by Ruby Loren
“Are you coming, or what?" I called back, seeing Lowell hadn’t moved.
“I’m not allowed to get involved anymore. I’ve been told to just let whatever happens happens. It was lucky for me that someone decided to kill Tom. If they hadn’t, Ms Borel might not have been able to shut him up in time.” He looked at me steadily. “I would have been a dead man walking.”
“Don’t you care about doing the right thing? What’s wrong with you?”
“I've got a job to do,” was all he said back.
I stared at him. “Lowell, why are you in Cornwall?”
“I can't tell you that,” he said and my heart broke into a billion tiny pieces.
11
Elephants Never Forget
“You think Darren Banks stabbed himself?” Detective Toyne didn’t even try to hide the abject disbelief in his voice.
I did my best to avoid bunching my hands into fists, but it was tough.
I’d driven to the police station after my disagreement with Lowell. he might be content to bury his head beneath the sand, but I wasn’t. I’d asked to speak with the detectives and had hit them with my revelation.
To my surprise, they weren’t impressed.
“There's no evidence to support this. You could be right, but all you’ve got is the type of stab wound and an interpretation of something that a sensationalist writer wrote down in his notes,” Maynard explained.
“Well, when you put it like that…” I started to say, but I could see their point. I’d been so sure that the knife wound was a breakthrough but now it didn’t even sound that plausible.
“Even if Darren - for whatever reason - did stab himself, it doesn’t mean that he’s responsible for murder," Maynard continued.
I thanked the pair for their time and walked out of the interview room. I’d been so sure that it was Darren but now I simply didn’t know.
“I think you might be right.”
I turned around to find Detective Toyne standing behind me.
“Really? Or are you just saying that for some reason that will benefit you?” I said, still sore over his ‘selfless’ decision to destroy evidence that had in fact not been his decision at all.
“I think there’s a chance it’s him. Even I can admit it’s a more likely scenario than the woman lifting someone the same weight and size as her up onto a cork board and staking her there.”
“Great,” I said, not meaning it. “So, what happens next?”
He shrugged. “I’d better go over the evidence again with this new idea. Perhaps something will jump out at us. I’ll have to see. Hopefully no one else will die before then.”
I really felt like adding 'as if you'd care!’ but I refrained.
“Note to self, stay away from Zara, or risk getting caught in the crossfire,” I muttered.
To my great surprise, Toyne actually laughed.
The next morning, I realised I’d practically completed my review of the zoo without realising it. Perhaps it had been the interruptions, or maybe the massive development projects I’d been overseeing, but I’d written enough about each and every group of animals in the zoo without noticing. All that remained was to put it together and draw a conclusion that I hoped would help Pendalay improve for years to come.
I was just enjoying the quiet of the early November morning when my phone rang.
“It’s me, Zara. I need a massive favour.” She coughed and I pulled a face at the sound of phlegm. “I’m pretty unwell, but I promised the Johnsons I’d return the legal documents they entrusted me with when they accepted the company’s proposal. There are certain legal things we have to see before we can be sure we can work with a company," she briefly explained.
I found myself wondering whether or not I needed something like that every time I worked with a new zoo. At the moment, I had a homemade contract I handed over. Then I just had to hope that I was paid and that nothing bad happened. Perhaps that wasn’t the best way to do it.
“I would ask one of the others, but they don’t know where my house is and if you don’t know, it can be tricky to find. The sat navs don’t like it.”
“Okay, I think I can pop over in a minute,” I said, figuring it was only a short drive. “Hey, is Darren okay?”
“Yes, they stitched him up last night. You won’t believe it, but he's back at work today! He’s already gone over to the office to work on our own accounts. Work, work, work!” Zara said and then broke off into a coughing fit. “See you soon!"
I hung up and looked down at the phone. I muttered something rude under my breath and texted Lowell to tell him where I’d gone and that I would text him back in twenty minutes to let him know I was okay - just in case.
It’ll be fine. You have a few suspicions about Darren, but he’s not at the house, my mind whispered to me. Unfortunately, that didn’t quell the feeling of unease when I walked out of the zoo to my car.
I shook it off and drove over. I parked a little way from the hamlet, in the same spot that Lowell had the night we’d gone to confront Tom Riley.
When I walked around the corner towards Zara’s house, I was relieved to see that Darren's car wasn’t there. Zara had already said he’d be at the office, but if he was the one to watch, I didn’t want to find myself anywhere near him.
“Come in!” Zara said, hiding her nose behind a tissue. “Do your best to stay away from me. I don’t want you to catch this, it's nasty.”
I nodded and followed her inside the compact but cosy house.
“The papers are just through in my office,” Zara said.
I ground to a halt in the living room, confronted by what appeared to be an entire army of tiny elephants adorning every flat surface.
“Nice elephants,” I said, unable not to comment having stared for so long.
Zara smiled. “I've been collecting them since I was a child. It used to be something my father bought for me, but since he's been gone, Darren’s carried on the tradition.”
“That’s really sweet of him,” I said.
“I don’t want to keep you all day! I feel bad enough having to ask you to be my delivery driver.”
She led the way down the corridor but ground to a halt before the end.
“Oh no… I feel a sneeze coming on! Excuse me, I need to tissue up. The office is just on the left. You can go in. The papers are on the chair!" She hurried back down the corridor.
I looked at the closed door for a second before surreptitiously covering my hand with a sleeve. Getting sick was not on my to do list.
I pushed it open and walked into the office.
Darren was on the other side of the room.
I drew an involuntary gasp of air before I realised his wrists and ankles had been cable tied together and there was a gag in his mouth.
I just had time for the horrible realisation to set in before a thick wad of tissue was pressed against my face. I breathed in a heavy chemical stench and everything went black.
I woke up what felt like a few minutes later and was nearly sick. I'd seen enough films to know I’d just been attacked with either chloroform or ether. I also knew who was responsible for doing it to me.
I tried to stand up and felt plastic bite into my ankles. My wrists were bound too. It was with a growing sense of dread that I recognised the ties as the same type used to suspend poor Jayne Fairfax.
“I’m glad you’re awake!” Zara said in her normal, cheery voice. I didn’t fail to notice she had no trace of a cold now. “I'm sorry to do this to you, but I need you to hear me out. I didn’t want you to just run off to the police. So, no hard feelings?”
A glare was the only response I gave to that.
“Did you do all of this?” I meant the murders and all the elements of stalking, but even as I said it, I knew it wasn't right.
“Of course not! I'm the victim here. He’s the one doing it all, but you already knew that, didn't you?" She asked.
I thought about it and inclined my head.
Zara’s
face broke into a grin. “I knew it! You see what other people don’t. When did you realise?”
“Tom had written something in his notes and then I spent last night with Lowell trying to recreate Darren's stab wound. It turns out he probably did it to himself.”
There was muffled noises as Darren tried to say something on the subject.
Zara threw him a withering look. “Yes, he did it to deflect suspicion away. Him ‘finding’ Tom’s body in the field behind the house in what’s basically the middle of nowhere was probably going to come back and bite him. I don't know what he thought was going to happen,” she said, scathingly.
“He probably thought Lowell was going to come on his own and then it would be his word against a man who’d turned up at Tom’s house, looking for a way to settle a score over the book that he was writing about me,” I said, remembering the warning phone call Lowell had told me about. It must have been Darren who’d called.
“That’s pretty good! I knew you were the right person to come to. You understand when other people won’t.”
She sighed. “I don’t have it all figured out myself, but I’ll tell you my own theories. All of this started a couple of months after we’d given up the jewellery business. We’d finished our courses and had our first batch of clients when the first threatening letter arrived. It was cut out of newspaper and it said that they were going to take everything I loved from me.” She let out a dry sob, but I wasn’t so sure I could trust Zara’s emotions. I’d already been manipulated once today and I had a feeling she’d been playing a lot of people for longer than that.
“Things just went on from there. The letters kept coming and then it was windows being broken, paint smeared on the door, dead animals posted through the letter box. It was horrendous.”
She shook her head. “Back then, we thought the police could help us. They even managed to isolate a suspect. Before they could look into it more, this guy, who owned one of the nastier businesses we’d worked to give a boost, was arrested for GBH. It came out that he was also responsible for several other assaults and his fingerprints were on record as being present at a few breaking and entering cases. He went to prison and everything stopped. The police didn't bother to look any further."
She shrugged. “At the time, I was just pleased it was over. I knew it was time to make a fresh start because our home in Otley just held bad memories now. We decided to move around a bit and it was great. I thought my troubles were behind me… until I got that phone call, the day we met in my office.”
Zara pushed her brown hair back from her chin. “I wasn't lying when I said I thought it was a scam call. I’d hoped it was. I didn’t want to believe it was all going to happen again.”
“When did you know?” I asked, hoping that time was dragging on enough for Lowell to realise I wasn’t texting back. Surely those twenty minutes would have to have elapsed by now? With a sinking heart, I remembered he hadn't replied to the first text. I could very well be on my own.
“I knew they were back after the rat appeared. It was just the same sort of thing the stalker in Otley had done. I’m not stupid. I looked at the people around me and only recognised one person from back when it had all happened - my husband.”
“What about Detective Toyne?" I asked.
“I only recognised him recently,” she confessed. “Perhaps he should have been on my list of potentials but the more I thought about it, the more Darren seemed to be the answer. If he’d had his fun in Otley and left it, I’d never have known. Starting up again here was how I knew that it wasn’t the man the police had pegged as being responsible.” She ran a hand along the back of the desk chair and looked down disdainfully at Darren. “Things always happened to me when Darren wasn’t around. The Leeds police assumed I must be being watched and only attacked when I was on my own to make me feel even more scared. It turns out, it was because Darren was running off to put together more horrible things.”
She sighed. "I never thought he’d go so far as to actually kill someone. I still can’t bear to think about what happened to poor Jayne…” Her lower lip trembled. “He killed that nice police officer, too! I know he was writing about us, but there was no need to do that. He’s just a monster.”
Her eyes cleared and the glassy, unshed tears seemed to vanish. “That's why I need you, Madi.”
“Why?” I said, still baffled as to why I was tied up on the floor of her office.
“I need you to kill him for me. I can’t do it. I just can’t.”
“Why do you think I’d be willing to do something like that?!” I said.
I was starting to think Zara had lost the plot.
“You’ve killed people before, right? The police asked if I knew about the things you’d been involved in. They all but implied you were involved with big secretive stuff. Can’t you just get rid of him?” She said, looking appealingly at me.
“No! I’ve never killed anybody.” Not deliberately, anyway, I mentally added, thinking of what had happened when I’d had to escape from a basement through a pit of black mamba snakes and had been pursued. It hadn't ended well for the person chasing me.
“Please, Madi. I know you can. We’ll say it was self-defence. You caught him trying to attack me.” Zara looked me in the eyes and held out a knife. “This is the knife he stabbed himself with. I found it with the fake nails in the Halloween maze. I bet he thought no one would notice. If you use it, it will be easy to prove that he used it before you and stabbed himself. Please, Madi…” She blinked back fresh tears. “He’s going to kill me if you don’t.”
I looked across at Darren who was shaking his head, furiously. Perhaps Zara was telling the truth and he was behind all of this, but what if this was just another one of Zara's games? Detective Toyne might have been right about her all along.
“Don’t pretend you're innocent…” Darren had managed to spit out the gag.
“I am innocent! Why did you do this to me? I thought you loved me!” Zara bit back.
I shut my eyes against the pounding headache that had just started behind my eyes. Getting caught between a lovers’ tiff wasn’t fun at the best of times, but this pair were on a whole different level. I couldn’t believe Zara thought I’d be willing to murder her husband!
“You lost all of our money! All because you thought it might be nice to sell the stupid stuff you made. I went along with it because I was nuts enough to love you. I let you take it way too far, but then it was too late. We were broke. Everything that we had was gone,” Darren said.
“We did it together! We said it was the best thing that ever happened to us. Look at how the business is doing now,” Zara said, her voice starting to tremble.
“Of course it wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to us, you stupid woman. It ruined my life! You didn't seem to realise that. Nothing changed after the first business went bad, you just kept living in cloud cuckoo land. I hated that about you,” Darren said, his eyes screwing up and making his face look piggy.
"She's done bad stuff too!” He turned to me. “Remember the step? That was all her. Anyone could have stepped on that. I could have lost my foot!”
“I was just defending myself!” Zara shouted back.
Darren gave a roar of anger and struggled to his feet, trying to rip the cable ties off using brute force. Zara screamed as he gave up trying to break free and instead launched himself across the room. She tried to get away but tripped and fell, clinging onto the desk.
Something fell onto the carpet and smashed. The smell of chemicals rose in the air and I knew the bottle of knockout drug had been smashed.
Acting on the advice of a YouTube video - watched on a rainy day several weeks before - I raised my cable-tied hands above my head and swung them down, pulling my hands away from each other as I did. To my surprise, the tie broke. It also took quite a lot of skin with it, but now wasn’t the time to worry about that.
“Do it!” Zara screamed, kicking Darren’s writhing body away from her. I fel
t my headache worsen as the fumes in the room got thicker.
I used my hands to wrench my feet apart before standing up. I pulled my phone free from my pocket and managed to dial 999 before Zara realised what I was doing and grabbed my already sore wrist. I cried out and dropped the phone, aiming an elbow at her head. It collided with her cheek and she fell back on Darren, who immediately tried to loop his arms over her head in an attempt to strangle her.
While Zara screamed, I walked around to Darren’s left side and gave him a sharp kick, right where I remembered the stab wound being. Darren did some screaming of his own and Zara managed to get free.
“Kill him! Kill him!” she shouted, pointing to the knife, which had somehow ended up lying halfway beneath a chest of drawers.
Darren started to crawl towards it, but I gave him another kick for good measure.
Zara looked like she was about to try something too, but I fixed her with a dark look.
“This stops right now. The police are probably already on their way over here,” I said, praying that it was true. I wasn’t sure if my call had actually gone through.
“Just do it!” Zara snarled and ran forwards.
I stepped to the side and tripped backwards over a cardboard box, inadvertently lifting my legs up and tripping Zara. She flew through the air and hit the wall of the office, denting the plasterboard before sliding down to the floor with a dazed look on her face.
Darren was still writhing in pain after what I’d done to his stab wound. I was betting some of his stitches weren't where they should be anymore.
I looked around and saw my phone, but the fumes in the room were making everything swim. I gave up and pulled the door of the office open, nearly walking into Detective Toyne.
He grabbed my shoulders and slammed me up against the wall before he recognised me.
“Are you okay?” he said, several moments too late.
I would have had some choice words to say back to him if my head hadn’t felt like it was spinning like a top.
“I need air,” I muttered and staggered back through the collection of police until I was outside of the house, standing on the doorstep right next to where the rat had been hung in the tree.
