Dead in Time (The Sara Jones Cycle Book 1)

by Terence Bailey

  He rose from the chair with the grace of an athlete, and extended his hand towards the shadows where Sara stood.

  ‘My name is Eldon Carson.’

  Sara remained where she stood, refusing to accept the killer’s proffered hand. Eldon Carson shrugged and stretched out both his hands in a gesture of defencelessness.

  ‘I’m not armed,’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt you. Could you please drop the pencil?’

  Sara looked down at her makeshift weapon, which was clenched tightly in her left hand. She let go, and it clattered on the floorboards. Sara glanced past the killer, to the window looking over her driveway.

  ‘I know there’s a policeman outside,’ Carson continued. ‘Right now, he’s at the end of the lane. He didn’t hear you shout. If you call him again, or run, or try to get his attention in any way, I might have to hurt him. Nobody wants that ... especially not Gareth. So please – just for the moment – hear what I’ve got to say.’

  Sara drew a wavering breath, and clenched her muscles, forcing them still. ‘Go on then, say it.’

  Carson balled his fists and drummed them against his thighs. ‘There’s so much to tell you. I need to leave this place for a while, but I wanted to see you again before I did.’ He lowered his voice to a quiet, sincere monotone. ‘That’s how important you are to me.’

  Sara raised her eyebrows. ‘You’ve seen me. Now what?’

  ‘I just want you to listen.’ He held out his hands, in a gesture of supplication. ‘I need you to understand.’

  Sara scanned the dimly lit room, and finally sat down on a love-seat. ‘Talk away,’ she said.

  She had selected the seat because it was within easy reach of her medical bag. From the corner of her eye, she noted its exact position, and found herself wondering just how psychic Eldon Carson really was.

  Jamie’s flat was in a gentrified house next to a council estate off Brixton Hill. On this Sunday evening, his television blared highlights of an England test match in South Africa. Jamie listened to it while glancing out of the window at the street life before him. In the aftermath of the day’s drizzle, it was a muggy night, and the heat had brought his neighbours drifting onto the pavement to chat, laugh, smoke and drink. At around ten o’clock, a hollow pang reminded Jamie that he had not eaten since breakfast – and the only things left in his fridge were several jars of condiments, two tins of beer, and a plastic tub of cherry tomatoes that were turning white with mould. He switched off the television, slipped on a pair of trainers, and joined the throng on his street.

  There was a bar nearby that he visited every now and then. Each time, its name, decor, and the nationality of its serving staff had changed. Jamie headed towards it now, breezing past the Hare Krishnas dancing in front of Pizza Hut, and the man in white robes selling incense from a folding table. Pungent smoke curled through the hot evening air.

  At the bar – an Italian place now – Jamie chose a table near the window, and ordered imported beer and something on a ciabatta. He watched the late-night record shop across the street and thought pensively. Tomorrow, he would make the five-hour drive back to Aberystwyth. That afternoon’s conversation with Rhodri had left him unsettled; he had hoped the meeting would produce a reason to ignore Sara’s discouragement, and continue delving into the deaths of her parents. Instead, Rhodri had repeated Sara’s request to let the matter drop.

  By the time his food arrived on an enormous metal slab, Jamie had decided to take Sara’s request at face value. The more he pushed, the stronger the reaction against him. Tomorrow, he would drive straight to Penweddig and promise to stay out of Sara’s business – and her life – as long as she wanted.

  Maybe time alone could change things. In the meantime, his responsibility would be to continue to be of use in Aberystwyth, so that his Chief Officer would allow him to remain, and the Dyfed-Powys Police would continue to pay for him to do so. More than ever, he needed to stay in Aberystwyth, in the hope that Sara’s turbulent emotions would swing in his favour again soon.

  ‘Let me start by saying how well you do your job,’ Eldon Carson stated. He stood only a couple of feet from Sara, towering over her as she sat on the love-seat. ‘Everything you thought about me is right. What I did to Kapadia, Williams, the Morgan boy, and that pervert in Clarach. They were all messages.’

  ‘Messages to whom?’

  ‘At the start, to everybody.’ He inclined his head. ‘Later on, the messages were to you.’

  ‘To me,’ Sara repeated flatly.

  Carson smiled and held out his arms in a symbolic embrace. ‘And you figured it out! The way you detailed it to those CID men at the police station was incredible.’

  ‘How do you know what I told them?’ Sara asked.

  Eldon Carson chuckled. ‘Because I’m psychic,’ he said. Suddenly, his tone grew earnest. ‘You see, Miss Sara, that’s the thing. That’s what I’ve had to deal with: looking at a stranger on the street, say, and knowing he was going to burn himself and his children to death in his car, with his wife watching. Seeing some guy and knowing he’ll rape and kill a young woman. How do you think I felt?’

  Sara stared at him levelly. ‘I suppose, pretty confused,’ she said.

  ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘Well, for one thing, you must’ve wondered why all these killers had descended on Aberystwyth. You see, Mr Carson, that’s a problem I’m having with your story. Why are so many bad people here, of all places?

  Eldon Carson nodded appreciatively. ‘A decent question,’ he said. ‘It’s not that Aberystwyth is especially bad, Miss Sara. It’s just like everywhere else. There’s not a small town anywhere without three or four people who will, in time, do awful things. Trouble up to now’s been, nobody knew who they were.’ In the half-light, Sara could see him smile as he added, ‘But I do.’

  He stared beyond her, out the window at the darkening field of sheep beyond. ‘That’s what I have to face every day of my life. Let them call me a serial killer if they want to, I’ve got to do what’s right.’

  Sara took advantage of his distraction to edge closer to her medical bag. She knew her only hope to use the weapon inside was to keep him talking.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said soothingly, dropping a hand towards the bag, ‘it’s not easy for someone like me to accept all this. I told CID you think you’re psychic, not that I do.’

  Carson turned to her, and she drew her hand sharply away from the bag. ‘You’ve always been afraid of dogs,’ he said, ‘because you were bitten by one when you were three. You didn’t remember that till now.’

  Sara paused, startled. She did have vague memories of a dog ... snarling, leaping up, thick cords of saliva foaming as it barked.

  ‘At your eleventh birthday party, the boys laughed when you said you were going to marry Gary Barlow. Until you were five, you had a stuffed panda named Charlie Chan.’ Carson paused, concentrated, and then added, ‘You always thought you lost it, but actually your brother burned it on a Guy Fawkes fire.’

  Sara gasped at the thought of her favourite bedtime toy going up in flames. Suddenly, in her memories, she was five again, and Rhodri was a devilish seven-year-old.

  ‘That is absolute proof I’m psychic,’ Carson said with a smirk, ‘because, until a few seconds ago, I didn’t know what a Guy Fawkes fire was. And I’m still not sure about Gary Barlow.’

  Calm down, Sara told herself, and keep him talking. Wait for him to relax.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘even if I do accept you’re psychic, how can you possibly see the future when it hasn’t happened yet? The future’s an open book. Isn’t it true that anything might happen?’

  The American hesitated, groping for the right words. ‘About ten years ago, I tried to understand what I was feeling,’ he said, ‘so I started hanging around psychic fairs, Spiritualist churches, anywhere I might find a kindred spirit.’ He grinned whimsically. ‘I never did. But I did hear a lot of theories about psychic phenomena. The future may not
be fixed, but that doesn’t mean that anything can happen. Think of it as a series of probabilities, with some more likely than others.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, as a medical doctor, you’d be more likely to take a job in a hospital than become a bus driver.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sara looked up at Eldon Carson’s burning eyes, the concentration on his face. This was no randomly violent killer, but an intelligent and thoughtful young man.

  ‘With some people, you might find several probabilities of equal strength. Then, the future is hard to predict.’

  She nodded, encouraging him to continue.

  ‘In other cases, there’s only one likely probability, because all parts of a person’s life flow in the same direction. Then, the future’s near-written in stone.’

  ‘So with Mr Kapadia ...’

  ‘Everything pre-disposed him to an act that would kill his children before the end of this summer.’

  He spread his hands in a gesture of inevitability. ‘A random element had to be introduced to stop it ... and that had to be me.’

  ‘But why did you kill him?’ Sara asked. ‘Couldn’t you have just broken his leg or something?’

  Carson turned his gaze once more to the window. ‘Maybe I’m not a good enough psychic to know if that would have worked ...’

  His voice trailed away, and he gazed far into the distance, as if re-experiencing the grisly steps he had taken.

  ‘To be absolutely sure,’ he added in a quiet, faraway voice, ‘Navid Kapadia had to die, before he took his kids with him.’

  Seeing her chance, Sara jerked open the bag and groped for the syringe. She clutched it in her left hand like a dagger, and threw herself forward.

  At the same moment, Carson made a graceful leap to the side, and twisted like a natural athlete, his hand shooting out for the syringe.

  Shit! Sara thought. He knew!

  She tumbled forward – but Carson, in mid-turn, had not yet steadied himself. Sara’s right shoulder shoved against the back of his left calf as she fell, and he stumbled, lost balance, and toppled over her with a cry. She huffed as the weight of his muscular body crashed down on her, pinning her to the floor.

  ‘You never asked me the most important question,’ he gasped, winded. ‘Why you? ’ Before he had settled on her, she managed to twist her shoulders. ‘You need me,’ he cried. ‘I can help you understand your life ...’

  In a fluid motion, she pulled in her stomach muscles, shoved her left hand underneath her body, and brought the syringe down like a dagger, driving the needle deeply into Eldon Carson’s right buttock. She pushed down the plunger and injected the tube’s entire 400mg – four times the normal dosage. He bellowed as the solution burned through his muscles, and rolled off her, thrashing as powerful sedative began to course through his bloodstream.

  On his hands and knees, he looked at her wildly, his expression one of surprise and fear, his skin draining of colour. ‘No!’ he cried.

  Unsteadily, he stumbled to his feet, blanching as though he might vomit, and thrust an unsteady hand at the wall. To have so much of the drug injected so quickly was a form of torture. Sara was astonished that Carson was not howling in agony.

  ‘Don’t do this! You need me,’ he repeated, his speech thickening. ‘You’re psychic too!’

  He began to sway, and fell against the stone wall, grazing his bare arms and leaving streaks of blood. ‘Think about it!’ he gasped imploringly. ‘You need to ... to understand.’

  Carson’s knees buckled, and he sank again to the wooden floorboards. Within seconds, he was moaning like a wounded animal, and slurring incoherently. Sara peered out the window, fearful that the constable might hear, but she could not locate him. She grabbed a thick linen napkin from the kitchen, and wedged it into his mouth.

  Carson’s body twitched; he was not yet unconscious, but uncoordinated like a drunk. From her medical bag, she withdrew a roll of gauze and wrapped it several times around his head, fastening it with fabric tape, securing the napkin in his mouth. Sara managed to roll him over and bind his wrists together with more gauze. When the roll ran out, she used the fabric tape, wrapping it around his wrists, and using it to immobilise his legs.

  By the time she had secured him, Carson had slipped into deep unconsciousness. A shiver ran down Sara’s spine as his final words resonated in her mind. She looked into his glazed, unfocused eyes.

  ‘Now,’ she said out loud, ‘what am I supposed to do with you?’

  FIFTEEN

  Alone, on a dark night, in the quiet of a house surrounded by fields and trees, the boundaries between logic and intuition, right and wrong, are indistinct. Darkness promotes uncertainty; we rely on more primitive senses than logic to guide us. Sometimes they take us places we would not otherwise go.

  Sara had sedated and restrained the murderer, Eldon Carson ... but she had not called the police.

  Instead, she had dragged her drugged captive to the small stable attached to the living room – the one she and Ceri had cleared of boxes only recently – and, in the dark, tied him prone to a large wooden workbench. As soon as she had bound him securely, she collapsed into a fit of trembling and hyperventilation.

  She fought the spasms in her limbs, forced herself to tear rectangles from an empty cardboard box and fit them over the stable’s two small windows. Then she walked unsteadily to her kitchen, where she brewed coffee with great deliberation.

  I need to think rationally, she repeated to herself.

  I need to think.

  She carried her mug of coffee up to her room, the hot ceramic burning her knuckles. He might be lying, she thought with desperate concentration, but what if he’s telling the truth? After all, he had known things that nobody outside Sara’s family knew, things she herself had half forgotten. It was possible that he had obtained the information from someone; perhaps he had met Rhoddo and learned about her stuffed panda, Charlie Chan. But what about the Gary Barlow story? Had Rhodri even been at her eleventh birthday party? Would he have remembered the Gary Barlow story?

  Maybe an old friend heard these stories a long time ago, and told them to the killer.

  Those would all be rational explanations ... yet, on this dark night, they seemed less plausible than the irrational one: that Eldon Carson was psychic. And if he was, then maybe he did know who was going to commit crimes.

  Sara would not act when the case had not been proven; the stakes were far too high.

  What if he actually could stop the worst individuals from committing their evil acts? What then? Would I have the right to stop him? And how many innocent people would die if I did?

  She pulled her covers chest-high. Eldon Carson’s presence in her house was palpable, and Sara felt as though she were his prisoner, not he hers. She found herself wishing desperately that Jamie were at her side.

  After nearly an hour had passed, Sara rose, and descended the wooden steps to the stable door. The roll of tape had settled in the corner. The contents of her medical bag were still scattered across the floor. She pushed the handle, and stepped down onto the cold, cement floor. The drug she had administered to Carson would, in normal doses, have sedated him for no more than a few hours. The amount she had given him would keep him under all night.

  Carson lay across the grimy wooden workbench, ropes of bright yellow nylon fastened at his chest and pelvis. His bound legs and feet dangled off the edge of the bench, and Sara, having run out of rope, had secured them to the workbench’s legs with thick gardening wire. She knew that her captive would be very stiff when she finally released him – but he would feel so bad from the pentobarbital, he’d be unlikely to notice.

  Sweating, yet chilled, Sara stood a silent vigil next to the bulk of his body, replaying their previous night’s conversation. What had the young man meant when he shouted that she was psychic too? Had it simply been a ploy to unnerve her?

  Then it had worked, she thought. She longed to be able to shake him awake, to ask him – but he wou
ld not regain consciousness for hours. She certainly was not psychic, Sara told herself, that was self-evident ... but, standing alone in the fertile dark, troubling question grew in her mind.

  If, twenty years ago, she could have prevented Glyn Thomas from murdering her parents by allowing his death, would she have done it?

  The answer was obvious, and terrifying.

  Sara had left and returned to the stable several more times that night, growing more and more exhausted, emotionally and physically. She waited with agitation for the moment her captive would wake, yet still he slumbered on. Sometime after dawn, she fell into a deep but uneasy slumber, from which she woke with a start just after nine in the morning.

  When she stepped down onto the cold concrete floor, the sharp odour of urine made her retch. Carson’s eyes were glazed but open. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, fighting to sound calm, ‘I did leave you rather a long time, didn’t I?’

  From the kitchen, she fetched a washing-up bowl of soapy water and a J-cloth. On her way through the living room, she picked up her medical bag, and set everything next to the old, wooden workbench. Through the corner of her eye, she could see Carson’s pleading expression, but refused to make eye contact. Methodically, she donned surgical gloves, and selected scissors from her bag. Deciding against dulling them, she removed a pair of gardening shears from a peg on the stone wall, and made precise incisions up both legs of Carson’s jeans. She pulled the soaking fabric away, removed his pants, and began to wash his clammy legs. ‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she muttered, ‘I’m a doctor.’

  Eldon Carson made muffled pleas through his gag. He did not know that she was as desperate to talk to him as he was to her. When she finished washing his legs, she slowly removed an empty syringe from her bag. Holding it in his line of vision, she stuck the needle into a glass ampoule, drawing the clear liquid upwards.

  ‘This,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘is haloperidol – a drug used to sedate psychopaths. If you think what I gave you last night was strong, you don’t want to try this.’