Keep Her Close

by M. J. Ford

  Still nothing.

  ‘I don’t think he’s here,’ she muttered. With the relief came profound, almost painful disappointment. Maybe he’d had second thoughts, or something had gone wrong. Maybe he was still playing the game. If he wasn’t here, for whatever reason, that only augured badly for Sophie.

  In her back pocket, the phone vibrated. She took it out.

  ‘In the church,’ said Pryce. ‘Side door.’

  ‘Is Sophie—?’

  He hung up.

  ‘He wants me to enter the church,’ she whispered for the mic. ‘I’ll confirm if he’s inside.’

  She walked around the curved wall of the chancel, following a gravel path. She found the wooden door ajar. It was barely five and half feet high, and she had to stoop to enter. It opened straight into the nave.

  Sophie Okafor was sitting in the front pew, perfectly erect, trembling in her school hockey kit. One knee was covered in dried blood, and a tight gag cut into the sides of her mouth. In the gloom of the unlit interior, the whites of her terrified eyes were the brightest thing. Pryce sat directly behind her. His right hand held a gun at the base of her neck, but he was looking Jo up and down.

  She was caught for a moment in the memory of kissing him, and had to swallow back a retch.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, Sophie,’ said Jo. ‘My name is Jo Masters, and I’m a detective with Thames Valley—’

  ‘She knows who you are,’ said Pryce. ‘I’ve told her all about you.’ He pulled out the gag. ‘Tell her, Soph.’

  ‘Please …’ said Sophie. ‘Please let me go.’

  ‘Why don’t we send Sophie outside?’ said Jo. Even if the team hadn’t heard Pryce’s voice, they’d know he was present now. ‘I’ve come, just like you asked.’

  ‘Alone?’ said Pryce. ‘Or is that big old building opposite full of armed police? I don’t think the DCI would let his most celebrated detective come all the way out here on her own.’

  ‘Notorious might be a better description,’ said Jo. ‘I really don’t think Stratton gave a fuck. I’m on my own.’

  If she ran at him now, he’d have to turn the gun on her. He’d get one shot off for sure. If it missed, she could reach him. If Sophie had it in her, she could get out.

  A lot of ifs.

  She took a step forward, and the barrel was on her in a fraction of a second.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Jo,’ he said. ‘That vest might stop one bullet, but you won’t be running anywhere afterwards.’

  She couldn’t move. Fear made her legs like jelly. Jo was fairly certain the gun was a Glock. Ten rounds, if fully loaded. Plenty to kill both of them several times over.

  ‘Enough people have died,’ she said.

  He laughed suddenly. ‘That’s rich, considering. Enough for whom?’

  ‘Enough to prove your point,’ said Jo. ‘You’ve won. You’re better than me. I’m finished.’

  ‘Move away from the door. Towards the altar.’ He waved the gun.

  Jo did as he said. ‘Jack, you don’t need to hurt her. You’re not a child-killer.’

  Pryce grabbed Sophie’s hair, yanking her to her feet. She wailed, twisting painfully in his grip. He put the gun into her back. Jo worried the AR team would hear and decide to move.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said, to them as much as Sophie. ‘We’ll get you out of here.’

  ‘It won’t be me that’s killed her,’ said Pryce. He kept Sophie close to him, gun tight into her ribs, as he dragged her towards the door.

  ‘Don’t … please,’ said the girl. She stumbled and tripped, almost falling but he caught her and hauled her with him. He kept his eyes on Jo as they reached the door. ‘Outside,’ he said to Jo, then he went through the door. She followed, teeth gritted against the pain in her knee. Back in the open air, they moved around the chancel. ‘Keep your fucking distance,’ he said.

  Sophie’s eyes were pleading as he marched her across the graveyard, past the weeping stone angels. Jo cast a glance back to the manor house. Too many trees. No clear line of sight for Menzies’ snipers, even if they were in position. Still she prayed for the crack of a shot.

  Pryce pushed Sophie to the ground. She was sobbing. ‘You can’t. You can’t. I need to see my mum. You can’t …’

  Jo ran to her side, putting her body in between the gun and the girl.

  The veins on Pryce’s head were unnatural. Demonic. The man she’d worked with – cool, collected, in control – was gone completely.

  ‘Turn around, Jo. Take a look.’

  She did as he said, and saw a modest, newer headstone, made of speckled white marble.

  Elizabeth Mackintosh, 1986-2010. Taken from us too soon.

  ‘Jack, I’m sorry,’ she said, turning back to him.

  ‘Look at it!’ he shouted. ‘Look at it or I’ll shoot you in the fucking face!’

  She turned her head.

  ‘Jack, I didn’t know about Lizzie. I never knew.’

  He moved quickly, rushing towards her, and grabbing her hair. The gun was pressed into the side of her head so hard she thought it might crack her skull. Sophie was whimpering.

  Run! thought Jo. Just run, you stupid girl. Pryce’s voice hissed in her ear. ‘Of course you didn’t know, you fucking bitch. You and that corrupt fuck of a boyfriend walked off into the fucking sunset, didn’t you?’ He thrust her forward onto the ground, and spat a gobbet of warm spit into her hair. ‘Didn’t you?’ he yelled. He lifted the gun to hit her with the butt end, but then backed off towards Sophie once more.

  Jo let the spit run down her neck.

  ‘I did my best afterwards,’ said Pryce, talking almost to himself. ‘I read books, so many fucking books. We went to grief counselling. There are plenty of resources you can access, you know? Groups where people talk about their miscarriages and their dead children. But we were a bit too hardcore for them. I mean, come on, we had the best fucking sob story of the lot. Our kid wasn’t ill, wasn’t some clump of fucking cells.’ He winced, pressing the gun’s hilt to his temple as if to still the raging thoughts inside his skull. ‘She was ready. She was beautiful. I was at the hospital waiting for the ambulance. An hour later, I’d have held her. Do you have any fucking idea how that feels, to think you’re an hour from holding your baby and then they hand her to you and she’s fucking dead?’

  Jo could only shake her head. ‘Jack, I’m sorry,’ she said.

  The horror fell from his face, and his eyes were cold in an instant. ‘You know, that’s exactly what Tyndle said. He had no clue either. He was so happy to help. So happy to get his own back on the woman who left him looking like that. Thought it was just a fun game. Take a few girls, demand the ransom. Thought we were going to get rich, the thick bastard.’ He smiled, nodding. ‘But I let him know, right as I cut him. I let him fucking know.’

  Sophie was watching, eyes agog. As Pryce talked, Jo went over the possibilities. If she could get to him now – get him on the ground – she’d have a chance. She just had to distract him for long enough.

  ‘What was her name, Jack?’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Your little girl? We called ours Madeleine.’

  Pryce’s face twisted and he lifted his arms to his face, looking like he might throw up. Jo launched herself at him, eyes only on the gun, and her hands closed over his wrist.

  ‘Run!’ she shouted to Sophie.

  Jack wrenched her backwards with him, twisting the gun, and she lost her grip. With a flailing arm, he caught her across the side of the head. She heard a bang and at the same time her whole body spun around.

  She found herself lying on her back. Sophie hadn’t moved and was pressing herself against another headstone, hyperventilating. Jo’s vest was hitched up to her neck, and she saw smoke rising from the front. Pryce stared at her, a look of utter amazement on his face, then lifted the gun and fired again. For a moment, Jo thought he’d missed, but then there was pain unlike anything she’d thought possible, ripping through her stomach – sh
arp, like a lance of red-hot metal. Which seemed strange, because there was nothing sticking into her. There was a weight on her stomach, spreading through her hips and thighs like someone was sitting on her middle. And it seeped up under the vest too, making it hard to breathe. She reached down to her lower abdomen as Pryce walked over to her.

  Her fingers came away bloody.

  He shot me. I’ve been shot.

  She knew she didn’t have long at all – each breath was harder than the last. Her fingers slipped over the clasps of the vest, unhooking the bottom ones.

  ‘You’re dying, Jo,’ said Pryce, coming closer, eyes fixed on hers. ‘Look at me, Jo. There’s a bullet in your guts. You’re dying.’

  I know I’m fucking dying.

  God! Why couldn’t she breathe? The pain was going, but she felt like someone had driven a lance through her belly and skewered her into the ground.

  ‘Tell me how it feels,’ said Pryce.

  Jo had pins and needles in her fingers as she scrabbled with the second set of catches. She had to get the vest off.

  Pryce leant closer. ‘Please tell me. Does it hurt?’

  The catches came loose. As they did, the gun she’d secreted underneath fell to the ground at her hip. Pryce saw it as she grabbed it. The hilt was warm from her body. She brought it around, and for a second his eyes flared with fear, followed by a sort of admiration. She pulled the trigger and the kick-back was astonishing, jolting the gun from her hand. Pryce staggered backwards, clutching the right side of his chest, as blood, thick and tinged almost black, bubbled over his fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jo, almost by instinct.

  Pryce, still standing, lifted the Glock to point at Sophie’s head. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he replied.

  ‘No …’ said Jo, reaching out. She heard a soft pop, and the side of Pryce’s face blew apart, spattering the gravestones beside him with lumps of pale meat. He stood upright for what seemed an age before falling sideways. Sophie’s mouth opened wide.

  Jo heard male voices, shouting, and a screaming that didn’t stop. She lay back, sapped of strength, a dead weight. The sky above was darker than it should be, unless she’d got the hours all wrong and night was falling already. It darkened further as she watched, closing in from the sides, until there was just a small circle of white, crisscrossed with black branches. Then it was a face. Andy Carrick’s face.

  ‘Keep your eyes open,’ he said. ‘Stay awake.’

  She knew what he was saying, but she really didn’t want to. After the day she’d had, going to sleep felt like just the right thing to do.

  Epilogue

  It was Carly who’d persuaded her to give Lucas another shot, and they were taking it slowly. Moving back in seemed a way off, for sure, but the few meetings they’d had on neutral turf had been amicable, even fond. Harry Ferman had tentatively said he thought it was a good idea too – that she’d always seemed happiest when talking about Lucas. And even when Jo had told him the full story of how Lucas’s marriage had failed, he’d still refused to condemn. ‘Everyone deserves a second chance,’ he’d said.

  As for Lucas himself, he poured it all out. How his drinking had been heavy before the kids even came along, but had only got worse, as had the lengths he had gone to, to conceal it from his family and colleagues. It had come to a head when he’d pulled out at a junction after picking the kids up from school following a few pints in the pub. He’d managed to give his details to the other driver at the scene, but Carly had known straight away. She could smell it on him. She’d given him an ultimatum to stop, or she’d take the kids away. He’d promised he would, and then broken that promise almost at once, totalling the car a week later near their house. This time, thankfully, the kids hadn’t been in it. Carly had taken the blame for the crash, but thrown Lucas out. From that point he’d got worse, until eventually a hospital admission after a three-day bender, and a referral to an abstinence clinic had helped him turn a corner. Six months later, he’d re-established contact with his family, and begun the long, slow process of proving himself to them by working and staying sober. By then, Carly had understandably moved on.

  Jo still wasn’t sure why he’d never told her. She thought she’d have understood and given him a chance. After all, there were plenty of coppers with similar substance problems. She wasn’t naïve. Lucas said he’d thought about telling her lots of times. Bob Whittaker, the head gardener, was an addict too – they’d met at AA – and he’d often urged Lucas to come clean. But he’d just been so scared it would mess things up. He figured that Jo had probably had to deal with drunks so often in her line of work that knowing she had a potential one for a boyfriend would be too much. Especially after Ben, and his demons.

  At their last meeting, a winter walk along the canal, they made a pact. A fresh start. No more lies.

  As Jo parked up in the hospital car park, she told herself the story she was spinning down the phone now didn’t count.

  ‘It’s just a check-up,’ she said. ‘I don’t need hand-holding.’

  ‘Okay,’ replied Lucas, ‘but call me afterwards.’

  Jo grimaced as she climbed out of the car, and a groan escaped her lips. Even now, six weeks after the shooting, it still felt like she’d been kicked in the chest by a mule. Though the second bullet had potentially been lethal, it was the first bullet, the one stopped by the vest, that had given her the most pain. There wasn’t much they could do for a cracked sternum, except advise bed-rest. And she’d had quite enough of that.

  The automatic doors swished open, delivering a blast of heat from above. At the reception desk, the partner of a heavily pregnant woman was filling in a form. Jo waited for her turn, then gave her details.

  ‘Waiting room 2b,’ said the receptionist. ‘Go to the end of the corridor, turn right, and there are some chairs.’

  Jo followed the receptionist’s instructions, past various consultation suites, blood rooms, and offices. She sipped the water bottle nervously, though her bladder was close to bursting already. There was one other woman sitting waiting, with a toddler on his hands and knees, pushing a toy car around on the floor.

  Jo smiled at her as she took her seat.

  She’d had about enough of hospitals. They’d kept her in for four days after the shooting, three in intensive care, then moved her to another ward for monitoring and convalescence. The first few hours were a complete blur as they pumped her full of morphine. Paul and Amelia said they’d visited, but Jo couldn’t remember it at all. The second bullet had passed straight through the soft tissue of her insides, narrowly missing her spine. They’d had to remove a length of her small intestine in emergency surgery and stem the internal bleeding, but by all accounts, as the doctor had said, she had been lucky. Very lucky indeed.

  When the team had come to visit on the second day, Dimitriou had asked afterwards if they’d let her keep the bullet.

  ‘Why the fuck would she want that?’ Heidi had said. She’d come to visit two days shy of her due date. ‘To put under her pillow for the bullet fairy?’

  ‘For posterity,’ said Dimitriou. ‘I would.’

  Jo assumed they’d taken it for evidence, along with the one embedded in the vest. The internal inquiry into Pryce’s death would be long and drawn out, no doubt. Putting together the chain of events by which he managed to kidnap four young women while employed by Thames Valley Police, deceiving a team of presumably seasoned detectives, would be embarrassing. Questions would be asked about how his personal history had been overlooked in the recruitment process, or deemed to be non-relevant. Carrick had taken Jo over the initial findings already. At the stage Pryce had applied to join the police, his academic record was exemplary. He seemed to be just what the police force needed – young, passionate, driven. He’d been on anti-anxiety medicine for several years though, in increasing doses, and it looked likely that he was self-medicating too. The scariest thing for Jo was that he’d applied to move to Avon and Somerset a year ago, when Jo was still based ther
e, but there hadn’t been a vacancy. If he had transferred then, she wondered how things might have panned out. The thought was sobering. Perhaps Ben would still be alive, and she would be dead.

  A petite, very young nurse in a pristine white uniform came along the corridor.

  ‘Josephine Masters?’

  Jo stood up and followed her into a small room, with a semi-reclined medical couch in the centre, a spotlight on an articulated stand, and a bulky monitor and console.

  ‘My name is Yolanda, and I’m going to be carrying out your sonogram,’ said the woman. She went through Jo’s details, then asked her to hop onto the bed. Jo took off her coat and hung it over the single chair, presumably for partners, then got on.

  ‘Swing your legs up for me,’ said the sonographer, ‘and pull up your top.’

  Jo did so, revealing the lower tide-mark of green bruising from her breastbone, and the two scars, almost healed, across her belly. The nurse raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Would you believe, someone shot me?’ said Jo. ‘They missed the important parts, though.’

  The nurse frowned, clearly struggling to work out if Jo was attempting a joke. ‘I thought your name rang a bell. You’re the detective with Thames Valley Police.’

  Jo smiled.

  ‘Gosh.’ She picked up a tube. ‘Well, normally I warn people this is going to be cold, but you’re probably tough enough. Can you pull your underwear down a tad too, please?’ Jo obeyed. The sonographer squeezed out clear cool gel across Jo’s stomach, then used the end of the ultrasound scanner to smear it across Jo’s skin.

  ‘When was your last period?’

  Jo told her the date, roughly seven and a half weeks ago. It was early for a scan, but they were taking extra precautions given what Jo had endured.

  On the screen, black shapes flitted about, speckled with static. Jo had no idea what she was looking at, but the sonographer watched intently, moving the scanner back and forth. She focused on a small, shapeless patch of white.

  She smiled. ‘There you are!’

  Jo craned her neck. She’d done more pregnancy tests than she could count, but she needed someone else to see it too – to prove it to herself. ‘Is everything okay?’