Last Breath

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘It’ll be light soon,’ said Moss. ‘Who wants another coffee before the office opens?’

  * * *

  Just before eight, they left the car and walked through Borough High Street to the offices of Genesis, where Bryony Wilson had worked. It was a tall brown brick building about three hundred yards down from the market. They joined a group of bleary-eyed office workers trudging up the steps to the main entrance. They went to the front desk and had to deal with an overzealous head of security, but when they produced their warrant cards and explained that they were investigating the murder of one of the company’s employees, she called the manager of Human Resources.

  They were instructed to go up to the sixth floor, but mistakenly came out onto the fifth floor with a group of office workers. When they saw the floor number written on the wall, they were about to go back to the lifts when Moss noticed a collage of staff photos on the wall. Under some of their names were gold stars. Bryony was pictured with hunched shoulders and a manic gummy smile. Under the photo were three gold stars.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Erika to a dark-haired girl about to go into the office. ‘What do the stars mean?’

  ‘Commendations,’ she said, pulling a security pass from her bag. ‘Overtime you get one; the company emails you a twenty-five quid iTunes voucher.’

  ‘Does Bryony Wilson work on this floor?’ asked Erika.

  Moss and Peterson gave her a look; they were supposed to be going up to meet the head of Human Resources.

  ‘She’s my Team Leader,’ said the girl.

  She put her pass on a sensor and opened the door. They followed her inside and along the large open-plan office. She stopped at a desk towards the end divided into partitions.

  ‘This is her desk, if you want to wait for her…’

  Bryony’s partition was tidy with a pot of pens topped with Trolls of varying coloured fuzzy hair. On one side of her computer was a plastic M&M Yellow figure, smiling with a thumb up, and under her desk was a footrest and a spare pair of smart court shoes.

  ‘She walked to work,’ said the girl, following Erika’s eyes to the shoes. ‘Sorry, who are you?’

  Erika took out her warrant card and introduced them all.

  ‘Why are you looking for Bryony?’ asked the girl, sitting in her chair warily.

  ‘We’ll need a warrant if they don’t want to play ball with the computer,’ said Peterson, peering at Bryony’s desk.

  ‘This was Bryony’s permanent workstation?’ asked Moss. The girl nodded. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Katrina Ballard,’ she said, tucking a long strand of hair behind her ear.

  Erika, Moss and Peterson moved around the desks, adorned with mess, paperwork and family photos. Erika came to a stop at a desk where a photo of a large white-faced dog was pinned below a computer monitor. It was an unusual breed. With the wide face of a Staffordshire bull terrier, but with black spots like a Dalmatian.

  ‘Excuse me,’ came a shrill female voice. ‘EXCUSE ME, officers?’

  They looked up, and a small woman with poker-straight dark hair and a pinafore dress was striding towards them.

  ‘I’m Mina Anwar, I’m HR manager.’ She reached them and her eyes darted around them, attempting to work out what they were doing.

  ‘Thank you. We must have come out on the wrong floor,’ said Erika, giving her a disarming smile.

  ‘If you’d like to come up to my office,’ she said, putting out a small arm to scoop them up and away. Other members of staff were arriving and had noticed the commotion.

  ‘Lead the way,’ said Erika.

  When they came out onto the communal corridor by the lifts, Erika’s phone rang. The lift doors pinged and opened. It was John on the phone.

  ‘Boss, we’ve been working through the night following up the CCTV. We managed to get more footage of the blue car from a traffic camera near the South Circular, and we have a full number plate: J892 FZD.’

  Erika held up her hand, and they all stopped outside the lifts.

  ‘That’s fantastic, John!’

  ‘The car is registered to a thirty-seven-year-old white male called Morris Cartwright. He’s a farm labourer, and he has two convictions for assaulting women, in 2011 and 2013. And, get this, he lives in a village on the outskirts of London called Dunton Green. It’s near Sevenoaks.’

  Erika quickly relayed the information to Moss and Peterson. Moss punched the air, and Peterson put his hands to his head and closed his eyes.

  ‘Yes!’ he cried.

  Mina waited by the lifts, her hand being buffeted by the doors as they kept trying to close.

  ‘Officers, I have a lot to do this morning, can you please explain what is happening here?’ she asked.

  ‘Boss, you and Peterson go,’ said Moss. ‘I’ll stay here and get as much info as I can about Bryony.’

  Erika and Peterson took the waiting lift and, just before the doors closed, Moss gave them a smile.

  ‘Good luck and stay safe,’ she said.

  As it started to descend to the ground floor, Erika hoped that they weren’t too late. That Beth was still alive.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Darryl had started throwing up in the early hours of Sunday morning, and then a dull headache had crept up from the base of his neck to a stabbing pain in his temple. At lunchtime, his mother had made him a sandwich, but when he’d taken a small bite, it had come straight back up again. The pain and a sense of doom continued, until he came down to the living room in the evening. John and Mary were watching an episode of Inspector Morse.

  ‘Mum, I don’t feel well,’ he said.

  ‘You must be coming down with something, just get a good night’s sleep,’ said Mary, studying him over the top of her drink.

  ‘You should get the hell out of here, is what you should do,’ said John, not taking his eyes off the television. ‘I have to get up for work in the morning, and I don’t want to catch whatever it is.’

  Darryl had left the living room, and as he’d started upstairs he’d had to grab the bannister, feeling dizzy, and a tingling sensation had begun down his left arm. He went to bed, and as he lay there the pain increased.

  He drifted off to sleep in the early hours of the morning, and began a cycle of dreams which repeated over and over.

  In the dream, he would wake on a bright sunny day still in his bedroom, with the light streaming through the curtains. He’d get up and be relieved to see that the bed sheets were dry. Then he would hear it: the ting ting sound coming from the wardrobe, a hanger lightly brushing the wood. Then a tight creak of taut rope, and as he approached the wardrobe door, the key would begin to spin, until the door swung open to reveal Joe hanging inside, his feet swinging in mid-air, trembling.

  ‘You’ve pissed the bed, baby,’ Joe’s voice would say, but his lips weren’t moving. His purple bloated face was fixed in a smile with the eyes open.

  Finally, Darryl would feel the warm liquid splashing on his legs.

  The dreams seemed to go round in circles, over and over, and every time he thought he was awake, the same would happen over again. The sunny room, the ting ting sound of a hanger in the wardrobe…

  The pain grew intense in his side throughout these dreams, and the final time he’d come to, the room was dark. He’d climbed out of bed and felt the sheets. They were dry. He’d moved to the curtain and seen that it was dark outside: a large bright moon hung in the clear sky.

  I’m awake, he’d thought. I have to be awake.

  Then a ragged breathing came from the wardrobe. It seemed to loom bigger in the room. The door slowly opened and a large figure stepped out and into the light cast by the moon. It was Bryony, her face wide and now almost blackened. The telephone cord was wound tight around her neck, and she was advancing on him. Darryl had turned to get out of bed, but lying beside him, with her bloody battered head on the pillow, was the coffee bike girl, Janelle, and next to her lay Lacey and Ella. They tried to open their beaten eyes; they reached out for
him with their arms… Bryony started to unwind the cord from around her neck…

  * * *

  Darryl woke, finally. It was pouring with rain outside, and he was drenched in sweat. He gingerly pulled back the cover and incredible pain shot down his left side. His stomach and chest were covered in clusters of yellow pustules. There were scores of them, and just moving sent pain shooting through his body. His mattress was soaked in urine.

  ‘Darryl,’ came a voice through the door. ‘Darryl, are you alright? You were shouting; you were shouting about Joe?’

  His mother opened the door and came in.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ he said, wincing in pain.

  His mother went to him and stared down at the terrible rash and pustules.

  ‘Shingles. You’ve got shingles,’ she said incredulously. ‘Why were you shouting about your brother?’

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Beth drifted out of a disturbed sleep. A faint light came through the thick iron grate in the ceiling, and the metal vents banged in the wind, accompanied by a low moaning howl.

  She was so cold, she flexed her frozen fingers bound by the chain. She touched her tongue to her arm. The bandage felt dry and a little tacky. How long had she been here? Had that freak been back when she was asleep? What if he was here, now, crouching in the shadows?

  ‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice echoed in the darkness and sounded strangely polite. Then despite everything she laughed. ‘Come on, Beth, he’s a complete psycho, and it’s not as if he’s going to say hello back…’

  It must be morning, she thought; there was light coming from above, and there was a definite sliver of white light filtering through under the door. She remembered the last morning before she was abducted. She’d come downstairs to the kitchen, and her aunt had been on the phone with one of her friends.

  ‘You don’t want to get into threesomes quite yet, Derek,’ she’d said. ‘Why don’t you both try taking up a hobby, see if that brings you closer together? I’ve always wanted to learn bridge.’ Aunt Marie had smiled, and indicated that there was coffee in the pot. She’d sat on the stool, drank coffee and eaten hot buttered toast with jam, listening, laughing, as her aunt gossiped on the phone. She wondered what Aunt Marie was doing right now and missed her like crazy.

  Beth tried to sit up straighter so that the chain wouldn’t dig into her neck, and she felt a strange tickling sensation in her hair. She felt her head, thinking it was a spider or a fly, when something fell from her hair and landed on her leg. She picked it up. It was the other half of the safety pin. Her hands had been above her head when she was trying to unpick the padlock. It must have fallen into her hair when it broke, and become tangled during her frantic search. She lifted the corner of the blanket beside her feet and found the other piece of the pin.

  She now had a long thin piece of metal making up the sharp pin, ending in a twisted loop, and she had the remainder of the safety pin; the curved safety head which was attached to a long piece of metal.

  She remembered something she had seen in one of the CSI TV shows Aunt Marie loved to watch. The character had been locked in a cupboard under the stairs, and had used a bobby pin to pick a lock: snapping it in half and using the two pieces of metal, one piece was slipped into the top part of the lock, and then another in the bottom. She still wasn’t sure how the hell it would work but this had to mean something, didn’t it?

  Of course, the captive woman in CSI had broken out of the cupboard with remarkably sleek hair, and even though she’d been in there for two days, her light blue slacks were devoid of piss stains… Beth could only imagine what she looked like, and she laughed. A laugh which then turned into tears. She cursed the lack of light, and that her hands were bound together. She turned the two pieces of metal over between each of her fingers, but her hands were numb. Beth blew on her hands to warm them up.

  If she could manage this, then she might have a chance to escape.

  Chapter Eighty

  Erika drove fast through London, blue lights and siren blaring all the way. Peterson called in for backup, giving the address for Morris Cartwright. As they reached the South Circular, it began to pelt with torrential rain. It hammered down on the roof, and the windscreen wipers could barely keep up with the deluge, but Erika pressed on.

  They reached the outskirts of Dunton Green forty minutes later, just after ten a.m. It was a tiny village and very quiet. They drove through it in a matter of minutes, past a church and then the train station, a pub, and a small supermarket before the houses thinned back out to a country lane surrounded by fields. The rain continued to pound on the roof of the car, and as the road banked sharply down, Erika sped through a deep flooded patch.

  ‘That’s deep water there, whoa…’ said Peterson, grabbing the dashboard, and as they sped through it a spray of water engulfed the car and spilled up and over the bonnet.

  Erika thought the engine might cut out but, miraculously, it didn’t.

  They approached a couple of houses surrounded by fields, and Erika pulled up in the small driveway of the first. It was two semi-detached houses, and they sat in a dip amongst a vast field. A chain fence surrounded the back garden, but there was no shed, no outbuildings. It was open.

  ‘This is it?’ said Erika, when she turned off the engine.

  ‘This is the address. Confirmed by control,’ said Peterson.

  ‘This is a shitty little two-up-two-down,’ she said.

  They got out of the car as the rain continued to pelt down, and they had to avoid a huge muddy puddle on their way to the front door.

  A young messy-haired woman in tracksuit bottoms and a grubby T-shirt answered the door, with a podgy pale baby on her hip. It reminded Erika of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters films. The baby turned to look at them with big blue eyes, along with the woman whose eyes were tiny, and a little too far apart.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Are you Mrs Cartwright?’ asked Erika.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Erika Foster; this is Detective Inspector Peterson,’ said Erika, blinking in the heavy rain as they held up their warrant cards. ‘We’re looking for Morris Cartwright.’

  The woman rolled her eyes, tipped her head back and yelled: ‘Morris! It’s the pigs again!’

  Morris came into the hallway wearing jeans, a T-shirt and in bare feet. He was holding a yoghurt pot and had the spoon in his mouth.

  ‘I ain’t done nothing,’ he said, taking it out. Erika saw his front two teeth were missing.

  Just then two police cars pulled into the drive behind their car, the blue lights rolling above. Morris took one look at them and bolted back down the hallway. Erika and Peterson dashed past the woman and the pudgy baby. The hallway led past a tatty living room, to a grubby kitchen. The back door was already open, and they could see Morris running barefoot across the waterlogged garden. He dodged a small plastic swing set, and went to vault the chain fence, but slipped and landed in the mud. Erika and Peterson bundled over to him, just as two uniformed officers appeared out of the back door.

  They all slipped around in the mud, the rain still pelting down, and Morris still resisted as Erika tried to handcuff him and read him his rights.

  ‘Where are you trying to go with no shoes?’ shouted Peterson, himself slipping over. He got up and slammed Morris against the fence, pulling his arms behind his back.

  Erika put him in cuffs.

  ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of the kidnap, false imprisonment, and murder of Janelle Robinson, Lacey Greene, and Ella Wilkinson, and the kidnap and false imprisonment of Beth Rose…’ Peterson turned him round, and he spat at Erika. They handed him over to the uniformed officers, who dragged him away.

  ‘That’s him? You can’t be serious,’ said Peterson, wiping his face.

  ‘I know, he’s an idiot,’ said Erika, running her hands through her hair. They were both drenched.

  Chapter Eighty-One


  The rain had started to fall harder, roaring on the roof of the Oast House. Below, in the brick furnace chamber, Beth was sitting with both hands tucked between her thighs. She had made an attempt to pick the padlock, but her hands were bound together and her fingers had been numb, and it was as if she’d been holding the tiny pieces of the safety pin wearing boxing gloves. They’d warmed up a little, because she felt a dull ache with pins and needles, as the sensation came back into her fingers.

  ‘Okay, come on, come on, let’s do this,’ she said, lifting her hands and flexing them. She was worried he’d soon be coming back. She took the two pieces of the broken safety pin, one in each hand. Now to make the key, or something that would mimic a key. The padlock was behind her head, and she couldn’t see what she was doing.

  She took several deep breaths and then shifted her body down, so that the padlock rested against the nape of her neck, upside down. Her hands were bound together, and chained, but there was just enough slack in the chain so she could lift her hands behind her head. Gripping the two pieces of safety pin, she found the lock and inserted the longer piece with the safety head in at the top, pressing it into place and holding it fast. Then with her other hand she pushed in the straight piece of metal with the pointed end.

  With her arms in the air behind her head she gripped the padlock with her free fingers.

  ‘Shit, what the hell do I do now, turn it? Yes, stay calm… Think CSI… You’re going to get out of this and you’re going to be on CSI.’ She smiled at the thought. ‘Or even if not, you’ll have a great story to tell.’

  Clasping the two pieces of metal in place and holding them between her thumbs and forefingers, she started to twist. It was awkward and fiddly, and wouldn’t budge. She pushed the two halves of the safety pin into the lock harder and twisted again.

  Suddenly the padlock sprang open and landed on the concrete floor with a loud clatter. Beth gasped in shock and pulled her head forward, quickly un-looping the chains from around her neck. She flexed her body, feeling a sense of joy and elation. Her hands were still chained together, and the chain was padlocked to the opposite side of the cage, but she could move around; she flexed her stiff neck and body and moved to the padlock where the chain around her wrists was locked to the opposite side of the cage.