“Jesus,” Nessa breathed out when her eyes dropped back to the iPad.
Jenny was sat on a chair in the middle of a shabby room. Around her neck was a noose. The rope extended upwards, through a metal hoop on the ceiling and down to a platform where it was attached to a weight. Sitting next to the weight was a small electronic timer.
2:00
“So, basically, in two hours, the platform will fall, and Jenny will be hung.” It was evident how it worked, and I don’t know why I felt the need to explain it to Nessa.
“And I’ll have seconds to sever the rope with a bullet,” Nessa finished for me in a quiet voice. She had paled, and her teeth were gnawing on her lower lip as though she was deep in thought. Or worse, worried. I knew the burden of Jenny’s life was more in her hands than mine, and for some reason that angered me.
“But this is my game. How come it all falls on you?”
“You can’t look at it like that. Look at the cemetery. It was your muscle that dug up that grave. Not mine. We’re in this together. And just because she’s your family, that doesn’t mean I will be any less determined to win this one.”
Although I had only known Nessa for six days, I knew, without a doubt, that she meant every word. That she would fight for my family as she did her own.
“We better move,” she uttered as she grabbed her coat. “We have to make a detour to mine, and the clock is ticking.”
“Why yours?” I asked as I followed her out and threw her the car keys.
“Because me and Jenny will need a friend of mine.”
16:25
I stared wide eyed and open mouthed when Nessa climbed back into the car and threw the rifle she had exited her house casually holding onto the back seat.
“Umm. Please tell me you have a license for that.”
Slowly, she turned her head to face me. Quirking an eyebrow, she smirked. “Of course I have, officer.”
Casting another glance at the firearm taking up most of my back seat when Nessa clipped in her seatbelt and started the engine, I found myself with no words.
“Look,” she stated quietly as she pulled off her drive and back into the traffic. “If I only get one shot at this, I need a rifle with a calibre I am familiarised with. I have no doubt the GM will provide one, but I get one shot to save your ex-wife, Detective Inspector Fen, and I need to trust my aim.”
“Okay,” I clicked my tongue and looked out of the side window, so I couldn’t see the lie in her eyes when she answered my next question. “I’m presuming it’s an air rifle?”
“As in BB? Sure it is… We’ll just go with that. Although I’m quite certain a BB bullet isn’t going to sever a rope thick enough to suspend a dead body from.” Her small chuckle had me sighing loudly. I really didn’t want to know why a doctor would have her own rifle, but I’d swallow it if it meant she would save Jenny’s life.
17:32
00:38
“Fuck!”
Helping Nessa up for the fourth time since we’d entered the dense, unforgiving woods, I shone the torchlight down so she could rub the fresh bruise on her shin.
“Fucking trees! I swear, if we survive this, I’m chopping down every bastard tree in my back garden! I never, in all my life, want to see another one!”
“We must be near now,” I stated, looking around for the promised light of a fire. Nothing but blackness flashed back at me, and my stomach sank that little bit more. My breath misted in front of my face as I spun in a circle, the chill in the air as cold as the marrow in my bones.
“We could be going all fucking night at this rate,” Nessa grumbled as she hoisted the rifle over her shoulder and righted herself. “Surely we should have found the spot by now! You think he’s playing with us? Well, apart from the usual…”
Nessa flinched when I slapped my hand over her mouth to stop her loud rambling. “Shh.”
Just as she was about to argue, the same noise I had heard a moment ago also caught her attention. I gawped at her when she pulled a Glock out of the back of her waistband and clicked off the safety. “What the hell? Another?”
“Another air pistol,” she whispered with a wink before she manoeuvred around me and pressed her back to mine. Slowly we turned in a circle, scoping the shadows for any sign of movement.
“Oh, shit!” Nessa exclaimed quietly when a low growl came from the undergrowth to the right of us. “What is it with this guy and dogs?”
We both took a step back, guns outstretched in our hands when another louder snarl had the hairs on the back of my neck springing to attention.
“That’s no dog.”
Nessa stood rooted to the spot when my words sank in. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Please, tell me you’re wrong, and that most definitely is another rottweiler!”
“Okay then, it’s as much dog as your bullets are pellets,” I whispered as we retreated further. “And I’m hoping your aim is as hot with badgers as it is with dogs!”
“And yours,” she replied, spinning around when a replica growl came from the bushes behind us. “Because his wife has decided to join him for supper.”
Why the hell did we have shit luck, all – the – damn - time?
“We don’t have time for this!” I uttered angrily, as I kept my aim directly in front of me, and Nessa targeted the area behind me.
“So, we need to take them both out first shot! You any good?” she asked, her voice tinged with both caution and hope.
“We’ll soon find out!” I stated when the predators charged at their prey.
Day 6
17:37
00:33
I fired once. Nessa shot twice.
“Jesus, they’re fast!” she huffed out as she turned to check on me. Her eyes widened when she saw how close I had been to the animal tearing my leg off with its insanely huge teeth. The black and white beast lay roughly a foot away from me. I was proud it had only taken me one shot when Miss Crack Shot of The Year had needed two. That was until I turned around and saw how far away her kill was. Both of them.
“Who the hell taught you to shoot?”
She didn’t answer me, and flicking the safety back on, she returned her gun to the back of her jeans and stepped over the carcass of my prey. “Nice shot,” she remarked when she caught sight of the bullet hole between its eyes.
“Thank you.” I grinned proudly. I felt like I’d gotten an A+ in a Carol Vorderman math class.
“I’d pay homage, oh great one.” She smirked, glancing at me over her shoulder. “But we need to get moving before Grandpa Badger decides to come looking for his family and you nearly lose a leg again.”
“That’s right,” I muttered, “Allow a man his dream before you take away all his dignity!”
She chuckled. “Bit like being promised the most amazing blowjob of your life by a piranha, eh? Dream or dignity? Not sure which you’d go for, Craig Harrison!”
“Who?”
She laughed and again refused to answer my question.
I did return her smug smirk though when she tripped for the fifth time, and I stepped over her.
00:09
“Thank fuck!”
We both broke into a run when up ahead a faint orange glow became a beacon through the thickness of the trees. The lump that had been forming in my throat became that little bit less, although the beat of my heart became that little bit crazier when we broke through the trees into a clearing.
00:06
Nessa tore off the note that was taped to a rifle. I didn’t fail to notice how her hands shook when she picked up the compass that sat beside it.
We were doomed. Or, more accurately, Jenny was.
‘Facing east on an X that marks the spot,
you must stand and take your only shot.
72˚ North, by 48˚ West,
Dr Griffiths, it’s time to shoot your best.
With a steady hand and a careful eye,
Will Mrs Fen live, or will she die?’
“That’s all the damn coordina
tes I get?” Nessa fumed as she lifted the rifle off her shoulder and looked around for the conventional X.
The clock was ticking, and I had to bite my tongue at the amount of time she was taking to sort her shit out. I remained quiet, listening to her ramble to herself as she fought to find the focus she needed to do this.
Finding the marker on the ground, she checked which way she needed to face, and turned slightly right.
00:03
Blowing out a long breath, she closed her eyes.
I watched her shoulders relax when she finally found her equilibrium and focussed.
Glancing down, I checked the time.
00:02
“Come on, Ness!” I whispered under my breath as my heartbeat paused.
Pressing the scope to her eye, her eyelids flickered open. Muttering numbers quietly, she directed the gun upwards, and then to the left, deviating back and forth a little as she mumbled a few swear words.
I knew she’d found Jenny when she, at long last, levelled her aim and her finger slid over the trigger.
00:01
Time felt like it stopped alongside my heart. My stomach was gradually climbing up my throat, although I daren’t swallow it back down in case the noise put Nessa off her intense concentration.
My body jerked when the gunshot echoed around the woods, sending the wildlife scurrying for their lives.
Daring to hope, I lowered my eyes to the iPad.
Jenny sat with tears streaking her pretty face, and an excess length of rope swung redundantly between her legs.
Nessa dropped to her knees, the rifle abandoned by her side, as the faint smell of smoke drifted up my nostrils.
“You fucking did it!” I breathed out with a shaky voice.
“Craig Harrison, time to take retirement!” Was all she said, before she leaned back on her hands, faced the sky, and screamed.
And I made a mental note to Google this damn Craig Harrison!
Day 6
21.45
Nessa
“7248,” I relayed the instructed degrees I had been given to Caelan. He wrote the numbers down alongside all the others, and we both took a moment to allow the digits to sink in.
“Well, so far we have, 729, 11520, 0214349, 143, 7248, and the word blood. The cryptographer I contacted assures me they aren’t numerical codes, or coding of any sort, so there’s no hidden message in them. Plus, there’s no sequence to them, they appear to be completely random.”
“We’re missing something. We have to be!”
An email alert popped up in the bottom righthand corner of Caelan’s laptop screen. Clicking on it, he opened the attachment. I leaned closer to see when the CCTV footage of Lawrence’s Bar that Caelan had requested began to play. My medical skills had come in useful once or twice during these six days of hell, and now I was grateful Caelan had easy access obtaining video footage that might help us discover the identity of whoever was doing this to us.
Caelan pointed at the screen when the camera caught an image of me dancing with a couple of my friends. It didn’t remain on me for long, however, but within minutes Caelan spotted himself stood at the bar talking to a woman. Once or twice, as the images revealed us speaking to random people we didn’t know or did know, for that matter, Caelan would still the video, enlarge it, and save each picture.
“There!” I exclaimed when the footage showed me stood at the bar talking to a man to my left. Another man, all in black, was sat directly to my right on a barstool. His face was down, only the back of his head visible to us, as he sat stirring his drink with a small cocktail stick. The hairs on my neck prickled and my breath caught with hope in my throat.
Instantly, Caelan rewound the film, then slowed the playback down, and we watched in silence. The man to my left leaned into me and whispered something in my ear, making me laugh.
“Do you recognise him?”
I shook my head. “No, but I’m more interested in the man to my right.”
“Bingo!” Caelan announced when the man in black took my distraction as an opportunity to quickly slip something into my drink that sat on the bar in front of me.
Checking through each of the different angles of the club which the cameras covered, we both grew frustrated when every single image of the man in black showed him from behind. It was like he purposely turned his back and looked down in each of the zones.
“Well, as usual, he’s done his homework,” Caelan groaned when we ran out of footage.
“It must have taken him months of planning to learn every angle each camera covers with that much precision.”
“And you don’t know the guy who was distracting you?”
I shook my head, watching when Caelan skipped the recording back to where I’d had my drink spiked. “No. I don’t recall him, to be honest.”
Caelan enlarged the image and took another still, adding the new photograph to the file he’d created to store the pictures. “I’ll see if I can get my tech guy to sharpen the images.”
Leaving him searching through more footage, I went into the kitchen to fix us both a drink.
Grabbing the open bottle of Jack, I poured us both a hefty portion and opened the freezer for the ice. The cubes clinked against the cut glass when I slammed the freezer door shut with my shoulder and turned around.
A scream burst from me, and the whisky splattered my bare legs when I dropped both glasses and they shattered on the ceramic tiles.
Her glare was as fierce as the look of disgust that curled her lip. She stood, by the open back door, with her hands on her hips, observing me.
The kitchen door flew open and Caelan burst in, gun outstretched in front of him.
“Fuck!” the woman cried as she stumbled backwards and held up her hands.
“Jesus, Mindy!” Caelan huffed out as he lowered his gun and put the safety back on. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Who is she?” She pointed a long finger at me, stabbing the air with her perfectly manicured red nail.
“A friend!” Caelan returned her scowl with a quirk of an eyebrow. “I asked what you’re doing here!”
“You haven’t returned any of my calls.”
“I lost my phone.”
“I’ve been ringing you for over a week now!” The glower of anger in her eyes turned to hurt, and I grimaced.
“Listen… I’ll…” I pointed to the door and hurried across the kitchen.
“Shit,” Caelan declared. “You’re bleeding!”
I looked down and watched the small trickle of blood ooze from a cut in my shin. Only wearing short pyjamas, the small gash merely added yet more colour to my bruised legs. “Just superficial. I’ll sort it.”
“Sit,” he ordered, pulling out a chair.
“Caelan…”
“Sit – the – fuck – down, Ness!”
Rolling my eyes and blowing out a frustrated breath, I lowered myself onto the chair.
“You can go now, Mindy!” he snapped as he grabbed some tweezers from a drawer and the roll of kitchen paper from the counter.
“Just a friend?” Mindy uttered through clenched teeth as Caelan dropped to a crouch in front of me. “She’s in her pyjamas, Caelan!”
Slowly, he moved his gaze up my body, and then looked to Mindy. He stared at her for a long moment, before he said, “So she is. I’m actually stumped how you failed your sergeant's exam.”
“Fuck you!”
I jumped when the door slammed behind her.
The silence around us was thick, and I sat looking over Caelan’s head as he carefully took the shards of glass out of my leg and then proceeded to delicately swipe at the wound with a piece of kitchen roll.
“Don’t!” he advised when I opened my mouth to say something.
“What?”
“You,” he huffed. “You can’t resist.”
“Nuh-uh,” I muttered with a shake of my head. “Saying nothing.”
“Make’s a change!”
I glowered down at him a
s he applied a plaster over the clean wound. “Although, you were really mean!”
He sighed and stood up. “I rest my case!”
Day 7
08:37
Caelan caught me looking – or should that be glaring - at him over the rim of my coffee cup for the third time and sighed. Folding his newspaper, he placed it on the table by his plate of toast and turned his gaze to me. “I have no doubt this house is rigged tighter than Lawrence’s Bar is. The GM won’t leave any corner uncovered here.”
He didn’t say anything else, and I shrugged, waiting for him to go on. Waiting for an explanation as to why he was so unkind to a woman who obviously cared a great deal about him.
Steadily, he clicked his tongue and lifted an eyebrow as if I should understand what he was trying to tell me without words.
“Mindy is just someone I slept with once.” His eyebrow lifted higher. “She’s of no importance to me, or to my life, Nessa.”
“Oh. I see,” I said, finally cottoning on. “No one worth taking seconds of, then?”
He smiled and gave me a sneaky wink. “Absolutely not. Wasn’t any good either. Too selfish.”
I wasn’t sure why his cruelness to Mindy yesterday had been playing on my mind all night. It was of no concern of mine how he treated women. However, if I was honest with myself, I had been both disappointed with him, and a little jealous of her. Mindy was everything I wasn’t. Tall and slender, with lustrous blonde hair that fell over sculptured shoulders and rested at her trim waist.
Now his attitude towards her made sense. He was informing the Game Master that she wasn’t anyone significant so that he wouldn’t drag her into this shitstorm. So, did that make her important to him? I wasn’t sure I liked the faint sinking feeling inside my belly with that thought.
Game Master Page 8
