Denied to all but Ghosts (52 page)

“You two go on in, I’ll make sure you don’t
miss anything,” smiled an unconcerned Blanch.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing they say;
unfortunately, Blanch was not privy to any as her companions left
to walk her arm in arm towards the pavilion.

The band finished playing its latest
discordant rumpus when Blanch decided that they had been in the
tent long enough. As she flung back the canvas flap, her world
collapsed around her as she found the tent empty, save for a
discarded robe draped across a circular table. She noticed the open
canvas flap at the rear of the tent wafting in what breeze there
was that day. A cold shiver ran down her spine. She had failed in
her allotted task of looking after Beckett and Emily. Yet what if
that had been their intention all along?

Blanch dashed into the floral marquee and
Houghton was about to remonstrate with the interloper when he
recognised the diminutive frame of his sergeant.

“They’ve gone!” Blanch shouted breathlessly
at Houghton, “they’ve bloody well gone!”

Houghton roughly grabbed Blanch by her arms,
he was acutely aware of the disintegration of the calm that had
accompanied the day up until the revelation of the SOCO results.
Cavendish had become instantly introverted upon hearing the report
and Houghton had watched with fascination and alarm the physicality
of Cavendish’s thought processes as he tried to make sense of what
had been revealed. The smoking, the pacing, the muttering to
himself, for a normally calm man Cavendish was certainly animated
when he was unsettled, there was almost an hysterical intensity
oozing from his rigid body.

“What happened, Blanch?” asked Houghton as
calmly as he could, trying to maintain a degree of professional
level headedness. She took a deep breath and recounted the incident
at the fortuneteller's pavilion.

Houghton desperately tried to repudiate the
thoughts that were invading his head, that Beckett had absconded
with Emily, that she had taken her opportunity to flee and had
taken her besotted lover with her. So all along, she had been
playing games with them.

He felt sick. He felt sick with
disappointment and sick with rage. He despised Emily Spelman for
her abject deception and he despised Tom Beckett for his
fecklessness. He despised himself for being a complicit fool.

“Okay, Blanch,” said Houghton, “go check the
Focus, if it has gone put out a call, think of anything that’s
likely to get the local plods moving. They can’t have gone very
far, they’re most likely heading for Bristol, that’s Tom’s home
turf.”

“Right oh, Sir,” whatever emotions Blanch was
experiencing she hid them behind a mask of practised stoicism.

“Wait!” commanded Cavendish, “just wait a
moment, Blanch!”

“Wait for what, for Christ sake!” shouted
Houghton, his emotions bettering his self-restraint, “They’ve
fucked off!” he shouted angrily.

“We don’t know that, Josh, we don’t know
that,” declared Cavendish, attempting to convince Houghton of
Beckett’s innocence.

“I suppose Simeon and Miles have kidnapped
them!” lambasted Houghton.

“Possibly!” replied Cavendish with equal
volume though perhaps not the same degree of conviction.

“Oh, come on, Cavendish,” said Houghton in a
more moderate voice, “now you’re clutching at bloody straws! You
just don’t want to think that Tom has let you down, do you!”

Cavendish had no answer, he felt the same
sense of betrayal as Houghton but his foremost emotion after the
initial panic was one of utter disillusionment. He felt flat and
his vitality had leached viscerally from his body leaving him
listless and lost. He had no credible plan of action. He could not
bring himself to believe that Thomas would do this to him. Thomas
was his friend, wasn’t he?

It was an opportune moment for the youngest
member of the Montgomery family to enter the marquee. Edward ducked
into the tent and looked hastily around him before he spotted
Cavendish. Edward ran anxiously up to the inquisitor breathing
heavily and spoke quickly but persuasively.

“Herr Cavendish, you’ve got to come quick,
they’ve taken them. Your friends are in deep shit!”

“Who has them, Edward?” asked Cavendish
fervently.

“Jas and Brad!”

A smile of relief played across Cavendish’s
face, which confused the anxious Edward.

“You don’t understand, your two friends are
in real danger, Jas was really manic when she saw her arrive, God
know what she’ll do to her!”

Cavendish instantly recalled the heady aroma
of floral scent when he and Beckett had stood in the conservatory
conversing with Ralph and Estelle. He made a mental note to take
more interest in horticulture.

“Thank you, Edward,” beamed Cavendish, “you
lead the way. Ready Josh, Blanch?”

Houghton displayed an expression of
consternation induced by the eddy and flux of the revelations with
which he was being bombarded. Blanch betrayed no such emotion; her
jaw remained firmly and resolutely set. Nothing seemed to faze or
distract the girl from the Black Country.

Beckett’s entire essence was consumed by
terror. His breaths came in short violent bursts via his flared
nostrils; convinced he was going to suffocate, he gagged and heaved
against the noxious cloth, which had been thrust cruelly into his
mouth. The world became a macabre waking nightmare as the coarse
hood drew tighter around his face with each desperate gasp for air.
His hearing had become over sensitised so that he inwardly flinched
at each random sound as he was dragged from the clairvoyant's
marquee.

Tossed savagely onto a leather sofa, Beckett
felt what he thought to be the impact of another person next to
him. The Bristolian retched violently against the gag as the hood
was unexpectedly wrenched from his perspiring head; surely, now he
was about to die as he swallowed the gag deep to the back of his
throat. Yet without warning, the material was jerked from his
mouth.

In his state of utter horror, he had failed
to realise that his wrists had been bound and an agonised cry burst
from his parched mouth as the narrow plastic cable tie bit into his
flesh as he attempted to move his hands from behind his back.

Through eyes smarting with tears, he glimpsed
Emily perched to his right, her petrified countenance replicating
his own. He vaguely understood that he was in the IKEA room at
Yoxter Manor where he and Cavendish had interviewed the Montgomery
children a lifetime ago.

Posing haughtily before him was the
distinctive young woman he recognised as Jasmine Montgomery and a
young man with a crew cut hairstyle. He heard Emily gasp with
dismay as she discerned the presence of Brad Patterson.

“Why did you have to come here!” spat Jasmine
at Emily, “you should have stayed away, you stupid whore! Why did
you have to come back to taunt poor Brad?”

Jasmine's eyes, which Beckett had once
described as alluring and innocent, now possessed a psychotic
intensity that chilled his soul. Jasmine turned her attention to
Beckett.

“I think we know what we should do with
Sundance,” she said unconsciously using the epithet she had given
him during the Cavendish interview.

“What, here?” asked Brad, “what about your
parents?”

“They are busy with their fete; you won’t see
them all day. And no, you dummy, we’ve a cellar, Mummy would hate
to get blood over the parquet! We do have a freezer you could
use.”

“Jeez, Jas. That took planning and
preparation!” exclaimed Brad. Jasmine scoffed at her boyfriend’s
negativity,

“Oh, you’re so pathetic sometimes, always got
an excuse, do I have to do everything!” Brad appeared to be wounded
by Jasmine’s baiting. “Get the old slag on her feet,” she callously
ordered, “I knew we shouldn’t have left her in Wells, you and your
‘saving her for later’ crap.”

Brad grasped Emily by the tops of her bare
arms, hauled her to her feet, and stood behind her, pinning her
restrained arms to her side. Jasmine picked up a pair of dress
making scissors that lay innocuously on top of the glass top coffee
table and repeatedly snapped the scissors together in front of her
fervid face as she sidled up to the distraught Doctor. Savagely
grabbing a handful of Emily’s long hair, Jasmine bunched the soft
tress it into a crude pigtail.

“Keep still, bitch,” Jasmine hissed at the
flinching Emily, “I’d hate to cut your pretty face, Brad wouldn’t
like that!”

The smiling Montgomery girl maliciously began
to shear at the base of the pigtail, drawing blood as she
carelessly sliced into Emily’s scalp. Emily screeched with pain and
ignominy as her luxuriant hair was hacked from her head. The
frantic and spiteful despoiling repeated until the floor at Emily’s
feet lay strewn with bloody hair. Emily sobbed unashamedly as
Jasmine gleefully cut the shoulder straps of her striped dress and
tugged the fabric over her blue bra down to her waist.

Thomas Beckett could tolerate Emily's
humiliation no longer. He had watched with a resigned fatalism as
Jasmine severed Emily’s gorgeous hair but the final violation of
the dress was his tipping point. Like the action hero he most
certainly wasn’t he sprang furiously from the sofa and head down
screamed as he rammed into the side of a stunned Brad, who was
still restraining Emily’s arms.

Brad released Emily under the impetus of the
charge and lurched against the coffee table. However, Brad, the
failed college quarterback, commendably retained his footing and
swiftly dispensed two sharp punches to the photographer’s ribcage
before placing him in a headlock with his left arm.

The coup de grace was melted out as Brad
smashed his knee into Beckett’s down turned face, stifling the
older man’s shouts of rage. There was a sickening thud of compacted
flesh and bone as Beckett crumpled inertly to the floor.

Jasmine laughed demonically at the sight of
the unmoving photographer, thoroughly invigorated by the display of
savagery.

“Poor Sundance! Put the whore over the arm of
the couch!” shouted Jasmine at Brad. He read his girlfriend’s
approval of his handling of the Beckett attack and smiled liked a
eulogised schoolboy.

Emily was by now incapable of making any
sound as Brad bundled her crudely over the left arm of the white
leather sofa, nearest the door, and Jasmine forced Emily’s blooded
face down into the leather cushion. Brad gave a whoop of delight as
he posed by Emily’s bottom as it rested over the arm of the sofa
and eagerly grasped the hem of her dress in preparation for his
overdue assault upon the academic. He looked to Jasmine for
permission to continue and she nodded her head vociferously.

Estelle Montgomery was still wondering if she
had really left her wrap in the lounge as her husband had
suggested. She was, however, pleased to escape the gaggle of
visitors outside to gain a few minutes of peace and quiet. Estelle
strolled sublimely unaware into the room, followed dutifully by
Ralph.

Despite her concerns, she was pleased with
the way the fete was progressing; her expectations were that the
charity receipts would by far exceed last year’s record-breaking
takings. Estelle came to a stuttering halt, shocked at the vignette
that greeted her. She was at a loss to describe the inexplicable
scene depicted before her in the sanctity of her own home.

“Oh, I say...,” mumbled a wide-eyed
Ralph.

“What is going on here!” boomed an incensed
Estelle, not believing the implications of what was about to
unfold.

Her eyes flitted furiously revealing the
bullet points of the debauched scene. An anonymous man lay face
down in a pool of his own blood leaking over her precious parquet
flooring. The puzzling array of strewn hair leading to the
whimpering woman held prostrate over the arm of her sofa.

Brad froze, one hand still gripping the hem
of Emily’s dress, now pulled high to join the tatters of the top
half of her garment gathered about her waist. His other hand
clenched the exposed flesh of her inner right thigh as he
frenziedly struggled to pry her disobliging legs apart.

Jasmine however exhibited no such rigor as
she careful raised her head away from the attentions of the
writhing victim and cooly regarded her mother.

“I thought you were busy, Mummy. It’s
alright, everything here is under control.”

“What do you mean, you stupid girl. Let that
woman go at once!” demanded Estelle.

“Oh, come on, Brad,” said Jasmine petulantly,
“let’s take the bitch up to my room, maybe we won’t get interrupted
there!”

Estelle scurried across to Jasmine, grabbed
her arm and roughly pulled her away from Emily and to her feet. The
daughter stood querulously before her incensed mother as Estelle
raised her hand high above her head, priming her hand to dispense
the slap to her wayward daughter.

“Not so fast, Mrs M,” insisted Brad. Estelle
distractedly turned her attention towards Brad and found herself
staring down the barrel of his black Browning pistol. Brad smiled
as he gestured Estelle and Ralph to stand at the opposite end of
the sofa, nearest the French windows that looked out onto the
secluded walled garden of the manor.

Empowered by the handgun, Brad strutted
cockily around the room; his girlfriend had lost her scowl and
smiled sweetly at Brad who, as a sign of devotion to his
sweetheart, indifferently kicked the insensate Beckett in the face
before swaggering across to stand in front of the French
window.

Jasmine leant down to Emily and pulled the
distraught academic from the sofa whilst retrieving the scissors
from the coffee table.

“Come, Bradley. Let’s go upstairs.”