by Wes Markin
The hotel room that Lacey Ray had just checked herself into at the Mercure under the pseudonym, Laura Bryce, was more of a citrus-green colour than her preferred blue. It didn’t matter so much; following the beating, she’d already conducted the murder last night in the Blue Room. Tonight’s eight o’clock rendezvous with Phil Holmes was a mere formality.
There were risks she knew. But why fight it? It feels far too good, far too natural ...
She hadn’t been able to resist striking that blow to Jake’s marriage, following his arrogant judgements and callous dismissal of her attention. The police would be hunting her now anyway, and it was only a matter of time before they linked her to Brian Lawrence in Southampton.
She’d be no worse off for killing Phil; she’d still be on the same plane tomorrow, in the same disguise, with the same new identity.
Then, she’d disappear into Nice with a new identity and she would be untouchable. She looked over at the bag which contained her new passport. Lucy Evans, not long left until I bring you to life.
She thought back to how she’d given the copper back at her flat the slip, disappearing out of the rear exit near the bins. At the end of all this, Salisbury’s finest will be kicking themselves.
Above the bed was an artist’s rendition of the cathedral in medieval times. Uneducated folk swarmed around it in rags. How sweet they looked, she thought, uncorrupted by technology and ambition. She paused to wonder if her motivations would have been different if she’d been born back then.
She went back over to the bed, opened her bag and took a quick inventory: a gag, rope, handcuffs, a penknife and a pair of secateurs.
Kyle Meadows, Alex Wright, Brian Lawrence and now, Phil Holmes. Men who liked to control, men who had finally lost control.
She pushed her tools to one side, lay down and stretched out. Plenty of time to sleep. Keep her energy up.
She had a busy evening ahead.
16
THE FLICKERING BULB finally blew, leaving Sarah Ray’s bare-box room to whatever sunlight the frugal winter offered through a tiny window. Lying back on the bed, she continued to be plagued by the same question that had been driving her insane all night:
Are my family dead?
She stood up and looked around. The safe house looked as if it would be a real nightmare to sanitise. Not that she could manage it right now anyway. Currently, she felt like a mummified corpse; dry, dusty and slowly decaying.
She walked over to the window and caught her reflection in the dirty glass.
Grey ...
Old ...
As a young woman, she’d wanted to be a model – she’d had a chance, or so those close to her had said. But she’d wasted her life on a husband who hadn’t loved her and a son who pitied her. She was a mummified corpse. With mummified dreams.
She used a tissue to wipe dirt off the glass.
Why Paul?
Notoriety, violence and despair had followed the Rays throughout history. Was there a curse? A curse echoing throughout the generations?
It wasn’t fair. Paul had been different; he was such a good boy, he’d had a chance ...
Until the curse which echoed in his blood had finally caught up with him.
Her phone beeped. It was a picture message and a tear sprang to her eye when she saw her handsome young boy looking exhausted, staring at her through a mop of greasy hair. She touched the picture of her son and then read the attached message:
“The car park of Lankton field in Woodford. One hour. Tell no one. Come alone and your family will live. Be punctual, if you are late, one of them will die.”
They’re still alive.
And may just stay that way if she followed the rules. But then she recalled the police’s rule: if the kidnapper contacts, Bryan should be told immediately.
But hadn’t they botched their last attempt at getting Paul back?
And she’d been so convinced that time that he was coming home. She couldn’t go through that same disappointment again; it was her duty, as his mother, to go and get him.
She looked at her watch. It was half-past three. She had until half-past four.
She’d need a car.
Bryan’s.
Twenty-five minutes after giving Bryan a coffee laced with a powerful hypnotic sleeping pill – and copious amounts of sweetener to mask the horrid taste – Sarah returned to the living room. The door was ajar, so she observed him through the narrow crack. He was sitting on a nauseating green and yellow sofa; a throwback from the seventies that the police department probably got gratis from the family of someone who had died. Because his feet were on an oak coffee table, the only object in the entire house that Sarah could stomach, that familiar irritability – a result of her OCD – swept over her. She fought with all her will.
Bryan was reading today’s paper through wiry spectacles, stretched to breaking point by his chubby face. Why was he not asleep yet? She’d have to leave and get the bus if she didn’t get his keys, time was against her. She pushed the door open fully, stepped into the room, winced at the smell of old smoke, and cleared her throat.
Over his wiry glasses, he looked up at her.
Unable to fight the irritability any longer, she gestured at the coffee table on which he rested his feet. It doesn’t matter how dirty the place is, there are no excuses for making it dirtier.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and brought his feet down.
The relief was immediate.
‘I’d like to go out for a walk, clear my head.’
‘That’s not a good idea,’ he said, rising to his feet as if he was worried she might just run out. He pointed outside at the worsening snowfall. ‘Besides, look at it out there.’
She noticed he was slurring his words.
She said, ‘I’ll go mad, if I stay in here much longer.’
‘I’ll go with you.’ He took a step forward.
She realised she was sweating heavily despite the icy draft reaching in through the single-glazed window. ‘I’ll be fine on my own.’
He stopped and put his hand to his forehead. While blinking rapidly, he staggered backward.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I must have stood up too quickly.’
‘I’ll get you a drink.’
‘Yes, please.’ Stumbling back, he fell into his chair.
Thank God, she thought, edging backwards to the kitchen. Grabbing a glass whitened with lime scale with one hand, she turned the tap on with her other. The pipes clunked.
After rushing the water back to him, he took a mouthful and spat it back in his glass. ‘Tastes foul.’
The sleeping tablets were definitely kicking in; the metallic taste was the side-effect which always got her first too.
‘Let me get you another.’ She grabbed the glass from his hands. Five minutes later, when she came back in, his eyes were closed and he was snoring loudly.
As she rustled in the pockets of his jeans for the car keys, he didn’t even stir.
Outside the safe house, the clouds were shifting and the sun was brightening. Sarah’s eyes were drawn to the spiralling snowflakes – she likened them to the shavings from a glowing star. She raised her arms as she walked towards Bryan’s black Audi and allowed the snowflakes to prickle the backs of her hands. After shining so gloriously in the air, she was disappointed when they turned to water and dripped off her skin.
After bashing snow from her boots, she climbed into the car and turned the engine on. There was a built in Satnav, so she punched in Lankton. It was less than ten miles away. Thank god. The ETA sprang up - thirteen minutes. She reversed out of the drive.
The air-conditioning unit in the Salisbury Cathedral School reception churned out hot air. Yorke noticed that the Christmas tree beneath had expressed its discontent by shedding most of its pines while the presents around it, organised so neatly only two days ago, suddenly looked dishevelled. No carols hummed from the speakers today.
When he requested the head teacher, Laura Baines, the el
derly receptionist picked up the phone and mumbled something into it from the side of her mouth. He couldn’t understand a word that she had said, and assumed Laura Baines must have grown accustomed to her receptionist’s slur.
The artificially-heated air was clinging to him like a hungry leech, so he peeled off his jacket and hooked it over his arm.
While waiting for Laura Baines, he checked in with Willows, and was disappointed to hear that there was still no sign of Lacey Ray, despite the sizeable chunk of manpower assigned to the task.
Baines was with him a minute later. She gripped his hand tightly and widened her bloodshot eyes.
Was she pleading with him to put an end to this whole infernal affair?
He almost spoke, but held back; he’d already made one promise too many since beginning this case.
‘As I said on the message, Phil left the school after you finished interviewing him. I’ll take you to his office,’ Baines said.
Like last time, he matched her strong and purposeful stride and thought how unbelievable it was that it’d only been two days since he’d visited that toilet with its river of blood and sinister words scrawled on the wall. It felt like much longer.
There were children about, but not as many as you would have expected considering the school day had only just ended.
‘Seems quiet,’ Yorke said.
‘Afterschool clubs are cancelled.’ She sighed. ‘We are having a hard time with our attendance figures. The parents are paranoid.’
A young boy held a door open for them. The new generation seemed far more polite than the tabloids would have you believe. He wondered if it was like this in other less privileged areas – such as the one he was brought up in, twelve miles outside Salisbury. He hoped so.
‘I heard your message,’ Yorke said, ‘but could you explain it to me again, just to make sure that I got the facts straight?’
‘Lawrence Goodman and three other teachers have e-mailed me to say that Paul requested a password change in their classes.’
‘Because he couldn’t log on?’
‘Well, Paul claimed to be unable to log on, and each of the four teachers allowed him to go to Phil Holmes for a password change. In fairness, the fact that he’s had a password change doesn’t become common knowledge, so none of the teachers knew about the other requests. To have to go four times in the past two weeks makes no sense.’
‘Could there be any reason you can think of that the changes weren’t working?’
‘None, Detective, one change sufficed for every other student who went.’
‘Why aren’t the requests logged?’
‘Well, I suppose they are, but Phil Holmes will be doing the logging. No one has ever had to follow up on it before. It’s never been an issue.’
‘Truanting from lessons is not an issue?’
‘We don’t have much of a problem with that here and as for Paul, he was an impeccable student, so I wouldn’t have expected him to be doing that anyway.’
‘Unless he had a good reason to, a reason you didn’t know about.’
‘This way, Detective.’
He followed her and recognised this part of the school. He looked into Simon Rushton’s classroom. Two days earlier Rushton’s head had been in his hands, while Jessica Hart, the woman he was starting an affair with, comforted him.
She stopped by the door that had “IT OFFICE” written on it in bold letters, pushed it open and switched on the light.
Then, for ten minutes, Yorke haunted the IT office like a disorientated ghost.
Doctor Who, in various incarnations, and several Chelsea footballers stared down at him. There was a ghost of a smile on all of their faces; a suggestion, almost, that they knew something he didn’t.
He stared at Frank Lampard the longest, recalling the date circled on Paul’s calendar for his interview; a date Paul had been forced to miss.
‘There’s a lot of coincidence in this room,’ Yorke said, turning to look at Baines. He pointed at several posters. ‘Paul’s favourite football team, favourite TV programme.’
He glanced around again, half-expecting to see a heavily-thumbed copy of Isaac Asimov’s “foundation”; Paul’s favourite book.
‘They’re popular interests,’ Baines said.
‘True,’ Yorke said, looking over the poky little office, trying to find another clue hidden among the empty, coffee-stained mugs, disorganised piles of printed spreadsheets and unmarked CDs. ‘But he could also have been using these popular interests to get close to Paul. Six months is enough time to do that.’
‘Still, I cannot believe it, Phil is so reserved, he doesn’t really socialise with anyone.’
‘Paul came to this room four times in two weeks during lessons; additionally, his best friend, Nathan, told us that he had abandoned him to come into school very early recently – was it to spend more time with Phil? We already knew someone had been getting close to him inside this school; someone who had spiked him with a laxative and then had him wait outside the Sapphire restaurant in a hired van – it is very feasible that Phil could have convinced Paul to do this, if they were friends.’
‘So, I employed the kidnapper?’ The colour drained from Baines’ face and she seemed to sag slightly.
‘Sorry, just doing my job and thinking it through. I could still be wrong.’
But my gut says I’m not.
He phoned Topham and had an APW put out on Phil Holmes; he also made a request for a warrant so forensics could collect evidence from this office.
‘He wants money, doesn’t he?’ Baines said, fighting off the shock, and straightening herself back up into a dominating posture. ‘So, can’t we give him it, and get the boy back?’
‘It’s not just about money.’
‘What’s it about then?’
He thought about the infernal message, “In the Blood,” and said, ‘I think it’s something to do with his family.’
‘Why would Phil Holmes be interested in Paul’s family?’
‘I don’t know – but I’m willing to bet that the answer lies with his own family.’
Sarah saw a squirrel in the road and despite Joe’s constant ravings about her swerving around animals, she followed her instincts.
The force of the tyre hitting, and then mounting the raised ground alongside the concrete road, threw her back and forth, but fortunately, she managed to regain control of the car again and applied pressure to the brakes. With the left side of the car raised dangerously high, she tried to weave it back onto the road and away from the looming trees, but was met with a thump as her front-left tyre buried itself into a ditch; the front-right tyre followed quickly, and the car stalled.
Winded, she took a moment to compose herself. Then, with tears forming in her eyes, she restarted the car and tried the accelerator. The front tyres screeched.
‘Shit!’
She punched the steering wheel and tried again. The car didn’t budge. Knowing that she might be burying the tyres deeper into the snowy ground, she stopped and her eyes darted to the Sat Nav. Half a mile to the car park with five minutes to spare.
After clambering out of the car, she looked at the damage; the left side was raised high by the sloped ground, and the front of the car pointed down into the ditch. She’d been lucky. If she’d not hit the brakes when she had, she’d have gone into that ditch with a dangerous amount of force. ‘You stupid fucking woman.’
Snow-covered trees, seemingly piled on top of each other, suddenly appeared to be watching her, as if preparing to close in; this gave her the kick start she needed, and she started to run.
Despite the heavy snow, she didn’t slip; the road had been gritted recently and she wore a good pair of trainers with a solid grip. The problem was the sinking sun and the lack of street lighting; she was as vulnerable as that squirrel had been only moments ago. Continuously brushing snow out of her eyes, she kept as close to the raised ground as she could without tripping.
Within minutes she was coughing an
d spluttering, but she was certain she was making good ground. She had to get there on time. She just had to. For Paul.
When she turned the corner, she was blinded by the sudden glare of headlights; shielding her eyes, she pressed herself to the raised ground, gasping when the driver hit the horn. Ultimately, she remained safe because the car was on the other side of the road; it might not end so well if one approached from behind.
When she first caught sight of the entrance to the car park ahead, she felt a burst of relief, but then the fatigue really kicked in. Her heart was smashing into her ribs with too much force, and a stitch threatened to bring her to her knees. She slowed, gasping for air and when she looked at her watch, she saw that she had only two minutes left and felt completely deflated.
The whiteness around her glowed, and another horn caused her to jump out of her skin. A car behind. The lunatic screeched around her, missing by an inch.
Someone leaned out the passenger window and shouted. ‘Stupid prick.’
She held her hand in the air. ‘Please, stop!’ She said, realising that she hadn’t the energy to raise her voice loud enough. The speed freak disappeared into the growing darkness.
Down to a slow jog, she struggled to keep her tears back. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said over and over again. Gritting her teeth, she willed herself onwards.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She glanced at her watch, and felt like the world was crumbling down around her.
Out of time.
She read the message. “Too late. I warned you.”
Despite ice-cold fingers, she managed to text back. “Just not my son please not my son.”
When she eventually reached the car park, she went to lean against a tree to catch her breath, but instead collapsed into floods of tears.
The Holmes’ quaint townhouse was sitting in the cloudy shadow of a vast council estate; a stomach-turning hangover from the eighties. Yorke didn’t like it around here; he found the memories it evoked from his own youth too distracting – old Bros songs buzzing from a transistor in a crumbling kitchen, a single mother labouring over a hot stove, and four siblings bouncing around a brick council house for ten years until it could barely stand any longer. He pushed the memories aside and parked on a patch of dead grass opposite the townhouse.
