Death Surge (31 page)

‘But there’s nothing shameful in mental illness,’ he said.

‘Isn’t there? Don’t you believe it! Once people know that they look at you more warily. No one will trust you, and they certainly won’t give you money for sponsorship.’

‘Scott Masefield seems to have done all right.’ That earned him a glowering look.

‘He and his crew are all veterans,’ Stevington snarled with resentment. ‘Everyone makes an exception in their case. Casualties of war, post traumatic stress disorder and all that. But it’s different for everyone else.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that you were a patient at the hospital?’ Horton said, injecting incredulity into his voice, while silently thinking that Stevington should be committed and right now. He caught a flash of anger in the dark eyes.

‘See, even you don’t understand,’ he cried, but his indignation didn’t fool Horton. There had to be something more that Johnnie had seen, something that had really scared him, and it couldn’t just have been a man, but a man doing something. Rapidly, he recalled what Stevington had said earlier.
Dad struggled on alone in a dead end job, incarcerated in a steel shed, hating every minute of it but not having the guts to break loose. It drove him mad
. And then he knew.

‘Was your
father
a patient?’

Stevington eyed him keenly but didn’t speak.

As the dark shadows of the buildings in the grounds of the former Royal Naval hospital at Haslar slid by on their right, Horton said, ‘Your father suffered from depression and was admitted to the hospital. Johnnie and his mates saw you in the grounds with him.’ But that wasn’t enough to make Stevington kill them. Or was it? Not unless Stevington’s father had killed himself in those grounds and Stevington had been there at the time.

Following Horton’s train of thought, Stevington said, ‘If the police had discovered that I had been there that night they would have jumped to the conclusion that I had something to do with his death. There would have been an investigation, media interest, I’d have lost my sponsors and I would have lost the chance of competing in the race because I’d have had to hang around and answer questions.’

‘And for that three men have died!’ Horton cried.

‘They don’t matter! What does is the race,’ Stevington answered in earnest, almost beseeching Horton to understand.

‘And winning it at all costs,’ Horton said more calmly as he rapidly tried to assess how best to handle the man in front of him.

‘Yes,’ Stevington replied almost triumphantly. ‘My father didn’t want me to go. He thought I’d be killed. He begged me to stay.’

‘And that meant making a commitment. You don’t much care for those, do you, Roland?’

‘No, and I don’t think you do either.’

But Stevington was wrong about that.

‘It means making sacrifices, compromising,’ Stevington said as he slowed in an increasingly rough sea. Soon they’d be drawing level with Fort Monckton. ‘I’d be trapped. He couldn’t grasp what yacht racing meant to me. I was due to sail to La Rochelle the next day. I was getting the boat ready. I went to see him before sailing but when I got there he was dead, hanging from a tree in the grounds. There was nothing I could do.’

‘You could have stayed and got his body down.’ Horton didn’t believe him. He knew what had happened. Stevington had killed his father and had made it look like suicide. Johnnie might not have witnessed that, but he’d seen the body swinging and a figure looming in the bushes. The tales of mad people haunting the grounds had assailed him. He thought he’d seen a ghost; he’d taken fright and ran out. The others had followed. Johnnie had been glad to be arrested. It had shocked him, and he was too frightened to say what he’d seen fearing he’d be ridiculed or haunted further. He put it out of his mind and made an attempt to change his life. The nightmare apparition of a man’s body dangling from a tree and perhaps a hunched figure beside it had receded. It had never happened.

‘There wasn’t time to get him down,’ Stevington said. ‘I couldn’t do anything anyway. I heard a noise, and that’s when I saw them run into the grounds. I stepped back behind the shrubbery but one of them turned at the sound and looked straight at me. I heard him tell the others that the place was giving him the creeps and to get out. They didn’t want to go. They argued. But he ran out into the driveway.’

And the others had followed. Roland Stevington had escaped the security cameras because he was already inside the grounds and had been for some time. He’d also been permitted entry because his father was a patient.

‘But that’s not how it happened, Roland. You killed your father because you despised his weakness and you thought his dependency would stifle you and prevent you from doing what you wanted, not to mention that on his death you would inherit his house, which would help fund your passion, sailing.’

He thought of Harriet Eames falling for this man. Was she in love with Stevington? He’d seen them kiss, but that was nothing. At least he hoped to God it meant nothing. Because the evening he’d seen them together, Stevington had left her to dump Stuart’s body in the boat house and Tyler’s in the moat. He wondered how she was going to take the news and if she and Stevington had made love before he’d done the deed. He said, ‘Your determination and bravery instil a kind of hero worship in others, which you used to trap Johnnie.’

He thought with disgust how Johnnie had been duped by this evil bastard. Curbing his fury as best he could and forcing his voice to sound normal, he continued, ‘You strangled your father, then you took off into the night on your yacht. When did you hear the official news about his death?’

They were rounding Gilkicker Point. Horton could just about make out the curved mound of Gilkicker Fort where he’d been earlier. But suddenly Stevington swung the motorboat shoreward, and Horton, with a quickening heartbeat, realized this was their destination.

‘Days later, I forget when, but by then I was racing and couldn’t come back. I left it to the lawyers to deal with, they were his executors. We had no family.’

It was dark, but Stevington, an accomplished yachtsman, had no trouble taking the small craft into the shore and up on to the beach. Silencing the engine and jumping off he said, ‘My father was weak, ill and unhappy. It was a merciful release.’

‘And you despise weakness. Yes, I can see that,’ Horton answered thoughtfully, as though he was seriously considering and accepting this. And with his father dead Roland was free to pursue his goal. The winning of the Velux 5 Oceans race. And he did win it, and more in between, always sailing alone and making sure to guard against close commitments and to destroy anyone he thought would stand in his way.

Horton jumped off the boat but left Stevington to haul it further up the shingle beach on his own. He didn’t need any assistance. Now that Horton knew Johnnie was inside the fort he could attempt to overcome Stevington, but he didn’t know exactly where he was hidden. He could call in and get the huge ruinous building searched but that would take time and there was a chance that Stevington was decoying him here. He had to be certain. Stevington was counting on that.

He produced a torch. ‘Shall we go?’

Horton noted Stevington didn’t go back on to the boat to fetch the cool box. Perhaps he had decided he could give Johnnie what was in it once he had the young man on the boat, and that meant Stevington was counting on not having him along as a passenger. Horton fell into step beside Stevington, their feet crunching on the stones, the drizzling rain sweeping in off the sea behind them as they headed towards the looming dark curved structure.

‘It’s an amazing place,’ Stevington said, as though he was a tour guide. ‘Unique in defence fortification because so many important innovations in coastal defence were trialled here, including the use of electric searchlights for defence of the batteries at night. I’m glad it’s going to be restored, even if it is for houses and apartments. They haven’t got very far with it; it’s costing an absolute fortune.’

Stevington veered to the left and began to climb the earth embankment that had been put in front of the fort in 1904. Horton followed, his mind racing. Wherever Johnnie was hidden in this edifice he hoped it wasn’t underground, because in order to save him and get out of this alive he’d have to overcome his own dread of confined spaces.

‘Did you promise Johnnie that you and he might join up to race together?’ Johnnie would have looked up to Stevington. He suspected that Stevington had told Johnnie that he had the talent to become a world-renowned sailor. It would have been so simple; the lad loved sailing. And perhaps he craved the ultimate challenge, the danger and the exhilaration of pitting his wits against the most dangerous seas in the World. Stevington had offered to mentor Johnnie, but he’d told him it had to be kept a secret until they were ready to announce it to Andreadis and others when the time was right. When had Johnnie seen through this? When had the shock and then the bitter disappointment that he’d been duped dawned on him? Horton felt cold and sick with anger, but he couldn’t let it show. Not yet.

He said, ‘You saw Johnnie Oslow on Andreadis’s yacht at Porto Cervo on the Costa Smeralda. You’re well-known in the sailing world, a respected world-class hero, an accomplished yachtsman, and in front of you was a man who could possibly tell the world that you had been in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital one night seven years ago when your father had died. You couldn’t be sure he hadn’t recognized you. And you needed to know if he’d been in touch with the others and told them. But why did you have to kill them?’

‘I couldn’t take the chance. Besides, what does it matter? Ryan Spencer was a thief, a layabout, living off benefits and doing nothing with his life except fathering children and letting the state pay for them. He’s no loss. Tyler Godfray was a mummy’s boy who thought he was tough but blubbed like a child, just like Ryan.’

Horton stiffened. God, he’d like to make this tough guy blub, but he guessed that no matter what he did to him, if he ever got the chance, it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. ‘And Stuart Jayston?’

‘The same. Flash little tyke who couldn’t even wipe his nose without running to mummy and daddy.’

Horton’s fists clenched. He wanted to smash them into Stevington’s face, but he couldn’t. First he had to be sure that Johnnie was safe. He said, ‘But Johnnie was different.’

‘I knew the boy had something because I’ve watched him racing. He reminds me of myself when I was his age,’ Stevington tossed over his shoulder. They were almost at the top of the earth embankment now. It was slippery underfoot because of the rain.

‘He’s got guts. Even when I told him he’d never get out alive he didn’t plead or cry. He just nodded and said, “I guessed as much.”’

And that was what had saved him thus far. That and the fact that Stevington wanted him as a scapegoat for the murders.

Stevington peeled back a large piece of wood resting against the wire fence at the top of the embankment and stepped through a gap in the wire he’d probably cut himself. Horton slipped and quickly recovered himself as Stevington turned at the sound. The rain was driving off the sea in greater force now, chilling Horton to the bone despite his leather jacket and it being August. Beneath him was what appeared at first to be a large semicircle of blackness but in reality was a courtyard, or rather a parade ground. To the right was what remained of the gun casements, facing the sea, and underneath them were ruins that had most probably been the ammunition stores. To the left he could see the row of derelict houses that must have been the barrack rooms and offices and an entrance to the fort from the northern side. Stevington descended, and Horton followed. Crossing the courtyard Stevington paused at a flight of stone steps that led up the three-storey building, most of which was open to the elements. To the left of the steps though was a green door, which was padlocked. Stevington retrieved a key from his pocket and opened it.

Horton had a moment’s doubt that Johnnie was here. He said, ‘You were taking a chance that the builders wouldn’t want access.’

‘I checked. They’ve postponed the work for a few weeks. Run into some trouble on the development.’

He gestured Horton inside. Stevington’s torch picked out a large empty room with a gaping hole of a fireplace on Horton’s right. As Stevington led him further inside, Horton’s eyes restlessly swept the area. There didn’t appear to be anything left inside this part of the building that he could use as a weapon. They turned into a small room before stepping through what must have been a corridor into another largish room. The blackness was oppressive. Horton felt it clawing at his throat. His fists clenched, and he could feel the sweat on his back.

Stevington stopped. His torch beam swept the room, and Horton’s gaze followed it eagerly. There was a rusting chain on a wheel, a kind of pulley mechanism, but it was too far away and he didn’t know if the chain would be easily dislodged from the pulley. Quickly, he looked back at the beam of the torch, which was now shining into the hole of the fireplace. And there huddled in it was Johnnie, his feet and hands bound and his mouth gagged with black tape. His eyes were closed, and they didn’t open even when Stevington’s torch beam alighted on his face, which was lean and filthy but unbeaten.

Horton controlled his fury sufficiently to say, ‘Is he alive?’

‘He was yesterday.’

And now that Horton had seen Johnnie, what was Stevington going to do with him? ‘I want to check.’

‘Please yourself.’

Horton stepped forward, holding his breath; he was giving Stevington the perfect opportunity to bring the torch crashing down on the back of his head and knock him unconscious; then Stevington would strangle him, just as he had Ryan, Tyler and Stuart. Horton had a fraction of a second to act. He held his breath and steeled himself for the attack. He leaned forward and, sensing the movement behind him, quickly dashed to his right, fell to the ground and rolled over, reaching inside his leather jacket for the large stone he’d grabbed from the top of the earth embankment as he’d slipped. It wasn’t much, but it might buy him time – that, and the handful of grit he scooped from the floor with his other hand.