by D C Vaughn
Rebecca kept moving. She had already walked the length of the east river, and then crossed via a bridge just south of her apartment and turned north, heading back the way she had come. She strolled through the darkness, listening to the whisper of traffic on the main road and the hymn of nature on the other as night animals scurried for cover by the water’s edge. For a homeless person, it probably felt as though the whole world was busily going about its business and ignoring them entirely.
She was half way back up the river when she saw the first sleeping bag. It was a red one, smeared with grime and with torn edges where its thermal lining was spilling in fluffy white feathers out into the darkness. The sleeping bag was surrounded by debris, old food and drink cartons, plus a carrier bag filled with who–knew–what, but Rebecca’s only interest was in the man rolled up in a foetal position within the bag.
‘Hello?’
She approached the bag beneath the shelter of the bridge, cautious of what the man within might do. She saw him turn his head, which was wrapped within the sleeping bag. Dark skin and thick beard, eyes black and glittering as they reflected weak lights from further down the river.
‘What?’ came a voice, slurred, mumbled.
Rebecca guessed that the man was heavily intoxicated. Most of them drank during the day to stave off the cold at night. She moved closer and crouched down nearby. From her purse she produced a five–pound note and handed it to the man
The man took it cautiously, his eyes fixed upon her as though she might suddenly snatch the money back.
‘Thank you, he said softly, his voice clearer now.
‘I need to ask a favour,’ she said. ‘Do you know a man named either Greaves or Mintram?’
The vagrant’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Greavesy? Yeah, I know him. Why do you want to know?’
Rebecca realised that the man wasn’t in fact drunk but had merely been sleeping when she had approached. He propped himself up on one elbow, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
‘He died recently,’ Rebecca said.
The man froze, looked at her for a moment, and then sighed. ‘Another decent one gone. What happened to him?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘You’re the police,’ the man said cautiously.
‘Yes,’ Rebecca replied, ‘but I’m not on duty right now. There’s something about Greaves’s death that bothers me. Do you have any knowledge of whether Greaves suffered from headaches, sensitivity to light, nausea, paranoia, that kind of thing?’
The man seemed quite taken aback and had to think about it for a moment.
‘No, I don’t think so, but there are a lot of the folks around here suffering from things like that at the moment.’
Rebecca felt a tingle of anticipation ripple up and down her spine. ‘Really? Do you know where I can find them?’
‘Sure,’ came the response. ‘Old Barry T’s struggling with migraines, so he says. Keeps insisting that he’s been possessed.’
Rebecca pulled out a scrap of paper from her pocket and a pen and scribbled down the name. ‘Go on.’
‘Erm, Sophie’s gone to the bad the last few months, lots of headaches, illness. She’s one of the young ones, was fit as a fiddle before, but she barely makes it out of her squat these days.’
‘Where can I find her?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Barnes Road,’ the man replied. ‘Can’t remember the number but you can’t miss it, it’s all boarded up. Sophie and others get in through the bottom back windows and keep the boards in place so that nobody notices them there.’
‘Drugs?’ Rebecca asked.
‘No, Sophie’s clean but for a little booze and her ciggies. I haven’t seen her for days.’
The man gave her three more names, all of them suffering from maladies that Rebecca found all too familiar. As soon as she was done, she thanked the man and moved on. She walked toward the town centre, intent on tracking down at least one of the beleaguered homeless men and women, whom she was certain were the people whose live feeds she had seen in Colin’s house on the television screens.
They were the perfect targets: homeless, distrusted and avoided by all, dependent on charity services, soup kitchens and the generosity of the occasional passer by for every scrap of food, water and shelter they could find. For a little cash and the signing of an NDA, Rebecca was pretty sure that she had found the test beds for Neuray’s insane surveillance technology.
Now all she had to do was prove it, and she knew the perfect person to call to help her.
*
DCI Stone sat behind his desk and stared into space, wondering how the hell the case had gone south so quickly. They’d had a suspect in custody, a motive, means and opportunity, and in the space of four hours everything had fallen apart.
He looked up at a wipe–board on which he had created his own bubble–map of the players in the case, Rebecca Kyle front and centre. For a moment he stared at it without really seeing anything, but then he found his gaze wandering to the Russian known only as “Colin”.
There was a sense that they were in imminent danger of the Home Office getting involved in the case, not to mention MI5. This was bigger than a simple murder investigation, although Stone liked to keep any investigation, no matter how big, focussed on the crime that provoked it. Two men were dead, and it was his remit to identify and apprehend the killer. Stone knew that the parallels with the poisoning case in Salisbury were close, and that with Ashton Kershaw claiming an assault at the hands of two Russian men there was far more to this than just Rebecca Kyle’s involvement, which was looking more and more to be coincidental and perhaps even staged.
That thought caught him unawares and he leaned back in his seat, folded his arms and stared at the images. Rebecca Kyle, a police detective, would be an unlikely target to be framed for a homicide due to the nature of her work and that of her colleagues, but if even a fraction of what she had told them under caution was true…
Stone reached out and picked up the telephone that had begun ringing in front of him.
‘Stone.’
‘You’re going to love this,’ DCI Kieran Russell said down the line. ‘Forensics got back to us after going over the site at the farmhouse where we found Rebecca Kyle.’
‘And?’
‘They found DNA evidence that matches Sam Lincoln at the same site. He was there, just like she said. We also found blood splatter in the old army abutments near the farmhouse from a second, unknown victim, who must have been struck or otherwise assaulted, as well as two teeth. They’re being sent for a high–priority analysis as we speak.’
Stone leaned back in his seat. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Either Rebecca Kyle is some kind of violent psychopath running rings around us all, or she’s telling the truth. We still haven’t found the man she refers to as Colin and Hannah’s confirmed that there’s no record of him ever working at Neuray.’
‘Okay, do me a favour,’ Stone said. ‘I want you to start digging around into Dylan Carter. Find out everything and anything you can about any possible connections to these Russians over the past few days: phone calls, e–mails, anything at all.’
‘You sound like you’re in danger of having a change of heart.’
‘Kyle might just be a pawn in all of this, but if Sam Lincoln’s alive then I’m not so sure about him. Get back to me as soon as you learn of anything useful. Oh, and where the hell is Marchant?’
‘Don’t know, she’s not answering her mobile, must be stuck in traffic or something.’
Stone hung up the phone and surveyed the wipe board one last time. Sam Lincoln might have orchestrated the whole damned thing for all he knew. Still, Stone knew he was racing against time now. If the media got hold of half of what had happened, it would only hasten MI5’s involvement and the inevitable security around the case that would see jurisdiction pass to the security services.
Stone wanted both murders solved before that happened, if for no other reason than his own satisfactio
n.
***
XXXVIII
The house stood on the corner of Barnes Road, three stories towering into the velvety black sky. The windows were boarded, the exterior sealed off with chain–link fencing that suggested the site had been scheduled for demolition, probably to build apartments to cater for Exeter’s rapidly growing population.
‘Just for the record, this is bloody insane.’
Jenny stood beside Rebecca, her arms folded and a sour look on her face. One thick strand of dreadlocked blonde hair hung in front of her face, the rest pinned back in a dense ponytail.
‘It won’t take long,’ Rebecca promised. ‘Besides, there’s nothing to worry about: you’re just helping a suspected murderess break into a creepy abandoned building. At night. That might be full of criminals.’
‘This is why you didn’t become a comedienne.’
Rebecca glanced at her watch and saw that it was just after eight o’clock, late enough that the town centre would be falling silent but for the bars and pubs. Folks with little or no money would huddle away from the bustle and the cold, knowing that there was little to be gained from drunk teenagers and other revellers who would as likely be violent rather than sympathetic to their plight.
Rebecca made her way to the rear of the building via an alleyway that cut through between the gardens of rows of terraced houses, and she quickly found a section of the fencing that had been cut open. She carefully prized the wire fencing out, stepped into what had once been a garden, and replaced the section of fence as soon as Jenny was through.
The rear garden was nothing more than a large patch of mud strewn with chunks of old tiles and other debris. Rebecca picked her way toward the back door of the house, seeking the entrance that the man under the bridge had suggested was the way in for the squaters living here. She quickly identified it, the door panels loosely in place but easy to pull aside.
‘You do know that I might not know any of the people in here, don’t you?’ Jenny reminded her.
‘I just need a lead on one person, anybody who has been implanted, and I was told that this was a good place to look. Stay behind me.’
Rebecca took a breath and then eased the panel open enough for her to slip into utter blackness.
The interior of the house smelled of damp and that peculiar odour of bitterly cold air that almost smelled like smoke. Rebecca’s eyes adjusted somewhat to the gloom and she saw a doorway to her left that led into what had once been the kitchen. Aged tiles and threadbare curtains hung stiff with cold in the window. Grubby sinks lined with dark stains, metal pipework, crumbling masonry. A dead rat lay on the floor, stiff and emaciated.
‘Lovely,’ Jenny whispered. ‘I could have been in the pub by now, just you remember that.’
Rebecca eased her way into the house, down a narrow hall that led toward the front door. On her left she saw another open doorway, while on her right was a stairs that led up to the first floor. Debris crunched beneath her shoes as she crept to the open doorway and peered inside.
A single, collapsed sofa was set against a wall, the floor strewn with trash. The scent of cigarette smoke stained the air, the groggy odour of hash and stale food hanging as though frozen with the cold air itself. There was no movement but she could see a thick sleeping back on the sofa, large enough that there could be somebody inside it.
Rebecca stepped inside the room, trying not to make a sound as she crept up on what she hoped was the girl she believed was named Sophie. As soon as she was standing over the sleeping bag, she took a breath.
‘Hello?’
Her voice sounded small in the blackness, empty, alone. The sleeping bag did not move. Rebecca took a pace closer and reached out for the bag to shake it.
‘Anyone in there…?’
The sleeping bag exploded outward and a figure lunged at her. Wild eyes, mouth agape, a scream of some kind that burst from her lungs like the cry of an enraged eagle. A wicked blade flashed in the faint light coming through the window boards from the streetlights outside, and Rebecca jerked backwards as the knife’s edge hissed past her face with millimetres to spare.
‘Sophie!’ Jenny yelled. ‘Sophie, it’s me, Jenny!’
The figure whirled and the blade flashed through the air. Jenny ducked beneath the wild blow, but then the figure swung a punch that connected with Jenny’s jaw and sent her flying across the room to crash into the opposite wall.
Rebecca reached out and grabbed the figure’s wrist, hoping to pin the knife down long enough to disarm them. With shocking speed the figure turned, twisted out of Rebecca’s grip and slammed an elbow backwards into Rebecca’s chest. She stumbled backwards, off balance as the figure ploughed into Rebecca and hurled her onto her back. Rebecca’s limbs flailed as she crashed down and the air burst from her lungs in an agonised gasp as the back of her head hit the unforgiving floorboards. Her vision starred as she saw the figure plunge down on top of her with knife in hand, the blade slashing downward.
Rebecca threw her hands up and managed to catch the wrist again, but the weight bearing down upon the weapon drove it inexorably toward Rebecca’s throat.
‘I’m here to help!’ Rebecca shrieked in panic as the metal touched her skin. Her arms burned and shook as she fought for her life.
‘Please!’ she strained. ‘I’m here to see you!’
The face of a girl glared down at her, eyes as dark as night, lank hair spilling onto Rebecca’s face like black snakes, and then the girl sneered and shifted her weight, bringing it all to bear on the knife. Rebecca’s cried out as she felt the sharp point of the blade press down into her skin alongside the pulsing thread of an artery, and then she felt the skin break in a sharp lance of white pain.
Something crashed into the room and suddenly the girl was hurled to one side, the blade gone as Rebecca rolled away in shock. The girl hit the wall of the room alongside an old fireplace as the new intruder plunged down upon her and twisted the knife from her grasp before she could bring it to bear once more.
Rebecca heard the girl cry out in pain as the weapon was snatched away, and then suddenly the room filled with light as the intruder switched on a powerful torch and held it pointed up at the ceiling.
Sam Lincoln glanced across at Rebecca, breathing heavily as he looked her over, apparently checking for wounds.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
Rebecca was about to reply when the girl launched herself off the ground and tried to dash past Sam. Sam dodged right and blocked her path, and the girl backed up, snarling like a trapped animal and glaring at them with eyes just as wild. Sam held the knife in one hand and for a moment Rebecca saw a mental image of him beating the Russian assassin. She didn’t know what he might do next and she needed the girl alive.
‘Sophie?’
Rebecca spoke the girl’s name out loud and in an instant the girl’s gaze snapped to hers, eyes now wide with surprise as well as fury.
‘How do you know my name?’ she snarled.
‘It’s a long story,’ Rebecca replied.
‘Get out of my house.’
‘It’s not your house.’
‘Get out of my life!’
Sophie launched herself again at Sam, fingers reaching out for his face in suicidal rage. Sam dodged back, caught her by the upper arms and flung her clean over Rebecca to land on the sofa. Rebecca got to her feet, put herself between Sam and Sophie.
‘Sophie, listen to me. We’re not here to hurt you. We need your help.’
Sophie glared back at them. ‘Bullshit, you’re just here to take everything, that’s all you people do. You’re with the filth, bitch, I can smell it from here! I wouldn’t trust you with nothin’.’
Rebecca was about to reply, but then Sophie got to her feet and rushed over. ‘Soph, it’s me, Jenny. Rebecca’s sound, okay? Listen to her.’
Sophie glared uncertainly at them all.
Rebecca kept her hands by her sides, trying to be as non–threatening as possible.
‘Yes,
I’m a police detective, but that’s not why I’m here. Tell me, have you been suffering from any headaches lately? Violent thoughts? Been drinking or yearning for drugs when you normally wouldn’t?’
Sophie stared at Rebecca for a long moment, and even in the pale light of the nearby torch she could see that the girl was surprised.
‘Same here,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’ve worked out what’s happening, and I think that the same thing’s being done to you.’
Sophie recoiled from them on the sofa. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sophie, did you recently get medical help from a charity?’
Sophie’s eyes widened a little further, the rage spilling from them. ‘Yeah, so what?’
‘Was it after that treatment that you started to feel different, worse?’
Sophie said nothing for a long moment, but then she scowled again. ‘I ain’t fallin’ for this crap. You’re just tryin’ to set me up for something and…’
‘Headaches behind the eyes, memories that keep coming back but don’t make sense?’
Sophie’s retort died on her lips, and for just a moment Rebecca saw for the first time the lost and lonely teenager hidden behind the violence. Sophie began to shiver, the room around them as cold as ice.
‘They put something in you, Sophie,’ Rebecca said. ‘They did the same to me. I need you to come with us, because what you have inside you could solve two murders, one of them a man you might know by the name of Greaves.’
Sophie looked like a deer caught in headlights. ‘Greavesy? He’s dead?’
Sam moved forward. ‘Two days ago. And if we’re right, you’re a target too.’
Sophie shook her head. ‘I ain’t comin’ with you.’
Jenny stepped forward again. ‘You’ve got to, they’re not kidding Soph’. Trust me, as frickin’ crazy as it sounds, they’re telling the truth and there’s not much time. I’m goin’ with them. Are you in, or what?’
***
