He didn’t need to tell Lethe to keep on digging.
Come dawn they’d know everything there was to know about this Ghost Walker woman.
But it was still a long time until dawn, and he had a ninth house to visit.
He had talked to neighbors, trying to build up a picture of the victims’ last few days, but they were city people. City people kept to themselves. It wasn’t like even fifteen years ago when everyone knew everyone else’s business. Now the doors closed, and what went on behind them was anyone’s guess. Door-to-door inquiries were a waste of time. Even if they had seen something, people pretended temporary blindness. There was no sense of civic duty anymore. There wasn’t even a milkman doing a daily delivery anymore. Everything had become so anonymous.
Ronan Frost walked down the street. He pulled his jacket closer. The night was cold on his skin. It didn’t feel like spring had finally arrived. It felt like winter had killed any trace of warmth. Cars lined the side of the road, parked bumper to bumper. There were no expensive sports cars in the long snake of Fords, Fiats, Mazdas and Citroens. These were all functional vehicles. None of them were new. This was a part of the city where a new car came in a poor second to feeding the family.
Most of the houses had alarm boxes up above the doors. It was a good bet that more than half of them were dummies. It was that kind of place.
He looked for a twitching curtain, a Neighborhood Watch sticker in a window, anything that would suggest a nosy neighbor who might just have seen something out of the ordinary. But the curtains were drawn and the lights dimmed. People didn’t look out into the street because they knew what was good for them. Frost walked down the middle of the road, breathing in the city smell. He could almost taste the danger pheromones in the back of his throat. This place had more in common with the Belfast of his early 20s than just the graffiti.
He counted the numbers down until he reached the white door of the ninth house. The windows were dark. Weeds had grown up between the cracks in the pavement, and the bare bulb of the outside light was broken. It was the right street, the right house, but it was quite unlike any of the other eight he had visited. The others had all been in better parts of their various cities, more expensive houses in the up-and-coming suburbs if not the heart of the cities themselves, but not this one. This place smacked of poverty. He could feel the desperation crawling up and down his skin like mites.
Of course, the benefit of a street like this was, if the curtains didn’t twitch, he doubted very much if anyone would call the police either.
He walked up to the door, and taking the Browning from his belt holster, broke the small window with the butt of the gun. He knocked out the jagged glass teeth left behind and reached through for the lock. He had assumed the deadbolt wouldn’t have been set if the occupants had been bundled off in a hurry. He was right. The door swung open.
Frost stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
The first thing that hit him was the smell.
He gagged and had to fight back the urge to vomit, the stench was that intense.
He knew the smell. There was only one thing in the world that owned this odor: new death.
At least a week’s worth of unopened mail spilled across the mat, along with the newspapers. He knelt down and counted eight days’ worth of unread news. So, nine days ago the inhabitants of this small two-up two-down terrace in the middle of the wrong part of town had been taken. The feel of this place, even in the dark, was different. He didn’t turn on the light as he walked, trailing his fingers along the wall to make sure he didn’t stumble. He found the end of the balustrade and worked his way carefully up the stairs. The house was quiet. The higher he climbed the worse the smell became. Moonlight streamed in silver through an upstairs window, casting a long light slash through the shadows of the dark house. In the light he saw the swirls of wallpaper that had been hung back in the mid-70s. It felt coarse and heavy beneath his fingers.
He heard his own breathing and realized it had become shallower and sharper with each new step. He knew what was waiting up there. But that didn’t mean he could just turn his back and head off looking for house number ten. Indeed, the fact that he knew what was waiting for him meant it was all the more important that he face it. It was exactly what he had come looking for: proof.
His first thought as he reached the landing was that something had gone wrong. The open area didn’t feel right. It wasn’t Feng Shui. It was far more instinctive and predictive than that. People had a way of arranging the things in their life so that they were simple, functional. Furniture placement was repetitive. He could go into rooms blind and know even before he stepped through the door how a good number of those rooms were laid out. But the first floor landing was wrong. It was out of balance.
It took him a second to realize why. The chair that should have been in the right angle, where the balustrade met the immersion cupboard at the far side of the landing, had been dragged out so that it half-blocked the way into the bathroom. Its back was toward him. He tried to picture the struggle that would have turned it. On the opposite wall the blanket box had a thicker band of shadow on the side nearest him, meaning it hadn’t been pushed back up against the wall properly. In his mind’s eye Frost pictured someone on their back, thrashing about as they were dragged toward the stairs. They caught the chair and tried to hold onto it as it twisted away from the wall. They kicked out with their right foot, trying to get some sort of leverage as they lost their grip on the chair. It might not have played out exactly like that, but he knew it was close enough to make no difference.
The floorboards groaned beneath his weight.
He walked toward the first of three doors, to the smallest bedroom. He couldn’t tell what color it had been painted in the moonlight, but a mobile with elephants and toucans and other exotic animals hung over a cot, and most of the floor was cluttered with cuddly toys and stuffed bears. There was no sign of the baby. That, he knew, was the only moment of blessed relief he was going to have until he left the house. He was well aware of the numbers: ninety percent of all kidnap victims were dead within thirty-six hours of being taken. There weren’t going to be any happy endings in this house.
There was a body on the bed in the next room. She lay sprawled out across the bed sheets. Her blood had turned them dark. Dark specks crawled across her face, stomach and legs: flies. They would have started laying their eggs in her already. In another day or two her flesh would be crawling with maggots.
Frost covered his nose and mouth and moved into the room. Up close, the stench made his eyes water.
She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been opened up. Twenty, thirty, forty cuts-it was impossible to tell where one entry wound ended and another began. They had sliced into each other and across each other. Frost didn’t want to think about the frenzy that must have driven the attack. No one deserved to die in so much pain. He looked at her lying on the bed, stripped of dignity as well as life. There was no way she hadn’t suffered. She’d been fighting and screaming through each and every knife thrust until her system shut down in shock.
All he could think was that she might have been beautiful once, but not anymore.
He looked at the ruin of flesh that had been a wife and mother nine days ago, and he wanted to break something.
He continued to walk around the room. For the sheer amount of violence there was very little out of place in the room. There was no sign of the baby. Was that the leverage they’d used against the guy to make him burn himself? Murdered his wife and kidnapped his baby? Or did he think they were both still alive? Did he think that by burning himself he was saving them?
Of course he did. How else did you keep a guy compliant? Kill his wife and he’s going to be thinking all the time about how to hurt you, how to turn on you, even if his child’s life depends on it, because he isn’t stupid. He knows that if you’ve killed one, you’ll kill the other as soon as he’s given you what you want. So no, the guy had to think his wife
and child were safe. The poor bastard went to his death thinking he was buying their lives.
The woman’s mobile phone was on the bedside table. He tried to turn it on but the battery had discharged. He cracked it open and took the battery out so he could get at the SIM card.
Frost pressed his finger against the headset in his ear and triggered the call-home auto-dial. Lethe answered on the first ring.
“What do you need, boss?”
“Run the number on this SIM card for me, last call made, last one received.” He recited the three strings of numbers printed on the back of the card and waited while Lethe did his thing. It took a couple of minutes. In that time Frost looked around the room. Even discounting the body on the bed it was aterly sad room, white built-in wardrobes around the bed, from corner to corner and up to the ceiling. He opened a few of the cupboards and the night stand drawer. There was nothing particularly out of place in any of them, clothes and the junk of life shoved away in drawers to be forgotten about. She had been reading Agatha Christie. She’d never know who did it, Frost thought. He walked across to the window and looked out over the backyard. The word yard (in terms of grass and flowers and greenery) was a bit of a misnomer. It was a patch of cracked paving and unruly weeds fenced in by rotten wood that had been painted with brilliant white emulsion. The slats of wood looked like Papa Death’s rictus grinning up at him.
“Okay, here we go,” Lethe said in his ear, breaking his macabre chain of thought. “Last call in was from a cell phone registered to one Miles Devere. You recognize the name?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells,” Frost said, running the name through his memory. “Check him out though, just to be on the safe side.”
“Will do. Right, so, last call out, now this is interesting..” Lethe broke off. Frost could hear the sound of his fingers rattling off the keys beneath them. “Last call out was to the Nicholls Tobacco Warehouse, a bonded warehouse down by the Canning Docks. And what’s interesting about that, I hear you ask? Well, that was abandoned in 1983 and condemned in 2006. It’s a ruin. They had a campaign in the ’90s to try and stop the decay of all these old buildings that were built during the Industrial Revolution. Stop the Rot it was called. They made a lot of noise about preserving our heritage, but I don’t think they had a lot of luck-certainly not in this case. Nicholls is due to be torn down and replaced by luxury apartments. The phone was reconnected twelve days ago. So riddle me this, boss: why would a derelict building suddenly need a working telephone?”
“Running a line into the site office as they get ready for the demolition,” Frost said.
“Oh, go on then, take all the fun out of it with a practical answer, why don’t you?”
Outside, Frost heard the doppler of a siren rising and falling as it raced through the night. It could have been more than four or five streets away, and it was getting closer all the time. He resisted the urge to run. They weren’t coming for him. Sirens were as common as takeouts in this part of the city. He could think of a dozen reasons off the top of his head why they were heading anywhere but here, to this two-up two-down terraced house with the dead woman lying in a whorish sprawl on her bloody sheets. But with each heartbeat the sirens grew louder, and he knew each of those dozen reasons was wrong.
“Okay, Jude. I think I’m in a bit of trouble here,” he said, walking over to the door. The sirens couldn’t have been more than a street away. “Tell me the plod aren’t on the way here. Lie to me if you have to.”
“You really want me to lie?” Frost could hear the humor in his voice. He was enjoying this far too much. “Well, then, three squad cars most definitely haven’t been scrambled to number 11 Halsey Road, the last known residence of one Tristan James, ex of this parish, and his wife Wilma and their eight-month-old son, Marcus. No police on their way whatsoever. You might as well put your feet up and watch TV. Nothing exciting is going to happen whatsoever.”
“You’re not a very convincing liar,” Frost said.
The door downstairs opened.
Frost backed into the room. Whichever way he looked at it, being found in the house with the dead girl wasn’t good. He moved slowly toward the window. “Can you see out there?”
“In two seconds I’ll be able to.”
Frost didn’t know how Lethe did what he did, probably hooking into a Defense satellite and or something equally illegal and frightening. The boy had a way with machines. All that really mattered to Frost right then was that Lethe was his eyes and ears. He wouldn’t be able to get out of the house without him.
“Give me their positions,” he whispered into the headset, barely daring to vocalize the words. He tried the window, but it had been painted shut. He pushed against the frame but there was no way it was going to give without making a god-awful racket. The last thing he wanted to do was let everyone in the house know exactly where he was.
He crept back to the bedroom door, doing his best to keep his weight distribution even so that the floorboards didn’t betray him. He could hear them moving about downstairs, working their way through the rooms. They sounded nervous, pumped up, ready for a fight. They were talking loudly, barking instructions at each other. He stood absolutely still. No way this was going to end well. They’d be listening for the slightest out of place sound. The way he figured, he had at best a minute before they came upstairs. The place wasn’t that big, and there weren’t that many places to hide. It would take no time to sweep through the downstairs, and given the all-pervasive reek, they all knew they were in a death house. They were expecting to find a corpse. They weren’t expecting him to be there. If he startled them, it could all go south very quickly. “Lethe,” he breathed, “please tell me they didn’t send a Tactical Response Unit.”
“No guns,” the voice in his ear assured him.
That was one less thing to worry about. He heard them clumping about beneath him-which meant he had less than half a minute to get out of the house. He couldn’t just run down the stairs and out the front door, no matter how much the simplicity of the idea appealed. They would be on to him before he was halfway down the stairs. He didn’t really want to have to explain what he was doing in the house. But, for that matter, he didn’t really want to shoot anyone either. So it was all about not being caught.
“Three cars in the street out front,” Lethe whispered in his ear. Frost almost laughed at the younger man’s theatrics. It wasn’t as though it was Lethe who was standing over a corpse, separated from half a dozen policemen by a few inches of wood and plasterboard. “Two men are still outside. One is heading around the side of the house, going for the backdoor. That means three are inside.”
Three wasn’t a good number.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Frost whispered, rubbing at his forehead. “Can you do something? Cause a distraction?”
Without waiting for an answer, Frost crept across the landing. He ignored the baby’s room; the window there looked out onto the front of the house. That left the bathroom which, as he had expected, had a tiny fly-window that was neither for use nor ornament. Frost started to reach around for his gun, ready to shoot his way out if he had to, when he saw the chair half across the bathroom doorway. Again he was struck by how out of place it was. He looked up. There was a small loft access hatch in the ceiling directly above it. The hatch was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. He didn’t have a lot of choice. It was that or charge down the stairs guns blazing straight onto the evening news.
Frost heard the downstairs backdoor opening.
The cops had done the first sweep.
They were talking now. He could hear every muffled word they said.
“You check upstairs,” one of them said. Frost heard the crackle of a radio. They were sending in a situation report: downstairs all-clear.
Frost didn’t wait for the sound of the first footsteps on the stairs. He stood on the chair and reached up. Placing the flats of his palms on the wood he pushed slightly, lifting it less than an inch clear and
eased it aside. Moving quickly, he gripped the sides of the loft hatch and pulled himself up, swinging his legs inide the hole as he heard the heavy sound of the policeman climbing the stairs. He didn’t have time to slide the hatch all the way back in place. All he could do was ease it across so that it covered most of the hole and hope no one looked up. Frost lay on his back in the dark, listening to the sound of the search beneath him. The chair was still directly under the hatch, but there was nothing he could do about it so it wasn’t worth worrying about. He lay on his back, his Browning cradled against his chest.
“Oh, sweet Lord,” he heard, followed by the hacking sound of a man heaving his guts up. More footsteps on the stairs, running this time. Frost risked rolling onto his side, and put his eye to the crack. He couldn’t see much through the narrow gap, the shoulder of one uniformed officer and part of the back of another. “Trust me, you really don’t want to go in there.”
“Damn,” another muttered, backing out of the room.
Frost didn’t dare breathe. All it would take was for one of them to realize the chair was out of place and to look up. And because he didn’t dare breathe, the smell clawed its way into his lungs, trying to force him to. He closed his eyes, willing them to go back downstairs. He couldn’t exactly hide in the loft space forever, and soon the place would be swarming with forensics and crime scene investigators. One of them would look up. They would see that the hatch was out of place, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He tried to think. His prints were all over the house, but he hadn’t touched the woman or the bed. But he had touched the window, her phone, the door handle. Had he touched the balustrade? Had he touched anything downstairs? He cursed himself for being an idiot.
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