by M K Farrar
Ryan lifted his gaze to hers. “Shit. The paint. The analysis said it was acrylic paint, used for smaller jobs. Could it have come from the father’s workshop if he was painting furniture? The hacksaw, too?”
“I’d say there is a very strong possibility.”
“It would explain why Clara doesn’t appear on any electoral registers either until recently. I thought she was spending time in a mental institute, which might still be the case, but if she wasn’t, she would have been at her father’s house.” Adrenaline rushed through his veins. “Is this place still standing?”
“As far as we’re aware. I haven’t found anything to say that it’s been torn down. Do you think that’s where Clara has gone?”
“Yes, and if she’s taken Joe with her, he could be in danger.”
He stood at the front of everyone and clapped his hands to get their attention. “I need everyone onto this. We believe Clara Reed has taken Joe to her old family home. We need to contact the local police for any information on the house, her, or her father. We must find the location of this cabin. We know it’s off-grid and in North-East Somerset, but that’s all we’ve got. I want every single person onto it. Scour the internet, look into Frank Reed’s missing person’s case, go into Clara Reed’s past. Do whatever it takes. A man’s life might be in danger.”
Dev called over from his desk, “We’ve got a hit on the ANPR. Reed’s car was spotted on the A37 heading south yesterday afternoon.”
Ryan immediately pulled up a map of the area. Sure enough, that route took her towards North-East Somerset.
“She must have gone to the family cabin. We just need to narrow down that location. Keep going, see if we can pick up the car on a smaller road.
Shonda got his attention. “Boss, I’ve gone back through the original misper case for Frank Reed and got the search area the police used at the time.”
“Do you recognise any of the names on the case? Maybe we can contact one of them and see if they remember where the cabin is.”
She shook her head. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t recognise anyone. Bit before my time.”
“Let me see.” Ryan read through the names, but like Shonda, he didn’t recognise any of them. They could have easily moved to different forces or retired over the past thirteen years. “Run searches on them, but in the meantime, it narrows down the area we need to look over. Let’s use Google Earth to try and spot the cabin through the trees.”
Minutes passed, and Ryan was filled with the sense of time running out.
“I think I’ve got an approximate location!” Linda shouted out. “It’s completely off-grid, and the lane leading up to the property doesn’t even have a name, so it might take some searching before we find it, but I think it’s the one.”
Ryan was already on his feet. “That sounds like the place. Excellent work. Notify local police so they can search, too. We’ll join them there.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The smooth wooden handle of the handsaw felt good in her palm. She turned it so the serrated edge of the blade was pointing upwards and then clamped the lower part of the saw in the vice.
Clara picked up the correct-sized file and judged the sharpening angle at about thirty degrees. It was important to use the right amount of pressure when sharpening the blade, as she knew from experience that to make the blade uniform, she needed to pass the file an equal number of times and with the same pressure on each tooth.
As she worked, her thoughts jumped from one thing to another and back again. The man she had cuffed to her father’s bed wasn’t her father, but he was the same. They were all the same. They said and did the right things to get what they wanted, and then they couldn’t get away fast enough.
It had been a long time after she’d murdered her father that anyone had even noticed he was missing. They hadn’t had any bills to pay, and she’d been homeschooled. She’d been able to live off the land, using the wind turbine and the solar panels for her electricity, chopping wood for the fireplace and oven. She’d eaten the dried pasta and stored tins, supplementing them with berries she’d foraged and rabbits and squirrels she’d caught in traps. No one had any idea that this wild girl was living so far from anyone else.
But then, one day, someone turned up looking for Frank Reed. Before he’d died, her father had been commissioned to create a new piece of furniture—an eight-seater dining room table—and had already been paid. The man had wanted to know where his table was. Clara had done her best to put him off, telling him she’d get her dad to phone when he got back, though she didn’t know how long he would be.
The man had accepted that the first time, but not the second. He’d started to get angry and had told her that he’d wait at the cabin for Frank, and that he didn’t put up with people who wanted to rip him off. She’d wondered then if she could get rid of him the same way she had her father, but she knew people would ask questions. Someone would miss this man, and they’d come here and poke around, and then they’d learn the truth.
In the end, she’d been forced to tell the man that her father hadn’t come home. That he’d walked into the woods one day and that was the last time she’d seen him. The man had asked how old she was, that frown of concern across his features. She’d told him she was eighteen and more than capable of looking after herself, but either he hadn’t believed her or he’d wanted his money back, because the next thing she’d known, the police and social services had turned up. She’d needed to stick as closely to the truth as possible because, if she didn’t, they’d catch her out.
Her father’s car had still been sitting outside the cabin, but the police didn’t pay it any attention. If they had, they might have figured out she’d used the vehicle to move pieces of Frank Reed’s body after she’d killed him. She’d cut him up in his own workshop, using his tools, and then wrapped pieces of him up and taken them far away from the cabin and their land, and buried them, or had weighted them down and thrown them in the river. Then she’d bleached and scrubbed until her hands were raw.
But the police hadn’t really been interested in what they saw as a crazy man. How could anyone sane live how they did? The police assumed mental health problems were involved, and he’d probably just wandered off one day and perhaps topped himself somewhere. Or maybe he’d had enough of his strange life and decided his daughter was old enough to take care of herself and he’d started over somewhere new. No one was there to nag the police about what progress they’d made, and Clara certainly wasn’t going to be that person, either. In the end, Frank Reed wasn’t worth their time.
Clara had been taken to a foster home. Away from the cabin, she’d been able to put all thoughts of her father out of her mind. She convinced herself the story she’d given to the police was the correct one.
It was better than the truth.
She’d thought being in care was a good thing for her. There had been other people around, peers she could talk to, a school she could attend, and then later, college. She’d had friends, though she’d found it difficult to relate to things they talked about, television programmes they’d grown up watching, and places they’d been. She’d tried, though, tried harder than anything she’d ever done in her life, and she found that when she mimicked how they acted, dressed how they dressed, laughed how they laughed, listened to the right music and watched the right television, she’d begun to blend in. Everything had been going well until that night outside the club.
Clara shook the thought from her head and focused on her job. The painful rasp of metal on metal filled the small workshop. Her arms had started to ache, and she shifted position on her stool, easing her stiff back. She was doing a good job, though, and as she touched her finger to the sharpened points of the saw, and a pinprick of blood appeared, Clara smiled.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The rasping of a tool sharpening came from somewhere outside, and the sound terrified Joe.
Every part of his body ached. It hurt to swallow, and his head thum
ped with a steady pulse, like someone punching the inside of his skull, over and over.
Time was running out. Either he died here from dehydration, or Clara would return with whatever instrument she was out there sharpening and would start to dismember him. Both possibilities sickened him with fear.
He’d grown weak in his efforts to pull the headboard from the base, but he couldn’t give up now. If he gave up, he’d die. It was as simple as that. Besides, it had been working, hadn’t it? The headboard was looser than it had been before, it had more give when he rocked it back and forth or yanked it upwards, he was sure of it.
Or was he? Maybe it was just wishful thinking, and the headboard was no looser than it had been at the start.
“Clara!” he croaked. “I can hear you out there. I’m sorry for whatever it is you’ve been through, but that wasn’t my fault. You’re punishing the wrong person. Please, just let me out of here, and I won’t say anything to anyone. I promise.”
The swish-swish of the blade sharpening paused for a second. She’d heard him, he was sure.
“Come on. I know you’re not a bad person. I’ve seen how you want to help others. You can still make this right.”
He suspected it was too late for that. At some point, the police were bound to figure this out, and then she’d be spending a lot of time behind bars.
It was no good. He couldn’t rely on her setting him free. If she was going to do that, she’d have done it by now.
His muscles already felt wasted just from not being able to get out of bed, or perhaps it was the lack of water in the stuffy cabin. He prepared himself to try again, wrenched his legs under him, even as his calf muscles and those at the soles of his feet twinged with fresh cramps. Joe gritted his teeth and kept going, forcing himself to his knees, despite the agony twisting through his shoulders. His wrists were dark with dried blood where the metal cuffs had cut through the skin from him pulling on them. He’d quickly given up the hope of being able to get his hands through the cuffs. He had big hands and narrow wrists, and unless he somehow cut half his hand off, they’d never come off by themselves.
The thrashing back and forth that he’d done had moved the bed and headboard away from the wall. With the metal struts only attached to the base, it meant if he pulled and pushed on the bars, it put pressure on the screws holding it at the bottom. He dug his feet under him, his heels digging into the mattress, and braced his shoulders against the metal bedstead. He growled out his frustration and pain, eyes squeezed shut, jaw rigid, putting everything he had into it.
His heart lurched.
It had moved, hadn’t it? Just a fraction, but the headboard now had more give.
Joe stopped and switched positions, as best he could, getting to his knees. Now he leaned forward, hoping the two opposing forces would eventually yank the screws from their castings. That was all they were—screws. He wasn’t going to lose his life because of a few pieces of metal smaller than his finger.
Something went ‘click’, and suddenly one side of the headboard dropped lower than the other. He sucked in a breath, hardly able to believe it. It had worked. He’d yanked one of the screws out.
Renewed by his success, he switched positions again. That one part of the headboard now hung loose both hindered and helped him. It dragged his arm lower on the right, reducing his range of motion, but also meant he could put all his focus on the left-hand side.
Come on, you son of a bitch!
He pushed and pulled and pushed and pulled, then was forced to stop as a wave of dizziness took over. His heart felt like it was too shallow in his chest, like his ribs had disintegrated so it was forced to pound against the inside of his skin. Where previously, he’d wanted Clara to come back so he could beg her to free him, or at least bring him a drink of water, now he didn’t want her to come in at all. If she did, she might realise he’d almost freed himself and either kill him right away or tie him back up again.
The dizziness passed, and he got to work again.
Suddenly, the headboard came free, and he fell back as it dropped against the wall, dragging him with it. He knocked the back of his head on the metal, and black spots dotted his vision. Shit. He couldn’t pass out now.
Joe forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths and waited for his vision to return. He had to be careful. If he was going to get out of here, he couldn’t alert Clara to there being anything wrong. The headboard was heavy, and he was going to need to take it with him, the entire weight of the item hanging off his arms. If he had another dizzy spell and fell, and it landed on top of him, he might never get back up again.
He couldn’t just lie here for long, though. She might come back at any minute.
Movement came at the bedroom doorway, and he realised his fears had come true. Clara stood there, her hair a wild frizz around her head, her eyes strangely blank.
“What have you been doing, Joe?”
He froze in position, sick with fear. She might not notice anything was wrong right away. If he stayed still, looking as though the headboard was attached to the bed, she might think everything was as it should be.
It dawned on him that he was going to need to act that way, too.
“Clara, where the fuck have you been?” he demanded. It didn’t matter if she heard the tremor in his voice. It was natural for him to be frightened. “Let me go, right now.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I can tell something’s wrong. You’re sweating.”
“Of course I’m sweating. It’s boiling in here, and I haven’t had a drink since you cuffed me.”
The image of an icy glass of water popped into his head, and he almost groaned with need.
“You don’t want a drink,” she said. “It’ll only prolong things for you.”
His breath was tight in his chest. “What are you saying? That you’re going to kill me?”
She shrugged. “If you happen to die, that’s not really me killing you, is it?”
“You’re not going to get away with it. We had sex. Your DNA will be all over my body. If you try to dump it somewhere, the police will pick up on that right away.”
The corner of her mouth curled in a strange kind of smile. “Don’t worry, I have ways of dealing with that.”
“What do you mean?”
“A good dunk in a bath of bleach quickly denatures the DNA.”
He swallowed hard and wished he hadn’t mentioned it.
“What are you saying? That you’ve done this before?”
Her gaze hardened. “You mean have I made sure men don’t get to just use me and get away with it? “
“That’s not what happened here, Clara. I would never do that. I’m a good person.”
She chuckled, but the sound was cold. “You keep telling yourself that. Just like every man who forces himself on a woman and tells himself that it was her fault. That she led him on, or she’d drunk too much to know what she really meant when she said stop. Or an older man who takes advantage of a young girl because she doesn’t know any better.”
“I’ve never done that!” he protested. “I didn’t do that, not to you or anyone else.”
“Yes, you did. You’re just like the others. You slept with me and then you were going to leave.”
Joe held back a sob. “I would have come back again! You never gave me the chance.”
“If I’d have given you the chance, you wouldn’t have come back.”
“You don’t know that.” He was pleading now, his voice high-pitched with worry. There was madness in her eyes, and it terrified him. How many other men had she done this to?
“Yes, I do. The very first man in my life did exactly that. He took what he wanted, and then when I was no longer good enough for him, he threw me out of his bed.”
“So an ex-boyfriend dumped you and now you’re taking it out on me?” His fear morphed to anger. “This is fucking bullshit.”
“Not an ex-boyfriend. My own father. He used me like that, and then he didn’t want me anymore. He ha
ted the way my body changed growing up. He rejected me, and I made him pay for it.”
Joe’s blood ran cold. What was she saying? That her father abused her?
“I’m sorry about whatever happened to you, but none of that was my fault.”
“No, it never is anyone else’s fault, is it? Somehow, you men always manage to make sure it’s the woman who’s to blame.”
Her eyes narrowed, her head cocked slightly to the left, and she took a step closer.
Joe tensed, his breath held. She was going to notice, he was sure of it. Panicky nausea washed over him, and he fought to keep a grip.
She stepped nearer.
He had to act. Take her by surprise while he had the chance.
Joe let out a yell and swung his legs off the bed. Digging deeper than he ever had in his life, using a level of reserve he didn’t know he had, he pulled the headboard up from the back of the bed and then launched himself around, aiming the metal at Clara.
Chapter Thirty-Three
As they drove, a call came in.
In the passenger seat, Mallory answered. She listened intently, and then said, “We’re close. ETA within a few minutes.”
She hung up and twisted slightly to face Ryan. “One of the local officers had found the place. We’re not far. All uniformed officers have been directed there.”
“Excellent.”
He continued to drive, following the direction Mallory gave him.
“The road should be coming up ahead, boss,” she said. “Right around this corner.”
As he took the bend, several parked squad cars came into view. The local uniformed police had arrived as well. A gate blocked the way from the main road. Someone had use bolt cutters to unlock it, giving them access to the dirt track beyond.
Ryan slowed and pulled the car over to join them. The vehicles behind, containing the rest of his team, did the same.
