The Girl in the Empty Room

by Neil Randall

  “Black Death?” Ryan and Katie said at once.

  “Aye,” the Boge replied, opening the car door. “Come, quickly, we don’t have much time.”

  Katie grabbed the handle and tried to wrench the door back shut.

  “No way. We’re not going with you. We’re getting out of here.” With her free hand she slipped the car into reverse and pressed her foot down on the accelerator, only for the engine to instantly die on her, spluttering to silence. “What?”

  “Do not fear,” said Bogdanovic, patting her gently on the shoulder. “Jacqueline has marked neither of you with the blackness. If you put your trust in her, you will leave here unharmed, of that I give you my personal guarantee.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When Hepworth was pulled from the car wreck he had difficulty piecing things together. While paramedics treated, what were, incredibly, only superficial injuries, cuts and bruises, a gash to the forehead that required a few minor stitches, he looked around the yard strewn with piles of rubble, two stuffed crocodiles, a corpse covered by a white sheet, that of his partner and friend, Diane Priestly, and two dead dogs, each riddled with what were clearly gunshots.

  With a battering ram, a policeman forced a caravan door open.

  “Over here,” he heard someone shout.

  Inside they found a body in such a bizarre state of decomposition it was impossible to positively identify it as Bogdanovic, or tell exactly how long the man had been dead. And as the police had no record of anyone of that name ever existing, they could only suppose that it was indeed the strange character who’d inhabited this stretch of disputed land for the last ten years.

  “What happened?” Hepworth asked no-one in particular, his eyes clouding with both tears and confusion.

  A man behind him said, “Looks like your partner was mauled to death by a pair of vicious fighting dogs. Looks like the guy who lived here died some time ago. Maybe that’s why the dogs were so vicious – they were hungry, hadn’t been fed for days. You were just unlucky, Sir.”

  “But the – the crocodiles, they killed. They –” he trailed off, feeling someone’s hand rest on his shoulder.

  “You took a nasty bang to the head, Sir. We better get you to the hospital, run some tests. Maybe you’ve got a concussion.”

  ***

  When armed soldiers stormed the quarantine tent they found a scene of bloody carnage. Two hundred people had been murdered in their sleep, hacked to death, scalped, their throats cut. Piled by the entrance was a great mound of matted hair, the tops of severed skulls, left like some kind of sacrificial offering. On one of the beds, mumbling to himself, blood-spattered against his naked body, a wooden stake in his hand with a severed pig’s head on top of it, sat Aaron Wells, deranged, completely out of his mind.

  As soldiers encircled him, rifles aimed, he lifted his head and smiled at them.

  “Now – Now they can’t hurt her anymore.”

  ***

  Katie and Ryan woke up naked in bed, snuggled up in each other’s arms.

  “Jesus!” she pushed him away and gathered up the bed sheets, trying to cover herself.

  “What?” said Ryan, jolting upright. “What’s happened? Where are we?”

  Both looked around the room – Ryan’s bedroom, with Nirvana and Primal Scream posters on the walls, shelves straining with vinyl records, a state of the art stereo system, bass guitar and a rail full of clothes.

  “How did we get here?” said Katie.

  “I – I don’t know. Last thing I remember we were up at the Boge’s and there were sirens, and then the car wouldn’t start and –”

  “Look.” Katie pointed to a single sheet of paper at the end of the bed. “That’s Jacqueline’s handwriting. I’m sure of it.”

  She picked up the note and they both started to read:

  Get together, be happy, take care of the kids, become one family. You’ll do a much better job of bringing them up than I ever could. Life twisted me too far out of shape, I didn’t recognise myself anymore. And I knew a long, long time ago that everyone I loved would be far better off without me.

  ***

  On the strength of an anonymous tip-off, police conducted a thorough search of Michael Babb’s house.

  “Don’t know what you expect to find,” he was quoted as saying. “I ain’t done nothing wrong. Search away, no skin off my nose.”

  In the double garage officers found a machete, the blade congealed with blood and clumps of matted hair. Later D.N.A. testing confirmed that the fingerprints on the handle belonged to Babb, and samples of blood and hair on the blade belonged to the murdered Polish women and some of the victims found inside the quarantine zone.

  As they delved into Babb’s business interests, police discovered that he was not only transporting desperate workers from the continent illegally, exploiting them, providing forged documents and defrauding the tax system, but driving the women into prostitution, supplying local men in positions of power – councillors, judges, members of parliament – with a steady supply of sex workers, in exchange for favours, in turning a blind eye to his criminal activities.

  Within a week, Babb was charged with multiple murders, including that of missing single mother Jacqueline Franklin, as money deposited into her bank account was traced back to an off-shore account in the Bahamas registered to one of his private companies. Even though a body had not been found, there was enough corroboratory evidence – phone records, threatening text messages sent to her mobile number – to suggest that Babb was responsible for Franklin’s disappearance, probable murder, and the disposal of her body.

  A police spokesman said:

  “Undoubtedly, we have thwarted serious criminal activities here, an unprecedented spree of killing and exploitation of vulnerable females. Clearly, Michael Babb is a very dangerous man, a serial killer the likes of which this, or any other country has never seen before, a man destined to spend the rest of his life behind bars.”

  ***

  Calling out excitedly, Liam and Pippa ran down the hallway, the little boy carrying a shoebox under his arm.

  “Look, Nanny, look.”

  At first, Jane Brooke didn’t realise that the bundles of used fifty pound notes inside the shoebox, secured with elastic bands, were real.

  “My God!” she said, picking up a bundle. “Where did you get all of this?”

  “The voices told us to look under the bed,” said Pippa. “They told us it was a present from mummy.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  So traumatised was Detective Inspector Hepworth, the police force had no other option than to recommend that he go into early retirement, with immediate effect. In the months that followed this once level-headed, dependable man underwent extensive psychiatric counselling, but none of the specialists who treated him could ever get to the bottom of his problems, or make him realise that the inexplicable events he insisted took place in that small coastal town were a product of a disturbed mind.

  “Are you still troubled by the same dream?”

  “Yes,” said Hepworth, much aged, his hair having turned snow-white within days of the incident which cost his partner her life. “In the dream, I’m rowing down a vast river, like the Amazon, when my canoe gets overturned. As I swim to the river bank, and haul myself out of the water, a crocodile grabs me. Just as its jaws clamp down on my chest, I feel this incredible sense of warmth and well-being, and hug the croc’s cold, scaly snout with all the tenderness of a lover.”

  “But you do realise that this dream is no more than a projection of your unconscious guilt, don’t you? That you associate the crocodile with the death of Diane Priestly, simply because of the stuffed crocodiles found at the scene of the tragedy, that they’ve become a motif for your problems, because you feel you should’ve saved your partner’s life.”

  At this point, Hepworth, in the methodical way he always approached investigations, listed one anomaly after another:

  “What about the damage done to the
car? No-one has ever accounted for that. What about the bite radius on the injuries Diane suffered? – far too big and extensive to have been inflicted by a pair of dogs. What about the gnomes, hundreds of them smashed to pieces?”

  “Mr Hepworth, Daniel, please, take a step back, think about what you’re saying: magical gnomes, giant crocodiles. These are figments of your traumatised imagination, things that defy all reasonable explanation.”

  With a generous pension provision, and careful management of his savings, Hepworth, a bachelor with no children, was able to maintain a comfortable if modest existence. But he could never accept that what he’d experienced that day was a paranoid delusion – it had all seemed so real. And he devoted himself to investigating the matter, reading through old files, case reports and witness statements, and talking to people involved in the original search for Jacqueline Franklin, including her friend Katie Davison. In a series of telephone conversations and the exchange of hundreds of emails, he followed up on all the information she gave him, the links to websites, connecting the killing spree in the small Norfolk town to those in America. But all he was left with was a series of compelling coincidences, interconnecting strands, deeper and deeper layers of mystery, the likes of which, had he fully confided in his psychiatrist, would’ve probably led to his indefinite internment in a mental institute.

  Regardless, it brought him no closer to solving the mystery.

  Not until some twenty years later, when Hepworth was approaching his seventieth birthday, did he make a significant breakthrough. One morning in late October (although the fact it was the twenty-ninth completely escaped his notice at the time, and in the subsequent weeks that passed), he received an email and attachment from a cyber friend, whom he could only have described as a conspiracy theory enthusiast, a young Texan of only twenty-five, who, like Katie had been following the Boge killings for years, going so far as to set up a blog (which had accumulated an impressive ten thousand followers), making the connection between each killing spree.

  To: danielhepworth@buzzback.com

  From: JinxyH1990@virtualpost.com

  07:13 October 29th 2035

  Daniel,

  RE: The Boge Killings

  Please find attached photographs of a patient at a high security mental facility near the small town of Nattawa, California. Apparently, she’s been there for the last twenty years, suffering from severe drug-induced brain damage, a form of a permanent vegetative state, and has never uttered a word. She came to my attention completely by chance, because she was described as having a tattoo depicting the Indian spiritual leader, Chief Wanayama, on her wrist. But perhaps, even more intriguingly, this woman hasn’t aged at all in those twenty years (see two attached photographs – before and after shots, if you like).

  Maybe we’re onto something, maybe not – but your thoughts, as always, would be greatly appreciated.

  Kind regards

  Your friend, Jinx Hoover III

  When Hepworth downloaded the photographs he almost toppled out of his chair – for there was Jacqueline Franklin, a face he first became acquainted with when scrolling through endless photographs on her Facebook page some two decades ago, a face that had since become embedded in his mind.

  When he exchanged this information with Katie (who had long since married Ryan Carmichael), it was agreed that they had to proceed with utmost caution, as both Jacqueline’s children were grown up now, happily married, young professionals, who, moreover, retained very little memory of their birth mother (in fact, both had come to call Katie their mother).

  Eventually, the subject was broached, and after much soul-searching, the family decided to take a trip out to California. In the spring of the following year, Hepworth, Katie, Ryan and their four children arrived at the institute, where friendly staff members directed them to the patient’s private room.

  “Before we go in,” said a kindly-faced nurse. “I think I better warn you about Jane’s – that’s what we’ve always called her, like a Jane Doe – condition. For some reason, she doesn’t seem to age as quickly as normal folks. Why that is the specialists just don’t know. But, suffice to say, she doesn’t look no different from the day she was wheeled in here.”

  In an eerie scene, like something from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, the visitors looked in on a perfectly preserved flesh and bone image of Jacqueline Franklin, the young woman she was twenty years ago. In a plain nightgown, her hair up a scruffy bunch, she sat in the white-walled room, eyes closed, in a chair by the window.

  “My word,” Hepworth was the first to speak, advancing into the room. “The likeness is uncanny. It must be her, mustn’t it?”

  Ryan fell in beside him.

  “I don’t know,” he said, crouching down and rolling up one of her sleeves, finding a single tattoo on her wrist, that of Chief Wanayama. “The exact same tattoo, in the exact same place. What are the chances?” He stood and straightened, turned his head, but his wife and children were no longer standing in the doorway.

  Hepworth patted him on the shoulder.

  “It’s probably too much for them.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Ryan tried to force out a smile. “I think it’s probably too much for me, too.”

  Hepworth stole another glance at Jacqueline’s all too familiar face.

  “But – But how did she get here? And what happened to the other tattoos?”

  In the corridor, Katie gave Pippa and Liam a big hug.

  “That’s just how I remember her,” sobbed Pippa, “– zonked out, unable to talk.”

  While the family went off to discuss things, Hepworth spoke to the institute’s senior administration officer, Frank, an incredibly helpful, organised and amiable man, who offered the former policeman complete access to this mysterious woman’s records – not that there was particularly much to disclose: admitted in late 2014, brought in by a man who never identified himself, her fees, which were substantial, were paid promptly every month, indicating that whoever was paying them was extremely wealthy

  “And from our records,” said Frank, “it would appear that she only has one visit a year.”

  “Really?” said Hepworth. “And who might that be?”

  “Here.” Frank slid the visitors’ book across the desk. “That’s the guy, or I should say guys, who’ve paid her a visit once a year, every year, on the twenty-ninth of October. They don’t stay too long, by all accounts – in and out.”

  The register bore two signatures, for the first five years: B. Bogdanovic, and for each year thereafter: C. Wanayama.

  THE END

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