Requiem

by David Hodges

  ‘Yes?’ he snapped, sensing the SOCO officer hovering.

  ‘We … er … found a pair of handcuffs attached to a chain in a cellar under the stairs,’ she said. ‘There’s also a mattress down there. Looks like that’s where he might have held her.’

  The DCI nodded curtly. ‘Fat lot of use that information is to us now,’ he threw back uncharitably. ‘Unless it can tell us where the bastard has gone to ground.’ He scowled. ‘What I can’t understand is why he would bring Kate back here then shoot off somewhere else. Why not go there straight away?’

  ‘I think I might be able to help on that score, Guv,’ Roscoe growled, stomping into the room. ‘One of the lads found a bundle of clothes in a dirty linen basket upstairs, including,’ he added, ‘a pair of blue suede shoes.’

  ‘So he came back here to rid himself of Norton’s ID,’ Ansell said, ‘which means we’re not looking for a Norton look-alike any more, but possibly Twister as he really is – minus the beard.’

  ‘Plus a green Land Rover with a canvas top, according to Lewis,’ Roscoe reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  Ansell glared at him. ‘Which is where exactly? None of the patrols have so far turned it up. And while we ponce about here, Twister just sits it out in his bolt-hole, waiting for midnight.’

  ‘We can only keep looking, Guv,’ Roscoe said lamely. ‘We’ve still got several hours to go and I’ve got every available unit out on the Levels, plus the chopper again, equipped with a searchlight and night vision bins.’

  Ansell gave a disparaging snort. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘so all we need now then is a clairvoyant or a bloody miracle!’

  As he spoke, he glanced at his wristwatch. It was 9.30 pm.

  chapter 37

  LEWIS WAS NOT an advanced driver, neither had he been on one of the force’s specialist traffic driving courses, but he was used to tasty vehicles after years of Jaguar ownership and the high performance car he had borrowed was certainly tasty. The trouble was, he had no real idea where he was going. He was sure the green Land Rover he had seen from the police helicopter was the key, but finding the right drove was another story and, even if he did manage to find it, where did he go from there? He could hardly search every house, barn and shed he came across in the hope of striking lucky. But he had to do something and time was fast running out for Kate.

  As it was, he drove backwards and forwards along a veritable labyrinth of droves and tracks for what seemed like an eternity, before he found what might have been the right one, catching the front wing of the traffic car on a stony bank and scraping the front and rear passenger doors along a barbed wire fence in the process.

  ‘Slow down,’ a voice in his brain warned as he churned along the drove between the silvery lines of twin rhynes like a dragster. He did slow once when a large barn loomed up above the hedgerow on his left and he peered at the tumbledown structure for a brief moment in the light of the newly risen moon before deciding it did not merit closer inspection. A group of isolated farm buildings attracted his attention shortly afterwards and, seeing a Land Rover parked in front of one of them, he went to investigate, but a search of the buildings revealed nothing more than cattle feed and farm machinery and the Land Rover turned out to be an abandoned wreck, tenanted by rats, which fled in the blaze of his torch.

  The drove then met a main road, and he braked hard just in time as a Tesco delivery van flashed past, blasting its horn as he almost shot out in front of it. He was starting to hyperventilate, feeling the panic welling up inside him as the futility of what he was doing hit him. Which way did he go now? Treacherous mist clouded the moon and dimmed his headlights. If it got any thicker, he knew he would be stuffed.

  In desperation, he turned left towards Mark village and headed back to Highbridge, determined to check the derelict funeral parlour where the police investigation had ended two years ago. He knew it was unlikely that Twister would have chosen somewhere so obvious for his bolt-hole, but he had to make sure anyway. As it transpired, his assumption was spot on: the place was totally deserted, not even the sign of a police presence – just blue and white crime-scene tapes across the entrances stirring creepily in a faint breeze. A complete waste of time.

  Returning to the traffic car and heading back to the Levels, he switched on the vehicle’s radio again, listening briefly to the transmissions as he drove. Control had been calling him incessantly ever since he had roared away from Norton’s house, ordering him to return there at once, and in the end he had turned the radio off. But he realized now that this had been a stupid thing to do. It was vital for him to know what was going on, just in case something turned up. But his change of heart altered nothing. In quick succession he heard the units responding to Control’s location checks with negative after negative result. It seemed Kate had vanished off the face of the earth. It was 10.15 pm.

  Kate had intended ignoring the digital clock, trying to concentrate her mind instead on coming up with an escape plan, but for some reason her mind seemed sluggish and unresponsive and her gaze was continually drawn to the red numerals grinning at her in silent mockery.

  She had already tried to tear herself free from the black tape which bound her wrists to the arms of the chair, but Twister had done too good a job and it didn’t give a centimetre. She’d even tried to free the swivel chair from its fixings by a forceful rocking, with the intention of walking it to the rear doors of the Transit, but the legs were bolted too securely to the steel floor of the vehicle and wouldn’t budge.

  Twister’s face appeared on the screen – obviously by means of some remote activation again – in the midst of her futile struggles, deriding her attempts and letting her know that he was keeping a close eye on her. She refused to let him see that she was rattled by his taunts and made a conscious effort not to respond to them. In the end, he seemed to lose interest, but before the screen went blank again, he made sure she was aware of the time displayed by the digital clock. It was 10.28 pm.

  Sergeant Daniel Brown – nicknamed Da Vinci, after his famous namesake’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code – was tired and losing his focus. They had been aloft again in the Eurocopter 135 for close on three hours now without spotting anything of interest and the pilot, Ed Cole, was getting more and more twitchy about the poor visibility and the fact that his fuel was getting low. It was bad enough flying at night, but the ever thickening mist was making things increasingly difficult – as well as a lot more hazardous. The thought of running out of fuel was the sort of thing that nightmares were made of.

  ‘One more sweep, then home,’ Cole snapped into his headphones mic. ‘Sod what your headquarters wants. I’m not risking our necks any more in this.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Brown replied, knocking his own mic with his hand as he stifled a yawn. ‘I’m about done anyway.’

  In fact, as it turned out, they didn’t complete the sweep and ironically, just ten minutes later, it was the pilot who spotted the faint chinks of light in the roof of the building directly below them, not his so-called observer, and he nudged his colleague quickly. ‘What’s that?’

  Brown peered in the direction the pilot had indicated and shrugged. ‘Some sort of barn. It may have escaped your notice, but there’re quite a few of them dotted around the Levels.’

  Cole zoomed in closer, switching on the chopper’s powerful searchlight. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, ignoring the sarcasm, ‘but lit up inside? That seems a bit strange.’

  Brown took another look. ‘No lights as far as I can see,’ he retorted. ‘Place looks derelict – like the farmhouse next to it.’

  Cole frowned, seeing that the place was now in complete darkness. ‘Well, there were lights on just now. I’m sure of it.’

  Brown chuckled. ‘You’re losing it, Ed. The old eyes are going. Anyway, I don’t see a Land Rover parked there – or any other vehicle for that matter. Place looks deserted. Probably just ghosts.’

  Cole shrugged, switched off the spotlight and took them up again.
‘Ghosts or not, better report it anyway,’ he said, ‘just in case.’

  ‘Do that when we get back,’ his colleague replied. ‘I’m bloody starving and if we tell them over the air, we’ll be kept here for the next hour till the troops can check it out. Waste of bloody time anyway, if you ask me.’

  As the helicopter’s flashing navigation light disappeared in the swirls of mist, Twister, standing motionless in the darkness of the barn, got up to switch on his portable spotlights again. Then, returning to the box in front of his computer, which served as a makeshift seat, he sat down and drank some more coffee from his mug. In the Transit van parked just feet away from him, Kate heard the fading sound of the machine with a sense of despair. It was 11.06 pm.

  Lewis was in the process of negotiating a sharp bend in the mist-shrouded road he was following when he saw the helicopter swoop in overhead and train its searchlight on something to his right. Pulling into a gateway, he peered through gaps in the swirling moonlit tinged clouds to try and catch a glimpse of what could have attracted their attention. But after dropping to within what must have been just a hundred feet of the ground, the searchlight was extinguished and the machine’s flashing navigation light faded into the murk as it thudded away across the desolate farmland in the direction of Bristol.

  What the hell had they seen? It couldn’t have been a positive sighting of anything, otherwise there would have been an alert over the air on the police radio, but they had spent several minutes hovering above a particular spot, obviously scrutinizing something, so it must have been worth a look in the first place.

  Frowning, he pulled out again, keeping his speed right down this time and throwing frequent glances over the low skeletal hedgerows as he carefully steered the car between the treacherous rhynes bordering the road on each side.

  He saw the flicker of light a few minutes later – a ghostly iridescence which showed itself only briefly in the murk before being swallowed up again. Veering across the road up on to the grass verge, he slithered to a stop and clambered out on to the verge, where he stood for a moment, waiting for the clouds of vapour to clear. He didn’t have to wait long and he stiffened when the farmhouse suddenly materialized several hundred yards away across an open field, chinks of light showing through the roof of a large barn at its rear.

  The place was supposed to be derelict – and he knew that for a fact, because it had suddenly dawned on him exactly where he had ended up, and he felt his body chill as his mind peeled back the years. He remembered with horrible clarity the burned out police surveillance van; the sweet stench of cremated flesh thrusting its way through the smell of burned rubber and fabric and scorched steel. He knew without investigating further that the drove, which had seen the incineration of his colleagues two years before, cut through the field on the other side of the buildings he was looking at. This had been the very property the police surveillance crew had been targeting when they had been murdered: the home of serial arsonist, Terry Duval.

  Duval was long since dead, of course – wasted by police marksmen who had believed him to be armed when they had confronted him – and, as far as Lewis was aware, the farm had been empty ever since. Yet the spectral glow hovering over the roof of the barn was unmistakable and even when the mist swirled back in front of him to repair its tattered skeins, he stood there motionless and disbelieving.

  Surely Twister wouldn’t have had the nerve to haul Kate back to the scene of his original crime? Like the funeral parlour Lewis had just visited, that would have been much too obvious a move. Yet when Ansell had initiated his area search, it did not seem to have occurred to him to prioritize the Duval place. Maybe he hadn’t considered it, because it was so obvious. Knowing Twister, however, this was exactly the sort of brazen thing he would do – and it made sense for the psychopath to want to finish his so-called game on the anniversary of Operation Firetrap at the very spot where the whole awful business had begun.

  The detective’s throat was dry and his hands were shaking as he grabbed his torch and scrambled out of the car.

  Not even bothering to shut his car door, he trotted down the road a few yards until he found a gap in the hedge, with wooden planks bridging the rhyne to a chained-up gate.

  He realized he could be wasting more valuable time checking the property out. There could be any number of reasons why the barn was lit up the way it was and Twister could be holding Kate somewhere miles away, but he had to find out for certain and there was a familiar cold twist in his gut that he knew he dare not ignore. It was only after he had clambered over the gate and was heading diagonally across the field that he remembered he had left his police radio in the car and had no means of calling for assistance. But there was no way he could go back, for time was already running out for Kate – and it was then that he came face to face with the massive black bull! It was 11.15 pm.

  chapter 38

  ‘TIME TO GO, Kate.’ Twister’s face was back on the screen, his expression bleak.’

  Kate simply stared at him, her eyes vacant and seemingly lacking in comprehension and her vocal chords frozen with the kind of shoc-kinduced paralysis that comes with the approach of imminent death. She had expended so much energy trying to free herself from the swivel chair, that she had reached exhaustion point and an almost fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable. Her wrists were raw and bloodied and she had cut her thigh through her trousers on a sharp piece of plastic packing material still attached to the underside of her seat. Although her wounds had now dried a little, blood had spattered all around her chair and she had vomited on the floor on one side.

  ‘I’ve never actually witnessed a live cremation,’ Twister went on with brutal indifference. ‘Not even poor old Pauline’s. It should be quite interesting, though I would think the initial blast and resultant dismemberment might spoil the ultimate action of the flames.’ He gave a brief smile. ‘Still, we shall have to see, shan’t we?’

  Then the screen went blank and, as if from afar, Kate heard what sounded like the heavy wooden doors of a barn scrape open. Moments later the Transit shook as a door slammed at the front of the van and a heavy engine burst into life. They were moving, slowly at first, but gathering speed over a rough bumpy surface that sent stones clanging up under the vehicle.

  The tears were rolling down Kate’s face now. She had tried so hard to be brave and resolute; tried so hard not to give Twister any satisfaction, but the pretence was over now. She was going to die – at 28 years of age – going to be ripped to pieces by a powerful explosive charge and shards of torn metal and all she could hope for was that her end would be quick. Unable to stop herself, she raised her head to look at the digital clock and saw that it was 11.22 pm.

  Lewis had never been so close to a bull before and, distorted by the action of the mist, it seemed even bigger and more ferocious than it probably was in reality. Either way, it was big enough for him and he turned and fled from the thing, heading in the direction of the now barely visible derelict farmhouse as fast as he could manage, his feet sinking deep into the sodden ground and making loud sucking noises with each extraction. Once he looked behind him and saw that the animal was coming after him, not in a charge, but more in the form of a lumbering gait, its curiosity obviously aroused and its aggression no doubt mounting by the second.

  He reached the far side of the field within a few yards – only to find further progress blocked by another four to five foot wide rhyne, separating the field from the derelict property on the other side. When he turned to glance behind him, he saw that the bull was right there too, some three to four yards behind him, snorting, tossing its head and pawing the ground.

  Then the mist came to his aid, swirling in between them, drowning everything in a clammy white sea. He veered sharply to his left, hoping the bull would lose track of him, but there it was again, a sinister black shadow emerging from the gloom directly in front of him. He backtracked, as he thought – although it was difficult to tell in the gloom – but seconds later the animal
was lumbering towards him from his right, forcing him to duck back into the mist.

  For several anxious minutes, he played a spooky game of hide-and-seek with the animal, which, despite constant changes in his direction, always seemed to sense where he was heading and block his path.

  At one stage he thought he heard a vehicle making its way through the mist a few hundred yards away, its wheels churning into a loose gravelly surface, but he couldn’t see a thing. What if it was Twister, leaving the barn? Maybe the helicopter had spooked him or he had glimpsed Lewis’s own approach in the patrol car? On the other hand, what if the ruthless psychopath had not been using the barn at all and, while Lewis was playing silly games with the bull, he was actually somewhere else, waiting for the appointed hour to snap poor little Kate’s neck? The detective felt panic welling up inside him. It had to be nearly midnight.

  Then he saw the gate – standing there on the edge of the rhyne – looking incongruous, unattached as it was to adjoining fences, but obviously giving access to a bridge of some sort linking the two fields. In desperation he went for it, but so did the bull, just feet away now to his right. The darned thing had to be telepathic.

  He reached the gate seconds before the now enraged creature and, without checking to see if the gate was locked or not, he leaped for it, fingers scrabbling at the wooden bars as he literally threw himself over, the torch flying from his hand ahead of him and pitching into the rhyne with a dull ‘plop’.

  He almost made it too, although not entirely, and one wicked curved horn caught his left trouser leg ripping the material apart and gouging his calf. But then he was on the other side, stumbling to his knees, jerking upright almost immediately and limping away from the gate across a grass bridge, teeth gritted against the pain in his torn calf as something wet and sticky streamed down his leg into his sock.