The Fear Within

by J. S. Law

  He said nothing, just watched her, Dan could feel it and knew he’d be looking for any hesitation, that was how he worked. He’d be watching for body language, weakness, anything at all that would tell him she needed to talk, that she needed not to walk out that door.

  Dan never broke stride, except to look up at the cameras and shrug toward them, as though she’d done her best. She reached the door and knocked twice, hard and loud.

  “Not even a good-bye?” he said from behind her, but Dan didn’t turn back to look at him.

  She waited, looking through the vertical glass pane to see where the guard was, and then knocked again when she didn’t see him coming.

  The guard walked into view, unlocked the door, and Dan stepped through it.

  Her heart was beating fast. Had she given in too soon and blown her chance to talk with him, and all over a few stupid comments? She forced herself to walk quickly through the door without looking back, making sure her shoulders were low and relaxed and her gait nonchalant, as if she hadn’t wanted to go in there anyway and so he’d saved her a chore.

  The door was almost shut behind her, the guard fiddling with the key, when she heard him call.

  “Okay, Danny,” shouted Hamilton. “Okay.”

  Dan kept walking, aware that the guard had stopped the door from shutting properly.

  “Miss,” said the guard. “Mr. Hamilton says he wants to talk?”

  Dan didn’t stop walking, seeing the next door and knowing that once she passed through it, the chance really was gone.

  “If he wants to talk, he knows what to do. He didn’t have the world’s greatest upbringing, but the navy taught him manners,” said Dan, reaching for the handle and closing her eyes.

  The latch clicked and she began to pull the door open.

  “Sorry, Danny,” shouted Hamilton, and Dan paused. “I’m sorry.”

  She turned and looked back at the guard, who raised his eyebrows as though unsure what was going on.

  “He said he was sorry, miss,” said the guard.

  Dan paused, waiting, not sure how quickly to go back. Then she released the door and walked slowly toward the interview room, aware that her footsteps echoed, marking her progress.

  She waited at the door, smiled at the guard, and then leaned round and looked at Hamilton.

  “I. Am. Sorry,” he said, looking straight at her. “My behavior was unacceptable and, frankly, I think I was just crying out for attention. It won’t happen again today.”

  Dan paused as though considering this, then walked back into the room, thanking the guard, and sat down opposite Hamilton.

  She looked at him, wondering whether it’d get easier each time she saw him but thinking that it likely wouldn’t, as she dropped her hands beneath the table so he wouldn’t see them shaking.

  “You came back to talk,” he said. “So what’s up?”

  “I’ve got more questions,” said Dan, “but I think you know what some of them are going to be, don’t you?”

  He smiled and spread his fingers out on the table in front of her.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I said that to you once, do you remember?”

  Dan just stared at him, saying nothing.

  He stopped and rolled his eyes, as though she were a boring friend refusing to relax and have fun.

  “How did I know what, Danny? You must be clearer when you phrase your questions.”

  “How did you know what investigation I was working? You didn’t help with the NCA investigation we talked about at all, you helped me with my case.”

  “I’m sure I said I’d only help you,” he said, as though this were obvious, pulling a face as though trying to recall a previous conversation to make sure he was correct. “Yup, I remember now. You were there, I was here, I was wearing these bracelets”—he paused—“do they make me look fat, Danny, you can tell me? Anyway, you asked me some questions and I said that I’d help you, specifically you, and no one else. And did I?”

  Dan wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure which answer showed strength and which showed weakness, whether there was even a line drawn between them.

  “Yes, you did,” she said, opting for honesty.

  His eyes opened wide and he smiled broadly, like a child being told exciting news.

  “Did you find my old friend William?” he asked, leaning toward her, eager to hear.

  “I did,” said Dan.

  “Well, I really wasn’t sure you would, you know. He’s a nasty piece of work, but I thought you’d figure out where he’d had his fun before long, once you had the name. How was he?”

  “Not good,” said Dan.

  Hamilton shook his head slowly. “Such a waste. He had real talent, that one, could have gone all the way, but crimes that leave live victims, I always thought they were higher risk.”

  “He was a rapist, not a footballer who showed promise,” said Dan.

  Hamilton seemed to have been thinking about something else and now snapped back to look at her.

  “But if you saw him, that means they’ve kept him alive. Was it awful?”

  Dan nodded, just once.

  “But you’ll go and get him now, won’t you, Danny? You won’t be able to help yourself. Regardless of what he’s done, you’ll hunt for where he is and go and fetch him. It’ll worry at you constantly, just like the case on Tenacity; I’m reliably informed you’re still pursuing that, too.”

  Dan looked down at Hamilton’s hands, still flat on the table in front of him, the fingers spread out and steady.

  Those hands had murdered so many people and yet they looked so normal, so ordinary, the skin gathered between the knuckles, the veins raised.

  “Why did you put me onto him? You don’t do anything without reason.”

  He smiled again, saw her looking at his hands and tapped each fingertip against the table once, starting with his left pinkie and working across to the other before he spoke.

  “Well, you know one reason now,” he said, and Dan realized that freeing Knight was something Hamilton knew she would try to do, something he knew she would think about, an injustice she wouldn’t be able to let pass. “Other reasons, well, it’s more complicated, I grant you that.” He paused, looked away from her, his brow furrowing, and then he looked back. “Or is it? Honestly, Danny, I get so little intelligent conversation in here that I rather forget what women like you are capable of. Did you bring a chess set? I offered to coach you. I think you’d be good if you tried, though you know that even in chess, the women don’t play in the men’s tournaments, and with good reason. Did you know that the top-rated woman in the world is ranked fifty-ninth overall? If that doesn’t tell you what you need to know about gender equality, then I really don’t know what will.”

  Dan drew in another deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Okay, okay, but Danny, please, one day, talk gender equality with me. It’s something I’ve wanted to discuss for years, and I know my views and yours won’t match, but we can have a rigorous discussion about it, right? An intellectual joust and still be friends?”

  “What was the reason?” asked Dan.

  “Chess set?”

  Dan knew he was jousting with her for power again, trying to take back what she’d won in the opening exchange, trying to make his early loss nothing more than a gambit. She considered it, watching him closely.

  “I make no promises,” she said.

  He nodded at that, seemingly appeased.

  “The key reason, Danny, is this. I need you to trust me, to know just how much I know and how much I can help you. Because at some point, possibly soon, I’m going to want to trade, and I will need you to understand, and to convince the Morlocks out there, that I have something of value to offer.”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me where the bodies of your victims are?”

  “Oh, Danny,” he said, and rolled his eyes again. “Stop with the bodies, for God’s sake.”

  Dan no
ticed that he didn’t deny that there were bodies this time, a first as far as she could remember.

  “Then what?” asked Dan. “If that’s not what you have to trade, then tell me what it is.”

  He shook his head, and his eyes darkened. “Not yet, Danny, but when the time comes and I do tell you what I have to offer, you’ll know for sure I’m not lying. Trust me on that. You’ll know the value of what I have.”

  He spoke in riddles, as always, and Dan would’ve written off what he’d said, if only he hadn’t led her to Knight and from there to the lair Cox had operated from. He’d proved that he knew more than she’d thought, more than should be possible. He was right, Dan wouldn’t be able to live knowing that Knight was being held the way he was, but he’d also shown his hand, just a fleeting glimpse of it, and Dan wondered if he realized how much.

  The pool of people who knew what Dan was working on, who knew about Cox and all that had happened in the time since Natasha disappeared, wasn’t small, not by any means, but it was finite, and though it could have been any number of civilian police, the obvious link here went right back to Hamilton’s roots in the Armed Forces. There was someone he was close to. There was a trust between them, and a method of communicating, a deep knowledge of both what Hamilton might know and what he would want to know. Someone that close, someone that far inside Hamilton’s head, could easily be the same person who might know where Hamilton kept his victims’ bodies. Someone that close might even be able to send parts of them to the National Crime Agency, though why remained a mystery.

  “Well, no one can hear us,” said Dan, looking around at the cameras. “I can cover the debrief and tell them that you told me not much, just chatter and nonsense, but what I want to know is if you know how to find Sarah Cox.”

  He leaned back at this, smiling at her as though he’d found some new respect for Dan, or maybe seen a side of her that he hadn’t expected to.

  “Are we speaking so directly now?” he asked, his face bemused. “Aren’t we supposed to talk in circles? I’m not sure how comfortable I feel being asked an incriminating question outright. Frankly, I’m hurt you think I might even have that information.”

  Dan leaned forward and drummed her fingers on the table, watching Hamilton as he watched her. She was trying to read him, though she knew it was a pointless exercise—the man had spent almost his whole life pretending to be something that he wasn’t, pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  He’d carried this off in life generally, but also as a policeman, even when surrounded by those same people who were trying to identify him for his crimes. He was worrying at the inside of his lip now, nibbling at the skin as though trying to tear a tiny piece of it away. He licked his lips, his tongue just poking into view.

  “I don’t think I can answer that, Danny.”

  He reacted to the way she let her shoulders slump, as though he could see that she was disappointed in him and he wanted to turn that around, to get her interest back.

  “Not necessarily because I wouldn’t, but I simply don’t have that information.”

  Dan sighed and let her eyes fall back down toward her hands, which were flat on the table, mirroring his.

  He turned his hands over and made them into fists, only his index fingers remaining straight as he pointed at her. “But I do have some ideas. You see, Cox likes them small and blond, doesn’t she? She’s taken on Knight’s tastes?”

  Dan nodded.

  “And she’s big? Not obese, but sturdy?”

  Dan shrugged and nodded again.

  “Do you think she’s attractive to men?”

  “She’s not ugly,” said Dan.

  “But she’s not feminine, is she? She’s not the sort that William Knight would go for?”

  “No, she’s not.”

  He leaned back.

  “She’ll have known all about you, Danny. You’re petite and in a position of power, a direct threat to her, in her mind at least. I’m sure you’ve endeared yourself to her with your wit and charm, too, so she’ll have done her research on you, that much I’m certain of. So, while I don’t know where she is, I can tell you a few places she might be. One would be your home, where she knows you’ll definitely go. Maybe have that checked before you go in. She’ll have watched it, know where it is, seen you come and go. Maybe not often, but you’re too high-profile for someone like her not to be interested in.”

  “Okay,” said Dan. “I’d get my house checked anyway, so hardly a revelation.”

  “Well, the other place she’d go will be the opposite. If she’s scared of you now, thinks you’ve brought this on her and she’s running, then she may go somewhere she thinks you’d definitely never go. I genuinely don’t know where that might be, but she’ll have her own ideas.”

  Dan paused, thinking.

  “I think you just managed to talk for two whole minutes and say absolutely nothing of use at all,” she said.

  Hamilton’s face turned dark and his eyes narrowed again.

  “Oh, Danny, you’re such a disappointment. It’s part of who you are, of course, the focus, the single-mindedness and self-obsession, but it really does you no good sometimes. Like your submarine, Tenacity, sometimes you have to stick your head up and look around.”

  “I don’t think I’m with you,” said Dan.

  “No, you never really were. But at the very least, ask some questions, try to become informed. Ignorance, this level of it, really doesn’t suit you.”

  Dan looked at him and couldn’t help but feel rebuked. She needed to change the subject, to see how he reacted, to move away from this line of conversation.

  “Someone’s sending fingers from your victims to the NCA,” said Dan.

  “I know. Isn’t it terribly exciting!” said Hamilton, and Dan noted that, again, he hadn’t denied the victims were his.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why they’re doing it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Of course … I will not,” said Hamilton, and laughed at his own joke.

  “Do you think you’ve helped me in some other way than locating Cox?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me how?”

  “I hear your slot on the investigation has become vacant again. How’s Stewart? Will he recover?”

  Dan watched him, desperately trying to think whether he could have managed to hurt Stewart Mackenzie, the investigator assigned to the NCA case in Dan’s stead, or whether he’d simply found out about it and was trying to exaggerate his reach.

  “Tell me how you helped me,” said Dan, ignoring his comments about Mackenzie.

  He looked at her and didn’t reply.

  “When we found the place where Natasha Moore had been kept, someone had cut off her ring finger. That’s the same finger that’s been sent to the NCA from your other victims. I don’t think it was Cox. Do you know who did it?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, as though they were finally making some progress. “Did you find out who at the NCA the fingers were addressed to?”

  Dan shook her head.

  “Jesus, Danny,” said Hamilton, trying to throw his hands in the air. “This is painful, like pulling teeth. I really thought you were better than this.”

  “Help me, then. I can’t see the link.”

  He leaned back, his smile broader than she’d ever seen it.

  “And so you finally ask me outright for help. Help which I will gift to you, though only a push, Danny, a nudge in the right direction and no more.”

  Dan nodded.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Tell me, Danny, at this moment, what do you want more than anything else? Be honest with me, only you and I can hear, tell me the things you want.”

  “I want to find Sarah Cox, because I believe—”

  “No need for explanations, Danny, it
matters not to me why you want these things, only that you do.”

  “Okay, I want to find Sarah Cox. I want William Knight to be freed and face a proper trial for his crimes.”

  Hamilton was nodding as she spoke.

  “I want to find Ryan Taylor and bring the people who used Tenacity to smuggle drugs into the country to proper justice. I want to find the person sending women’s ring fingers to the NCA, and I want to find out who cut Natasha Moore’s ring finger off, and why. Then I want to bring them to justice, too.”

  He laughed and clapped, his chains rattling as he did.

  “Damn, you’re good. So selfless, so committed to justice. You know what? I believe you, too, because your life is so devoid of meaning and purpose that you want nothing personal at all, just crimes to be solved and justice to be served. What a grand person you are, Lieutenant Danielle Lewis, so utterly selfless and yet so completely selfish and self-centered at the same time. But what if all of those things, that list of things, what if they weren’t so different after all? What if some threads loomed them together like different scenes on the same tapestry? What if many, if not all, were connected in some way?”

  “Then…”

  Dan stopped, she didn’t know what to say.

  “Yes, Danny, go on.”

  “Then I’d need to find out what the connection was.”

  He clapped again. “You would indeed. But what could possibly connect all these different silken threads, Danny? What beast might live at the hub?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking at him. “It can’t be me. So if you’re going for that, then don’t. Natasha Moore and Sarah Cox had nothing to do with me at all, I was just assigned to the investigation.”

  “That’s true, you were. It was random chance, but now, at the end here, things changed, no? Two investigations began to merge.”

  “The fingers?” asked Dan.

  “The fingers,” repeated Hamilton. “An interception, an intruder, someone with a cameo in the wrong crime, but they’re stealing the show, don’t you think, Danny?”

  Dan thought about that, thought about her feeling that Cox hadn’t been the one who’d cut off Natasha’s finger. Why would she do that? It made no sense. But then who had?

  “So I’m the link?” said Dan, turning up the corner of her mouth and scrunching her nose. “Chris, if my life was that exciting, I’d be delighted, honestly I would. The excitement of being at the center of intrigue and conspiracy—but alas, I think we both know I’m not.”