by David Hodges
‘And I do, Roz,’ Pauline soothed, moving with her, ‘and I do. Trouble is, I love money even more, you see’ – her face hardened – ‘and I just can’t risk you turning me in.’
Callow managed to side-step the first vicious thrust of the knife, but the second ripped right through her coat and she felt a searing pain as the blade cut into her side. Then her fist smashed into Pauline’s face, sending her staggering backwards. Before the crazed woman could recover, she had hauled the door shut between them and literally thrown herself at the staircase.
Such was her panic, that she was halfway down before Pauline erupted on to the landing and she would have got away completely had she not suddenly lost her footing. Uttering a wild scream as her leg twisted under her with a loud snapping sound, she tumbled headlong down the remaining stairs and slammed into the base of the grandfather clock in its alcove at the bottom where she lay still.
Pauline took her time descending the staircase, but there was a triumphant gleam in her eyes as she bent over the DCI’s prostrate form and lifted her head by the hair. She could feel a faint pulse in her neck and for some reason this excited her. Her mouth was dry as she placed the edge of the blade across the milk-white throat. ‘Sorry, Roz,’ she murmured and tightened her grip on the knife, savouring the moment. In fact, she was so absorbed in what she was about to do that she failed to hear the rustling sound behind her and the knife slipped from her nerveless fingers as the muscular arm encircled her own neck.
A blast of bad breath enveloped her as Twister rasped in her ear, ‘Key rule of assassination, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Always make sure your victim is actually dead.’
And with a sudden twist of his powerful hands he snapped her spine.
Twister was in trouble; he knew that only too well. The knife had plunged deep into his abdomen and some of the internal tissue had forced itself out through the wound when it had been withdrawn. But, going by the colour of the blood seeping from the hole in his gut, which he had plugged with his handkerchief and some of the tape he had used on Hayden Lewis after snapping Pauline Cross’s neck, he was reasonably sure that his liver had escaped damage. Had it been otherwise, the blood would have been streaked with black and that would have amounted to a death sentence. Though reassured by his brief examination, however, he knew he still needed urgent medical treatment. It wasn’t the first nasty wound he had ever received, of course. His time in the SAS had seen to that and his body was already badly scarred from encounters with knives, bayonets, machetes and on one occasion even some razor wire. But he was not as fit as he had been then and he knew it was touch and go as to whether the physical toughness and resilience to severe pain, which had ensured his survival in the old days, would be enough to see him through the vengeful task he was desperate to complete before he handed himself over to the backstreet doctor who had tended him – and many other fugitives like him – in the past.
He’d really thought he had killed that double-crossing bitch, but somehow he hadn’t done as good a job as usual. Returning to check her seemingly lifeless body – crumpled over the corpse of the lady copper – he’d been astonished to detect the faint tickle of a pulse in her neck. For a moment that had thrown him – but only for a moment. Catching sight of one of his wheeled stretchers in the beam of the torch as he clambered over the two bodies into the hallway, he had been furnished with his most sadistic idea yet. Finishing madam off with another quick twist of the neck would have been the obvious thing to do under the circumstances – send her off to her Maker before blood loss, organ failure or septicaemia sent him there himself – but that would have been much too easy and now that Fate had presented him with a further opportunity to punish her, he was determined to make the most of it.
‘Well, sweetheart,’ he rasped, coughing up some blood from a torn lip as he crouched down beside her and stared into the immobile wide-open eyes with the aid of his torch, ‘so you’re still alive, are you? Paralysed, but still with us. Now, there’s a thing.’
Just to make sure, he also checked her wrist, detecting the same feeble flicker. Striking a match, he cruelly held the flame against her cheek, until a sickly scorching smell became apparent, and he was pleased to see that she didn’t stir a muscle.
‘Can’t move, can you?’ he gloated. ‘Can’t shout, cry – not even blink. But,’ and he pressed his face closer to hers, ‘I bet you can still feel, and that’s good, because I’ve got a real treat in store for you.’
And he planted a sneering bloody kiss on her forehead.
chapter 27
KATE STOOD STOCK still. The blood-curdling scream from somewhere above her head had been followed by a heavy thudding sound, then a crash and a discordant jangling. It suggested that something – or someone – had fallen down the main staircase and collided with the clock she had noticed in the hallway earlier. But if it was a someone, who could have taken the tumble, she wondered? Larry Wadman perhaps? The scream had sounded as if it had been made by a woman, but, muffled by the solid wooden ceiling of the cellar, it was impossible to be certain.
Her heart was pounding again as she strained her ears for any further noises, but there were no more and she released her breath in an explosive gasp. Her professional training dictated that she should investigate the disturbance, but she had no intention of doing any such thing. She had enough on her hands already in this creepy house of horror without poking her nose into something else.
Lewis was sagging in his bonds, head bent forward on his chest. His face was a bloodied mess and his nose, which looked as if it had been broken, was badly swollen and still dribbling blood. He was obviously in great pain and the resilience that had helped him to keep going up until now seemed to have deserted him, resulting in a gradual loss of consciousness.
Getting him up the steps and out of the cellar, she knew, was going to be a real problem, but before that she had a more pressing challenge to overcome. Whatever the sticky tape was that the killer had used on him, it could not be unravelled in the normal way and she had wasted precious time trying unsuccessfully to prise it apart. What she needed was something sharp enough to cut through it, but she had absolutely nothing on her that would serve the purpose.
Suspecting that she was fast running out of time and expecting the cellar door to be thrown open any moment as the killer returned to finish the job he had started, she made a frantic search of the cellar itself, but failed to turn up any kind of discarded blade among the rubbish that littered the floor.
It dawned on her then that if she had nothing to hand with which to cut Lewis’s bonds, then she would have to get a blade from somewhere else and the only place she could be certain of finding one in a hurry was the embalming room upstairs. The very thought of venturing back in there filled her with dread, but she knew she had no other realistic alternative and, throwing another anxious glance at Lewis’s sagging body, she turned for the stairs.
She found the hallway still cloaked in a heavy darkness, but it was far from empty. The squeak of dry wheel bearings was accompanied by the sound of dragging footsteps. Through a crack in the half-closed cellar door she glimpsed a solid black mass – a powerfully built man – hunched over what appeared to be the same sort of wheeled stretcher she had spotted earlier as he pushed it slowly along the hallway towards the rear of the building. As the figure passed by, she picked up the sound of laboured breathing, punctuated by sharp grunts, suggesting that the man was in pain or the exertion was proving too much for him. She watched as he was absorbed by the gloom, then saw him reappear briefly a moment later in a sudden wash of insipid light – the chapel of rest? A door slammed and the light was snuffed out. She was alone again, but for how long?
Crossing the hallway with the speed of a frightened hare crossing a main road, she found the door of the embalming room and slipped inside. The surgical instruments glinted at her through the glass of the twin cabinets; cold, sinister and infinitely gruesome. She found a key in the lock of the first cabinet and gently tugged
it open. The wicked looking scalpel attracted her attention immediately and she lifted it carefully off the shelf, grimacing as she thought of what it must have been used for maybe not that long ago.
She closed the cabinet and was on the point of returning to the hallway when she heard the familiar squeak of wheels. She switched off her torch and once more stood motionless in the darkness, waiting for the stretcher to pass by. Instead, it stopped and she heard something slam into the door. Bloody hell, caught with her knickers down again – and in the same sodding place.
There was no time to hide – not even in the fridge – and all she could do was to slip behind the door before it flew open, the handle jabbing into her stomach, and crushing her against the wall. She gritted her teeth from the impact, holding back the cry that rose to her lips as the blow reawakened the pain in her bruised ribs. Then the light snapped on and, peering round the edge of the door, she watched the stretcher lurch past her, wheels now squealing on the tiled floor. Wadman – she recognized him from his CRO file immediately – seemed to have difficulty walking and he leaned heavily on the stretcher for support, bent over on one side as he forced it across the room towards the refrigerators.
The stretcher was not empty either and she stared with unutterable revulsion at the thing in the long white robe that was being transported – just its blue-tinged bare feet visible to her as Wadman opened the door of the first refrigerator and adjusted the height of the trolley so that he could slide the corpse on to the metal tray inside.
Tearing her gaze away from the gruesome operation, she noticed something else – Wadman was bleeding badly. His light coloured shirt seemed to be saturated on one side, and he had left a trail of dark spots behind him on the tiled floor. She couldn’t imagine how he had come by his injuries – maybe it had something to do with the disturbance she had heard – but that was the least of her concerns. On the plus side, it meant he was partially incapacitated, which gave her something of an edge, but she had no illusions as to how dangerous he still was. An extremely powerful man, she would stand no chance at all in a physical confrontation with him. Her only hope was that his injury had slowed him up enough for her to keep clear of those deadly hands.
It was at that moment, while he had his back towards her, that she decided to make her move. Gently pushing the door away from her and holding her breath in case the hinges creaked, she crept from behind it. The door made no sound, but to her alarm her knee cracked as she crossed the tiled floor. She froze and glanced quickly towards Wadman. But he still had his back towards her and, fully occupied manoeuvring the corpse into the fridge, seemed unaware of her presence. Risking all, she quickly tiptoed out of the room and into the comforting darkness of the hallway.
There was no challenging shout or the sound of footsteps coming after her, but as she jerked the cellar door open and ducked through the opening, she heard a loud metallic crash from across the hall, which she assumed to be the fridge being slammed shut. Standing there for a moment with her back against the door and her eyes tightly closed, she forced herself to wait for the adrenalin rush to subside. And it was as she stood there that she heard the squeak of the stretcher’s wheels once again, this time moving down the hall towards the front of the building.
What on earth was Wadman up to? Obviously badly injured, bleeding and hardly able to stand upright, why on earth was he trundling a stretcher about in the darkness instead of seeking medical help for his injury? His behaviour didn’t make sense – unless, she mused with a shudder, he was stocking up his freezers with more victims of his murderous proclivities. Whatever the truth was, one thing was very clear to her: somehow she had to get Lewis out of the place before that stretcher returned and stopped outside the cellar door.
Roz Callow was in considerable pain. She knew she had broken her leg and suspected she had also suffered other injuries as a result of her fall. Her left arm was trapped under her body and there was a creeping numbness at the base of her skull which was threatening to plunge her into a smoky oblivion. She had to resist it, to stay conscious until she could summon assistance, yet she was terrified to move or make a sound in case she attracted the attention of Pauline’s killer. He was out there somewhere in the darkness, she knew that only too well. He had already taken Pauline’s body – picked her up and loaded her on to some sort of wheeled stretcher before carting her away – and it was almost certain he would be back. On the face of it, playing dead seemed the safest bet, but what if he decided to check her out when he returned to make sure she was legit – just like Pauline? That really would mean curtains.
Forcing her right hand under her body, she felt for the police radio trapped beneath her in her coat pocket. If she could just get hold of it in time … A door slammed at the far end of the hall as her fingers touched the top of the metal casing – or was it the bottom? God help her! The bloody thing was up the wrong way. She forced her hand deeper into her pocket, but even as she managed to tear the radio free and fumble with the control buttons, she heard the unmistakable squeak of the stretcher’s wheels. Wadman was coming for her.
Kate’s hands were trembling as she sliced through the sticky tape binding Hayden Lewis, her eyes constantly darting apprehensively towards the stairs and the cellar door. Lewis was still only partially conscious, but he managed a crooked grin as she cut the tape away. ‘Mind my important bits, Kate, won’t you?’ he said before drifting off again.
Having heard the stretcher squeaking back along the hallway just minutes before, Kate tried hard to hold down the panic welling up inside her. She was only a quarter done, but the last thing she needed was to make a mistake with the scalpel and sever an artery – not that Lewis looked as though he had much blood left in him to start with.
As the tape fell away from him, however, she couldn’t help agonizing once again over the next phase of her crazy rescue plan – single-handedly getting a near unconscious colleague up the steep rickety stairs, through the back door and across the yard to the street under the very nose of a psychopathic killer. In her heart of hearts she knew she was on to a loser, but she had to at least try. If only she’d managed to keep hold of her mobile telephone, she could have short-circuited this whole thing and called up the cavalry, but Terry Duval had put paid to that when he’d ordered her to dump the phone out of the window of his Land Rover. As for Lewis, she’d already learned from him that his mobile was in Wadman’s hands, so that was that; she could expect no help from anyone.
She cut the last of the tape away from Lewis’s legs and shook him – at first gently and then a lot harder. ‘Wake up, man,’ she said hoarsely. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’
Lewis opened his eyes and gave another weak smile. ‘Just when I was beginning to enjoy myself,’ he murmured before his head dipped again.
Kate swore and once more shook him awake, pulling him forward in the seat by his shoulders. ‘Stand up, you prat.’ she hissed.
He lurched in his seat, as if making some sort of effort, then fell back again. ‘Hayden.’ she snarled close to his ear. ‘Do I have to grab your balls to get you on your feet?’
That registered all right and he jerked upright on the chair with a short laugh. ‘You really know how to please a chap, don’t you?’ he said and, reaching for her shoulder with one hand, he pressed down on the edge of the chair with the other to hoist himself up. Kate realized that it wasn’t just the injury to his nose and the blood loss that was a problem. Trussed up for so long, his legs had been weakened through lack of circulation and it would take a while before he was able to rely on them with any degree of confidence.
Twice he tried to stand up and twice fell back on to the chair again before finally managing it. Even then, he still had to lean on Kate as he stood there swaying unsteadily. After the chest injuries she herself had suffered, his weight proved to be a major problem and she had to grit her teeth tightly to prevent herself crying out as she led him slowly towards the stairs. He made it without falling over and relieved some of
the pressure on her shoulder when he transferred his grip to the banister rail, but he still needed support climbing the stairs and he nearly overbalanced several times before they reached the top.
So far so good, she mused, breathing heavily from her exertions, but there was an even more difficult job to come. Leaving him propped against the wall, she opened the cellar door very slightly and peered through the crack. Silence, but she was not reassured and peered intently into the blacked out hallway for several seconds before she was satisfied. ‘Come on,’ she whispered and, pulling the door right back, held out her arm for him to lean on as she guided him through the opening, the scalpel held out in front of her in her other hand.
Squeak, squeak, squeak. The familiar sound raised the hairs at the back of her neck. She froze, darting quick frightened glances into the gloom on both sides. The heavy darkness totally concealed whatever was lurking there. She heard a grim laugh and suddenly realized that the pair of them were clearly illuminated by the light streaming out of the cellar doorway. She pulled Lewis to one side of the door, kicked it shut, then held him up against the wall to prevent him falling over again.
‘Well, if it isn’t little Miss Katie,’ a harsh voice called out. ‘Now, that is a nice surprise.’
She thought quickly, her skin wet and clammy. Wadman had the upper hand. He knew exactly where they were, whereas he himself could be hiding anywhere in the hallway. Maybe he was just feet away, creeping slowly towards them like a big black spider with poisonous dripping fangs. The analogy wasn’t pleasant and she felt her skin crawl.
Squeak, squeak, squeak. She whirled round. The sound was coming from her left – from the direction of the front door. She shrank against the wall, edging along it in the opposite direction, pushing Lewis ahead of her.
