Scare Me

by Richard Parker

  “Why Eva Lockwood, Will?” The question was almost accusatory.

  “I can’t even begin to fathom why she would be part of this.”

  “Did she suffer?”

  Will looked at her skeletal body. “Long before today.”

  Pope and Weaver read the new message as soon as it appeared on the website in their creaky room in The Man In The Moon.

  Easton Grey

  MR AND MRS FROST COME ALONE

  BRING YOUR MOBILES

  Pope and Weaver had checked into the inn just outside Hanworth village and had already done a thorough recce of the immediate area. They’d located Easton Grey after a few enquiries at the bar. Pope had done some pieces to camera outside the gates. It was the first time he’d ever pre-empted a crime scene.

  On the GPS map Pope could see she was heading back to the airport. “Just a matter of hours now. We give the Frosts the time they need before we move in.” He did another search for breaking new stories in Serangoon. He’d found one report of a fire in the specific vicinity, but no details had been released.

  Weaver was checking his lens. “We can’t risk this slipping through our fingers. I want us to be in close. And we’ve got to be prepared for the situation to change.”

  “We give the Frosts the time they need before we move in,” he reiterated. “Then we’ll tail her from Easton Grey and lead the cops straight to wherever she heads afterwards. I’ve got the networks on speed dial. When we tell them who we’ve run down we’ll get ourselves in position and they can scramble us an aerial crew for the live arrest.”

  Will assumed there wouldn’t be any further need for the website. His last destination was all-too familiar, but he’d kept the laptop on for the duration of the flight. He’d focussed on the photos taken inside his home and dreaded the addition of any new ones. The Amberson family tableau vividly re-presented itself every time his eyes lingered on the familiar couch in his TV lounge.

  They landed bumpily and his mobile rang as soon as he exited the cabin.

  “Carla, stay exactly where you are.”

  “But we have to do what they say.”

  “We know this is going to be a trap…”

  The certainty of that hung between them and the chasm separating him from his wife suddenly seemed wider than when he’d been on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “We’ve done everything they’ve asked. If they’ve requested both of us, I have to go.” It sounded like Carla was already getting up to leave.

  “This is where we get to call the shots. Whatever’s waiting at home is an end to this. They have to finish it there and will have to accept it’ll just be me.”

  “It’s our home, Will,” she countered, anger distorting her voice.

  “I’m being made to pay for something I did. Eva Lockwood was part of my past.”

  As he’d left the house in Stirling Crescent, Will had told Carla the scant details he remembered about his brief acquaintance with Eva in college. Her death proved the campaign had to be directed at him.

  “If I can exchange myself for Libby…” A shoulder bumped his as he slowed in a bottleneck of passengers in the concourse entrance.

  “This isn’t your decision to make. Do you really expect me to let you do this on your own?”

  “We can’t waste time arguing this.”

  “I’m driving back to Hanworth.” He heard his drawer open and the clatter of keys.

  “No. Don’t go anywhere… yet. Let me think for a minute.” He looked at his watch. It was 3.16pm. With no specific directions to wait for, was it assumed they’d go straight to Easton Grey?

  An incoherent passenger announcement barked metallically. Their dialogue suspended, Will closed his eyes. He shut out the ache and noise and again imagined himself hovering above, looking down at his insignificance. What was his clearest path?

  The announcement ended.

  “Will?”

  “Did you get that?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Bomb scare, looks like I’m going to be delayed getting out of the terminal.” He heard her exhale and closed his eyes. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m clear. We’ll arrange a place to meet between here and the house. Sit tight until then, OK?”

  “OK,” she said reluctantly.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  It was just over fifteen minutes later that Carla realised what he’d done. She’d prepared herself to leave, checking the news sites for signs of a bomb scare story. But she assumed that what invariably turned out to be hoaxes weren’t worthy of coverage.

  She’d tried his mobile, but it went to his answering service.

  Carla maximised the GPS map. The dot told her Will was already outside the airport. He’d never deceived her in all the years they’d been married. It made the realisation doubly devastating.

  She immediately grabbed her mobile and handbag and left the office, her prison door bumping wide as she hurried to the lift. As she headed down to ground level, anger at his betrayal burnt through her.

  She couldn’t summon the police. Not after having obeyed the kidnappers’ instructions until now. They’d done everything they’d been told. Her presence had been demanded. They both had to be there.

  In the downstairs car park, Will’s blue Audi Q7 was parked in its space. She deactivated the alarm and had the door open before she noticed the front tyre was flat.

  The back one was deflated as well. Carla moved round to the passenger side and found the same situation there. How could it have been vandalised when the car park was so secure?

  A pair of hands slid around her waist.

  “She’s almost on top of us.” Weaver shifted in the driver’s seat and looked up from the iPad across the tarmac to the main gates of Easton Grey. Their Lexus was parked twenty yards away from them on the opposite side of the road under an overhang of trees. Pope had wanted them to position themselves further back, but Weaver wanted to be as tight in as possible.

  The red dot shifted. It was heading north of their location.

  Weaver started the engine. “Looks like she’s going to come in through the back.”

  Having surveyed the boundary it was evident that access could easily be gained to the grounds from most points using only a ladder. The north wall bordered secluded farmland, however, and had collapsed in several places making entry even easier.

  Pope put his hand on the wheel. “She can’t know we’re following her.”

  Weaver chewed faster, nodded dismissively and accelerated hard.

  Minutes later, Will stepped out of a black taxi in front of the same gates. The first cabby he’d found at the airport had been bemused by his request to drive without a passenger. Will had handed him the first GPS phone and said he had to deliver it to Sloman’s farm. He was to wait outside until somebody came to collect it from him. His second ride had brought him to Easton Grey.

  How many cabs had he used in the last four days? He looked up the length of the empty lawns flanking the gravelled driveway that led to the house. The cloudless blue sky of a drowsy afternoon allowed the sun to bathe the sandstone bricks and glint off the mullioned windows.

  “Thinking of breaking in?” The driver remained stationary with his engine puttering while Will stood at the towering electric gates.

  He knew how it looked to him. Had he really only been away four days? But it wasn’t just absence and the state of his clothes that made him feel like an intruder to his own home. He sensed a deviation in the normal atmosphere.

  She was waiting for him.

  He paid and fished out his keys. His jacket was still saturated from his visit to the house in Stirling Crescent, but every item he’d collected was safe within the inside pocket.

  Crows squawked in the nearby copse. The cab driver lingered to watch him activate the gates with his fob and then pulled away. Will strode up the gravel, lobbing the laptop to the side of the drive.

  Carla twisted onto her back and slammed both heels of her hands repeated
ly against the ceiling of her prison. She’d almost escaped her attacker, but had been forced into the boot of the car beside Will’s. She should have recognised it. Should have questioned its presence.

  “Let me out!” Every fibre pumped the scream from her, her temples buzzing with the exertion. She continued hammering the lined metal, not caring if she broke her wrists. She thought of Will surrendering himself. “Help!”

  Somebody had to hear. It was late afternoon, but too early for people to be leaving the building.

  She tried to focus in the dark, but couldn’t even see the backs of her hands above her. She’d dropped her bag. Her mobile had been inside. She started kicking with both feet, driving the pointed toes of her high heels into the lid. She tested with her fingers above her head and then down the sides of her body, searching for any object that might have been left in there. Was there something she could use to bash her way out? Her fingertips only brushed the carpet lining the bottom. She kicked harder, pounded harder, screamed harder.

  Then she listened. Nothing. But the car hadn’t moved yet. She had to attract someone’s attention before she was driven away. She felt her own laboured breath bounce back hot and acrid on her face.

  Somebody had once told her if you were locked in a boot you should try to poke your hand through the rear light. She angled her body so she could make a space to manoeuvre her arm and clawed in the corner above her. Her nails rasped against metal. Was the light unit sealed in?

  She started kicking again, shouting at the lid and battering it with her fists.

  There was no mistaking who had locked her in.

  Will bypassed the front door and entered the house through the back, but was puzzled when he had to deactivate the alarm inside the kitchen. No way in left open for him? Perhaps she thought it unnecessary. But how could she elude the movement detectors?

  He couldn’t have beaten her back here. He wandered cautiously around the rooms, the office a suspended moment in time reminding him of the life he had lost. The swivel chair was still in the middle of the floor, pushed back after they’d hurriedly left on the morning he’d found the site.

  Nothing downstairs was out of place.

  He headed upstairs. Their bed was still unmade. He entered Libby’s room, something he hadn’t done for some time as she’d insisted on privacy for her and Luke. Photos of her nuzzling him were arranged in a clutch of frames on the dresser. He was relieved that no black-framed pictures were present. The last image he’d seen of Luke popped into his memory.

  An oil-effect shot of Will, Carla and Libby at her eighteenth birthday party was mounted on the wall over the bed. He remembered Luke taking it. It had been a distraction while Will had been trying to install their new gas-fired deck barbecue.

  He went back downstairs again, opening each door and taking in the emptiness of the rooms. Spaces embellished with every conceivable lifestyle appliance. He recalled how his home had looked like a showroom when he’d seen it broken down into flat images on the site.

  Although he’d spent his life in disavowal of the figure that had stood over him on the beach, Will recognised he’d been replicating him in every way. He’d applied the cosmetics of a happy family life here just as his father had incessantly painted the outside of the house and neglected what was at the heart of it. And, like him, he’d been unable to hide his disapproval from his only child, had shut them out for not becoming the person he’d envisaged.

  He didn’t know anything about Libby’s world even though she’d existed so close by. He’d ignored everything that jarred with his own perception of her. All of his positive recollections of her were from the time she’d been a child. It was his own expectations at fault, his projections of who he wanted her to be. Her life had always been there for him to participate in, but he’d been in denial of the woman she was becoming.

  Even though he’d been so happy when Jessie had been about to join the family, he disapproved of Libby’s pregnancy. He hadn’t kept that a secret from her and he wondered if she’d been waiting for him to forgive her.

  Consequences. That’s the word he’d used. Had he been so secure in his own immunity from them?

  He padded onto the landing and listened to the stillness of the house. Nobody was here. Had this been a diversion? He thought about Carla and how he’d tricked her into being excluded.

  He suddenly remembered the new security installation and went to the utility room where they’d set up the monitor. He switched it on and a black and white mosaic display of different camera angles allowed him to survey the interior and exterior of the house. No sign of her. But as his eyes skimmed over the summer house he recalled the picture of Carla there that had been hung in the Chicago apartment. They were drawn back to it again. Candles flickered in its window.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  As he made his way down the incline of the lawn, a cool breeze played against his ears. The wind rippled in the ring of yew trees beyond, but he knew the serenity of the scene belied what was hiding within it.

  His mind returned again to the one victim he knew: Eva Lockwood. He’d rarely thought about Eva let alone uttered her name in such a long time, but at eighteen she’d briefly been the epicentre of his universe.

  He’d first caught glimpses of her on campus at Brunel in his first year. She was tall and pale and nobody else seemed to notice her. Will had been drawn to her; she was quiet, demure. She’d worn her tight brunette curls in a selection of colourful headscarves and seemed to be a willing outsider.

  His own background had made him feel like an impostor at Brunel, so he’d felt an immediate affinity towards her. Soon after he’d been more familiar with her timetable than she was. Having discovered that her anthropology and his engineering curricula were never likely to unite them inside the same building, he took to attending parties at human sciences.

  He managed to engage her at the department’s Christmas Punch Ball. She was half-Dutch with wealthy parents and had been sombre and indifferent about her education. She’d wanted to travel, but her family had tethered her until she’d completed her studies. Will had been besotted and had rationalised her apathy. To him her aloofness had been enigmatic. He’d thought about nothing but her during the intervening holidays.

  When he met her again, the following term, she had no recollection of him or their previous conversation. He’d been devastated, and it was Eva’s detachment that precipitated events a few months later.

  By then he was casually involved with Jenny Sturgess. He’d already heard Eva had personal problems; that she was dropping out. But after an all-night campus party ended with his new girlfriend dumping him, it was Eva that persuaded him to allow her back to his room.

  He’d already convinced himself that the two of them were never destined to be together, but her abrupt interest allowed events to develop at a speed he’d never envisaged. There had been some impromptu, drunken passion, but when he’d woken up she’d been clothed and asleep on the couch. He’d assumed they’d both been too drunk to perform, that his virginity was still maddeningly intact.

  Alcohol ensured he remembered little of the night they spent together, and Eva repeated her talent for selective amnesia afterwards. He’d played down the fact to himself that he’d barely registered on her radar by discovering that nobody else had either. Will found out why she’d been such a willing pariah. She was addicted to amphetamines.

  He still looked for her on campus, but one day realised she was no longer attending. He’d met and fallen in love with Carla soon after and Eva had dissolved into his past. Carla knew of her, but had never encountered her during her own time at Brunel.

  Did everything end at a woman he’d briefly known over twenty years ago? Or did it begin there and he’d been working his way back along the website’s street towards her?

  Twenty-five years ago. There was one possibility, one he’d been desperately trying to dismiss, that had been terrifying him since he’d walked out of the rundown house in Stirling Cresc
ent.

  As the distance between him and the hexagonal wooden building diminished, he could hear the sound of Libby’s glass wind chimes gently striking each other.

  He knew no lights had been left on the night he’d been in there with Carla. They’d blown out the candles and lanterns before they’d returned to the house, they’d have burned out by now in any case. The double doors at the front hadn’t been left open either.

  He stopped at the threshold, as he had at the other addresses, squinting through the doorway into the gloomy interior. He could see flames newly lit and their light bouncing from the reflective, coloured glass hanging from the ceiling.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but decided against it. She knew he was here. She had Libby. He had no leverage. He was at her disposal now.

  He took the three steps into the summer house and, for a moment, his eyes had to readjust from the glare of the sun outside. The inside had its familiar aroma – cut grass and citronella – but there was a different scent here. One he’d first encountered on the plane.

  As the details of the room defined themselves, he saw her. She was standing to his right, glinting mirror shards obscuring her expression. For a split second he was walking in as he had four days ago. Carla had been waiting for him then, naked as this woman was now.

  She padded forward on her bare feet. This was no seduction. Her pallid, bony body exhibited scars like constellations, raised blisters and circular black blemishes scattered from her shoulders, between the gap in her tight breasts and down to the tops of her legs.

  She darted through the winking glass and Will felt a punch to his sternum. It was hard, but not enough to force him backwards, but the sensation that chased it fastened the muscles across his chest and dropped him onto his side.

  Will could hear his body spasm and knock the wooden floor with the heel of his shoe. He saw the Taser in her hand as she bent to examine his convulsions.