“Hurry up. There could be more of them,” she urged, and Payne knew that she was making sense. Without a second look back, he lay down and wriggled off the roof onto the wet grass below.
Something had scraped his bare legs on the way down the house, and he realised he was bleeding. What a night this had turned out to be. He stood in his garden, in boxer shorts and t-shirt, both damp from the grass, and felt unsteady on his feet. Linwood pulled him to the front of the house where her car was waiting. “We need to go, now before any more show up.”
“What are you talking about? I need to call the fire brigade before my house burns down.”
The neighbours were starting to open their curtains and lights appeared at bedroom windows.
“Your neighbours can do that. If we don’t go now, they’re bound to catch up with you again. They’ve tagged you somehow. You’re a target. Come with me and I can protect you.”
Her expression had changed dramatically from her time in his kitchen. Gone was the confident arrogance of a woman in control, to be replaced with a wild-eyed desperation. “Please, there isn’t much time.”
“Let me get some clothes.” Before she could argue, he ran back inside the house. Dust and debris swirled in the darkened hallway, and Payne covered his nose and mouth. A fire burned above him somewhere but he couldn’t see the flames. He thought about staying and trying to put it out but one glance up the stairwell convinced him it was too far gone for him to do anything about on his own. He had some clothes in the utility room off the kitchen, not ironed, but fine. Grabbing a few other things from the kitchen, he rushed back outside. The neighbours were on doorsteps now. One of them shouted they’d called the fire service.
Linwood sat in her car, passenger door open ready for Payne.
“I’m not coming with you,” said Payne and he closed the door.
Linwood got out of her side. “What do you mean? We need to work together.”
“Impossible. We can’t work together.”
“Why on earth not. I’m your best chance to get through this alive.”
He laughed. “You might be the very thing that’s got me close to being killed. You’re dangerous. How can I work with you?” He turned back to his house, listening for the sirens in the distance. They couldn’t be far away now.
“Spencer, don’t go it alone. We need to cooperate.”
“Come to the station tomorrow and we’ll talk.”
She hesitated. “I can’t. Come with me and work together.” She held out a business card. “You can find me using this.”
He looked at her, saw the cold discomfort behind the eyes, and took the card. With a sagging posture, she turned and hurried back to her car. Payne watched as the engine roared to life and she powered through the gears, off into the night.
24
Max woke up to the phone ringing. He practically leapt off the sofa, disoriented and with a banging headache. His foot kicked against a pizza box on the floor, and it all came back to him.
It was bright outside with the early morning light. He checked his watch and saw it was half five. He hadn’t woken once in the night, and he guessed that meant Cindy hadn’t returned.
But where was the ringing phone? Max followed the noise to a side table in the hallway. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” he said cautiously.
A burst of static hit his ears and he yanked the handset away from his ear. When the static subsided, he put the phone back against his ear. “Hello,” he called again, louder in case the other person was having problems hearing him as well.
The line went dead, so he put the phone down again. He was half way to the kitchen to get a glass of water when the phone rang a third time.
“Hello,” he answered.
Static.
“Cindy?” he said into the handset.
The static stopped. The usual background hiss took its place.
“Cindy, is that you?” Max noticed his heart was beating faster.
There was a faint clicking. Max listened intently, straining to make out any other background noise that would help identify where the call was being made from, but there wasn’t anything. Could he have been disconnected?
“Cindy?” he whispered. “Talk to me.”
A quick burst of static filled his eardrums, then after the burst, a voice.
“Where is she?”
It was a young woman’s voice.
“She’s not here. Who is this?”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
The line went quiet.
Max held on, waiting for something more from the caller. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know where she is.”
His reply, thrown back at him. Different intonation. Slightly sarcastic.
“Who are you?” Max asked.
“Who are you?”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You’re Max.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Look behind you.”
“What do you mean?” but he turned as he spoke and he saw exactly what the caller meant. Sylvia was standing on the stairs.
There was a solid click on the line and Max knew the call was over. He dropped the phone back in its cradle.
“Sylvia, can you hear me? It’s me, Max.”
She tilted her head in a very familiar way. It sent a chill down Max’s back. Instinctively, he glanced to his left and right, checking out the routes out of the house.
Max took a sideways step towards the kitchen, keeping his body facing his mother-in-law.
Without warning, Sylvia ran down the last few steps, crouched like an animal. Max ran for the kitchen and slammed the door shut behind him. Nothing to pull across the door, no locks to stop it advancing. He’d seen knives in one of the drawers last night but he wasn’t about to attack Sylvia. Instead, he turned the key in the back door and stepped outside just as Sylvia entered the kitchen. She darted towards him and Max ran to the back of the garden, hoping that he’d be more nimble over the fence than she’d be.
He hit the fence without slowing, and grabbed the top, ignoring the rough edges digging into his palms as he pulled himself up and over. Sylvia slammed into the fence and he saw her hands gripping the top, trying to follow him, but he didn’t wait to see whether she’d succeed. Max ran back through the undergrowth and away from the house as fast as he could.
25
“Dennis, I'm going to be late if you don't get a move on!” Carla Castleton's voice could cut through concrete. She knew it, her husband Dennis knew it, and so did half the street. She heard him wandering around upstairs, the toilet flushed, and seconds later Dennis appeared before her. His tie was askew and she corrected it, enjoying tightening the knot a fraction as she did so. He didn't notice. Still half-asleep as per usual.
“No time for breakfast dear, if you'd wanted some you should have got up with me an hour ago.”
“I'll grab some toast, I can eat it on the go,” Dennis said heading for the kitchen, but he was stopped by a perfectly manicured hand, resplendent in Vampire Red nail polish, pushing against his chest, urging him backwards towards the door.
“I told you already Dennis. I'm going to be late if we don't get our skates on. It's an important day for me. I want to impress old fish face.” Old fish face being her boss at the bookies where Carla had just been promoted to senior cashier. It had taken months of effortless flirting on her part, all perfectly innocent of course, to persuade him that she was best equipped to deal with the extra responsibilities—more able to than say Suzanne with her cracked elbows and onion breath. On this first day at least, she wanted to create a good impression.
Not that her daft husband appreciated any of this effort she was going through on their behalf. Dennis had been out of work for a little over two years, having been made redundant from the meat packing factory where he'd worked for twenty years. It had taken a little adjusting having him around much more than us
ual, but at least that dreadful smell of dried blood didn't emanate from his pores any more.
Carla Castleton knew the secret of a good life was to embrace the present, and that meant you had to find the silver linings wherever you could, so it was a shock when she opened the front door to find a stranger poised with a finger ready to ring the doorbell.
“Hi, yeah, sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Ben Castleton.”
Max sat on the edge of the settee feeling desperately out of his comfort zone. It had taken some persuading to get the couple to let him past the front door and now that he was here he didn't really know where to begin. The woman of the house, Carla, scowled at him from the armchair closest to the door. Her husband stood beside her, not quite willing to commit to sitting down in the front room with this stranger, as if doing so would validate the intrusion and disruption to their daily routine.
The house itself was a typical modest semi-detached from the fifties in what seemed a safe if not quite desirable part of Fulwood. After being allowed past the front door, he had been quickly ushered into the front room, a nice simple modern style that jarred desperately with the outside of the house.
Carla spoke first. A relief as Max had momentarily dried up.
“What's this about our Ben? Are you from the police?”
Max shook his head. “No, I’m not police. I just need to talk to Ben. Is he here now?”
“Are you taking the mickey?”
Max frowned. “No. I really would like to talk to him.”
“Ben’s our son.” Carla turned to her husband. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Dennis stood there, staring into space.
“Dennis!” she snapped.
“What do you want me to say?”
Carla shook her head. “I don’t know. Bloody useless you are. Listen. I’m going to be late for work now. What you’ve got to say had better be important.” Her face was stony.
Max squirmed in his chair. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to cause any trouble. It’s just important that I speak to Ben. I’m looking for my wife. His name came up in one of her files. I was hoping he might know where she was. It’s really important that I find her.”
Carla flicked Dennis a look.
“Sorry, but you did say you wanted to ask us about Ben, but you’re actually looking for your wife?” Dennis said.
“I found his name on my wife’s computer. I don’t know why she had it, and she’s not around for me to ask.”
“Where is she?” Carla asked.
“Missing,” he said.
“Missing,” Carla repeated.
“Yes.”
“Well, how long has she been gone?”
“About six hours.”
Carla laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Max said, irritated.
“Six hours isn’t missing. Try seventeen years.” Carla looked at her husband, and sighed. “I’m bloody starving. Shall we have a bacon butty?”
They moved into the back room adjacent to the kitchen and Carla suggested Max sit at the dining room table whilst she fussed around in the kitchen making breakfast with Dennis. Max stood by the window instead, looking out into the small but perfectly formed garden. He didn’t know what to make of this couple.
“I’m curious,” he said across the room, loudly enough for them to hear in the kitchen. “Why haven’t you thrown me out yet?”
The couple entered and Carla placed a delicious-looking bacon sandwich on the table for Max. They all sat down to eat.
“You want to talk about Ben. No one’s come to talk about Ben for years. It’s nice to hear someone else say his name, that’s all.”
The bacon was chewy and smoked and came with red sauce despite Max not asking for it. However, it tasted fantastic and Max, to his embarrassment wolfed his down before his hosts had really started theirs.
“So what happened with your wife? Why do you think she’s missing? No one’s missing after six hours,” Carla asked.
A difficult question. Max had only just met these two people, and already he was sat at their table eating their food. They seemed nice people as well, and obviously they’d been through something bad with their son. Would it be right to dump his own problems at their feet? In the end though, Max decided that if he wasn’t prepared to share his own story, he wasn’t giving them any reason to trust him, so he told them everything.
For ten minutes, the Castletons sat and listened. They drank their tea, and ate their breakfast whilst Max explained how he’d been arrested, then attacked at the police station, before trying to track down his wife at the hospital. When it came to the details about how his attacker at the police station had no face, and what had happened at Sylvia’s house, he hesitated. However he said it, it was always going to sound far-fetched. To give the Castletons credit, they didn’t say a word until Max was finished.
“Missing faces? How could they see, or breathe come to that?” Carla asked.
“I don’t know. But they can. I sat down and watched Sylvia when she fell asleep. She was definitely breathing. As for seeing? I don’t know.”
“It sounds crazy.”
“I know. But I also know that it all happened. Every last word of it.”
Carla sipped her tea. “Sounds like you’ve had a busy day,” she said. Her voice was warmer than it had been at any time since Max had been in her house. “What do you say Dennis?”
Dennis had long since finished his breakfast and sat twirling his empty mug in his hands. “I saw it on the Internet about the police station. They said it was a gas leak.”
“No, it wasn’t a gas leak,” Max said shaking his head. “I don’t know how they caused the explosion but I do know for sure that it was them. The whole thing happened so quickly. It was like a planned assault.”
“Planned?” Dennis said. “Planned by who?”
Max shrugged his shoulders. He’d been asking himself the same question. “I don’t know. But there’s more going on here than I’ve seen. Now that I’ve told you everything, I need to ask you something. Why aren’t you surprised?”
“Surprised?” Dennis said.
“You seem to be taking me at my word.”
“We had to put up with a lot when Ben went missing. You believe what you’re telling me.” Dennis looked squarely into his eyes. “Your wife, Cindy? We know Ben was seeing someone called Cindy on the night he disappeared. We were staying in Southport at the time. Ben told us he was meeting friends by the lake and he wouldn’t be late home. Your wife had Ben’s address on her computer? Was she Ben’s girlfriend do you think?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s possible.” It seemed strange to think that his wife had been seeing this couple’s son on the night he went missing as a teenager.
Dennis nodded. “Tell me more about the man at the hospital. The one in the suit who was taking your wife somewhere.”
“There’s not much to tell. I didn’t catch a name. He looked like he could handle himself. And he had a weapon, something like you’ve never seen.” For some reason, Max didn’t want to mention what Thadeus had done to him with the silver substance.
Carla looked at Max. “We had a lot of visitors after Ben went missing. At first it was just the police. Ben was just another missing persons report. They tried to do their best. Put us in touch with the missing person charity whilst they said they’d do what they could. Then out of the blue, a new lot showed up. They flashed official looking documents at us. The police stopped coming then. This new lot said they were in charge of the investigation and we needed to speak to them should Ben ever turn up.”
“And did they help?”
Carla shook her head. “It was only a missing person’s case.”
Dennis interrupted. “They told us that over one hundred thousand people go missing each year. Ben was of legal age. He could leave home if he wanted. They told us there was no evidence of foul play.”
“But you didn’t believe them?”
“Of course w
e didn’t believe them. Ben would never have gone off without telling us. Tell me though, this weapon of yours, the one at the hospital. Fired bolts of blue light did it?”
Max sat up straight in his chair, the hairs on his arm suddenly standing to attention. “Yes. How did you know?”
“We’ve got witnesses who saw a light show across the lake he told us he was meeting friends at. The night he went missing. They thought it was some fancy new fireworks. I’ve got a statement from one of the policemen at the scene who saw a few men he didn’t recognise holding devices he thought were guns but they were unlike anything he’d ever seen.”
“It sounds like we’ve come across the same people. Who are they?”
“The description I’ve got from this policeman could well be part of the group who came to see us here. Part of that team that said they were looking into Ben’s disappearance instead of the police. After a couple of visits, this team vanished. Couldn’t get hold of them on the number they gave us. The police were unhelpful, denied ever sending any other group round to see us.”
Dennis paused, and looked across at Carla. She downed the rest of her cup of tea and placed the empty cup before her looking into it as if it would somehow reveal the answers she sought.
The phone in the hall starting ringing.
“You said they weren’t police. But they were capable of organising a cover up. Were they government? What’s the word—spooks?”
Carla went to answer the phone. Max looked intensely at Dennis. “Tell me who they are so I can find them. They’ve tried to kill me. They’ve framed me for murder.”
Dennis stood up abruptly and moved to stand by the window, the chair rocked behind him but didn't tip over.
“It doesn’t sound like them. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. Didn’t I mention the cover up?”
“Well somebody knows who tried to kill me.”
“I’m going to find them, and Cindy. Somebody’s going to give me the answers I need. My girlfriend was murdered and I’m going to make somebody pay for that.”
The Face Stealer Page 14
