Next to Die (38 page)

Ruby leaned forward too, closer to the windscreen, relieved now. She almost laughed. She had never met Billy. They had shared internet chats, but never face to face, and so her nervousness turned into excitement, that at last she would meet him.

She could see someone ahead, but he seemed smaller than she expected, his hood up, face hidden, the sleeves too long, so that she couldn’t see his face or the broad width of his shoulders.

Billy’s dad flashed his headlights. He seemed more excited now, smiling and nodding.

‘Who is it?’ Ruby said. ‘Is that Billy?’

As the figure reached the van, he wound down the window. ‘Get in the back.’

Ruby craned her neck to get a view, but whoever it was moved too quickly. The back doors opened and there was a clattering noise.

‘Billy?’ she said, turning, grinning, excited. ‘It’s me, Ruby.’

Then Ruby gasped as an arm clamped around her neck. She let out a whimper. ‘I’m not Billy, little darling.’

It was a woman’s voice.

Ruby struggled, kicking out, crying, her feet hitting the glove compartment, scuffing the dull grey plastic.

There was a glint of metal and then she felt the tip of a knife blade pressed against her neck, just below her ear, pushing into her skin so that it puckered under the point.

‘If I cut you there, you will die straight away,’ the woman said. ‘Do you want that?’

Ruby stopped moving and swallowed. ‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. Where’s Billy?’

‘You don’t need to understand. This is it. Perhaps the end. It all turns on your brother now. Does he love you enough?’

‘My brother? What do you mean?’

‘Sam. He’s the one I want. For now, you come with us. Will you do that? Will you come quietly and survive? Because if you struggle, I will kill you. You won’t be the first.’

Ruby took deep breaths as tears welled in her eyes. She thought of Sam. He would be angry with her. She should have listened. She’d got herself in danger and it was all her fault. Now he was in danger.

‘You’re not Billy’s dad, are you?’ Ruby said.

The man laughed. The woman pressed the knife harder.

The man got out of the van and ran round to the passenger side. When he opened the door, he grabbed Ruby round the neck and pulled her upwards, out of the van. She shrieked but the noise was cut short as she was propelled quickly along the pavement, her feet making soft skipping noises on the floor.

The street they were in got darker the further they went, the streetlights broken. She tried to struggle against him but he was too strong. The woman was behind him.

They arrived at some old metal gates, blocked off by steel plates and with razor wire along the top. They couldn’t go any further. She might be able to run, but then he kicked at some corrugated iron next to it and a gap appeared, like a dark gash, just blackness beyond.

‘Go in,’ he said, and he pushed her hard through the small gap. Her leg caught on something sharp and she cried out, but he didn’t stop. Soon they were on the other side and she was being pushed through nettles and grass, stumbling over mounds of rubble, towards a corner where no light reached.

The woman pulled out a telephone and pointed it at Ruby, the flash of the camera making Ruby blink. As she looked at the picture, she said, ‘Take her inside. I’ve got a call to make.’

There was another screech of metal and the dark block of light yielded to a blue glow and the sheen of tiled stairs.

‘Keep going,’ the man said.

Ruby pulled away from him. ‘No, I won’t!’ But then she was struck by something. Her head hurt and she started to fall. When she hit the ground, the noises were fainter, and as she looked upwards, she could see the stars and the gleam of the moon, much brighter than the shadows and rubble of where she had been taken.

As hands grabbed her again, hard and calloused, she said sorry. To her mother, to her father, the man she had never really known, and to her two brothers, who did their best for her. She had got it wrong and spoiled everything.

As she was taken inside wherever she was, the metal sheet was pushed back into place, and all Ruby saw was darkness.

Sixty-Four

Joe looked up at the sound of a car outside. He went to the window. A taxi, and Sam.

Sam burst into the house, despite his bandages. ‘Tell me what you know,’ he said, the worry clear on his face.

‘Ruby hasn’t come home.’

‘Have you called the cops?’

Joe shook his head. ‘Not yet. This is Ruby we’re talking about. I’m just trying to work it all out, so we can convince whoever that it’s not just some silly teenager out too late.’

‘You think this is attention-seeking?’ Sam said.

‘Call it what you like.’

‘Have you called all her friends?’

‘All the ones we know about, but Mum says she doesn’t bring many back here.’ Joe stepped aside as Sam went past. ‘There’s no special skill in trying to find her, Sam. I’ve done all the things you would have done.’

‘So where is she?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been for a drive round the usual places. The shops. The community centre. Plenty of kids hanging around, but no Ruby.’

Sam stayed silent for a moment, his tension visible from the clench of his jaw. ‘This might be more than attention-seeking,’ he said eventually. ‘She was followed, you know that.’

‘Ruby said she was. That isn’t the same as being followed.’

‘There was someone in the trees.’

‘Or perhaps it was someone running away because you were charging after them?’

Sam didn’t respond to that.

‘I’ve gone through her online accounts, her emails, and there’s nothing that suggests she’s about to do anything stupid,’ Joe said. ‘Is this another go at us? So soon after it was all about Ellie, and you know how she gets around the anniversary, because it isn’t about her anymore. She knows girls are going missing. She might be deliberately making us worry, and she’ll come home and be pleased to see us here, her big brothers making her the centre of everything again. How can I ring the police with that possibility?’

‘Because there have been teenage girls going missing for a while now, all connected to Ben Grant’s case,’ Sam said, getting angry. ‘That makes Ruby’s whereabouts pretty damn important. And where’s Ronnie?’

‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve been looking for him, because our trainee hasn’t turned in today and he hinted that he knew something. He said something else too, that I was supposed to stop him.’

Sam pursed his lips, and Joe could see he was deciding how far he could go.

‘If Ruby is at risk, we share,’ Joe said.

‘I think Ronnie might have been Ben Grant’s accomplice,’ Sam said.

Joe was surprised. ‘Ronnie Bagley?’

‘Grant talked about a hair fetish. It wasn’t his thing, but we think he was taunting us, giving Ronnie away without actually naming him.’

‘Ruby might have a boyfriend,’ Joe said. ‘She could be there.’

‘Do you know that?’

‘No, I don’t. I just saw a picture in her bedroom, propped up against her alarm.’

Sam rushed out of the room, and so Joe followed him, running up the stairs.

As Joe ran into Ruby’s room, Sam was holding the photograph. A good-looking teenager, clean-cut, sitting on his bed, posters around his walls.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ Joe said. ‘Who is it?’

Sam swallowed. ‘It’s not who it is. It’s what it is.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Sam took a deep breath. ‘This is Ronnie’s grooming picture. All of those missing girls – unconnected, apart from the link to Grant’s case, and this picture.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ Joe said. ‘Call the cops. Do what you have to do.’

Sam pulled out his phone, but as he did so, it started to ring. He clicked to answer. Joe watched as he listened, Sam’s eyes growing wider.

‘Who are you?’ Sam said, anger in his voice.

Joe watched as Sam listened, sweat prickling his forehead, until he moved his phone from his ear and stared at it, disbelief in his eyes.

‘What is it?’ Joe said.

Sam looked up. There were tears brimming over his eyelids, but they were of anger, real rage, not sadness.

‘They’ve got her,’ he said.

Sixty-Five

Ruby was dragged up some stairs. She’d heard the conversation on the phone, knew that the woman had called Sam, because she’d said his name. So she pulled back, crying now, desperate, but she was hit again, a punch this time, hard on her arm. She wailed out loud. It was an adult punch, harder than she had ever felt, and she began to succumb to the pain.

She couldn’t see where she was going. It was dark ahead, lit only by the flash of a torch, the beam bouncing off dirty white tiles, ferns and moss growing through the cracks. Her feet tripped, but her movement was upwards, and she was carried forward by the two people who held her.

They emerged from the stairs into a huge open space broken by pillars, like a large empty factory, except that there was a large gash in the centre of the concrete floor, filled by undergrowth. She looked up. The roof was smashed and broken, the stars visible. There was a flap of wings and something swooped from one rafter to another.

‘Where are we?’ she said.

‘Would it make a difference if I told you?’ the woman said.

Ruby didn’t answer that.

She was pushed against a metal pillar and her hands were pulled behind her back and tied together with a scarf produced from the woman’s pocket.

‘Don’t think about running,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll run faster than you and kill you when I catch you.’

Ruby nodded, sobbing softly, and then slid slowly downwards so that she was sitting on the floor. She put her head back, the iron cold and hard. As she looked along the length of the building, she saw lights beyond, one end of the building completely open. She listened. She could hear trains, as the steady roll of passenger carriages and the screech of wheels echoed along the vast empty space.

She tried to stay calm. She had to get a sense of her surroundings, because if she was going to get away, she needed to know where to go. The woman was pacing, her hood down, doing something with her phone, as if she was sending a message. Her hair was in a short dark bob, and she looked skinny, her jeans hanging slack on her legs.

The man turned to the woman and said, ‘So, this is it. What happens afterwards?’

The woman paused. ‘I go to Ben, to tell him.’

‘But what about us? Ben will find out anyway. What about our future?’

‘We’re not doing it for us, you know that.’

‘You promised that this would be it, no more.’

She stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips. ‘You never quite got it, did you? This was never about you and me.’

‘It was for me,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘You’re being pathetic.’

‘You talked about deep love. Perhaps I have that, because it is why I do this. I don’t do it for her.’ He waved his hand towards Ruby. ‘It’s for us. This has got to be the end.’

The woman turned away and walked towards Ruby. She knelt down in front of her. She reached out and stroked the side of Ruby’s cheek. Ruby flinched and pulled her head away.

‘You know this is the end,’ the woman said softly.

‘No,’ Ruby said, shaking her head. ‘My brothers will hunt you down if you harm me.’

The woman smiled, pity in her eyes. ‘They won’t find me. And they might not find you.’ She leaned forward and kissed Ruby on the forehead, like a sad goodbye. Then she reached in her pocket for a black cloth.

Ruby thrashed her head around as the woman applied the blindfold, but then her vision went dark as the cloth was pulled tight around her head. The woman’s perfume filled her nostrils as she whispered in Ruby’s ear, ‘Darkness thrills, don’t you think? You won’t know where we will be, but we will be watching you. If you try to get away, it will mean the end of your life. Quick, painless, but you don’t want that, do you? You choose life.’

Ruby swallowed and then nodded that she understood. The woman stepped away, her footsteps just light sweeps on the concrete floor. Ruby tried to hold back the fear. She wasn’t going to be weak.

There were words spoken, just whispers that Ruby didn’t catch, but then she recognised the skip of the woman’s shoes down the stairs. They were lighter, more nimble, and the echo was familiar, enclosed, so that the noises bounced. Then there was the metallic scrape as the woman left the building.

She was alone with the man. This was her best chance to get away.

‘What do you mean, they’ve got her?’ Joe said.

Sam looked at his phone. ‘Ruby. They’ve taken her.’

Joe couldn’t speak.

‘Does the name Monica mean anything?’

‘Yes. She’s the trainee I talked about, the one Ronnie hinted at.’ Then Joe closed his eyes. ‘We thought she was ill at first and just hadn’t phoned in.’

‘And now you think she’s missing?’

‘Yes.’

Sam closed his eyes and took some deep breaths. ‘They said Ruby will go the same way as Monica.’

Sam’s phone beeped. He looked down. It was a message. A picture message. When he opened it, he swayed, lightheaded, scared.

It was a picture of Ruby, being held, fear on her face. He showed it to Joe.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Joe whispered. There were too many facts coming at him, swirling, making his head swim, sweat dampening his forehead. Images of Monica, a young professional starting out, merged with Ruby, all long legs and teenage nuisance. ‘Who are they?’

‘It was a woman on the phone,’ Sam said. ‘It was a woman at Terry’s house, who did this.’ He nodded at his arm. ‘She mentioned it, said that it had been good to meet at Terry’s house, except that it wasn’t supposed to end like that, because this was the way. It’s supposed to end with Ruby.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s revenge for Ben Grant. Whoever she is, she must be working with Ronnie.’

‘Call the police now,’ Joe demanded. When Sam stalled, Joe pulled out his own phone. ‘I’ll call them if you won’t.’

Sam held out his hand. ‘No, you can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of the usual shit these types come out with, that if I do, they’ll kill Ruby.’