by Steve Mosby
And there it was. The sick feeling at the back of my head.
Something is wrong here.
Easy to dismiss it as confirmation bias, of course, because in this case we already knew a little about what was wrong. My gaze drifted to the half-demolished garage on the side of the house, where the remains of the crashed car were still quite spectacularly embedded. The collision had taken out a good quarter of the external structure, and the roof had collapsed towards the front, so that the garage looked a little like it was frowning at what had been done to it.
‘What are you thinking, Will?’ Emma said.
‘I’m not thinking anything yet.’
She sighed quietly to herself. Emma and I had been partners for years now, and she was used to me. My introspection, my moods. They were well known enough for them to be considered a character trait of sorts throughout the department. I was not particularly well liked. Apparently.
‘You’re not going to get weird on me, are you?’ Emma said.
I stared at the house.
‘It looks like a face,’ I said.
‘What?’ Emma leaned over and peered out. ‘The house? I suppose so. But all houses look a bit like faces, don’t they?’
‘Pareidolia.’
‘Exactly.’
Which was true, but that effect was especially striking here, and for a moment it was all I could see. The pale grey outside walls transformed into dead skin; the open door became a thin mouth; the pinpoint lights in the upstairs windows were pupils that seemed to be staring at me from the centre of bright red eyes. The house looked like a head half buried in the ground, crying out in pain or anger.
And then the effect was gone again.
‘I’m not going to get weird on you,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe you. But let’s go and see what we’ve got.’
Outside the car, Emma led the way. She usually did, though we were equal rank. The fact that we were both in our mid thirties was one of the very few commonalities we shared, the others being that we were both tall and slim. But Emma was appealing and confident. People warmed to her easily, and she had the kind of relaxed charisma that pointed towards promotion and a career much higher up the chain than partnering the likes of me. It’s safe to say I was neither charismatic nor appealing. Where Emma strode, I tended to slump as I walked, subconsciously minimising my presence; I didn’t like to be noticed. Emma said once that even when it was sunny I looked like I was pulling my coat around me against the rain. You look like everything’s weighing you down on some philosophical level, she’d said. I’d told her she might be right. And like it’s always making you miserable. And again.
Approaching the house, I noticed there were already reporters assembled on the opposite side of the street.
‘Can you tell us about the woman, Detective?’
A TV crew was setting up a little way down, but the ones closest to us were mostly just hacks for the local papers. Well, I vaguely recognised the guy who had just spoken, and he certainly was. Almost instinctively, I moved to the far side of Emma, pulling that metaphorical coat around myself.
‘No,’ Emma said cheerfully. ‘We’ve literally been on the scene for ten seconds, Joe. With your keen journalistic eye, I’d have thought you’d have seen us arrive.’
Her response got us a sneer from Joe. There’s always a bit of a dance between police and reporters – a push and pull of information – but it’s generally good-humoured. You all understand the music, and God knows you’ve practised the moves often enough, and so with some of them you can joke around and banter a bit. Not with Joe, by the looks of things.
‘Apparently it’s Amanda,’ he said.
‘If you say so.’
‘Word is that she’s in hospital.’
‘That’s more than one word, Joe,’ Emma called over her shoulder. ‘You’ll probably need to watch that when filing copy.’
‘Word is she’s not going to make it.’
Despite myself, I stopped at that and turned around slowly.
Joe looked pleased to have got a reaction, and looking at him, I didn’t think it was just from scoring a hit on me. He actually seemed pleased that the story might have an unhappy ending. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to say or do, but I found myself taking a step back towards him.
Emma placed a firm hand on my arm.
‘Let’s keep moving, Will.’
I stared at Joe for a moment longer, then turned around again and followed her towards the officer guarding the cordon.
‘What exactly were you going to do just then?’ she said.
‘I have absolutely no idea. Maybe try to make him understand he was talking about someone’s life.’
‘Joe doesn’t care, trust me.’
‘There’s always a first time.’ I frowned. ‘Anyway, how come he knows who this woman is and we haven’t been told?’
‘Finger on the pulse, our Joe. Plus, you can’t expect anyone to tell us anything, can you? We’re only in charge here, after all.’
‘True.’
Something about what Joe had said bothered me, though. It was almost subconscious, the same way it might register when someone said your name on the other side of a loud, crowded room but when you looked across you couldn’t tell who. And the bad feeling remained. After we’d showed our IDs at the cordon, I stared up at the house again and couldn’t shake the sensation that it was watching me.
‘I want to see the garage first,’ I said.
‘Naturally.’
We walked along the front of the house until we reached the garage at the side. Rubble and glass were scattered over the short driveway in front. Most of the debris, of course, would be inside. From the back, the car itself looked surprisingly fine, although enough of the passenger side was visible to see the damage there, along with a portion of the crumpled bonnet.
The car was – or had been – a black Honda that had been reported stolen yesterday. Just after eleven o’clock this morning, a patrol car had spotted it, and when they put their siren on, the driver had decided to attempt to get away instead of pulling over. He’d been lucky not to kill anyone during a five-minute high-speed pursuit through the streets, but when he’d approached the corner here, he’d finally lost control, careered off the road, and ploughed straight into the edge of this garage, taking a chunk of the structure down with him.
The driver himself was in a stable condition. He had been placed under arrest and then taken to hospital.
Along with the woman.
I moved to the side of the crashed car now and knelt down beside it, just as the first officer at the scene had done. In the immediate aftermath of the collision, nobody had emerged from the house to inspect the damage. The officer had wanted to make sure that there was no one inside the garage. But there had been.
I peered in. A bare bulb was hanging from a cord, lopsided due to the tilt of the roof. The two walls that stood intact were lined with metal shelves, and my gaze passed over piles of tools, irons and heaters, cans of petrol and paint, unidentifiable clusters of metal pieces. It looked like the garage of a mechanic, the idea supported by the concrete pit in the centre. That was where the attending officer, upon turning on his torch and shining it through the exposed corner, had seen the naked woman, gagged and strapped into a home-made wooden pillory, staring back at him in shock.
Word is that she’s in hospital.
Word is she’s not going to make it.
We were less well informed than the dregs of the local media, as I had no idea right now how the woman was doing. All I knew from the initial report was that she had been severely dehydrated when found, and that she’d suffered obvious and serious injuries.
My gaze moved from the now empty pit back to the racks on the walls. The tools there. The irons. Breathing in, I could smell an awful congealed stink of bodily fluids.
‘SOCO?’ I said quietly.
‘On their way.’
It was time to go inside the house, but
I continued to stare into the garage for a moment longer. Nothing was moving in there, but the stillness felt strange and heavy. Portentous.
Something terrible has happened here.
Of course, I knew enough by then for that feeling to be entirely justified. Except that I didn’t. Not really.
I had no idea how much worse it was about to get.
Three
As we carefully explored the ground floor of the house, we got word through about the owner. His name was John Edward Blythe. He was forty-two years old and he actually did work as a mechanic, at a large chain garage a few miles from the house. Officers were en route there now to arrest him.
‘Nice place,’ Emma said.
‘You think it’s nice?’
‘No, of course not. You need to work on your sarcasm detection.’
Excluding the kitchen, there were two large rooms downstairs. Both of them were filthy and cluttered with so much bric-a-brac that it was actually difficult to move about. There was an unnerving lack of organisation to it all. While a normal house might have had a lounge and a dining room, it wasn’t remotely clear here which was intended to be which, or if either of them was. In one room, a settee had been placed at an angle, facing a bare wall. In the other, battered armchairs were clustered backwards around a pillar of weathered boxes that stretched almost to the ceiling. There were old wooden chairs balanced upside down, like a bar after closing time, and piles of magazines arranged in haphazard patterns. Everything smelled musty and damp. Faded canvas prints of nature scenes had been tacked to the walls, but the angles were all skewed, as though the house had leaned to one side, or the person placing them hadn’t really understood what pictures were for.
It only exacerbated the feeling I’d experienced when we’d arrived here. While the house seemed well maintained enough from the exterior, that was purely a matter of appearance – a careful act of fitting in with the neighbourhood as much as possible. Behind the front door, everything was not just a mess, but almost alien. If the outside had reminded me momentarily of a head half submerged in the ground, then the interior offered a disturbing insight into the thoughts that went on in that head. Disordered, distracted, uncaring. A confused attempt at normality that had gone deeply wrong.
As we walked into the kitchen, Emma seemed to read my mind.
‘It looks like madness, doesn’t it?’ she said.
‘Looks like it. Smells like it.’ Feels like it too, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Although by this point, I thought that Emma wouldn’t have disagreed with me.
Flies buzzed around the unwashed plates and dishes piled on the kitchen counter and lining the floor around the edges of the cabinets. The sink was full to the brim with filthy grey water. Like the rest of the downstairs, the room didn’t seem like it had ever been cleaned, or the window opened. There was an unpleasant meaty smell in the air.
Emma gestured around the room.
‘What kind of person lives like this?’
‘John Blythe, apparently.’ I checked my phone for updates. There was nothing so far. I put the phone away. ‘Hopefully we’ll get to find out in person shortly.’
‘Cellar door?’ Emma said. ‘Or a pantry?’
I looked across at where she was pointing. There was a door in the far wall, directly opposite the one that led into the attached garage. Most of the white paint had flecked off it, leaving swathes of bare black wood; it looked like something that had charred in a bonfire. The unease inside me deepened.
‘Let’s find out.’
I snapped on a pair of gloves and approached the door. Just before I grasped the cold handle, I imagined a slight tingle of electricity in my hand. When I opened the door, a waft of old air escaped from the stairwell beyond, and I grimaced.
‘Cellar,’ I said.
The stench came next. It was the same meaty, unwashed aroma that permeated the kitchen, but much more intense than that. And on some primal level, I understood. Whatever was down there was the source of it. The rotting heart of the place.
Something is terribly wrong here.
Emma said, ‘Oh God. Can you. . . ?’
‘Smell it? Yes.’
There was a light switch on the nearest wall beyond the door. I flicked it on, and a bulb came to life at the top of the stairs, the cord wrapped in strings of dust. Lights had come on below me as well. I could hear a faint, ominous buzzing sound emanating from the cellar.
‘Will, we should wait for SOCO.’
I nodded. We should. But I couldn’t stop now. I stepped through the doorway and stood at the top of the dusty stone staircase. The house felt more alive than ever, and I couldn’t shake the ridiculous feeling that it recognised me somehow. As though, below the surface of the world, two cogs had come together and were now turning in unison.
With every step down, the smell grew stronger. I knew what it was. Old meat and decay, but with an added element that wasn’t a smell so much as recognition on a deeper level. I knew full well what I was descending towards, if not what form it might take.
It still wasn’t immediately apparent when I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the cellar. It was a small, square space, and in comparison to the first floor of the house it was relatively clean and tidy. There was a mattress beside the bottom of the steps. As hard as it was to believe, perhaps John Blythe slept down here sometimes. Otherwise, the room was empty. But as I looked over to the far side, I saw another door in the wall there.
Emma joined me at the bottom of the steps, her arm across her face.
‘Oh God, the stench.’
I didn’t reply. Instead, I walked over to the closed door. An old black key had been left in the lock. I turned it, then pulled the door open slowly. There was a smaller, secondary part to the cellar beyond, and as I stepped inside, I saw what had been stored in there.
Barrels.
There were four of them. They were made of opaque white plastic, their black lids clipped around the top with enormous metal clasps. All the same size – probably about ten gallons each. And I could see enough through the plastic to tell that at least three of them were full of something.
I crouched down in front of them.
‘Will. . .’
‘I’m not going to touch them.’
I tilted my head slightly, peering at the obscured shapes within and trying to make sense of them. There was no light in this second room, and I was casting too much of a shadow over them. After a moment, I pulled out a pen torch and played the light across the plastic.
I forced myself not to recoil. This close, the things inside looked like a crowd of people pressed up behind a blurred-glass door, contorted around each other. As the light moved here and there, I made out a web of hair swirled against the inside, a splayed hand pushed against the plastic, the fingers dissolved at the edges. . .
It felt like the heart of the house was beating too quickly now.
Apparently it’s Amanda.
I’d been so intent on forgetting the reporter outside and getting to the scene that I hadn’t chased the thought – the name. Now, though, it clicked into place. I remembered where I had heard it before, and I understood what I was seeing in front of me right now.
I stood up suddenly as the consequences unfolded in my head. John Edward Blythe was not here. Our best chance was to arrest him at work, but we didn’t know for sure he was even there.
‘We need to get to the press outside.’ I moved quickly past Emma, back through the cellar, almost running up the staircase. ‘We need a press blackout on this whole scene.’
Too late, of course.
Way too late by then.
Four
It doesn’t matter who gets him.
That was part of what I was telling myself two hours later, when Emma and I were sitting in the office of DCI Graham Reeves, our direct superior.
It doesn’t have to be you.
Which was a good thing, because right now I didn’t think it was going to be me. Reeves was a thi
n, wiry man in his late fifties, with tight muscles and salt-and-pepper hair that he kept shaved neatly to grade one. He was not beloved throughout the department. His mood could most correctly be judged by betting on the exact inverse of how he appeared, in that the angrier he was, the calmer he seemed – and right now, he seemed very calm indeed. That calmness was very obviously directed at Emma and me. The room was threateningly silent.
We had been joined by DI James Ferguson. He was a large man in his late forties, and he naturally slumped when sitting, like something partially solid that had been poured on to the chair. A good officer, I suppose, but very much an arch-careerist. He had led the investigation into Amanda Cassidy’s disappearance, and I very much doubted he would want to relinquish it now that it had exploded into the kind of case you could pin a promotion on.
Without speaking, Reeves turned the monitor on his desk around to face the three of us, but specifically Emma and me. An open internet window showed rolling coverage from a news website. There were plenty to choose from right now, I was sure. This one was being streamed live from a press helicopter, and showed footage of officers moving in and out of John Blythe’s property. A red banner at the bottom of the screen proclaimed: AMANDA CASSIDY FOUND ALIVE. HAS THE RED RIVER KILLER BEEN IDENTIFIED? The volume was muted, but I didn’t need an audio commentary to understand the message. Reeves was staring at us with blank, almost dead eyes. I wasn’t sure he was actually even breathing.
‘Well?’ he said finally.
I left it to Emma to reply. I would have done so at the best of times anyway, but right now I was distracted by a hundred different thoughts and trying hard to suppress them all – or to keep them from showing on my face, at least. I couldn’t afford to let anybody know what was going on in my head. If I did, there was a good chance I’d be removed from the investigation before it even began. And even though it didn’t matter who got him – it doesn’t have to be you – I didn’t want that.
‘The situation was out of our hands before we even arrived at the scene, sir,’ Emma said.
‘Was it now?’
