Siren (27 page)

On the morning of day five, the killer Luther Hand woke to the sound of the calico cat stretching and flopping its warm, furry body against the glass of the bedroom window. He looked across to the clock. It was past eight.

Today is a day to kill.

Luther was still in control of the situation, but increasingly he felt unsure of exactly what that situation was. It would soon be one week, and he had still not killed Makedde. At first he had just wanted to contain her. He had rationalised that killing her away from Paris would be wise. It would define her case as that of a missing person, a noncrime. Out here, buried under the cellar, her body might not be found for many years—it might never be found. That would be a professional result. Luther had been confident enough about the professionalism of his actions to have not found the urge to have her with him threatening. He’d envisaged keeping her for a day or two, thinking that would get her out of his system. He had believed that would satisfy him.

But no.

Something else was happening that he could not explain.

He sensed that some central part of his identity was dissolving day by day, losing strength and relevance in this isolated place in the countryside. It was as if he could no longer really pinpoint who he was.
Luther Hand.
Or Luther Davis, the son of Cathy Davis? He was no longer acting professionally, no longer acting like Mr Hand. He was taking an unnecessary risk by keeping his mark alive, and he could not even say why. And with the inexorable progress of that internal change, that questioning of his identity, came something else—a kind of awakening to the new. Or a rediscovery of the old.

Five days.

And Madame Q was still not responding. Perhaps what Makedde said was true? Had the Cavanaghs been caught up in an international investigation and somehow led Interpol to Madame Q and her operation? If so, that meant Interpol could have all the information Madame Q had, information about the job. About him.

Luther had always been careful, though. He had never met Madame Q. As far as he knew, she did not know what he looked like. Their communications, like those with his other agents, had always been electronic. There were go-betweens, contacts, package drops. No one knew where he lived, what his birth name was. He could not be tracked.

Luther got up, showered and dressed and went about his morning preparations.

With a cup of coffee in hand, he took out his work phone. There were no messages on it.

The job is dead. Madame Q is gone.

Now certain that his professional involvement was complete, Luther disassembled the phone and destroyed the pieces so they could not be traced.

No one knew where he was. No one, not even Madame Q, had known where he would take Makedde. That was good.

Perhaps he could stay with Makedde for a while. Perhaps he could even bring her upstairs?

Laid out before him on the kitchen table were Makedde’s phone and notebook. With a sense of curiosity he switched on Makedde’s mobile phone. He would check the messages to see if anyone was yet concerned about her. If not, that might buy him more time. He felt safe in this farmhouse. There was nothing linking him or Makedde to this place. Still, when news broke that she was missing, he hoped to be back in Mumbai.

A text message came in to her phone.

MAK I AM AT HOTEL DES GRANDES ÉCOLES. REALLY WORRIED. I’M HERE ONE MORE NIGHT. NO ONE IN AUSTRALIA KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. I’M GOING TO CONTACT THE POLICE TOMORROW IF I DON’T HEAR FROM YOU. I HOPE YOU ARE OKAY. BOGEY

Luther felt a weight fall across him. Time was running out. Could the police trace her here? Or him?

He knew what he had to do. Luther delivered fresh water and food to his captive, Makedde, while she slept. He packed up his laptop and briefcase and put them in the Mercedes in the garage, started the car and prepared for the drive to Paris.

The cellar had been particularly quiet.

No creaking. No disturbances. No voices. No visits.

On the afternoon of day five, Makedde woke on the mattress in the stone prison where she had been living out hours of her life, bound by an ankle chain and a waning sense of faith in the world.

She wondered what her future held. She had tried talking with her captor, identifying with him, and had got nowhere.

Will I die in this cellar? Will anyone know of my passing, except this monster who is keeping me?

Only he wasn’t a monster. He did have a human side, but it was pushed down deep inside him. He was a large man of intimidating size, and his physicality brought to mind the case of Edmund Kemper, a man of unusually high IQ, a height of two metres plus, and a bulk of 136 kilos, who was raised by a strict mother who apparently suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder, and used to chain him up in the basement because she was afraid he would molest his sisters. She made him into a monster. He viewed himself as a
monster, and thought natural sex drive was disgusting and evil. He killed ten people—most of them women whom he raped posthumously—including his own mother before giving himself up to the police. Edmund Kemper had been treated like a monster, and that’s certainly what he became. And this man who kept Mak. What was his story? He
was
a professional killer, she was now certain. What was he doing with her? Why hadn’t he killed her already? She could see that his face was heavily scarred. What were the scars from? The man who was keeping Mak was not inhuman. He was a man. If she could appeal to the man in him, she might save herself.

But for the moment she had no opportunities. Her ankle was raw. She had no tools to relieve herself of its chafing bondage. He had left her water and food, and he had not come back for some time.

Where is he?

Mak picked up her plastic water dish and drank from it, feeling the cold liquid slide down her throat and into the base of her hollow stomach. She ate the bread, and scooped up the remains of a cold TV dinner out of its foil tray with a spoon. Her nameless captor clearly did not trust her with other implements—glassware, forks, knives. Spooning a TV dinner and drinking out of a cat bowl; she had been reduced to this. Her life had brought her to this point.

Mak put the foil tray down, and became aware of a creeping numbness in her limbs, her brain and her heart. She had, for the moment, lost interest in reversing the spread of that natural anaesthetic. The man who was holding her captive had left her to ponder her fate. He had been gone for a stretch of time that she guessed to be equal to a day in the language of her pre-captivity life. In that time she had really begun to
believe that she might never make it out of the dark little cellar alive. Her hope was waning with every passing hour, and her inner strength was crumbling in the face of the futility of her attempts to find a way out. She had being trying to reach her captor, and had so far failed. He had walked away from her, and she was still chained up there, no better off than she had been on day one. He could come back at any moment to finish her off. There were no white knights and no guarantees, and if Mak could not save herself from this place then it was over for her, and this whole strange journey of a life she had experienced would have finally reached its end. At thirty, her life would end in a dank, foreign cellar, after being held captive for a number of days she could not accurately document, for reasons she did not understand.

There are no white knights.

This reality penetrated to her core. Some primal belief, some childish ideal had not fully been extinguished until now, despite her harsh years of experience. Funny, she thought, how, despite everything she knew, some part of her female psyche had still held the tiniest fraction of hope that a white knight would come charging in, as in the fairytales of childhood. An angelic Jesus figure haloed in white light and song. A Prince Charming. Or the more rational but no less naïve idea of the far-reaching, infallible long arm of the law. The cops rushing in at the last moment to save every hostage and put the bad guys in jail.

No. Mak had never been one to wait for miracles. But now that she had truly acknowledged their non-existence, the lack of hope saddened her deeply. She recalled a quote that had always stuck with her—attributed to Helen Keller, she was fairly sure:
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in
nature
. There was no security here, in this life of Makedde’s, or in the limited world she was bound to in this dark cellar. There was no security. In her life, the few fleeting scraps of security she had clung to had turned out to be sad illusions. Her mother was dead. Her father was far away. Her sister had always been distant. She had no children. No husband. No land. No home. And she would die at thirty in this cellar.

You’ll die here.

She was losing her will. Her sense of self-preservation was wavering.

From some distant place, cocooned in her numbness, Mak observed her internal crumbling dispassionately.

You’re losing your mind. Really, finally losing your mind.

Mak woke with a start.

She’d dozed off again. She didn’t know how long she’d been resting on her mattress, her eyes closed.

She was not alone.

Her captor stood before her, and at the sight of him she felt fear fly through her organs—her heart thumping, her brain jolted. He loomed over her with his incredible physical mass, and the pocket of his pants bulged. For an instant she feared he would sexually attack her. But no. He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket, and she saw something else too. Something metal. A round metal keyring. There was a small key on it. It would be the key for her ankle.
The key.
And quickly the metal ring slipped back into the fabric of his pocket as he removed a box of matches with his monstrously large hand. If she had blinked, she would have missed it.

‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. ‘Oh, thank you. You are so kind.’

He had been away for some stretch of time, and had
returned with a packet of cigarettes and a box of household matches. Where had he gone?

She saw the corner of the door, ajar at the top of the stairs.

‘Share one with me?’ she suggested, moving over on the mattress in the hope he would join her.

‘I don’t smoke,’ he said flatly.

Neither do I.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said again, and accepted the cigarette, taking it between her fingers and reaching for the box of matches clumsily, knocking it out of his hand, emptying its contents on the stone floor, half a dozen matches scattering across the stone.

‘Oh,’ she said, as if embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry.’ She gathered what she could and put them back in the box. She drew one match across the side of the matchbox and it lit. She held the cigarette between her lips and touched the match to the end. The flame was strong and red. Inviting. Makedde had never smoked a cigarette before, only the occasional cigar, and those had always gone out on her and needed relighting. She was not much of a smoker. With a touch of anxiety, she drew the cigarette smoke in a little and blew it out of her mouth without inhaling too much.

‘Thank you so much. I was dying for it.’ She coughed, and tried to recover herself. ‘I thought I’d quit, but…I was really missing it,’ she tried to explain.

He looked at her, watchful.

Behind his cold gaze she thought she sensed him weighing up the situation. He was a man much larger than her. She was unarmed, and still bound at the ankle. What could she possibly do if she got closer—give him a cigarette burn? Surely his pride would allow physical contact with her, if he at all desired
it. He was difficult to reach, she could see that, but was it so impossible? He was still a man. There was another angle she could try.

‘I still don’t know your name, but I feel I know you.’

He continued to watch her, not moving.

‘I’m lonely down here by myself. I hope you don’t mind if I talk a bit.’ She
was
lonely, and she did want to talk. If she was going to die in this place, she wanted to be heard. There were things she wanted to say to this man, or say for herself, she didn’t know which. Mak shifted to one side of the mattress, indicating that she had made room for him. ‘You can sit down, if you like. My name is Makedde.’ She had told him her name before, but she repeated it so that this man might know her, perhaps even understand her. She needed to understand him, and understand what was happening between them. ‘I’d like to know your name, but if you don’t want to tell me, that’s okay.’

He hadn’t killed her yet. He hadn’t harmed her. What was in store for her? What was the plan? Was he waiting for something?

He did not answer.

She tried again. ‘Have you ever lost someone?’ she asked.

He appeared surprised by her question. Mak knew that he was older than her. Chances were that his parents were in their later years, or had already passed on. Perhaps she could reveal some part of herself to him, and he would reciprocate.

‘I lost my mother,’ she told him. ‘She died when I was a teenager. Cancer. It was a rare form of cancer called multiple myeloma. Have you heard of it?’

He shook his head, signalling that finally he had engaged with her.
A cigarette and a shake of the head. Connection.
It was a
small miracle. Inside, she rejoiced. She felt part of herself break loose, find hope. She felt emotions begin to surface again.

‘I want to tell you this because…because I don’t know why I’m here and why you’re keeping me, and if I am to die, I want to talk about my mother first. Jane was her name. Jane Vanderwall. She was my inspiration, my everything.’ He did not stop her, so she continued in a queer ramble. ‘I hadn’t heard of multiple myeloma, either. But then I was barely sixteen, and there were many horrors I hadn’t yet heard of. Multiple myeloma is more common in older male patients, but she was only forty-three. The doctors didn’t see it coming, and neither did we.’ Her throat began to tighten as she spoke. She felt the precursor to tears—tears for her mother, tears for Andy, tears for her crazy ruined life that seemed always to deal her the greatest horrors and injustice. She didn’t care that she would cry. Why should she hold back? Who could care? Days or weeks down in that cellar, and she could not possibly care any more whether this man saw her cry. ‘They gave her a bone marrow transplant. That was her only hope, you know, although, at the time, the risk was extremely high, much higher than it is with the procedures they use now. Her brother gave his marrow. He was her best match. The transplant was so hard. They kept her in the leukaemia ward with the other bone marrow patients, and many of them were children. Everyone there was bald. Some of the visitors were even bald; they’d shaved their heads for their siblings or friends, to show support. She was in there for months, fighting. There was a chart on the wall that I didn’t understand. White blood-cell count. Graphs. Numbers. And the whole time, for months, my father refused to leave her side. Even though he has a bad
back, he slept in this crappy little fold-out cot next to her, holding her hand. They talked, and she suffered, and they talked some more, and eventually she couldn’t speak any more, and he was alone, holding the hand of the woman who’d been his wife—my mother. And, I remember…’ Now a single hot tear cascaded down her cheek. ‘…I remember how we held hands and formed a vigil around her in her last days. My father, my sister, Theresa, and I formed a circle around her. I held her right hand in mine, and it was swollen and warm, like a balloon filled with hot water. It didn’t feel like her. The room smelled strange, the air filled with chemicals I couldn’t place. Her face was puffy and slack, nearly unrecognisable. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open, with tubes going down…’

Mak’s lips trembled a little but she steadied. Warm tears began streaming from her eyes, flowing uninhibited. She did not sob, but she let the tears fall, not bothering to wipe them away.

‘They had her on a respirator by then. And once her own breathing failed completely…’ She frowned, with the effort of keeping her voice steady. ‘She’d fought so hard. She did all the right things, and she died.’

For a time Makedde sat still on the mattress, her face streaked and wet. Neither of them spoke. She noticed that her cigarette had gone out. It had bent in her fingers. She had forgotten it during her story.

Her captor took another from the pack and lit it for her. She leaned forward and he placed it in her lips, his fingers brushing her face briefly.

‘I’m sorry about your mum,’ he finally said. ‘I lost my mum, too.’

His voice was deep and gravelly, but cracked a little, perhaps with emotion? Or disuse? She could not be certain he was being genuine. She could not be certain of anything.

She shifted closer. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Losing your mum is hard. No one can replace her. Was it recent?’ she dared to ask.

The look in his eye changed. He stood up, disengaged.

Dammit, not again. Don’t go away and leave me here…

‘You don’t have to go,’ she said softly. ‘We can talk about something else.’

But it was too late. He was already leaving, and with that look in his eye that spoke of some deep internal conflict.

What was his plan? Had the Cavanaghs sent him, or was he acting alone? What was in store for her? When would she be executed, or…?

She needed to reach him.

‘Please…’

She needed to reach him before he carried out whatever terrible task he had been postponing.

Mak stood. She put the cigarette on the ground.

‘Please don’t go.’ Her tears were running fast now, pouring down her cheeks. ‘I’ve been here for a long time. I can’t tell how long, because there are no windows. But I know it’s been a long time. You’ve fed me. You’ve given me water. You haven’t harmed me,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to hurt me. You’re kind. You’ve been nice to me.’

He stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at her. She saw in his eyes that she was getting some reaction.

‘I’m lonely down here.’ With shaking hands, she undid her wool coat and slid it off her shoulders. ‘I want you to know it’s all right if you want to kiss me.’

He frowned, and took a step backwards, all the time staring at her.

‘You have me here because…because you want me here. You
want
me. You’ve got me. Just don’t leave me alone any more, please. I’m lonely. I want you to stay.’

Mak licked her lips deliberately. His eyes watched the movement of her tongue.

She gestured at the chain. ‘I can’t go anywhere. Just stay with me. Please. You’re big and strong.’ She said this as one compliments a man, not as one describes a monstrous creature. ‘I’m not frightened of you. I know I’m yours. But I’m not scared of you.’

He took a step forward. ‘I don’t…scare you?’

She looked him square in the eyes. ‘No.’

And it was true. She was no longer scared. She had discovered the darkest parts of herself, and she wondered if she could ever truly be scared of anything again.

‘I don’t want to be alone any more. Stay with me. Hold me.’

He moved closer, and she did not flinch. Her right big toe began to tingle, precisely where the surgeon had carefully reattached it. It had been severed by a scalpel at the hands of a murderer. Andy Flynn had saved her that time. There would be no saviour now. There would be no happy ending. It was too late for happy endings.

‘I want to. Please…’ she whispered into his ear and pulled him close. Her lips were dry, cracked, and they met his and found new moisture there. She unzipped her jeans with one hand, running her other around his thick, knotted neck, over his skull, feeling the scars beneath the fuzz of his short hair. He was missing part of his ear. She licked at the lobe, and ran her tongue across his scarred cheek.

‘I want you.’

He hesitated for only a moment, and then his hands were busy. She covered his scars in kisses, and heard his belt buckle drag along the stone. He had unzipped his pants as well, and they slid to his knees.

Just a little more…a little bit more…

He leaned over her, naked from the waist. She wrapped her legs around him, and pulled him in, feeling a thrilling revulsion electrify her every nerve. She could feel him straining against her pelvis. She locked her knees behind his back, feeling with her thighs, her shins, her toes, feeling him and his clothing with sensual dexterity.

‘I want you,’ she whispered.

He pulled at her jeans, sliding them down from her waist.

More…just a little more…

He got to his knees and yanked her pants off. She licked his broad hand and he rubbed it between her legs. In seconds he penetrated her roughly, and she moaned unconsciously from a mix of revulsion and disturbing womanly pleasure and pain. She clung to him as he thrust into her again. She wrapped her arms around him, her fingers running over his back, his thighs, his legs, her own bare feet. Her toes moved too, and found the metal ring she sought, half exposed in his pants pocket. He thrust again, and let out a grunting exhalation. His pleasure was building fast. She didn’t have long. She raised the key ring with her foot until she could grab it with one hand and insert the key in the cuff. ‘Yes,’ she moaned. It turned. The lock turned. He was losing himself in her, his mouth on her neck, on her chest, his thrusting increasing. She was there below him, receiving him, but not there, not receiving him, receiving her own plans, her own
survival. Now her ankle was free, and she was running her fingers down his pants leg, her hips in the air, him leaning into her.

Click.

There.

With a sudden jerk she pulled away from him, throwing herself backwards. He was a confused bull, lunging at her and the air between them, his penis wet and angry, pointing. He had been so shocked that she had been able to slip past the edge of the mattress, just out of his immediate reach. She rolled backwards through a fast and awkward somersault, and arrived, momentarily dizzy, with her heels against a wall of shelves and wine bottles. He recovered himself quickly, however, and with a strange look in his eye moved towards her with his arms outreached in a gesture of pain, desire and confusion.

He reached the end of his chain.

Mak had her back to one of the floor-to-ceiling racks of bottles. She rose to her feet, and pulled her jeans back up and adjusted her T-shirt to cover herself. She pushed the greasy hair back from her drying eyes. Face stony, and with her mind focused to a sharp crystal, she reached behind her for one of the bottles at her back. She swung it off the shelf and smashed the top of it on the ground at her feet, sending splinters of glass skittering across the stone. Her captor flinched and prepared himself for an attack, expecting her to slash at him with the sharp edges of the bottle, but that was not her plan. The bottle broken open, she dumped its contents at his feet, soaking his pants, his shoes. Moving quickly now, animated with her purpose, she took another bottle from the shelf, smashed the top off and threw the alcohol at him.
Instinctively, he tried to dodge the airborne wave of stinging cognac, and it landed down one side, the rest splattering on the mattress behind him. She repeated this game, dousing the mattress, dousing him, smashing bottle after bottle while he went mad with his confinement, his chained ankle beginning to bleed.