by Ben Cheetham
“Your film. If I…die…” Mr X’s eyes rolled as if he might lose consciousness, before refocusing on Julian. He forced his next words out in a gasp. “Your film will be sent to your mother, the newspapers, the police. And everything you love will be taken from you.”
“Who’ll do the sending if you’re dead?”
“Mr X.”
Julian’s face crumpled into lines of confusion. “But you’re Mr X.”
“No I’m…not.”
“Who the fuck are you then?”
“I’m nobody.”
Julian stared at the injured man as if trying to pierce his thoughts. “You’re lying.”
A repulsive sound that might’ve been laughter bubbled out of Mr X’s throat. “Am I?”
Julian grabbed the knife’s hilt, wiggled it, felt the blade scrape bone. “You’re going to tell me the truth,” he said grimly, as Mr X twitched and screamed, “about Mia, about yourself, about all of it, or I’m going to kill you.”
“Kill me and you kill yourself,” Mr X screeched, before his eyes rolled upward and he passed out. For a few seconds, his breathing continued to gurgle like a drain, then he fell silent. Julian felt for a pulse, and found it, weak and thready. Half-a-minute passed. Mr X’s eyes flickered open and looked at Julian with an expression of approval, even pride. He spoke quite clearly, as if buoyed by his feelings. “You’ve got even more potential than I thought.”
“Fuck you,” retorted Julian. He glanced warningly at the knife. “The truth.”
“Don’t be foolish. There’s no such thing as truth – at least, not the kind you’re after. There’s only perception. Now call me a fucking ambulance.”
Julian looked again at the shelves of videotapes and DVDs. His mind spoke in two voices. Your whole life, everything you hope for, everything you love will be lost, said one. Your whole life, everything you say, everything you hear will be a lie, said the other. There was a phone on the bottom shelf beside a video and DVD player. With these thoughts weighing on his breath like lead, he reached for it. “Good boy, I knew you’d see sense,” said Mr X.
Again, Mike Hill picked up on the first ring. “Have you found her?”
“No, but I don’t think you need worry, Mr Hill,” said Julian. “I think she’s okay.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was right, he wouldn’t dare go near her.”
“Who wouldn’t dare go near her?”
“What are you doing, Julian?” said Mr X.
“I’m proving you wrong. There is such a thing as truth. And I’m going to show you it.”
“Fool!” Mr X spat the word and a mouthful of blood into Julian’s face. “Stupid spoilt, rich-” He choked off into a croak. Veins popping on his throat and forehead, he forced out a hoarse whisper, “You’re finished. You might as well jump off the bridge.”
Julian wiped the back of his hand across his face. “Better that than live the life you’re offering.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked Mike.
“Nobody. There’s something I need to show you.”
“For Christ’s sake! What’s going on, Julian?”
“I can’t explain over the phone, you need to come here and see it for yourself.”
“I can’t. Eleanor might return while I’m gone.”
“Leave a note. She knows how to contact you if she needs to. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. It might be the biggest story you ever come across.”
“Where are you?”
Julian explained where he was.
“But that’s in the middle of the forest. What are you doing there?”
“I’m at a house.”
“I didn’t think anybody lived out there.”
“They don’t, not anymore. No more questions. Are you coming?”
Mike was silent a moment, doubt and unease vying with his professional curiosity. Curiosity won out. “Okay, Julian.”
Julian hung up and looked at Mr X, his hands slowly clenching and unclenching. He looked at his dad. Blood billowed like a dark red storm cloud around the corpse. His hands clenched harder and faster. Pale to his lips, he jerked his gaze back to Mr X.
Mr X’s pupils shrank with fear in their dirty-brown irises. Then he caught hold of himself, and his nostrils flared. “Go on. Do it. Do it!” His voice was defiant, almost goading.
As if someone had struck his elbow, Julian’s hand shot towards the knife’s hilt, but stopped just short of it. For several seconds, it wavered back and forth as if caught between two opposing forces. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, he snatched it back. Mr X’s leering, contemptuous grin returned as Julian rose and approached the shelves. Names and dates were written on the spines of the videotapes and DVDs, which were seemingly arranged in no particular order. He searched fruitlessly for his disc and any discs dating to the day of Mia’s disappearance. “You won’t find your disc,” said Mr X, guessing in part what he was looking for. “And even if you did, it wouldn’t do you any good. I told you, it’s just a copy.”
“I think you’re lying. There was no time to make copies.”
“Maybe you’re right, but even if I am lying you still can’t leave me alive. Not unless you want that reporter to find out what’s behind your mask.”
“I’m not afraid of showing people the truth of myself.”
Mr X gurgled with harsh laughter, blowing bloody bubbles. “Who’s lying now?”
“I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I agree. All of us here do,” Mr X said softly, and with what seemed genuine sympathy, as if they were surrounded by phantoms with which he and Julian shared an intimate, sorrowful kinship. “We accept you for what you are, but no one else will. You’ll be an outcast, worse than dead. Is that really what you want?”
“I…” Julian’s voice faltered.
“It’s still not too late, Julian. Ring Mike Hill, stop him from coming here.”
“The truth...” Julian swayed as if he might fall over. “I’m going to show you…”
“How are you going to show me the truth?” Mr X’s voice grew stronger, as if feeding on Julian’s weakness. “By killing me? By destroying yourself? That’s not the truth, Julian, that’s just a different kind of lie.”
Julian clutched the shelves for support, his eyes moving back and forth along them. Most of the names were unfamiliar. Some he seemed to vaguely recognise. Two were all too familiar. The first of these didn’t surprise him. After everything Mr X had said, he’d guessed he’d find Tom Benson’s name. The second caused his breathing to stop momentarily. “Michael Ridgway,” he murmured. “The A1 Murderer.”
“One of our more illustrious members,” boasted Mr X.
Julian looked at him as if he doubted his sanity. “He was a serial killer.”
“No, merely a serial abductor. To my knowledge, Michael only ever killed one girl. The rest he sold to us. Funny thing is, the police charged him with the murders of all the girls except the one he actually killed.”
“Susan Carter.”
“Once again, you’ve impressed me, Julian. How did you know that?”
“My grandma tried to help her parents find her body.”
Mr X nearly choked on a bubble of mocking laughter. “Ah yes, of course, your psychic granny.”
“So Susan Carter and all those other girls died here.”
“I’ll let you find out for yourself what happened to them.” Mr X rolled his eyes at the shelves. “They’re all up there somewhere.”
A sudden thought struck Julian, shaking his certainty that Eleanor was alive and unmolested. “You said you never go near girls like Susan Carter.”
“I didn’t tell Michael to take Susan. He took her on an impulse, because he saw her and wanted her. I was angry. But I couldn’t stay angry with him for long. He was such a nice man.”
“A nice man!” Julian’s voice was rank with incredulous revulsion. Reassured, however, he removed Michael Ridgway’s disc and, very carefully, as if i
t was something fragile and precious, inserted it into the DVD player. The TV flickered into life, showing the adjoining room. Michael Ridgway was pacing agitatedly up and down beside the bed. He was middle-aged, balding, paunchy. Nobody out of the ordinary. Nobody you’d give a second glance. He stopped pacing when the chauffeur entered with his hands on Susan Carter’s shoulders, guiding her in front of him. The chauffeur closed the door, leaving her alone with Michael Ridgway.
Michael Ridgway looked at Susan Carter and she looked back at him. A minute passed, two minutes. Neither of them moved, spoke, or even seemed to breathe. Julian might’ve thought the DVD was faulty, if it hadn’t been for Susan Carter’s eyes. They were alive with fear. It seeped out of them, seemed to seep right out of the screen into his heart, pleading for help, for mercy. Suddenly, as if acting on some silent signal known only to himself, Michael Ridgway lashed out, hitting Susan Carter full in the face. Without a sound, she collapsed to the carpet and lay with her eyes closed, motionless as a doll. Michael Ridgway stared down at her a moment, his eyes blank and dead, like a shark’s. Then, straddling her waist, he hit her again, and again, and again, mechanically, relentlessly. To Julian, the beating seemed to go on for hours. He flinched at every blow, but didn’t turn away from the screen. Something was building inside him, something he needed. Finally, Michael Ridgway stopped and stood off Susan Carter. Except she wasn’t recognisable as Susan Carter anymore. Now she was recognisable only as something dead. A piece of meat. Michael Ridgway’s chest heaved, but his expression was calm, almost serene, as he looked at himself in the mirror, then looked through the mirror directly into Julian’s eyes. There was no spark of connection. The eyes were as unrecognisable to Julian as those that’d glared out of his Grandma Alice’s possessed face.
The screen went blank. But Julian continued to stare at it, trembling, pressure building inside him until he couldn’t contain it any longer. In an eruption of white-hot fury, he lunged at Mr X and drove the knife into him fully to the hilt. A scream croaked in Mr X’s throat. His body spasmed into a tight, foetal ball. Then he lay silent and limp.
After that, in a kind of semi-conscious frenzy, Julian started tearing the house apart, searching vainly for his DVD or any clues to Mia’s whereabouts. In one room, he found a trunk of dildos, lubricants, whips, chains, leather wrist and ankle restraints, and other sex paraphernalia. In another, he shuddered at the discovery of a cupboard neatly stacked with latex gloves, duct tape and plastic wrap. He was in the kitchen, flinging stuff out of a cubby-hole so that he could get to a trapdoor, when Mike Hill arrived.
“Hello,” Mike called from the hallway, his voice uncertain, perhaps even a little afraid. “Julian, are you there?”
“In here,” Julian shouted, yanking at the trapdoor’s handle.
Mike gasped when he saw Julian. “What happened to you?”
“Help me open this.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Quivering tendons stood out on Julian’s neck as he strained to lift the trapdoor. He pitched backward as the handle slipped through his sweaty, blood-stained hands. “For fuck’s sake, help me.”
“No. Not until you tell me whose house this is, and whose car that is all smashed up outside, and why there’s a dead dog in some kind of-”
“There’s no time,” Julian interrupted breathlessly. “Don’t you understand? She might be down there.”
“Who’s she?”
“Mia!”
Mike’s eyes widened. “Mia Bradshaw?”
“Yes. Now help me.”
They both bent to grasp the handle. Faces reddening, arms trembling, they lifted the thick, wooden trapdoor. Stairs led down into darkness. There was a switch inside the hatch. Julian flicked it and a bulb flickered into life down below, illuminating a dirty concrete floor. The stairs led to a large, low-ceilinged cellar full of exactly what you might expect to find in such a place – a well-stocked wine rack, a tool bench, some dusty old furniture piled in a corner, a row of shelves crammed with cleaning products, rusting cans of paint, boxes, and glass jars full of nails and screws. Julian’s eyes scoured the room. He rushed over to the furniture, and started flinging chairs and tables aside. They concealed nothing.
“There’s nothing down here,” said Mike. “It’s just an ordinary cellar.”
“That’s exactly what he wants you to think.”
“Who?”
Without replying, Julian turned to the shelves and swept his arm along them, sending their contents crashing to the floor.
“Stop, Julian.” Mike caught hold of Julian’s arm and pulled him away from the shelves.
“Get your fucking hands off me.” Julian wrenched his arm free, hitting the light-bulb with his hand. Shadows whirled wildly around the room. The bulb flickered and Mia’s face leaped at him out of the momentary darkness, pale and blood streaked. With a gasp, he recoiled against the tool-bench.
“Okay, enough is enough,” Mike snapped. “I want to know what’s going on, and I want to know now.”
Julian wasn’t listening, he was staring at the floor, eyes narrowed. There were parallel scuff marks on the concrete, as if the tool bench had recently been moved. He dropped to his knees and felt around under the bench. His fingers detected what was hidden to his eyes. “There’s another trapdoor here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Help me move this bench.”
Julian and Mike dragged the bench away from the wall, revealing a recessed metal handle. They heaved the trapdoor open, releasing a warm puff of air as fetid as the breath of a nightmare. Mike put the back of his hand to his mouth. “It smells like something died-” He broke off as the full import of his words swept over him.
Again, stairs led down. Again, there was a switch inside the hatch. Again, a light came on when Julian flicked it, illuminating a concrete floor. As Julian started forward, Mike said, “Maybe you shouldn’t go down there. Maybe we should call the police.”
“No police,” Julian retorted, scowling. “Not until we know for sure what’s down there.”
The smell grew stronger with every step they descended, until the air seemed thick with it. Julian could hear Mike swallowing hard behind him. Julian felt no urge to vomit. After what he’d witnessed upstairs, it would take more than a bad smell to sicken him. “What the hell is this?” Mike said in a low, nauseated voice, when they reached the second cellar.
A table stood adjacent to the foot of the stairs, its surface cluttered with unused hypodermic needles and brown medicine bottles. Several pairs of police-style handcuffs and leg-shackles dangled from nails above the table. Six human-sized cages lined one of the walls. In each of the first four cages there was a camping-bed and a bucket. It was too gloomy to see what was in the final two cages. Julian picked up one of the bottles and read its label. “Diamorphine.”
“Heroin,” said Mike, taking the bottle from him. “Looks like it was stolen from a hospital.”
Julian squinted into the darkness, thinking of Joanne Butcher. “Heroin for an overdose nobody would find suspicious.”
“More like for getting girls hooked on, then making them work for a fix. A sex trafficking operation, that’s what this is, isn’t it?”
“This is The Society of Dirty Hearts.”
“What’s The Society-”
“There’s someone in the last cage,” exclaimed Julian, darting towards the rear of the cellar. A dimly visible figure lay on a camp-bed, swaddled in blankets, head buried beneath a pillow. Julian’s voice trembled in the gloom, half fearful, half hopeful. “Mia!” The figure didn’t move. He frantically rattled the cage’s padlocked door, calling Mia’s name again. Still no response.
Mike’s lighter sparked to life. The wavering flame extinguished Julian’s hope. “It’s not her,” he said, staring hollow-eyed with disappointment at the wisps of red hair curling out from under the pillow.
“Who is it then?”
A name came into J
ulian’s head. Ginger. “We need to get this door open.”
“Wait here.” Mike dashed away. He returned after half-a-minute with a hammer. It took ten minutes to smash the padlock open. The figure on the bed never once stirred. Julian ducked into the cage and removed the pillow. As he’d suspected, it was Ginger. She looked dead. But when Mike felt for a pulse in her wrist, he said, “She’s alive…barely.”
“What do you think’s wrong with her?”
By way of explanation, Mike pointed at a row of fresh needle marks on Ginger’s inner forearm. “Help me move her. She needs to get to a hospital.”
Looking at Ginger’s sunken, pale bluish face, Julian felt no antipathy. But neither did he feel any sympathy. You were right, he thought, I’ll never understand. “Okay, but first I have to show you something upstairs.”
“There’s no time. She could die.” As Julian turned and headed for the stairs, Mike added, “Do you hear me?”
“I hear.” Julian started up the stairs.
Mike pursued him, catching hold of his arm. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you care?”
“Yes I care. That’s why I need to show you this.”
“Show me what? What could be more important than that woman’s life?”
“The truth,” said Julian. “Only the truth.”
Chapter 24
Julian scanned the columns of figures on his computer screen, silently tallying. He wrote a number down and stared at it, unable to tear his eyes away until the whistle blew for knocking off. He took a bottle of whisky out of his desk drawer, poured himself a measure, swallowed it, and poured another. He tensed at a knock at his office door. “Come in,” he said in a low voice, almost as if he didn’t want to be heard. He drew a little breath of relief when Jake entered. Not for the first time, Julian was struck by the change in his appearance. He was barely recognisable as the boy who’d staggered off into the forest all those months ago, bruised and bloodied. His shaved hair had grown out. His face was fuller, healthy-looking. He wore the blue overalls of a machinist.
Jake glanced at the drink in Julian’s hand. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”
