by Steve Mosby
'These houses are pretty handy for us from the outside. Three main exits. Front and back, here and here, and out through the garage. There's a small window onto the driveway, but it's a worm-hole and it'll be covered.' He sniffed, considering the map. 'Yeah. All good.'
'The interior?' Kearney said.
'Not so great. Four rooms upstairs, three down. Attic via loft panel here. The cellar door is usually in the side of the stairs there. But these houses, it's easy enough to partition things off, move things around. We won't know exactly what we're facing until we're in.' He looked up suddenly. 'Firearms?'
'It's possible,' Kearney said. 'But we have no reason to believe so.'
'But a hostage?'
'Rebecca Wingate.'
Burrows looked down again. Her name clearly wasn't important, so much as the challenge she represented to his logistics. Regardless of whether Timms was armed, a hostage could be used against them in ways that were at least as difficult to deal with as a weapon.
It troubled Kearney as well. He knew the first rule in a situation like this was that the subject was never allowed to leave, no matter what. If the house was contained, Rebecca was the only possible victim. If Timms escaped, other lives would be at risk. So although Burrows would do everything possible to secure Rebecca Wingate's safety, she was not his only objective here.
It was a terrifying situation for her to be in.
The alternative, though, was worse.
'Yes,' Kearney said. 'We hope there's a hostage.'
He and Todd sat in the back of the comms van, watching the door-team's approach on a series of monitors.
The main display showed a basic overview of the house from above - a two-dimensional satellite image, with the GPS locations of officers updating in jerks every three seconds. Every yellow triangle had a small number attached to it. These corresponded to the other screens, which were stacked to the side, illuminated like the windows in a block of flats. Each of these showed the video feed from the cameras attached to the different members of the team. There were ten in total.
Kearney watched the men assemble, piecing the whole scene together from the fractal jigsaw of overlapping images in front of him. On one screen, there was a slanted view of the front door. Directly above, the screen showed a man in black standing by that exact same door. On the monitor to the side, he could see both men. The same actors in the same scenes, all shot from different angles, creating a composite that became self- referential, a series without an end.
Here was the front of the house.
On the top screen, the driveway: jogging backwards and then tilting as the officer flattened against the wall. Kearney could see the small window Burrows had mentioned.
Beside that screen, the camera darted across a back garden, then slid to a silent halt by the side of a patio door, dark green bushes reflected in the glass.
No direct sound: that came through the headset he was wearing, which connected him on the same frequency Burrows and his team were using.
He heard Burrows count down softly. 'Go.'
A metal battering ram swung at different angles on the screens. In his ears, the door went half in with a flat crack, then - a second swing - crunched off its hinges.
'Go.'
All hell broke loose.
Through the headphones: shouting, pounding, calling-out. radio snarls. The monitors became a whirling dance of blue-grey movement. Officers appeared to be everywhere at once, as though the situation was a shattered mirror and the same men were being reflected by the fragments. Kearney watched black-armoured backs huddling forward, caught a snatched glance of a corridor spinning, then - bang- a door crashing open into a living-room…
'Clear.'
His gaze flicked from screen to screen, from one room to the next: officers fanning out, their duplicates vanishing. He saw a kitchen turning on one screen, this way, the other - 'Clear' - and then cabinets being pulled open one by one.
A black shape flashed past.
Kearney followed it to the next screen, where a gloved hand pushed open a door at the side of the kitchen. There was only blackness beyond it for a second, then a supernova pulse of ghost light that seemed to whump in the air, then settle, revealing bright grey dust hanging there like ash. The camera panned steadily over the old wooden racks on the far side of the empty garage. Kearney saw cans of paint, a roll of plastic sheeting.
Wedges of shadows rotated with the camera, smooth and steady, like the second hand of a clock.
'Clear.'
'Empty garage,' Kearney noted. 'Empty driveway too.'
According to the information they had, Timms drove a white Ford transit van. Where was it?
On the satellite feed, the yellow triangles were spreading steadily across the blueprint of the house. They began to overlap, forming stars, as officers thumped up the stairs to the second floor.
Kearney saw the bathroom, the shower-head hanging down, twisted. On the next screen, a black fist punched methodically down at bed sheets. In the corner of that screen, a figure was crouching down. Kearney looked up and saw the area under the bed revealed. Dust and curls of hair resting on sketchily painted white floorboards.
'Clear.'
Fifteen seconds had passed.
Timms's studio was a large room at the back of the house. It was impeccably tidy: the walls clean and white; the floor laid with laminated boards. An easel rested on plastic sheeting beside a folding wooden table covered with plates and bowls and brushes; half-finished canvases were propped against one wall, bulky as paving slabs.
'Clear.'
'He's not there,' Todd said.
Kearney was staring intently at the screens.
Neither is she.
Unless…
His gaze travelled back down the stack of monitors. After the frenzy of activity, each of them was now drawing to a tentative standstill, as officers waited in the rooms they'd contained. Only two screens at the bottom were still active. Burrows was leading a second man down into the cellar beneath the house.
Kearney kept his attention on the one that showed Burrows in the centre, ducking awkwardly down the stone steps. They looked very old, as though they'd been carved out of the ground itself.
At the bottom, the camera panned round steadily, giving hints of the huge open space beneath the building. It appeared to stretch across the entire foundations of the house, and had the feel of archaeological ruins. The floor was cobbled, like a Victorian street, and the lights sat in opaque, plastic cases on the pillars. Broken down sections of wall created odd, angled shadows that wavered at the edges.
From the headset, Kearney could hear a cold sound, like wind rushing through a tunnel. Motes of dust hung in the air. It seemed a long time before anyone said anything. When the silence was broken, it was Burrows who spoke.
'We've got something here.'
Kearney tried to see on the monitor, but his eyes couldn't make sense of the image. From what he could tell, there was a pale gap in the darkness - a hole in the wall, like a mouth filled with sharp, crimson teeth. In the centre, there was something a little like a woman's face. That's an eye, he thought. But there was only one. Then the camera panned down, played across some dark shapes resting on the floor.
Kearney leaned forward even further, heart beating quickly.
'What is that?' he said into the mic. 'Is it her?'
Burrows's camera didn't move.
'I can't tell,' he said.
Down in Timms's basement, Kearney shivered a little at the memory of the interview from earlier. Thomas Wells's soft, quiet words were as insistent and chilling as the draught beneath the house.
They're a part of me now.
I'm made of them.
He and Todd were standing at the far end of the cellar, both of them looking at what Timms had stored down here. The official studio, on the top floor of the house, had obviously been a front: something for the journalists to photograph. Not the whole story. It was down here, in the cold and the da
rkness, that Roger Timms had produced his real work.
There was a large canvas propped up on a rickety table, flat against the wall of the cellar. This was what he'd seen on the monitor, and it had looked strange because the painting was still a work in progress. The jagged red teeth were actually spreads of background colour, extending up and down around the outline of a woman's head, the detail within only half completed. Timms had only got as far as roughly colouring in the woman's face on the right-hand side. So there was a single, bright, staring eye and some shading around the howl of a mouth, but little else. No hair yet. Just a blank space on the canvas, waiting to be filled.
Yet it was clear to Kearney what they were looking at. The portrait was incomplete, but it was of Rebecca Wingate.
'Tomorrow's going to be a long day,' Todd said. 'We're going to need to get hold of all his paintings. And I mean ail of them.'
He shook his head.
'A long day.'
Kearney nodded absently, his face set hard, then looked down at the row of demijohns on the floor by the table. They were dull, ugly shapes. Any shine in the glass had long been lost under the crust of old blood within.
All except one, in fact. The last bottle along was new enough to gleam in the dim light. And despite the swathes of crimson on Roger Timms's uncompleted portrait, it was still half full of blood.
* * *
Part Three
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning, I woke up feeling clammy. Partly it was the vodka I'd drunk the night before, and partly the warmth that had settled in the hotel room as the sun rose. I'd been half awake for a while, the heat growing into a steady pulse that became impossible to ignore.
Over at the window, I opened it wide and breathed in the freshest air I could find. In the distance, above the industrial roofs, a screen was visible on the side of an office block, the display flicking between the day's temperature - seventeen degrees centigrade already - and the time. Half-past eight.
I had a dim memory of how I'd spent the rest of my evening. After deciding I was probably too drunk to go and visit Christopher Ellis, I'd compounded the problem by drinking more, and at some point, I'd begun looking through more of the posts on that website. Not just Ellis's either. I'd clicked on thread titles, more or less at random. I wasn't sure why I'd even started, but the more I looked, the harder it became to stop.
The last thing I saw was a video clip of six soldiers in Chechnya, face down in a field, hands tied behind their backs, having their throats cut one by one. By then, the room around me was pitch black, making the computer screen so bright it hurt my eyes. The alcohol was buzzing in my head, and something else was humming in my chest. I'd gone to pour another drink, and, at that point, a sensible part of me had taken the executive decision that I'd seen and drunk enough.
More than enough, I realised now.
I filled the small hotel room's miniature kettle and found a sachet of coffee. Then, while I waited for the water to boil, I made my first phone call on the nice new mobile.
'Mike?' I said. 'It's Alex.'
'How are you doing, man?'
'I'm all right,' I said.
'Good stuff.' In the background, I could hear Josh crying, and Julie shushing him gently. 'We've not heard anything new.'
'I didn't think you would have. I was just wondering something. Have you got a couple of hours free?'
Mike paused. I imagined him looking across his front room, probably slightly reluctant, but not wanting to say no. That word had never settled comfortably into his vocabulary.
'Well, I'm supposed to be going to see James at ten.'
James. I remembered the blood Mike and I had seen yesterday in the kitchen, and wondered how he could bring himself to do it.
I said, 'No problem.'
'What did you have in mind?'
'I just wanted to bag a lift to Wrexley. But I can taxi it.'
He thought it over. 'That's not far. It should be all right if we go soon. I can be there in - what - twenty?'
The way I felt, twenty was bad.
I said, 'Twenty's good, thanks.'
We arranged for him to pick me up at the back of the train station. After I hung up, I looked across the room at the laptop, switched off but still open on the desk.
Do you know what you're doing?
The kettle clicked off below a tree of billowing steam, distracting me from the question. There wasn't much time. I poured the coffee and headed for the shower.
At half-nine, Mike dropped me off in Wrexley. We hadn't spoken too much on the way over. I got the impression Julie had been quietly disapproving of this, her boyfriend doing favours for someone who'd lost the right to ask for them, but if so he didn't mention it. He did, however, want to know where I was going and why. I told him as much as I could.
'Whoa, Alex,' he said. 'Maybe we should go to the police.'
'And say what? This is just something Sarah was working on, and I'm interested to see what it was. This guy, Ellis, he's only one of the freaks she was talking to. There's nothing to tell the police.'
'But what if he's dangerous?'
I shrugged. 'The notes are in my hotel room. His address is there. You can give it to the police if anything happens to me. But it won't.'
Mike was silent for a moment.
'And you're not going to do something stupid?'
'No.'
I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Sleep and daylight have a way of knocking all those night-time ideas out of your head, and I was finding it hard to believe Ellis really was behind the disappearance of Sarah's body. Then again, someone was. My plan was to confront him with what I knew and see what he had to say for himself. That was all.
I looked out of the window, watching the scenery flash past.
But I hadn't forgotten the exhilaration I'd heard as he'd watched my wife die. Or the thread title he'd chosen for her afterwards. Bitch in bits.
'No,' I said again. 'I'm not going to do anything stupid.'
Ellis lived in a large block of flats on the edge of town. Or rather, a block of blocks; there were four of them, one on each side of a central square. Mike dropped me off in the middle. Before leaving, he made me promise to call him when I was done.
'I will.'
'You'd better,' he said. 'I've got your number now.'
'I'll know who to blame those obscene calls on later.'
He grinned. 'Take care of yourself.'
After he'd driven away, I headed across the square, past a shabby concrete playground. The rusted chains on the swings were tangled around the metal struts, and the seats had been stained yellow and brown by cigarette ends pressed against the plastic. The blocks of flats themselves were similarly unappealing. They'd been painted bright white, but all it had really achieved was to emphasise how ugly the structures were. Each floor was circled by a stone walkway, and appeared to be squinting its eyes closed against visitors. Even the sun couldn't cut through properly; it just slid through at an angle and landed in a thin, broken shard against the far block.
It was very quiet, but I wasn't entirely alone. A group of kids was hanging out in an alcove on the far side of the square, their heads pointed at me, faces barely visible inside the hoods. Three storeys up on that side, a man - incongruously wearing a suit and sunglasses - was leaning on a balcony, watching the world fail to go by.
I made my way to the base of Block C, and then into the stairwell, where the walls were covered with a scribbled collage of black marker pen that couldn't really be called graffiti. According to Sarah's notes, Ellis's flat was on the top floor. My footfalls echoed slightly as I headed up: chit chit chit, like a broom sweeping the stone.
Out on the walkway, it was surprisingly cold - just open enough to allow the breeze to cut through. At the far end, washing was hung across, flapping in the wind. Ellis's front door was halfway along, facing out across the square, beside a bent, wire mesh grille over a greasy window.
I knocked on
the door, then waited.
There was furtive movement from inside. A second later, I had the impression that someone was looking out at me through the spy hole.
And then nothing.
Someone was obviously in there.
'Hello?' I knocked again. 'Christopher Ellis?'
There was another pause, and then whoever was inside made a decision. I heard the rattle of a chain being pulled back, then a creak as the door opened. It was a young woman who answered. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a black crop- top, and her face was drawn, the skin pulled back as tightly as the thin hair she'd gathered into a ponytail.
'He's not here,' she said.
'He does live here though?'
'Yeah.' She snorted, then began fiddling with a roll-up and a lighter. 'Apparently, anyway.'
I was a little surprised. Because of his interests, I'd been expecting Ellis to live alone. It also meant that if he really had followed Sarah and taken her body, he wasn't likely to have brought it here. I supposed that should have been obvious enough from the three flights of stairs.
'Are you his wife?'
She gave me a sarcastic look and I got the message. Girlfriend, perhaps, but not too happy with that arrangement at this moment in time.
She lit the roll-up.
'What do you want with him?'
'Nothing much. A chat.'
'Does he owe you money? Because you'll be disappointed. He hasn't got any.'
'It's not money,' I said. 'I just wanted to talk to him about someone. A mutual friend.'
'Oh yeah? Who? Maybe he's a mutual friend of mine too.'
'Sarah Pepper.'
The woman cocked her head at that, like a predator hearing a click in the undergrowth. It wasn't that she recognised the name. It was simply that it was a woman's name.
'Who's she?'
'You might not know her,' I said. 'And "friend" might be pushing it. She was a journalist. She came to interview him for an article, probably back around April time?'
'Yeah. About his computer stuff?'
'Maybe,' I said.
