Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (32 page)

A sudden panicky thought occurred to her, and she tried wriggling her toes. Yes, they moved too! Her legs didn’t seem to want to cooperate, but that would come back with time.

An uncomfortable idea wriggled up into her conscious mind like a worm emerging from dank earth. People with amputations often said they thought they could still feel their missing limbs. What if she only
thought
she was moving her fingers and toes? What if they weren’t moving at all? What if they weren’t even there?

Time to open her eyes. She didn’t want to, afraid of what she might see, but she did it anyway.

She wasn’t in bed. That was the first thing. And if she wasn’t in bed then she probably wasn’t in hospital. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Through smeary eyes she thought she could see her hands resting on the arms of a chair: blue vinyl over soft padding which had been wrapped around a metal frame. She blinked a couple of times to clear her vision. Yes, her hands were indeed resting on what looked like the arms of a metal chair.

And they were fixed there with plastic cable-ties which had been tightened around her wrists and forearms.

Emma was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

Somewhere, through the sick throbbing in her head, she remembered a hand clamping around her face and a sharp, medicinal smell in her nostrils and catching at her throat as she breathed it in. Experimentally, she sniffed. She could still just about detect the residue of that chemical, whatever it was, on her skin, or possibly on her clothes from where it had dripped and soaked in.

Her clothes! Quickly she looked down. Yes, she was still dressed. Thank Christ! Whoever had done this to her, they’d left her dressed. Somehow, that was important.

She closed her eyes as that heavy mercury in her head swirled around, feeling her head nodding as the mercury pushed forwards and backwards, like an inexorable tide. Gradually it ebbed back to stillness, and she opened her eyes again.

She could see her knees, but not her legs. Judging by what had happened to her arms, they were probably tied to the chair as well. It was hard enough to break plastic cable ties at the best of times, when you had purchase and leverage. Trying to snap them by flexing her muscles was going to be impossible.

Which wasn’t going to stop her from trying, but she’d wait until she knew more about the situation, and panic seemed more of an attractive option. For now, her best course of action was to wait and watch and listen.

Something caught her attention. Beside each leg she could see a curved section of grey rubber. It took her a good few minutes to work out that they were tyres. At the end of the day, her only consolation was that the angle was unusual. She hadn’t expected to be looking down on tyres. But these were not from a car.

She was in a wheelchair. The knowledge took a little while to filter through her drug-slowed mind. A wheelchair.

Back to the hospital idea again?

No, she was fastened to the wheelchair. She wasn’t in a hospital. She’d been abducted. Imprisoned.

That smell was still just about discernible. Ether – wasn’t that what had been used as an accelerant on Tamara Stottart? If it was then Emma was lucky to be alive. A slight miscalculation with the amount of ether on the cloth that had been pressed against her face, or the length of time she had been forced to breathe the fumes, and she’d be brain damaged or dead. Assuming she wasn’t already brain damaged and just didn’t know it.

The fog was beginning to clear from her mind, and she didn’t think she was going to throw up. Not immediately, at any rate. The best thing she could do was make an evaluation of her environment. See if there was any opportunity for escape.

Without moving her head Emma lifted her gaze until she was looking out from beneath her eyelashes. Her eyelids and eyebrows were massed like a dark cloud above her. The movement sent fresh spikes of hot agony back through her eye sockets, but she swallowed hard and tried not to cry out.

She was in a shadowed room with breeze-block walls that had been painted white – an attempt at covering up the unpalatable truth, similar, as far as Emma was concerned, to spraying perfume on a corpse. She regretted the analogy as soon as it passed through her mind. She didn’t want to be thinking about corpses. Not here. Not now.

The room seemed to extend for some distance left and right, but her eyeline was cut off by two mobile room dividers, the kind Emma was familiar with from open-plan police offices. They had been placed about six feet to either side of her wheelchair, extending from the breeze-block wall out to about two-thirds the width of the room. This left an open space running
down the building on the wall opposite where she was parked – a little like a corridor. The dividers were probably at least six feet high; more than enough to stop her from seeing down the length of the room, even if she’d been standing up.

There was nobody in sight, so she raised her head and looked around. No point in still pretending she was unconscious.

The floor was covered in old linoleum marked in green and black triangles. It was cracked in places, and the edges were curling up, and there were brown stains splattered across it that made her feel like she wanted to simultaneously curl up and empty her bowels.

Frankly, if she was going to have to die, there were more attractive places to do it.

‘Either this lino goes or I do,’ she muttered to herself, trying to keep her spirits up.

‘Hello?’ A man’s voice from her left.

She kept silent.

‘Hello? Are you awake?’

‘We saw you being brought in,’ another voice said. This time it was a woman. She was also on Emma’s right, but sounded further away.

Analysing their tone of voice, Emma decided that they sounded scared. Maybe it was a come-on, a trick on the part of her abductor, but she might as well play along. Take nothing for granted; learn what you can.

‘My name is Emma Bradbury,’ she said, loudly and clearly. ‘I’m a sergeant in Essex Police.’

‘You’re with the
police
?’ the man said, surprised. ‘But you’re tied up.’

‘Yeah, funny old thing,’ Emma said quietly; then, more loudly, added, ‘We were looking for you, but I hadn’t planned on finding you quite like this. You
are
Mark and Sara Baillie, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Oh God, yes.’ The woman sounded relieved. Relieved and yet terrified. ‘Where are we? Why are we here?’

‘Not sure,’ Emma said. ‘I was hoping you might know.’

‘We woke up here,’ Mark Baillie said. ‘We’re tied to wheelchairs, just like you.’

‘What happened?’ Emma asked.

‘We don’t know!’ That was Sara again. Her voice sounded raw, as if she’d been crying. Or screaming. ‘We were in bed. Asleep. I remember smelling something funny, and then it was like I was falling down a dark hole in the ground. When I woke up, I was here. And so was Mark.’

‘What about our children?’ Mark asked urgently. ‘Are they all right? Have you seen them?’

Emma’s mind raced. The boys weren’t here? They certainly hadn’t been left in the house. That meant one of several things, none of which she wanted to share with Mark and Sara. Either the boys had breathed in too much ether and were dead, or they were being kept somewhere else, by themselves, or whoever had kidnapped them was already … already what? Torturing them as an audition for some insane choir? What was all this about? And what was she going to tell the parents?

‘I wasn’t at the crime scene – at your house, I mean,’ she lied. ‘I’m not sure where they are right now but … I’m sure they’re fine.’ Quickly, she moved on. ‘Did you see the person who wheeled me in? What did he look like?’

‘Male,’ Mark said, ‘quite muscular. He was wearing something over his face.’

‘Has he said anything to you?’

‘Nothing.’ Judging by her voice, Sara was on the verge of emotional collapse.

‘He brings us stuff to eat and drink,’ Mark said. ‘Soup in a
thermos. He holds it up while we drink it. And water, every few hours.’

‘Like he’s keeping us fresh for … something,’ Sara added dully. Then: ‘Oh my God, where are Corwin and Duncan?’

‘It’s going to be okay, Sara,’ Mark said. Emma could hear him suppressing his own hysteria so he could comfort his wife, if only from behind a barrier. ‘It’s going to be okay, love.’

It’s not
, Emma thought bleakly. It’s really not.

‘Does he ever let you loose?’ she asked. ‘I mean … to go to the bathroom. That kind of thing?’

There was a long pause, broken by Mark saying ‘No,’ in a flat tone of voice that suggested he didn’t want the subject pursued any more.

‘Ah,’ Emma said. Something else to look forward to: pissing and crapping herself as if she were a baby. This day was just getting better and better.

‘Look on the bright side, Emma,’ she murmured. ‘At least there’s soup.’

‘What?’ Mark again.

‘Don’t worry. Talking to myself.’ She paused. ‘So he’s not …
done
anything to you?’

‘Like
what?
’ said Sara, her voice getting shriller. ‘Like torture? Like rape? Oh Christ, is he going to rape me and make Mark watch?’

‘No,’ Emma said. ‘He’s not going to do that. I can fairly confidently promise you that sexual assault isn’t why we’re here.’

‘He’s done this before?’ Mark was quick on the uptake. ‘When? What does he
do
? How often has this happened? Why haven’t you caught him yet?’

‘All good questions,’ Emma said. ‘I wish I had answers for you, but I don’t. I’m tied up here as well. Whatever happens, happens to me as well as you.’

Silence, for a long while.

A door slammed open somewhere off to Emma’s left. She could hear footsteps clicking on the linoleum. A shadow appeared, cast by a light behind the approaching figure.

He stopped just the other side of the room divider. She could hear him breathing. Mark and Sara were so silent it was deafening. She couldn’t blame them. They didn’t want to attract attention to themselves.

‘Come on in,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level. ‘I want to see your face.’

He walked forward, past the end of the divider, and turned to face her.

Emma nearly screamed.

He was wearing some kind of mask, she realised belatedly, a black metal thing made of various sections riveted together, with holes for the eyes and dominated by an exaggeratedly pointed and hooked nose. A medieval executioner’s mask.

‘Brave,’ he whispered, voice muffled by the mask. She tried desperately to recognise it, but failed. Was it Stephen Stottart? She couldn’t tell.

‘Braver than you. At least I can show my face.’

‘You don’t get the choice, girl.’ There was venom in the tone of voice. Hatred. She still couldn’t tell who it was, or even if she’d heard it before.

‘My name is Emma Bradbury,’ she said again. ‘I’m a detective with Essex Police. Release me right
now
.’

Any hope that her status as a police officer would make him cower trickled away as he laughed. ‘I’ve killed so many people,’ he whispered hoarsely through the laughs. ‘Why do you think killing a policewoman would give me a moment’s unease?’

And that was the moment she knew she was probably going to die. Nobody knew where she was, nobody knew who
he
was,
and there was no rescue plan in motion. No reprieve. No hope.

He walked towards her, and she flinched despite herself, but he walked round behind the wheelchair and pushed it forward.

‘Let’s take a little tour,’ he whispered, still chuckling.

He took her left, back the way he had come, away from Mark and Sara Baillie, who were still being as silent as possible. He pushed her past a wooden stairway that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Emma looked to her right as they passed a series of empty cubicles, like the one she’d woken up in, each with its own wheelchair sitting over by the wall, each with brown stains on the floor. Maybe blood; maybe shit. The thought of either was enough to terrify her.

Past the last cubicle the room opened out into a much wider space. Weak light filtered in through high, narrow windows. The space was filled with objects under covers. Each object was about the size of a person; some lower, some higher. They looked as if they might have been statues, covered with dustsheets. Each one was lit by a spotlight above it. Wires had been attached to the ceiling, running from the spotlights to a junction box on the wall.

‘Some of these I found, some I bought,’ he said, pushing Emma up to the first shrouded object. ‘And some I made myself.’

He pulled the sheet off with a flourish. Underneath was a table, a simple folding table, with an object resting on top. The object looked like a pear made of metal and covered with ornate scrollwork. Four nearly invisible seams ran down its length, spaced equally around the circumference. On top, where the stalk would be, was a metal hoop.

‘It’s called the Pear of Anguish,’ he breathed. ‘Or the
Poire d’Angoisser
, if you prefer. Very popular in medieval times. It’s inserted into the mouth, or the rectum or the vagina. Wherever there’s an opening. There’s a screw running all the way down
the inside, and when that loop on top is turned, the four segments – you can see the four segments, can’t you? – they open up. Each one is hinged at the top, and they just get forced further and further apart by the screw. Believe me, they can open up much further than the human body can without bursting.’ He paused. ‘I don’t put it in the throat,’ he added in a hushed voice. ‘That would ruin the effect I’m trying to achieve. I need people to be able to scream.’

‘Why?’ Emma said through teeth that were trying to clamp themselves together, but he was pushing her on to another shrouded treasure.

‘This one,’ he whispered, ‘is called the Scavenger’s Gyres, or sometimes Skeffington’s Daughter – named for Sir Leonard Skeffington, who was the Lieutenant of the Tower of London in the time of Henry the Eighth.’ He tugged the sheet away. This time the object underneath was a wooden board holding a strange metal device about half the height of a person and made up of loops and rods of metal with sections that looked like they could slide along each other. It looked innocuous, like some oversized kitchen implement, and yet something about it made Emma’s blood freeze. It actually seemed to radiate a sense of evil. ‘Your neck and wrists and calves are locked into those hoops, and then the whole thing is gradually compressed. Your whole body is forced into a tighter and tighter space until the skin of your fingers and your toes splits open to let the blood spurt out and it gushes out of your mouth and nose and rectum. The pressure just gets too much, and the blood has to escape.’