The Chosen Ones

by Howard Linskey

  O’Brien froze and the colour seemed to drain from him. He tried hard to recover. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  O’Brien took a step towards the door. ‘Don’t try and leave,’ Bradshaw told him. It’s not going to look good if I have to wrestle you to the ground.’

  O’Brien turned, gritted his teeth and advanced on Bradshaw.

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Throw a punch. I’d love that.’

  O’Brien stopped in his tracks and seemed to be evaluating whether the younger man was serious. When it appeared he was, O’Brien changed tactic. ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Just because some prozzie has been saying stuff about me, it doesn’t mean it’s true. They’ll make up anything to get coppers into bother.’

  In answer, Bradshaw went to the large TV set at the end of the conference room. He bent towards the VCR and hit play. A videotaped image appeared on the TV and O’Brien walked towards it and peered at the screen. What he saw was a clear image of himself and Jenna sitting on a bench looking outwards towards a camera that had been secreted a long way back from the opposite bank then zoomed in on them from a distance. Tom Carney had used the good will he had mustered from the TV news producer from the footage he got of the police raid on the scrapyard to borrow the camera again. Then he had gone to the riverbank where Jenna had been ordered to meet her blackmailer and waited.

  The picture was at a slight angle because Tom could not have known which of the benches O’Brien was going to choose for his meeting with Jenna and he had to set up the camera in a spot where he could survey them yet not be seen, which was far from easy. Thankfully, the powerful zoom lens had made it possible.

  ‘Are you saying that’s not you, extorting money from a former prostitute?’

  O’Brien’s face betrayed him; it was filled with panic, anger and fear. ‘That’s not why I met with her,’ he said. ‘She approached me and said she had information … about a crime, an ongoing investigation.’

  ‘Really? That’s not what she says.’

  ‘Then it’s my word against hers,’ O’Brien hissed. ‘Isn’t it?’

  He turned back to the screen and realized there was no audio to accompany the video pictures. ‘What have you got here anyway?’ He sounded triumphant now. ‘Nothing. Just a bit of film of me sitting with someone. We could have been talking about anything.’ He was right. The pictures alone were nowhere near enough to get a conviction.

  ‘Now, are you done, Bradshaw? Because I’m not. I’m going to put in an official complaint about you. So help me, I’ll make sure everyone in this force hears what you tried to do to me. Everybody already knows you ain’t right in the head. You’re not one of us and you never will be.’

  It was then that the door opened and Tom walked in, accompanied by a young woman. ‘What’s he doing here?’ O’Brien demanded.

  Tom ignored him. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ he told Bradshaw. ‘Got held up downstairs when we signed in. I got the impression the desk sergeant isn’t that keen on journalists.’

  He turned to O’Brien. ‘This is Marie. You could say she’s a friend of a friend. I’ve brought her here today to take a look at the film I shot of you blackmailing my old friend Jenna.’ Before O’Brien could react or say another word, Tom said, ‘Okay, Marie, do your stuff.’

  The young woman walked closer to the TV set. She moved to within a few yards of it and stopped, peering at it intently as the video tape continued to roll, then, in front of a disbelieving O’Brien, she began to speak along with the tape.

  ‘Did you bring the money? Is that what I felt in your coat pocket?’

  ‘I brought the money, just like you asked … or should I say demanded.’

  ‘There’s no need to get shirty.’

  ‘Oh really? I’m supposed to be polite, am I, when someone blackmails me?’

  ‘Shut up and give me my money.’

  O’Brien looked like he was in complete shock. It was as if he was witnessing sorcery. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he managed.

  ‘That, O’Brien, is lip-reading,’ Bradshaw informed him.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Helen had to drive past the farmhouse and park on a grass verge just before she reached the corner that separated it from the Keogh cottage. She got out of her car, walked back and went to the locked, rusty gate. The house still looked abandoned – it was grubby and the net curtains were old and dirty. There were no lights on inside.

  Helen examined the yard beyond the gate. The ground was dry and there was no fresh mud on the concrete where a vehicle might have driven across it. The whole building had the air of a place long abandoned, but what might lie beyond it? Were there outbuildings or barns? Were there places on the land around that might have been mistaken in some victim’s overwrought mind for an underground dwelling?

  Helen knew she couldn’t ask the police to search the place without good cause but she didn’t fancy the idea of exploring the land around it without Tom and Ian at least knowing where she was, so she decided it was best to call them. She reached for her phone and, for once, was grateful that Tom’s chiding about the blooming thing never being charged had led her to take more care to plug it into the socket in the kitchen at night. Helen hoped she’d be able to get a signal in a rural spot like this, then, to her consternation, she realized the battery indicator was showing only a tiny amount of life.

  How could that be? She had definitely plugged it into the socket on the wall by the toaster. Then she remembered Tom’s other annoying trait. He was always turning off the power switches next to the sockets, rendering them useless, because he had once written a story where some people had died in a fire caused by a shorted electric circuit triggered by a ghetto-blaster that had been left plugged in. She cursed Tom for being so bloody anal and chided herself for forgetting about it. She tried to call him anyway but the phone died immediately.

  ‘Shit,’ she hissed. Helen knew she had to make a decision. She wanted to check the place out in case it held secrets beyond its stark building and she would have preferred people to know where she was going. Fate had robbed her of that opportunity, however, and she really didn’t want to leave here and waste more time driving back on another day, possibly for no reason.

  It was the lack of life in the building which convinced her to just do it. Helen told herself she would take a look, no more than that, then she would head back. If she saw anything even slightly suspicious, she could let Ian know and he could come back mob-handed with a warrant.

  Helen put a foot on the lowest part of the fence, placed her weight on it then climbed over the gate before carefully dismounting and standing in the farmyard.

  She didn’t move at first. Instead she waited to see if anyone would react to her presence by calling out, or whether a dog might start to bark at the intruder. But there was no sound and no sign of anyone in the farmhouse, not even a twitching curtain. She told herself that even if there was someone there she could explain her presence, though in truth she wasn’t sure how. Helen would knock on the door, just to make sure, then if no one answered she would take a look around. No harm in that, surely?

  She did feel a little uneasy now that she was on the wrong side of the gate, and she had to tell herself not to be so foolish. There really didn’t appear to be anyone living here. She walked up to the door of the farmhouse and knocked firmly then waited. After a few moments she knocked again, harder this time, but there was still no answer. She tried the door and it was locked.

  She walked round the side of the building and began to explore the farm.

  There was some shouting and a bit of a struggle at the very end but not as much as Bradshaw was expecting. DS O’Brien didn’t go quietly, but his eventual arrest wasn’t as violent or noisy as any of them had feared. Admittedly, some onlookers came towards the conference room once the raised voice of the DS reached a certain volume, but all they heard as he was led away from the room was a loud but surprisingly half-hearte
d protest that ‘This is all bullshit and she is some kind of bloody witch!’

  To begin with, the problem had kept Tom up at night. How could he record a conversation with a man who was bound to check his victim wasn’t wearing a wire and savvy enough to avoid specifying a particular spot for a bug to be planted there in advance? He could have picked any one of a number of benches along the riverbank or simply chosen to have walked along it with Jenna while he talked.

  The idea of filming him from a distance came to him after the raid on the scrapyard. The footage Tom provided to his producer friend of large numbers of migrants being rescued had gone down a storm and the promise that there might be more footage he would be interested in involving police corruption and blackmail had been persuasive. But there was no way to clearly record what they were saying from that distance. All Tom would be left with was a film with no dialogue.

  It was thinking about silent films that had done it, those old movies where people mouthed the words and the dialogue appeared on the screen in the form of subtitles. That was what he needed. Magical subtitles that could communicate the meaning of lips that moved silently. Then he realized there was a better and far less fanciful idea. He needed someone who could look at those silent lips and read them for him.

  Marie from the Furry Friends Centre had been an absolute star, never questioning her involvement and accepting the word of Helen, Tom and later DS Ian Bradshaw that she was on the side of right. What really impressed Tom was how unfazed she had been when she was face to face with DS O’Brien. She had merely concentrated on the job in hand and read every incriminating word from the screen, even as the accused man had begun to first question then rant at her.

  Tom phoned Jenna with the news and broke off from her repeated, relieved thank-yous only because Marie was patiently waiting for a lift back. He took her to lunch first then dropped her off at the hearing-dog centre before heading home so he could write a piece about a detective sergeant being arrested for corruption then sell it as an exclusive.

  ‘That’s another one we owe you, Tom,’ said Paul Hill, Tom’s long-standing contact at the Daily Mirror when he phoned it in to the tabloid.

  ‘It’s actually money that you owe me Paul, not favours, so I would be grateful for prompt payment.’

  ‘You got it, mate.’ The spectre of Tom’s outstanding bills began to slowly recede.

  Finally, he returned to Bradshaw at police HQ. ‘I don’t suppose we’re too popular right now,’ he said, ‘with the rank and file.’

  ‘Normally, you’re not,’ admitted the detective, ‘but I don’t think O’Brien has many friends left. They’re all in shock. It’s not as if your lip-reader was going to make any of it up. Jenna played her part as well, by the way, coaxing the incriminating words out of him, though I suppose some of that was your doing?’

  ‘I gave her a few pointers but she still had to hand him enough rope to hang himself. She did a great job – there was a lot resting on it for her.’

  Bradshaw shook his head in something resembling disbelief. ‘I still can’t quite believe he did it. I mean, I never liked the guy, we’d had our tussles in the past, but what the hell was he thinking?’

  ‘The usual,’ said Tom. ‘That the rules don’t apply to him, that he would get away with it.’

  ‘Do you really think he’ll go down for this? Won’t they want to give him the benefit of the doubt one last time?’

  Bradshaw shook his head. ‘They just searched O’Brien’s house. They found the ledger with the girls’ names in it. Why would he have that except to blackmail them? He’s finished, Tom.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Two stone animals flanked the back door of the farmhouse, as if guarding it. The statues were old, weather-beaten and quite small, each one the dimensions of a medium-sized dog, and they glared out, as if warning trespassers not to come too close. Helen couldn’t make out exactly what they were meant to be. They were a bit like domestic cats, though fierce-looking. Could they be pumas or jaguars? Could they perhaps be the lions that Sarah said she saw when she escaped her captivity? It was possible, but was this even a garden? Not really. It was a farmyard backing on to fields.

  At the far end of the yard were a number of metal drums. Three were stacked next to one another vertically and a fourth was lying on the ground, having presumably fallen over at some point and never been righted. Grass grew around them and the metal on the drums was rusted. It looked as if they hadn’t been moved in a while. Perhaps they were empty or, like the farmhouse, no longer of use to anyone. Helen drew closer and noticed writing on the side of each drum. She had to bend low so that she was almost down on one knee in order to read it. There was white lettering on a blue background and it gave information on the contents of the drums. The largest word was presumably the name of the company that supplied them, then there were some chemical symbols which meant nothing to Helen.

  C3H4Cl2F2O

  Followed by a product name: Methoxyflurane.

  Outlawed in the UK since the late seventies, according to Dr Hemming, but it could put you to sleep and damage your internal organs. Now Helen was staring at barrels of the stuff on a farm in rural County Durham. How could there be any innocent explanation for this?

  Helen turned and looked about her. No one there, nobody staring out at her from the farmhouse windows, even though for a moment she was convinced she was being watched. She switched her attention back to the barrels then, determined to record the information written on them. Helen reached inside her jacket pocket for her notebook and a pen, bending low once more to write down the chemical symbol, name and address.

  When she was done, she straightened once more and her eyeline went beyond the barrels to the fields behind them. This was grazing land that been allowed to fall fallow, so it was littered with weeds and wildflowers that were blooming now that spring was here. It was a colourful spectacle, so at odds with Helen’s creeping sense of dread, and complemented by a large clump of trees off to one side of the field which had broken into bloom. They stretched all the way down the hill. Their branches were thrusting outwards proudly now that they were full of colourful blossom. So that’s where the street name came from. These were magnolia trees and there were dozens of them with pretty pale flowers at the end of their branches.

  Pink flowers.

  Pink trees, thought Helen.

  Helen was so shocked by this realization that she opened her mouth to actually say the words, but then she heard a loud click. Someone was standing behind her. Slowly and reluctantly, she turned to face her fate. There was a man there, standing between her and the gate of the farm, preventing her from returning to the safety of the open road and her car. He was wearing a balaclava and carrying a large double-barrelled shotgun, which he pointed right at her.

  ‘Please don’t shoot me,’ she said quietly, because she was certain now that he would.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ he told her.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  1990

  Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.

  ‒ James 1:15

  Chris was fourteen when he finally worked out the secret of the big house. The sense that his father owned it, too, was a vague one till then and never discussed between them, but no one else lived there or appeared to have the right to come there. His father went into the building unaccompanied, its fields bordered the garden of the cottage and he used to roam them freely, and the adjacent woodland.

  The first night that Chris followed Father, first to the farmhouse then, after he emerged from it, across the fields, he was driven by more than simple curiosity. He knew about the bunker and his father’s plans for it but instinct told him there was something not quite right in the world and that his father was a part of it somehow. He felt compelled to discover just what the man was up to after dark while Chris was tucked up in bed.

  He watched as the door to one of the big metal boxes swung open
. Light from the lamp his father held illuminated the scene inside but all Chris could make out was a dark figure with a bright light beside him. He knew there was someone already in there, despite the fact he could not see them. He could hear her. She didn’t scream but instead there was a pitiful, desperate sound like a low wail. His father placed the lamp on the ground by the door of the big metal box.

  Somehow Chris dared to move closer until he had a clearer view of his father, who still held the shotgun but now had something in his other hand. It looked like a little plastic bag, and he drew something from it and held it in his right hand while he kept the gun pointed forward with his left, then moved further into the box and disappeared. The sounds from the woman became shriller for a moment, then they were muffled until, finally, they ceased. The door was pushed to, from the inside, until it was almost fully closed. Only a thin line of light came from one side now, a tiny gap, because his father had been careful not to lock himself inside it by accident.

  Chris would never know what pushed him on, but he began to move forward, abandoning all caution, along with his usual dread of retribution from his father. He wanted to know the secret of the big box. He had to know it, in fact.

  He reached the door. Initially he had wanted to creep up to it and observe without being seen but that was impossible now. Instead he opened it, and his presence was immediately detected. His father whirled, wide-eyed, and pointed the gun straight at him. He was shocked, angry ‒ frightened, too, by the look on his face. It was only later that Chris realized his father could have turned and fired at him in one movement, without even thinking. From that range, the twelve-bore would have ripped him to pieces.

  But he didn’t fire. Instead he lowered the gun and they both looked at the figure on the bed. A girl? A woman. A woman not so very much older than Chris. Curvy, with long brown hair, like the girl in one of his father’s paintings that hung in the hallway, and she was asleep, her clothes half removed. The damp cloth on the floor smelt strongly of chemicals. That was what his father must have removed from the plastic bag as he entered the box.