by Tara Moss
CHAPTER 49
Mak cracked open her heavy eyelids a millimetre, as far as she could manage. She was in a dark, unfamiliar space.
Below her was something like a bare mattress, and around her was wrapped a heavy set of woollen blankets. She could see her breath in the air. Her nose felt cold, though her eyes were warm and puffy. She did not know where she was, or how she had got there, and nearly as urgent as this confusion was the tornado of pain in her head, and her throat, which ached as if she had been punched in the trachea. She pulled a leaden hand from under the blankets and caressed her aching neck. Thirsty. Unbearably thirsty. With effort, she struggled to sit up, and immediately felt a deep throbbing in her muscles. Her head felt almost too heavy to keep upright.
My ankle?
Makedde’s ankle felt strange. With dread, she pulled the blankets away and looked at it. The room spun. No! There was a heavy cuff locked around her flesh. A metal cuff and a chain…
Scream.
Scream!
Makedde’s mouth opened to shriek, but she caught herself before she uttered a sound. It was only a well-honed survival instinct that kept her quiet. For the moment she was alone. But she might not remain alone if she made a noise. She had to use caution. Anyone she would meet in this situation was not likely to be on her side. She had to figure a way out before her captor—or captors—came back.
Nothing to be gained from screaming right now. Nothing at all. Look. Listen. Remain calm. Figure this out. You can figure this out…
Waves of dizziness bombarded her. She was being beckoned back into unconsciousness. She struggled to remain alert and take in some of the detail around her. She was in a cold, dank space that smelled of mould and fermentation. She could see that the ceiling was low, perhaps not much more than two metres high. The floor was made of stone. The walls were stone. She saw wooden shelves of bottles on both sides of her. A cellar? She was not in the Denfert-Rochereau Ossuary any more. Could she be somewhere nearby? She hoped so. But probably not. Mak sensed that a lot of time had elapsed. Perhaps hours, perhaps even a day or two. Yes, it was at least a day. Her mouth was dry, her stomach felt hollow. My God, where is this place? There were no windows. She could not tell the time of day. A bit of light crept in from the top of a narrow, steep staircase of the type you found leading to attics, she thought. Was it artificial light, or sun seeping through? She could not tell.
Her eyelids felt heavy. They threatened to shut. Mak had been drugged. She was imprisoned, and she had been drugged.
Arslan.
Could he have been following her? Could he have tracked her down and drugged her? He was dangerous and he was on the loose. She was in danger.
As it is at the moment, you can’t get far. No windows. One door. You are chained. And you don’t know why.
The world within and without her dissolved into a terrifying, ill-defined fog. Her body didn’t feel right. Her brain stopped co-operating, stopped being lucid. And now her eyelids were too heavy to stay open any longer. She forced them open with her fingertips.
It isn’t safe to sleep.
Stay awake…
Stay awake!
A black void crept in around her, suffocating, stifling, more powerful than her determination to remain wakeful. The corners of her vision blackened like the edges of an old photograph. Gradually her fingers dropped, and her warm, bloodshot eyes shut of their own volition.
Mak felt her neck go limp as she slipped again into unconsciousness, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the heavy iron ankle cuff that kept her prisoner.
CHAPTER 50
Luther Hand inserted his key and silently unlocked the heavy padlock on the cellar door.
He paused.
The padlock was new, and looked out of place in the rustic surroundings of the dilapidated farmhouse, where everything seemed to have been in place decades before his arrival. He let it swing on the hook with a rattle. He pushed the door open with his boot, and listened.
Silence.
Had there been any witness to this moment, they would have seen that Luther’s ravaged face did not betray any emotion. Beneath the surface of his cold countenance, however, conflict raged. With the door ajar, Luther peered inside at the short, steep set of steps that descended to the wine cellar. The stairs disappeared into relative darkness. His eyes took a moment to adjust, and once he could make out ghostly shapes of stone and wood, he stepped inside and listened again. Luther felt a strange tightness in his stomach, a kind of queer adrenaline. He took pleasure in standing in the cool dark, listening for stirring below. He felt satisfaction. Strangeness. Even something like fear.
He could hear nothing.
Is she asleep?
There was no need to sneak up on her now, not as he had in the Catacombs.
Luther pulled a cord that dangled just inside the doorway next to him, and a bare light bulb flickered to life, casting a pale white glow into the space, illuminating the wooden steps and old stone walls. Now he could hear movement below, a weak shifting. The light had startled her out of a doze. She was there just below him. She was awake. Wasting no more time, Luther walked solidly down the staircase. It was not until he reached the bottom that he looked at his captive.
Makedde Vanderwall.
The bare bulb cast a circle of light on the floor where she sat. He’d taken her boots off to fit her ankle with the heavy iron cuff. The right leg of her jeans half obscured the cuff, from which a slack trail of chain ran to one dusty corner of the cellar, and an iron ring on the wall. The chain was solid, and quite sufficient to keep anyone in one place, even the likes of Mak Vanderwall who had proved resourceful in the past. She wore her black top and winter coat, which he had emptied of its few contents—a mobile phone, some cash, an old-fashioned hotel key and a small notepad and pen. He’d covered her with blankets, and she now wore them around her shoulders and over her toes. She was huddled on the bare mattress, knees bent to her chest and back against the wall. It was cold down here, cold and dark.
There was much about this moment which was odd for Luther. For starters, he had rarely been interested in keeping people alive. On the handful of occasions in his career when he’d been required to do so, he’d arranged a similar setup, finding a cellar or storehouse, usually equipped with basic medical supplies and the most common tools of persuasion. Waterboarding. Electric shock. Those targets would always be eliminated once the required information was elicited. This was not Luther’s area of expertise, and such jobs had been rare. He was an expert killer, not a torturer. That sort of work was generally left to those with military training or a particular interest in the field. It was not Luther’s interest.
And this was different. Luther was not being paid to keep Mak alive. He was being paid to kill her.
He stood near the edge of the mattress, and observed the vision of her at his feet with an odd cocktail of feeling. Exhilaration. Strangeness. He had killed a handful of women in the course of his professional duties, but he had never before had a living woman captive in his care. Since he was a small boy, his contact with women had been limited, and once it was clear that his mother would be safer believing him dead, he had lost touch with the one woman in his life who had cared about him. Women hired for their company were his only option, and if it were not for those women that Ms Rosalay introduced him to, he would not have had any intimate encounters at all. It was not that he didn’t like women. Luther loved women, and he was attracted to them. The problem had always been that they did not like him. He repelled them. It was only the girls at Ms Rosalay’s establishment who were nice to him. But frustratingly, most of them were not very good at masking their distress at his appearance. When they saw him—his size, his face, his scars, his crooked nose, his half-torn ear—their eyes filled with an alarm and disgust they could not hide. Some of the younger girls even cried when he got close. That was not what he wanted. Luther didn’t want to make women cry. He had no violence for them. That was not why he was there. He wished t
o avoid violence outside his work, and inflicting unwanted fear caused him a deep personal sadness.
So, Luther’s experiences with women were few. Yet here he was with a woman at his feet. This woman…
Will she recognise me now? Will she realise we have met before?
Makedde was still weakly shifting, seemingly disoriented. Possibly the drugs had not worn off, he thought. She was moving though, and eventually, from under the dishevelled mane of her blonde hair, a pair of bloodshot blue-green eyes found him. He did not register any expression in them except exhaustion. He did not register any recognition. Her beautiful eyes were puffy and red, mascara making dark smudges across her lashes. She was contained. This woman would no longer be swinging a motorcycle helmet at his face, breaking his nose. She would not be kicking him, scratching him, fighting and fleeing. He had her. Six years after she first crossed his path, Makedde Vanderwall was finally helpless before him, and this fact delivered mixed emotions. For Luther this issue had become significant. The desire to contain her had crept up on him. Even in the Catacombs, he had not been sure what he would ultimately do with her, or how much his chosen method of elimination was motivated by professionalism.
We have a history, you and I. We have a history.
When Luther had first laid eyes on this woman, he had been in the early stages of his career. He had been roughing people up for cash, and not very good cash at that, certainly nothing like the five- and six-figure contracts he could now demand. Back in those days, his clients were lowlifes. The work was unsophisticated. Mak had been a Canadian visiting Sydney to work as a fashion model, and Luther had at first been hired to merely spook her: move things around in her apartment when she wasn’t there, confuse her, leave threatening messages, with the ultimate aim of scaring her back onto a plane to her homeland. It happened that one day he was concealed behind her couch and saw her in a state of undress. She’d had no inkling he was there, and she had moved through her apartment disrobed and radiantly naked. You are beautiful, he had wanted to tell her, but waited instead for a safe way to exit before being discovered. That week Luther lost the top of his ear to some unseen protector in her yard at night, in an incident he still did not understand. The man had come out of nowhere. He had used an extremely sharp blade. Luther had not been fast enough to respond. Even with all his many scars and the injuries he had received over the years, losing part of an ear was not something one soon forgot.
But that was years ago.
If he had not lost a chunk of his ear in a backyard in Sydney—sliced off by some protector of Makedde Vanderwall—he would not have fled to Queensland and might not have come to the attention of Madame Q. He might not have graduated to the international scene. So, in a way, this disoriented woman at his feet was responsible for his elevated career, his success.
Strange.
It was a surprisingly small world, and five years and many jobs later she had ended up on his hit list for the first time. It was a different world for Luther by then. He was a high-end professional hitman. But she had proved more resilient and unpredictable than expected. She broke his nose in the hallway of a townhouse in Sydney, fled by motorcycle, and crashed. But she survived the accident. Her survival had been one of his extremely rare professional failures, and now the same client wanted him to kill Makedde Vanderwall before she could return to Australia. This time he would not disappoint. Mak would not be going home.
As time had passed, Luther had begun to build Makedde up in his mind. In his dreams she had become almost mythical. She was the one who got away.
Here she is.
Mak did not look so magnificent and mythical now. She had slumped over again, exhausted. One slim hand was stretched out towards the wall, palm up. Her perfectly formed lips were dry and cracked. Those intense blue-green eyes had once again shut.
I must feed her. She needs water.
Men like Luther Hand did not end up in the company of women like Makedde Vanderwall. He knew that. Still, she had left an impression on his life. A deep impression. Part of him had been pleased when she had survived the motorcycle crash in Australia. It should have disappointed him. It meant he had failed at his task. And yet, it did not seem a worthy fate for her.
He left Makedde huddled on the mattress in the cellar, his mind strangely conflicted. He needed to gather himself and make a plan. Luther locked the cellar door and made his way into the kitchen. He checked his work phone. There was no message waiting from Madame Q, which puzzled him only momentarily. He thought for a while about what to do, and then, having decided his next step, he sent Madame Q a message with the agreed single word, to indicate that the job was done, and Makedde Vanderwall was dead.
COMPLETE.
CHAPTER 51
Makedde Vanderwall felt clear-headed and eerily calm.
With deliberate movements, she resumed her cross-legged position on the bare mattress that had become her narrow domain. It was no coincidence that her repose resembled that of a person meditating. She was captive in the cellar of an old building, her ankle chained to a wall, and if she had any chance of getting out, it would require mental alertness. Until now, focus had been proving difficult. Her temples still throbbed lightly from a gradually retreating headache. Her tongue felt furry. The strained muscles in her shoulders ached. Her socks were caked with dust. Her lips were cracked, and she thought she tasted blood.
Think.
Think.
She was, for the moment, successfully swallowing her panic.
Mak had deduced that she was trapped in an underground wine cellar, and as soon as the drugs had worn off and she became sufficiently lucid, she had checked for her mobile phone in her coat, hoping for emergency reception. Finding her phone missing, along with her money and keys, she had done a meticulous search of the space she was trapped in, moving in a grid pattern from one side to the other as far as the chain would allow her, in much the same pattern as she had methodically searched crime scenes. This is a crime scene. The victim is you, she thought darkly. She had carefully scoured the ground for bits of wire, safety pins, anything sharp, anything she could use as a weapon. So far she had found nothing save for dust, alcohol and splinters of wood. She could smash a bottle and use it to slash at her attacker, but she would be easily overpowered by a man the size of the one she remembered seeing briefly standing over her—if her recollections were at all accurate. Her only vision of him had been blurry and dark. She had examined the bottles on the shelves, and found that they were mostly French red wine, and some cognac, which gave her hope that she was still in France, perhaps not far from where she had been attacked. But where exactly? And why? Some of the vintages were impressively old. She wondered how often the place was frequented. Not often enough to be a commercial restaurant cellar, by the look of things. In fact, it didn’t look like the place had been frequented at all recently. Except to make her a cosy little bed, of course.
She was desperate to remove the heavy iron cuff around her right ankle. During her schooling for her Certificate III in Investigative Services, she had learned how to pick locks. She was not particularly practised at it, but she knew she could bust out of handcuffs, given time and the right tools. But where to find the tools? A simple bobby pin could open handcuffs, and she could do that behind her back without even looking. She felt that a similar trick should work for the cuff that bound her. Now she wished she was in the habit of putting her hair up.
Fuck.
And she wished she had taken the time to study her new lock-picking book.
Increasingly, she sensed that she had arrived in her predicament via an experienced hand, or perhaps even a professional’s. Since becoming more lucid, she had not had the opportunity to lay eyes on him. She did not know his plan, his reason for keeping her, or if he was acting alone. But the attack in the Catacombs had been quick. So quick. She hadn’t time enough to react, and that was rare for her. Until the past couple of hours, time had been a blur. She had obviously been drugged, but she coul
d not guess with what. A needle had been jabbed into her buttock, and she thought she felt a bruise there when she shifted position on the mattress. What she could remember was that there had been a man. A man had done this to her, he was responsible for her captivity, and was clearly intent on keeping her here against her will. He’d supplied her with water. He’d given her blankets. He had not yet done physical violence to her. She had vague flashes of memory about him, but those recollections were slippery and she did not trust them because of the effects of whatever drug he had sedated her with. She was sure, however, that the man was not Arslan. The man she had seen possessed a completely different build than the contortionist, or any of the other performers for that matter. They were all wiry and lean. Her impression was that the man who was keeping her was quite enormous in size. In her unreliable recollection he took on monstrous physical characteristics—a huge body with a thick, knotted neck and a scarred, odd-looking face, the details of which were patchy. She thought she remembered his hands as being the size of dinner plates, meaty and muscular. In the few memories she could grasp of her captivity, he had visited her once or twice, and each time he was a dark blur, misshapen and strange, a Mr Hyde to someone’s Dr Jekyll.
She knew these recollections were not entirely reliable.
It isn’t Arslan. It’s someone else.
But who? Why?
Was this someone acting for Arslan, or the troupe?
The facts that Makedde had some sense of certainty about, the important facts, were that there appeared to be only one person holding her captive, it wasn’t Arslan from the theatre troupe, and that the man who was keeping her here and had come into the cellar had not been wearing a mask. Nor had he blindfolded her. He had allowed her to see him, and that was a very bad thing. That meant that her release was not part of his plan. She was not gagged, which led her to believe that her screaming would not cause her captor any inconvenience. She would not waste her breath on screaming until she heard other voices, other footsteps, and given the opportunity she would then scream with all her might, and not stop. Her situation was clearly one of life or death, and she would take no half-measures. Mak had killed a man before, and she was willing to do it again. She did not have romantic notions of perishing. She would have to get out, and to do so she would probably have to kill the man who had attacked her in the dark Catacombs, amongst the bones and the dust. And anyone else who might be working with him.
