Where Wolves Fear to Prey (Manor Park Thrillers Book 1)

by G H Mockford

  I held the chair up high and began to go up the stairs, slowly, trying to remember if they had creaked when he had come up or down them. I was almost at the top when I hit a problem. How was I going to open the door? It opened towards me. I decided a good defence was a good offence. I’d wait until he came back and then charge at him. He’d be surprised and, if I were him, despite his size, I wouldn’t want chair legs thrust at my head and chest.

  I braced myself and waited.

  And waited.

  He didn’t come. Afraid I might not get another chance. I slowly reached out for the door handle. My fingers wrapped around it, and then I turned it, little by little. I ripped the door open, picked up the chair and prepared to run.

  To my utter shock, he was on the other side reaching for the handle with a mug of coffee in his other hand. I swung the chair up at him. He instinctively lifted his arms to protect his face but ended up tipping the hot coffee all over himself instead. He yelled, dropped the mug, and put his hands to his face.

  I charged at him. The chair legs straddled his middle and pushed him back towards the wall. There was a dull thunk as his head, and the chair legs hit the plaster behind him. I had to press the advantage while he was hurt and disorientated. Putting all my strength into it - and he weighed a ton - I used the chair to push him to the right. He slid along the wall and crashed to the floor in the kitchen, taking some tea towels drying on the radiator with him.

  I thought about smashing the chair on him. It would keep him down and might also break the chair so that I could get my right arm free. I raised it up and hesitated. I couldn’t do it. Not on his exposed head. I’d never hurt anyone in my life, and I wasn’t about to start now.

  I held the chair above my head, silently thanking the old house for having high ceilings, and spun round. A passageway to the front door was formed by the back of a leather sofa and the wall. I ran down it. I reached out for the door handle and felt my sweaty fingers close around it.

  I jerked it down

  Nothing happened.

  He had locked the door.

  I turned as he was getting to his feet. He lifted his t-shirt up and wiped his face. I could see his stomach was a solid wall of muscle with a perfectly formed six-pack. I yelled like a madman and charged him, adrenaline fuelling my system, my tiredness temporarily forgotten.

  The chair legs were about to hit him, square in the chest, when he side stepped through the cellar door, and I sailed past him and into the kitchen. My makeshift weapon bulldozed the kitchen table out of the way, throwing the two chairs that accompanied it to the floor. I went to spin round so I could charge him again, or prepare to protect myself, but the chair tangled in the table and, for a moment, I couldn’t move. I felt a strong arm come up from behind me and lock around my neck.

  ‘Give it up, mate. You’re not going anywhere,’ he snarled.

  My left hand grabbed his wrist to try and prise it free, but I didn’t stand a hope in hell. I swung my right arm up, the weight of the chair forgotten. The bones inside it twisted unnaturally as the weight of the seat forced them to turn beyond what was normal. A sharp pain ripped through my elbow, and I cried out just as I felt the chair connect solidly with my kidnapper. He released my neck.

  I grabbed my improvised weapon with both hands and hit him, sending him to the floor.

  Then I lost control, out of fear or out of blood lust I wasn’t quite sure, but I repeatedly smashed the chair down on his prone figure. I had to press my advantage. If I didn’t get away now, I never would. He’d be so angry that I had tried to escape, and now that I had attacked him, there was no telling what he might do.

  I raised the chair higher and struck again. It fell apart in my hands, but I was still left with the armrest strapped to me. I grabbed the broken spar that came out of the bottom of it, the part that had stopped me from sliding off the bindings and wrenched it off my arm with relative ease.

  And looked down at the bleeding man at my feet.

  I’d never hurt anyone in my life, and I wasn’t about to start now.

  What had I done? I staggered for a moment and felt sick, as my actions stared back at me, red and vivid. What had I become? I was as bad as him. His methods might be wrong, but he was only trying to protect his daughter, but then, I was only trying to protect myself.

  I had to get out of the house, now. The table I’d collided with blocked the way to the back door. I quickly grabbed it and pushed it out of the way with surprising ease, my raised adrenaline sending it sliding across the floor. I seized the door handle. It was locked too. I reached down and scooped up one of the fallen chairs and pushed it against the sink, which was full of dirty crockery. I climbed up and reached for the window, but it too was locked.

  ‘I live in Manor Park,’ my captor said with a laugh. ‘Do you think I’d leave my home unlocked?’

  I climbed down from the chair and stared at him as he wiped his arm across his bloody mouth, a look of both fury and triumph upon his face.

  It was at that moment that all the power, energy, and hope fled my weary body. I collapsed onto the kitchen chair, which moments before was my ladder to freedom.

  He glanced around the room, confident he had beaten me, and stepped past me to the vacuum cleaner in the corner, and began pulling the cable from its auto retractor. When it came to a stop, he put his foot on the top of the machine and with one sharp tug, ripped it out.

  ‘Hold your hands out. Wrists together,’ he ordered me, but I didn’t move. ‘We can make this hard or easy. It makes no difference to me.’

  ‘Look, why don’t we just talk about this?’ I said. He shook his head without saying a word and held up his hands to show me what to do, just in case I was stupid. He quickly wrapped the flex around my wrists, then between them and back over the top so he could pull it tighter together. Having secured it, he began to lead me like a dog back downstairs.

  Eight

  Bill Thacker lay awake in bed. He glanced at his clock radio. It was 7:07am and there was a hell of a commotion coming from somewhere.

  There had been a rise in burglaries in the area recently, and, as a result, Bill had taken to keeping his late wife’s hockey stick by the bed.

  He couldn’t quite make out if the noise were coming from next door, or from within his own home, and that worried him. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but at seventy-seven years of age, he didn’t expect it to be. Neither were his joints or memory. He’d seen and heard a lot in those years.

  ‘Strange,’ he said to himself as he sat up in bed and swung his legs over the side. ‘Next door are usually really quiet and they never get up this early on a Saturday.’ He stood up and wrapped his dressing gown around himself. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  Since losing his wife, Susan, a few years ago, he had started talking to himself, or rather to her. He didn’t like being on his own, and there were times when he felt hopeless and useless without her. He'd often told her he hoped he’d go first, as he felt he couldn’t live without her. Somehow he managed to keep going, but he would gladly sacrifice the rest of his days to kiss Susan and tell her how much he still loved her.

  He turned the light on and waited at the top of the stairs, just in case he was wrong and the intruder was in his home. Deciding to play it safe, he went back for the hockey stick.

  ‘Good to know you’re here with me, Suki,’ he said, using the pet name he’d given his darling wife. ‘Come on, duck,’ he said, as he hefted the stick and walked downstairs.

  There were another loud crash and a yell.

  This time Bill could tell it was coming from next door’s kitchen. Bill leaned against the wall, pressed his ear against it and strained to listen.

  It went quiet.

  Bill listened for a little longer.

  Nothing.

  He cursed his old ears. Now he wasn’t sure what he’d heard. There were times he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He went into his front room, sat on the sofa and picked up the phone. His th
umb hovered over the nine button as he debated whether to make the call or keep out of it.

  Nine

  Sarah reached out to her clock. It was 7:55. Quite late for her, maybe it was because of the stress of Parents’ Evening, coupled with being disturbed earlier. Not that she’d really slept since her first unwanted wake up call.

  There was something about Freeman’s message that bothered her. It just didn’t seem right. She sat up in bed and grabbed her iPhone. She read through the last four or five messages that Freeman had sent to her.

  He never, ever shortened the spelling in his texts or sent short messages for that matter. Freeman was one of those fussy people, who even bothered to put all the punctuation in.

  Helo.

  No, he’d never spell it like that. If he had, he would have sent another immediately after, which would read Hello.

  Maybe he was drunk? That might explain it.

  At 6:07 in the morning?

  Sarah hadn’t known him very long, but they’d been out a few times as a department. Thinking about it, she’d never seen him get drunk, and he’d never turned up to school on a Monday morning looking awful and telling tales about a weekend of mad adventures.

  Maybe he didn’t want to drink and drive. Maybe that was why he didn’t come to The Trip to meet them all.

  Sarah shook her head even though no one was there to see it in the dark room. She knew he wouldn’t just not turn up, and he’d usually have just one before driving home most Fridays. At the very least he would have sent a text to tell her he wasn’t coming.

  She looked down at the qwerty keyboard that presented itself on her touch screen. She looked at the letters. It didn’t take the English teacher long to spot the possible spelling error, or rather, typing error.

  Helo.

  Or was it supposed to be Help?

  Ten

  ‘After you,’ my captor said, stepping past the cellar doorway. I was right; he was going to be much more careful from now on. From the very beginning, I had a feeling that he was uncomfortable with what he was doing. He might be an ex-soldier, but he didn’t seem a violent man at heart. I had to find a way of tapping into that and take advantage. Talking my way out of the situation seemed to be my only option, not only because physically I wouldn’t stand a chance against him, but violence wasn’t in my nature either. I’d lost control of myself in the kitchen. Fear and a drive to survive had spurred me on and, to be honest, the chair initially hit him by accident, and once he let me go, I had to do something.

  I started down the stairs; I could tell he was keeping his distance from me, wary that I might launch another attack. I heard him stop about half way down.

  ‘When you get to the bottom, stand below me,’ he said pointing over the banister. I did as I was told. ‘Now, slide down the wall and sit down on the floor.’

  When I had carried out his instructions, he pulled my arms up over my head. The cable dug into my wrists. My arms were fully extended though not uncomfortably so. I watched him wrap the flex around the banister and loop it through itself. Then he walked back to the top of the stairs and tied the end off. I could tell at a glance that it was well out of reach. I relaxed my arms and let them dangle from the cable.

  He went upstairs and left the door open, safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to escape this time. I heard him fill a kettle and then tidy up the kitchen, putting all the furniture back in its proper place. I could hear a splashing sound; maybe he was washing the blood off his face. The kettle finished boiling, and there came the sounds of a clinking spoon on coffee jars and a mug. It was strange to hear the sounds of normality in such an abnormal situation.

  He came back down, his face indeed cleaner, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a chair in the other. He spun the seat round, put it on the floor by the discarded diary, and sat on it backwards like some cocky boys tried once in a year seven class. He bent down and picked up the diary.

  ‘Where are we going with this?’ I asked him. He looked at the floor. ‘What do you hope to achieve?’

  ‘I just want you to admit it,’ he said, regaining his composure once again, or maybe he was just tired and weary like me.

  ‘I’m not going to admit to something I didn’t do. Look, you said it doesn’t say a name in there,’ I said, nodding my head at the pink book in his hand. ‘I’m Freeman. Mr Freeman.’ I thought I saw him smirk, and then it dawned on me the ridiculousness of my name right now.

  He said nothing for a long time. What was he thinking? Was he planning his next move, or was he just confused and lost?

  ‘Paul,’ he said simply. His eyes looked heavy. Assuming he had been standing guard while I was unconscious earlier it made sense he would be tireder than me. No wonder he needed the coffee.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Paul,’ I said.

  He made one of those, yeah, right laughs. ‘So, Mr Freeman, you say you didn’t do it.’

  ‘No, Paul, I’m not just saying it. I know I didn’t. But sadly there’s no way I can prove it to you. There’s only one person who can tell you who did this terrible thing.’

  ‘I can’t ask her,’ Paul said hanging his head.

  ‘Why not? I don’t really know you from Adam, but from what little you’ve said, and from what I’ve read in that,’ I nodded at the diary, ‘I can see that you have a very close relationship with Charlie. She trusts you. You trust her.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said again and shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Firstly, what would I say to her? Secondly, she would know I read her diary. You’ve read what it says there. She’d be disappointed. Maybe she'd hate me.’

  ‘But she doesn’t need to know you did. Just tell her about the test you found.’ He went quiet. He was thinking about it, or at least I hoped he was. ‘You can do it. It’s a better course of action than this,’ I said, looking up at the cable above me. He looked at the knot too.

  ‘You expect me to just let you go?’

  ‘Paul, it’s your only choice. What else are you going to do – kill me?’ I waited with bated breath.

  ‘But after what I’ve done…’

  ‘Paul, I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he said, disbelief clear in his voice.

  ‘I understand why you’ve done this. Love makes us do things we’d never dream of. Byron once said ‘Love will find a path where wolves fear to prey’. You've done this out of love, not hate; I can see that. I’ll tell no one. Trust me.’

  As soon as I’d said those last two words I knew I'd made a mistake. His face darkened. His hands gripped the chair, and he began to shake his head from side to side.

  ‘How can I trust you? You’d tell me anything to get away. For all, I know you did do it.’

  ‘I’ve been honest with you from the moment I woke up.’ And then, with awful timing, the drum solo at the beginning of Superstition by Stevie Wonder started to play from my pocket.

  Eleven

  I knew that lying to Paul now would be a catastrophic mistake, the worst error of my life, maybe my last. ‘It’s my mobile phone,’ I explained.

  ‘No, shit!’

  ‘Let’s just ignore it,’ I said.

  ‘Have you had it all the time?’ he said his voice a mixture of anger and panic. He stepped up to me, dug inside my pocket and pulled out the phone. He stood and stared at it as Stevie Wonder’s voice sang out of the speaker. I cursed myself for not putting it on silent when I had the chance.

  ‘Who’s Sarah?’ he said, reading the caller ID on the screen.

  ‘She’s another teacher at Byron. Just ignore it or let me answer it.’

  ‘Why the fuck would I let you do that?’ he said, shaking the phone at me.

  ‘I sent a message to her earlier; it said, “help”.’ A dark cloud swept across his face at my admission. ‘Let me answer, and I’ll pretend it was a joke,’ I said.

  The room was filled with silence. Paul stood looking at the phone for a moment
and then threw it down onto the hard, brick floor. It bounced wildly, flying at me, narrowly missing my face. It flew between two spindles of the banister rail, hit the wall behind me and bounced down the stairs hitting each step one-by-one. Finally, Paul walked over to it and just in case it wasn’t already damaged enough, stamped on it – hard. Three times. The phone lay on the ground a twisted wreck of electronic parts.

  ‘She won’t be calling again,’ he said as he kicked the broken pieces into the opposite corner of the room. Any progress I’d made towards gaining his confidence was now gone.

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds. The next thing, I felt his powerful right hand around my throat. He lifted me up. ‘Please,’ I managed to gurgle. My vision began to cloud, and darkness began to swirl all around me. The strength of this man was unbelievable. No one was that strong, were they? It had to be rage, emotion and adrenaline, as well as sheer muscle power, , surely?

  I tried to open my mouth, to plead for my life, but nothing would come out. Was this how it was all to end for me? To die at the hands of some poor, tortured man for a crime I didn’t commit? Would anyone find me? Would anyone even miss me? Who did I have in my life like Paul had Charlie?

  ‘Porrrrrr,’ I yelled. ‘Porrrrrr, stod ’ I called, staring deep into his eyes. At first he stared back. Then he blinked. ‘Porrrrrr. It’sss not too late.’ His hand loosened, ever so slightly. ‘You’re a good man,’ I said. It was easier to speak now the pressure had eased. His eyes blinked some more as if he was coming out of a trance. I pressed on. ‘Who will protect Charlie and the baby if you’re in prison?’

  His hand slowly lowered, and I could feel my toes brush against the blessed floor.

  ‘You’re going to be a grandfather. Do you want your grandchild to think you’re a bad man instead of the brave, loving father who brought up its mother on his own? I know it’s important to you. I know Charlie is, and I know her baby will be too.’