Blood From Stone

by Frances Fyfield

  Fine, I’ll be off then. Hen had often been left in charge. Hen knew how to lock up after, and he was out of here. Hen could do no wrong. Hen was the boss’s daughter.

  There was no rescue posse. The place was dead. John had never been clever, only reliable. The boss’s daughter could have whatever she liked and never told tales.

  You haven’t got a fucking key?

  No, I’ve got all the duplicate keys, so we’ll try a few, shall we? Peter Friel’s got the key, and I don’t know exactly which unit, so we might have to try a few. I didn’t load it in here, he did. And he didn’t remember the number, but it’s one of these, right, down here, this zone. Look, there’s no need to hold on to me, there’s no one else here, I’m trying to help you, right?

  Right.

  Hat down, she led them slowly along the straight lines of daylight-free corridors, with the small, signal lights winking from the walls – the same endless passages where she had once raced as a ten-year-old. Rick Boyd kept his head down, Frank looked around like a big bear off territory.

  Left at the end, right, left again, down that set of doors, I think, then on the left.

  She was going faster. Nearly there: they were breathless. Hen stopped at a door on her right, gestured for the keys Rick carried.

  Could be this one.

  He opened the door and almost fell through it. It opened inwards. Frank went in first, like a sniffer dog. Rick Boyd stood back, holding the door, ushering Hen in front, always keeping up the rear and blocking escape. If only there were not two of them. Frank’s scissors weighed down the jacket of his suit. The lights in here were dim, emergency lights only, until someone found the master switch – Hen was not about to tell them where she was.

  They were in the neglected archive store, full of documents on unstable, free-standing metal shelves not bolted to the walls, a cheap storage job in a place so much ignored it scarcely mattered if it was safe. Rick stayed where he was, half inside the dark room, half outside, letting his trouble-shooter go first, waiting and watching as Frank moved in, looking for treasure which was his, not hurrying, ambling down the central aisle of a room hired by a local authority, as if he had been sent to value it. Other people’s stuff always fascinated Frank. Hen darted to one side, behind the back of the stacks, moving parallel to him, getting ahead, gauging the distance. Then she used all her strength to push. The central stack of ledgers swayed briefly and fell, hitting him even as he turned to watch in dull astonishment. While the noise reverberated in tune with his brief grunt of surprise, Hen was back by the door. She could see Rick Boyd’s hand still curled round the edge and she flung herself against the metal while he still held on. He was only just beginning to retreat when the door slammed against his hand.

  He roared like an animal and tried to pull back. Hen seized the inner handle, opened the door fractionally and slammed it again. And again, and again, until it closed without resistance and she leaned against it. Listening to shuffling and a keening noise, then nothing.

  She moved to the opposite end and turned on the lights. She looked around for any kind of weapon, searching in her pockets. Then she waited, she could easily wait. Frank had the scissors in his pocket after all, and they were the only weapon she feared. She doubted he was dead; he was not the first to fall between these shelves. She feared the scissors more than she feared the man. She had watched him run away before: she knew his smell now. For Frank she felt nothing more than an enraged puzzlement as to why he wanted to hurt her at all, and why the fool was letting himself be led by someone who ran away and left him. For a few seconds her mind wandered into speculation while she struggled to control her breath. The most dangerous things in her pockets were a reel of thread and two packets of needles. The only weapon she had was the place itself.

  There was everything useful in here. Rubbish was useful. There were other weapons everywhere. Rick Boyd would find them, but Rick Boyd would not know his way in the dark, so she would have to find him first. In the car, she had been thinking of what he wanted, and what he was. Wily, cowardly, sadistic, obsessive, wanting something, but not wanting to be caught. Using the man Frank as a shield, thinking ahead to let Frank take the rap, making Frank strike the blows. It would be Frank’s blood on the Lover, Frank’s picture on the video camera, Frank in the frame, and maybe Rick would be worse without an ally like that, he did not have anyone to take the blame any more, and therefore not a lot to lose. Rick thought he was immortal; Rick would change tack and make himself believe that there were no consequences to whatever he did. It was Frank who was supposed to do the damage. Now it would have to be him. He would either stay and fight for Marianne’s mementos like a wounded savage, or the bully would run away as soon as he could find the way out.

  However had he persuaded Frank to do this? Easy. She shivered. He had persuaded Angel to live in slavery and conspire in the mutilation of herself. He wanted any evidence of that eradicated: he wanted any knowledge of that destroyed. It was madness with a kind of sanity; it had nothing to do with conscience. He would not give up on what he wanted yet; he would not have run away. She should stay where she was and hide, but she could not stay still: she had never been able to do it for long, even when playing hide and seek. The door of the room remained shut, Rick Boyd on the other side or further away. The only sound was Frank moaning. Hen went towards him and looked down on him dispassionately.

  He was sprawled beneath the metal stack, with the shelves lying across his lower back and buttocks. The stack had housed old folders, catalogues and anonymous directories that were spread around him. His chest was flat against the floor, his arms outflung and his head turned to one side. There was no visible blood in the dim light. He did not seem to know where he was or why, and his predicament was not clear to him yet. Maybe then he would start screaming and waste his energy. He seemed like a man who wasted his energy most of the time. A waster, a loser.

  If he used his little intelligence, in time he would be able to worm himself out from beneath the stack, unless his back was broken. Either way, it was difficult to care. She wanted to ask him something. She bent over and spoke into his one visible ear.

  ‘Why did you want to kill me, Frank? What have I ever done to you? Tell me, and I might help you.’

  When he muttered, she had to stoop further to hear, repelled by the smell of him. Sweat and fear, booze and dope, the ingrained dirt of the not-washed, the familiar smell of a Rick Boyd victim, lost to himself, all dignity stolen, like Angel.

  ‘He says you’re Marianne’s daughter. He says you’ll get it all. You . . . get it all . . . I get nothing.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Shearer. Frank Shearer. Marianne’s brother.’

  She kicked him without force, shaking her head, almost laughing.

  ‘You’ve been conned by the best, Frank.’

  She left him and went out into the corridor, leaving the door open.

  Seek and you shall find. Do not misjudge the psychopath because you do not know how to judge or predict him. In the dim light of the corridor, she saw a lone gleaming spot of blood on the floor. Encouraging; almost cheering. As long as she made a single wound or broke one little finger bone, they were more like equal and he might be afraid. Hen hesitated, considering which way to go next. Getting the hell out made the most sense; getting back to the office and the phone and then out, running like mad, that made sense. She walked left to where the corridor reached another of the endless junctions. Her boots sounded loud on the concrete floor: she leaned against the wall and took them off. Then, in her socks, she quietly followed where she thought he might have gone. Rick Boyd had an uncanny instinct for weakness, an innate taste for what was precious and valuable and a powerful urge to destroy it; he might have an equally unerring sense of direction.

  She paused in a pool of brighter light at the junction, listened to the silence and examined the pockets of the boiler suit yet again. There were needles and linen thread as strong as fishing wire, a th
ing for unpicking stitches, safety pins, a small perfume spray, but no mobile phone that was always in the bag she carried. She wondered what the spray was doing there, wanted to throw it away in disgust. There was nothing in her pockets useful for anything but the making of cats’ cradles. She could not overpower him, she could only run away from him, and she would not do that.

  They had taken seven keys to seven separate units. Rick Boyd had them all. He would try them one by one but he did not know what he was looking for. He would only know that Hen had led them into the wrong place.

  Hen knew exactly where the trunk was stored. Zone A, suitable for clothing, metal containers inside rooms and one of the more expensive areas. Odd to think there was storage and luxury storage, some units guaranteed more air- and watertight than others, with better light. There was no equality in stored rubbish; if you wanted it safer than houses, you paid more. By a process of elimination, using the numbers of the keys, he would find it in the end, might have found it by now, but would he recognise what he found? There was a washbasin in an alcove on her left, washbasins in many of the corridors, not always with running water. The clue to Rick Boyd’s spoor was in the pinkish water still in the basin and the drips below. She took strength from reminding herself that she had hurt him. It was cold in the centre of this enclosed world and she was conscious of hurting all over. It was the chilliness of the place, even in summer, that had stopped her playing hide and seek and it seemed to be freezing her now. She moved faster. Then paused again.

  She was in a hallway of twelve metal containers, the size of shower rooms, forming their own streets in what once might have been a spacious hospital ward. The containers that were being used had locked padlocks hanging from the metal hasps of the doors: the empty ones had the locks hanging free. The padlocks varied in size. The one she took was as big as a fist, cold and heavy to the touch. She had always laughed at these padlocks. They looked impressive; they comforted the customer who held the key, but for all the weight the mechanism was primitive enough to be unlocked by a child with a penknife. It was the weight of it that counted, the feeling of security and that was why she wanted it in her hand.

  Left, right, away from the centre, through another set of swing doors, another washbasin, another pool of light. Past three open doors showing stacks of furniture, rammed into the space, books in another, the contents of a child’s bedroom in the third. He had tried them all, dismissed them, until he found this and he was not sure about it. He was oblivious to inspection, no longer cared who saw him, framed by the light inside his metal cell. Instinct must have told him he was in the right place, but his instinct for what he wanted seemed to have deserted him. Perhaps he could only smell the presence of Marianne Shearer in here, realised that all he had wanted was the knowledge that was in her mind. Hen had a sudden flash image of something seen in a film, long ago, a picture of a man raiding an ancient tomb for treasure, not knowing what he should take away, until he fell prey to the curse.

  He had used a knife to slash at the cambric wardrobe bags bearing the purple and orange delivery labels with the distinctive Joyce name. The beige cloth was torn, not to ribbons, only enough to have created a jagged inspection hole. That effort had wearied him; the discovery that the blade of his kitchen knife was dull against tough fabric, his left hand was not strong enough and the contents were not what he thought they were. The knife had dropped to the concrete floor. He had taken off the windcheater he had worn and used it to bind his other hand. He was sitting on the trunk, holding his wrapped hand between his crossed legs, bent over himself, his head bowed, exposing his neck. The heel of his foot beat a tattoo against the edge of the trunk, masking any noise she made. The sound she heard first was a light thump, thump, thump of indecision. Someone kicking against the cold.

  Hen paused long enough to consider if there was enough time to pull the door closed and use the new padlock and key she carried to lock him in from the outside but the padlocks were fiddly; she would have to be quicker than he. She might just do it, but she could not take the risk. A piece of scarlet cloth protruded from the hole he had made in the wardrobe bag, and that angered her. She could not take the risk of leaving him locked in here with all his destructive strength, because what would he do but destroy it?

  She stepped forward with the padlock held firmly in both her hands, raised them high and smashed it down on the back of his neck.

  Rick Boyd slumped sideways. She could not believe it could ever be as easy as that, as easy as it had seemed to be with Frank. Better to hit him again and again, but revulsion prevailed. She did not want to be close enough, nor repeat that sick sensation of metal against flesh and bone, nor become like him and take pleasure in it. She pushed him off the trunk, aiding his own, agonisingly slow sliding to the floor. Cat got your tongue, Rick? Never silent for long, surely. He lay on his side. She pulled his damaged hand from between his legs, unwound the windcheater binding and tossed it aside. She avoided looking at the purpling lump of flesh, grasped the back of his shirt and dragged him towards the door. The shirt rode up over his perfect, washboard abdomen, the contours visible in the harsh neon light of the unit, making her feel sick. He was beginning to move, struggle, and murmur incoherently. She tied a sleeve of the windcheater round his good wrist, knotting it tightly. She pulled the rest of the noisy nylon windcheater through a metal strut on the back of the door and secured it with the padlock. When he came round, it would be the padlock he would see: he would have one badly injured hand to free himself. Enough to buy time.

  She tore strips from the wardrobe cloth; didn’t he know this kind of material was easier to tear than to cut? She could tie his feet with that. Her own feet and her own limbs were icy cold. She wanted to stitch his mouth shut with linen thread, but the needles she carried were wrong. No, it was bad enough to touch him at all. Scissors would have been useful: she could have snipped off his fingers, one by one.

  Rick Boyd opened his eyes and looked at her, the way he had stared in court with all the old arrogance of injured innocence. He winked, slowly.

  ‘Hello, Angel,’ he said. ‘It was always you I wanted.’

  She wanted a knife, then. She sprayed the perfume into his mouth and eyes and watched him choke. He screamed and tried to lift his hands to rub it away, hitting the injured hand against his chin, clumsily putting a finger into his mouth, biting down and screaming again. His body contorted, still powerful, and then as awareness dawned, he was quieter. He opened his inflamed eyes, blinked and stared as if realising for the first time that what he saw was not what he expected to see. He twisted and saw the padlock anchoring him to the door and began to groan, softly. She was not smiling at him. Only Angel had smiled.

  She was not smiling or responding at all, except for staring back at him, her face a study of disgust.

  ‘Where’s Frank? Where’s my friend?’

  ‘Friend? You have no friends. There’s only me. Stay still while I touch you. Don’t look.’

  She tied his ankles with strips of canvas. There were spasms of movement rather than resistance. He closed his eyes: she did not trust him. Hen went back to the first of the units he had tried en route to this one to fetch whatever she could find. A real rubbish unit with old household stuff awaiting further use, soft objects padding out the hard. Ironic, really, that she should find black bin liners labelled ‘Curtains/blankets’. They promised warmth and suffocation and she staggered beneath the weight. The whole contents of this packed unit shifted ominously as she pulled them out, disobeying all the rules. We never, ever touch anyone’s things, unless they’ve absolutely stopped paying for the space. She laid a weighty set of mismatched curtains across his torso, pinning him down with cloth. His eyes were blue and also inflamed; they mirrored his terror. There. He was immobilised for a while. There didn’t seem too much hurry about anything any more. Hen would have liked him not to be there. He got in the way.

  ‘Please,’ he murmured. ‘Please.’

  There was no satisfact
ion in his pleading. It was not what she wanted.

  ‘What did you say to the last woman who said “Please?”’ she asked him.

  His body shook. Warmth flooded him from the suffocating material. He bared his teeth in the effort not to scream. Sweat rolled from his thick hair down the side of his face. He whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head.

  ‘No you aren’t. I just wanted you to know what it was like.’

  She told him she had the scissors from Frank’s pocket. Told him she was considering doing to him what he had done to Angel. Or would he prefer her to cover him with something else? There was plenty of polythene in here, dangerous to children. No hurry. She thought of asking him, Why? but it seemed pointless. There was no Why to Rick Boyd.

  She was sitting on the trunk watching him watching her, not enjoying the raw fear of him, the passive distress, simply noting the fact that yes, he did know how it felt now. The colour seemed to leach from his mesmerising blue eyes, like blue flowers losing lustre and intensity.

  Footsteps sounded down the corridor, coming towards them. At last, she was thinking, will someone come and save me from myself? The footsteps were plural and hurried, not recognisable, although she thought she could decipher the click of female hooves and the more ponderous ones of a male. Hide and seek taught footstep recognition, as well as how to hold your breath.

  Rick Boyd heard, too. He began to scream for help in a high, piercing girlish sound that was peculiarly pitiful. Hen’s last, irrelevant thought was that the scream did justice to his size. It worked very well on an audience.

  There were gasps of horror from the doorway behind her. Then her father’s sad, angry voice.

  ‘Oh God, Hen. Why can’t you leave things alone? What have you done now?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Continuation of cross-examination of Marianne Shearer, QC, by herself

  Q. Can you clarify, please? Make it clear, please, why you’re so ashamed of yourself that you really want to die?