught in short gasps of vapour that whorled into the air above her. Memories flickered through her mind like barely seen stars, and then one returned with a vengeance.
‘Sam?’
She managed to look down and saw that she was still lying on the pew, but Sam was nowhere to be seen. The packs of medical supplies were gone. Pain seared her head once again and she reached up, felt a fresh dressing beneath her hair.
‘Sam?’
More voices, more memories. Rebecca forced herself upright, tried to ignore the throbbing in her temples as she slowly swung her legs off the pew and tried to stand. She felt no different than before, her head still full of pain, her eyes aching and nausea swilling in her guts. She hadn’t eaten properly in days and was now half–full of anaesthetic.
Boots splashed through water again outside, rushing toward the door of the house. Rebecca looked around her and saw an old length of two by four the size of a cricket bat. She grabbed it on impulse as the cottage door crashed open and the figure of a man loomed before her.
Rebecca swung the length of wood and caught the man across the side of his head. She heard a grunt of pain as the man staggered into the wall, and then more bodies tumbled into the cottage and strong hands gripped her and swung her back toward the pew. Rebecca slammed down onto the hard wood as her makeshift weapon was pinned to one side, whorls of light flashing before her eyes as she struggled to maintain consciousness.
‘Stay down! Stop resisting!’
Rebecca heard the words and suddenly she saw the black and white uniforms, the blue glow of radio communicator screens, saw police officers staring down at her.
‘Kieran?!’ she shrieked, her voice twisted with pain and dismay.
‘Becca?’
She turned toward the voice and saw Kieran pushing himself off the wall, one hand to his head where she’d clouted him with the two by four. Another bulky form entered the cottage, his long coat drenched with rain, his shaved head glistening with water. Police torches sliced like laser beams through the darkness as he stalked toward her, the hard lines of his face ghoulishly illuminated. Stone didn’t remove his hands from his pockets as he looked down at her.
‘Rebecca Kyle, I’m arresting you on suspicion of homicide and the assault of a police officer. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand the charges against you?’
Rebecca looked back up at him, pulses of white pain lancing this way and that across her skull.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
Stone looked surprised. Maybe he thought that she’d have put up more of a fight, but Rebecca was overcome with a fatigue that weighed it seemed more than all the worlds’ worries. Her shoulders sagged with exhaustion, her mind addled. Sam was gone, again. She could tell that. He might have been arrested already but she didn’t want to reveal that he had been in the cottage in case there was a chance, any chance, that he had been successful in removing the chip from her brain.
But if he had, he now possessed the only evidence she had that could support her story.
Sam’s done a runner.
That chip could be worth millions on the black market.
He’s sold you out. Either that or he’s still really working for Neuray.
Rebecca let her hands be cuffed behind her back as she sat on the pew. She was shivering, her teeth chattering in her jaw, the cuffs cold and uncaring around her wrists. Someone approached her and wrapped a thermal Mylar blanket around her shoulders. She looked up and saw Kieran, his forehead scuffed and bleeding where she’d hit him. She winced at the sight of the injury.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kieran said as he noticed the direction of her gaze, ‘nothing much up there to damage anyway.’
Two police officers helped her to her feet but she stumbled, her legs weak, and bumped against Kieran. The DS put his arms around her and held her steady for a moment.
‘You’re safe,’ he said.
Rebecca felt safer than she had for a long time, but right now she didn’t know whether Sam had protected her or used her. What if her memory of him really was that of a bully, of a violent man? He knew about the technology, had developed it himself, and she’d watched him beat a man half to death in an act so violent that she could barely understand it, could not square it with the man she had fallen in love with years’ before.
‘I’m not safe,’ she said as Kieran released her. ‘Check the man in the river. He’s Russian, that’s why you can’t find him.’
‘We know,’ Kieran replied.
Rebecca was momentarily stumped. She saw the expression on his features, a visage of sympathy. For a moment she didn’t understand, but then she saw Hannah in the background, watching her as though she were some kind of trapped, frightened animal, caged and haunted. Stone was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching her in much the same way. The way that people would look at someone who was mentally ill, in need of help. Off their bloody trolley.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she whispered to Kieran.
‘You need to go now,’ Kieran replied. ‘I’ll speak to you soon.’
There was a finality about his words that struck through her core and burst back out again in a lance of disgust.
‘You’re chasing the wrong person! Neuray are behind all of this!’
The police officers holding her tightened their grip. ‘Easy now, don’t make this any harder than it already…’
‘It’s Neuray and Dylan Carter,’ Rebecca insisted. ‘They’re trying to sell chips that control people’s thoughts and actions!’
Stone, Hannah and Kieran watched in silence as she railed at them. She heard her own enraged screeches, coming as though from afar like storm–tossed rollers to break upon the unbending pillars of rock that were her colleagues. The pain in her skull intensified but it only made her fury worse as she raged and spat and dribbled, her limbs twitching and writhing as she was hauled out of the cottage and into the night
. None of them responded, merely watching her until she was dragged out sight toward waiting patrol cars.
*
‘I don’t know where to begin with all of this.’
DC Marchant stood in the cottage after Rebecca was dragged away, her cries echoing out into the lonely night until they were drowned out by the rain.
‘They were in the abutments,’ Stone advised her. ‘Looks as though they started there and then headed here.’
‘That cage,’ Hannah uttered. ‘The mattress. You really think she was being held in there? It’s no wonder she’s lost her marbles.’
Kieran shook his head.
‘It doesn’t add up. She was in Exeter earlier today, we know that from the witness testimony. A few hours in that cage isn’t enough to drive someone insane.’
‘She wasn’t all that stable in the first place,’ Hannah retorted. ‘How much would it take to drive someone like that over the edge? And what if it’s not her that was in the cage?’
Marchant said nothing. Kieran glanced around them at the abandoned cottage. ‘The mobile phone signal we tracked was detected at the abutments, but not out here. Do we still have a lead on it?’
‘The signal’s gone silent,’ Marchant replied. ‘Whoever it is, they’re probably aware that we’re onto them.’
‘Then it proves that there’s a third party in all of this. But then why come all the way out here? This place has been abandoned for years. There’s no food here, no water, no nothing. She would have died out here alone within a few days.’
Kieran glanced at Stone, seeking support, but the DCI was standing in the centre of the cottage and sniffing the air.
‘What is it?’ Hannah asked.
Stone didn’t respond for a moment, simply standing with his eyes closed and breathing in and out for a few more moments.
‘You don’t smell that?’
Hannah walked over to the DCI’s side and sniffed the air alongside him. They would have looked comical together were it not for the nature of the investigation.
‘Iodine,’ Hannah said.
DCI Stone nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. Did you notice Kyle’s head?’
When Hannah and Kieran shook their heads, Stone elaborated.
‘She was in a state so I didn’t notice it at first either, but the dressing on her head was fresh, looked like it had been put there right before we arrived.’
Hannah’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe she replaced it somewhere along the way? She could be carrying spares in her handbag.’
Kieran shook his head. ‘Becca didn’t have a bag with her,’ he pointed out. ‘And iodine is used as a disinfectant for external wounds. Potassium iodide, I think.’
‘That’s right,’ Stone added from one side. ‘Yet there are no medical supplies here or on Rebecca’s person, and no reason whatsoever for there to be a presence of iodine in a two–hundred–year old abandoned cottage.’
‘So, somebody else had to be here,’ Kieran agreed.
Hannah raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not buying into her story, are you?’
‘It’s not about buying into anything,’ Stone replied. ‘There’s something we’re not seeing here. I’ve spent hours going through Kyle’s service record, talking to her friends and other colleagues. None of this fits with her history.’
‘We’ve got two dead bodies,’ Hannah repeated. ‘Rebecca Kyle is connected to at least one of them and now we find her hiding out here. People don’t run if they’re innocent.’
DCI Stone nodded, taking it all in.
‘Let’s get back to the station. Kyle’s going to be in no fit state to talk until the morning. I want this place examined with a fine–toothed comb, nothing left unturned. If there is any evidence at all of someone else being here, I want to know about it.’
***
XXXIII
Rebecca sat in an interview room in Devon & Cornwall Police Headquarters, a WPC standing by the door to keep an eye on her.
She had been locked overnight in a cell, but compared to the bitter chill of the abandoned cottage it had been an almost blissful sleep. What had tainted the occasion had been the calls and howls of a juvenile two cells down, off his face on the new street drug of choice known as “Black Mamba”. The drug had become famous for sending users into a near zombie–like state, utterly incoherent and incapable of caring for themselves. She had finally been able to get some sleep when the drug user had been carted off by ambulance to hospital, his condition far too unstable for him to remain in police custody.
Her exhaustion had overwhelmed her and by the time she had been processed by the duty sergeant at 2am she had been almost asleep on her feet. She had fallen into a deep sleep the moment her head had hit the pillow in her cell and had not moved for over five hours, until the duty roster had switched over and a simple breakfast had been served at the unholy hour of half past seven. Now she awaited interview, presumably with DCI Stone and DC Marchant, as there seemed little chance that Kieran would be here. She recalled his expression of sympathy – no, pity, and she knew that her last ally within the force was now probably resigned to her guilt.
The interview room door opened and Stone walked in with Marchant at his side. The WPC left the room, closing the door behind her as Stone sat down. Marchant put a coffee in front of Rebecca, offered her a wan smile that Rebecca couldn’t tell was genuine or sympathetic.
‘Sleep well?’ Stone asked.
‘Better than lately,’ Rebecca replied, keen to show she was back in control of herself. ‘Can’t tell if that’s from the anaesthetic or just exhaustion.’
‘Anaesthetic?’ Marchant asked.
‘Long story,’ Rebecca replied, ‘that’s what we’re here for, right?’
Stone nodded. ‘DCI Stone and DC Marchant, the time is eight forty–six am…’
Stone went through the preamble of recording for both audio and the watching cameras the date, time, officers present and reminding Rebecca of the charges against her. She had waved her right to a solicitor at this point, not wanting to oppose the investigation any more than she had already done, but aware that she might need one by the time this interview was over. Right now, she knew that she had hurt nobody, but she also felt certain that Stone and Marchant believed that she was the prime suspect and would press for a confession. It’s what she would have done.
‘So, Rebecca, can you tell me what happened yesterday after you agreed to meet me here at the station at eleven in the morning?’
Rebecca cleared her thoughts and began recounting her day.
‘I was on my way out to the station when I was met by a man who called himself Colin, outside my apartment…’
Stone and Marchant listened intently as Rebecca told of how she was taken back to the Colin’s home and then saw the evidence of Neuray’s remarkable surveillance technology, the computers that could see human thoughts and relay them onto a screen. She was careful not to leave out any detail, including the revelation that Sam was about to become a whistle–blower at Neuray, and both Stone and Marchant took and referred to notes as she detailed what had happened. She spoke of having to enter Pete and Helen’s home to recover the data chip, Colin’s betrayal and his taking her out onto the moors to the abutments, the Faraday Cage, and then…
‘Then, Colin took the RAM chip from me,’ she said finally. ‘Another man showed up, the same man who had followed Greaves out of Nandos, and he pulled a gun. Before I knew it, Colin was walking out with the only evidence I had to prove my story and the other man was pointing the gun at me.’
Stone leaned forward. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Sam happened,’ Rebecca said, and despite her uncertainty about his motivations she could not help the tiny smile that curled from the corner of her lips as she recalled his heroic intervention. ‘He came crashing into the abutment and tackled the gunman to the ground, disarmed him and…’
She broke off. Stone and Marchant waited for what felt like an age.
‘And?’ Stone pressed.
Rebecca realised that she had backed herself into a corner. Although she had not seen it in that way, the fact of the matter was that Sam had battered a man almost to death with his bare hands. She knew that she could not lie, for to do so now would be fatal to any defence she might try to mount in the absence of the data stick that Colin had stolen.
‘Sam assaulted him, nearly beat him to death,’ she said.
DCI Stone glanced at DC Marchant and then he leaned back in his seat.
‘Sam Lincoln attacked the man who was about to shoot you?’
Rebecca nodded.
‘Then what?’ Marchant pressed.
‘The gunman was out cold, Sam spoke to me, told me some of what had happened. We were there when the gunman recovered consciousness and fled. Then he took me to the cottage,’ Rebecca went on, ‘and promised me he would remove the chip that Neuray implanted in me. He said that without it, they would no longer be able to track my movements, and with half a chance I might be able to prove my innocence. That was the last time I saw him.’
‘Before the team found you in the cottage,’ Stone said.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘I was just coming awake from the anaesthetic when I heard you approaching. I was afraid that it was the Russian coming back to finish the job so I got up and grabbed the first thing I could see. I hit the first man through the door with it. I didn’t know it was Kieran.’
Stone wrote down a few more notes.
‘And you say that Sam removed the implant from your head, just like that?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘That’s what he said he was going to do. I don’t know anything much about these chips he referred to, how they really work. I just know that since I’ve woken up this morning, I don’t have any more screaming headaches and I feel, just, different.’
‘Different how?’ Marchant asked.
‘I can’t explain it,’ Rebecca said. ‘Lighter, clearer. Something’s changed and it’s for the better, but I can’t put my finger on it right now. He did something all right.’
