Gripping Thrillers

by Iain Rob Wright

  “And Cheryl,” said Leo.

  “No, bruh. She ain’t meant to be part of this, innit? So it’s either you or Happy what murdered Polly, I reckon.”

  Leo shuffled around on his butt so that he was facing Monty. “What? I didn’t kill Polly, you moron.”

  “Well, you must have done something.”

  “He blackmailed John,” said Cheryl. “He admitted it to me earlier. He’s been exploiting John with threats of exposing his cheating to his wife.”

  Monty studied Cheryl and then studied Leo. Then he shrugged. “There you go then, Happy must have killed his niece.”

  “So there’s nothing left to hide,” said Cheryl. “We need to find the next game and just admit everything. It’s our only chance.”

  Leo leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. “Finally, this might be over.”

  “Hold up,” said Monty, “something still doesn’t add up. There was a confession the murderer was supposed to sign.”

  “Yeah,” said Leo, huffing. “You signed it.”

  “Yeah, bruh, but I only signed it to save Happy, innit? Happy was stuck in that chair being buried alive by sand.”

  “Because it wasn’t his sin,” said Cheryl, understanding what he was getting at. “Happy was made to sit in the chair because he wasn’t guilty of the murder. The confession wasn’t for him.”

  “So I guess we don’t know everything after all,” said Leo, looking downcast.

  “Let’s not assume we’ve got this all figured out,” said Monty.

  Cheryl sighed. “You’re right. We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. There’s clearly more to this than we understand.”

  “But we do know one thing,” said Monty. “Polly didn’t disappear, she was murdered — and Alfie knows who the killer is. Anybody up for getting some answers?”

  Cheryl looked at Alfie, moaning on his back and sobbing with pain. It would be cruel to badger him, but when she thought about him burying the body of an innocent young girl, she suddenly didn’t care. “It’s time for people to stop keeping secrets,” she said. “I want to hear the truth.”

  Cheryl knelt by Alfie’s head, wanting to look him in the eye as he answered their questions. His confession must have been true because his torture had ended as soon as he’d spoken Polly’s name. It must mean someone could hear them, and they knew when Alfie had admitted what they’d wanted to hear. They weren’t alone down here in the tunnel.

  And yet Cheryl had never felt so isolated, so vulnerable. She wanted her mother so badly it hurt and being smothered would never again be a burden if she got out of this alive.

  Hell, I’ll happily never leave the house again.

  Just need to stay strong, Cher. Need to find my way out of this situation.

  Monty gave Alfie a tap on the arm to get his attention. Despite his pain, Alfie was lucid, and looked at Monty right away. “You gotta get help for me, man. I need a hospital.”

  “There’s no help coming,” said Monty callously. “So just deal with it. We need you to do some explaining.”

  “Please man, just—”

  “Shut up, bruh. Tell us what you know about Polly. Did you kill her?”

  “What? No, I swear. Just help me. Please, man.”

  “We can’t help you,” said Cheryl. She looked down at the sticky patches of bright red skin peeking through his ragged jeans and winced. “We’re trapped, you know that. Our only way out is to tell the truth, so tell us what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  Monty gripped Alfie’s ankle and squeezed. “Listen up. Polly was a cool chick and I liked her, so start speaking or I’ll mash you up.”

  Alfie gritted his teeth to keep from bellowing. He closed his eyes and shuddered but managed to nod. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. I didn’t kill her, okay? I swear.”

  “But you buried her,” said Leo with a snarl.

  “I buried her, yeah.”

  Cheryl didn’t understand. “Why?”

  “Because he made me! He made me bury her so no one would know what happened.”

  Cheryl grabbed Alfie’s arm, growing frustrated. She shook him. “Who asked you to bury Polly’s body?”

  Alfie clenched his jaw as if he intended not to answer, but when Monty grabbed his ankle again he had no choice. “Uncle John! It was John who asked me, all right? He killed her. I just… He threatened to blame it on me if I didn’t help him and said I would have a job for life if I helped make it go away. He gave me twenty-percent of Alscon. You know how much the company is worth? Three-mil.”

  Leo whistled. “Half-a-million quid in stocks to bury a body. I’d have been tempted myself.”

  Cheryl glared at Leo, intended to chide him, but when she thought about that kind of money, she couldn’t judge with an entirely clean conscious. Polly had already been dead, after all.

  What the hell am I saying?

  “Why did John kill her?” she demanded.

  “It was an accident. She stumbled out of the bushes right into the middle of the road and John ran her down. It was the night of the staff do, the night at the Claybrook Estate. We were all wasted, man. She must have been drunk too. It was just an accident. Please—”

  Cheryl shook his arm again. “Why not call the police? Huh?”

  “Because John had been doing champagne and coke all night. He should never have been behind the wheel. Plus Maggie had been in the passenger seat sucking him off.”

  Cheryl recoiled. “Jesus! You sick people. You goddamn si—”

  “Hold up,” said Leo, raising a hand. “What d’you mean John ran her down? A limo took us all to the Claybrook that night. No one drove there.”

  Alfie managed to get up on one elbow, and he shook his head. “Monty drove his TVR. He didn’t want his family knowing he was going to drink.”

  Leo huffed. “Yeah, and if I remember right, Monty ended up more wasted than anyone. It was the same night he wrapped his car around a tree.”

  Monty looked away, ashamed, but he didn’t deny it.

  Alfie was shaking his head again. “Monty never drove that night. It wasn’t him that wrote off his car. It was John.” He looked at Monty now. “You were passed out in the hotel’s lobby by half-ten. John called you a lightweight and took your keys for a laugh. Maggie wanted to see how fast the TVR went, so John took her for a spin. I was having a fag on the front steps when they left and I watched them burn it away down the driveway. It was a really long access road, remember? Went right through a load of woods and past a pond.”

  Monty didn’t reply. His mouth was open and his eyes were wide and unblinking.

  “I remember it,” said Leo. “How did John and Maggie manage to hit Polly all the way out there? Was she partying with them?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” said Alfie. “I got a text just after midnight telling me to meet him at the pond. I didn’t find out what had happened until I got there. John said she stumbled out of the bushes and into the road. He’d been doing over sixty when he hit her, and then he had skidded into a tree. Somehow, he and Maggie were okay, but they were both covered in bruises. Polly was lying in the trees, but there wasn’t anything they could do. By the time I got there Maggie was in hysterics, but John was frightening. I thought if I refused to help him, he might kill me too. Drown me in the pond or something.”

  “So what did you do with her body?” Cheryl felt sick to her stomach. Alfie wasn’t even twenty and he’d helped dispose of a corpse. Was he a victim too? Or as evil as John?

  And what about Maggie?

  “There was a bonfire nearby,” Alfie told them. “I tried to burn her body there amongst the wood with my lighter, but it was taking too long and the fire kept burning out. I was out there so long the sun started to rise. I panicked and dragged her body over to this old shipping container full of broken lawnmowers and stuff. I found a shovel and dug underneath it, buried her there. For months I was sure her body would turn up, but no one found her. After a year, I snuck back onto
the estate and went to check on the container. It was still there, full of the same old gardening equipment.”

  Monty’s lower lip was curled in disgust. “The police questioned us for months, bruh. John put up a ten-grand reward for information. You’ve kept up a lie for nearly two years. How do you sleep at night?”

  “By drinking and partying. You think I’m okay with it? I liked Polly too, man. I asked the girl out the week she started.”

  “Yeah,” said Leo, “and she turned you down. Must’ve felt like you had the last laugh.”

  “Get stuffed, man. You asked her out too. In fact I remember you had a right thing for her. We all tried to get with her.”

  Cheryl groaned. “Jesus Christ, I can’t actually be hearing this. Yesterday you were all just a bunch of people I worked with, and now…” She stood up instead of finishing her thought. Leo reached for her hand but she dodged away. She didn’t want to be touched. She needed space.

  She needed air.

  She needed her mum.

  And more than ever, she needed her dad. What would her life have looked like if he hadn’t left her?

  None of this is supposed to involve me. I never even met Polly.

  Without thinking, Cheryl found herself inside the cell with the brass coffin. Her eyes caught the video cameras above and she yelled at them. “If this is all about an innocent girl, then you’re a hypocrite. What the hell am I doing down here? What did I do? Let me out of here because I’m innocent too, just like Polly was.”

  The cameras’ lights were no longer on. Their mechanisms no longer whirred with life. No one was listening, no one was watching. She wandered back out of the cell and into the tunnel. They had done as requested — Alfie had confessed — so what came next?

  More games?

  What would be the point? The truth was out now. Alfie’s confession had been recorded. Her co-workers were a bunch of criminals, ranging from petty theft and blackmail to murder and unlawful disposing of a corpse. Their secrets were out.

  I need to get out of this hole and as far away from these people as possible.

  Just need to convince a psychopath to release me from his dungeon first.

  She sensed Leo move a few feet behind her. He probably wanted to check on her, but his crimes sickened her. And yet she still found herself liking him. Leo hadn’t buried a body like Alfie had, or run down a girl like John. He had behaved like a bit of a snake, but if he owned his mistakes didn’t he deserve forgiveness? And what about Monty? He was no murderer either, just a chancer and a thief. Whatever her co-workers had done, they were human, and she reminded herself that they were all stuck in this situation together. They had to stay on the same side for now. She had to ignore their crimes as best she could.

  Someone was trying to kill them all. The point of these games was to extract confessions, but part of her knew that the trick at the end would be them never getting out. The more she thought about it, the more she imagined them all disappearing off the face of the earth, their confessions published all over the internet with no way to refute them. This torture chamber wasn’t for their benefit, not a chance to atone, it was for whoever had led them down here. It was for the amusement of a twisted psychopath.

  Cheryl turned and made an announcement. “No more games.”

  Alfie glanced up at her from the floor. He had managed to sit up and was looking at his own charred legs in horror. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean you’ve been right all along, Alfie. We’re all going to die down here. Every time we play along with this psycho’s rules, someone gets hurt or killed. This whole thing is revenge, and the more we play by the rules the worse things get. So no more playing by the rules. We’re finding a way out of this mess.”

  Leo nodded, his square chin jutting out defiantly. “I agree. This game is rigged.”

  Monty bashed his fist into his palm, and for the first time ever since meeting him, he gave her a warm, genuine smile instead of a smarmy smirk. His defences were down, and the real Monty Rizwan was on display. She liked him.

  Alfie reached up to Leo and took his hand. He pulled himself onto his feet and limped a few steps on his burnt feet. “When I was a kid,” he said, “my grandad used to play Monopoly with me. He insisted it was great fun, better than any videogame I might find. Of course, I thought it was boring as hell, but my parents insisted I give the old guy a few hours of company each week, so I didn’t have much choice. Grandad beat me every time, without fail. He never gave me a chance or handicapped himself, just kept on beating me. The last time we played — the last time before he died — I flipped that goddamn Monopoly board so high it almost hit the ceiling fan. I can still picture the look on my Grandad’s face. He was heartbroken. I’ve never stopped regretting what I did that day. But this day is different.”

  Leo frowned. “You’ve lost me, dude.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you, man, is that this time I will have zero fucking regrets about flipping the board on this goddamn game.”

  Slowly, a grin crept onto Leo’s face and he nodded. “Nice.”

  “We need to find the next game,” said Cheryl.

  Leo folded his arms and looked at her. “I thought our whole plan was to not play the game.”

  “It is, but I want to find out what we’re supposed to do so we can do something else. Let’s find the next cell.”

  After checking on John and Maggie, and still deciding that nothing could be done, they got to work. It didn’t take them long to find what they were looking for. There were only two cells left, and both were unlit, but while one had a padlock the other seemed to have some kind of magnetic bolt on it. The padlock had numbers on the rollers, of which there were only two. Printed above the two rollers were a pair of letters. P and M.

  “Polly McIntyre,” said Leo, although it was obvious enough, “and two numbers. What combination would only be two numbers?”

  “Age,” said Monty. “Try putting Polly’s age.”

  Leo looked at Monty and licked his bottom lip. “How old was she? I’m not sure if she was eighteen or nineteen.”

  “She was eighteen,” said Monty. “We had drinks for her birthday a few weeks before she vanished, remember?” He winced and rephrased it. “Before Alfie buried her under a shipping container. Fuck.”

  Alfie lowered his head in shame and said nothing. What could he say? They all wanted out of there, but Alfie was facing jail time if they reported his crime, and Cheryl, for one, would absolutely report it. It was just a shame Happy wasn’t alive to find out what had happened to his niece.

  But what was Happy’s part in all this? What was his crime? Which sin did he die for?

  Leo rolled in the number 18 and the padlock instantly popped. He unthreaded it from the gate and pushed it open but didn’t step inside. It was still dark. Cheryl waved a hand just inside the gate to capture the sensor’s attention. The room lit up like the others. They were presented with something dreadfully recognisable.

  A noose.

  Behind the noose was a television. White words appeared on a black background.

  Polly McIntyre died October 14th 2016 aged 18. She left behind a loving mother, Sharon, and a younger brother, Michael. Her cause of death was strangulation.

  Cheryl and Leo looked at one another, then both looked at Alfie. “I thought she died from being run over.”

  Alfie held his hand sup. “That’s what John told me, I swear. She was dead when I got there.”

  Cheryl glanced back down the tunnel to where John and Maggie were still lying together. She didn’t even know if they were still alive. “My God, Polly must have been alive after the accident. John must have strangled her to keep her from getting help.”

  Monty covered his mouth, then ran his hand up his face and over his head. “I don’t think I can take much more of this.”

  Alfie hobbled backwards, keeping his hands held protectively out in front of him. “I don’t know anything about her being strangled.”

&
nbsp; The words on screen refreshed.

  Congratulations for reaching the truth, but not all secrets have yet been brought to life.

  The fans are running backwards. Your oxygen will expire in one hour.

  Life Demands Life

  Cheryl groaned. She couldn’t handle any more secrets, and frankly she didn’t care either. Things couldn’t get worse, so why keep torturing them? The timbre of the ceiling fans changed, the blades running in the opposite direction. Did that mean the air was actively being sucked out of the tunnel? It might have been her mind playing tricks on her, but she already felt stifled. Her head began to throb.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Leo was rubbing at the burns on his hand again. Did he need more Vaseline? She decided it wasn’t important.

  Monty pinched his forehead, creating vertical wrinkles. “We’re supposed to hang ourselves, bruh. What else could a noose mean?”

  “I’ll go in and take a look around,” said Leo with a defeated sigh, but Cheryl grabbed his arm.

  “No! We’re not playing along anymore, remember?”

  “But we’re going to suffocate down here if we refuse to do anything.”

  “Not yet we’re not. Let’s think of something this psycho doesn’t expect.”

  Alfie folded his arms, burying his hands under his armpits. “So, we should not hang ourselves then? Sounds good to me.”

  Cheryl took a slow walk down the tunnel, looking all around. The bulbs above her head were just out of reach, as were the fan blades now running backwards. She walked past the curtain hiding Happy’s fate and past the cell full of half-burnt supplies. There was nothing they could use. Nothing that jumped out at her and filled her with ideas. When she had decided to no longer play along, she’d hoped some magnificent plan would come to her, but nothing came to mind.