Souls At Zero (A Dark Psychological Thriller)

by Neal Martin

  Without turning around, Edger said, "To do what I have to do."

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was an old attic room. Bare boards on the floor. A low ceiling that was steeply pitched on both sides, creating a sharp peak in the middle. On one of the exterior concrete walls there was a small round window, which was the only source of light in the room. The only way in or out of the attic room was through a trap door at one end. The whole room had a fusty smell and dark patches of damp on most of the walls and ceiling. Gusts of wind blew through the eaves, causing the felt in the ceiling to flap noisily. Cold drafts swirled around the room, occasionally so strong they shifted the dust around on the old floorboards. In the middle of the room was a single mattress, brand new, along with three folded up blankets and a white pillow with no casing on it. Next to the mattress, there was two small bottles of unopened water, a Mars bar and a bag of boiled sweets. Next to them was a large black bucket and a roll of toilet paper.

  Kaitlin McGuire sat on the edge of the mattress, her knees drawn up to her chest, her thin arms wrapped around her legs. Since waking up inside the attic room a few hours ago (her kidnapper injecting her for a second time after speaking briefly with Harry on the phone earlier), she spent the first hour shouting for help, until her throat went hoarse, and she ended up being sick in the corner of the room, the half digested contents of the Ulster fry she ate that morning congealing in a puddle of vomit, the smell of which would occasionally assail her nostrils and make her stomach heave again.

  She had no idea where she was. When she looked out the small round window of the room she was in, all she saw was an endless expanse of rough, grassy terrain and an ominous grey sky that made her feel more isolated and alone than she already was. She saw no other houses, no roads, nothing. Just empty space.

  When she went to the trap door on the opposite side of the room, she found it to be securely locked from the other side. It didn't budge at all when she pulled on it. Eventually she had to accept that she was trapped inside the room and that she wasn't getting out unless whoever had put her there let her out. And going by the mattress and everything else in the room, Kaitlin knew she wasn't getting out anytime soon. She realised to her horror that she may be held in the room for days, maybe even weeks. Perhaps she would never get out at all. She would never see her mother again, or Harry, or anyone else. That set her off crying again, and her whole body shook with terror. A fear of the unknown gripped her so hard she began to hyperventilate, and soon after she felt a warmth spread from between her legs that soaked through her jeans. Shame was now added to everything else she felt, and that's when she drew her legs up and gripped herself tightly, rocking back and forth in an effort to calm down, which proved to be impossible under the circumstances.

  It wasn't long before she heard noise coming from down below her. There was someone downstairs in the house, walking around, creaking the floorboards and making the occasional banging noise that would make Kaitlin jump with fright. At one point, she heard the squeaking noise of someone climbing a ladder, which appeared to lead to the trap door of the attic room she was in. Kaitlin gripped herself tighter and held her breath as her heart began to pound loudly against her chest.

  Then there was the sound of a lock turning and the trap door opened a few inches.

  Kaitlin couldn't help it. She scrambled in fear to one corner of the room, the same corner where she had vomited earlier, but she hardly noticed she was sitting in the pool of sick, because her eyes were on the person peeking through the opening at her. She could make out two eyes staring at her as the person used their head to hold the trapdoor open. It was a man. Maybe the same man who took her from the cafe that morning. She couldn't tell for sure because of the lack of light. The man continued staring at her for a long moment, then he stepped down the ladder he was on and his face disappeared, the trapdoor closing behind him. The click of the lock made Kaitlin jump. She heard footsteps on the creaky floorboards below, which got quieter the further the person moved away from the attic room.

  Kaitlin dared not move, even after the man had gone. She feared he would come back again, perhaps come right into the room next time. What did he want? Why did he take her in the first place? Did he intend to hurt her? She couldn't think straight. Her mind was too locked up with fear to think.

  She didn't know how long she stayed huddled in the corner, still sitting in her own vomit, her jeans soaked with stinging urine. When she eventually moved back to the mattress, the room had become a lot darker as the light from the window began to fade. She didn't wear a watch and her kidnapper had taken her phone from her coat pocket, so she had no idea what time it was. Not that time mattered in her situation. All she had was time until someone came and rescued her or the kidnapper…

  What the kidnapper would do to her was not something she wanted to think about. Instead, she forced herself to think about Harry. Harry was a soldier. He said himself, he protected people.

  So why hadn't he protected her this morning? Why he had he let her be kidnapped?

  Stop it.

  This wasn't Harry's fault. He was knocked out in that cafe. There was nothing he could have done.

  He told her to run, she remembered that. And she remembered that she thought why at the time. Why run? And then she remembered the man in the baseball cap coming over, and then a sharp stinging pain in her neck and then…

  And then she woke up in the strange room, with no idea how she got there or why she was there in the first place. A phone was shoved in her face by a man whose face was covered in shadow, and then she heard Harry's voice on the phone. The phone was then taken away, and she felt a familiar sharp prick in the side of her neck, followed by oblivion again.

  She now knew she was someone's captive, but she still didn't know why.

  As the light from outside the window continued to fade, shrouding the room in darkness, Kaitlin felt her body temperature begin to drop, and she started shivering uncontrollably. She reached over and took one of the blankets that were next to her on the mattress, then she wrapped the blanket around herself, which didn't do much to stop the cold, but which gave her scant comfort at least.

  There was nothing else to do but wait, and pray that Harry would come and save her. That thought, that Harry was out there somewhere, planning her rescue, was the only thing stopping the terror she felt from completely overwhelming her.

  The man who kidnapped Kaitlin McGuire was known as Blutwolf. A German name that translated into Blood Wolf. That was the name he had been given many years ago by the Angel of Death. Whatever Blutwolf's real name was—the name he had been born with—it didn't matter anymore. He had been reborn as Blutwolf. He also possessed over a dozen different passports, all under different names. When the phone rang however, and the Angel of Death said his name, it was always Blutwolf.

  Blutwolf stood in the living room of the abandoned farmhouse he had chosen as a hideout until his work was done. The farmhouse was remote, the nearest house being at least two miles away. It also lacked any kind of electricity, so Blutwolf used candles for light.

  The living room of the farmhouse was small. The wall paper was peeled off the walls in places to reveal the damp underneath. Filthy net curtains still covered the window that looked out into the desolate front yard. Blutwolf stood still in the centre of the room, listening. The girl was quiet up in the attic room where he put her, which was good. He didn't want to have to drug her again to keep her quiet. As he listened, he heard rats or mice scurrying around under the floorboards, scratching on the ceiling above him. Outside, the wind was blowing in strong gusts, howling through the farmhouse and causing the candles on the living room floor to flicker wildly.

  On one of the patterned wallpapered walls there was a total of nine A4 photographs pinned up with tacks. All of the photographs were next to each other in a straight line, except the last one, which was centred underneath the rest on its own.

  Blutwolf stood staring at the
photographs, looking at each one in turn. Each photograph featured a different person, seven men and two women. The people in the photographs ranged in age from early fifties to late seventies. Blutwolf had taken each of the photographs himself recently. A hate-filled rage built up in him as he took in the faces before him. It was a hot rage that started in the pit of his stomach and spread out into every inch of his body until he felt like he was on fire. His jaw muscles tightened so much he thought he would crack his teeth. His breathing quickened to a frantic pace, and then he began to strip out of his clothes, until he stood completely naked.

  There wasn't a single piece of skin on Blutwolf's body that wasn't marked or scarred in some way. His entire body was a mass of raised scar tissue, like he had endured every form of torture imaginable. There were short and long criss-crossing slashes everywhere, deep pits of damaged tissue caused by the force of blunt objects hitting his body, expansive burn marks that made his skin look like melted plastic, bite marks and places where his flesh was missing altogether, leaving only a ragged depression behind. His face was the only part of his body that didn't have extensive scarring, except a long, deep gash that ran down the left side of his face, caused by a knife that he remembered all too well cutting into him.

  Surrounded by lit candles, shadows flickering across his atrociously scarred body, Blutwolf bent down and picked a straight razor up off the dirty carpeted floor. Still looking at the photographs on the wall, the rage still flowing through him like boiling lava, Blutwolf opened the straight razor, and without hesitation, made a long, deep cut across his chest, slicing into the thick scar tissue, sighing with relief as the rage in him seemed to escape through the wound he had created. As the nerves under his scarred and damaged flesh were deadened, he didn't feel the blood running down over the thick clumps of plastic looking scar tissue.

  With his left hand, Blutwolf touched the open wound in his chest, dabbing his fingers with blood. Then he walked to the wall and stared at the first photograph. "Don't let me down, Harry," he said, before smearing blood over the Lord Mayor of Belfast's face.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Edger was doing over eighty miles per hour as he drove down the M1 towards Lisburn. Fifteen minutes beforehand, he had phoned Donna Lennon, Rankin Investigation's in-house tech expert, and told her that he needed her help, that it was urgent. Donna refused at first, citing her need to get ready for the concert she was going to at the Odyssey Arena with her girlfriend later in the evening. When Edger told her the situation was life or death, she went quiet for a moment, then said she would help him. He told her he would be with her shortly.

  He was still raging over the screw-up back at Rankin's office as he aggressively weaved in and out of the traffic on the motorway. Calling the kidnapper like that had been a stupid mistake, one born out of desperation. He should have known from experience that decisions made in haste and desperation never end well. As it was, he now had half the time he initially had to do something about the kidnapper's demands. The clock on the dash said 4:45 p.m. Which meant he had less than twelve hours to convince Kaitlin's kidnapper that the Lord Mayor of Belfast was dead, either by killing the Mayor, or faking the man's death somehow. Both options were going to be next to impossible to carry out, especially in the small window of time he had to operate in.

  An even bigger worry that had started to eat at him was even if he managed to convince the kidnapper the Mayor was dead, what other demands would the kidnapper have after that? Was the bastard going to use Edger as his personal assassin, having Edger running around killing people that the kidnapper had on some list?

  Edger had to stop himself from thinking about that.

  Focus on the problem at hand.

  He needed to find out everything he could about the present Lord Mayor. In doing so, he was hoping that a reason would present itself as to why the kidnapper wanted Brian McGinty dead, a reason that may also help to uncover the identity of the kidnapper himself.

  He was still at a loss as to who the kidnapper might be. Certainly it wasn't his long gone brother, as Rankin had posited earlier. Edger still couldn't believe Rankin had even said that. Edger had been close to his brother. They loved each other, looked out for each other. Even if Declan was somehow not dead, there was no possible reason for him to target Edger in this way, to kidnap his daughter—Declan's own niece—and force him to kill people. It was ludicrous to even think it. Which meant the kidnapper had to be someone Edger had crossed paths with in his time as a soldier. Having had a bit of time to think about it, he realised that there was more than a few people out there whom he wouldn't put it past to take such drastic action against him.

  The person who stood out most in his mind was a guy called Terry O'Rourke. When Edger first arrived at Aubagne, the home of the main Foreign Legion recruiting base in Marseilles, France, he was eighteen years old. Terry O'Rourke—a Dublin born twenty year old who was short in height but had a big mouth—came to Aubagne at the same time, and as O'Rourke was also Irish, Edger naturally gravitated towards the guy, even though O'Rourke was a bit too mouthy for Edger's liking. He'd only got off the train and he was bragging about how he would breeze through the training no problem to get his white Kepi, because he had apparently already done a year in the Irish Army before being kicked out for reasons he refused to go into. Edger was under no illusions about how hard the Legion training was going to be, so he just smiled at O'Rourke and let him think what he wanted, knowing the guy was in for a shock when training started.

  When training did finally start, O'Rourke struggled. He wasn't as tough as he made himself out to be. More than that, Edger soon realised the guy was mentally unhinged. Over time, he seemed to take a dislike to Edger, probably because Edger was doing better in the training than he was. Then one night while everyone was sleeping in the billet, Edger found himself being dragged out of his bunk by someone that he soon realised was O'Rourke. O'Rourke had a psychotic look in his eyes as he proceeded to madly kick and punch at Edger as he lay in shock on the floor, doing his best to defend himself against O'Rourke's blows. Then Edger caught sight of something shiny in O'Rourke's hand, and he realised with horror it was a knife. To this day, Edger didn't know how O'Rourke had gotten hold of a knife, let alone get it into the billet with him, but he had, and he intended to kill Edger with it, there was no doubt about that. Edger struggled to get up off the floor at this point, pleading with O'Rourke to calm down, but it was obvious the guy was mentally somewhere else entirely. He had lost his mind. Then a Caporal ran into the billet and tried to restrain O'Rourke, but O'Rourke was possessed of psychotic strength, and he immediately spun around and stabbed the Caporal in the neck. The Caporal hit the ground, blood jetting out of his neck all over the place. It eventually took six people to wrestle O'Rourke to the ground and restrain him so he could be handcuffed and taken away. As he was being dragged away by two Caporal's, O'Rourke screamed at Edger that he would kill him some day. The Caporal O'Rourke stabbed ended up dying, and O'Rourke himself was imprisoned by the Legion, given a life sentence.

  As Edger drove into the estate where Donna Lennon lived, he shook his head at the memory of O'Rourke. A man like that should have been in a mental hospital from the start. Edger had no idea if the man was still in prison, or if he was out, but he certainly wouldn't put it past him to go after Edger again, even after all these years. But if that was the case, why the hell would O'Rourke kidnap Edger's daughter and demand that he kill the Lord Mayor of Belfast? It made no sense, but then nothing about O'Rourke made sense to Edger at the time, so who the fuck knows?

  Regardless of who was doing this to Edger, it didn't change the fact that they had his daughter, and they had forced him into a time sensitive kill mission that would spawn severe consequences for his daughter if it failed. For the time being at least, Edger knew his focus had to be less on who was doing this to him, and more on how he was going meet their demands.

  Donna Lennon lived alone in a three bedroom semi in a quiet residential est
ate just of the main Belfast Road. It was the first time Edger had actually been to her home and he was surprised that she lived in such a large house, given that she lived alone. He had her pegged as an apartment type girl, but then he remembered that Donna's parents had died within six months of each other a few years ago, leaving the house to her.

  Donna opened the front door as he was walking up the path. She stood waiting on him, dressed all in black, wearing heavy dark eye makeup, her shoulder length black hair more tousled than usual. The T-shirt she wore had an image of a large eye on it and above the eye was the word TOOL. "This better be important," she said as he reached the door. "Tool waits for no man."

  "You look like a teenager," he said, as he stepped past her into the hallway.

  "Some of us refuse to grow up. I'm only twenty-eight anyway. Still a spring chicken, unlike you, old man."

  He forced a smile, not in the mood for the usual back and forth he often had with her. "You alone?"

  "Yeah. I'm meeting my girlfriend at the train station. Soon, I might add."

  Edger nodded. "I need your help, Donna."

  "I gathered that," she said, heading into the living room. He followed behind her into the room. She obviously hadn't changed the decor since her parents died, because the walls still had flowery wallpaper on them, as well as flowery curtains on the windows. Donna however, had added her own flourishes here and there, in the form of skulls, a lamp made of bones and some very weird artwork on the walls that was totally at odds with the wallpaper. She sat down on the white fabric sofa and picked a glass up off the table which seemed to be full of Jack Daniel's if the bottle on the table was anything to go by. "You want a drink?"

  He shook his head. "No. I need you to hack Belfast City Hall, Donna."