The Family

by P. R. Black

  Becky jumped a full foot in the air like a spooked cat. One stack of books swung round behind her, cutting her path off. There was only one way out, indeed; a left-hand turn, away from a corner of Romance and Adult sections closing off the path ahead.

  Then she heard him breathing – fast, excited breaths.

  She could see him. He was directly to the left, clearly visible through a gap between the books and the shelf above.

  She looked into his eyes – the eyes she knew so well, thick and black irises, bulging wide.

  The eyes disappeared briefly, as he slipped on the bone mask. Then the face swept away like a flicked page, and his heavy footsteps thudded down the row of books towards the final corner.

  Coming for her.

  42

  Becky turned towards the stack of books blocking her way. She threw her weight behind it, but it budged only a little.

  Then he appeared. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans. The bone mask was there, the patchwork skull of a stag or a bison, shorn of horns, the nude jaw and mean little teeth yellowed with age. And then those same eyes, and the same long, curved knife in his hands. He was a giant, now, as tall and as broad as he had been sparse and lean as a younger man.

  He paused a moment to take her in, then grunted, before he charged.

  All the training, all Becky’s strength, every blow she’d struck at heavy bags, sparring partners and even real people – it all melted away. She didn’t take a deep breath from low in her diaphragm; she did not crouch in a defence stance; she did not bounce on her heels, ready for combat. She screamed, a desperate, feral squawk. She dropped the pepper spray.

  Becky scrambled up the stack of books like a monkey, featherlight. Adrenaline gave her wings, took her up in its hands.

  He leapt for her, sweeping the blade down with one huge, swinging blow.

  She glanced back a moment before she reached the summit of the bookstack, one foot trailing over the edge. The outer edge of the uppermost bookshelf burst open as if by a gunshot; a book spine flailed in a shredded flap of cloth and hardboard; Becky felt the tip of the heavy blade glance off her boot. But then she was above him, scrambling over the roof of the bookstack, clods of stirred dust clogging her nostrils.

  Then the ground shifted, alarmingly.

  He shoved at the stack before she was over the top and dropping down the other side, and it leaned crazily as she landed on the floor.

  She felt the sliced edged of her boot digging into her skin. She wondered if the blade had gone right through; if she was leaving footprints of blood as she ran along the rows of sci-fi books. The streaming rocket tail on the sign was a jaunty insult.

  Hana was nowhere to be seen; there was no one behind the counter. She was alone with him in the main room.

  She ran round the empty corridor and burst through the door. Outside it was the way out – but somehow, he was ahead of her, running towards her from a different entrance, yelling. He must have taken another way, to get between her and the main exit.

  His guttural voice filled every molecule in the empty air, reverberating through her body to the marrow.

  He was between her and the front door. His blade traced silvery arcs in his pistoning arm as he sprinted towards her.

  She ran, a flight straight out of a nightmare. There was a door ahead and to the left, and she jerked at the handle. It was unlocked; she ran through it into a dark blue corridor lit by small, dim windows set high on the walls. A storage cupboard was to her right, the handle of a mop jutting out of a crack in the door, preventing it from closing. On instinct, Becky snatched the handle as she ran towards two other doors.

  He jerked open the door behind her. His breathing, muffled by the mask, was still slow and steady. Through the thunder of their feet she could hear that he was gaining on her; he was faster than her. She was braced for the kiss of the steel through the back of her neck, or between her shoulder blades. Once, Becky felt a sharp sweep that tugged almost playfully at her trailing hair.

  Then she gripped a door handle and pushed through a door to the right.

  She was in a tiny office, with space only for a desk and some filing cabinets; she slammed the door shut and tipped one over, blocking the doorway just as it was pushed open from the other side.

  The door thudded once, twice, only a sliver of space between the jamb and the open edge. Becky jammed the second filing cabinet against the first.

  The door jerked once more, meeting yet more solid resistance; then the person on the other side backed off.

  The world settled back on its axis. Becky became aware of her hands, shaking in a near-comical palsy. At the windows behind her, a faint breeze stirred some venetian blinds badly in need of a dusting.

  In the sliver of space at the crack of the door appeared a single shark-black eye, marooned in the dirty yellow of old bone like a filthy china cup. The pupil seemed freakishly large, reflecting the light in brilliant silver points, giving them an almost feral cast.

  His voice was shaky with the effort of running, but clear, and loud.

  ‘Little bitch, where will you run to next? Where can you go now?’

  Becky kicked out at the filing cabinet; the eye snatched away before the door could slam shut on it. It pushed open again, a little further this time. The eye reappeared, thinned out in mirth.

  ‘Ah, the day is coming near, when we can be together. I look forward to it. It won’t just be a day. It will be days, weeks, months… a lifetime of suffering. So much of it that you might love me by the end. Or perhaps we should just have a morning? Like your mother, brother, father and sister? Little suckling pigs, fresh for the kill, ready for the roast.’ He bellowed this last word. ‘Of course, that day would be a lifetime for you. All you have left. My little pet. When shall we play?’

  ‘Sooner than you think.’ She allowed her jaw to sag, forced one long, slow breath, despite her quivering nerves and galloping heart. ‘I’m looking forward to it as much as you.’

  ‘Are you really? You look frightened and weak to me, little pet. Sweet little dog. You imagined perhaps we might dance together? That we would fight? You?’ He laughed. ‘There is only one dance left to us. By the time I’m finished with you, you might beg. You did before? Remember? Remember begging?’

  Becky said nothing. She moved round to the other side of the desk and pulled the cord on the venetian blinds. They covered a window criss-crossed with reinforced glass. Again, she was reminded in a flash of the Glasgow trip, off-licences glimpsed through a taxi window. There was grilling outside, and she knew an awful sinking feeling, the realisation that these walls would continue to shift and close in on her until there wasn’t even space to breathe.

  At the corner of the grilling behind the window, she noted that one of the boltholes was empty. A gust of wind clanged the grille against the window-frame, then snatched it back again; it gave away several inches of space, maybe more. Hope flared.

  ‘We can talk about your father, Becky, can we not? I’d like to talk about him. Imagine having such a coward for a daddy. No wonder he died as he did. He must have welcomed the knife. I wouldn’t blame you for that. No one would. He was the biggest pig of all, Becky. You should not blame yourself.’

  Becky came back round the front of the desk, and spat at that gleaming, gleeful eye.

  As if from a nightmare, a hand took its place, with a blade at the end of it, slicing the air in quick, hard strokes. Becky felt the air scatter from its path, and she cringed back.

  ‘You remember this knife? Don’t you? Remember what we did with it? I’ll see the scar again. I’ll kiss it better for you. We’ll talk about that day. We’ll relive it again and again. I have so much to tell you. So much.’

  The knife retreated. Becky’s bag was gone, lost in the maelstrom of the library, and all her weapons with it. But she had another.

  She snatched up the mop, and darted the handle through the gap. She knew the satisfaction of a grunt of pain, saw the single eye squeeze shut. Then she ran rou
nd the desk, tore open the reinforced window and leapt on the sill, kicking hard at the grille penning her in.

  It burst open on the second kick, swinging free, tethered only by the elderly bolts on the right-hand side. Becky was through in a single bound, keeping her feet together for the ground-floor drop onto a grassy area.

  Becky sprinted round the other side of the library, teeth gritted. This time. This time. No mistakes.

  The front door of the library was still swinging when she got there.

  In the near distance, out of sight, a car started and roared away.

  Spots of liquid glowed on the shiny linoleum of the corridor, and she glanced down at her foot, the floor of her stomach dropping like a conjuror’s cabinet.

  It was blood. Hers.

  The knife had split her boot and sock, and nicked the hard edge of her heel – deep, but not into the bone. She was not aware of pain, but knew it was coming. She limped into the place where the random order of the bookshelves turned to outright chaos.

  A treacherous relief flooded her system and laid a calming hand on her shoulder. He was gone, surely gone.

  The woman behind the counter burst through the door. If she had resembled Louis Walsh before, now she was his demonic double from another direction, shrieking, jabbing her finger.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ Becky said. When the woman drew closer, her voice growing more shrill, Becky cut her losses and left. In the distance, she could hear police sirens.

  She limped past the toast-textured tenement blocks as best she could, in mortal terror again now that she was in the open. If she had been watched on the way in, traced somehow… perhaps he had been tracing her progress all along. Bernard hadn’t been cautious enough, it seemed. Or she hadn’t been paranoid enough.

  This was where the trail led – the trail he’d unwittingly left, leaving a path by omission in Rupert’s files, the blank places where he’d excised his past from databases drawing an arrow, pointing towards this town, the place where the line halted at its easternmost point of his crimes.

  Her hire car was untouched. She allowed her paranoia a check of the back seat and the boot, even underneath, lest he should be clinging to the superstructure, before she drove back to her room in the centre of town.

  There, she bit at the hard skin beside her thumbnail.

  She had no choice now. It was time.

  Becky took out an older phone, the screen battle-scarred, and dialled a number.

  While the phone rang out, Becky tried to picture the size and shape of the man in the mask, the length of the limbs, how lean he had seemed. She’d never forget the eyes, of course.

  Finally, Bernard picked up. ‘Becky? How did it go?’

  ‘He’s here, Bernard. He almost got the drop on me.’

  ‘Jesus! How?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be a total coincidence, but I reckon he’s tracking me. You were bang on the money.’

  ‘You all right? He hurt you?’

  ‘Not so much. I let him get away, Bernard. I let him get away.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’ll get out of here. Just the same as he will…’

  *

  Him

  The screen of his phone lit up in the passenger’s seat beside him, a sudden blue flare like a laser beam. He snatched it up and parsed the information there in moments. It was a signal, pinned to the centre of a map, a red arrow pulsing.

  Excitement flooded him. ‘Here and now,’ he said to himself softly. ‘Little bitch, this is where it ends.’

  He used the phone as a sat-nav; it wasn’t far. He started the car in the backstreets where he’d parked near the library, and edged out into traffic.

  He was there in moments. He drove past the building twice, instantly taking in the front door, the lack of a concierge. He gained glimpses of the other side of the block as he drove round, again and again. There was one wall that edged onto a back yard, hidden behind some trees. Nice and quiet, well-hidden.

  The app was very detailed. The flashing light on the phone told him which room she was in.

  Taking care that no one watched him, he parked up, then padded over to the wall. His long arms reached the very top, and he scrambled over nimbly enough, though no one was around to hear him grunt, or to see him clutch his lower back as he steadied himself at the top.

  A quick check of the phone; she was one floor up. A wall separated out the back yard, where the rubbish was dumped.

  Pulling his hat low over his brow and raising his hood, he heaved himself onto the narrow edge of red brick wall, perpendicular to the hotel, and padded over the narrow top, as sure-footed as a cat.

  What a foolish place to stay, he thought wryly, checking the phone one last time. When it came right down to it, she was just another idiot.

  I might have to do her quickly, he thought, regretfully, as he pushed at the smudged glass of a bathroom window.

  Inside, he had to fight to keep his breathing steady, so great was his excitement. He knew she was just behind a door at the end of the corridor. He crept as slowly as possible, paying little attention to the spyhole. Even if she was watching him approach – a black-edged nightmare crawling through the fish-eye aperture – she had only seconds to react.

  He booted the door open, and was surprised when it offered little resistance, sending him off-balance as he lurched into the room.

  There was just a bed, a sink, and an open doorway into an empty bathroom. No sign of the bitch.

  He frowned, glancing round the room. The only other piece of furniture was a cheap writing desk. On it was a phone, brand new. Its screen brightened suddenly.

  And then the muzzle flashes erupted all around him.

  He blinked, holding his hands up.

  It was the flash of cameras, from every direction, seemingly from every corner of the room.

  A voice came from the phone.

  ‘Hi, dickhead. It’s me, Becky. I’m not home right now, but you are. It is you, isn’t it? Say hello to the viewers at home. I know your name now. It’s Nico, isn’t it? Or is that just what your family called you? We’ll have that catch-up I promised you, Nico. Very, very soon. I guarantee it.’

  But by this point, the phone was speaking to an empty room.

  43

  ‘Disappointing,’ Bernard said. He was on one of the secure phone lines; Becky had decided never to use video messaging again.

  ‘It could have been better,’ Becky said, uneasily, the phone cradled at her shoulder. She was making an adjustment to the whiteboard in her kitchen, now. She’d cleared a space in the middle and written a name. His name. ‘Nothing wrong with the quality, we just didn’t catch enough of him. I can’t even be sure if it is him, I guess. I’d know for sure it was him if we had his eyes. But it’s a lot better than nothing.’

  ‘A question… are you sure it is our guy?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Bernard sighed. ‘I mean, have you considered… it’s a copycat? Or someone related to the original killer? I mean he must be old, you know, if it’s the same guy. But for an older person he moves quick enough. And he got over the wall and through the window…’

  ‘He could be in his fifties. That’s not so old, and definitely not infirm. You ever seen a Tom Cruise movie?’

  ‘Just saying. Keeping an open mind.’

  ‘I doubt it’s someone else.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘If there was a team, they’d surely have got me by now. Besides – we got information on where he’s from. He came to intercept me. That proves it. We hit pay dirt. It’s him. We’ve got a name.’

  On her computer screen was their guy, from multiple angles. He hadn’t hung around to dismantle any of the equipment. Unfortunately, he had got lucky – his eyes were obscured by a low hood he kept on all the way through.

  He hadn’t smashed the phone or taken it with him – something he must surely have cursed himself for, later.

  Becky star
ed into the long, straight jawline, the cruel little mouth, the tip of a long, thin nose. You panicked, didn’t you? You ran out of there. And you’ll be scared now. Maybe a bit desperate. If there’s a time for you to make a mistake, this is it.

  Becky had been back home for a day. Though she tried to dampen down her elation, she was exultant at having caught him out. She’d used the second of the phones which she’d connected to Rupert – the back-up she hadn’t smashed after he was killed. Bernard’s eyes had lit up when she’d mentioned its existence.

  The trap had been his idea – a simple relay, cameras set up in rooms, motion sensors and flashes.

  It meant she’d had to rent out two rooms in Romania, with the compromised phone left in its own room along with the camera equipment Meanwhile, she’d got Bernard to book her a room separately, keeping her true location off-grid as far as possible.

  They’d assumed that their guy had accessed Rupert’s records, and was tracking Becky’s spare phone – and from there, maybe a host of other things. As he had already made contact with Becky, there was every possibility that he would track the outstanding phone and pinpoint its location if it was used.

  The assumption held good for when he had tried to kill her in the library. Eager, but still frighteningly controlled in his approach, he’d put it all together in seconds, from almost the moment she’d used the compromised phone… and he had walked straight into the trap.

  As to how he’d got into the room, no one was quite sure – he must have scaled a back wall, but it was improbably high and narrow, requiring the dexterity of a cat and the strength of a gorilla to get to the top in the first place. And surely there would have been witnesses along the back court of the hotel.

  But there he was, on the screen.

  Well, part of him, anyway. He wore a hooded top pulled low, and a dark green combat jacket over the top, with boots, dark trousers and the collars of same plaid shirt he’d worn at the library visible. Dressed for a secret mission. What had those jacket pockets contained? Knives, rope, tape? The only thing which gave Becky pause; there was no mask in this scene. Perhaps it was too risky to take into the open. It would have meant taking a backpack, and it seemed that he wanted to get his business over with quickly after missing his target at the library.