Deviance. London Psychic Book 3 (12 page)

"Only the abattoir setting," Blake said, pulling out his phone. He opened a map of the area. "Meat processing is mainly done outside the city these days, but an older map might help us with where the abattoirs once stood." He was silent for a moment and then showed Jamie the phone. "Look how close we are to the East London Crematorium," he said. "If you had to dispose of body parts, this would be a good place to do it."

"We could split up," Jamie said. "You can stay here and watch for anyone collecting the package and I'll go to the crematorium and see what I can find."
 

Blake raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? You want to go alone to the crematorium?"

Jamie shrugged. "The dead don't bother me. It's the living I worry about."

The buzz of a motorbike grew louder as it came up the hill and then pulled to a stop outside the post office. It was a courier bike with the logo of a well-known firm on the side. The leather-clad figure dismounted and then entered the delivery office.
 

"This must be it," Jamie said. She pulled on her helmet and sat astride the bike. "You coming?"
 

Blake grinned. "You really know how to give a boy a good time."
 

He pulled her spare helmet over his head, sitting behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. The delivery man emerged with the brown paper package under his arm. He put it in one of the side panniers and headed off down the road. Jamie pulled out behind him, keeping him in sight as they drove further east.
 

The shops changed into housing estates, evidence of homelessness and job seekers in the rundown yards and people hanging out on the corners. Jamie stayed well back, but with the volume of traffic even this far out, it was unlikely the courier would be suspicious. He was only doing his job.
 

It wasn't long before the courier turned into an industrial estate with only one road in and out. Jamie pulled over at the edge of the road and watched as the bike turned out of sight around a corner towards what looked like a derelict warehouse. The courier opened a roller door, put the package inside, pulled the door back down, and then drove back out of the park. He glanced at Jamie and Blake as he turned from the estate, but with the nonchalance of live-and-let-live London, where anything goes.

As the courier roared away up the street, Jamie drove down to the warehouse, turning off the bike's engine outside the roller-door. Blake dismounted and pulled his helmet off and Jamie followed suit, pulling a flashlight from her pannier.
 

They stood for a moment, listening for any sound. All they could hear was the noise of the city. There was nothing from inside the building.

Blake reached down and pulled up the roller door to reveal an empty loading bay. The package sat inside the entrance.
 

"Leave it," Jamie whispered as Blake reached for it. Her years of working for the police had honed a sense of when something wasn't quite right and this place made her skin crawl.
 

There was a door at the back of the loading bay. Jamie pointed at it and Blake nodded. Together, they walked quietly towards it.

The door was double padlocked, but that didn't deter Blake.
 

"Misspent youth," he explained as he picked up a short metal pipe, swinging it a little to heft its weight. Wielding it like a hammer, it only took a few sharp blows to smash off the padlocks. The sound of the metal clashing resounded in the loading bay, and it would definitely warn anyone inside of their presence.
 

The door opened silently at Jamie's push, evidence that it had been oiled recently which seemed out of place in a derelict building. It was dark inside, but she could sense a wide space in front of them and the sharp lines of machinery loomed from the shadows. A metallic smell pervaded the air. As Blake stepped in behind Jamie, he grasped the door frame, his knuckles white with tension.
 

"This has to be the place," he whispered. "I recognize the smell of old blood."

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Jamie realized the machinery was for meat processing and packaging. Chains and hooks, winches used for heavy carcasses, blades for cutting, crushing weights. She shivered a little, imagining the place spattered in the blood of dead animals. She turned on the flashlight quickly and the beam reflected off shiny surfaces within. The equipment was spotless and left pristine, although a thin layer of dust had settled over it, evidence of time passing since the last animal was processed here.

"This isn't the slaughter room," Blake whispered. "We need to go deeper into the factory."

If she had still been in the police, it would have been well past the time to call for backup, but Jamie knew they wouldn't come for an empty, disused abattoir with a bad feeling about it. Her rational side understood the craziness of following a hunch based on Blake's psychic vision, but he had been right before and they had no other leads on finding O.
 

She shone the torch around the large processing area, finally locating a door behind one of the machines.
 

"That way," she said, walking with light feet across the warehouse, her senses alert for any sound. It was so quiet here, too quiet. Blake's hand found hers and squeezed gently as they crossed the space.
 

"We'll find her," he said, but his voice was shaky.
 

What had he seen in the vision that had affected him so much? Jamie wondered. And would they face it again in reality behind this door?

There were signs next to the door indicating a cold zone and the safety equipment necessary to enter the slaughterhouse rooms. Jamie pushed the handle down and the door swung open.
 

She shone the beam inside with her arm outstretched, panning it around the long room. The floor and walls were tiled and meat hooks hung down on chains from the ceiling. A long metal table stood in the middle with grooves down the sides and a drain underneath. Jamie couldn't help but imagine the table running with blood, crimson circling the drain as life ebbed away.
 

A dripping sound echoed through the space.

"That's water from a cooling system," Jamie said. "If the place is deserted, it shouldn't be on."

She stepped into the room and walked past the table heading for the shadows at the far end. Blake followed close behind, his breath coming fast. The silence was oppressive, as if the walls of the building were closing in on them, ready to crush them into pieces. Jamie couldn't stand the quiet any longer.
 

"Olivia," she called, her voice echoing in the chamber. "Is anyone here?"

As the echoes died away, they waited in silence but no noise came back except the dripping of water. They walked to the back of the space and found two enormous fridge doors. There was a low buzzing noise, evidence that the fridges were running.
 

Blake pulled at one of the doors and it swung open, an automatic light coming on inside.
 

"Oh no," he whispered as he saw what was within.

"What is it?" Jamie yanked the handle, pulling the door fully open so she could see inside.
 

A metal table sat against one side of the fridge. On top of it were several pieces of flesh, each covered in a tattoo. There were two long strips, one tattooed with a rainbow that Jamie recognized from the picture of Nicholas Randolph. She pushed down the nausea that rose within her. She had been at so many crime scenes, but there was something macabre about this one. The pieces of flesh were clinically clean. But for the tattoos, they wouldn't have known this had once been a man.
 

"I have to call it in," Jamie said. "This is a police matter now."

"What about the other fridge?" Blake gestured towards the other door, his face sickly pale in the harsh light. Jamie gulped down her hesitation and yanked it open, ready to face whatever horrors might be within.

As the automatic light flickered on, Jamie saw the thin figure huddled in the corner, arms wrapped around herself, head drooped to one side, features pale with a blueish tinge.

Jamie rushed inside and pulled O into her arms, feeling for the pulse at her neck. There was a faint beat there, but it was slow and unsteady. Blake blocked the fridge door open and together they carried O's unconscious form out into the main slaughter area. Blake pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around O's body and head, pulling her close to his warm frame as he rubbed her arms.
 

Jamie pulled out her phone and called for an ambulance and the police.
 

***

Several hours later, Jamie and Blake sat in the Royal London Hospital emergency waiting room. They had given detailed statements to the officers in charge of the scene, and after Jamie had spoken to Missinghall, they'd been allowed to leave.

Jamie tapped her foot on the floor, a rhythmic sound of impatience.

"They'll tell us when she's awake," Blake said, putting his hand on her arm. "There's nothing more we can do."

"I hope she remembers the bastard who took her." Jamie stood up and paced the floor. "Missinghall said the abattoir was clean. No prints. Just a lot of bleach. Whoever it was knew police procedure."

A nurse poked her head around the doorway.
 

"Olivia's awake. She wants to see you, Ms Brooke."

Jamie looked over at Blake and he nodded his head.
 

"It's OK, I'll stay here and wait for you. She doesn't even know me."

"I'll make sure she understands about your part in finding her," Jamie said. She followed the nurse out of the room and down a white corridor to the ward area. The smell of antiseptic reminded Jamie too much of the morgues she had frequented as part of the homicide team. It was a smell that masked disease and decay in her mind, not a scent of health and wellness. The nurse pointed out a tiny room where a police officer stood outside the door.

"Ten minutes," she warned. "Then she has to rest."

Jamie gave her name to the officer, and after he had checked her ID, she stepped inside. O lay curled up in the bed, wrapped in warming blankets around her body and over her head in a hood. Her eyes were bright blue against her ice-pale skin, but her lips had a pinkish hue now. She would make it.
 

"How you doing?" Jamie asked, sitting by the bed.
 

"Better than earlier," O whispered, her voice hoarse. "Thank you."

The words were simple, but Jamie understood the edge of death. She had come close to it herself in the Hellfire Caves and she knew what it meant to come back from the brink.
 

"Do you know who it was?" she asked.
 

O shut her eyes for a moment and then sighed. "I wish I did. I was walking back to the flat late last night. I'm not afraid to walk in Southwark – it's my patch, you know." Jamie nodded for O to continue. "As I walked under the arches at London Bridge, a figure came up behind me and covered my mouth with a cloth, holding me tight, and then it was only blackness. The next thing I knew I was shivering in that fridge." She fell silent for a moment. "But I heard a knife being sharpened, Jamie. That metallic repetition as the blade is drawn over and over on the lodestone … and later I heard screaming."
 

"I believe you," Jamie said. "There were – packages – in the fridge next to yours, but no fingerprints or anything in trace evidence to help us find whoever did it."

"He came in once," O said, her voice so quiet that Jamie had to lean in closer. "He wore black clothes and a floor-length black apron, and a mask on his face with a long beak."

"The Venetian plague doctor?" Jamie asked.
 

O nodded. "Yes, I've seen similar ones. The mask gave me hope because if he didn't want me to see his face, then he was going to let me go. But then he told me to strip. It was so cold, but I did what he asked. He told me to spin around and show him the extent of the octopus tattoo. I couldn't see his eyes but I felt them on my body. It was like he was measuring me up for something. It was the first time I've wanted to scrub the ink from my skin." Tears glistened in O's eyes and one rolled down her cheek to the pillow. Jamie reached forward and took her hand, waiting for her to carry on. "As I turned, he said that it was a shame I wouldn't be dancing at the masquerade ball. Then he told me to dress and that he would be back."

"And then?" Jamie asked.
 

"Then I tried to stay warm … and then you were there."

There were voices outside the room and then the door burst open. Magda rushed in, her face stricken, arms outstretched. Jamie stood and let her take her place by O's side, the tears of both women mingling on the pillow as they whispered to each other.
 

Jamie walked to the window, looking out as they talked for a moment in low voices. She remembered waking up in hospital after the Hellfire Caves, how Blake had been by her side, his hand near hers on the bed. A flicker of a smile played on her lips. It made all the difference having someone who cared enough to be there. She thought of him waiting for her a corridor away. They were both such damaged people, but perhaps there was hope that together, they could transcend their history.
 

"Thank you, Jamie," Magda said. "If you hadn't found her when you did …"

"I don't think this is the end of it," Jamie said. "We didn't find the man responsible, and if O's right, he could be targeting the masquerade ball next."

"So many of the people going have ink," O said. "Lots of my friends from Torture Garden are attending. Any excuse to dress up extravagantly."

"I need to call my contact at the police and let him know about the threat," Jamie said. "Is there anything else you need?"

O smiled and squeezed Magda's hand. "I've got everything I need right here."
 

Jamie left them together and emerged back into the corridor. She called Missinghall and he answered quickly.