I had to be here doing this and that’s all there was to it. I could offer no other explanation.
The front door was open. I went inside, the large entrance hall looking like a capacious cave in the gloomy light. I called out.
‘Joseph? Sharon?’
But I received no reply. I touched my coat and felt the weight of the gun next to my thudding heart. I wandered through the ground floor rooms and all remained quiet and still. Deathly silent, like a mausoleum. I could hear the soughing sound of the sea beyond the cliffs, the sounds of the waves like great sighs as they fell onto the beach. A gull screamed like a forlorn spirit in the cold sky above.
I heard the clink of glass. Like a tiny hammer hitting stone. It came from the kitchens. I made my way cautiously down the hall towards the kitchen door and pushed it open. Sitting at a brushed-chrome worktop, three bottles of wine lined up like red-coated soldiers in front of him, was Joseph Boothman. He had his head buried in his arms, as if asleep. His back rose and fell to his steady breathing.
‘Joseph,’ I said.
He looked up, his face haggard, his eyes wet as if he’d been crying heavily for a very long time. ‘I’ve been trying to get drunk,’ he said. ‘But I can’t make it happen.’
‘I know what’s been going on,’ I said, moving closer to him, seeing my blurred and distorted face reflected in the shiny metal surface of a kitchen cupboard. There was the smell of old cooking oil hanging in the air.
He regarded me silently for a minute or so. ‘Mark is dead,’ he said, and I saw his eyes begin to well up again. ‘My brother is dead…’
‘Did you kill him?’ I asked. The question didn’t seem unusual and I had no compunction in asking it.
He studied the bottle in front of him, picked it up and took a great swig from the neck. ‘I suppose I did.’
Again I felt the raging fires of my anger stoking up inside me, and I took out the gun and held it but inches from Joseph’s drooping head. ‘I ought to kill you, too, Joseph.’
‘Go ahead,’ he said, taking another drink. It spilled down his chin like thin red blood and splashed onto the worktop. ‘It’s what I deserve.’
I tried to control my breathing. My heart dashed itself against my ribcage like a demented cat.
‘You deal in trafficked girls, that right?’ I accused. He remained silent. I prodded his temple with the end of the gun.
‘Go ahead, pull the trigger.’
‘Girls who are vulnerable in some way, lonely, run away from home, in need of love and attention. Mark managed to link the disappearance of young girls, going back quite a lengthy period, to bands that were playing at the time. He also figured out Rusty Steele had been in each band at the time. If it wasn’t so despicable I’d say it was a clever way of covering up your tracks. But just to make it more difficult to make the connection, every now and again, Rusty quits one band and either joins or sets up another band, effectively hiding what’s going on and making it very difficult to link any disappearance with one single group. But Mark and the investigator he employed eventually made that connection.’
‘Good old Mark,’ he said, raising the bottle.
‘But it’s not just Rusty, is it? There’s an entire network that works together in order to make this happen. Firstly, you’ve got two guys who scout out the locality, sourcing likely young women. They get friendly with them, make out they’re going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to them. They tell these girls that they know this band, and would they like free tickets to a gig and passes to go backstage to see the band after the show? That right so far?’
Joseph licked his lower lip. ‘Maybe.’
‘Young, impressionable, vulnerable – they jump at the chance. So they go backstage, and Rusty Steele – maybe others in the group, too – vet them, see which would be the pick of the bunch. Girls from out of town, girls that might not be missed or easily traced back to the band. Maybe the girls have drink or drug problems, no family to bother about them or take an interest in their disappearance. They’re plied with booze first, and given all the attention they’ve ever craved and never had. They’re made to feel special, sometimes for the first time in their lives, to feel important, to feel wanted and loved. Then you give them the drugs, if they aren’t already on them before they get to you. Before they know it they’re losing control, there are threats of violence if they don’t go along with things. They get beaten up if they don’t. They can’t escape.’ I took out a sheet of paper from my pocket, tossed it in front of him. ‘Recognise that?’
He smoothed it out with his hand on the steel surface of the worktop. Spilt wine soaked into one corner. ‘Why don’t you tell me? You’re going to anyway.’
‘It’s part of an architect’s plan for The Bay hotel. It’s the cellars, right?’ He said nothing. I pushed the gun harder into his temple. ‘Right?’
‘If you say so.’ He drank from the bottle again.
I grabbed the bottle from his hand and threw it against a wall. It smashed, the sound disconcertingly loud, the wine running down the wallpaper. ‘I do say so!’ I said. ‘I didn’t make the connection with the Bay at first, nor work out why young women always seemed to disappear in the winter months. This plan told me. You use the cellars to keep the girls locked away for a while, a stopping-off place till they’re sufficiently drugged up to be passed on as sex slaves and prostitutes, disappearing into cities in the UK, into London, all over Europe. I couldn’t work out why they seemed to go missing in the winter. But it was obvious really. That’s when business in the hotel is running at its lowest, all but deserted. Less chance of anyone accidentally stumbling on your little scheme. But there’s not really much chance of that, is there? Because the access to the cellars are through rear doors that supposedly haven’t been used since Victorian times when the hotel was a house. And the cellars are located deep down. Even if the girls could make a noise it’s hardly likely they’d be heard, is it?’
‘Go ahead, pull the trigger,’ he demanded.
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Why? Why do you do this?’
‘Why does anyone do anything? Love, I guess…’
‘Love? That’s perverted!’ I cried.
‘The things we do for love…’ he sang hollowly.
‘Like killing Mark’s girlfriend?’
He eyed me, his soulless smile fading. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. She wasn’t called Carol, was she? That was to try and put me off the scent. What was her real name, the woman you and Mark got involved with, the one you killed?’
‘She was called Jeanette,’ he mumbled. ‘She was called Jeanette Gardener.’ His eyes closed and he drew in a rasping breath.
’You killed her, didn’t you? OK, so somehow you pointed the blame in Mark’s direction and he nearly ended up going to jail for it, but it was you who killed her. Let me guess; she came to see your band, except it was you playing the part of Rusty Steele back then. But you do a bad thing. You let this girl get too close to you – maybe you even felt something for her – she somehow got to know about what you were doing and you were afraid she would uncover it, so you killed her.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he growled.
‘But you were behind it,’ I said. ‘Somehow, somewhere, your hand was in it, deny that.’
He bent his head and closed his eyes. He looked exhausted. His frame shook involuntarily, I don’t know why. ‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter anymore.’
‘Doesn’t matter?’ I felt my anger boiling up again, my finger tightening alarmingly on the trigger. ‘You killed someone. You tried to make it look like your brother did it. And you killed him! You killed your brother!’
That moment was as close as it came to me pulling the trigger.
‘I did not kill him!’ he fired.
‘How does Sharon fit into all this?’
‘Leave her out of this. She doesn’t know anything,’ he said.
‘She’s got to know something. How can you keep this so
rt of thing secret from her all these years? She was the one who told me her name was Carol, when all along she knew it wasn’t. She’s covering up for you, isn’t she? Has she been threatened, too, is that it?’
’She knows nothing, I tell you!’
I clenched my teeth, breathing heavily down my nose.
‘Take me to the cellars,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Take me!’ I demanded.
Joseph rubbed his eyes and rose steadily from the worktop. ‘You won’t like what you see.’
‘Take me anyway.’
‘Let it drop, Toby. You’ll only get hurt.’
‘I’m already hurting.’
He avoided looking directly into my face. ‘It’s your call. This way,’ he said.
‘And don’t try anything stupid, Joseph. I’m warning you; if I have to use this thing, I will.’
‘You haven’t got it in you, Toby. You’re not that kind of man.’
‘I’m not the same man I was,’ I admitted coldly. ‘I don’t know what I’m capable of these days. I want to see the cellars.’
He led me down corridors to the rear of the hotel. He paused at a door, a large key in his hand.
‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.
‘We sometimes do things we never intended.’
‘Are you trying to make excuses? I think it’s too late for that now, don’t you, Joseph?’
‘I loved him, you know. In spite of everything, I loved Mark.’
‘You’ve got a strange way of showing it. Open the damn door.’
The grating sound of the key turning in the lock seemed extraordinarily loud, and at that moment I didn’t want to see what was in the cellars. I wanted to forget I knew anything at all about this sordid affair, and wished that my cosy little innocent world might have stayed just that. A walk on a beach one night. That’s how all this madness began. I didn’t just find the bones of a murdered woman; I stumbled into a mean and depraved world until then closed off to me. A world that had nothing to do with my bookshop, with my quiet, secluded life. I had no business being in it, but here I was, going down the rabbit hole and afraid I might never re-emerge.
The light at the top of the stone cellar steps was already burning, but I never thought about that at the time. The steps were steep, and Joseph in his drunken state had to reach out a number of times to prevent himself from falling. At one point I felt sure he would miss his footing and tumble down the steps. But he reached the bottom safely and turned to me.
We were in a small, square, stone-walled room, dark, dank and empty. The smell in the air reminded me of damp earth. Joseph went to a door at the far end. It was veneered in sheet steel, rust pock-marking sections of it. Beads of moisture clinging to it as if it had been sweating. There was a keyhole and two open padlocks, but no handle. Joseph pushed it open. It hadn’t been locked.
Compared to the room we were in, the inside of the next room was brightly lit by a single high-wattage bulb hanging from the ceiling. The first thing I noticed was the smell. It was the stink of unwashed human bodies, of urine and faeces, like a toilet block that hadn’t been cleaned for months. I gasped and choked back bile.
There were three beds in the cramped, bare-walled space. Two of them were empty save for soiled, crumpled sheets, a steel bucket beside each. The third had an occupant, partially covered over with a similar sheet, a woman’s bare arm, pale and snake-like hanging limply over the edge of the bed.
‘Oh my God!’ I said, putting a hand to my mouth. I felt I was going to throw up at any moment. ‘Is she dead?’
Joseph shook his head, the movement laborious. ‘No, she’s not dead yet.’
‘Yet?’
He shrugged. I motioned for him to go further into the room, to stand beside one of the empty beds. ‘Where does that lead?’ I said, indicating another metal-clad door behind him.
‘Another room like this,’ he said.
‘Anyone in it?’
‘No. It’s empty.’
I moved to the bed with the woman in it. There was a strange, chemical smell in the air as I approached, and I avoided the metal bucket at the foot of the bed, which had been used as a makeshift toilet, a foetid stench rising from it. I noticed there were fiery-red puncture marks on the woman’s arm, the veins puffy and standing proud, and a scarlet welt around her wrist as if she’d recently been released from some tight binding or other, but I didn’t expect the arm to move and I jumped back in alarm. I heard her groan quietly.
I cautiously peeled back the stained sheet that covered her face. I could see strands of greasy dark hair and I knew instantly this was the private detective, the woman called Carol.
But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It finally became clear why I was drawn here.
Because when the sheet came away fully, I was left staring at Madeline’s Parian-pale face.
21
Carol
Her eyes flicked open. They were cloudy, as if she was struggling to awake from some deep sleep. I don’t think she actually registered seeing me at first.
‘Madeline!’ I said, hardly believing what I was seeing. I reached out and touched her cheek. Her skin was cold, but she was real. She was real!
I began to think I’d been caught up in a strange dream where nothing is as it first seems, and as in a dream, in the midst of this lurid nightmare, my fervent, impossible wish had come true.
But she wasn’t blonde. She had dark hair. It threw me.
But it was Madeline’s eyes that blinked at me, Madeline’s mouth that started to open as her mind finally came into focus and she tried to speak.
‘Her name’s Madeline Carol,’ said Joseph, puncturing my dream and snapping me back to reality with a jolt. ‘The woman Mark hired. A private investigator.’
Madeline Carol. Carol was her surname!
‘What have you done to her?’ I said angrily.
‘We didn’t know who she was at first, not when Rusty brought sent her through after he met her at the gig in Exeter. She gave him a story that she was homeless, an addict, in order to get inside our operation. She put up a fight when she realised she was in too deep, many of them do, but we soon calmed her down with a few shots. Even then we didn’t know who she really was. We were processing her like we do with all the rest, but it was you that gave her away, when you came to see us after Mark had died. You told us about a private detective he’d been working with and we put two and two together.’
I pulled back the sheet. Madeline was naked beneath, bruises on her arm and upper torso. Her other arm was fastened by a leather strap to the side of the metal bed.
‘Who are you?’ she said, the words sounding as if her mouth had been full of cotton wool. ‘Get off me…. You…. Bastard…’
She attempted to fight me off, but she was desperately weak and her punch to my arm was feather-soft.
‘It’s OK,’ I said to her, ‘you’re safe now.’ I began to undo the buckle on the leather strap around her wrist. ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’ I released the binding and put my arm under her neck, lifting her head from the bed.
It all happened in a blur.
My attention was so focussed on Madeline that I was only vaguely aware of the door behind Joseph bursting open, and in the time it took for me to let go of Madeline and swing round, the figure was on me and I felt a crashing blow to my head (not for the first time, I add) that knocked me from the bed and onto the stone floor. My stitches come away and blood spurted from the gash in my head. The pain hit me like a freight train and I cried aloud in agony.
‘What are you doing, Joe?’ I heard Sharon scream. ‘What are you doing?’
I tried to stagger to my feet, blood running down my forehead and into my eyes, but I was beaten again by the rusted metal pole Sharon was wielding, and I felt a burning in my arm where it made brutal contact.
‘Stop it, Sharon!’ Joseph called, going to her.
I was aware of him grabbing the pole out of her h
and.
‘What are you doing bringing him down here?’ she screeched hysterically.
‘He knows,’ he returned. ‘He knows everything.’
She stared at me, her eyes like twin fiery balls. It was like there was a demon possessing her and staring out through her contorted face.
‘He can’t!’ she said.
‘It’s over, Sharon,’ said Joseph.
She bent down and picked up the gun that I’d let fall to the floor. She handed it over to Joseph. ‘Make sure he doesn’t move. I’ve got to take care of the girl.’
‘Sharon…’ I said weakly. I was still trapped in a nightmare where anything could happen. I couldn’t believe Sharon was involved. It just wasn’t possible. My head began to grow fuzzy. I felt on the verge of passing out, and I fought to retain a hold on consciousness.
She ignored me, pushed me aside as she leant over Madeline. I was powerless at the moment to do anything. Helplessly, I saw her reach into her pocket and take out a small box. From this she took out a syringe and filled it from a tiny glass bottle.
‘No, Sharon,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s over, I tell you.’
‘It isn’t!’ she returned. ‘I’m going to finish what I started. This little lady is going to have her overdose.’
‘And Toby? Is he going to have one, too?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning to Madeline and lifting her arm, the needle at the ready. ‘I need to do this first and then I’ll decide what to do about Toby.’
‘It has to end, Sharon. It’s out. It’s all out. We’re finished. You’re finished.’
‘We can still clear this up,’ she said, prodding Madeline’s veins to make them stand out.
‘Yet another murder? I can’t let you do that, Sharon.’
She turned to him. ‘Just do as I say, you weak-kneed snivelling excuse for a man!’
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 37
