by Chris Ryan
Two a.m.
The figure at the bottom of the stairs didn’t move.
To look at him, you wouldn’t know he was an intruder. He wasn’t dressed in black. He didn’t wear a balaclava. In order to hide the missing eye that made him so distinctive, he wore a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles with a white swab covering the right-hand lens. It made him look like he’d had medical attention. Other than that, he wore a pair of jeans – a little baggy, because his body was very thin – and a navy jumper that he’d bought earlier that day from Marks & Spencer, along with the rucksack that was now slung over his shoulder. When it was time for him to leave the house, nobody would see anything other than an ordinary man walking down an ordinary street.
They certainly wouldn’t know that he’d just carried out a less than ordinary crime.
The weapon in his hand was a Browning semiautomatic. It fired 9mm rounds, enough to kill a man at ten to twenty metres. Or a woman, of course. Or a girl. The barrel of the handgun was longer than normal, because he had fitted a suppresser to the weapon. This would silence the shot. Not completely, but instead of giving a loud retort that would wake up the whole street, the shot would sound like somebody knocking on a door. There was a small risk that it would wake the other occupants of the house. If that happened, the intruder would deal with it. But if everything went according to plan, there would only be one murder tonight. He was experienced enough to realize that leaving more dead bodies behind than necessary was generally a bad idea.
The cuckoo returned to its cubbyhole and the intruder started to climb the stairs. A floorboard creaked underneath his feet. He stopped and listened.
Nothing. The house was still asleep. He continued to creep slowly upstairs, gripping the Browning in his right hand.
The first bedroom he checked was very small. It contained a single bed, but there were no bedclothes on it. The intruder sensed this room hadn’t been used for many months. He closed the door and walked past the bathroom to the other end of the landing where there were two more doors. The intruder felt for the door knob of the left-hand door and quietly – very quietly – opened it. He peered inside. A double bed. The dark outlines of two people. The sound of gentle snoring.
He closed the door again. There was just one more room to try now.
The door of this final room was slightly ajar. When the intruder pushed it open, it didn’t make a sound. He stepped inside. This room was bigger than the first and smaller than the second. The lights were off – he knew that already from staking the house out – but the yellow glow of a street lamp flooded in through the open curtains. There was a dressing table, a mirror on the wall, a cupboard, a chest of drawers and a small pile of clothes that had been dumped on the floor.
And a bed, of course.
And in the bed, huddled under the duvet, the outline of a figure. Not small enough for a child, not big enough for an adult.
The intruder had found his target.
He raised his gun.
He was pleased that the girl was covered by her duvet. It gave him two advantages. The thick padding would absorb a bit more of the sound of his gun. It would, in a way, be doubly silenced. But perhaps more importantly it meant that when he shot her, the blood from the wound would be soaked up. Blood, he knew, was the very devil to get off your skin and out of your clothes. He was glad he’d be able to avoid the spatter.
He pressed the barrel of his Browning against the soft, squashy material.
He fired.
The sound of the shot was quiet, but the impact made the whole bed judder. The figure underneath the duvet shook once and was still. At that range – point blank – the intruder knew it would only take a single shot, so he removed the gun from the duvet, bent over and gently peeled back the covers to check his handiwork.
He took a sharp breath.
There was no blood. There was no blood because there was no wound. And there was no wound because there was no body. All the intruder saw was a pile of pillows. One of them had a bullet hole. In the dim light he could just see the scorch marks around it, and the stuffing that had come loose from inside.
He felt his skin prickle with anger. He’d been outsmarted. By a girl. How had she known he was coming for her? Had she known it? Perhaps her absence tonight was nothing to do with him. Perhaps she was missing from her bedroom for some other reason …
There was no point giving in to his anger. He took his rucksack from his shoulder and hid the Browning away. He removed something else from the bag. It was very small. No different in size from the little chocolate drops he used to give his Alsatian dog when he was a boy. But it wasn’t a chocolate drop. He looked around the room again. On the bedside table was a reading lamp. He unscrewed the bulb from the lamp and felt inside the metal shade. The object attached itself to the interior. The intruder screwed the bulb back in. Then he gently drew the duvet back over the pillows, like he was tucking someone in.
As he went downstairs, the same floorboard creaked. He didn’t stop this time. He headed straight for the back door, exited the house and locked it again with the picks he had used to let himself in.
And then he walked back up Acacia Drive. There was nobody around to see him go.
‘Are you sure there’s nobody here?’
Ellie was on edge. Not that this was a surprise. She’d been on edge for days. But watching a serious-faced, fair-haired man breaking into number 62 – the house directly opposite hers – certainly hadn’t been a good way to calm her nerves. ‘We come as a pair, sweetie,’ Gabs had said. ‘Love and marriage, horse and carriage …’ Apart from telling her that his name was Raf – and what kind of name was that, anyway? – he’d said nothing to her. But it had only taken him a matter of seconds to break into Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s house, and only a few seconds more to disable the burglar alarm.
‘How does he know the code?’ Ellie asked the woman who called herself Gabs.
‘It’s on file,’ Gabs said, ‘if you know where to look.’
Ellie could sense that this was the only answer she was likely to receive. ‘Are you sure there’s nobody here?’ she repeated.
‘Relax, sweetie. I’m sure. Mr and Mrs Carmichael were on a British Airways flight to Lanzarote three days ago. Their return ticket isn’t booked for another ten days and Mr Carmichael used his Visa card five hours ago to buy dinner out there. They really aren’t going to be walking in on us.’
Ellie stared at Gabs. ‘How do you know all that stuff?’
‘Ways and means, sweetie. Ways and means. You should remember that if you ever need to disappear. If you’re not careful, people can track your location very precisely.’
‘Why would I want to disappear?’ Ellie said quickly. She didn’t know why, but the thought of it touched a nerve. Hadn’t everyone thought of disappearing, even if they didn’t mean it?
Gabs appeared to sense her nervousness. ‘I don’t know, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Why would you?’
Raf led the way – through the kitchen, up the thickly carpeted stairs and into the front bedroom. The curtains were closed, but Gabs had a torch with a pencil-thin beam which she shone briefly around the room. This was clearly where Mr and Mrs Carmichael slept. There was a double bed and, on the bedside tables, pictures of their three children. They’d all left home now, but Ellie saw them around sometimes and recognized their faces.
‘Don’t switch the lights on,’ Gabs warned as she turned off the torch. Ellie caught herself giving her a cross look in the darkness. Like she was going to do that. She lingered by the bed. Raf was carrying a metal case – bigger than the briefcase her dad took to work, but smaller than a suitcase. He laid this on the bed and opened it up. He removed a tripod and set it up just in front of the curtains. Then he removed something that looked like a small telescope with a flat screen, about fifteen centimetres square, at the viewing end. He fixed this to the tripod. With his right hand he drew one of the curtains back just a couple of inches, and with his left he nudged the apparatus to
wards the window.
‘What’s that?’
‘You don’t need to whisper, sweetie,’ Gabs said. ‘Nobody can hear us. It’s a night sight. It means we can zoom in on things in the dark. Things like your bedroom.’
Gabs nodded towards the screen and Ellie approached. Raf had finished fiddling with the sight. It was directed towards Ellie’s window. Shrouded in a green haze, she could make out almost every detail of her bedroom. The door. The chest of drawers. And the bed, of course, which on Gabs’s instruction she had set up with dummy pillows the moment she knew her mum and dad were asleep, and just before she’d opened her bedroom curtains and sneaked out of the house to meet her and this strange, silent man called Raf.
Ellie stared at it for a moment. It was pretty creepy, like she was looking in on herself while she slept. ‘What do we do now?’ She was still whispering, despite what Gabs had said.
‘We wait. And we watch. And if nothing happens we come back tomorrow night and we wait and watch again. But you know what? I’ve got a feeling that won’t be necessary.’
She was right.
They had been sitting in absolute silence for a good couple of hours. Ellie had started to get cold and, if she was honest, a bit bored. She was staring at her watch, trying to make out the time in the darkness – it was about five to three – when she heard the faint sound of footsteps in the street below.
Gabs and Raf looked at each other. The footsteps stopped. The two adults turned their attention to the screen at the back of the night sight. Ellie did the same. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, but she found herself holding her breath in any case.
She shivered. Was it the cold, or something else?
Four minutes past three. Ellie couldn’t help gasping as, in the green haze of the screen, she saw her bedroom door open. A man entered. It was difficult to make out his features through the night sight. She could see, though, that he was wearing glasses. One lens was covered up with some kind of dressing. He had a shaved head and was very thin. There was a rucksack on his shoulder.
As he stood by Ellie’s bed, looking down on the bulge created by the pillows, she saw something in his right hand. But it was only when he fired silently into the duvet that she realized it was a gun.
Ellie cried out. She felt Gabs’s hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s OK, Ellie …’
But it wasn’t OK. It wasn’t anything like OK. The man was peeling back the duvet to reveal the pillows she’d stuffed down there. She felt herself on the brink of tears. ‘He wants to … He just tried to …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words ‘kill me’. ‘Why?’ she wailed. ‘What have I done?’
The ghostly green image showed the man removing something from his rucksack and fiddling with Ellie’s bedside light. But suddenly Ellie wasn’t concerned with any of that. Another, more sinister, thought had entered her head.
‘My mum and dad,’ she breathed. ‘What’s he going to do to my mum and dad?’
She stood up and started to make for the door of Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s bedroom. But then she felt Gabs’s hands on her again. Firmer than last time. Rougher.
‘Get off me!’ Ellie hissed. ‘Get off me! I have to go and warn them. I have to go and—’
‘Your parents are perfectly safe,’ Gabs told her. Even though Ellie continued to wriggle, she didn’t let go and she was too strong for the younger girl.
‘What do you mean they’re perfectly safe? There’s a murderer in my house with a gun. What are you, stupid? Let me go …’
‘Stop and think, Ellie,’ said Gabs, her voice much more abrupt than it had been up till now. ‘Who did he just try to kill?’
‘Me, obviously.’
‘So if he still wants you dead, why would he kill your parents? The police would be crawling all over this place. He wouldn’t be able to get near you.’
Ellie stopped wriggling. She looked over at the screen. The man was just leaving the room, closing Ellie’s door behind him.
‘Listen carefully,’ Gabs breathed.
They stood still. Ellie could hear nothing but the beating of her heart. And then, a minute later, footsteps on the pavement outside again, disappearing up Acacia Drive.
Silence in Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s bedroom. Ellie was too shocked, too terrified to speak.
‘I think,’ said Raf after a few seconds, ‘we should find out why our friend was so interested in Ellie’s bedside lamp. Ellie, time for you to pop back home.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘I can’t …’
‘Yes you can, sweetie,’ Gabs told her.
‘What if he comes back?’
‘He won’t come back. Not tonight.’
‘But what if he does?’
Gabs gave her a bleak smile. She put her hands inside her black leather jacket and pulled out a gun. ‘If he does,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ll deal with it. I’ll be covering the entrance to your house, Ellie. You’ll be fine. Go up into your bedroom, remove the bulb from your lamp and examine it. When – if – you find anything, bring it back here.’
Ellie looked from Gabs to Raf. Their faces, shrouded in the darkness of the room, were very serious. She didn’t know if Gabs and her gun made her feel better about all this, or worse.
‘Why does he want to kill me?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you can recognize him. He’s not the kind of guy who likes to be recognized.’
‘Who is he?’
‘You don’t need to know that, Ellie.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Trust me, Ellie, it’s much better—’
‘If you want me to go and check my light, you’d better tell me what’s going on, Gabs. Otherwise I’m going to stand in the middle of the street and start screaming for the police.’
Gabs and Raf exchanged another glance, and Ellie saw Raf nod slightly.
‘All right, Ellie,’ said Gabs, her voice serious. ‘His name is Adan Ramirez. His nickname is Calaca, which means skeleton. He comes from Mexico and I honestly don’t know how many people he’s killed.’
‘But what’s this got to do with me? Why did he show me a picture of Zak? What’s it got to do with him? Zak’s dead, for God’s sake …’
‘Ellie, sweetie, I can’t tell you anything else. You’ve just got to trust us.’
‘Trust you? How can I trust you? How can I trust anyone? What happens when you’re not here? I’ll never get away from him.’ She could feel the tears coming again and she didn’t care. ‘He’ll kill me.’
‘No he won’t, Ellie.’
‘How do you know? How can you say that?’
‘Because we’re here. Me and Raf. And believe me, we’re very good at this sort of thing. But you have to do as we ask, Ellie. You have to go over to your house and check out that lamp. You can do it, sweetie. You really can.’
Ellie took another deep breath and tried to get control of herself.
Raf’s voice: ‘If you hadn’t trusted us up till now, Ellie, Calaca wouldn’t have put a bullet into your pillows tonight. He’d have put one in your head.’
There was no way Ellie could argue with that.
Outside Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s house, Acacia Drive was silent. A black cat padded across the road, but apart from that there was no movement. ‘Can’t you come with me?’ Ellie asked Gabs. Raf had remained in the house, keeping up surveillance on her room.
Gabs shook her head. She still had the gun in her right hand. ‘I need to watch from here,’ she said. ‘It’s safer that way. Go now.’
As the strange woman with white-blonde hair retreated into the shadows cast by Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s front porch, Ellie crossed the road. It was only fifteen metres to her house. It felt like fifteen miles. Her head was filled with the terrifying image of the man they called Calaca. They had heard him walking away from number sixty-three, but they hadn’t seen him. Which meant he could still be here.
And if he was still here …
She entered the house by the back door, un
locking it as quietly as she could. Inside the house, all was dark. She heard the cuckoo clock ticking in the dining room. As she walked upstairs, she knew which was the creaking step and she avoided it. Seconds later she was in her room.
She noticed the smell. A faint reek of burning, like someone had lit a match in here. She tiptoed over to her bed and ran the flat of her hand over the duvet. Her fingers brushed against the bullet hole. The edges were crispy and flaked away as she touched them. As she poked her finger into the hole, she couldn’t help imagining what that bullet would have done to her skin …
Footsteps on the landing. Ellie gasped. She looked towards the window where she knew Raf would be watching her. But before she could make any sign of distress, the footsteps had got closer.
The door was opening.
Ellie spun round.
Light. It hurt her eyes.
A figure in her room.
‘Ellie Lewis, what on earth do you think you’re doing?’
She blinked. Her mum, dressed in a flowery dressing gown and with her hair in a net, was standing in the doorway.
‘Why are you dressed? What’s going on? What’s that smell?’
Ellie looked guiltily at her duvet. Her mum pushed past her and touched her fingers to the hole just like Ellie had done in the darkness.
‘What on earth is this?’ she demanded.
Ellie didn’t know what to say. She glanced towards the window again.
‘Don’t just stand there, young lady. I asked you a question. What is it?’
Ellie bit her lower lip. ‘Cigarette burn.’ She couldn’t believe what she was saying. She’d never touched a cigarette in her life. She hated them.
Her mother blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Her voice was a dangerous whisper.
‘Cigarette burn,’ Ellie repeated. ‘Sorry.’
A second figure appeared in the door. It was her dad. He was wearing nothing but a pair of Y-fronts. Ellie wished he wouldn’t walk about the house like that. His hairy belly wobbled out above the waistband. It made her skin crawl.
‘She’s been smoking in her room, Godfrey. Look, she’s made a cigarette burn in my best linen.’
