Mother of Demons

by Maynard Sims

  “Won’t involving another force get you in trouble with Mackie?” he said.

  “Probably. But you know, I’m past caring. I meant what I said last night about quitting the force. If we find Alice and stop all these killings, at least I’ll go out with a bang and not a whimper. Do you think it’s worth having another go at Tim?”

  “No. I won’t get any more from him. He’s protecting his sister,” Harry said. “Let’s leave it to Ryman to execute his plan. Let’s go back to London. We could have lunch.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think I’d like that.”

  “Have you worked with DI Ryman before?”

  “No,” Susan said.

  “Only you two seem quite familiar.”

  “I know his wife, Annie. She’s a JP. We’ve sat on a number of committees together, and I’ve had dinner at their place a few times. That’s how I know Frank.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Frank’s a good copper and hates the politics of the job as much as I do.”

  “It’s good to have him on our side.”

  “Yes,” she said, turning to walk back along the corridor. “Yes, it is.”

  Harry stood there, and then followed her.

  Jason was waiting for Harry in his office when he arrived in Whitehall the next day.

  “Hi, Jason,” he said. “How’s Vi?”

  “She continues to amaze and confound doctors with her recovery rate,” Jason said with a smile. “I told you she was tough. It’s probably too early to say this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she were up and around in a couple of days.”

  “That’s great news,” Harry said and brought Jason up-to-date with what had happened at Hitchin police station yesterday.

  “But that’s fantastic,” Jason said. “It gives us our first hard lead to find Alice. Do you think it might work?”

  “You spoke to Tim Logan. Did he seem like a drug user to you?”

  Jason shook his head. “No. Despite giving his parents a hard time, and his ‘rebel without a cause’ stance, I think Tim’s straight as a die.”

  “That’s why I think he’s going to be conflicted. He’s helping his sister out of loyalty, even though he knows it’s fundamentally wrong to do so. I think in the end, it will be their downfall. Anyway, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be keeping Vi company?”

  “No,” Jason said. “The last thing she wants is me moping around her and watching that she doesn’t exert herself. She told me to go away and make myself useful somewhere else. But actually I thought I’d come and tell you to stop worrying about telling her the truth about Alice. She knows.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t have to. I was right when I said she’d been roaming yesterday. She actually connected with Alice at last. Vi’s been trying and failing to reach her since she took off with Markos.”

  “Did she get any clue of her whereabouts?”

  “No, but she was inside her mind when Alice killed again last night. She didn’t give me all the details, but I gather it was pretty gruesome. I think it was the nature of the killing that brought on the coronary. Now Vi’s impatient to get back to her library. She said she wanted to read up on a few things.”

  “She didn’t show any signs that she was upset about Alice’s true nature?”

  “Quite the reverse. I think she partly blames herself for the way Alice is. She seemed cold, like ice. She said, ‘This is down to me, Jason, and it’s up to me to fix it’.”

  “And what did she mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. But she had that steely look in her eye. I’ve seen it before when she means business. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her when she gets like that.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sarah Palmer had worked hard all morning. Hamish Anderson, her boss, had been on her back since she came in at eight. “File this, Sarah,” “Call them, Sarah.” Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags bloody full, sir!

  She stepped out onto the balcony that ran the length of the building, and took a pack of cigarettes from her bag, slid one out and lit it. Not being able to smoke inside buildings was stupid. Didn’t the legislators understand that people who smoked often did it to relieve stress? And working for a pig like Hamish Anderson was the cause of her stress.

  Sarah was forty-six, unmarried, with a son who was now in his late twenties and who lived in Canada with a wife and children. She hadn’t seen him in over ten years, and had never seen her grandchildren.

  For a while, earlier this year, she had thought life was starting to get exciting again. Like it was when she was in her teens. She’d met a man, Wade, who had shown her that life could be fun after forty. They had started a passionate relationship, based on nothing other than sex, and that sex had been the most daring she had ever experienced. He’d introduced her to bondage, S&M, fetishism, and awakened something in her that she’d always suspected was there, but had always denied.

  When he told her he was taking her somewhere special, somewhere that would take her to new levels of erotic fulfillment, she had jumped at it. But when they arrived at a warehouse on a bleak industrial park in Barking, she’d struggled to maintain her enthusiasm. Not very shades of…

  When they got inside though, she had to revise her opinion. The lights were low and there were at least twenty people in there, men and women, all in states of partial undress. Wade was snatched away from her by a young woman with long, raven hair, wearing a leather thong and very little else. Sarah panicked at first, being left on her own. But she wasn’t on her own for long. A man, a similar age to herself, but well muscled and very good-looking, appeared at her side, started to whisper in her ear, made suggestions to her that were so forthright and so graphic she could feel herself blush.

  But as he continued to whisper his obscene litany of things he was going to do to her, she started to become aroused and made no protest when he peeled the clothes from her body. On a coarse blanket on the floor of the warehouse, she had sex with him. Let her body be used in ways she could have only imagined in her sickest, most twisted fantasies.

  When the sex was done, and the people in the warehouse were exhausted, spent, lights at the side of the warehouse came on. Twin spotlights illuminated a stone altar. A naked girl with short dark hair was lying on the altar, her hands and legs restrained, a band around her head to stop her twisting it to see the anticipation of the people in the room, many of them kneeling on small, rectangular cushions, lips opening and closing in silent prayer. All of them with their attention fixed on the altar.

  At first Sarah though this was the prelude to some communal sex game, perhaps an orgy of some kind, and her pulse started to quicken.

  When the handsome man wearing a long, scarlet robe appeared at the rear of the altar with a beautiful, young, blonde girl at his side, Sarah was convinced she was going to witness something she had never seen before. The man in the robe started speaking, intoning the words like a priest giving a sermon in church. Foreign words she didn’t understand. The young blonde woman stared straight ahead, eyes blank, unseeing, as if her mind was lost on a private voyage to some distant place. She was not connecting to events happening around her.

  When the man took the strange-looking knife from his robe, his congregation gasped. When he lifted the knife and plunged it through the chest of the young dark-haired girl, a cry went around the room, almost exultation.

  Sarah didn’t witness the events that followed. She quickly gathered up her clothes, dragged some of them on, rushed from the warehouse and threw up. Wade found her outside a short while afterwards. He seemed intoxicated, high. She let him guide her to the car and drive her home. When she reached her house, she got out of the car and ran inside, swearing to herself that she would never see him again.

  So now she found herself smoking a cigarette in the chilly October air, standing on the balcony of th
e office building that Hamish Anderson and Associates occupied. Bored, desperately bored of her life and wondering if she should contact Wade again.

  She took a step towards the rail to launch her cigarette stub into space, and saw a young woman staring up at her from the car park. The woman was wearing a short, white tunic dress, made from a thin material that caught in the October breeze.

  She must be freezing, Sarah thought, but the girl didn’t seem affected by the cold. She stood there, staring up at Sarah, her left arm extended. And, in that instant, Sarah recognized her as the blonde girl from the warehouse.

  “Hey!” she called, but as the words left her lips and were whipped away by the wind, the girl drew back her other arm in a quick, fluid moment and splayed her fingers.

  Sarah was thrown backwards by the force of something driving through her chest. It drove her against the glass and she was suspended there for a moment, before her knees gave way and she slid down the window, leaving a bloody slug trail on the glass.

  For a moment Sarah Palmer just sat there, wondering why the front of her blouse had turned from white to red, and why she seemed to have a hole in her chest. And then a savage, electric pain coursed through her. Her head fell forward and darkness engulfed her.

  It had been a slow start to his shift at the burger bar in the Stevenage retail park. His manager had him cleaning tables with an antibacterial spray and a roll of paper towels. When the girl wearing the uniform of the local school—plaid skirt, green sweater over a white blouse—came through the double swing doors, Tim Logan was back behind the counter. He smiled at the girl wearing the uniform and said, “What can I get you?”

  “Cheeseburger and large fries, with a chocolate shake,” she said. She wore her curly ginger hair short and had retainers on her teeth, but she had nice eyes.

  He took her money and handed her the change. “Fries will be a couple of minutes. Take a seat and I’ll bring it over to you.”

  The girl thanked him and took a seat at a table in the center of the restaurant to wait for her meal. She had chosen a table with the remains of someone else’s meal cluttering a quarter of it. Tim watched her as she moved the detritus to one side, pulled a schoolbook from a schoolbag with a One Direction decal covering one side. She glanced back at him and smiled.

  A few moments later, the bell on the fryer rang, and Tim went across with a brown paper bag and started to assemble her order. He glanced across at her, caught her eye and smiled at her again. He opened the bag, dropped in two twenty-pound notes at the bottom, measured the fries into a thin cardboard container with an aluminum scoop and placed it in the bag, then went back to the burger delivery slide and picked up the paper-wrapped cheeseburger, placing it in the bag, next to the fries and on top of the banknotes.

  The shake machine had been playing up since he’d arrived earlier, and it took an age to fill the paper cup. Finally the hose dribbled to a stop, and he snapped on the lid. He pulled a tray from the pile at the side and laid it on the counter in front of him. He placed the bag and the shake on it, threw on two napkins and a red-and-white plastic straw and carried the whole lot across to the girl, who had her schoolbook open on the table in front of her.

  He placed the tray down beside her, took a discarded tray from an adjacent table and started to load the remnants of the previous customer’s meal onto it. The girl wearing the retainers on her teeth flashed him another metallic smile and nodded down at the small grip-seal bag of crystal meth lying in the center of her open schoolbook.

  As Tim cleared the rubbish, he glanced about to see he wasn’t being observed, scooped up the bag of meth and dropped it into the pocket of his tunic. Then he took the tray across to the waste bin and pushed open the hinged front, slid the contents of the tray into the plastic sack below and returned to the counter. A few minutes later, the ginger-haired girl had finished her cheeseburger and fries, taken the money from the paper bag and hidden it in her schoolbook, which she closed and placed into her One Direction satchel. She looked across at him one last time, smiled again and left the burger bar, still sucking on her chocolate shake.

  Detective Constables Bob Mason and Ken Perkins from Hitchin CID sat in their car on the west side of the Stevenage retail park and watched the burger bar where Tim Logan had spent the past four hours working his shift behind the counter.

  Mason fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. “Something’s happening. They’re shutting up for the night.” As they watched, the lights went out behind the counter and the front door opened. Tim Logan walked out and continued around the side of the small, square building to where he’d left his trail bike.

  The two DCs heard the bike start with a tinny roar, and then Tim rode across the car park towards the exit.

  “Go,” said Mason as Perkins started the black Mondeo. “Don’t let him out of your sight.”

  They followed, closely but not close enough to be seen. “He’s heading towards the A1,” Perkins said

  “And home, I expect,” Mason agreed. “Another wasted night.”

  They crossed three of the town’s many roundabouts, keeping Tim’s taillights in view. “Probably,” Mason said. But at the next roundabout Tim took the left-hand exit.

  “This isn’t the way,” Perkins said.

  “Just keep on him. Let’s see where he’s taking us.”

  They followed but hung back, the distance just about allowing them to see his taillights. “Pull in a little closer,” Mason said. “Don’t, whatever you do, lose him, or Ryman will have our nuts for breakfast.”

  The road gave onto a narrow lane, cutting across woodland. Perkins sped up and slowed down to negotiate the bends in the road.

  They turned the next corner.

  “Where did he go?” Mason said.

  Perkins switched the headlamps to full beam to scan the road. Either side of the lane were dense stands of trees.

  Tim sat on his bike, headlamps switched off, hidden from view between the tightly packed sycamore and ash, and watched the unmarked police car drive past slowly, the driver’s and his passenger’s necks craned forward, looking for any sign of his trail bike. He was smiling. He’d seen them watching the burger bar earlier when he’d gone out for a smoke, but they obviously hadn’t realized he’d spotted them.

  “Follow me now, idiots,” he said, turned the bike on a sixpence and sped off through the wood.

  “What do you mean, they lost him?” Susan barked down the phone. “I thought your men were up to this. He’s only a kid, Frank, not Steve McQueen.”

  “His motorcycle was the off-road type,” Ryman said, acutely embarrassed. “He probably took off across country. We’ll just have to visit the Logan house and wait for him. If he has more meth on him, we’ll find it.”

  “And if he’s not gone to restock his stash and has gone to see his sister instead, where does that leave us?”

  “With egg all over our faces.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Sorry, Sue.”

  “Not your fault, Frank,” she said wearily. “Just call me if he turns up.”

  “Will do.”

  Susan hung up the phone, slamming it down on its cradle. “Sod it!” she said, and then picked up the phone again and rang Harry to give him the bad news.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The house had been empty for years. Buried deep in the middle of Burwell Wood, it had been home to squatters and vagrants and a colony of wild dogs. Now it had reached such a level of disrepair and dereliction, they had all moved out and moved on—even the dogs.

  Tim pulled aside the sheet of corrugated iron that covered the entrance and slipped inside, switching on his Maglite and sweeping it across the floor. Most of the boards had rotted, and one wrong step would mean a ten-foot drop to the cellar below.

  The stairs were just as rotted and just as treacherous. He kept to the edge of the treads and picked his wa
y up, holding tightly on to the mold- and lichen-covered handrail. “Ally,” he called softly. “I’m here.”

  He made his way along the landing to the room and stepped inside. She was crouched in a corner of the room, the sleeping bag he had brought a few days ago wrapped snugly around her body. He shone the flashlight over her, and she shielded her eyes with her hand.

  “Apollo,” she said softly. “I knew you’d come.”

  “Yeah, Ally, I’m here,” Tim said. “I’ll always be here for you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “Some good news at last,” Harry said. “Jason just called. Vi’s out of intensive care. She’s been moved to a private room.”

  “That’s great, Harry,” Susan said into the phone. “I wish I had some for you. Frank Ryman phoned me earlier to tell me that Tim Logan didn’t return home last night. He hasn’t been seen since they lost him in the lanes last night.”

  “So now we have both Logan children missing. Great.”

  “And there was another killing yesterday afternoon in Stevenage. A woman called Sarah Palmer was killed at her place of work. The preliminary report from McBride suggests she suffered similar wounds as Terry Butler and Mikey Gibson. Stab wounds to the heart made by a long, thin, cylindrical object—possibly an arrow, McBride’s thinking now, but one that leaves no trace evidence in the wound. And Scene of Crime hasn’t produced any evidence to support his theory. No arrows have been found at the crime scenes.”

  “Nor are they likely to be,” Harry said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ll explain it to you, but it’s going to require you keep an open mind,” he said.

  “Harry, since I met you and got to learn about Department 18, my mind’s been opened in ways I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. Let’s hear your explanation.”

  “Okay,” Harry said. “I’ve been up all night thinking this through. Vi Bulmer has some pretty amazing paranormal powers. I’ve seen her in action and know that to be the case. I think some, if not all, of those powers have been passed down to Alice through the bloodline.