A Fatal Cut

by Priscilla Masters

‘Set me free. Please.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to him!’ He raged. ‘I wanted to tell him he was on the right track, that it was all your wonderful idea.’

  She bit back her comment.

  Reluctantly, Barney loosened the straps.

  The ‘surgeon’ lunged.

  • • • •

  When Forrest finally entered he found Terry Carling lying on the floor, two police officers restraining him. Karys was cowering in the corner and another couple of officers were desperately trying to staunch the blood that was still pouring from Barney Lewisham’s back.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  February 2000

  It was a month later. The first glimpse of snowdrops had arrived. It felt as though spring was round the corner. Or maybe the nights only seemed brighter because the threat was gone.

  A rumour had reached Forrest, so he knew it was Karys’s last day in the mortuary and he wanted to see her even if only to say goodbye. What her plans were he didn’t yet know.

  He was glad when she opened the door instead of Paget. He hadn’t known how he would explain his presence to the mortuary attendant. The old chap would have seen right through it.

  They went into Karys’s office. It immediately struck him how much better she was looking. Slimmer, more confident, glowing. Recalled to life.

  ‘You know I’m leaving?’

  Forrest nodded.

  ‘I didn’t want to do any more post-mortems,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ve decided to do some re-training and go into general practice.’ Her smile grew even wider. ‘I feel I can do some real good, make something of my life. Of my profession.’

  ‘And relationships?’

  ‘Those too.’

  The words hung between them.

  ‘David,’ she said tentatively. ‘I’ve thought a lot about the night in Carling’s lockup. I don’t really mean flashbacks, they’re natural, and anyway, I know they fade in time. No. It’s another aspect.’

  He sat down as though invited.

  ‘It was Barney loosening the straps on me that turned Terry Carling against him. Up until then,’ she smiled thoughtfully, ‘I think Barney had the advantage. Carling was so shocked to see him, they were discussing anaesthetics like a pair of medical colleagues.’ She shivered at the memory.

  ‘So?’

  ‘It was my fault. Again.’

  He went to her and wrapped his arms round her. ‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ he said. ‘It was all to do with Barney. If it hadn’t been for his preening bloody confidence we’d have got to our bloodthirsty murdering friend a lot more quickly. Besides, if it hadn’t been for Barney none of this would ever have happened.’

  ‘You mean Terry Carling wouldn’t have killed anyone?’

  Forrest chuckled. ‘Well, maybe his seducing mother-in-law. No one else, Karys. It was a sort of uncontrolled fury that turned him into the monster he became. He must have spent hours pumping his mother-in-law about the event, and she accidentally fed him misinformation. Lewisham put nothing into Sutcliffe’s coffee.’

  She stared at him. ‘You’re lying. ‘Dying to—’

  ‘No. He told me that night. He merely milked your guilt. That’s all. Let you think it was all your fault. It wasn’t your fault, Karys. It was his.’

  Karys laughed softly. ‘I’ve carried this around with me for years, David. I think I feel better already.’

  ‘So do I, now we’ve got him. Carling had spent months planning everything right down to the last detail, collecting blades, surgical equipment, sutures, even green towels. All from the theatre. Every time he picked his mother-in-law up from work he must have filled his pockets. He’d drawn up a list of victims, all written just like a surgeon’s whiteboard in the theatre. Got the names of the operations right too.’

  He dropped his eyes as he recalled Karys’s name and the procedure that had been selected for her. He never wanted her to know.

  ‘Enough of this,’ he said quickly. ‘How about dinner? Again?’

  ‘If I can choose the restaurant this time.’

  ‘No, at my place.’

  He’d buy a new picture before she came. Throw out the memory of men in bowler hats raining depressingly on identical roofs. It was time to find something prettier, more comfortable. ‘And I’ll do the cooking,’ he finished triumphantly.

  Karys didn’t argue.

  Author’s Note

  For those of you frustrated by the omission of the name of the Magritte painting which had once adorned the wall of Detective Inspector Forrest’s sitting room the missing title is Golconda.

  If you enjoyed reading A Fatal Cut by Priscilla Masters you might be interested in Shade of Death by Aline Templeton, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Prologue

  The scary, awful screaming and howling seemed further away now, though it was hard to tell because of the echoes.

  Snuffling and choking in terror, with her hand over her mouth to stifle the noise of her uncontrollable sobbing, she groped her way along in the impenetrable dark, still too frightened to use the small blue torch she had in the pocket of her thin summer dress. Her fat feet in their Start-rite sandals kept stumbling over rocks and into potholes she couldn’t see; she couldn’t remember how many times she had fallen, but her fleshy knees and her hands were sticky with blood.

  She was lost now. She hadn’t gone far – she couldn’t have, moving so slowly – but she didn’t know which way she was facing and in the caves there were these huge horrible holes you could just fall down and then they would never even find your dead body. She’d been well warned never to go in; she always just said, ‘Oh, Mum, don’t go on about it’, but was she ever wishing now she’d done as she was told!

  It was really creepy, walking in the dark like this, but it would have been worse to let them catch her. It was the darkness that had let her escape, just like she was invisible or something. She’d cowered down, watching the flares and the lights from their torches flickering, casting giant shapeless shadows on the walls of the passage beyond, heard them yelling like savages as they rushed past. Hunting her…

  Yes, the noise was definitely further away now. She let out a long, shuddering sigh and put up her hand to wipe her eyes. Her cheeks felt stiff where the salty tears had dried.

  The silence seemed to be gathering itself together again as the animal sounds faded, until it was part of the thick, endless, terrible blackness. It was dead cold too. She pulled the blue cardie her mum had knitted tight over her dress, but it didn’t help much.

  She couldn’t hear them at all now, but strangely that didn’t make her feel any better. There was still a faint sort of whispery sound, sort of like, well, like a huge animal breathing... She was almost scared to take the little blue torch out of her pocket and switch it on, for fear of what she might see. But then, she was scared of the dark too.

  With her groping, outstretched hands she could feel a wall in front and another beside her. She turned round, shrank further into the corner, huddling down, and took out the torch.

  When, taking a deep breath, she switched it on, the feeble pencil beam didn’t go very far. She shone it round about; she was in a little, shallow sort of cave, and all there was to be seen were rocks and stones and a puddle or two. Nothing awful, nothing like – oh well, eyes or anything.

  She shuddered at the thought, then shone the torch down to look at her injuries. Both knees were badly bruised and gashed, and blood had trickled down her stocky legs on to the neat white socks which were filthy already with mud and dust. There was a huge triangular tear in her dress too. She didn’t know when that had happened. Mum would kill her when she got home – she was dead fussy, was Mum.

  If she got home. Just as the thought came to her, the torch flickered and she gasped in alarm. She switched it off and it was as if her eyes were shut; she blinked them once or twice, just to make sure they were actually open. She was really scared now, really really scared, even more scared than she had been when they wer
e after her, but in a different way.

  ‘Spying on our mysteries! Get the spy! Get her! Get her!’ Someone had caught a glimpse of her and screamed, then they’d all started screaming like they’d gone crazy or something and she had run away in what had seemed like real terror. Then.

  But in a sort of way she hadn’t quite believed it was anything but a mean, horrible game. She was used to them slagging her off and calling her names. Like ‘sneak’ and ‘snitch’ when all she’d ever done was say what was true. And just suppose they’d caught her – they wouldn’t have dared to hurt her, not really. Not once they’d cooled down.

  So that panic wasn’t like this. This was worse, much worse. This was a cold deadly chill that seemed to be seeping into her very bones with the icy damp.

  Her teeth had started to chatter. She’d no idea where she was now. Even if her torch battery didn’t run out, she could wander for ever if she took a wrong turning. She could starve to death, if she didn’t pitch into one of those dreadful holes, screaming uselessly as she fell…

  But that wouldn’t happen. They’d have to come back, look for her, say sorry. Or tell someone where she was, if she wasn’t back for dinner time.

  Of course they’d have to. She had begun to cry again; she sniffed dolefully, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. To cheer herself up, she thought of how she’d make them pay for frightening her like this. They’d be in trouble and no mistake, once she told her mum what they’d done to her.

  But what if they didn’t come back? What if they were scared she’d tell, what if they just went home and pretended they didn’t know where she was? No one else even knew that the others came here.

  She wasn’t going to think about that, not yet, anyway. They’ll come back to find me before I count to a thousand, she told herself, trying not to hear the sound of her racing heart.

  She had reached six hundred and thirty-five when she saw it – the faint, bobbing beam of a big torch somewhere down the further passage. Only one beam, no voices. They must have separated to search for her, realised they’d have to say sorry and beg her not to tell…

  The torchlight was nearer now, shining along the passage she had escaped into, towards the mouth of her little cave. She stepped forward. ‘Who’s that?’ she called. ‘I’m in here, and you’d better come and get me out or I’ll tell what you all did—’

  The beam of light swung sharply round, picking her out ruthlessly, shining directly into her face. She couldn’t make out who was behind it; she put up her hand to shield her eyes.

  ‘Who is it?’ she demanded again, more shrilly this time. ‘I can’t see you – put the light down lower.’

  But the beam didn’t waver. As the person holding it advanced slowly, silently, menacingly, she took a step backwards and then another step.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! You’re scaring me! Who is it?’

  She turned away, trying even in that confined space to slip past, to vanish into the darkness as she had somehow managed to do before. But this time she was skewered by the dazzling light which drove her back, back into the corner she had come from.

  Deathly fear clutched at her throat so that she could hardly breathe. ‘No, no,’ she whimpered, turning away, burying her face in her arms against the rock face. ‘No, no!’

  Something hard and heavy struck the back of her head. She knew a second of searing pain and she screamed. Then her legs buckled beneath her, the bright light faded and the darkness came surging in to swallow her up.

  Chapter One

  Lindy could sense the cave all about her, almost like a malevolent presence, as behind the others she stumbled out into it from the cramped, tortuous passageway. She could hear its echoing vastness in the hollow sounds the men’s boots made on the rocky floor. The powerful beams from the miners’ lamps in the helmets they wore gave only glimpses of its immensity, and currents of air from other passages and shafts and crevices whispered across her face like some slow, menacing exhalation.

  She straightened up painfully, easing her back and neck and rubbing the bruises on her plump arms and legs. Lindy wasn’t built for wriggling through confined spaces, not like Doug and Ally, who were thin as whippets and lithe as eels. As was bloody Andrea, who was on her first ever caving outing too, but was loudly loving every minute of it.

  Lindy wasn’t. She hated the darkness and the clammy damp and the dank smell and the crushing feeling of having hundreds of tons of earth and rocks above her head. She was muddy and wet and cold and here in the main chamber it seemed colder than ever, a deathly ice-house chill that seemed to go right through to her bones.

  From the dense shadows above, water dripped through a billion trillion pores in the limestone, a perpetual rain which had formed pale crystalline pillars or was dropping now with a sharp, delicate ringing sound into the clear stream coursing along the channel it had carved out for itself over millions and millions of years. Lindy couldn’t get her mind round that sort of time.

  Doug and Ally whooped as they reached it, prancing round boulders scattered on the floor like building bricks after a giant toddler’s tantrum, their lamps throwing distorted silhouettes on to the craggy walls. Andrea jumped down neatly to join them, and their high excited voices awoke echoes long-dead and better, Lindy thought uneasily, left undisturbed.

  She shuddered. Like a cathedral, Doug had told her lyrically when she’d met him at the End of Year Dinner, like some great beautiful temple of nature, where you could feel as if you just might be the first person in the world ever to step into this secret place. Awesome, he had told her as he chatted her into signing up for the University Caving Club the following year. Looking into his bright blue eyes, she had decided there and then that she would follow him, if not to the ends, then certainly to the bottom of the earth. Now she wished she’d gone down whenever term finished and was safely at home in Middlesex instead of in this dreadful place.

  She couldn’t complain that he’d hyped it. It reminded her more than anything of the description of Hell in Paradise Lost, which she’d done for A level. Something about rocks and caves and shades of death.

  Still, here at least you could stand up and walk normally, which was more than you could do in the passage she had just struggled through, where the ground rose and the roof came down without warning and you had to crawl into terrifying narrow funnels through puddles and even little streams. Or else the walls came together so that you were squeezing painfully sideways between rocks greasy with the sweat of damp while cold drips from above landed suddenly on your face like the touch of a clammy finger on your skin, but you couldn’t scream, because this was what Doug and Ally had casually described as an afternoon stroll, and bloody Andrea was greeting each new torment with fetching cries of delight.

  So, gritting her teeth, she managed to say, ‘Brilliant!’ when Doug came back to ask her what she thought of it and help her across the stream where she was hesitantly looking for a way to cross. She joined in the laughter when Ally made a joke, but as the laughter reverberated away into the dim recesses it seemed to take on a mocking life of its own. Never, in all her eighteen years, had Lindy felt so coldly and unreasoningly afraid.

  The others were moving to the far end of the cave and she hurried clumsily to join them, wincing as she caught her ankle on an unnoticed projection. With his torch, Doug was proprietorially highlighting the curious profiles to be picked out in the chemical streaks on the walls and the hollow straw stalactites hanging like icicles from the roof.

  And there, right at the back of the cave was the Cataract. He had told them about it, a sort of petrified waterfall spilling from a hole near the roof, its sculpted folds like crumpled yellowing lace.

  Yes, it was awesome, and beautiful too, Lindy acknowledged, in a bleak, inhuman, scary sort of way. She had to compress her lips to trap the wail, ‘Can we go back now?’ which was threatening to escape.

  ‘God, this is just so, like – well, I don’t know. Mind-blowing!’ Andrea was squealing. ‘It’s sensa
tional – how come you didn’t tell me it would be like this?’

  Lindy could see, even though his helmet shadowed his face, that Doug was beaming fatuously. Ally, showing off, had scaled a rough pile of rocks to shine his torch behind the Cataract. As it sprang into gleaming life, every flow-edge and ripple glistening, even Lindy gasped and Andrea shrieked. A thousand eldritch shrieks chimed a spectral chorus.

  Ally had vanished behind the curtain of calcite. ‘Hey Doug,’ he called, his voice a little muffled, ‘have you been up here? Did you know there’s a passage behind?’

  ‘Really?’ Doug went up the rocks like a Barbary ape, and disappeared too.

  ‘Gosh, isn’t this thrilling?’ Andrea gave a giggle of excitement, and Lindy repeated hollowly, ‘Thrilling!’ You didn’t need to be reading psychology to work out what would happen next.

  When they reappeared, Ally called down, ‘We’re just going to do a quick recce. There’s quite a wide lead-off back here—’

  ‘Of course, it may not go anywhere, or there may be a shaft, or water.’ Doug’s excitement was obvious. ‘We just want to check it out for the Club next year, OK? We won’t be long – you two just wait here—’

  ‘Forget it!’ Andrea was already nimbly scaling the steep blocks. ‘Less of the girlie stuff. Lindy and I are right there with you, aren’t we, Lindy?’

  Doug, looking down at Lindy standing unhappily below, said doubtfully, ‘Well, I don’t know – it could get a bit iffy—’

  Andrea followed his gaze, then said contemptuously, ‘Oh, if Lindy doesn’t fancy it she can just wait here, can’t she?’

  Wait alone here, in this sinister temple to who knew what dark deity, with the shadows encroaching on her as the light from the others’ lamps disappeared behind the Cataract?

  ‘No, no, I’m coming,’ Lindy said hastily.

  ‘Fine, why not?’ Ally’s tone was a little too hearty, but Doug came down to help her – well, haul her up as she scrabbled awkwardly for footholds.