Siren (28 page)

‘Bitch!’ her former captor screamed, blind with rage. He had not even pulled up his pants, and the sight of him aroused, dishevelled, dangerous—yet helpless—struck Mak in that moment as darkly comic.

Her clothing was already hopelessly filthy, and now she pulled her T-shirt off completely, standing unashamedly in front of him in her bra, half-naked but no longer touchable. She doused the fabric in a third bottle of fine cognac, emptying it, and thinking for the briefest moment how strange it would have seemed to the purchaser of these bottles that his fine, carefully cellared cognac should be used to soak a woman’s T-shirt. When she was done, one end of it was as wet as if she had dumped it in a bath. The fumes stung her eyes.

Fire, motherfucker. Fire.

The match was just where she had managed to toss it, when she’d knocked the box from his hand, beside one leg of shelving, beyond the reach of the chain that had held her, and now held him. Sick with triumph and sorrow, she trembled slightly as she took the tiny match in her hand. It was dry.
Thank God it’s dry.
It was dry and perfect. That tiny red tip—no larger than the pinky nail on a newborn baby—held the key to her captor’s destruction. She caught the look of understanding in his eyes when she held it up. He panicked and leaped towards her, the chain going taut and pulling his right leg out from under him, sending him sprawling at her
feet. He pulled his leg to his chest—once, twice—and she saw a puff of dust come up from the corner. He was going to try to pull the chain from the wall.

Mak ran the match across the rough stone floor.

It lit.

Kill or be killed.

She touched the flaming tip to the edge of her cognacsoaked T-shirt, and watched the flame spread across it, almost invisibly at first.

His eyes were on the shirt now and the growing flame that was running up the fabric towards her hand. He knew instinctively that it would find him, and that he only had a second to prepare for it. He scrambled backwards on his knees like a huge dog. She threw the shirt with a swoop of her arm and it landed with a wet slap across his face. He flicked it away, but he was covered, a flame ran blue across the material, across him, and when it hit his hair, it too lit in an almost invisible flame, which soon rose with deadly magnificence. Mak doubted that she had ever seen anything so magnificent, so powerful, so heroic as that growing cognac flame as it danced, and its host danced with it, hopping, squirming, clawing at his face and his burning clothes and not yet letting out a sound.

Eat fire, fucker.

Makedde walked to the wall, took the old wooden shelving in both hands and in one—two—three pulls, wrenched it from its position. The shelf teetered forward and fell in slow motion, crashing across the floor in a chaos of shattering glass, liquor and splintering wood, the edge of the shelving hitting her burning captor hard in the ankle as he struggled to get clear of it. She saw him holding his face and rolling on broken glass next to the mattress, which now rose in
flame. He was trying to put his clothes out. His hair was still burning. She felt strangely disconnected from the scene, disconnected from everything but her bright clarity, her survival.

Eat fire, fucker. Eat fire.

Numb, shaking madly and with sweat beading on her skin from the building heat of the cellar which had so long held her in deathly cold, Mak turned and made her way up the staircase, scarcely seeing the steps, her feet knowing just where to fall. The edges of the staircase were catching now, slowly, with a line of low flame that ran up the treads in a zigzag. She was untouched by it as she leaped from stair to stair. She was apart from it. And behind her, a deep animal moaning began. The man’s skin was melting under flame. His hair was burning away. The chain rattled as he struggled and rolled, trying to put himself out. She did not turn to look.
It is you, or me
. She reached the top of the stairs, and found that the door to the cellar was still ajar and opened at the slightest push. It swung open on its hinges. There was a shiny new padlock resting on one side, the key sitting in the lock.

How much of my life did he take? How much of my life did he spend?

There was a cracking sound. It was the wooden stairs, already breaking with heat and flame. Smoke was billowing out with a horrible smell—wood and dust and flesh burning. He was burning alive down there. Burning and chained. His flesh would be burning off his bones.

She did not look.

Makedde closed the cellar door behind her, locking the smoke in, and muffling the sounds of the crackling flame, the searing death below. She snapped the padlock shut, and with
dusty bare feet walked across the uneven floorboards of an old farmhouse and out into a winter evening in the countryside of Burgundy, cold, moist grass pushing up between the toes that had held the key to her escape.

Makedde Vanderwall stood barefoot and dishevelled on the gravel driveway of the remote farmhouse, emptied by a deep exhaustion. It was only the queer adrenaline of survival that continued to animate her with unnatural energy, propelling her until she was safe from immediate danger. But when would that be? Where? Through stinging eyes she saw shades of green stretching in all directions, the sky glowing an overcast white. Wood fences intersected the fields like stitches.
Stitches and scars. Stitches and scars.
Mak recognised nothing of her surrounds. On a hilltop in the far distance she could see glimpses of an ornate church of some kind, and what looked like a small village. Here and there were cottages dotting the expanse of fields. If Paris was nearby, it was hiding very, very well.

As you stand here, he is burning and suffocating in that cellar. He’d had so many scars. You touched them. You kissed them.

She would be haunted by those moments, and yet she was alive. Behind her, the farmhouse was smoking.

Leave this place.

Leave everything, Mak.

There were no fire trucks, no cop cars, no neighbours rushing to her aid. She could not tell how far away the next neighbour lived. She was alone. She wanted to keep moving until she was far from the place of her confinement. She thought of Bogey waiting for her in the hotel room in Paris. She wanted to be there. She wanted to collapse into his arms, and not move or speak for a tremendously long time. She needed transportation. Right in front of her in the driveway there was a car. It was rusted and old. The tyres were flat. It might not even have petrol in the tank.
Hopeless.
It looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. She could run to the nearest neighbour’s house. Perhaps call the police.

No.

She remembered how little the police had done for Tobias Murphy, for her slain friend Catherine Gerber. Never mind her father’s convictions, never mind how she’d been raised to believe in justice and truth. Never mind Andy Flynn. Never mind the Cavanaghs. No, she’d had enough of the police and their
justice
. She’d had enough of playing by the rules while others flaunted their immunity.

Leave this place.

Leave everything, Mak.

The farmhouse appeared to have a garage attached on one side. She ran to it, and tried the tilting door. It didn’t budge. She moved around the side and found a smaller door. It was unlocked.
He must have driven here. He must have a car.
She threw the door open, and with a sense of a prayer coming true, she found herself looking at a black Mercedes, just sitting there, waiting for her to jump inside. At the sight of it, she nearly cried with relief.

Oh, yes. Finally. Yes.

She opened the car door and searched around the driver’s seat before realising that the keys were actually in the ignition, clearly ready for her captor to make a quick getaway if he needed to.

But he was not going anywhere. She was.

In the back seat there was a briefcase. Perhaps it held the man’s identification. The case was locked.

There was a crash of glass as the windows of the farmhouse blew out. The fire was gaining strength. She had to leave, and fast. There was no time to retrieve her phone, her wallet.

Go, go…

With a renewed sense of urgency, Mak leaped into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. She groped around the dash for a remote to open the garage door, and not finding it, pulled open the glove box. Instead of a remote controller, a Glock pistol fell out onto the passenger seat next to her. She blinked at it. There was a wallet in the glove box, and a passport—no,
four
. There were four passports in the glove box of the car. She had no time for this. She had to get away before the garage went up in flames.

Mak leaped out of the car and found a chain pulley alongside the garage door. Using all her strength she pulled until the door lifted outwards. Light streamed into the dark space. Relief. She was nearly there. She could speed off and leave this horrid place behind…

And then Makedde saw something that made her freeze in her tracks.

Out of the corner of her eye, a familiar sight. Something that didn’t belong here. Something she didn’t want to see in
this garage, in this farmhouse, in this horrible place. It was the tips of a pair of shoes. Pointy shoes. Black pointy shoes.

She choked.

No.

Silently, tears began to fall from her eyes. She did not even notice them. She did not wipe them away.

Black shoes were poking out from a bundle wrapped in plastic. Familiar shoes.
Wrong. This is wrong. This can’t be.
Her instincts registered the horror before her brain did. She clambered towards the shoes, and kneeling, began to unwrap the plastic sheath. It was the shape of a body.

No.

No!

She tore at the plastic, desperate. Pulling away the layers of her grim find, she began to make out the features of the dead body inside.

Black hair. Glasses. Leather jacket.

Bogey.

Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey…

She had known the instant she saw those shoes that it was Bogey, and that he had somehow tried to save her, that he was dead now, because of her, and it would be the final nail in her coffin. In that moment she knew with certainty that she could never return to a normal life. Not with what she had seen, what she had experienced. Makedde loved this man, she had found new love with him and he had shown her new possibilities, new emotions, the chance of a new life. It was precisely because he loved her that he was now there in front of her with his throat cut open. His eyes were open, unseeing, sunk back into his pallid face. His beautiful lips were dotted with smears of blood. He had been dead for at least a day in
that garage, or days, while she had been chained up in the cellar just below him, wishing so badly to be near him.

I’m going to go mad.

Perhaps she
had
gone mad already. This life of hers was madness. Everyone who had ever told her that things would be okay—
Everything will be okay, Mak—
was wrong. Everything in her world was wrong. A trembling began all through her body, and she found herself temporarily unable to act. She wanted to crawl inside his plastic shroud and hold his body, and die there with him, let the flames engulf them both. She realised the danger. If she kept standing there looking at Bogey’s body she would die.

Numb, moving like an automaton, Makedde walked to the car and popped the trunk open. Inside, she found cash, jewels and what she recognised to be a sniper’s case and the tools of a hitman. The man who had abducted her had been a professional. She had known it, and now she knew in her guts that the Cavanaghs had set the man loose on her, and that they would not be satisfied until she was dead.

With an unnatural strength powered by adrenaline, Makedde lifted Bogey in her arms, and bore his body to the open car. With a tenderness too late, she laid him in the trunk, gently closed his stiff eyelids, and kissed his cold lips. She closed the lid and took a breath. Around her, there was more glass smashing, and the sound of cracking. The garage was heating up. The blaze outside was getting bigger now. The whole farmhouse would go. It was time to leave.

Makedde got into the driver’s seat, gripped the stick shift, put the car into gear and drove.

Blind to everything save the winding road before her, Mak drove through the French countryside for hours without
stopping until sheer exhaustion made her pull the car over. She fell asleep across the front seat with the doors locked, the loaded Glock near to hand, and the stick shift digging into her ribs. She woke thirsty, bruised and in darkness, a bloodstreaked leather jacket wrapped around her. The Mercedes clock glowed the hour of 10:10.

She remembered driving away in the car. At some point she had woken, shaking violently, and had removed the jacket from Bogey’s cold body and wrapped it around herself for warmth, along with his scarf, which was now bundled in the back seat, dark with dried blood.

It took her a moment to orient herself, and seconds later, the tears began. She ignored them. She wasn’t interested in tears. She was interested only in revenge.

The man she loved was dead in the trunk of the car, and she had enough weapons, jewels and cash to make a new life, under the radar, a life where the Cavanaghs and their thugs could never find her.

They wouldn’t need to.

She would find them.

It was not the life she had wanted, not the life she had asked for. It was the life she had to lead.