by J. S. Law
Dan thought about that, unwilling to discuss it, unwilling to back out, and unwilling to do what was needed. She took a deep breath and pulled the bag onto the top of her head, unrolling it until it just covered her eyes.
“I can live with that,” he said. “But can you lean your head forward, please, chin down, and then lean against the door as though you’re sleeping?”
Dan did as she was asked, her mouth and nose in the open air, her eyes in complete darkness. She could feel him checking her, looking across to make sure she couldn’t see where they were going.
“I’m afraid you’ll need to stay like that for around forty minutes now. I’ll let you know when you can take it off.”
“Okay,” said Dan, her throat dry.
* * *
SHE TRIED TO remember the turnings and timings as she felt the car lean. She tried to judge where they might be going, but after a short while she gave up. At one point it felt as though he’d gone twice round a roundabout just to throw her, and several times she heard voices, revelers still out and about. They seemed to drive on forever. She was pleased when she felt the car go down a slight incline, and then the light of wherever they were was so bright that it actually pierced the black hood, making her realize that her eyes had been tight shut the whole time.
“We’re here,” he said, as the car stopped. “I’ll take the hood, but I’m afraid you will need to wear it again on the way home.”
Dan took it off and handed it to him.
They were in a well-lit area, an underground garage of some sort, though there didn’t seem to be enough supports for that. Maybe it was part of a large warehouse.
A low horn sounded nearby. It continued for six seconds and Dan recognized it as shipping. They were near the sea, down by the docks, though it could have been Portsmouth, Southampton, or even farther afield in the time they’d been driving.
The area wasn’t huge, maybe big enough to park ten cars, but it looked clean and well maintained.
Marcus got out of the car and walked around to open her door for her. He stood back, smiling again, and waited for her to get out.
“I really like your boots, by the way,” he said.
Dan stopped short, thrown by the compliment.
“Thank you,” she managed, looking down at them.
“This way, please.”
He led her across the small area to a stairwell. He started up the stairs and Dan heard noises, people talking behind doors that came into view as they approached the first landing.
They must have been underground after all, because Marcus looked at his phone as they climbed the next set of stairs and waited for a signal to connect. Then he dialed a speed-dial number and waited only a second.
“We’re here,” he said, and hung up.
He looked back at her again.
“You okay?” he asked.
Dan nodded and they continued up the stairs.
They must have climbed four or five stories before Dan turned a corner and saw a green metal security door, set back on one side of a wide, dirty landing.
If where the car was parked had been clean, the stairwell and landings more than made up for that. The smell of urine was strong enough to make Dan’s eyes water, and there was another smell, too, one she couldn’t place, like a deep rot.
“So, you’re Jimmy’s right-hand man, then?” asked Dan, as they stopped on the landing.
Marcus smiled but didn’t answer. He turned to face her and looked her in the eye.
“I want to tell you right now that you won’t like what you see in here. You can leave at any time; you just have to tell me you want to. You’ll be safe, you have my word on that.”
“Your word?”
“Yes, my word,” he said.
“And that counts for something, does it?”
“It counts for everything, Dan.”
Dan nodded, looking Marcus up and down, the perfect gentleman, well-spoken, well-mannered, intelligent, thoughtful, and observant, and right-hand man to a gangster.
“I’ll be with you all the time, and I won’t try to tell you how to prepare yourself, because I can’t, but I can say, take your time and don’t rush anything. If you need a few moments, you can have them, but once you step back out through that door, it’ll never open for you again.”
“Unless I show up with all my police friends and the big red key,” said Dan, with a smile.
“Once you’ve been in there, I really don’t think you’ll ever tell anyone about it, but we shall see. You ready?”
“Born ready.”
34
Wednesday, February 4 (early hours)
The door opened on the first knock.
Past the threshold, Dan saw a dim, dirty hallway that ran straight along to what looked like an ancient, filthy kitchen.
The man who’d opened the door was obese and unwashed.
The stink from both him and from the flat made Dan wince, though Marcus seemed not to notice.
The man didn’t speak. He turned around in the hallway, his middle touching both walls as he did, his gut hanging out below a stretched gray T-shirt, and waddled away without a word.
He passed three doors on the right and entered the one at the very end, just before the kitchen. The glow from a television illuminated the hallway for a brief second, and then he was gone, the door shut behind him.
“Marcus, how do you know my dad?” asked Dan.
“We served together several times, I’m proud to say.”
Dan nodded, unsure why she’d needed to know that, then pursed her lips.
“Why am I here?”
“Because I’m going to show you something Jimmy thinks might help you, but I need to talk to you first.” He paused. “Actually, I don’t need to, but it might be easier and more useful for you to understand a little of what’s gone on before, you see.”
“You’ve got William Knight here, haven’t you?”
He nodded.
“Can he speak?” asked Dan.
Marcus moved his head from side to side, as though weighing the answer, unsure if it was as straightforward a question as it seemed.
“Do you know what Knight did?” Marcus asked.
“I do.”
“You know, after he was found and brought here, five years or more ago, before my time, we spoke to him and we found out that he’d lost count of the number of girls he’d abducted and raped, but we were able to get him to describe thirty-seven of them.”
Dan’s mouth opened but she did not speak.
“Only eleven girls ever came forward to the police. But you know that, I’m guessing. That’s twenty-six girls whose lives were shattered and didn’t, or couldn’t, for whatever reason, come forward. But thirty-seven, at a minimum, who’ll live with what was done to them by an external force that destroyed their innocence, their confidence, their intimacy…” He shook his head.
“So you got him, and he’s still here, after five years?”
Marcus nodded again. “Do you know how he picked his victims?”
“No, not fully, I know he targeted them on the way home from nightclubs, offering them a lift.”
Marcus grimaced.
“No. I mean yes, that’s how he got them, but his selection method was more than that. He only liked very petite, very young, very pretty blondes. He liked them to be virgins, that was his fantasy, that he was deflowering them. If they weren’t virgins—and he asked every one of them—then they got it worse. That’s his words, Danny, not mine, I don’t believe rape can be worse, or better, but that’s what he did.”
Dan drew in a deep breath but couldn’t speak.
“Imagine having your life wrecked solely because you’re young and pretty and your hair’s blond,” said Marcus.
“He did this to Jimmy’s daughter,” said Dan, not sure whether it was a question or a statement, or why she’d said it at all.
“He did. And Jimmy doesn’t forgive, or forget, but I ought to prepare you a bit. You’ve se
en pictures of Knight, right? Seen what he looked like? Big, powerful, loved to lift the weights?”
“I’ve seen some sights, Marcus. Let’s just go and speak to him. I’ll be fine.”
Marcus looked at her closely, examining her eyes.
“Okay,” he said.
There were three matching doors on the left side of the hallway, each heavily secured with three large bolts positioned top, middle, and bottom. He stopped outside the third and last on the left. He reached down and drew back the bottom bolt first, then the top, and finally he turned to look at her again before he pulled back the center bolt and opened the door.
There was a partition wall only five feet inside the door that ran across the width of the room, wall to wall, as though they’d entered a waiting area.
Light came through the wooden partition at intervals, through a number of small round holes, maybe three feet from the floor.
Dan frowned and Marcus moved along to the left. At the far end of the partition wall, he undid more bolts and pushed against a hidden door into the space beyond. She followed him, slipping past him as he stood back and gestured her through the gap.
Again, the smell made her recoil, each point on her journey here more putrid than the last, and she tried to inhale only through her mouth as she moved into the squalor behind the wooden panel.
The room was dim, the bare low-wattage lightbulb overhead casting shadows all around her. There was an unmade bed in the corner.
Dan saw a bucket on the floor. It’d been emptied, but she could see and smell that it was used for human waste, and she felt her stomach lurch.
The room was dire, disgusting, no furniture except for the bed and the bucket.
There was movement on the bed. As her eyes adjusted, Dan saw the outline of something vaguely human take shape. It was emaciated, like a corpse, its skin a sickening color, light yellow patches between reds and mottled blues.
The last time she’d seen something like this, it had been under a tarpaulin in Chris Hamilton’s garage.
She turned and looked back at Marcus.
“Tell me,” she said.
“After they got him, it was decided that he should suffer for as long as the girls would. Namely, for the rest of his life. So he lives here now. He’s kept alive by our friend who met you at the door.”
Dan felt nauseated as she looked back at the near-corpse on the bed.
“If he’s very badly injured, or if his life’s in danger, then he’s taken offline for a while, stitched up and treated, and then it all starts again. He lives in the same nightmare as his victims—the punishment fits the crime, as they say.”
“This is inhumane,” said Dan.
“Raping young girls is inhumane, Dan,” Marcus replied, his voice hard, though Dan noted that he still hadn’t come inside the room.
“His keeper, best you don’t know his name, is a nasty piece of work, a sadist, and sometimes we have to give them a little time and distance, but Mr. Knight has shown an amazing degree of resilience.”
Dan looked again at the holes.
“You need me to explain?” asked Marcus.
Dan looked back at him, not declining.
“If something comes through these holes”—Marcus leaned in just enough to point at one—“then Mr. Knight gets on his knees and uses his mouth. I’m led to believe he was a bit of a biter in the early days, so you’ll notice, when you speak to him, that he has no teeth anymore.”
Dan realized that she could breathe normally through the smell, though her heartbeat was quickening.
She looked at the shape on the bed, it wasn’t moving, and felt tears form in her eyes.
“Don’t cry for him, Dan,” said Marcus. “He’s caused more than enough tears.”
Dan shook her head, taking a moment to compose herself.
“You ready to speak to him?”
Dan shook her head.
“Not like this.”
“Okay,” said Marcus. He gestured for her to leave the room.
“What are we—?”
“It’s like this or it isn’t happening at all, Dan. He never leaves this room.”
She stood, wavering, thoughts crashing through her mind, confused, powerful, uncontrollable. She looked at the living skeleton on the bed, her eyes adjusted now to see what she was sure were burn marks on his face and lash marks down his bruised and discolored skin.
“Can you ask him if he knew Christopher Hamilton?” said Dan.
Marcus hesitated at the door, obviously not wanting to come in, and Dan sensed that he’d made some degree of peace with this but it wasn’t a place he was comfortable in.
“I’ll get the Keeper,” he said.
“No,” blurted Dan, unsure why she spoke so quickly but knowing that regardless of this man’s crimes, she couldn’t watch what might happen if the Keeper came through the door.
She moved closer to the bed, able to see now that Knight was lying on his stomach, his head turned away from her.
He was naked and on his back she could see raised scars, angry and deep, spelling the word RAPIST from left to right, starting at his lower back, the flat line of the R running along where his waistband would be and the T curving up and over his emaciated shoulder.
“William,” she said, speaking quietly. “William Knight?”
It stirred and the face turned toward her.
She had never seen, not in history, or on television, or in her nightmares, a human being in this condition and still alive.
He looked at her, his eyes dull and dead, nothing behind them, nobody home.
“William. Will you answer some questions for me? Can you do that?”
A long groan escaped, then a hiss as Dan was certain she heard him say, “Yes.”
“Did you know Christopher Hamilton?”
“Yes,” he said, barely a whisper.
“Do you know what he did?”
“Yes,” he said, forcing Dan to come closer so that she could hear him.
“Did you help him hurt girls?”
“No.”
“But you know that he did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where he put their bodies, William?”
“No,” he said, the single syllable exhaled in a long breath.
“Mr. Knight.” It was Marcus, speaking from the door. “Do I need to ask the Keeper to come in here and help us to be sure you’re telling the truth?”
There was a rasping sound and Knight’s skeletal body juddered on the bed.
“No,” he said, the voice pathetic, heartbreaking, the embodiment of hopelessness and despair.
“So you don’t know where he put those girls?” asked Dan. “You promise that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ve been told that you do know, William. I was told that you could help me.”
He moved, quickly enough to make Dan jump back, and she felt Marcus move to her side in a flash, but Knight had just curled up into a ball and was weeping.
“I don’t. Please. I don’t know. No more today. Please. No more today.”
The words landed on Dan like blows.
“Let’s go,” she said to Marcus, turning away and heading for the door.
“You sure you’re done? This is a onetime thing, Dan. It’s now or it’s never.”
Dan looked at Marcus and then back at Knight.
The man was curled up, his knees drawn to his chest, and he looked no bigger than an eight-year-old child. His skin was tight over his bones like leather and Dan could see every vertebra pushing against the bruised and scarred skin on his back.
She recalled what Hamilton had said to her. “I will help you, Dan—not them, you.” Then she thought about Knight’s file, remembered that he’d been the driver for Cox’s family for eight years, during the height of his crimes. She turned back.
“William,” she said, moving closer and feeling Marcus back away again, but not as far as the door. “Do you know Natasha Moore?”
&nbs
p; “No,” he sobbed.
“Do you know Sarah Cox?”
He stopped shaking and turned his face toward her.
“Yes,” he said, his voice hopeful, as though glad he could help.
“Did you know her as a child, as a teenager?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you hurt Sarah?”
“No.” He said. “Never, not one time, no. I promise. She was…”
“She was what?” asked Dan.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what she was.”
Hamilton had led her here, to Knight, and Knight knew Sarah Cox. Dan knew there was no such thing as coincidence where Hamilton was involved.
“Tell me about her, William. Tell me what you know about Sarah Cox.”
“I don’t know what to tell,” he said.
“I’ll go and grab the Keeper,” said Marcus. “I hear he’s excellent at helping with ideas.”
“No. No! I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me then. I know you drove for her dad. I think you were a friend of their family.”
“She watched,” he said, and the words caused Dan to inhale as she immediately understood what he meant.
“Explain that,” said Marcus, the voice so cold and hard that Dan had to turn to look at him to be sure it was still him.
“She found me with one of them. She followed me out one night, hidden in the back of the car. She followed and watched. After that, whenever she could, I had to let her watch. I sometimes had to let her help me pick them. Then she wouldn’t tell.”
Dan’s jaw was set. She couldn’t smell anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything except an image of Sarah Cox, in her early teens, watching as William Knight beat and raped young girls.
“Why didn’t you hurt her?” asked Dan.
He rocked back and forth now, shaking his head.
“Didn’t like her. Too big.”
Dan thought about Knight’s victims, petite and blond—that’s how she’d been told he picked them, exactly like Natasha Moore and Victoria Nash. Dan also realized now that Hamilton had never meant to help the NCA investigation. He was helping Dan, playing games with her, showing her that even inside prison, he knew what she was working on and knew more than she did about it. He was establishing value.
