Death Trap (39 page)

The questions bounced inside her mind, her frustration at not being able to hit the street to get answers pumping her blood pressure higher and higher. She needed to get out of here. She needed . . . The muscles in her body tightened. Her head jacked off the wall.

Of course. The one person who can get me out of here.

Rio strode over to the blue cell door, looked through the tiny observational window and shouted, ‘Officer. Officer.’

She shouted until she heard footsteps echo in the corridor outside, then she stepped back as a lean face peered at her through the resistant glass.

‘What?’ The single word was laced with annoyance.

‘I’m ready to make that phone call I’m entitled to.’

After she made her call Rio couldn’t sit down because she was worried about Nikki.

fifty-four

8:10 p.m.

Nikki eased off the mattress on the floor. With bare feet, she walked lightly to the door, pressed her ear against it and waited. No sounds. Quiet. Her hand formed around the round, brass handle. Gently turned. The door opened with a click that sounded like the accelerated thud of her heart. Once again she waited. Then she pushed the door out into the dark corridor. Waited. The left side of her head tilted slightly forwards to catch the sound of Calum moving. Quiet. She knew this wasn’t going to be easy because there was only one other room here, so it must also be doubling up as the place that Calum slept in.

After finding out about Ade, Calum had decided it was best for both of them to call it an early night.

Ade, Ade, Ade.

His name twisted mournfully in her head as she remembered what had happened to him. Didn’t matter what anyone else told her, she knew that he’d ended up dead in the river because of her. Nikki hurt so bad, but it also gave her the courage to do what she had to do. She crept out into the black beyond her room, kept going on tiptoes until she got to the door of the other room. Relief flooded her when she saw that the door was fully back against the wall, open. She slid her body against the wall on the opposite side to the door, took a deep breath, then poked her head around the corner to look inside the room.

It too was bathed in dark, and Calum was asleep on the chair behind the desk. His head was back, tilted to the side, a soft nasal beat of air moving in and out of his body. She suspected that he’d taken one of those pills from the bottle she’d seen him holding in the toilet earlier – probably something heavy-duty that took away the pain and made him drowsy.

Nikki saw what she wanted, sitting pretty on top of the filing cabinet against the wall. She moved quietly, but with an urgency to get this over and done. She got to the cabinet, sweat slicking the skin between her nose and mouth. Her hand shot out . . .

‘What’s up Nikki?’

Calum’s voice made her jump, her hand dropping back. She turned to see him staring with hooded eyes at her. Apart from his eyes he didn’t move, remaining relaxed and easy in the chair.

‘I couldn’t sleep – couldn’t stop thinking about Ade.’ He started to move, but she stretched her palm at him. ‘No, please. Don’t. I just needed to walk around, it’s what I do sometimes to clear my head.’

Calum eased back into the chair. ‘If you want to talk—’

‘No. What’s the point? He’s not coming back.’

With her head hanging low, her hands folded in front of her, Nikki made her way back out into the corridor. Once back in the other room she laid down, hands clasped together, on top of the duvet. Alert she stayed on her back for fifteen minutes to give Calum enough time to either realise what she’d done or go back to sleep. He never came. That’s when she looked down at what she held: one of the three mobile phones she’d observed Calum using.

Nikki quickly punched in a number. On the fourth ring the line connected.

‘It’s Nicola . . .’

9:07 p.m.

A full hour after making her call Rio’s cell opened. The same officer who had appeared at the window stood in the doorway. His expression was even more surly than before. She was so tempted to give him a dressing down, infused with every regulation she remembered about how the police should interact with the public – including those housed within the four walls of a cell. So tempted . . .

‘I take it I’m free to go.’

‘Collect your stuff from the duty sergeant at the main desk.’

Minutes later, once she’d signed the necessary paperwork and collected her things from the desk sergeant, she allowed herself to turn to the man who had managed to get her out of there.

Stephen Foster.

He waited until they were outside before turning to her and saying, ‘Never thought I’d see the day when you’d be calling on me for help.’

But Rio didn’t have time to talk, only time to check her mobile. Her finger tapped the screen.

Password.

Activate screen.

No ‘safe’ text from Calum.

‘Is everything alright?’ the lawyer asked, but she ignored him.

Rio double-checked the phone. The last ‘safe’ text was at 8:00 p.m. Nothing for 9:00 p.m. Calum never missed a check-in. Something was wrong. She called Calum. The phone rang and rang – six times – before connecting.

Voicemail.

Rio started running without thanking Stephen Foster.

fifty-five

10:03 p.m.

When Rio found the security door downstairs leading to Calum’s office on the latch she knew that her gut instinct had been right – something was wrong. She didn’t pause, didn’t let herself think of the grisly scene that might be awaiting her upstairs if the professional killer had finally earned his blood money. Rio flicked the door further back with the tip of her shoe, swallowed a huge intake of air as she pushed inside. Her gaze swept the tunnel of darkness that was the staircase. Empty.

She took the steps one at a time. A noise came from out of nowhere, behind her. She swung around, keeping her footing balanced. No one there. She realised what the sound was – two people talking, their voices fading into the distance outside. Her chest rippled with the uneven air she was pulling in. She twisted back around, treading on a step that had no business creaking at a time like this.

Rio held back, waiting to see if there was any reaction from inside to the noise, but it remained eerily quiet. She held back again when she reached the top. Counted –
One. Two. Three.
– Shoved forwards ready to take on anything and everything that waited in the dark.

But there was no one there, which didn’t mean that they weren’t concealed, ready to take her down. Cautiously she put one foot slowly in front of the other, towards the room where Nikki should be sleeping. The door was closed when she got there. Rio kicked the door and danced slightly to the side, but still with a view inside the room. No sounds. No one on the mattress. No Nikki.

This was bad. Really bad.

She got back into the corridor and picked up her pace as she reached Calum’s office. Rio found it hard to keep the emotions away this time knowing what she might find inside. Someone who she’d once counted as one of her closest friends . . . No, he was so much more to her than that, probably dead because she’d brought a crap load of trouble to his door. Rio ditched the overwhelming feelings as she thrust the door back. Her heart hammered when she saw Calum tied to his chair lying on its side on the floor. She rushed over to him. His mouth was covered with metallic tape.

He wasn’t moving.

Please God let him be alive.

She felt for the pulse in Calum’s neck, sighed with relief when it beat against the pad of her finger. She pulled the tape from his mouth.

She shook his shoulders gently. ‘Calum, wake up.’

No movement. She shook him harder – still no response. She slapped his cheek. He moaned. She slapped the other side of his face. He let out a groggy sound.

The volume in her voice grew. ‘Calum, you have to get up. Now. Nikki’s gone.’

His head moved, his dark hair clouding around and over his face. She raised her hand again as one of his green eyes popped open. Her hand dropped. She moved around the chair and untied his hands.

‘Are you injured?’

He lay on the ground, both eyes now fully opened. He groaned as he shook his head. ‘Don’t know . . . how they got . . .’ He sucked in much needed oxygen between words.

‘What do you mean
they
?’

‘I know you’ve been desperate to get me on my back, but can you help me up?’

It took Rio less than a minute to right the chair and have him sitting in it. Once he was upright she saw the blood at the back of his head.

‘Have you got a towel or something—?’

‘Forget that, I’m OK. They must’ve disabled the security system. One of them coshed me on the back of the head—’

‘You keep saying
they
?’

‘There were two of them, dressed from head to toe in black, wearing hoodies and scarves over their faces.’

Confusion pulled Rio’s features. ‘The hitman was working on his own as far as we know—’

‘That’s the usual MO, a lone pro who relies on no one but himself.’

Rio covered her mouth as her mind turned this way and that. If this wasn’t the hitman . . . What the hell was going on here?

‘Check the top of the cabinet for a mobile phone,’ Calum said, as he gingerly rubbed his fingers into the blood on the back of his head.

‘Nothing here,’ she answered after she checked.

‘Bollocks.’ Calum cursed some more. ‘Earlier I found Nikki in the room as I was sleeping. She’d just found out about her boyfriend.’

This was going from bad to worse.

‘She said she was walking around because she was upset and needed to think and like I fool I believed her cock-and-bull story, but I suspect she came in to swipe one of my phones. Check next door.’

Less than a minute later Rio was back with the mobile. ‘I found it amongst the bedding.’ Rio punched it on and made a noise with disgust when it went straight to the home screen. ‘I thought you were meant to be one of the best security consultants in the business, so why isn’t this locked?’

Slowly he stood up. ‘It’s one of my back-up phones, so I don’t use it very often.’

But Rio wasn’t listening as she tapped the phone icon and checked out the recent calls history. The number she found made her breath catch in her throat.

She gazed over at Calum. ‘This isn’t good if this is what I think it is.’

‘Who did she call?’

‘I’ll tell you on the way. We need to move now because there might not be much time.’

11:05 p.m.

There was no welcoming light on the porch of 20 Beacon House, Peckham, SE15 when Rio and Calum stood outside it this time.

‘Let me do all the talking,’ Rio instructed Calum.

The hallway light came on after Rio pressed the bell. The slap of backless slippers sounded inside, moving towards the door. It didn’t open but Rio felt the eyes that observed her through the peephole.

‘Move away from my home,’ the voice inside commanded.

‘I can’t do that, Mrs Ibraheem. Nicola Bell is missing and I think that your son, Chiwetel, may have taken her. He was very angry when I saw him at the coroner’s, threatening to kill Nicola.’

‘My son would never do something like that—’

‘We both know that Chiwetel is involved in all types of rough trade.’

The accusation pushed the other woman’s voice higher. ‘Go away and leave me alone to grieve for my boy.’

‘If you don’t open the door, how are you going to feel when your other son is back behind bars again? And believe me I’m going to make it my business to make sure that happens if he touches one grain of hair on that girl’s head.’

Silence. Then a thud as a bolt was pulled back. Finally the door opened. Ade’s mother looked drained, the flesh sagging on her face. She wore a green and white headscarf tied at the back and a caramel coloured dressing coat hugged her body.

As Rio stepped inside she turned to Calum. ‘Wait for me here.’

‘But—’

Rio quietly closed the door. The other woman stood her ground, not extending a welcome further into her home.

‘Nikki phoned here earlier.’

Mrs Ibraheem’s teeth twisted into her bottom lip. Then, ‘I told her what I’m telling you; stay away, leave me alone. But she was so upset . . . The Quran says ‘‘Allah does not guide the wrongdoers’’, and it would have been wrong of me not to listen to her, so I listened, let her fill me with her words of love for my son.’ Her hand swept up one side of her headscarf. ‘But, Allah forgive me, I know that she is the cause of why I’m going to have to bury my Adeyemi.’

‘Did she tell you where she was?’

‘I never asked her to, she just told me. I repeated the address to her to make sure I had heard right. And Chiwetel was here—’

‘Where do you think he took her?’

Tears formed in the bottom of her eyes and Rio felt an aching sympathy for her. ‘He’s not a bad boy. He just got so angry when his father left to stay in Nigeria. He felt abandoned . . . I did the best I could.’