The creature that was once Carla hesitated, almost gloating at Max as his backside hit the tiled floor. Max made a strange noise, something between a scream and a growl as the anger and shock hit him. Knowing that he had lost, but refusing to surrender, he started feeling his way along the wall, heading for the door to the hall.
There was a noise of steel hitting bone and Carla fell to the floor. Dennis stood over her, saucepan in hand.
“I’m never going to hear the last of that,” he said breathlessly.
26
“We need to get you to a hospital,” Dennis spoke fast, kneeling on the floor beside Max, pressing a tea towel into the wound above his right shoulder, careful not to mess with the knife that was embedded to the hilt. The towel turned red in seconds.
“Tie her up, before she wakes.” Max nodded towards Carla who was slumped on the floor in a heap.
“Forget about her, we need to get this sorted.”
“If she wakes up and she’s not tied up, this wound is going to be the least of my trouble.”
Dennis sighed, and grabbed a new towel from a drawer. “Hold this,” he said, pressing the towel onto the wound. He quickly grabbed the rope and stood looking fretful for a minute, not sure how he was going to manage this. Then, he grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors and used them to cut off a section of rope. He used that to bind Carla’s feet, crossing the ends several times and Max thought the result looked good. The remaining length he fed under Carla’s torso, wrapping it around her body, pinning her arms to her sides. He repeated as many times as the length of rope allowed him, and when it wouldn’t go round any more, he tied it together in a proficient looking knot.
Max groaned.
“You OK Max?”
“I’ll live.”
The area around the wound felt hot and he thought he was going to be sick. He didn’t like seeing blood at the best of times, and had an aversion to seeing his own spilling out on somebody else’s floor.
“I need to take this out,” he said, using his good hand to feel for the handle on the knife.
“Don’t do that! You’re meant to leave it in place. It could be stopping some blood loss.”
“It’s coming out,” Max said defiantly.
“Just wait a minute.” Dennis ran from the room, and returned seconds later with the house phone. He started to type in numbers.
“What are you doing? Put it down!” Max shouted and Dennis complied, looking confused.
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No. You can’t use the phone. That’s how they got to Carla. That’s what triggered Sylvia to attack me. They’re using it to control people.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Look at her. She was on the phone when this happened. Remember the call I had in the shed minutes before this happened?”
Dennis nodded. “You said it was interference.”
“I’ve heard it before. At home, when Cindy said she was on the phone to her mum. Then again, when I was at her mum’s house, just before Sylvia attacked me.”
“Then it’s you, they’re after. You’re what’s making these people change.” The expression on Dennis’s face had changed from panic to one of wariness.
But was Dennis right? Were they after him? It was starting to look that way. What he’d previously dismissed as coincidence now seemed as obvious as night turning into day.
“My phone’s in my pocket. Take it.”
Dennis reached down and pulled Max’s phone from the pocket of his jeans. As soon as he did, it started ringing. They both stared at it. Dennis looked like he wanted to drop it.
“Don’t answer it. Take it outside and smash it with whatever you can find. A brick or a hammer, whatever. Just don’t answer it.”
Dennis glanced anxiously at the wound on Max’s shoulder. The blood had soaked this towel as well and was now trickling over Max’s fingers.
“Stop wasting time, just do it!”
Dennis snapped to attention and hurried outside. A few seconds later there was the sound of impact and breaking glass and plastic. He returned holding the remains of Max’s phone, which he proceeded to scatter on the kitchen work surface.
“They’ve been following me. Using the phones to find me somehow.” Max grimaced. The wound was really burning.
“Something in the phone itself?” Dennis started picking through the broken pieces on the work surface.
“You mean like a tracker?”
“It could be the phone triangulation signal. The GPS. The network knows which cell block you’re in.”
Max’s head was throbbing. It was hard to keep thinking straight enough to hold a conversation.
Carla’s arm moved. She was starting to regain consciousness.
“She’s waking up,” Dennis said.
“I hope you learnt those knots in the scouts.”
“She can’t get out of them.” Dennis bent down, passed another towel to Max, and threw his blood soaked one into the sink.
“I need to get you to a hospital. Do you think you can move? I can take you in the car.”
“I’m a wanted man still. The police will be there like a shot.”
“And maybe that’s not a bad thing. This is big. It’s too big for one man to handle on his own.”
“Ah, but we’re two men aren’t we.” Max looked into Dennis’s eyes, saw the fear that haunted him. “We can do this. Find out what happened to your son.”
Dennis stroked the back of Carla’s head, brushing the hair with his fingers. “And what about Carla? I can’t leave her like this.”
Max could understand. If this was someone he cared about, he’d want to stay and look after them. But there was the bigger picture to consider.
“There’s nothing we can do. We need to find out who did this to her and how we can help. Maybe there’s a way to undo this and bring her back.”
“Do you think there is?”
“I don’t know. I hope there is. But we’re not going to find out with me locked up in a cell, waiting for more of these—” he wanted to say creatures but luckily caught himself, “people, to hunt me down.”
Dennis slowly nodded his head. “You’re right. Of course I’ll help. But you’re wrong about one thing. If we don’t get you medical treatment right now, you’re going to die of blood loss on my floor. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain that to the authorities.”
“OK. You’re right. But—”
“We’ll use a false name. It might buy us enough time to get you treatment. We’ll worry about the police if and when they show up.”
Max knew this was the only sensible thing to do, but it still irked him that he was effectively waving a flag to the police to come and arrest him again.
“Do you think you can stand or do I need to carry you?”
Max felt lightheaded. He wasn’t sure if he could move without passing out. There seemed a lot of blood on the towels, and on him. His fingers were sticky with it.
“Get your keys, go and open the car. I’d sooner avoid any attention from the neighbours.”
Dennis nodded and left Max alone.
The area around the wound was feeling very strange. The hotness was still there, but it was accompanied by an itching sensation that didn’t feel right at all. Suddenly, Max was overcome with the thought of getting the knife out. He gripped the handle carefully, conscious of the warning Dennis had given him. What would be best? Should he do this quickly or delicately? Before his nerve got the better of him, he chose the first option and pulled it steadily but swiftly upwards. He yelled in surprise at the wave of pain that came from the area, but as soon as the blade was out of his flesh, the pain was gone. He didn’t expect that.
Dennis hurried back into the kitchen, car keys in hand and saw at once what Max had done.
“You idiot. I told you to wait.” He grabbed a fresh towel from the drawer and got on his knees beside Max. “You’re going to need to apply a lot more pressure now that’s out.” Max moved his h
and away from the wound to let Dennis put a new towel in place. But Dennis paused.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked.
“It’s stopped bleeding.”
Dennis pressed down on the shoulder with the towel, but Max didn’t feel any pain, just the weight of Dennis’s hand pushing against him.
“It feels different,” Max said, then without warning, brushed Dennis’s hand aside and staggered to his feet. The room span in his vision and he gripped tight hold of the work surface.
“We need to get you to the hospital. Maybe something’s got lodged in the wound. Caused it to stem the flow.”
“I don’t think so.” Max felt steadier. “You know, I think I feel OK.”
“You’re crazy. Look at the blood.”
“I know. But I don’t feel so bad.”
The area around the wound still felt hot, and there was an itching that reminded Max of skin recovering after sunburn.
“Have you got a mirror?”
“In the hall.”
Max took a deep breath, let go of the work surface, and stood upright. Dennis stood close behind, perhaps anticipating that he would fall again. Dennis was right about the blood. There seemed an awful lot of it on the floor. It was impossible to get to the hall without stepping through it, and he felt a little guilty about making bloodied footprints over the man’s carpets.
“Have you seen the knife?” Dennis said, his voice curious.
Max paused in the doorway, and put a hand against the solid frame to steady himself. Dennis held the knife out. All over the blade, tiny pock marks were visible. It looked like someone had taken a pin hammer to the metal and gone to town creating a pattern.
“It wasn’t like that earlier,” Dennis said calmly, answering Max’s unspoken question.
Max shook his head, and carried on to the mirror. The sight of himself covered in blood shocked him. His shirt was ruined, his face reminded him of his dad’s in the hospice before he died: pale and paper thin. Slowly, he unfastened the buttons and slipped the shirt off, letting it fall off his back. He’d expected a gaping wound but there was just a scar, about half an inch wide where the knife had once been. Cautiously, he touched the scar with his fingertips, anxious at first that doing so would cause the wound to open again, but it didn’t. The injury could have happened weeks ago, not minutes. It might have been his imagination, but for a moment, he was positive he saw a rippling under his skin close to the site of the wound.
“I don’t understand,” Dennis said, getting closer to see more clearly. “I saw the knife in you. You were bleeding.”
“I don’t understand either.”
Dennis stepped back suddenly from Max. “I think you should leave. I want you to go.”
The sudden change in his manner took Max by surprise. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m nothing to do with them, whoever they are.”
“But you’re part of the problem. If you hadn’t come here, Carla would still be OK. You’ve brought this onto us.”
For a fraction of a second, Max considered the possibility that Dennis was joking, but the look of anger on his face convinced him otherwise.
“I can’t leave you now. If I have brought this onto you, I need to make things right again. I’m not going to walk away.”
“Yes you are. You’re going to leave, now.”
Max shook his head. “What about your wife? She’s still part of this. That’s not going to change just because I leave.”
“You don’t know that. It might.”
“You’re kidding yourself. Wishful thinking. I can understand it, that maybe this is just a bad dream, but it’s not. It’s real, and like it or not, you’re the best weapon I’ve got against this group.”
Dennis was shaking his head, but Max persisted. “You know about them. You can help me track them down. We can sort out this mess together.”
“I don’t see how I can help.”
“Before I came here, I only had one name to go off, your son’s. Now, I’ve got twenty years research to help me fight them. But only if you’ll help me. What do you say, will you help me?”
Dennis was torn. Max had given him an impossible choice and he knew it. Was he prepared to risk leaving his wife the way she was for the tiny chance of finding his missing son? Max was glad he wasn’t in Dennis’s shoes right now.
Eventually Dennis said something. “What about Carla? I can’t leave her like that.”
“What else can you do? You can’t fix her without knowing what happened.”
“But she’s lying on the kitchen floor.”
“OK, we’ll move her.”
Max tried hard not to show his frustration at how Dennis was slowing them down, but in his heart he knew that Dennis was right; they couldn’t leave her lying on the floor. None of this was her fault. She was a victim in this, and Dennis had been right when he’d accused Max of bringing this onto them. They could have continued living their lives untroubled by any of this, but it would have been a life not knowing what happened to Ben. Max kept that in mind as he helped move Carla from the kitchen floor into the lounge where they improvised a mattress out of cushions.
She remained still and it was only because Max saw her chest rising and falling slowly that he knew she was alive at all.
“Do you think I hit her too hard? Why does she seem so docile?”
“Look, you did the right thing. She was going to kill me. I don’t think she’s hurt. The one at the police station took a bullet and still kept on coming. I think whatever’s happened to them to make them like this, it’s made them stronger. We can’t tell if she’s asleep or awake. She might have decided that there’s nothing more she can do, tied up like this.”
Dennis didn’t seem sure but he seemed happier now that they’d set her up somewhere better than the blood-stained kitchen floor.
“We should go,” Max said. “Don’t suppose you could lend me a shirt?”
27
Payne slowed his car and turned off the main road into the entrance to Scarisbrick Marina. A sloping track wound down to the main car park. Potholes shook the suspension and the gravel crunched under the tyres. He had a clear view of the marina and was momentarily mesmerised by how peaceful it looked with the branching jetties reaching out across the water like giant fingers resting on a pond. It wasn’t hard to imagine why Charlie would think of settling here after the divorce.
Hell, after the explosion in his house this morning, he’d be needing somewhere to stay. Maybe here wouldn’t be so bad. Payne had already spoken to Taylor twice that morning and he’d insinuated that it might make more sense for Payne to step down from the investigation now that he was being targeted. Payne had refused, more out of principle than logic. Besides, if he was a target, he wanted to be in the best place to get the bastards behind this.
He pulled his phone out and the card that Linwood had given him. Maybe he should have gone with her last night. Maybe that was the right thing to do. But, she was playing her own game and he didn’t fancy being one of her pawns.
There was a slim man waiting as Payne locked the car; in his forties wearing dark jeans and a body warmer, he looked like he belonged on the water. He smiled as he shook Payne’s hand.
“Phillip Lang,” he offered. “We spoke on the phone.”
“DI Payne. Thanks for this. Sorry about the short notice.”
“Least I can do. Couldn’t believe the news. I guess you never think of these things happening on your doorstep.”
Payne nodded. “Did you see much of Charlie?”
“Not really. He kept to himself, so far as I could tell. He spent most of his time out at work or sat on deck. But he did stop by the bar for a drink from time to time,” Lang said.
“He spent a fair bit of time in there?”
“He liked a drink.”
“And what did he talk about?”
“Well nothing. Like I said, he kept himself to himself.”
“The two of you didn’t talk?”
&nbs
p; “No, he just never seemed that bothered. He’d come into the café and sit at the end of the bar supping his pint. Sometimes he’d read the paper, often he’d just watch the TV. He spoke to a few others but it never seemed much more than a hello and goodbye.”
“Has he had any visitors to his boat?”
“Not sure. Nothing stands out. But, most days I’m rushed of my feet, so it would have been easy for him to have people come and go, and me never notice it.”
“Sure. I imagine it takes a lot of time running your own business.”
“You never thought about it?”
“Me? Christ no. What on earth could drag me away from the force? No, I think I’m best left where I am.” Payne paused, bit his lip. “What about mail? Any packages arrive? Anything unusual?”
Lang thought about this briefly, then said, “I don’t think so. I don’t handle it every day though. Sometimes my wife looks after it. She’s at home but I could ring and see what she remembers.”
“That would help, thank you.” He smiled a practised smile.
Lang slipped a mobile out of his jacket and thumbed through his list of contacts.
Payne nodded towards the boats. “Which one’s his?”
They’d walked around the building and turned the corner, coming out in front of the café’s main entrance. A few picnic benches sat on tarmac and all were empty bar one which had been taken over by a small group of smokers. A sign above the double wooden doors told Payne that the café had a dual role as bar and site office.
Lang stopped in his tracks, ear to his phone, and raised a hand towards the berths over on the left of the marina. Payne could make out a narrow boat moored at the end of one of the jetties—it stood out due to it being the only one on that particular branch. He put the phone down and back in his pocket. “She’s not answering. Probably in the bath. Friday night and she’ll be getting ready to go out.” He looked apologetic. Payne made a note to follow that up when he got back to the office.
The Face Stealer Page 16
