50/50 Killer (26 page)

What did it mean? Scott started to tell it that he didn't know. If it was about Jodie ... it was wrong. She hadn't chosen him at all, quite the opposite. But then an image pressed itself into his head. Jodie, sitting on the bed in her hotel room, her head in her hands. Crying.

'She didn't have to phone me,' he said. 'She could have pretended it never happened. She never even had to tell me.'

The devil inclined its head.

'And what did you do next?'

'I'm not well,' he told the answerphone at work. The tape was whirring slowly around in the empty office. His boss was never in until at least nine, sometimes didn't come in at all.

'I've been up half the night. I think I've eaten something dodgy. I feel dreadful.'

He said a few more things, none of them particularly convincing, and put the phone down.

Then he threw the glass of water on the bedside table against the far wall. It shattered, blew apart, and immediately he regretted it. The floorboards whispered as he swept up the broken glass, and the bin downstairs gave a few dusty rattles as it accepted the debris.

He collected his keys, his wallet and his coat, and headed out of the door.

'You went to see her, didn't you?'

The devil was crouching in front of him. Scott's sleeping mind accepted this; on one level he understood what was happening. These memories of Jodie's affair were two years old, but the devil existed in more recent memories, and the two were connected. They had spoken about this event. And when the memories shared moments, the narrative had a chance to cross. The poison could seep up.

He nodded.

Her hotel bedroom was much bigger than he'd imagined it would be. Normally, he liked hotels. There was something reassuring about the narrowness of the corridors, the soft lighting, the cave-like ambience of the rooms. But there was nothing comforting about those things now. He kept imagining Jodie and Kevin together.

She met him in the corridor and they walked to her room without saying much. She flicked on the light.

There was a cabinet along one wall, supporting a small television and a tray of tea and coffee-making equipment. No discarded sachets or dirty cups, he noticed, but she would definitely have made a drink. He wondered whether room service had cleared away one used cup or two.

The double bed was against the opposite wall, a lamp at either side of the headboard. A double-seater settee and two chairs circled a low table at the far end of the room.

'Coffee?' she said.

He nodded, but she was making it anyway.

'This kettle takes ages to boil.'

He watched her fidgeting; she didn't seem able to stand still or relax. A long minute of silence later, steam ribboned up from the kettle's spout. She passed him the mug of coffee, holding it gingerly by the rim and base so that he could take the handle.

'Thanks,' he said.

'That's okay.'

'Are you surprised I came down?'

'I'm pleased.'

'Right.'

'Please don't ...' As she said it, the words ran out of air, and she had to try again. 'Please don't leave me.'

'We need to talk about that.'

'Please don't leave me. I don't know what I'll do if you do.'

He sipped his coffee.

'I'll do anything,' she said. 'I really will. I'd do anything to be able to take it back, and I wish I could, but I can't. All I can do is say sorry. I was so drunk. It was such a huge mistake.'

He put the cup down on the floor.

She said, 'I hate myself for it more than you ever could.'

'I don't hate you, Jodie.'

'You should.'

Self-pity again, all but begging for reassurance in return. Instead, he spread his hands and tried to talk plainly.

'We need to figure out where we go from here.'

'Okay.'

'I want things to work out,' he said. 'But the truth is, I really don't know how they're going to. I've felt weird all day. Weird, and so, so hurt. It's not sunk in yet.'

'I'll quit if I have to.' She said it too quickly. 'If that's what you want, I'll do it. I'll do it right now.'

He looked at her. She'd made it sound so easy, so simple, but she'd been a partner in this business from the beginning; there had been three years of hard work before it started taking off. There should have been more conflict on her face, but instead she looked utterly committed.

She would choose him. If he wanted her to, she would walk away from everything else. To save their relationship. He continued to stare, not knowing what to say in reply.

On the one hand, there was no way he could ask her to do that. But he knew they couldn't be together if she was still working with Kevin, still seeing him every day. There was no middle ground between the two.

So he didn't say anything. After a moment, she nodded.

Over the next two years, Scott remembered that gesture and used it to justify what happened. That one nod gave him the ability to lie to himself. It hadn't been his decision.

He hadn't asked her to give up her life.

She did it willingly, of her own accord.

You chose me ...

Suddenly, he was somewhere else: some horrible place where the images were shorter and sharper. It was the dark, stone building, and the devil was leaning over him, holding the screwdriver in one hand. Steam was rising off it.

The devil pressed the red-hot blade down on his shoulder. Scott tried to flinch away, but he couldn't move. Everything was numb for a moment ... but then he felt the pain reverberate through his collar bone, all the way down to his ribs.

He began to scream, his mouth open, his head whipping from side to side. The noises he was making he couldn't even identify.

But the devil kept the blade pressed down hard. Scott could hear his skin sizzling. He could smell himself burning.

Was it possible to pass out within a dream?

As the thing took the screwdriver away and moved it down to the inside of his thigh, he discovered that it wasn't.

4 DECEMBER

4 HOURS, 20 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

3.00 A.M.

Mark

After Pete had signed out and headed off to co-ordinate the search, I logged onto the virtual briefing room and flagged down my door-to-door team. Annoyingly, all three of them looked as though they could keep going for days, and I felt momentarily inadequate. I was so tired I could hardly keep my thoughts in a straight line. But then, they were coding interviews in a nice warm office with access to as much coffee as they could physically drink.

I went through what I needed them to do. Wake Yvonne Gregory up - politely - and take round the picture of Jodie McNeice for identification, then get hold of someone at Jodie's work and see if they could confirm where she'd been for the last few days. There would be more to do later, I said, probably vaguely. It was two onerous tasks with the threat of more to follow, but they appeared to soak it up. I envied them their energy. However much I dressed it up, it couldn't be entirely down to caffeine.

On the way up to Scott's room, the tiredness hit me properly. I was walking down corridors and my vision was prowling ahead of me, occasionally getting distracted and lost. At the same time, I was doing my best to leave most of my thoughts behind. When I stopped, everything around me seemed to keep moving for a second. I was drunk on my own exhaustion.

'Excuse me, Officer.'

'Sorry.'

It wasn't so bad downstairs. On the lower level, people were moving about in small numbers, carrying cardboard files or pushing trolleys and cleaning-carts. But one floor up nobody was fucking around. There were lives to be saved, and everything was all very urgent and practised. I had to minimise myself as much as possible and keep out of the way, and the task was a little beyond me. I felt unsteady in my body and in my mind, and I needed to get some calm and resolve together before I talked to Scott.

Two minutes later, feeling pretty much the same, I was there.

I'd forgotten how quiet and still the room was. The soft light lent it a feeling of peace, underlined by the soporific constant of Scott's pulse on the machine by his bed. He was still propped up where I'd left him, his head tilted away to face the slatted blinds on the window. He looked comfortable, though, and for a moment I thought he might be asleep. But then he turned to look at me.

'It's you.' Almost immediately, he turned back to the window. 'I thought it would be the doctor again.'

I closed the door gently.

'Do you want the doctor? I can get one if you like. Believe me, there are hundreds of them out there.'

'No. I was hoping it would be you. I'm sorry about before.'

'There's nothing to be sorry about.'

I sat down in the chair by the bed, my legs trembling slightly, and switched on the recording equipment.

'What time is it?'

'Just after three,' I said.

'You've not found her yet?'

'Not yet, no,' I said. The questions were interesting. Was he aware on some level about the dawn deadline? 'But we will. Officers are searching for her in the woods right now. There are a number of places we think she might be being held.'

Having been out of the room for a while, I'd forgotten the horror of Scott's appearance. Even hidden behind the bandages and gauze, his injuries were painful to look at.

'But it's a large area to cover,' I said, 'so we really need any help you can give us. Difficult as it is, we need you to remember as much as you can about what happened to you.'

Perhaps it was a trick of the light or my memory, as well, but I thought the shadows in his face were deeper than before, and the hurt there more settled, more internal. He looked haunted, as though the memories he was avoiding had been left for dead in the woods, and now their ghosts were beginning to solidify in the half-lit dusk of the room. He was so crushed down by sadness that the physical pain seemed barely to register.

Finally, he turned to look at me, too tired to be embarrassed by his misery. But he didn't shake his head or make excuses.

'I have remembered something. It's strange.'

'What?'

'In the van. Do you remember I thought we stopped a couple of times on the way?'

'Sure.'

'Well, this is strange, but I think there was a child in the van with us.'

I couldn't hide my surprise. 'A child?'

'I mean a baby,' he said, as though that made it sound more normal. 'The guy in the devil mask, he kept whispering to someone in the passenger seat. Like, reassuring them? And I remember hearing a baby crying. And then, after one of the stops, I didn't hear it any more.'

I looked at him for a moment, weighing it up. It wasn't that I didn't believe him, exactly, but I had to consider the trauma he'd been through, the medication he was on. His mind might be trying to make sense of something entirely different by visualising it in a certain way.

Or else it might be true. In which case, he was right: it was strange. I filed it away for discussion downstairs.

'Can you remember anything the man said?'

'Not really. Not then, anyway.'

I paused. 'At some other time?'

'Yeah.' He nodded slowly. 'Actually, I think he was talking to me
a lot
. But it's like waking up with a bad hangover. You know you spoke to someone, but what you talked about is blank. Like we had a big conversation, but I can't remember what it was about.'

He thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. But he didn't seem distressed, only confused, and I got the impression that some part of him wanted me to keep asking questions.

'This man,' I said carefully, 'he follows people for a long time. He learns things about them. And what he finds out, he uses that information against them.'

'I don't understand. What does that mean?'

'You know that he's hurt you. The thing is, the way he hurts people isn't just physical. He'll have been saying things to upset you. He might have told you bad stuff about Jodie, for example.'

Scott looked at me.

'Does that mean anything to you?' I said.

But he seemed to have gone far away.

'Scott?'

He said very quietly: 'Kevin.'

I tried to hide any recognition of the name.

'Is that something you remember?'

'I think so. He was talking to me about Kevin.'

'Who's Kevin?'

He started to answer, but then stopped and turned away.

Be careful
, I told myself.
Don't lead him anywhere. Let him tell it in his own time.

He stared at the window for a long time. I sat as patiently as I could, listening to the gentle beep of the machine and wondering whether he was searching for words or memories, or simply gathering the resolve to talk to me at all.

Finally, he said, 'Jodie had an affair.'

'Okay.'

'Not an affair. A one-night stand.'

'When was this?'

'A couple of years ago. Kevin was a friend of hers from university. When they left, they set up this company together, built it from nothing. It was starting to do quite well, and this one time, they were away on business for a night. Staying in a hotel.'

He took a deep breath, and then went through the facts quickly, as though they were the last few reps in an exercise session.

'She got drunk. Ended up fucking him. Called me the next day and told me. And I know it doesn't make any sense, but I think the man in the devil mask was talking to me about that.'

I sat back.

It wasn't at all what I'd been expecting, and it took me a moment to put it into context. He was telling me not only that Jodie had started CCL with Kevin Simpson and had a brief affair with him
two years
ago, but that the 50/50 Killer had known about this. Even though it was possible he'd been following the couple for that long, it seemed unimaginable. But we hadn't heard from him in two years, had we? And, like Mercer said, he'd been planning something in that time.

'What happened after that night?' I said.

'We talked about it, about stuff. Splitting up. But it was just a drunken mistake. I didn't want to break up with her over it.'