With only room for one ‘guest’ here, it looked like Goddard was scouting possible replacements for Holly.
Also present were a small collection of spares for the lighting and set-up rigs used in the films Kris had sent me. Leaning in one corner was an upside-down placard. The text on it read: ‘LIBERTY BEFORE DEATH’.
From there I moved through to what was clearly the location used in the first piece of footage: a long, broad space that might once have been two rooms later knocked through and enlarged into one. Undecorated wood, same as the rest of the house. A second bed, similar to the one downstairs. No ceiling beneath the ridge of the roof above, just bare joists. There were still two halogen lamps up here, as well as a video camera on a tripod pointing at the bed. A hostess trolley to the right held a variety of tools. Unpleasant, metal contraptions for the most part. Restraints. Pliers. A cigarette lighter and a screwdriver with a soot-blackened head. A makeshift whip made of steel cable.
A side door led into a surprisingly well-decorated bedroom. A lilac carpet kept almost spotless. A double bed spread with a beige comforter with tiny purple flowers on it. A dresser and closet made of oak. The closet was full of Goddard’s clothes. There were more in the dresser. Tucked to the side of the top drawer was a Smith and Wesson revolver and a box of shells. I looked at it for a second, but left it where it was.
In the bottom drawer was a very old looking shoebox. Notes and photographs. Guys looking at the camera, smiling. Guys with one young boy or another held in front of them. Kris. Cody. The Gang of Six taking it in turns to abuse them while the others watched. Names, details of jobs or family lives, phone numbers. Out of date, but I guessed it wouldn’t have been hard to find any one of these guys in a pinch. In the notes, Heller was described as a “gangster” and a “killer”.
On top of the dresser were a pair of framed photographs. Both looked like they’d been taken years ago, had that washed-out color of old film, further faded from spending a long time out in the light. One showed a scrawny boy, can’t have been more than fourteen or so, with windblown brown hair, blinking into the sun behind the camera. He was in a t-shirt and shorts, had an adolescent suntan. On summer vacation somewhere. His arm was around the shoulder of a girl a couple of years younger than him. Wavy blonde hair, similar kids’ summer clothes, one hand held up to shade her eyes.
The second photo was of the girl on her own, a close-up of her face. Smiling, innocent. There was a definite resemblance to the boy in the first picture, something in the eyes. Brother and sister. Barely visible at the bottom, ‘Lucy’ was written in faded pencil.
I slipped back out of Goddard’s bedroom to check the film in the camera. I wanted to see if Holly was still alive. I’d made sure there was a tape in there and I was about to switch the machine on when the sound of an approaching car engine cut through the silence. I scooted over to the corner of the room from where I could see both doors, gun in hand, and waited.
The car came to a halt and the engine died. I heard the front door open and footsteps in the hall. Two people, both starting up the stairs. One set faded away along the landing, the second headed towards me.
The door opened, and Goddard walked into the room, over towards the camera. Five foot seven, medium build, looked around fifty-five. His hair was chocolate brown and had a faint greasy shine. Clean-shaven, pallid skin. He wore a heavy green jacket and jeans splashed with tiny specks of mud, and carried a package under one arm.
He didn’t notice me until I stepped forward, leveled my gun at the back of his head, and said, “Hello, Richard Goddard. Or is it Anderson?”
55.
He froze for a moment before saying, very calmly, “Alex Rourke.”
“Right in one.”
“And can I ask what you think you’re doing here?”
“You know the answer to that already.”
He sighed. “Kill me, rescue all the prisoners I’m keeping here, hope you don’t get caught by the cops. Or maybe you’ll find someone else to pin the crime on like you did with poor little Cody.”
“That’s basically it, yeah.”
“So why,” he said, slowly turning to face me, “are we having this conversation? Shouldn’t you have pulled the trigger by now? Or do you want to find out what I’ve done, or who I am and why I’ve done it?”
“I know what you’ve done. I know what you did to Cody, and how you turned him into your own pet monster. You tried to do the same with another kid called Kris but he escaped. Once Cody could be trusted to do only what he was told, you sent him back out into the outside world to snatch little girls for you. Is that your sister’s photo in the bedroom? Holly’s just someone to play out your fantasies about your sister, right? Someone you can torture and abuse to your heart’s content.”
Goddard’s eyes narrowed. “You found Kris. Little prick.”
“Right. And I talked to Gabriel Heller after you tried to have him kill me. So I know enough about you. I don’t know why or how you started going after kids. I guess there’s some sob story or other behind it, but I don’t care what it is. Someone like you, who gives a fuck about ‘why’?”
“I’ve had nothing to do with Gabriel in years.”
“That’s not what he says.”
“Are you going to take the word of a man like him?”
I rolled my eyes. “Am I going to take the word of a man like you?”
“I’ve got no reason to lie. You’re holding a gun to my head.”
“Neither did he. He was holding one to mine,” I said. “Face it, Goddard, you just like trying to mess with people. You love control, and you love lies and fantasy. You fucked and killed a bunch of kids. Dress it up with whatever bullshit justifications you like, you did it because you’re a sick fuck. Just like every single other sick fuck. I spent years dealing with guys like you. There’s nothing about ‘why’ that I haven’t already seen a hundred times, and there’s nothing about the ‘who’ that I give a damn about.”
He smiled without humor. “So I’ll ask again, why are we having this conversation?”
I smiled back at him. “Because I don’t like shooting people in the back.”
The door through to the master bedroom clicked open and Holly walked in. The long t-shirt she was wearing draped loosely over her shoulders and her hair hung in untidy strands around her face. In her hands, held unsteadily out in front of her, she had Goddard’s gun.
“Holly,” I said. She looked at me, confused, wide-eyed. A hint of recognition, but that was all. “Holly, put down the gun and go wait in the room next door.”
Goddard glanced at her. “Lucy, you know what to do.”
“I’m not going to let you kill him,” she said to me, and sighted up on me with the pistol.
“Holly, you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m here to set you free and take you away from all this. I’m a good guy.”
Goddard smiled. “She won’t listen to you, Alex. She’s my Lucy. She’ll do what she’s told just like Cody used to, once I’d educated him. She’s mine.”
Holly blinked once, twice and flexed her grip on the gun. I kept mine pointed at Goddard.
“You tried to do to her what you did to Cody? Make them into what you want by doing all that shit to them?”
“I educated Cody. I brought him up like a son.”
“Some father.”
“He never complained. And neither does Lucy. She’s mine.”
Holly nodded, said, shaking, “He takes care of me. He loves me.”
“Do you remember your parents, Holly? Your mom and dad, back in Providence? They’ve been missing you. They want you to come back to them.”
“No, I’ve got to stay here. I don’t want to leave. I can’t.” She shook her head violently. “You can’t make me.”
“Don’t you want to see them? They want to see you, Holly.” I tried to reconcile everything I knew about Holly the girl with what I was seeing now. Strange how she still sounded like a kid even though she’d become an adult. An
adult pointing a gun at me and who looked shaky enough to fire the thing for real.
“I… I don’t have parents. I’ve got my owner and that’s all I want. All I want.”
I thought back to the ‘slave contract’ downstairs and swallowed my anger. “Do you remember your friend Tina, who you went to see on the night you were grabbed and put into that van? Do you remember that, Holly?”
She stuttered, glanced at her captor. “What? No. I’m Lucy. I’m Lucy. Stop calling me that. I’m Lucy.”
“I’m here to help you, Holly.”
“You were supposed to leave us alone. You should be in prison, or dead. That gangster was supposed to kill you. You shouldn’t be here.”
“What did I tell you, Alex?” Goddard said with a smile. “She’s mine, and she’s never going to leave me.”
“Like the others?”
“Others?”
“The other girls you had Cody grab for you so you could take your pick. So you could find the one that matched what you had in mind the best. They didn’t leave you, did they?” I glanced at Holly. “You killed them. Killed them because you were bored with them, ditched the bodies and started again.”
Goddard shook his head. “They weren’t worthy. I haven’t had to do that in a long time.”
“Why did you keep snatching girls if Holly was the one you wanted, Goddard? I mean, if she was so perfect then why keep Cody out there grabbing them off the street after you had her already? He wasn’t sure about you then, Holly, and that hasn’t changed.”
She shook her head. I noticed she knew I was talking about her without calling her ‘Lucy’. “You’re lying. You’re lying.”
“Don’t you remember him bringing other girls home? Or leaving this house to go and examine them, to see if they fitted what he wanted better than you did? He’s always had an eye out for someone who’d suit him more than you, Holly. You shouldn’t stand by him. He doesn’t deserve it. Or you.”
“Lies, Lucy,” Goddard called to her as she bit her lip. “This man is just afraid and angry. He wants to hurt both of us and he knows you won’t let that happen. He just wants to confuse you so that he can kill me and then turn on you. You’ll do what I say, won’t you?”
Holly’s wide eyes flicked between us, but she kept the gun pointed at me. “I… of course, yes, of course.”
“Does Holly know you were planning on replacing her?” I said. “That she was getting too old for your fantasy? You like young ones, don’t you Goddard? And you were looking for a young girl to take her place.”
I saw her gaze move towards him again.
“That’s crap,” he said. “Don’t listen to him, Lucy.”
“There are pictures of the possible replacements on your bookshelf, tucked into your books on brainwashing. If you want to see for yourself, Holly, go and take a look. I won’t do anything.”
“It’s a trick, Lucy.”
“No trick. You never cared about her, of course you didn’t.” Beads of sweat were making my eyes itch. “You just wanted her to match the fantasy in your head, all this ‘Lucy’ shit. That’s what you care about, not her. How long before you found yourself an excuse to kill her?”
“No, no. I just wanted…”
“Maybe you’d pretend to yourself that I’d forced your hand and that you had to get rid of her? But deep down, you just want a reason to be finished with Holly. You’re already looking for a new Lucy. And living out here, killing Holly and ditching her body wouldn’t be hard. You were going to start again. You don’t want her any more.”
“That’s not… no, it’s all a lie! Lucy!” Goddard’s voice grew increasingly shrill.
Holly’s upper lip trembled and a tear trickled down her cheek. “You don’t want me? What did I do wrong?”
“He never wanted you, Holly. He just wants the fantasy you represented. Now he’s going to get that from someone else.”
A second tear, and a third. Holly lowered the gun a notch and turned fully to look at Goddard like a child facing an angry parent. “I did everything I was told like a good girl. Why?”
“It’s not your fault, Holly,” I said. “It never was. Everything, it’s all his fault. You never did wrong. He did.”
Goddard was weighing the change in her mood and her previously servile attitude. He must have known he was losing her, that things were slipping out of his control. One moment as he paused to make a decision, preserved in utter stillness, and then he lunged at her, arms outstretched, grabbing for the pistol.
He never made it.
My first bullet caught him in the shoulder, set him spinning as he stumbled. The second blew out the back of his head. A spray of red over the camera equipment and the wall behind him. He crashed to the floor in a bloody heap, so much dead meat.
Holly screamed, a wordless cry of grief and rage. Her watery eyes watched him fall, wide with horror and loss, her doubts and anger at him utterly overwhelmed as she realized he was gone. She was still howling, tears pouring down her face, as she snapped the revolver back up in front of her, features twisted by fury and a clear wish to see me dead in revenge. She was too far away for me to reach her.
Her finger tightened on the trigger and I acted on instinct. Another kick from the gun, and a hole blossomed in Holly’s chest as the bullet punched clean through her heart.
She dropped without firing a shot.
The scream was still on her face, and her eyes were wide, staring at me from where she slumped on the floor. The same innocent eyes that had looked out at me from her photograph all those years ago, back in a different world, a different life.
56.
I stood there for a minute or so, unmoving, the smell of gunfire, sharp and acrid, wafting past me as I stared at her corpse and tried to come to terms with what I’d done. Break them down, build them up. Teach them they were worthless and then give them little rewards. They’d adore you. Stockholm Syndrome, reprogramming, call it what you like.
Something Holly had said before she died came back to me. “You should be in prison, or dead. That gangster was supposed to kill you.”
Holly had been the one who called Heller and told him to deal with me. Goddard told the truth when he said he hadn’t been responsible. He’d wanted to get rid of me, and that’s why he’d hired Harvey and his brother. But he didn’t think of blackmailing his old criminal buddy. Which was why when Heller described the call he received, it hadn’t sounded like he’d had a nasty conversation with a former friend. It had sounded like a threat from a stranger, out of the blue. Heller hadn’t known who Holly was, but she’d known who he was and everything about him from the old days. She must have read Goddard’s notes, seen that he was a thug and a killer, and figured she could use him.
She’d done it to protect Goddard. He’d had that level of control over her. She’d wanted to keep her master safe from me.
She’d killed for him.
The son of a bitch remade Holly just as he remade Cody, to serve him. And both of them had loved him because of it.
Died for him because of it.
If I hadn’t staked out the post office, if she hadn’t seen me looking for them, would she still have acted this way? Would Tucker still be alive? Or Kris? Every action, every choice, had a thousand consequences pinwheeling from them.
I got to work on the scene. Fired a few rounds from Holly’s gun, a couple more from mine, a random spray to make it impossible to be certain who’d shot what into whom if and when the scene was discovered. I left Victor’s Berretta by Goddard’s hand. As far as the world would be concerned, the two of them fought when Holly found out his plans. These things happened. I left the window open, relying on wind and weather to help obscure any stray trace evidence, then headed downstairs.
I used duct tape and a plastic bag to seal over the broken windowpane to make it look like it had happened accidentally and they’d repaired it as best they could. I took the broken glass with me to be dumped in the woods well away from the house.
Outside, the wind had picked up a little, but there were still no sounds apart from the trees rasping against each other. No car engines. No police sirens. No indication that anyone knew what had just happened.
Holly Tynon had died seven years ago. Everything she was, the core of her personality, had been broken down and rebuilt by Goddard to fulfill a role in his own personal fantasy life. The girl I’d shot was a living ghost whose life was constant abuse and torture and whose personality was a construct of the monster who’d kept her as his slave.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
I hadn’t just killed the nineteen-year-old girl I’d come all this way to save, to restore to her family. To make up for my past mistakes. To repair everything I’d done wrong in the name of doing right.
After all was done, I still didn’t know who Goddard himself was and what had started him off, and I probably never would. I guessed he’d begun by abusing his sister, or at least fantasizing about it. It was the only way to explain his obsession with her years later. Maybe their parents found out, maybe they were separated, or maybe she died. It had taken him a while to have the confidence to find a surrogate that he could grow in her image, to do with as he wanted. First he’d practiced his technique on Cody and Kris, secure in his circle of friends. Only once he could distance himself from the abductions had he sent Cody, his shadow, out to find him a new Lucy.
Exactly why he’d chosen Holly, and exactly what had happened to the other girls Cody abducted for him beyond them “not being worthy”, I didn’t know. Someone would be out walking, or they’d be digging the foundations to a new highway, and they’d find another pathetic bundle of child’s bones and rags, and another name would be crossed off the list.
Maybe Cody could have been saved if he’d been willing to confide in someone when he was arrested, or even later in prison, some time before the end. He hadn’t been born the way he was, but made that way. I didn’t believe in God, but I did believe in redemption.
The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut Page 27
