Shatter (45 page)

‘You should both calm down,’ says the DI.

I try to stand but feel Monk’s hand on my shoulder, forcing me to stay seated. Veronica Cray is addressing Julianne, outlining the possible scenarios. Up until now the DI has always treated me with respect and valued my advice. Now she thinks my judgement has been compromised. I am too closely involved. My opinions can’t be relied upon. The whole scene has become dreamlike and slightly askew. The others are businesslike and thoughtful. I am dishevel ed and out of control.

Veronica Cray wants to move the operation to Trinity Road to make it easier for the police to respond. The landline wil be redirected to the incident room.

Julianne begins asking questions, her voice barely audible. She wants to know more details of the strategy. Oliver needs at least five minutes to track any cal and triangulate the signals from the nearest three phone towers. If the clocks in the base stations are synchronised perfectly, he may be able to pinpoint the cal er to within a hundred metres.

It isn’t foolproof. Signals can be affected by buildings, terrain and weather conditions. If Gideon moves indoors the signal strength wil change and if the clocks are out by even a microsecond it could mean a difference of tens of metres. Microseconds and metres— that’s what my daughter’s life is coming down to.

‘We’ve instal ed a GPS tracker and a hands-free phone cradle in your car. Tyler may issue instructions. He may want you to jump through hoops. We’re not ready for a mobile intercept so you have to stal him.’

‘For how long?’ she whispers.

‘A few more hours.’

Julianne shakes her head adamantly. It has to be sooner.

‘I know you want your daughter back, Mrs O’Loughlin, but we have to secure
your
safety first. This man has kil ed two women. I need a few hours to get helicopters and intercept teams ready. Until then we have to stal him.’

‘This is crazy,’ I say. ‘You know what he’s done before.’

DI Cray nods towards Monk. I feel his fingers close around my arm. ‘Come on, Professor, let’s take a walk.’

I try and twist out of the big man’s hand, but he takes a firmer hold. His other arm hooks over my shoulder. From a distance it probably looks like a friendly gesture, but I can’t move. He walks me into the kitchen and out the back door, along the path to the clothesline. A lone towel flaps in the breeze like a vertical flag.

There is a stale, unsavoury smel in my lungs. It’s coming from me. My medication has switched off suddenly. My head, shoulders and arms are writhing and jerking like a snake.

‘Are you OK?’ asks Monk.

‘I need my pil s.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Upstairs, beside my bed. The white plastic bottle. Levodopa.’ He disappears inside the cottage. Police officers and detectives are watching from the lane, looking at the freak show.

Parkinson’s sufferers talk a lot about preserving dignity. I have none of it now. Sometimes I imagine this is how I’m going to finish up. A writhing, twisting snake man or a life-sized statue, trapped in a permanent pose, unable to scratch my nose or shoo the pigeons away.

Monk comes back with the pil bottle and a glass of water. He has to hold my head stil to get the tablets on my tongue. Water spil s down my shirt.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘Did I do something to make it worse?’

‘It’s not your fault.’

Levodopa is the gold standard treatment for Parkinson’s. It’s supposed to reduce the tremors and stop the sudden frozen moments when my body locks up, unable to move.

My movements are becoming steadier. I can hold the glass of water to take another drink.

‘I want to go back inside.’

‘Can’t do that,’ he says. ‘Your wife doesn’t want you around.’

‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’

‘She looked pretty sure to me.’

Words, my best weapons, have suddenly deserted me. I look past Monk and see Julianne wearing an overcoat, being led towards a police car. Veronica Cray is with her.

Monk lets me get as far as the gate.

‘Where are you going?’ I shout.

‘To the station,’ says the DI.

‘I want to come.’

‘You should stay here.’

‘Let me talk to Julianne.’

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you just now.’

Julianne has ducked into the back seat of the car. She tucks her coat under her thighs before the door closes. I cal her name, but she doesn’t respond. The engine starts.

I watch them leave. They’re wrong. Every fibre of my being says they’re wrong. I know Gideon Tyler. I know his mind. He’s going to destroy Julianne. It doesn’t matter that she’s the strongest, most compassionate, intel igent woman I’ve ever known. That’s what he preys upon. The more she
feels
, the more he’s going to damage her.

The rest of the cars are leaving. Monk is going to stay. I fol ow him back to the cottage and sit at the table as he makes me a cup of tea and col ects phone numbers for Julianne’s family and mine. Imogen and Emma should stay somewhere else tonight. My parents are closest. Julianne’s parents are saner. Monk sorts it out.

Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table with my eyes closed, picturing Charlie’s face, her lop-sided smile, her pale eyes, the tiny scar on her forehead where she fel from a tree at age four.

I take a deep breath and cal Ruiz. A crowd roars in the background. He’s watching a rugby match.

‘What’s up?’

‘It’s Charlie. He’s taken Charlie.’

‘Who? Tyler?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘He cal ed Julianne. I talked to Charlie.’

I explain about finding Charlie’s bike and the phone cal s. As I tel the story, I can hear Ruiz walking away from the crowd, finding somewhere quieter.

‘What do you want to do?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I croak. ‘We have to get her back.’

‘I’m on my way.’

The cal s ends and I stare at the phone, wil ing it to ring. I want to hear Charlie’s voice. I try to think of the last words she said to me, the ones before Gideon took her. She told me a joke about a woman on a bus. I can’t remember the punchline but she laughed and laughed.

Someone is ringing the front doorbel . Monk answers it. The vicar has come to offer his support. I’ve only met him once, soon after we moved to Wel ow. He invited us to attend a Sunday service, which stil hasn’t happened. I wish I could remember his name.

‘I thought you might want to pray,’ he says softly.

‘I’m not a believer.’

‘That’s al right.’

He takes a step forward and gets down on his knees, crossing himself. I look at Monk, who looks back at me, unsure of what to do.

The vicar has lowered his head, clasping his hands.

‘Dear Lord, I ask you to look after young Charlotte O’Loughlin and bring her home safely to her family…’

Without thinking, I find myself on my knees next to him, lowering my head. Sometimes prayer is less about words than pure emotion.

57

When a man has nothing to call his own, he finds ways of acquiring other men’s possessions.

This house is an example. The Arab businessman is still away, gone south for the winter like a migrating bird. A housekeeper opens the place up when he’s due back, fluffing up the
pillows and airing the rooms. There’s also a gardener who comes in twice a week during the summer, but only once a month now because the grass has stopped growing and the
leaves have been raked into moulding drifts.

The house is as I remember, tall and ungainly with a turret room overlooking the bridge. A weathervane faces permanently east. The curtains are drawn. Windows and doors are
secured.

The garden is soggy and smells of decay. A rope swing is broken, frayed at one end, dangling halfway between a branch and the ground. I cross beneath it, skirting the garden
furniture, and stand before a wooden shed. The door is padlocked. Crouching on my haunches, I press a pick into the keyhole and feel it bounce over the pins. The first lock I ever
learned to pick was like this one. I practiced for hours sitting in front of the TV.

The barrel turns. I unhook the padlock from the latch and pull the door open, letting light leak across the dirt floor. Metal shelves hold plastic flowerpots, seed trays and old paint tins.

Garden tools stand in the corner. A ride-on lawnmower is parked at the centre.

I step back and look at the dimensions of the shed. There’s just enough room for me to stand. Then I start clearing the metal shelves and wrestling them to one side. I roll the lawn
mower onto the grass and begin moving the paint cans and bags of fertiliser to the garage.

The back wall of the shed is now clear. I take a pickaxe and swing it at the floor. The compacted earth breaks into a jagged jigsaw of dried mud. I swing the pick again and again,
pausing occasionally to shovel the soil away. After an hour I stop and rest, crouching and holding my forehead to the handle of the spade. I drink from the hosepipe outside. The
hole in the floor is ten inches deep and almost as long as the wall. It’s long enough to fit the sheet of plasterboard I found in the garage. I want to make it deeper.

Setting to work again, I carry buckets of earth to the end of the garden and hide the soil amid the compost heap. I am ready to build the box now. The sun is dropping through the
branches of the trees. Perhaps I should check on the girl.

Inside the house, in a second floor bedroom, she is lying on an iron-framed bed with a bare mattress. Dressed in a striped top, a cardigan, jeans and sneakers, she is curled up in a
ball, trying to make herself invisible.

She cannot see me— her eyes are taped. Her hands are secured behind her back with white plastic ties and her feet are chained together with just enough width to allow her to
hobble. She cannot go far. A noose is looped around her neck, tied off on a radiator, with just enough slack to allow her to reach a small bathroom with a sink and toilet. She doesn’t
realise it yet. Like a blind kitten she clings to the softness of the bed, unwilling to explore.

She speaks.

‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

She listens.

‘Hello… anyone… can you hear me?’

Louder this time: ‘HELP! PLEASE HELP! HELP!’

I press
record
. The tape turns. Scream, little one, scream as loud as you can.

A small lamp throws light across the room but not as far as my corner. She tests the bindings on her wrists, twisting her shoulders to the left and right, trying to slide her hands free.

The plastic ties are cutting into her skin.

Her head hits the wall. She turns on her back, raising her legs and kicks both feet at once against the wood panelling. The whole house seems to shake. She kicks again and again,
full of fear and frustration.

She arches backwards, bending her spine, forming a bridge between her shoulders and her feet. Raising her legs in the air in a half shoulder stand, she pivots at the waist, dropping
her knees to her chest and then further until they touch the bed on either side of her head. She has folded herself into a ball. Now she slides her bound wrists past the small of her
back, over her hips and under her backside. Surely she’s going to dislocate something.

Her hands squeeze past her feet and she can unfurl her legs again. How clever! Her hands are now in front of her instead of behind. She pulls off her tape blindfold and turns
towards the lamp. She still cannot see me in my dark corner.

Hooking her fingers through the noose around her neck, she lifts it free and then stares at her chained feet and the plastic ties on her wrists. She’s broken the skin. Blood weeps over
the white strips.

I cup my hands and smash them together. The mock applause echoes like pistol shots in the quietness of the room. The girl screams and tries to run but the chains around her
ankles send her sprawling to the floor.

I grab the back of her neck and pin her down under my weight, straddling her body, feeling the air being squeezed from her lungs. Grabbing her hair, I pull her head backward and
whisper in her ear.

‘You’re a very clever girl, Snowflake. I’m going to have to do a better job this time.’

‘No! No! No! Please. Let me go.’

The first loop of masking tape covers her nose, sealing off the airway. The next loop covers her eyes. I do it roughly, dragging her hair. She thrashes her head as more tape loops
around her forehead and her chin, encasing her in plastic. Soon only her mouth is exposed. When she opens it to scream, I slide the hose pipe between her lips and teeth, into the
back of her throat. She gags. I pull it out a little. More tape loops around her head, screeching as I drag it from the spool.

Her world has become dark. I can hear her breath whistling through the hose.

I speak to her softly. ‘Listen to me, Snowflake. Don’t fight. The harder you struggle, the more difficult it is to breathe.’

She is still wrestling at my arms. I hold a finger over the end of the hose, blocking off her air supply. Her body stiffens in panic.

‘That’s how easy it is, Snowflake. I can stop you breathing with one finger. Nod, if you understand.’

She nods. I take my finger away. She sucks air through the hose.

‘Breathe normally,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a panic attack, nothing more.’

I lift her back onto the bed: she curls into a ball.

‘Do you remember the room?’ I ask.

She nods.

‘There’s a toilet about eight feet to your right, beside a sink. You can reach it. I’ll show you.’

Hauling her upright, I put her feet on the floor and count the steps as she hobbles forward to the sink. I put her hands on the edge of the basin. ‘The cold tap is on the right.’

Then I show her the toilet, making her sit.