Behind the Facade (11 page)

As the sound of sirens grew in volume,
he laid his face next to hers and whispered hoarsely, “I’m so sorry, a
chuisle
. So very sorry for everything I put you through.”
He then put her in the recovery position and rose clumsily to his feet.

A very
dishevelled and bloody Sebastian appeared in front of him, having finally
emerged from the car.

“You!” he
began, but Sean had no time to exchange pleasantries. He limped rapidly away
from the scene.

Charlie screeched into the ambulance bay at the hospital and
sprang out of the car. “Hey! You can't park there!” someone yelled but Charlie
didn't even hear them. His heart pounded deafeningly in his ears. He lifted the
lifeless girl from the back seat, her body flopping like a rag doll in his
arms. The sheet covering her was black with blood. A sob erupted from him and
his knees almost collapsed from under him, her negligible weight not a factor,
just the weight of the despair that overpowered him.

“Somebody
help
me!” he screamed,
staggering towards the nearest entrance. He heard raised voices and a flurry of
activity around him. The girl was lifted out of his arms. He heard somebody
yell, “Get me a crash trolley here now!”

Someone put a hand on his shoulder and guided him over to a
chair. It was a woman in a blue hospital smock. She started talking to him and
he watched her mouth as it moved but his brain just didn't register the words.
She may as well have been talking in an alien language. She frowned, smacked
her hands on her knees in a gesture of frustration and moved away.

Charlie sat there for a little while longer, just gazing in to
space, too shell-shocked to unscramble what was left of his overloaded brain
and senses. Someone came again and sat next to him but he did not acknowledge
them. A warm hand was placed on the one he had clenched in his lap. He looked
numbly down at it.

“I know you're in shock, mate but you need to talk to us. We
don't even know who the girl you brought in is.” The girl had not made it and
the hospital had already called the police. But the young doctor speaking
thought it was prudent not to mention either of these facts to the man beside
him.

Charlie eventually looked across at the medic. He had short dark
hair, a smooth rosy face and a smiling mouth. He looked about the same age as
he was, but Charlie felt about a million years older.  The doctor hadn't
said as much but Charlie could read it in the way his smile failed to dispel
the sorrow in his brown eyes: the girl hadn't survived.

Charlie was about to speak
when someone shouted, “Where's the idiot who parked their car in the middle of
the ambulance bay?”

Charlie glanced up. He
didn't care about where he had left the car but regret over Brenna pierced him
like an already overused knife.

 The tall, angry
orderly must have seen this guilt in his face and descended upon him. “Is it
yours?”

Charlie stood up but the
man didn't wait for his reply. “Can you kindly move it out of the effing way?”
he asked belligerently. “Don't you realise that your stupidity could mean the
difference between life and death?” Charlie mouth twitched at this unknowingly
shrewd observation.

Before the man could continue his tirade, he held up his hands
and said, “I'm moving it. I'm moving it!” and ran outside.

He heard the doctor shout something after him but he ignored it.
The man was probably worried about him doing a runner but he had no intention
of doing that. He knew he'd been in a bit of a state in there but he hadn't
gone through everything and let that girl die for nothing. He would go back in
to the hospital and speak to the police about what he had stumbled across.

He eventually found a
legitimate parking space some distance from the A&E entrance. He bought a
parking ticket, the thought of having his usual rant about paying for parking
at a hospital flitting through his brain but barely registering. Instead he
felt a brief and bitter nostalgia for the time when he thought such irritations
were worth getting stressed over.

As he bent to stick the ticket on his car window, his eyes fell
on his phone still sitting in its holder. His thoughts returned to Brenna and
her dreadful desperation to get in touch with someone before she died.

He picked up the phone and
looked at it. The number might still be logged. He exited the
SatNav
function and saw the number on his screen, still
there waiting to be dialled. He would forever debate the wisdom of giving that
poor girl the phone in the first place, but perhaps he owed it to her to ring
that number.

Entering the car, he sat down in the driver's seat to make the
phone call. He pressed the green dial key and listened tensely to the line ring
out. It connected and he immediately began to speak, babbling in his
nervousness, until he heard a loud tone and realised that he had been
transferred to voicemail. He took some deep breaths to compose himself and
began to leave a more coherent message, introducing himself and giving the
girl’s name. He knew he must sound like a crank, as he didn’t even know who he
was talking to. Because of this, he was reluctant to go into any detail about
how he had come to have Brenna in his possession. Nevertheless, he mentioned
that Bespoke Cars were to blame and gave the name of the hospital. He couldn't
bring himself to say that the girl was dead. Nobody wanted to hear that kind of
news as a recorded message.

He couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed that he
hadn't managed to speak to someone. He sighed and pushed the phone into his
back pocket. He remained sitting for a few minutes, resting his head on the
steering wheel. A persuasive part of him wanted to just start the engine and
get the hell away. He'd done the best he could and he wasn't sure he had the
courage or the strength to relive what had happened and
attempt
to explain his actions. However, the police would no doubt track him down using
the hospital cameras and his car registration. Driving away would just make his
story even harder for them to swallow. 

The slam of the passenger side door brought him back to his
senses. His head snapped up and he found a stranger sitting next to him.
Charlie lurched back in surprise but the man placed a restraining hand on his
shoulder.

“Please don't be alarmed Charlie,” he urged in a pleasantly
soothing voice. “I'm here to look after you.”

He was well-built, dark haired and had the kind of dazzling good
looks that could easily have given him a successful modelling career. Charlie
allowed himself to relax, not pausing to question why this man knew his name,
the light of this man's beauty blinding him, as it had many others. In a
society obsessed with appearance, we don't like to believe that a beautiful
face does anything other than reflect inherent goodness.

He felt pressure at his side and looked down to see the barrel
of a gun pressed against him. He gasped in surprise and stared with horrified
dismay into the dark eyes of his accoster. When the man's gaze locked on to
him, his composure shattered instantly like a blown bulb. The eyes were an
unusual purple-black colour but lacked any warmth or depth; they were as
soulless as the eyes of a carnivorous insect.

Charlie opened his mouth to scream but the scream was reduced to
a choked cry of pain as the breath was jolted from him. The gun had been used
to administer a well-aimed jab to his abdomen.

“Do as I say or I will kill you.” The man's soft tones had now
taken on the sibilant menace of a snake.

Charlie closed his eyes. The world seemed to tilt for a moment. Would
he ever awaken from this nightmare? When Charlie reopened them, the man was
still there smiling at him. There was something innately creepy about it, like
the false human smiles they put on dogs in a famous television advert.

“Drive,” he commanded.

“Where
to?”
Charlie asked, trying not quite
successfully to keep the fear out of his voice.

“To your house, of
course,” the man replied as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. He
prodded Charlie again with the gun and his eerie smile widened as Charlie
grunted in protest. Charlie nodded in mute acquiescence and started the car
engine.

As they drove onto the
main road, he watched in his rear view mirror as the lights of the hospital
building diminished, his hard won resolve fading with them.

He drove home, the gun in his side a constant irritation, along
with his companion's maddening grin. It did cross his mind to try and cause an
accident but he never attempted anything. Perhaps this was because, in some
strange way, after all the agonising decisions he’d had to make it was almost a
relief to hand responsibility over to someone else. He also clung to the belief
that this man was not a killer and, if he did as he was told, he would come out
of this alive.

He parked the car up in his garage and killed the engine. He
somehow managed to will his legs to move and he staggered out of the car. The
gun was now swiftly relocated to his back and he was marched up to his back
door. His shredded nerves had now yielded their tenuous hold on his body and he
stabbed at the lock with his key like a drunken man. Once inside, the man
gestured for him to sit down on the sofa.

“Now then, Charlie,” said
the handsome man, his eyes crawling over his face. “My name is Sebastian.”

Charlie looked at him
warily. Why was this man introducing himself?

Sebastian
continued,
his voice light and conversational. “I have no
grievance with you. I have no feelings regarding you whatsoever.”

He crouched in front of Charlie
and slowly ran the cold barrel of the gun down his face, cocking his head, his
dark eyes dancing with devilish mirth. “I'd just as happily fuck you as kill
you.” Charlie smothered a whimper. Did this man know his sexual orientation?
Was he threatening to rape him?

“However,” Sebastian
continued in the same chillingly affable way, “I am not here in my own right. I
am acting on behalf of another.”

He now sat down next to
Charlie and put his arm around him in an overtly friendly gesture. Charlie
flinched a little, but knew better than to try to move away.

“My employer is not a bad
person. He has never lied. He has never stolen another person’s property.”

Sebastian fixed his
reptilian gaze on Charlie. Why had he ever thought this man handsome? He was like
a male Medusa.
Beautiful but grotesque at the same time.
He should have known he was a dead man as soon as Sebastian first turned those
heartless eyes upon him.

“You, on the other hand,
are nothing but a common criminal. You have lied. You have stolen,” his words
were accusatory but his tone was still one of friendly banter. 

Charlie shivered, feeling
tears burning behind his eyes but he willed them away and gritted his teeth. If
he was going to die, he’d be damned if he’d give this bastard the satisfaction
of seeing him break down and beg.

“You have also threatened
something most precious…my employer’s reputation.
And why?
Who knows?
Because you felt like it?
Because you just couldn’t help yourself?”

Sebastian now smiled, that
wide loose grin, exposing gleaming teeth.

Charlie quailed.

He tightened his arm
around Charlie. “You are lucky, Charlie. I wish I could do this my way….I could
always say that
I
just couldn’t help myself?”

Charlie glared defiantly
at Sebastian. “That girl isn’t a piece of property! I haven’t done anything
wrong! If your employer is behind what happened to her, he is the criminal.”

Sebastian leapt up at this
and laughed out loud. “Aha!” he declared. “It speaks at last! Oh and what wise
words too!”

He spun back to Charlie
and yanked him to his feet, his voice now devoid of any humanity, “You are
mistaken. That girl was legitimately bought, sold and paid for. You should not
have interfered. And now you must take the consequences.”

Charlie felt a tear escape
and slip down his face. He whispered fiercely, “You won’t get away with this!”

“I’m afraid this isn’t the
movies Charlie, my boy. No-one is going to save you.”

Sebastian eyed him up like
a predator circling its helpless prey. “Take off your coat and empty all your
pockets,” he commanded.

Charlie had no choice but to do as instructed, knowing that the
invoice he had kept with him would seal his fate as surely as a death warrant.
Sebastian pounced on the paper and opened it out, his face indecently beatific
with delight as he read the information on it.

“This never existed,” he stated bluntly. He took out a lighter
and set fire to it. Charlie watched numbly as it turned to ashes and crumbled
to the carpet, the Christian mantra “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” tramping
stupidly through his brain.

He was shoved through to the kitchen, forced into a chair at the
table and given a pen and paper. Sebastian dictated a note, which declared his
misery and resulting desire to kill
himself
.  He
performed all this in a kind of daze, doing exactly as he was told, his psyche
now far removed, as though already severed from his body. By contrast, his
senses were queerly heightened and everything seemed sharper and more vivid,
from the metallic ticking of the kitchen clock to the whorls and striations in
the stained oak of the table.

Sebastian had set up another chair with a thin noose hanging
above it. Charlie recognised his own green washing line. How helpful of him, he
thought detachedly, to have rafters in his kitchen, just right for the job.