by J. S. Law
“When was the last time you used a baton in anger?” she whispered. “You stay behind me.”
She stepped forward, feeling him follow, and headed farther into the tunnel.
She could see that there was a cavern ahead now. Some light was seeping toward her, dull and weak, but she knew they were coming to the end of the tunnel and could see the entrance to the Defiance gun emplacement.
Roger moved up beside her and she could tell that Barry had dropped farther behind.
They moved as silently as they could and eventually stepped down into a multilevel chamber. It was separated into sections, like huge pigeonholes, where guns would have been mounted, with space for their crews, ammunition, and supplies.
Dan had her baton raised and resting on her shoulder, ready to be brought down into action. She hugged the wall to her left and felt Roger do the same off to the right. There was a deeper darkness away to her left, a storage chamber behind the gun emplacements, clearly windowless, no light seeping in through cracks. Dan shivered but headed that way. She walked slowly, her senses on alert, and the smell was the first thing she noticed. She halted, breathing through her mouth, and took a moment to suppress the gag reflex.
Behind her, not far away, she could see Roger’s light moving around in other areas, and she snapped her fingers. His light turned toward her and then moved closer.
“Jesus,” he whispered, as he came close enough to smell it; he, too, recognized the scent of death.
Dan stepped forward toward the chamber, tense, her baton ready, and as she stepped into the doorway and shone the light inside, she felt her stomach lurch and flip as flies buzzed around her.
There were hooks around the walls, set there during the war to hang coats, rifles, and equipment, but now they were hung with the carcasses of animals in various states of decomposition.
Nearest to Dan was what looked like a fox, its front legs tied together above its head so it hung like a prisoner ready for interrogation. Its body had been ravaged, cut, and burned, and the marks on the wall behind it, the scratches and gouges, told Dan that the animal had lived through some of this torture and that its death hadn’t been quick.
She shone her light around the rest of the room and stopped.
In the far corner was a human, skin and bone, naked.
“We’re too late,” said Dan, feeling tears well in her eyes.
“Shhhh,” said Roger, his flashlight beam also focused there now.
Dan couldn’t look away, couldn’t help but notice the blond hair that was still visible, trapped between the skull and the wall.
“That’s not her,” said Roger, “that’s much older, far too decayed.”
Dan looked again, taking her time. He was right, the body had been there awhile, the blond hair drawing Dan’s eye away from the decomposed skeleton.
“It’s the girl who went overboard from Defiance,” said Dan, certain she was right. “Cox must have taken her and faked the report to the bridge. The girl never went overboard at all. Cox managed to hide her and get her here.”
Dan turned away, unable to look any longer, when her own flashlight beam caught something else. She looked back, bending forward and retching.
Sitting back against the wall on one side, almost hidden in the corner, was a male body, naked and skinny, blood congealed around the neck, the head nowhere to be seen.
45
Thursday, February 5
Dan watched as the two bodies were stretchered and taken away. She was as sure as she could be that the small blond corpse was Stephanie James, the young sailor thought to be lost overboard from Defiance a year or so before. Sarah Cox had been the one to see her fall, to report her overboard and start the recovery actions, but the woman’s body was never recovered, and no wonder.
The corpse looked so skinny underneath the blankets, barely making a bump in them.
The decapitated body came out second, Roger walking a few paces behind the gurney. He looked gray and strained as he walked; neither of them had any idea at all who this was.
The police and crime scene techs were still working in the area inside the Defiance gun emplacement as other people discussed how to enter the tunnel from the far end to avoid disturbing the bats any more than necessary.
Her phone rang, and she knew without looking it was her dad again.
He’d called already and she wanted to speak to him, but now wasn’t the time, not with all this going on around her.
“You know,” Roger said from behind her, “this place never saw action in any of the wars. It never even got its full quota of guns delivered, because they weren’t needed, and so, really, there shouldn’t be any death here.”
Dan looked at him, trying to understand what he meant.
“I mean there’s a place up top called the killing field. A place meant for death, designed to gun down invading forces so they couldn’t take this position and then attack and control Portsmouth Harbor. You expect death there, in a place like that, and maybe you expect it in a wartime gun emplacement, but it never happened, so there shouldn’t be any, and now we find this. Remains of one unidentified young girl, a whole host of animals, a headless corpse … It looks like some kind of ritualistic killing room.”
“I think she was practicing,” said Dan. “Anyone who’d ever watched American crime drama could see that. She’d been bringing them in and practicing.”
“Then she graduated to the next level?” he said, and Dan shot him a look.
“Graduated? Hardly a proud and successful day.”
Roger rolled his eyes at her. “You know what I meant, but torturing animals and even the young woman is one thing. Straight-up beheading an adult male, that’s something very different.”
She turned away and looked back into the mouth of the tunnel.
“I don’t think so,” said Dan. “I don’t think she graduated, I just don’t think doing it herself was what got her off. I think she tried it, but I think she wanted to watch, not do.”
Roger looked at her closely, squinting as though trying to read something more.
“That’s an interesting insight,” he said, finally looking away. “I’d be interested to know how you made that leap given the information we all have.”
Dan looked away.
“You know, if she’d disposed of those bodies,” Roger said, his voice strained, “we’d likely never have known. Even if we’d gone in there on an anonymous tip.” He stared at Dan as he said this. “Even then, we wouldn’t have known what we’d found. We just wouldn’t have known to look harder. We’d never have gone in there forensically.”
Dan nodded. Roger was right, and she knew it.
“That’s how Hamilton did it for so long,” she said.
He nodded.
“I don’t understand it, though,” said Dan. “I don’t get what we’re seeing. Her house looks as though she was running, so why take the time to come here and drop a body off? It’s pretty fresh—why not take it to the yacht along with whoever the other body is? It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” agreed Roger.
“And where’s the head?” said Dan. “I bet beheading someone takes a lot of strength.”
“Sarah Cox is strong,” said Roger. “You and John can testify to that.”
Dan nodded and was silent for a moment.
“So what now?” she asked. “How do we catch her? We don’t know where she is, or where she might have gone. She’s a flight risk by land and sea, and likely with a lot of cash. I’m guessing that, anyway, assuming she had an escape plan.”
Roger sat down next to Dan.
The wall she was sitting on was quite high, and the stone was cold beneath her.
He jumped up and sat closer to her, their legs touching and his broad shoulders making her lean off to one side a bit.
“Budge up, fatty,” she said, pushing him, but he didn’t move. Instead, he put one arm round her shoulders and held her toward him.
Then he poin
ted to the entrance to the tunnel.
“Look,” he said. “Look at where she was working. It’s private and remote, but look at the state of it. She’d little or no light to work with. It’s risky getting victims, animal or human, in and out. You saw the tools she was using. Most of them picked up from her garden shed. This place is perfect if you’re William Knight and you want to bring girls here, before they sealed up the upper access. You can come in quickly along the ridge there.”
He pointed along the top of the mound that connected the gun emplacements.
“You take the girls in and then you’re out of sight and you can do as you please. You don’t want light, not much, anyway, because you want them to have few memories of where they are, of who you are, and so you do what you want to do, then you bring them back out, unconscious, and drop them wherever. It’s perfect for someone like that. But for Cox, this place isn’t perfect at all. You saw that second body, the foxes, cats, dogs, badgers, and whatever else was in there. She wanted to experiment, to do things to people, and you’re possibly right, a lot of the pleasure for her has to be in the seeing. The top of the emplacement is closed off now, not even moonlight can get in, so she manages to get a copy of the key made and accesses the site through the tunnel, leaving traces and increasing her chance of discovery with every coming and going. Taking them in there’s risky, but she can check for cars, scout ahead for flashlights and other people, but bringing a dead body out of the tunnel … She used a location that’s also the site of a number of other crimes, maybe that added to it?”
“She used to come here with Knight and watch him,” said Dan. “I’m not sure what the relationship was, whether she became more powerful than him or what, but that’s how she knew this was here.”
He nodded.
“You can tell me the truth later about how you know all this, though I think I can figure it out, but, that aside, there’s nothing about this that tells me this woman’s prepared. Everything about it tells me she’s up and down, one minute fighting what she is and the next trying to embrace it. She used only what she had lying around and was doing it with equal parts of impulse, emotion, and guilt. She’s trying to be in control, maybe even believes that she is, but the fact that she kept Natasha Moore at her house at all tells me she didn’t know what to do. Here, Moore would have frozen to death eventually; at home she’s preserved, but a constant risk. Sarah Cox hasn’t yet fully understood what she wants, and that’s her undoing. It sounds like we already have a good starting point in identifying the older victim—Stephanie James, from what you’re saying—and we’ll confirm that soon. I think Natasha was to be her second, and I think we’ll identify the beheaded body very quickly. It’s a male, the body’s not in great condition, but he died recently, his head removed postmortem. I think we’ll probably have some ideas from the local missing persons list or from the navy defaulters and absentees list. I also think Natasha was a crime of passion, or impulse, done in the moment, forced. I think Cox saw Black and believed she could manipulate him, and Natasha was already in her sights, so she went with it to try and rope him in. I think she was forced to act on board the ship and bring Natasha off, and the fact that she had to do that, that she felt it necessary to take that huge risk again, means she doesn’t think through what she does, isn’t as clever as she thinks she is. But one thing I’m really certain of is that she doesn’t have an escape plan. She’s in the wind and doesn’t know what to do. She needs help, but she won’t know where to get it. We’ll find her soon, because she’ll have no idea where to go.”
Dan looked at Roger, then jumped down off the wall, moving away from him.
“We can’t just wait,” she said. “She could hurt someone else. We need to go and speak to people who know where she might go.”
“You off for another séance, then?” asked Roger, looking at her hard now. “Seems to me you’ve got information that can only come from a dead man.”
Dan shrugged and turned to walk away.
“Don’t start hiding things from me, Danny,” said Roger, his tone making her turn round. “We’ve always been close, you and I, and you know how important it is to confide, to share.”
She stopped and thought, looking at her friend, boss, and mentor as he swung his legs, kicking his heels against the wall like a small, bored child.
“I’ll share. I promise. I’m not going to speak to the dead, not again, but there’s someone else who knows way more than they should about all of this, and they’re very much alive.”
“No,” said Roger. “I won’t allow it, not again.”
“You can’t stop it, Roger.”
“Watch me,” he said.
Dan stepped toward him, feeling her temper rise.
“And why are you so against it?” she asked.
“Because Chris Hamilton does nothing to help anyone, ever. He only serves himself, only has his own agenda, and even if it feels like he’s helped you, even if it looks like he might have helped you by accident, he hasn’t. You can’t manipulate Chris Hamilton, because he lives only to manipulate others. Whatever he told you, whatever you’re holding back from me—”
“I’m not holding anything back,” said Dan. “I don’t know why you’d think that. It’s like you’re paranoid. I told you everything he said to me. I went and saw Jimmy Nash and he gave me information about William Knight and that led me here. But I thought I was following up on the NCA case, then it turns out that I’m not, that Hamilton actually led me here. So he knew about Cox, knew I was working the case, knew what she was doing, who she was. How’s that even possible? In the time frame he had, how can he know all that he knows? Is there a page on social media somewhere where the worst of the military’s villains get together and discuss their days? Trade secrets? What?”
“Hamilton only helps himself,” said Roger, seeming to ignore all Dan had said. “You don’t know what his end goal is, Danny, you don’t know what he’s trying to achieve, and I forbid you to speak to him again.”
Dan looked at Roger, saw the defiance melt out of him as he looked back at her.
“Come with me again. Wait in the viewing room like last time and I’ll come and debrief you the second I’m out. Okay?”
He jumped down and faced her.
“I need to go back in before we leave,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the tunnel. “You can come with, or wait here for me.”
Dan looked into the dark mouth of the tunnel and shivered.
“I’ll wait,” she said. “I’m not going back in there.”
He put a hand on her shoulder.
“You told me that about the shop in the New Forest, too, said you’d never go back there, but you know, that’s not how I think of you, I always think of you as someone who faces her fears, not shies away from them.”
“I face the fears I need to face,” she said, her mind drifting toward memories of her last meeting with Hamilton. “But the ones I don’t need to—places I don’t ever need to go again—I’m cutting myself some slack on those. I’ll wait here.”
46
Early September (ten years before)
Dan felt the pressure on her back disappear and be replaced with pain as she was picked up, bodily heaved off the floor by the seat of her trousers and the scruff of her neck and carried to another pallet across from where Chris Hamilton’s body lay motionless. She was dumped on the floor.
Now, much closer to him, Dan felt a surge of relief that brought tears to her eyes because she was sure she could see Chris’s chest moving; he was alive, at least.
She shuffled round and looked at the men, kneeling upright, tattoos revealed, the Armed Forces apparent in every one of them.
Then she looked at Matt Carson.
He was standing, ignoring her, looking at the men he’d assembled here. He paced toward a man at the end, a man Dan could now see was significantly older than the others.
“How you doing there, Malc?” Carson said, leaning down toward the man’s face. “How
’s the breathing? Age isn’t helping is it, making you weak?”
The man Malc said nothing. Was unable to speak.
“D’you remember,” Carson began, “in week two? We’d had a tough first week, and I think we can all honestly agree that I was struggling a bit. I was young, wasn’t I? Only sixteen, and just turned at that. The youngest in the regiment, I’d have been, if I’d been allowed to pass out with my class.”
Carson pulled over a chair; the sound of the legs dragging along the floor echoed around the rafters and bounced off the walls. He unslung the SA-80 rifle that was across his chest and laid it on a crate. Then he sat down in the center of the circle.
“You must remember, Jimbo,” he said, directing the words at another man. “In week two, when I was struggling a bit and I didn’t shower after one of the beasting sessions in the gym. I had to get to the next serial and I didn’t have time, so I turned up still sweating.”
None of the men moved or reacted in any way, and Dan began to watch them carefully, each in turn, watching for small signs of movement to tell her they were still alive.
“So anyway, I remember.” Carson smiled. “I remember when we got back from the parade square. I think it was you who grabbed me first, Jimbo, I think it was you, anyway. You grabbed me from behind, so I wasn’t totally sure, because I didn’t see. Anyways, the one thing I do remember, while you all held me down and two of you nearly took my skin off, scrubbing me with hard brooms, was you, Malc. I don’t know if you knew that I saw you, but I did, you was watching through the glass panel in the door to the showers, watching while they made me bleed.”
Dan saw Malc move, his eyes flicker, and for a moment she felt relieved that he was alive, until she remembered the crime scene where they’d found the last four bodies of the men Carson believed had wronged him. She remembered the blood that ran so far up the walls of Carson’s deserted home that she’d been unable to comprehend what he’d done to the bodies, the carcasses, that he’d left behind; maybe a quick death was the best outcome for these men, unless help came soon, unless help could get into this building before Carson could pull the trigger.
